Rings of Anubis: A Folley & Mallory Adventure

by E. Catherine Tobler

  “Eleanor, how long will you deny the obv—”

  “Mallory, don’t.” It was a plea. Fear slammed her heart into her throat, making it impossible to think or talk.

  Eleanor watched Mallory’s jaw tense, but he fell silent. She suspected she knew exactly how difficult that silence was for him.

  Cleo shifted on the couch, carefully gathering the radiant energy photographs into a stack, thin layers of cushioning paper between each. “I have returned the Lady to her slip in the archives,” she said in a voice that was like cool balm over the conversation. “We can work from the photographs, with no one the wiser. I’ll see you two in the morning?”

  Eleanor crossed her arms over her chest. She felt vulnerable with this new idea before her, as if a fresh wound had been opened. She was not surprised by Cleo’s sudden departure; their behavior had been dreadful.

  “Cleo, please forgive me.” “Me” and not Mallory because Mallory’s idea was absurd, frightening . . . and true? It cannot be. It cannot—but it can. Panic closed a hand around her neck.

  “There is nothing to forgive, Eleanor,” Cleo said. “I cannot say I would be holding up nearly as well in your position.”

  Mallory saw Cleo to the door, and Eleanor bolted from the couch, stalking back to the balcony where she had left her whiskey. She finished it in one gulp. It burned like hellfire, bright and toxic, and she struggled for an even breath when Mallory joined her.

  “Eleanor.”

  “Don’t. Don’t say it.”

  She wanted him to forget he had suggested the body could be that of her grandmother. She had believed for the longest time that the Lady was somehow her mother, that the mystery was that simple: her mother had traveled back in time, had lived an entire life elsewhere, only to die in the desert waste. It made no sense, the idea that her mother could dig herself up. But her grandmother? That made sense. Terrifying sense.

  And if it were true? Dalila Folley remained missing. Where was she if not in that ground? Did she live yet, in some distant time they could not reach without the rings of Anubis? Would there ever be an answer?

  I have grown weary of dust and decay, weary of flinging my soul-wealth away; weary of sowing for others to reap . . .

  Eleanor felt the gentle brush of Mallory’s fingertips against her forehead, moving a tendril of nutmeg-colored hair out of her eyes. Only then did she realize she was crying.

  “I wanted it to be her,” she said between choked sobs, and slumped against Mallory’s chest when at last the admission was made. He tucked her into his arms as if he had done it for years and years, and rocked her as she cried, saying nothing.

  When she at last quieted, the hoot of owls carried to them across the Cairo night. Eleanor realized Mallory was offering her a handkerchief. She closed her hand around the soft linen. It was still warm from his pocket when she pressed it against her eyes and cheeks.

  “It only means the search isn’t finished,” he said, keeping her tucked beneath his chin, one hand tracing random patterns along her back. The patterns were calming, and Eleanor let herself hover there for a long while. She thought of nothing but the shapes, circles blending into infinity’s figure of eight, which rounded into long coiling spirals moving inward toward her spine.

  “I suppose it’s childish,” she said when she felt she might keep her voice on an even keel. “To want to see her again—any way that I can, even if a weathered body.”

  Mallory made a low sound and gave Eleanor a nudge. He guided her from the balcony to the slim bed just inside the doors. She let him escort her to the thin mattress and cover her with the colorful woven blanket from the foot of the bed. He plumped the pillows behind her, then retrieved his own whiskey from the balcony ledge. He pressed it into her hands. His hands lingered around the glass, around her hands.

  “It’s not childish,” he said. “I think we all wish we could correct things in our past. That we might revisit people and places dear to us. There’s no replacing a mother.”

  His voice trailed off. Mallory drew his hands away, and his expression was less than happy, one saying he understood all too well.

  “Forgive me if I overstepped my bounds tonight,” he said.

  If he had, Eleanor wished he would do so again, be it with the kiss before Cleo’s arrival or his suggestion about her grandmother.

  Eleanor shook her head, wanting to reach a hand up and draw him back down to her side. She wanted to offer him another drink, another kiss, but it was too much for her right now. She felt overwhelmed by the idea of knowing him so well, by the possibility of the Lady being her own grandmother. Eleanor made only a murmur of agreement when Mallory said he would see her in the morning. She listened to the latch of the door and his footsteps retreating down the hall.

  Sleep was elusive. Part of her felt certain Anubis would cart her away if she fell asleep; part of her wanted that. She finished Mallory’s whiskey, then drew the insect netting around the bed. The ceiling, with its blue vault and precisely painted gold stars, was indistinct through the netting, unreal and beckoning. She listened to the distant sound of night birds outside, and felt the wash of cooling air from the open balcony doors, and still could find no rest.

  Her grandmother?

  Eleanor allowed herself to believe it. She saw her mother, not through her child-eyes, but through her adult eyes; saw her mother’s obsession as if it were her own—for it was.

  As she hounded her father through the years and insisted her mother was alive, Eleanor imagined her mother doing the same, for the sake of her own mother, Sagira. If this was true, surely Dalila had known the Lady was her mother; it explained her desperate need to claim her before time took her away.

  She knew she had to contact her father. If her mother’s own search had been motivated by the idea that the Lady was Sagira, surely he knew. His insistence told Eleanor he must. Would he admit it now?

  When she padded down the hallway in robe and slippers, her room key secure in her pocket, it was Mallory her thoughts turned to. He had obviously considered the idea that the Lady was her grandmother for some time, and the idea that he had thoughts yet unshared made Eleanor eager to speak with him. The more her mind embraced the possibility, the less frightening it became.

  She didn’t pause when she passed his room, tempting as it might be. No light glowed from beneath his door, and Auberon’s room was dark upon passing as well. Eleanor continued up one level in the elevator to the floor where Cleo lived.

  Light glowed from beneath Cleo’s door, which didn’t surprise Eleanor; they had much in common when it came to work and the inability to sleep entire nights through. She knocked, only wondering after she had, if Auberon might be with her. When Cleo opened the door, however, the room was empty but for her, and she welcomed Eleanor in.

  The room held a scent Eleanor came to recognize as developing chemicals for photographs. It didn’t appear a likely environment for such things—it looked more like a traditional lady’s parlor than a laboratory. Pastel floral prints were matched with bright stripes, lotus flowers blooming over fabric as well as erupting from black lacquer bowls around the room. The furniture was all ebony, gleaming in the lamplight. One table held an array of photographs, while another was scattered with paper. Glass inkwells—Cleo collected them—marched line after line across a bookcase.

  “I didn’t even look at the time,” Eleanor admitted in apology as Cleo latched the door behind her.

  “No apologies,” Cleo said and nudged Eleanor toward the tea service occupying a low table between two wide chairs.

  “When I have a project like this, I rarely sleep. My mind won’t let me. It just keeps running.” Cleo sat in the chair to the left of the tea, her violet caftan spreading out around her. “Sugar? Milk?”

  “Just sugar.”

  Eleanor watched Cleo’s remarkable mechanical hands deftly manage the cups, saucers, and small, steaming pot. The pot was inlaid with what looked like cloisonné lotus flowers blooming in profusion.

/>   “I couldn’t sleep, either,” Eleanor said as Cleo took up a small spoon and lifted the lid from the sugar bowl. “I was thinking about the Lady being my grandmother.”

  Cleo’s generous mouth lifted in a wide grin. “I think that idea might cause many sleepless nights. If you’re interested, there is a test we could run.”

  “Mallory mentioned something to me, but I think I have a quicker, less experimental way to get an answer, which is why I came. I was hoping you could help.”

  “If I can, I will.” Cleo added milk to her own tea until it was a pale and creamy brown, her spoon against the china cup the only sound in the room.

  Eleanor found herself attempting to summon the courage to even broach the idea. In her room, it seemed simple enough. But if her father confirmed the identity of the Lady, what then? The idea of “what happened next” had always appealed greatly to Eleanor, but now it felt like she had approached the edge of a cliff. She could not see the bottom of the valley below.

  “I need to contact my father in Paris,” Eleanor said. She cradled her cup in her palms, letting the heat seep into her. “If my mother was seeking her mother, he would know. I hope he would admit it now.”

  With that out, other words came more easily. Eleanor rambled about her parents and their bond, the way they had always understood each other. She could remember her father being only supportive when it came to Dalila’s research.

  As Eleanor chatted on, Cleo moved to an ebony cabinet and opened its doors. Inside squatted a device of brass and bronze. When Eleanor moved closer, she saw it was inscribed with the letters of the alphabet, over which lay a variety of hinged needles. Wires coursed around the interface, disappearing into a wooden cabinet inscribed with the image of an inkwell. Eleanor had never seen its like.

  “Will he still be at the Exposition?” Cleo asked, settling into the chair before the cabinet.

  “He will.”

  Cleo hummed pleasantly as she cranked the machine to life, slid a sheet of paper against the needles, and tapped a message out across the engraved letters. In this regard, it seemed very like the typewriters Eleanor had seen at the Exposition. “We’ll see if anyone is awake on that end at this hour. Surely there must be . . . ah!”

  It didn’t take long for Cleo to receive a response, something that left Eleanor a little breathless. The hinged needles moved across the sheet of paper, transferring the incoming message without the need of a spool of inked fabric ribbon. Each letter on the interface glowed as if it had been lit by a match, then dimmed as it was transferred. The type was small, precise.

  “The operator says your father is in the gallery and has gone to fetch him.” Cleo tilted her head as they waited and sipped at her milky tea. “If you know how to use this, I could leave you some privacy.”

  “I don’t know how, actually,” Eleanor admitted. She set her teacup down to take a closer look at the telegraph. “It’s astounding, the idea that you just communicated with someone in Paris in plain language rather than telegraphy code.”

  “It would seem to make the world smaller,” Cleo said, “and yet everywhere I travel, it remains impossibly large.”

  Eleanor watched the needles glide to and fro. Cleo read the words as they came through, and Eleanor had to laugh when her father expressed astonishment at hearing from her via this new technology.

  “Tell him I’ve already seen the Lady,” Eleanor said to Cleo, who transmitted the words as Eleanor spoke. Eleanor began to describe—as briefly as she could—all they had discovered, and how strange it was. When Cleo would pause, allowing for a reply (which came, but was always short, urging Eleanor onward), she saw none of this was news to her father. She felt like a fool, describing the line of bright white they had found in their radiant energy scans; felt like a child when she revealed the Lady had false teeth. He already knew.

  The relationship she remembered her parents having was one of complete trust and faith. They shared everything with one another, if not with her. Her father would know the identity of the Lady, because Dalila had been desperate to find her. Dalila would have shared all she had known with him. And on her disappearance, Eleanor thought, her father had swept Dalila’s research away. At her request?

  “Ask him if he already knows,” Eleanor said to Cleo. Her voice broke a little, and she was thankful her father couldn’t hear. Cleo typed the message out and they waited for one to return.

  “I’ve always known, Ellie,” came the reply, and Eleanor felt as though she had been punched.

  That he finally said it was a relief. Eleanor knew she didn’t have the strength to argue with him over this—what’s done was done, her years wasted when he knew the truth of what she sought, but the pain of betrayal she felt was keen. Cleo bowed her head, saying nothing, only waiting.

  “My theories,” she had Cleo transmit.

  “More like facts,” her father returned in the machine’s precise type. Cleo’s voice was even as she read the incoming words. “We should have told you, Eleanor—what we did was cruel, though to be fair, it did not go as we planned.”

  Planned. The word sent a stab of fear through Eleanor. That day in the desert, what had they planned?

  “What do you mean?”

  “You are very like your mother,” he replied, as if he hadn’t heard her question. She imagined him laughing a little at that, though Cleo didn’t. “We never thought you would pursue it and yet, being her daughter, how could you not? We raised you to be curious, and I’ve spent God knows how many years condemning you for being just that.”

  Eleanor didn’t know what to say—for it was all true. She held her silence, and Cleo began to read her father’s words as the needles moved again.

  “I met your mother when she was sixteen. I was twenty-one, and felt myself far beyond being charmed. She came to the college library, even though she was not a student. She told me the most fantastic story, and I swallowed it whole. She said that her mother had stepped back in time and she meant to find her.”

  It felt like winter in the room, Eleanor frozen to the floor, and while she pulled her robe closer, she said nothing. She and Cleo waited for the needles to move again.

  “When we married, she allowed me to see her research. It was impressive and it changed my mind. I thought I had believed her, Ellie, but I didn’t truly see until I looked at Lila’s notes. Her father—your grandfather, Tau el Jabari—had been devising a way to get Sagira back.”

  It was a strange way to get the story, Cleo reading what came through the machine. Eleanor sat back down and Cleo continued, sounding transfixed herself.

  “You know Tau was an archaeologist—Sagira went with him on his digs,” Cleo read. “Tau speaks of Sagira in his journals, how she felt a connection to the land that he could not explain and envied. She would mention a temple or tomb location, and while nothing had been previously discovered there, they always found something. Under thousands of years of sand, but there nonetheless. Tau called her his lucky charm. On one dig, he found the rings. They seemed nothing extraordinary, but that night, Sagira was drawn to them. She told him she recognized them. She held them and vanished.”

  “And my mother?” Eleanor asked. She had to force the question out and watched as Cleo typed and transmitted. Someone had once called her a lucky charm, too.

  “You are so like her, Ellie,” Cleo read. “She was desperate to find the body, to understand what had happened. You must remember that about her. You were a gift to her, and she never meant to hurt you. She hoped the rings would be with her mother’s body. She wanted—”

  Eleanor hardly had to wait for the words to come. She wanted to use the rings. She wanted to step back in time as her mother had done.

  Cleo read on. “But those men, Ellie, those riders. It was nothing we planned. You falling in harm’s way. I didn’t want Lila to use the rings, but could hardly deny her excavating the body. She promised she would wait, as long as she could see the body. We came to a compromise for your sake. But that day, nothin
g went right.”

  Eleanor closed her eyes. She could see it, the Glass of Anubis, opening, ripping her mother away. All these years, her father had known her theories were correct and still discounted them. He told her she was foolish, that her mother was dead. He had even gone so far as to have a memorial service, Eleanor saw now that it held a lifetime of deception.

  “Eleanor?”

  It was Cleo’s question, bringing her back to the present “I can’t—” She looked at the woman, hearing the echo of her father’s voice. “Close the connection. I’m finished.”

  Cleo did, and offered Eleanor the sheet of paper with its precisely rendered letters. Renshaw’s confession. Eleanor took the sheet, longing to crumple it.

  “Thank you, Cleo. I’m sorry to have bothered you so very late,” she said.

  She slipped from Cleo’s room and ran back to her own, cursing the apparent sloth of the elevator. She held her tears back, fighting them as she passed Auberon’s room and then Mallory’s. Later: she would tell them later, when she could speak without wanting to cry.

  In her room, beyond the balcony door, sunrise was beginning to brighten the horizon. Throughout the city, the minarets came to life with the vibrant call to prayer. Eleanor locked her door and clutched her father’s words against her chest. She muttered a prayer of her own, that she not lose her grip even as the world tilted out from under her. She shuffled into the bedroom and tossed the page onto the bed, where it covered her hairbrush.

  Her hairbrush.

  Eleanor lifted the page to reveal the brush where she had not left it, a crisp ivory envelope beneath it. Her attention came back to the balcony doors. She had left both standing open when she’d gone, but only one was open now.

  She snatched the envelope from the bed. Who the devil had been in her room? Was Mallory playing another game? Her hands shook as she pulled the slip of hotel paper from the envelope. The same handwriting as before, though this time the language was hieratic.

  You have looked now for years,

  I cannot be sorry;