“It makes no sense. Why would Matakara’s temple be the epicenter of the God-Breaker Plague? Why would a vampire be involved in such a thing? Her kind, too, would be exterminated.”
Genevieve Lefoux said, “May I suggest we look to the scientific evidence, and the reality of the situation first, and speculate afterward?”
“I take it you haven’t yet explored the temple?” Alexia was surprised.
“I only recently arrived here myself. We were mooring when your balloon touched down. How did you, by the way, manage to convince a Drifter to carry you?”
“I am supposed to right my father’s wrong,” replied Alexia cryptically, twisting up her face in disdain.
“Goodness, which of the many?” the inventor wanted to know. “Anyway, the temple is completely unexcavated, so it is still filled with sand. It would take years to dig it out. I wouldn’t know where to start.”
Alexia splashed at her. “My dear Genevieve, I don’t see that our answers are going to lie inside the temple.”
“No?”
“No. Remember what we have found out, that preternatural touch requires air—preferably dry air—to work? Don’t you think dead preternaturals might function the same way?”
“Dead preternaturals? Is that our source?”
Alexia only pursed her lips.
“How long have you known that might be a possibility?”
“Since Scotland.”
“The artifact of humanization was a mummy?”
“Of a preternatural, yes.”
“But why didn’t you tell me?”
Alexia gave her sometime friend a very funny look.
Madame Lefoux clearly understood. Alexia could not reveal such a dangerous scientific fact to a member of the OBO. “You think we should look for the epicenter outside the temple?”
“Indeed I do.”
“Can you manage it?”
Alexia frowned. “I can manage anything if we get some answers at the end of it.”
Thinking of the fact that she had recently fainted, Conall said, “We’ll bring water along and keep your dress as damp as possible. That might help.”
“Oh.” Alexia felt guilty for maligning her husband’s actions in her head. “Is that why you chucked me into the Nile fully clothed?”
Lord Maccon made a funny face. “Of course, dear.”
They paddled to shore and climbed out onto the muddy bank. The moment she was free of the river, Alexia began to feel that awful sense of repulsion against her skin.
“I think I may have to sleep in the river tonight,” she said to no one in particular.
“You’ve done stranger things, I suppose,” was her husband’s reply.
Early the next morning, before the heat of the sun, Lady Maccon, Lord Maccon, and Madame Lefoux climbed up the hill above Hatshepsut’s temple—or squelched up in Alexia’s case. She was all pruned from a night spent in the river, a kind of hammock having been made to support her while she slept. It had not been very restful at all, and she was peevish and annoyed as a result. A trail of Egyptians followed in their wake, each carrying a large urn or canteen of river water. At Alexia’s signal, one would step forward and splash her with it, rather too enthusiastically and much to Prudence’s amusement.
“Mama, wet!”
“Yes, darling.” Alexia could almost hear her daughter’s adult commentary behind the baby phrases: Sooner you than me, Mother.
The sand-covered hill they scaled formed the back part of the roof of the temple, where it had been carved into the side of a cliff. Alexia took the lead, despite her damp dress hindering her stride, her parasol raised against the vicious sun. Then came Genevieve, and then Conall and Prudence. They left Zayed and family back at camp.
It was there, on the top of that hill, they began to see the bodies. Or to be more precise, the mummies. Or to be even more precise, it was where Lord Maccon accidentally stepped on a long-dead preternatural.
It made a sad, dry, cracking noise and let out a little puff of brown dust.
“Conall, do be careful! Inhale one of those and you could be mortal forever! Or something equally nasty.”
“Yes, dear.” The earl wrinkled his nose and shook off his boot.
Madame Lefoux held up a hand and they all stopped walking and simply looked. They could see down the sloping back side of the hill the eight long pathways out into the desert.
“Ghost trails,” said Alexia, repeating Zayed.
“I hardly think so. Quite the opposite.” Madame Lefoux was crouched down examining one of the bodies.
They were all mummies, or at least they looked to be mummies. As they followed along one of the trails down the hill, they eventually came across unwrapped bodies, baked and charred into a mummylike state by the dry desert sun. A thin coating of sand covered most of them, but once brushed aside, it became clear that it was these bodies that formed the octopus’s tentacles. Hundreds of mummies, stretching out into the desert, spaced farther and farther apart. Maximizing the expansion, perhaps? Each one was marked by a headstone, some made of carved rock or wood. They bore no legend or the names of the dead. They were all carved with the same shape—or to be precise, two shapes, an ankh, broken.
Alexia looked out over the tendrils extending off into the sands, disappearing from sight. “My people.”
Madame Lefoux stood up from where she had crouched down to examine yet another mummy. “Preternaturals, all of them?”
“That would do it.”
“Do what, exactly?” The Frenchwoman goaded her into saying it out loud.
“Cause the plague. Dry desert air combined with hundreds of dead preternaturals, basically—oh, I don’t know how to put it properly—outgassing.”
“That’s a lot of dead preternaturals,” said her husband.
“Collected from all around the world for hundreds and hundreds of years, I suppose. There aren’t that many of us to start with. Could also be that originally they were all piled up and that forty years ago someone decided to start spreading them out.”
Lord Maccon glanced over at Genevieve. “That would take quite an operation.”
Alexia added, “Two operations: one to get it started originally and another to start it up again forty years ago.”
Madame Lefoux looked back at them, her dark head twisting between the two and her green eyes grave. “It isn’t me! This is the first I’ve heard of it, I promise you!”
“Yes,” agreed Alexia, “but it is the kind of thing that might require a secret society. A massive underground secret society, of scientists, perhaps, who might not get so squeamish as others about handling the dead and collecting them from all over the world.”
“You think the OBO is doing this!” Madame Lefoux rocked back on her heels, genuinely surprised by the idea.
“It is an octopus.” Alexia was having none of that kind of silliness.
“No, you mistake me. The Order did spawn the Hippocras Club. I read the reports. I know we are capable of monstrous things. I simply don’t believe this is us. To have such knowledge, to know what the body of a dead preternatural could do and not tell any other members? It is all very well to have a secret society of geniuses, but to keep such information secret from the members defeats the purpose. It’s ridiculous. Think of the weapons I could have devised against vampires and werewolves had I known this. No, not the Order. It must be some other operation. The Templars, perhaps. They certainly have the infrastructure and the inclination.”
Alexia frowned. “Don’t you think the Templars might have done more with such knowledge? Might have developed weapons, as you say, from the technology. Or more likely, have collected the bodies in Italy to protect the homeland there. Move the God-Breaker Plague rather than expand it.”
Conall Maccon joined the fray. “You know what I think?”
Both ladies turned to look at him, surprised that he was still there. Alexia’s husband had their daughter propped on his hip. He was looking scruffy and hot. Prudence was inordinately quiet and somber, faced with all the bodies. She ought to have screamed and cried with fear, like any ordinary child, but instead she had merely looked at them, muttered, “Mama” in a very humble way, and buried her face in her father’s neck.