Twenty-Seven
T he water that closed over Neil’s head was colder than it had any right to be. It moved fast, whipping him into a twisting current that threatened to pull Constance from his arms.
No, he thought with furious desperation, clutching at her dress to catch her even as his lungs began to scream.
Constance writhed in his grip. She caught his wrist and hauled Neil powerfully toward the surface. He kicked after her, pulling wildly with his free hand.
They burst through the water. Neil gasped for air, spluttering as he blinked at a sloshing world of blurry darkness. It took him a moment to realize that his spectacles were still on his face, though being repeatedly drenched with water, they were more or less impossible to see through.
Neil yanked the glasses off and shoved them into the pocket of his trousers, nearly submerging himself again in the process. Constance grabbed at him, her face a pale oval against the tumultuous darkness.
The current had already carried the Isis ahead of them. Cries of angry frustration echoed over the river from the boat. Even without his spectacles, Neil could see the rough form of the decks and the cold, shimmering glow of Julian Forster-Mowbray’s impossible sword.
The flames illuminated a lithe, dangerous shape that joined his former employer in the stern. Neil vaguely recognized it as Jacobs before it raised a hand, pointing the pistol at them from across the water.
“Get down, you idiot!” Constance snapped—and shoved him into the Nile.
Neil was swallowed by a chilling blackness, his body rushed by powerful surges that tossed him around like a cork as Constance held on to him, her fist twisted solidly into his shirt.
They surfaced again a moment later, shoved up by another pulse of the river. The Isis had moved further away. Neil picked out snippets of Julian’s furious orders to drop sails and turn around.
The reis hollered back—something about cliffs, current, and not losing my boat to some idiot ingilyzy.
The boat was not the only thing moving. The Nile carried Neil and Constance along the looming cliffs at an alarming speed.
Another wave sloshed over his head. He came up from it spluttering.
“This way!” Constance ordered.
She tugged at him and began to swim, arrowing capably through the water. Neil hauled himself after her, grateful that he had already abandoned his coat when he had thrown them to their possible doom.
They were moving closer to the cliffs, which rushed past Neil even faster now that they were nearer by. The sheer face of stone was painted a subtle silver by the light of the crescent moon, save for a few places where his poor eyesight detected dark abscesses in the surface of the rock.
He flinched against the assault of another wave and realized that the black spots were actually a pockmarking of rectangles that were certainly not natural in origin. Geography and years of research clicked together in his brain.
“Hold on!” he called out with a spark of scholarly interest. “Isn’t this Gebel Tukh?”
“Shut up and keep swimming!” Constance retorted.
The current shoved them into the base of the cliffs. Constance caught hold of a low ledge and snatched at Neil’s waistcoat as the river threatened to push him past her. She scrambled up, then hauled him from the water. The pair of them spilled onto the narrow surface of the rock.
The ledge was worn smooth by centuries of the cycle of the inundation. The surface slipped under Neil’s dripping body as he lay there entangled with Constance, gasping like a beached fish.
His mind reeled with the utter madness of what he had just done—jumping off a boat in the middle of the night next to an eighty-foot cliff. Dodging bullets. Tossing a three-thousand-year-old tablet of inestimable historical importance across a salon.
He groaned, dropping his head back against the stone.
Constance shoved at him as she tried to extricate herself. The narrowness of their perch just above the racing surface of the water didn’t leave her much room to maneuver, and Neil found himself shockingly aware of every limber inch of her muddy efforts.
He lurched away and nearly fell off the ledge. Constance caught him and yanked him to his feet.
They balanced there, bracing each other’s arms, until Constance abruptly released him.
“Why did you throw the tablet?” she demanded angrily.
“He was about to kill you!” Neil shot back.
She grabbed his shirt, shaking it with furious agitation. “Will it tell them where to find the tomb?”
The blood drained from Neil’s face. He couldn’t answer her.
Constance shoved him loose with a growl of disgust. The move nearly sent him sliding back into the river. He found a handhold on the cliff that rose beside him, using it to steady himself as his knees threatened to give out.
Neil couldn’t feel guilty for what he had done. He had been willing to die to keep the tablet and its secrets out of Julian Forster-Mowbray’s hands.
He hadn’t hesitated to sacrifice it to save Constance’s life.
She eyed the cliffs, her mouth tight with lingering frustration. “We need to find someplace less exposed in case they turn back the boat.”
“They can’t turn back the boat.” Neil’s voice was hoarse. He cleared his throat. “The current is too strong, and the wind is against them. They could only reverse course by offloading the crew and dragging the boat upriver by rope, and they can’t do that along these cliffs.”
“Well, that’s something, at least.” Constance grimly eyed the steep rocks that rose around them. “This way.”
She didn’t wait for him to answer. With the sturdy confidence of a goat, she picked out a path up the ragged face of the mountain. Neil struggled after her, torn between his terror of being left behind and his fear of losing his grip and plummeting into the river. Both outcomes felt entirely plausible.
He followed her to one of the square-cut openings in the rock. The doorway was barely tall enough to clear Neil’s head. Beyond it lay a narrow chamber cut into the face of the cliff, empty of anything but a scattering of rubble.
The ridge at Gebel Tukh was known to be peppered with rock-cut tombs, none of them considered to be of particular archaeological interest. All had been looted in antiquity, and their relative inaccessibility, suspended as they were above one of the most dangerous sections of the river, had deterred both casual explorers and professional excavators.
Neil’s eyes slowly adjusted to the gloom. If there had ever been a burial in this tomb, it was long gone now—not that he could make out much more about the place when it was all a blur. He fumbled for his glasses, taking them from his pocket and making a futile attempt to dry them on his soaked shirt.
He settled for blowing on them for a bit before slipping them back onto his face.
The world came back into focus—as did Constance.
Her hair had come loose, falling in damp waves around her shoulders. Her fashionable lawn dress was streaked with slime from their landing on the ledge. The fabric clung mercilessly to her well-proportioned figure.
Neil’s mouth went a bit dry, even as he considered with mortification how disheveled he must look himself.
That consideration vanished as Constance began picking at her buttons. She wriggled out of a sleeve.
“What… What are you…” Neil stuttered, panic rising.
“Stop gaping and take off your clothes,” she ordered.
“My what?! ” Neil squawked, fumbling to catch his glasses, which threatened to slide off his damp nose.
“They’ll dry better if you lay them out, and you’ll be less likely to catch a chill,” Constance clarified with barely concealed irritation.
She shoved her dress down over her hips and stepped out of it. Plucking it from the ground, she expertly twisted it into a knot, wringing it out.
Neil stared at the strong curve of her hip where it pressed against the fabric of her chemise. His mind blanked.
She rolled her eyes. “Stop looking so horrified. It’s not like I have any designs on your virtue. I had been considering it, but you scuppered any chance of that when you turned out to be such a lily-livered snitch.”
“I know,” Neil blurted back abjectly. “I was an utter…” His brain skidded to a halt as the full implication of Constance’s words cut through the fog of his shock.
I had been considering it…
Constance released the ties of her corset with a neat tug. She popped the clasps at the front of the lacy garment and tossed it down beside her wrung-out gown.
A strangled sound emerged from the back of Neil’s throat.
“Just take off your trousers already,” Constance snapped. “Or don’t, and freeze. It hardly makes any difference to me.”
She plopped down onto the ground in her chemise and drawers, crossing her arms over her chest and glaring out into the night.
Neil was starting to shiver. The Egyptian night was reasonably warm, but the water had been fairly bracing, and standing in a stone box while wearing soaked clothes was bound to leave one feeling a chill.
It’s fine, he told himself numbly as he struggled free of his clinging waistcoat, mortification burning through him. It isn’t like it means anything, he thought as he tugged his shirt over his head, the fabric sticking against his arms.
They were in desperate circumstances, and it was only Constance, he reminded himself as he squirmed free of his undershirt. He’d known her since she was in pinafores. It wasn’t as though… She was practically his…
I had been considering it…
His hands froze on the buttons of his trousers as the room started to spin.
“I can’t,” he blurted out, his face hot as a frying pan. “I’m sorry.”
“Suit yourself,” Constance retorted without looking at him.
Neil slumped down against the wall and let the exhaustion and humiliation wash over him.
“Who do you think they were?” Constance asked.
Neil opened his eyes to see her looking at a pair of statues carved into the wall near the tomb’s entrance. They were deeply weathered, the soft sandstone reduced to little more than the most basic forms of a man and a woman standing side-by-side in the thin silver moonlight.
“Old Kingdom,” Neil blurted automatically, resting his head back against the rough-cut stone. “Some minor Eighth Nome official and his wife.”
“How can you know that?” Constance pressed with a mix of irritation and curiosity.
Neil shifted uncomfortably. His wet trousers clung unpleasantly to his thighs. “The carvings on the wall are sunken relief rather than bas relief. That usually means Old Kingdom.”
“What about the Nome?” Constance studied him narrowly through the gloom. “What’s that, and what makes you think this fellow was part of one?
Nomes, Neil thought distractedly, her question brushing past him like a rogue butterfly. Nomes and gnomes.
He almost giggled. Apparently, a slight edge of hysteria was the natural outcome of a surplus of terror, shock, and mortification. “A Nome is an Ancient Egyptian administrative unit. And who else would he be?”
“Hmm.” Constance frowned as she continued to pin him with a thoughtful gaze.
The burst of manic energy faded, letting Neil’s rational mind slowly reassert itself—not that it remotely liked what it saw when it did.
“Mr. Forster-Mowbray’s sword was on fire,” he said, the words spilling involuntarily from his lips.
“You don’t say,” Constance huffed in reply.
Neil closed his eyes. “It was a flaming sword. An Anglo Saxon twist-welded flaming sword.”
“Julian called it Dyrnwyn,” Constance reported tiredly.
“Dyrnwyn?” Neil echoed, feeling as though the ground beneath him was sliding away even further. “As in the sword of Rydderch the Generous, King of Strathclyde? Dyrnwyn of the Thirteen Treasures of Britain?”
“He said it would only flame up for someone well-born or worthy. I’m not sure he realizes that those aren’t necessarily the same thing,” Constance added dryly.
“The flaming sword of Rydderch Hael is real.” Neil enunciated each word carefully, as though hearing them aloud would make them easier to accept. “And it flames. With fire.” He closed his eyes again. The stone box of the tomb swam around him.
“So now you believe it!” Constance retorted. “The thing the rest of us have been trying to tell you this entire time!”
“But you were talking about magic!” Neil pushed back wildly.
“Of course we were!” Constance threw up her hands. “What else do you think has been going on?”
Despair washed away Neil’s last shreds of indignation. He dropped his head to his arms where they were crossed over the soaked knees of his trousers. “I have been an enormous ass,” he mumbled mournfully into his lap.
“I suppose it’s something that you’re able to admit it,” Constance allowed. “That’s more than I can say for Julian Forster-Mowbray. At least Ellie, Adam, and Sayyid managed to escape with that batch of mysterious women.”
Neil’s head shot back up, his eyes widening with a mixture of hope and alarm. “They escaped? They’re all right? But how do you know?”
“I did a bit of eavesdropping.” Constance smiled a little viciously. “The look on Mr. Jacobs’ face when he gave Julian the news was quite satisfying.”
Relief crashed through Neil like a bucket of water. The impact was staggering, momentarily stealing his breath. When he finally spoke, his voice was hoarse and uneven. “I… I didn’t let myself really think of what might have… I couldn’t, or I would have…” A wash of overwhelming feeling choked off the words—and then Neil’s head shot up with a jolt of aching panic. “But are you certain? ”
Constance’s expression softened at the urgency of his tone. “I’m certain.”
Neil yanked off his spectacles and put his face in his shaking hands. “They all might have been…” His throat tightened on the word, cutting it off. He forced out the rest, the confession spilling from him in a desperate rush. “And Ellie told me—she told me that Julian was an unreliable rotter. She told me to trust her , only I couldn’t! No—I wouldn’t , because I wanted so badly for things to go back to the way they were! It was a stupid, stubborn, selfish impulse, and all three of them might have…”
He couldn’t bring himself to say the rest. It still hurt too much, shooting a wrenching fear through him that left him feeling as though he was tearing down the middle.
“It would have been my fault,” he finally choked out, pressing the heels of his trembling hands to his eyes.
A sigh carried to him softly from across the room. Something plopped down next to him. Warmth radiated against his damp skin as Constance settled against his side.
“You made a mistake,” Constance declared.
“A mistake?” Neil’s head jerked up. “I could have gotten all of them killed!”
“Give Ellie and Adam a little more credit than that,” Constance returned dryly.
“But I should have listened!” Neil pushed back.
“Yes,” Constance calmly agreed.
“I should have trusted all of you!”
“That, too. And I am still furious at you for it,” she added pointedly.
Neil stared at her helplessly.
Constance picked his spectacles up and slipped them over his ears. Her face came back into focus. She looked at him steadily. “But we’re all idiots every once in a while.”
Neil’s cheek was wet. He swiped at it awkwardly.
“You’ll do better next time,” Constance finished.
The easy confidence in her tone caught at something inside Neil’s chest and gave it a wrench. It hurt, and he found himself deeply, quietly grateful for it.
Constance comfortably leaned back against the wall beside him as Neil roughly pushed another tear from his cheek with the palm of his hand. It took him a few moments before he could speak again.
“What about this batch of mysterious women?” he asked once he felt like his voice would come out somewhat steady.
“I haven’t the foggiest idea.” Constance put on a slightly martyred tone. “If Ellie had something up her sleeve, she didn’t let me in on it. I can only guess that they were a band of rogue lady revolutionaries who caught wind of our mission and interceded to prevent the Staff of Moses from falling into the hands of Egypt’s enemies.”
Neil blinked, lost for words in the face of her fantastical theory.
“The important thing is that our co-conspirators are no longer in Julian’s clutches,” Constance continued. “Though we cannot rely on them to prevent that rogue from accomplishing his criminal mission. I am afraid that will be up to us.”
“Us?” Neil echoed with a snap of unease.
Constance cocked an eyebrow. “Frogs,” she recited neatly. “Locusts. Gnats. Pestilence. Boils. A thunderstorm of hail and fire. Water turning into blood. The slaughter of the firstborn. Am I missing anything?”
Neil swallowed thickly. “Three days of darkness,” he replied. “And lice.”
“And would you like to abandon the legendary staff that caused all of that to an avowed villain?” Constance prompted.
“No,” Neil moaned in response, resisting the urge to curl up into a ball. “But how are we supposed to stop him? There are only two of us!”
“And I lost my last dagger when we fell into the river.” Constance pouted. “I am rather cross about being deprived of both of my knives. I had to go to some lengths to acquire them in the first place. I can hardly rely on finding yet another means of blackmailing the butler.”
Neil felt a pang of sympathy for the head of the Tyrrell household staff.
“I’m not like Bates,” he warned carefully. “Or Ellie. I’m not a hero. I’m just a…”
He trailed off. A few days ago, he might have finished that sentence with the word ‘scholar’—but how could he call himself a scholar when he had been so blind to such an enormous truth about the world of the past? He had just discovered that the magic of the old stories wasn’t fantasy but as true to life as the dusty genealogies and battle records on which he had based his life’s work.
Only one word felt right in his current circumstances, and it wasn’t ‘scholar.’
“Fool,” Neil finished flatly. “I’m just a fool.” He put his fingers to the bridge of his nose, fighting a rising headache. “I don’t know how to do any of this. But it’s my mess. The least I can do is try to clean it up.”
“How much of the tablet were you able to translate?” Constance asked.
“Enough,” Neil replied.
“Will it tell them where to go?”
Neil’s shoulders slumped. “If I didn’t manage to break it when I threw it at Mr. Jacobs, then it will give them the exact coordinates of the tomb of Neferneferuaten at Tell al-Amarna.” He winced, forcing himself to continue. “Where I think it increasingly likely that the Staff of Moses, or the Was-Scepter of Khemenu—whatever the dashed thing really was—has been hidden for the last three thousand years.”
“Well. I suppose that settles that, then.” Constance shifted, lying down on the stone floor with her arm tucked under her head. “Try to sleep. You’ll need the energy for tomorrow.”
“What happens tomorrow?” Neil asked uneasily as he flattened himself uncomfortably on the hard ground beside her.
“We find a way off these cliffs, steal a boat, and go after Julian,” Constance returned authoritatively.
“Why do we have to steal a boat?” Neil protested, hesitant to add piracy to the list of frightening activities in which he was apparently to be engaged. “Haven’t you a wad of cash in your…”
The word ‘bosom’ stuck in his throat.
“I suppose I do.” Constance sounded disappointed.
Neil felt very far from capable of fixing the problems that faced them—problems that he had made—but as he lay on the cold ground of the tomb, he realized he was going to try.
He only hoped he wouldn’t be as much of an abject failure at it as he’d been at so many other things in his life.
“Goodnight, Stuffy,” Constance said, closing her eyes.
Neil’s gaze lingered on the elegant curve of her hip under the still-damp fabric of her chemise.
“Goodnight, Connie,” he said tightly, then rolled over to put his back to her.
His wet trousers clinging uncomfortably to his legs, Dr. Neil Fairfax resigned himself to an utterly miserable night.