Chapter Seventeen The French Teacher #3
“Is there someone following us?” Lyra said, and slipped the package unobtrusively, she hoped, into the left pocket of her skirt.
She couldn’t begin to guess what it was, or who had sent it, or why, but they had to move now, because Ionides said, “Two men. They watch you go in, they wait for you to come out. Stay close.”
He moved forward at a leisurely pace and she went with him, Asta close by her heels, and Ionides’s own gecko daemon on his shoulders, facing behind. Lyra could feel the weight of the little package against her thigh.
In the center of the square was a statue of a warrior on horseback, which seemed to be an established meeting place for the citizens of Baku. There were benches on an area of grass, and flower beds, and a kiosk selling drinks and food. Ionides pointed across the road to it.
“If we sit there we can look all around,” he said. “You hungry, Miss Silver?”
“I had a pastry, but it was insubstantial. Wispy.”
Lyra stopped at the first traffic light, Ionides close on her left, and waited with half a dozen other pedestrians.
“Are they anywhere near?” she murmured.
The gecko daemon said, “They are close by, watching. They will cross with us when the light changes.”
Lyra said, just loudly enough for Ionides and Asta to hear, “Then we’ll walk more slowly than these other people and partway across we’ll change our minds and suddenly turn and run back. On my signal. They don’t stay red for long.”
“Miss Silver…” Ionides began, but the lights changed at that moment, and the small group of pedestrians began to move off the pavement.
Lyra went with them, Ionides close at her side, and the two men came with the rest. When they were three-quarters of the way across she said “Now!” and turned and ran back. Asta darted ahead of her. Ionides followed without hesitating.
The two men, though, were caught by surprise.
At first they stood still, and made as if to follow Lyra, but then seemed to realize that they’d give themselves away by doing so, and hesitated; and by then the lights had changed, and the traffic was already surging forward, and they had to rush for the nearest sidewalk—and found themselves cut off from their quarry.
“Very good, Miss Silver,” said Ionides. “Now we get away before they can cross back.”
They turned down the nearest street out of the square, and then turned right into a smaller street, and then left into another busy shopping street, where a bus was pulling into a stop.
“Let’s get on,” said Lyra.
So they did, together with three other people. Ionides asked the driver something, and paid for them both, and then they found seats near the door.
“Queen Silver, you very lucky,” he said. “You know where this is going? The Marine Passenger Terminal.”
“Couldn’t be better,” she said.
“You still got your package from the post?”
“Of course.”
As the bus pulled away, she and Ionides, and Asta, and the gecko daemon all looked around to see if there was anyone who might have been following them, but there was no one who looked in the slightest bit suspicious.
Lyra took out the little package, with its string and sealing wax. She was intensely curious.
“You know who send it?” said Ionides.
“No idea. It’s addressed to the queen, so I suppose it can only be Mustafa Bey, really.”
She looked closely at the impression on the sealing wax, and then compared it with the mark he’d made with his ring on her laissez-passer. It was the same: two Arabic letters elegantly entwined.
“Same, huh?”
“Yes. I’ll have to break the seal to open it, but that’s the point, I suppose. Pity. It’s so neatly done.”
The bus was moving through the heavy traffic.
Lyra cracked the sealing wax and peeled it away, and found a complicated knot in the string underneath it.
As she prized one strand away from another with her nails, Ionides watched the street, and the passengers who got on, and the buildings nearby, and the progress she was making.
“You want to cut it?” he said.
“No. Might need the string. Nearly got it.”
“Malcolm would keep it too,” said Asta.
The last loop in the knot came undone, and she pulled it apart and tucked the string in her shirt pocket. She unfolded the brown paper and found another package inside, which had been addressed to Miss Lyra Silvertongue, c/o Mustafa Bey, Marletto’s Café, Aleppo.
The bus came to a halt. Four passengers got off, and three got on. Lyra found a note with the inner package, marked in red ink with Mustafa Bey’s seal:
Your Majesty, Whoever sent this package to you in my care is a person of great ingenuity and faith, which I trust will be rewarded when you open it. I hope your journey to Baku was comfortable. With solemn regards, Mustafa Bey
“I must write him a report,” Lyra said. “As soon as we’re safely on the ferry.”
The inner package was sealed with tape, not sealing wax, and the address was written in heavy black ink.
There was no return address. Something about the way it had been wrapped and addressed made Lyra think it had been done in haste.
It took her so long to peel back the tape that the bus came to a halt before she had unwrapped the paper, and Ionides said quietly, “Better put it away. This is the ferry terminal.”
The other passengers were all getting to their feet and gathering their possessions.
Several of them seemed to be going to the ferry, because they had suitcases or rucksacks, and there was a mother with two small children who had to edge her way towards the door carrying a folded pushchair as well as a heavy case.
A man offered to help carry the case, but she shook her head nervously.
One of the children was crying, and the man spoke again, and the mother, anxious and flustered, unwillingly let him carry the pushchair.
The passengers behind were jostling impatiently; the driver was looking back to see what the holdup was; Lyra tucked the package into her rucksack and sat back to wait till they could move.
Two minutes later all the other passengers had left, and Lyra and Asta and Ionides were standing outside the terminal of the Transcaspian Modern Ferry Company, and the unopened package lay safely in her rucksack.