“What was he planning to do?” Evelyn muttered, attempting to dig his fingernails into the tiny cracks between the close-fitted flags.
Rian handed him her chisel, but Prince Gustav stepped to the fore. He was holding an axe that had certainly not been in any belt-pouch, with a haft nearly six foot in length, and long, tapering double blades. A thing of the Aesir’s, according to Princess Leodhild.
“Stand away,” the prince said brusquely, and gripped the axe in both hands, the position ceremonial, with the haft down and the blades before his face.
He struck the centre of the flag sharply, a single blow that rang like the Tintarel Bells, and the heavy stone square split neatly in two. Evelyn bent to pry up one edge of the flag, and Rian and Gustav’s driver were quick to help him, especially when it became clear that there was an open space beneath, a shaft, with neatly-cut handholds up one side.
At the bottom lay Lynsey Blair.
TWENTY-NINE
“Go get a Thoth-den and the police,” Rian told the attendant tersely, as Evelyn lowered himself down the shaft. “Run.”
“Lyns?” Evelyn, voice tight with distress, lifted the Alban woman carefully. “She’s so cold.”
“Then hand her up, man!” Prince Gustav said.
Rian climbed swiftly down to join Evelyn, glancing from a wadded bloodstained cloth to the trail of dark red smears decorating the floor of a downward sloping tunnel leading from the shaft. The blood was tacky, crusted. Lynsey had crawled to this point, then collapsed.
“I’ll prop, you lift,” she told Evelyn, and wasted no time in doing just that, with Gustav and his driver hauling from above.
Climbing back up, Rian said: “Stabbed, I think. I can tell that her heart’s still beating, but it’s very weak.”
“Where is the nearest Thoth-den?” Evelyn asked Dama Wishart, managing to stand cradling the tall Alban woman in his arms. “We can’t wait here.”
“I’ll show you,” Dama Wishart said. “Not far, thankfully—we are at a pyramid, after all.”
“Good, good,” Prince Gustav said. “Go without delay, as will I. The sound it will have carried, the rats they will run. But they do not escape.”
Taking the torch from Dama Wishart, he leapt into the hidden tunnel, his driver quickly dropping down after him.
Evelyn wavered, but Rian took his shoulders and turned him toward the exit.
“I’ll look for Lyle,” she said. “Go.”
How would Lyle feel, knowing that only vampiric intervention was likely to save Lynsey? Climbing back into the shaft, Rian decided she would not ask him if she found him.
Gustav and his driver had already disappeared around a curve, two rivers rapidly gaining distance. Rian shook her head, wondering what diplomatic consequences there would be for Prytennia if one of Sweden’s princes, and Alba’s current Lord Protector, met a messy end in London.
Had she become someone who protected Prytennia’s interests? It was an odd thought, as strange as the idea of living a thousand years in the service of Cernunnos and the Trifold. But to do that she needed to survive now, and so did not race immediately after the Swedes, taking the time to ready her pistol and strain her senses, feeling for other rivers ahead. Nothing seemed to be in range.
The tunnel was neatly cut but narrow, close enough to brush elbows on either side, though she did not need to bow her head, and could manage a brisk pace without making a great deal of noise. Height and her Makepeace-given senses allowed her to gain on Gustav, so that she was within sight of him when he stopped, outlined by a dim glow.
A reverent curse drifted back to her, and the two men spoke softly before moving forward at a much more cautious pace. They had not progressed more than a few feet by the time Rian reached the entrance of a long chamber lit by several fulgite lamps.
Work tables, camp beds, and corpses. It was a slaughter house, reeking.
Rian recognised the head of a man lying on the ground to her right. He had been with Felix, coming from a meeting with Princess Leodhild. His body was several feet away, meaty chunks. She looked hastily around for Felix and Lyle, not spotting them immediately, counting five bodies, three men and two women, all torn apart.
Prince Gustav had found a sixth, the one that mattered above all others. Gleaming in dull purple tones, it was spread in countless crystalline fragments on one of the tables amidst a collection of the tools used to break it down. But enough was intact to be damning: a forearm, part of a foot, an entire hand.
“So it is true!” Gustav said, picking his way toward the table. “I guessed but did not believe, because the stone of rept does not at all resemble the crystal of fulgite. But I see the way of it. Look here, this is used.”
He had found a machine, resembling a tall drum or barrel, which opened up to reveal a scarred interior and a partially shattered fulgite person.
“So, it is fulquus itself they use,” Prince Gustav said. “Not a special thing that Rome alone controls.” He threw Rian a vastly entertained glance. “The cat, the pigeons, yes?”
No understatement. Egypt’s Otherworld was not easily reached, and even those who did not strive to become stars relied upon a well-preserved body to house their ba while it gathered strength to make the journey to the Field of Rushes. To destroy the body of an Egyptian was, potentially, to leave their ba homeless, without any choice but to attempt that journey immediately. Unlike Prytennia, where efforts were made as soon as possible to sever the tie between body and soul by breaking the body down, or the Nordic lands where the soul was sent on by means of fire, there was nothing more dreadful to the Egyptian than to interfere with the preserved bodies of the dead.
And over the past few decades, half the world had started powering their lamps with them.
Even looking beyond Egypt’s reaction, if the world now knew how to make fulgite, what would happen? None of the experiments in replicating fulgite’s ability to store and release fulquus had come anywhere close to creating a battery of similar capacity. None of the alternatives, old or new, could begin to compare to fulgite’s efficiency.
“I begin to see why the Nesweth sent the Huntresses,” Rian said, and Gustav ceased to be amused.
“No, it is impossible,” he said. “They could not have known, and could hold no hope to hide this now.” He looked around, then recovered his cheer. “Rome, it is about to enjoy a war, I think.”
“None of these are Dem Blair, my prince,” said the driver, Ishi.
“That is good. Let us find the Lyle.”
“There were several exits, one of them blocked by a heavy, close-fitting door, and two others that proved to lead to partially filled shafts—not, in Rian’s estimation, beneath the Black Pyramid, but perhaps one of the smaller pyramids used by the Thoth-den. They soon returned to examine the heavy door.”
“They ran, and sealed it behind,” Prince Gustav said. “Do the vampire parts of you feel them near, Keeper of Albion?”
Rian had been trying to gauge that very thing, hoping to select a direction, and finding it not an easy process. “There’s no-one close,” she said.
“Then we make noise again,” he said, and did so, this time shattering the stone door into flying fragments.
Beyond, the tunnel divided, and Gustav chose left without preamble. Rian paused to check her pocket watch. Makepeace would surely be on the move by now, perhaps even able to enter the south-facing pyramid.
“Someone alive ahead,” she said, catching Prince Gustav up. “And others, further away.”
“Good, good. But not so good.”