Chapter 1 #3
Ezra wasn’t entirely surprised. The Ellington name had always had the power to open doors—in Cairo, in Oxford, even in the thick of war.
It was one of the reasons he was allowed in the galleries after hours.
But there was a big difference between watching Lord Blackwood wield his influence and watching Elizabeth “Biz” Ellington do the same.
She seemed too young for that sort of thing—even at twenty. She didn’t have her father’s gravitas.
All she had was a muddy dress and a flock of eager followers.
“Where did your other friend run off to?” Ezra glanced at the opposite side of the gallery, where he’d seen the woman with the wire wings. There was only darkness in her place. “We don’t want her to get cursed by one of the upstairs mummies.”
Rose and Minnie exchanged a glance, while Biz’s expression tightened. Ezra bit the inside of his cheek, hard. A mistake. There had only ever been the three women. “I thought I counted four of you… Never mind. Trick of the shadows.”
Shadows liked to trick Ezra—they’d been slippery all his life.
But he knew they weren’t really to blame for the woman with the black-feathered wings.
She’d sprung straight from his mind. Doctors called such things a hallucination: a more sanitized term for madness.
After the war, they’d chalked it up to shell shock.
Of course you’d start seeing ghosts if you spent that much time around death…
This might have made Ezra feel better, but the visions had been happening long before he went off to fight.
He’d been seeing strange things his entire life…
What other child would be so petrified that a mummified cat might jump into their bed?
Though, in the war, ghosts weren’t all he saw.
His battlefields had been filled with angels and demons, with flaming swords and undying flowers.
With men’s memories swimming inside puddles of their blood.
George’s had been the worst—leaking out of his broken skull, alongside fragments of bone and brain.
Ezra had stood over him in shock, watching his own face swirling through the red.
Not just a reflection, but glimpses of them together as boys, gallivanting around Thornhill.
So much more than glass had cracked…
He’d lost himself then.
He’d let the madness wash over him.
They’d called Ezra a hero when he awoke, surrounded by oh so many more bodies. Their memories shimmered around him. George was still there. Still dead.
He tried not to think of this as he watched Biz, but it was difficult.
So much of her brother was in her face—magnified as she held the looking glass out to him.
“Here! Maybe you can help. The clue we found at Tower Bridge said we needed to count the sun’s eyes on death’s darkest stone, then pace yourself in the most false direction. ”
Ezra frowned. English was technically his third language, but he spoke it without an accent.
It was rare that he questioned his fluency, but Biz’s riddle had thrown him for a loop.
It wasn’t as elegant as the clues Lord Blackwood used to roll up in the napkins of their Saturday breakfast—maps and codices that sent the children sprawling across the estate for a day.
“Sounds like a lot of nonsense, no?” Minnie piped up. “The sun doesn’t have eyes!”
“The sun is an eye in Egyptian mythology,” Biz informed her friend. “It was believed to be the eye of the sun god Ra!”
Ezra knelt in front of the sarcophagus. “I don’t think you’ll find the Eye of Ra on a coffin… It’s not associated with funerary art.”
Biz crouched next to him, reaching out to trace some of the sarcophagus’s symbols. Her nail was painted bright red, the same shocking shade as her lips. It looked a little bit too much like blood for Ezra’s taste.
“That’s what I was wondering,” she said. “Do you think the clue writer meant the Eye of Horus instead? It would be an easy enough mistake.”
“Why’s that?” Rose asked.
“The symbols look similar, but they’re inversed,” Ezra explained. “Ra’s eye appears as a right wedjat. Horus’s eye is on the left and it’s the one that tends to appear on sarcophagi—they were placed there to allow the dead to keep watch.”
Rose’s cheeks pinkened as she regarded the sarcophagus. “So there’s, like, ghosts seeing us through this coffin?”
“Of course not!” scoffed Minnie. “It’s all superstitious mumbo jumbo. People didn’t know any better back then. They didn’t have newspapers or scientists or modern medicine. Our society is way more enlightened—”
“And yet we still can’t seem to figure out how the ancient Egyptians managed to build the pyramids,” Biz grunted.
“Eyes of Horus were usually depicted on coffins in pairs,” Ezra went on. “Especially during the First Intermediate Period and the Middle Kingdom—ah, yes. See? Here.” He pointed to the carving. “And here.”
Biz stood quickly. “That means I’ll have to take two paces in the ‘most false direction.’ If north is true, I’m guess that means south.”
South led back the way Ezra had come, toward the rugged rear of Ramesses II. Someone had wedged a small scroll where the hieroglyphs on the pharaoh’s spine broke off. Biz wasted no time scrambling up to grab it.
Be careful! The words crested Ezra’s throat—he wasn’t sure if they were more for the socialite or the statue’s sake.
In either case, there wasn’t much point.
Enough damage had already been done by dynamite.
The stone’s sacred inscriptions had long been split, and Biz had already managed to pluck the paper from this crack.
“Oh goody!” Rose clapped her hands together as Biz unrolled the clue. “What does this one say?”
“Tyger, tyger, burning bright, find the king of the jungle’s light. If not a king, then a regent he. If not a jungle, then a menagerie.”
“A zoo!” exclaimed Minnie. “The zoo at Regent’s Park has tigers, doesn’t it? That’s where the next clue must be!”
Ezra snorted. “You can’t seriously be considering breaking into the zoo.”