The lower level of the building was cold and Eleanor shivered, despite the warmth of her velvet bodice. She stepped into the archive to find Mallory and Auberon already there, walking slow paths through the assorted debris.
“Gentlemen,” she said, and was drawn back to the roof, when she’d said the same to Anubis and Horus. She studied Mallory and Auberon for a moment, pondering which man was which god. Based on looks alone, Auberon would be Anubis for his gleaming black skin, but Mallory was certainly no bird.
“You sounded upset, Eleanor—” Mallory broke off when she lifted the bundle of her handkerchief.
“I was gifted with this last night,” she said, crossing to the table in the center of the main room. She cleared off enough space to spread the handkerchief open and expose the vertebrae.
Mallory and Auberon leaned in to look at the bone, both noses wrinkling as they pondered what was before them.
“Who gifted you with such a thing?” Mallory asked. He straightened, eyes narrowed in suspicion and contemplation both.
Eleanor shook her head, knowing where his thoughts likely strayed. “No old acquaintance, Mallory, but a new one. Horus dropped by—quite literally, I suppose, given his wings—”
“Horus—”
“—Wings!”
“Mmm.”
“Why would he bring you a bone, Eleanor?”
“Oh, that’s a good question isn’t it?” Eleanor grinned, upset and amused at the same time. “Because he did not say, nor did Anubis, who was quite firm on the point that she of the ground and he of the sky did not converse but for the horizon between, and…” Eleanor trailed off, hands gesturing wildly in the air. “It was not the most restful of evenings.”
Mallory grunted and Auberon peered at the bone.
“A vertebrae, if I’m not mistaken.” He looked at both of them. “And if I had to guess further, human.”
Eleanor scowled. “I thought so.” She crossed her arms over her chest, baffled by the small thing. “Why in the world…” She trailed off, unable to answer the question that plagued them.
From the depths of the archive, there arose a ringing sound Eleanor had not yet grown accustomed to. She pushed away from the central table, moving toward the space she was slowly converting to an office of sorts; beneath the random debris, she was lead to believe there was an actual desk, with cubbies and drawers and useful things, but fro the time being… She exhaled, looking at the thing that was ringing.
Long ago, perhaps it would have been a bell pull, but it was now a series of darkened brass tubes. These tubes were six in number, and they ran up the wall, each of their lengths adorned in different fashions: flowers, tangling vines, schools of strange fish, and flocks of mystical birds. One tube was etched with flames, another with snowflakes that would never melt. Each tube vanished into the ceiling, twisting six individual paths toward six different end points. When one wanted to speak with someone on the other end of a tube—each carefully labeled in a hand Eleanor believed was Howard Irving’s own lettering—they depressed a lever and cranked a wheel, and lifted a small mouthpiece. It was rumored a Scotsman had invented it, leaving the device abandoned when he’d gone on to pursue greater and less cumbersome methods of communication.
Eleanor depressed the lever that would connect her to the front desk, and listened to Miss Baker, already in mid-conversation with someone who was not her. Eleanor tried to respond, but Miss Baker paid no attention, and it occurred to Eleanor that perhaps this was a conversation she was not entirely meant to overhear—who was Miss Baker speaking with? Eleanor did not recognize the voice, but—
Her eyes widened. “Bones?” she whispered.
As she listened, the mystery deepened. There had been an incident at the catacombs—while they were open to the public during the day, this had occurred overnight. Vandals were presumed, but it went beyond graffiti, for there were reports of strange, towering figures, and rituals with fire, birds, and wild dogs. A jackal in Paris, they said, and Eleanor nearly swallowed her tongue. And, worst of all, missing bones. Missing bones!
Eleanor straightened so quickly from the tube that she knocked her head into the shelf above the buried desk. She pressed a hand to her temple and eyed Mallory and Auberon as they approached.
“Oh, we’ve a mystery,” she said. Another mystery, she supposed.
IV.
Outside the catacomb entrance, beneath the lowering November sky, the police had strung rope barriers to keep the public out and back. By all reports the catacombs were having a capital year for visitors, the people clamoring to see the dead beneath the Paris streets, but today they were to be denied, given the mischief of the night before. Those gathered were upset that they were being prohibited entry, and raised their voices even louder as Eleanor, Mallory, and Auberon strode inside, already cleared to do so.
“Closed today! Get you home, good sir,” went the call from the officers stationed outside, but none were eager to actually leave, some part of them content to listen and look, given the rumors swirling in the air as if they were falling autumn leaves.
Reports of birds and wild dogs, after Eleanor had encountered Anubis and Horus and the latter had given her a broken vertebrae? She was certain of a connection, even if it made little sense on the surface. What business did Egyptian gods have in Paris’s own catacombs? The bone Horus had given Eleanor was bundled into her pocket even as they entered the gate house, and greeted Monsieur Dernier, who looked flustered by the police outside, Mistral’s attention, and having to close the catacombs so the agents could properly investigate.
“Agents, agents,” Dernier murmured, wringing his hands together. He reminded Eleanor of Doctor Fionnlagh in that he was a man who had seen his usual routine and surroundings completely disrupted. Dernier was accustomed to order, to everything being in its proper location. To finally reach a place where the catacombs were suited for regular and heavy visitation from an eager public, Dernier had been in his element, until now, when the catacombs stood— What was the exact word? Violated? Vandalized?
“Monsieur Dernier, were you on duty last night when the disturbance occurred?” Auberon asked. He had offered to lead the questioning, so that Eleanor and Mallory might take longer and deeper looks at the catacombs themselves, perhaps able to determine things Auberon himself could not, including scents in the underground mausoleum. Mallory had asked if that was a way of saying he and Eleanor had larger noses than he, and Auberon only smiled, refusing to answer.
“Yes, yes,” Dernier said, wringing his hands as he guided them into the narrow stone staircase that served as entry to the catacombs. “We always make a final pass, to ensure that no one remains within the halls, you understand. We had a lost child in the catacombs some months ago, the mother frantic as would any one be, and of course there are the rumors of Aspairt, himself lost in these passages for eleven years…can you imagine, eleven years…”
His voice carried back to Eleanor, who brought up the rear of the line as they continued down the long stone staircase. The passage was so narrow and long, Eleanor could believe they were descending into an Egyptian tomb; that the stone would transform the deeper they went, marked with warnings so as stay out, for danger did await any and all who befouled the Pharaoh’s resting place. It was with a soft laugh that she discovered a sign very much like that she expected, warning them that they were about to enter the empire of death, and she did not miss the way Mallory crossed himself as they stepped into the passages of bone and gloom.
“My God,” Eleanor whispered.
It was nothing she expected.
She knew of the catacombs, of course, but to see them was something entirely different. Given she was accustomed to Egyptians and their ways, seeing the displays of bones did not alarm her, but only fascinated—for how completely different the dead had been treated. Bodies had not been preserved through mummification or highly individualized tombs, but had been separated into literal piles and displays of indiscriminate bones, skulls here a
nd legs there. It chilled Eleanor to see it, the “art” that had been made with the shapes. Walls had been perfectly filled with bones, many defaced with graffiti, most darkened by time even as they were illuminated by weak gaslight. Millions of people, millions of bones. Every chamber smelled of dust, but the dust was that of bones, marrow, a decomposing humanity.
The deeper they walked into the passages, some long corridors filled with shelves of skulls, the more Eleanor became convinced the vertebrae she had been given came from the catacombs. Nothing else made sense—not that either puzzle was possessed of a wealth of reason. Eleanor wrapped her arms more closely around herself as they walked, chilled by both the temperature and the sight of the bones. She had worked with countless mummies, had walked into dozens of tombs, but the bare bones unsettled her. Obviously arranged with some kind of care, but not the care she had known; not how the Egyptians saw their dead into the underworld.
Anubis?
She reached for him, and was gifted with a distant rumble. If she closed her eyes, she could have believed that a dog brushed against her leg as it walked up the corridor past them, but there was no dog, only Mallory and Auberon and Dernier, talking about what had happened in these halls. As they rounded a curve, Dernier pointed to the destruction that had not yet been righted.
“Here, here,” he said, and walked a wide circle around the tumbled bones. His voice did not carry, nearly swallowed by the bones themselves.
Eleanor let Mallory and Auberon walk on, their steps soft on the floor, but she paused in the arched doorway, not wanting inside the room. It was not vastly different from those they had already passed through, but the idea that Anubis and Horus had possibly been here, had caused this, gave her great pause. Within the bones, fallen from their once-tidy display, Eleanor spied other vertebrae, spilled in a neat row so they almost looked joined. Eleanor was struck by an image within the arrangement of the bones, an image of a woman, but if this image existed only within her imagination, she could not say. She did not ask if any of the men saw it; she reached for either side of the doorway, to steady herself, forcing herself not to flee, but to stay, to witness.
It is only bones, she told herself, but it went beyond bones. These were once people, loved and hated and revered and scorned, and people. Those whom Egyptians would have carefully wrapped and tucked into sarcophagi, closed away from time’s eager mouth; carried down through the ages, not stacked in piles of unrelated bones, their natural whiteness fading into sepia and black thanks to time’s passage. Every single wall, edged in countless bones. Sharp, rounded, jutting at unnatural angles.
The nausea swept over Eleanor without warning. She dropped to her knees and the room shuttered to blackness, the stench of an opened grave rising around her. She was not given to swooning, but for one recent event—and Mallory would never let her live this down, but it was not fainting, she soon saw. It wasn’t something she could put a name to, for as the room resolved around her, it was not Mallory’s familiar form beside her, but Anubis. Eleanor picked herself up from the dirt and took a step toward him.
“What—”
The ancient god faded once more into the shadows and Eleanor found herself in an entirely unknown chamber of the catacombs, having no idea which way she should go. For the time being, she did not move at all, compelled to stillness, to contemplate the room in which she found herself. It was much like the room she had been in with Mallory, Auberon, and Dernier, but the bones here were not disturbed in any way. They lined the walls as they had for ages, aged skulls having been fashioned into a heart among other bones. The ends of arm and leg bones fashioned a strangely beautiful canvas around the skull heart, and when Eleanor stepped closer, she could see there was writing on the skulls. Across the forehead of each, names had been written in ink now fading.
She could not say if the names belonged to those dead, or was only graffiti, left behind at random. The heart gave her hope that it was intentional, that these people were known and loved, but what did that say of the scattered bones, of those without any order whatsoever? Further into the chamber, she found more such arrangements; hearts were common, but she found displays of skulls in other patterns: elaborate and branching crosses, uneven arches, and long lines that ran into the far distance, dividing huge sections of arm and leg bones.
Eleanor could not shake the feeling that the eye sockets were staring at her; row upon row of them, sockets black and gaping. Here and there, skulls had been vandalized, one wearing a crude approximation of lipstick and blush, its eyes outlined in a way that called to mind flowers, leaves, strange bright life where none other existed.
“Mallory?”
She called his name to determine if she was within earshot of the men, but there came no immediate reply. As hard as she listened, Eleanor heard absolutely nothing but for her own breath. She looked at the room once more, turning a slow circle.
“So why bring me here?” she asked Anubis, even though he had fled. “I am not your chess piece, to place as you will. What is it you want me to see…and why come to Paris at all, hmm?” She considered Anubis and his function within Egypt’s mythologies, and stilled. The idea that claimed her was not so farfetched, and yet—
“Does this chamber hold Egyptian dead?”
The question came out in a whisper. She felt entirely foolish, but the idea made her shiver as though she were seeing Anubis for the first time again. It was something she couldn’t quite wrap her mind around, the strange notion that some of these bones might have an Egyptian origin. But if that were the case…
“Why not just take them?”
She reached for the nearest wall, daring to touch the curve of a skull that emerged from one of the cross formations. It was cold, as if it had never known the warmth of blood and muscle, but she did not withdraw her hand. She allowed the bone to warm under her touch.
“Possibly because you are not a thief,” Eleanor murmured, and looked quickly up as the ceiling above her crackled. She expected to see a shift of bones, to have dirt rain upon her, but all was strangely calm. She exhaled and drew her hand back, fingers coated in the dust of ages.
Simply looking at the bones told her nothing; one bone looked much like any other, so there was no telling from whence they might have originated. Nor did she see anything obviously missing, like the vertebrae yet in her pocket.
“Let us presume,” she said, walking a slow line along the skulls, “that there are Egyptian dead here.” Another chill swept over her, but she kept on, no matter that she also felt nauseated at the idea of Egyptian dead lain to rest like this. Naked, unwrapped, unnamed. “What is the purpose of telling me? Archaeologist, yes, and now aligned with powerful Mistral, yes, but…unless you cease being tight-lipped, and tell me which bones, I am not certain how you think I can aid you. Anubis.”
Anubis, were he listening, remained silent.
“Pair this with Horus…in possession of a bone…given to me…” Eleanor thrust her hand into her pocket, holding onto the bone as she turned and walked back the way she had just come. The bone was warmer than the skull she had just touched, hard and somehow removed from the anger that hummed through her.
“Pair this with the strange occurrence at the museum, with an artifact bearing a falcon… Do not presume I am simple-minded, Anubis, but by all that is holy, stop these games, for they only waste time. Time is a mortal construct, yes, but we are bound by it even so—”
Anubis peeled himself from the shadows at the far end of the room, where the gaslight did not reach. Eleanor did not approach him, but stopped, watching the god as he watched her. He emerged slow, as tall as the ceiling, the gaslight painting him in a way that resembled the commingling of water and oil. He shimmered, not wholly dark, but also not wholly anything but a shaft of darkness. Her hand tightened around the bone in her pocket. Anubis had never done violence to her, and she didn’t expect him to now, but his appearance always alarmed her, for he was so unexpected. For years, he had been but an image on tomb walls, an
d now he lived and breathed and claimed her as one of his own.
Mortal constructs are of use.
His voice shook through her, low and dark like the Nile. Eleanor tried to move away from the sensation, but there was no escaping it. Like water, he trickled where he would, into every crevice, as if filling the very chamber they occupied.
And this, no game.
“Are there Egyptian dead here?” Eleanor asked.
Anubis bowed his head, as if in assent, and then surprised Eleanor by dropping to his knees. He kept his head bowed, arms spreading wide. His eyes closed, lashes thick and long beneath the gold that lined his lids. How like a piece of art, carefully wrought and brought to life. Eleanor inhaled sharply, overcome by his mere existence.
I can feel them, the bones of our people. They cry for proper rest, to be carried over. By your hands, Daughter.
Eleanor felt plunged in ice water. Her knees grew weak and she did not know if it was Anubis’s doing, trying to pull her down so that she might also honor the dead. She fought against the force, staying upright even as she began to shake. It was only the cold, she told herself, but it was a lie.
“And Horus?” she demanded. “The seal?”
On this, Anubis said nothing. He lifted his eyes, and gazed at Eleanor the way she felt the skulls had earlier; staring, unmoved, and unmovable. She did drop to her knees then, because she couldn’t bear the weight of his black expression upon her nor the way her entire body shook and only calmed when she was finally on her knees. She could not breathe until she looked away from Anubis and could not look away because he held her pinned.
“I am not a chess piece,” she whispered from a tight throat.
Nor even senet? You would leave them here, screaming? Daughter.
At that, Anubis pulled her into his thoughts where Eleanor could hear the cries of the dead. It was like nothing she had ever heard, the bones around them not silent, but shrieking and jostling in an unnatural rage as the cold ate away at them. When rattled together, they were a vast and shivering field of grain, dead beneath a moon that would never rise; in other times, the Seine invaded the low passage to silence them. This they could not bear, for it reminded them of the Nile, of the way their bare feet had once sunk into the black soil as the water flooded up and up, of the way they had planted and harvested and lived. This was the cruelest memory, the memory of a life they could no longer have paired with the memory of the afterworld they had been promised, but denied.
The Glass Falcon (Folley & Mallory Adventure Book 2) Page 4
