Rings of Anubis: A Folley & Mallory Adventure

by E. Catherine Tobler

  Virgil bowed his head and kissed Eleanor’s fingers. When he looked at her again, his smile was gentle. “Mirrors are difficult, showing you what lies behind, but glass . . . ” He thought of the swirling light and the images he had seen—Eleanor’s past twined with his. “You can look through glass, beyond the reflection. You can look ahead.”

  “Maybe that’s the trick of it.” Eleanor slipped her hand free of his, to slide her arm inside his jacket and around his waist as she burrowed close. “I am to return the rings to Anubis. I can’t do it alone.”

  “You can,” Virgil said, “but I will be there, tesorina. Trust in that.”

  Dalila and Sagira and a host of robed priests guided them to the Anubis chapel. No longer the ruin Eleanor had seen in modern times, the space was as it should be, pillars supporting a lapis-blue ceiling painted with golden stars. Every wall was intact and also brightly painted, the mural of Anubis reaching out of the wall toward Eleanor as they approached.

  But as she drew closer, she realized it was no mural. The creature standing before the wall was as dark as night, towering nearly to the ceiling. He smelled of rot and life in the same instant, like the cold, flooding Nile.

  Behind Anubis stood a large black horse with gleaming green eyes. Eleanor couldn’t put the horse into any context—it wasn’t part of the Anubis history she knew. On the other side of Anubis was a more familiar creature, the squat beast that was part crocodile, part lion, and part hippopotamus. Ammit was all hunger and snapping jaws.

  Dalila, Sagira, and the priests dropped to their knees before Anubis, and Eleanor slowly followed suit. She could not quite force herself to bow as the others did, for she couldn’t pry her eyes off Anubis. He was unlike anything she had seen, even in the dreams he had invaded.

  “God’s trousers,” Mallory whispered.

  Anubis was massive, his ears flicking against the star-painted ceiling above. His skin gleamed as if oiled, lapis and gold shimmering in the wide necklace draping his neck and chest. Eleanor looked for a seam, something that might indicate a mask, but there was none. Everything she saw and smelled told her this creature was real and here and looking at her with his blue-black eyes. Anubis’s fingers brushed her chin and curled lightly around her neck. Eleanor took a stuttering breath as his flooded-Nile scent rolled over her, as his fingers conveyed both his strength and heat.

  Mallory growled.

  Anubis laughed. The sound rolled through the chapel, shaking every wall.

  “Be calmed, wolf,” Anubis said, his black eyes taking in Mallory before he looked back to Eleanor. “Daughter.” His hand moved down to hers, fingers brushing over the rings. He made no demand for them, and before Eleanor could offer them, Anubis’s sharp face snapped up, his attention on the entrance of the chapel.

  The Irvings picked their way through the columns to stand behind Eleanor. Eleanor spied Auberon, Gin, and Cleo pressed to the back wall of the chapel, their expressions as shocked as she herself felt.

  “Great Anubis, I come to ask for the life of my daughter. For the life of Caroline June Irving.” Howard Irving’s voice didn’t tremble as he spoke; in fact, he sounded as though this was all merely a formality and that he was dearly tired of the entire thing.

  Eleanor looked back at Anubis. With one hand, Anubis gathered dust from the ground. Within the broad valley of his black palm, Caroline took shape, small and perfectly wrought in dust. Sabrina gasped.

  “This one,” Anubis said, “has been weighed and long ago given to Ammit. She did not live true. She tainted even her life-mate, who could have been her hope and salvation.” He exhaled a low breath across his palm, and the dust of Caroline scattered to every corner of the chapel.

  Anubis said nothing more. The silence in the chapel was broken only by Sabrina’s sobs.

  “Daughter, my rings.”

  With shaking hands, Eleanor released Mallory and pulled the rings from her own fingers. She did not know how the rings would fit upon Anubis’s large fingers, but as the metal had changed to accommodate her, so too did it for Anubis. The metal shifted in her grasp, feeling like flesh and not metal at all. The rings also appeared to know their place; each slid easily onto the god’s fingers. Eleanor hesitated to step away. Instead, she lifted a hand to his cheek. She wanted to touch the creature who had so plagued her, wanted to believe there was nothing here to fear.

  Anubis’s muzzle was warm to the touch, much as Mallory’s own when he was a wolf. Eleanor gave the god before her a scratch under the chin, realizing how absolutely foolish it was. But when Anubis stretched into the touch, finding the pleasure of a puppy in the affection, she couldn’t say who was more the fool.

  “Daughter,” Anubis said again, and Eleanor felt the jackal within her leap.

  Behind Anubis, the strange horse stamped a hoof, and Eleanor looked at him. His ebon hide streamed with water, which pattered to the floor, sending rivulets through the dust and columns. Was it the Nile, or another river that overflowed him? It could have been any wet place where a waterhorse might frolic. Within the steed’s green eyes, Eleanor saw a familiar imp, a man she had traveled part of the world with, a man who had always been more content with mischief than violence.

  “Hubert?” The whispered question came from Mallory. Eleanor dropped her hand from Anubis, because she didn’t know the answer. Waterhorses came from Ireland, though; her parents had told her stories of them, too, saying once that her own wolfhound was such a creature, made smaller so she might take him everywhere she would.

  “I would have guided him to Osiris, daughter,” Anubis said, “but his path is elsewhere.”

  With that, Anubis stepped past Eleanor and Mallory. The god reached one hand down, snatching both Irvings from the chapel floor. Sabrina shrieked anew and struggled in his grasp. Everyone scattered back as Anubis held firm to the couple.

  “You come to be weighed,” Anubis said.

  The ground shifted under Anubis’s passage, dust clouding the air in a golden haze. The chapel walls shimmered away, and Anubis claimed his position by the golden scales that assembled themselves out of the chapel’s dust. A feather already rested on one side.

  Eleanor stared as Anubis plucked the hearts out of both Howard and Sabrina. She expected blood, gore, but the hearts came seamlessly away, dry and dusty. A sizable crack ran through the center of Howard’s heart, whereas Sabrina’s was withered, almost gray. The Irvings stared at their own hearts as Eleanor did, transfixed.

  Ammit paced and snapped her glistening jaws more furiously as Anubis set Sabrina’s withered heart onto his brilliant scales. Other gods made themselves known then, emerging with whispers from the dust suspended in the air: green-skinned Osiris, pale Isis beside dark Seth, sharp-beaked Thoth.

  “We are hallucinating,” Eleanor whispered as she took a step backward, lodging herself firmly against Virgil.

  “I keep telling myself that, but not even while smoking opium have I seen such things,” Virgil whispered back. His arm slid around her.

  Bright images filled the space where once walls had stood, the light of the Glass coalescing into images that moved through the air. Eleanor watched Sabrina Irving’s life unfold, each image crystal-bright as the Glass spun it. Everything Sabrina did was for the only child she would bear, her daughter Caroline. No matter how awful, Sabrina saw the acts as selfless, wholly for Caroline’s benefit. If she had a hand in taking another’s life, she saw it adding to Caroline’s life. The scale did not agree.

  The withered heart dipped the scale downward, heavier than Ma’at’s feather. Anubis plucked the heart from his scale and without expression tossed it to Ammit. She caught it in her crocodile jaws, her squat hippopotamus body shuddering with pleasure as she consumed the filthy thing.

  Sabrina cried out. “You cannot—”

  But her protest was silenced as she crumbled to dust, a small trickle out of Anubis’s hand. Howard, still firmly in the god’s grip, tried to reach for her, but his hands met only dust. It blossomed in a cloud aro
und him, then into the Egyptian sky.

  Howard closed his eyes as Anubis took his heart to weigh. Like his wife’s before him, Howard’s heart dipped the golden scale, but this heart was heavier, to the point it moved the entire chapel. Under the weight of Irving’s love for his daughter and his devious work, the columns shifted and the ground cracked, sending Eleanor and Mallory to their knees in a cloud of dust.

  Mallory could not have gone far, but Eleanor realized he was no longer at her side. The heat of burning oil from spilled lamps surrounded her, brightening the curve of a shoulder within the dust. She reached out. Her fingers brushed the smooth-skinned flank of Ammit, and with a gasp, Eleanor withdrew. The whinny of a horse and splashing water carried through the cries of the priests and others. Eleanor pushed to her feet and stepped into Mallory.

  “Eleanor!”

  She grabbed his hands as he grabbed hers. Dust made their palms slick, but she held firm, refusing to lose him in the confusion again. The entire world was unsteady beneath their feet, the chapel continuing to buckle as sharp streams of light pierced the dust around them. Instinctively she pulled Mallory toward the light.

  She wanted to say goodbye to her mother, her grandmother, but knew deep down that she already had. The past was in the past, and she needed to leave it there. Their place was here, as surely as hers was elsewhere.

  Everything faded. Eleanor knew the comforting touch of Mallory’s hands as the light dwindled to a pinprick and the clouded dust evaporated. She closed her eyes and turned her face into Mallory’s neck. He smelled of myrrh and wine and dust, of places long since buried under sand. For once, she didn’t want a shovel.

  When Eleanor found the courage to open her eyes, the temple stood once more in ruin around them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Paris, France ~ 31 October, 1889

  “I do not believe this outrage.”

  “Believe it.”

  Eleanor tucked the wool blanket more firmly around her father’s knees. Her father’s annoyed-and-yet-not tone amused her for the first time in a long while, and she fought the smile that wanted to come. They had much ground to cover, she knew; many wounds still needed healing, but she prayed that now they actually could heal, now that everything was spread on the table before them.

  “You are staying in.” She brushed a kiss over his cheek, then stepped back. He looked somehow smaller and perhaps, she thought, more human than he had in her youth. “Juliana will be here and—”

  “I wanted to view the fireworks, Ellie.”

  “And so you may.” Eleanor gestured to the window of their rented rooms, where she had left the draperies open. “There is absolutely no sense in you running all over the Exposition grounds and exhausting yourself.”

  “And you?” Her father made a disgusted noise. “You’re no better. You should be home, resting and healing.”

  Eleanor’s hand went instinctively to her side, which was still tender, yet healing well. “Your wounds were considerably more grave, good sir,” she said. If her father thought she was going to miss the final night of the Exposition, he truly didn’t know her. She planned to run all over the Exposition grounds and exhaust herself before the night was through. After such explorations, Mallory had asked her to accompany him to services at Notre Dame.

  “Hmph.” He snorted and snuggled deeper into his chair, where he appeared wholly content despite his grumblings.

  Eleanor moved from her father’s chair at the sound of a knock on the door. It was strange to her that this room and the city beyond had not changed when so much else had.

  They had returned to Paris only three days prior, and Eleanor swore she could still taste the temple dust on her lips. Yet here, the Exposition went on; people boggled at the machines and inventions on an hourly basis, the mechanical pterodactyls had been returned to their graceful flights, and children continued to displace shells from their displays, thinking of nothing and nowhere beyond this place. Eleanor wished her own thoughts might be so easily distracted, but they continued to stray backward in time, to the sight of her mother in that garden—her mother content and in her place at last.

  Juliana squealed at Eleanor’s appearance when Eleanor opened the door. “Ah, look at you! Did the mask arrive?”

  Eleanor stepped back, the hem of her black cloak whispering over the ground. She had kept her dress and cloak simple, wanting the mask to draw all of the attention. “Just this morning.” She gestured to the table as Juliana entered, to the jackal mask perched upon a stack of books.

  It was a brown papier-mâché face, smudged here and there with gold paint. Small ears, one pierced with a thin gold ring, perked atop the head, while oval slits would allow her to see out. Eleanor had tried it on earlier to confirm the fit, which was perfect. And strangely, it felt right.

  Not telling her father and Juliana about her true nature also felt right, at least for the time being. She didn’t remotely understand it herself—there was so much yet to learn!—and she wanted to know more before she told them. She needed to know more. Saint Michael, give me strength to learn the truth of myself . . .

  “Absurd!” her father grumbled from his chair.

  “You hush,” Juliana said as she lifted the mask to give it a closer inspection.

  Eleanor closed the door as her friend and father exchanged barbs. “Perhaps this evening alone will give the two of you time to talk,” Eleanor said, giving them a gentle nudge in the direction she rather hoped they would take. She prayed her father would be able to truly let Dalila go now—even as she knew such a thing would take time.

  “Talk?” he asked.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Juliana said and returned the mask to its place. She brushed her hands over her jacket, then slowly began to unbutton it, as if only now deciding to stay.

  “Whatever could I have to say?” her father continued.

  Eleanor picked up the mask. “I’m sure you can think of something,” she murmured, then kissed Juliana’s cheek. “I will be terribly late in coming home, if I come home at all.”

  “When one keeps such dreadful company,” Juliana said with a grin, “one can hardly presume otherwise.”

  Eleanor left them, moving down the stairs and into the night, which was cool but not yet unbearable. The sky was clear and star-splattered, the trees still decked with leaves of orange and gold. She paused long enough to tie her mask into place, then moved toward the Exposition, toward the food vendors and the beautiful fountain in front of the Große Gallery.

  The Exposition remained as lively as ever. People still thronged to see the sights, many in costume for the final evening’s celebrations. More extravagant international fashions were on display tonight than she had seen over the course of the Exposition. The vendors remained as varied as the sprawling fair itself, foods from Spain, England, and Italy scenting the night air; it was a veritable feast for every sense, even if Eleanor declined the eels.

  Word was that some of the displays would be turned into bonfires; some vendors were shocked by the very idea, for who had the wealth to burn such things, whereas others wondered aloud if the dreadful tower Eiffel had assembled would be melted down as well.

  “Pray thee, good miss, a soul cake?”

  She turned at the sound of Mallory’s voice. They had not told each other their costumes for the evening, though she supposed he would know her under her jackal mask after all. She had speculated he would find a wolf mask, but it was a large papier-mâché toad head that perched upon his shoulders. He had chosen his green suit to pair with it. She noted the rumpled tie circling his neck.

  “Do toads eat cake, then, Mister Toad?” she asked. She kept hold of the bags that contained the pies and cakes, not yet surrendering them.

  “That’s Agent Toad to you, Miss,” came the reply. He lifted the toad head off his shoulders and grinned at her. His eyes were gleaming in a way she had only seen twice before. Eleanor blushed to know precisely what occupied his mind. It wasn’t cake.


  “Agent Toad,” she murmured, then surrendered the bags of treats so she could untie her own mask.

  Mallory guided her to nearby benches, where they took seats and he doled out the food. The meat pies were still steaming as they unwrapped them, fragrant between them in the cold air.

  “Someone told me they meant to melt Eiffel’s tower,” Mallory said around a rather large bite of pie. “Can you imagine our luck should that be the case?”

  Eleanor glanced up at the tower, gleaming against the night sky. The beacon at the tower’s uppermost point still streamed over the Exposition, clear and bright. “I would think it rather messy,” she eventually said. “I predict it shall stay, ever a thorn in your side.”

  Mallory drew his handkerchief out to wipe his mouth, looking at Eleanor across the open bag which still contained their sweet cakes. “Speaking of sides, how is yours, Miss Folley?”

  They had not seen each other in three days, and the separation had been nearly unbearable to Eleanor after having spent the prior two weeks rarely outside Mallory’s company. The days had been filled with long meetings and recitations over the adventures they had experienced. Director Walden, while firmly grounded in their court, wanted to ensure that everyone was clear on what had happened. He was almost amused when the stories matched up, puzzle pieces locking easily together.

  The holes in Mistral’s own files were patched with equal ease, as Irving’s covert activities helped explain them. Likewise, his personal doings led them to other Mistral agents who had not been quite so honest in their dealings throughout the years. No one showed any surprise when the Irvings didn’t arrive to defend themselves. Walden compared it to a nightmare fleeing the light of a new day.

  “Healing well,” Eleanor said. “I have seen Cleo, who took me to Dr. Fairbrass, and both are pleased with me—though how could they not be?” She sat straighter and tilted her head. “Considering my beauty and charm?”

  “God, I have missed you,” Mallory said with a laugh as he polished off his pie.

  Eleanor’s smile deepened. Would she ever grow tired of hearing that? “You found time for that, despite the meetings and explanations, followed by more meetings and explanations?”