Tomb of the Sun King, page 46
part #2 of Raiders of the Arcana Series
The big, heavily muscled Al-Saboor rounded the corner. The petite and wildly kicking figure hanging across his shoulder railed out a string of colorful insults.
“Put me down, you meathead!” Constance shouted.
The big fellow unceremoniously dumped her at the end of the row of prisoners and walked away.
Constance tugged furiously against the ropes that bound her hands behind her back.
“You’ll chafe your wrists that way,” Ellie called helpfully across the line of women.
After all, she had some experience with the matter.
“And to think that I was actually entertaining accepting that prat for a suitor!” Constance kicked her heels angrily against the stones. “I will tell you one thing, Eleanora—I am modifying my qualifications for potential husbands going forward. And they are going to include not being an utter villain!” She raised her voice, shouting across the ridge. “Did you hear that, you pigeon-livered ratbag!?”
Though Julian was still down in the tomb, Ellie thought he actually might. Constance was certainly exerting sufficient volume.
After Neil had fallen through the collapsed floor of the burial chamber, the room had erupted into chaos. Zeinab had the presence of mind to use the distraction of Neil’s fall to throw a beautifully painted three-thousand-year-old wooden room divider over the open sarcophagus, which was likely the only thing that saved them all from a bout of iron poisoning. Then she had shoved her husband into the pit, clearly calculating that his chances in a mysterious hole in the ground were better than his odds of surviving if he stayed in the tomb. She likely would have gone after him herself if that big, muscled Al-Saboor hadn’t snatched her around the waist and carted her off.
Zeinab had unleashed a string of Masri imprecations that would have burned a sailor’s ears, then bit the man for his trouble—which was how she had acquired the gag and extra bindings.
Ellie had managed to throw Neil her firebird bone as Adam hocked an Eighteenth Dynasty chair at Jacobs—which was not a tactic Ellie approved of, even under the circumstances. It had been a very fine piece with ebony inlay and lion-footed legs. Thankfully, the object was of exceptionally robust construction and held up even against the hard head of the gap-toothed Al-Saboor that Jacobs had ducked behind.
Jemmahor had used the distraction to dive behind the sarcophagus, while two more Al-Saboors had tackled Adam into a pile of walking sticks.
All in all, it had been an entirely uncivilized rout.
Ellie had been waiting for Jacobs to conduct a tidy series of executions once they were all subdued. Surely, whatever had made him hesitate to shoot them back at Hatshepsut’s temple must now be outweighed by all the trouble they continued to cause him. If it had been Julian holding him back, he certainly ought to have given up on his notion of convincing Constance to marry him by now—even if the rotter did consider being the grandson of a duke more important than something as trivial as moral character.
But they hadn’t been shot. Instead, Jacobs had ordered them bound and tossed into a helpless row against the rocks, where they were forced to watch the raid on Neferneferuaten’s tomb.
At least the thieves had taken Zeinab’s warning about the dangers of the hematite seriously. For the last quarter-hour, workers had been reeling up buckets of blood-red sludge from the tomb, which they then carried to the far end of the ridge and dumped over the side. Julian was clearly working to remove the deadly powder before he searched it—or the coffin that it protected—for the arcanum.
There had still been no word of Neil or Sayyid. Ellie’s stomach twisted with worry. She had been able to see that both men had survived their fall into the pit more or less intact, but it had been very clear there would be no climbing back out without the aid of a rope. Wherever they had gone to escape the bullets, they were trapped there unless they found some other way out of those mysterious caverns.
That left only one member of their party unaccounted for. There had been no sign of Umm Waseem when they emerged from the tomb, and a whispered question to Jemmahor revealed that the older woman had already vanished when ‘that dead-eyed devil’ Jacobs ambushed her. Ellie wondered whether the older woman’s absence indicated some hope of a rescue… and what form it might take.
She was still very curious about the contents of Umm Waseem’s black canvas bag.
Their two designated Al-Saboor guards idly chatted as they smoked, clearly bored by their assignment.
“Quick!” Ellie whispered in a low hiss. “Does anyone still have a blade?”
All of them had been searched for weapons when they had been captured. For the most part, those had been sadly lacking, other than Adam’s machete. The big knife had been confiscated in a process that resulted in several more bruises—both for Adam and for the unfortunate Al-Saboor that had been tasked with relieving him of his beloved knife.
Ellie spotted the big-eared man slumped against a rock on the other side of the ledge, holding a wet cloth to his head and groaning. The fellow beside him had his arm in a sling and kept casting dirty looks over at Adam.
“I lost mine back on the Isis.” Constance scowled. “I knew I should have equipped myself with more than two!”
“I only had the rifle,” Jemmahor said—glaring at the firearm in question, which was slung over the shoulder of the limping Al-Saboor.
“Ralph’s got mine,” Adam said darkly.
“Ralph?” Ellie echoed in confusion.
“You know—the one with the horsey teeth.” Adam nodded at an Al-Saboor giving orders to the workers.
Zeinab mumbled at them furiously from behind her gag, wiggling her fingers and jerking her head toward her back.
“Ostazah?” Jemmahor prompted, brow furrowing with confusion.
“Maybe a bug crawled into her galabeya,” Constance offered helpfully.
Zeinab rolled her eyes, knocking the heels of her shoes against the rocks in frustration as she made another frantic gesture with her head.
“It is not a bug!” Jemmahor realized excitedly. “She is telling us that they did not take her scalpels!”
“Mmmph!” Zeinab agreed.
“She keeps them in a roll tucked into her belt, under her abaya,” Jemmahor translated.
Constance looked sharply at their two guards. The pair were rolling more cigarettes.
She scooted behind Zeinab, pulling up the other woman’s cloak—no easy task with her hands bound behind her back, even if Zeinab did try to help her by bouncing on her rear and offering terse instructions through the gag—which nobody could make out.
Constance wriggled her hands under the folds of black fabric as the Al-Saboors, ten yards away, searched their pockets for a light.
“I have it!” she whispered triumphantly, tugging a slender leather bundle out from the back of Zeinab’s belt. “Now just hold still and I’ll—”
With her bound hands, Zeinab swatted Constance’s fingers away from the opened roll of medical instruments.
“Oh, very well!” Constance hissed back irritably, pushing her bound wrists at the midwife. “They are your scalpels, after all. But do it quickly!”
Zeinab gave Constance a withering look that clearly said if I do it quickly, I might slice one of your fingers off.
She set to work, and a moment later, Constance’s ropes fell away. She shook out her arms with obvious relief, then hurriedly plucked the scalpel from Zeinab’s fingers and set to work on the other woman’s bindings. Zeinab whipped her hands free and immediately yanked down the gag, spitting violently onto the rocks.
The Al-Saboors had found a book of matches and were lighting their cigarettes. They stiffened, coming to sudden attention as Mr. Jacobs crawled out from the entrance to the tomb.
“Jacobs!” Ellie hissed in warning.
His head snapped in her direction.
She froze as she met his gaze, forcing herself not to look down the line at the other women. Even a glance in their direction might give Constance and Zeinab away.
Jacobs’ eyes narrowed. He crossed over to speak to the two smoking cousins, who looked less bored and more nervous now Jacobs was there.
Ellie risked a glance at her companions. Constance leaned innocently against the rocks with her hands behind her back, whistling a little. Zeinab glared mutinously out over the ridge with her gag back in place.
Ellie let out a slow, silent breath of relief—then spotted the edge of Zeinab’s scalpel roll peeking out from under the black fall of her abaya.
She looked quickly back to Jacobs, her pulse thudding at the thought that he might turn back to them and notice.
A flicker of movement from beyond the cluster of armed men caught her eye. It flashed from the top of the curved ridge that framed the bowl where they sat—little more than a quick wisp of blacker shadow against the star-speckled night sky.
Ellie wondered if she had imagined it… until Jacobs’ head snapped up, his gaze zeroing in on the place where the shadow had been.
He frowned, heading for the ridge.
“Stop him!” Zeinab ordered in an urgent rasp, her gag pulled down once more. “Now!”
Ellie’s throat went dry with an instinctive panic. Her mind whirled for a solution that wouldn’t get them all killed. “How?”
“You could pretend to faint,” Constance offered helpfully.
“Or throw a rock at his testicles,” Jemmahor countered darkly.
Everyone stared at the apprentice midwife in surprise.
“What?” she shot back unapologetically. “You do not think that he deserves it?”
Ellie considered the options—with a pang of yearning over the lack of any potentially incendiary materials on hand.
Her train of thought was rudely interrupted by the bruised, dashing American beside her as he shouted across the night at the top of his substantial lungs.
“Hey, you cold-blooded bastard! How about you and I have a word?”
Everyone froze, from the crewmen carrying buckets of red sludge to the Al-Saboors with their rifles.
Jacobs stopped at the base of the cliff he was about to climb—and slowly turned back.
“Are you mad?” Ellie hissed to Adam. “Or have you forgotten that your hands are bound and you have no machete!”
“It worked, didn’t it?” Adam replied.
Ellie wasn’t so sure. Jacobs had hesitated, but he was still at the base of the ridge. He narrowed his eyes as though considering Adam’s request.
He turned away and began to climb.
“Not even about what you saw in that damned mirror?” Adam called after him boldly.
Jacobs went very, very still.
A chill crept over Ellie’s skin.
What you saw in that mirror…
There was only one mirror that mattered—the one that had lurked in the darkness beneath Tulan. A mirror that did not show reflections. A mirror that Ellie had destroyed.
Her own dark memories of that obsidian eye swirled up from the place where she had tried to bury them.
The soft plink of water in a pristine washroom. A gold-eyed woman with a scar on her cheek.
The history of an empire spilling into her brain like a rain of fire.
Tell me what you want.
“But Jacobs never used the mirror,” Ellie pressed unsteadily.
Adam replied without looking at her. His eyes were locked on Jacobs, who stared at him with dangerous focus from across the ledge. “I made him bleed. It’s how I knew where to find my knife—but Jacobs got a face full of that smoke as well.”
Blood. Mirror. Smoke. Ellie knew what that trinity had meant inside the hollow space beneath the city of the gods.
“But what would he have seen?” Ellie gasped, reeling.
Even as she asked the question, the answer echoed in her ears, murmuring in the voice of a mischievous old priest.
It seeks the answer in your heart—in your desire.
What desire did someone like Jacobs hide in his heart?
Then another implication of Adam’s revelation snapped into place.
“Hold on!” Ellie exclaimed, forgetting to keep her voice down. “Are you telling me that your deepest and most fervent desire was to get your blasted knife back?”
“I wanted a way to beat Jacobs!” Adam protested. “It’s not my fault if the best way to do that just happened to involve me getting hold of my machete.”
Ellie gazed at the familiar lines of his bruised, stubble-shadowed face. Warmth fluttered to life inside her chest. “You are…”
She wasn’t quite sure what she meant to say next. Incorrigible? Magnificent?
Before she could find out, Jacobs was there.
He loomed over them, the glare of the paraffin lamps scattered about the hollow throwing his shadow across the place where Ellie and Adam sat.
Jacobs cast a look back over his shoulder. All the rest of the men who had been blatantly gaping at him, from guards to crew, quickly went back to doing whatever it was they were supposed to be doing.
Ellie was painfully conscious of her bound hands. She was utterly powerless sitting on the ground at Jacobs’ feet.
In the corner of her eye, she saw Zeinab’s gaze flash once more to the crown of the ridge. Her mouth firmed into a fierce, determined line.
Ellie couldn’t know what she saw up there—but she hoped it was worth the terrible risk she and Adam had just taken.
Jacobs looked down at the two of them thoughtfully before his eyes shifted to Adam. “By all rights, the pair of you ought to have been dead three times over.”
A hint of frustration seethed through his words. A twist of fear wrenched in Ellie’s gut.
Adam leaned back against the rocks. “I’d say more like four or five, but who’s counting?”
Ellie forced herself to wade in, even though the thought of deliberately provoking Jacobs’ ire made her feel ill.
“So what is your innermost desire, Mr. Jacobs?” she asked, forcing a light tone. “Being set loose to murder anyone who irritates you?”
His expression was as calm and implacable as always—but Ellie thought she saw something else flash through his black gaze. Something… complicated.
“And why do you want to know, Miss Mallory?” Jacobs demanded.
Ellie’s pulse thudded with a rising sense of danger. She forced herself not to look away, even as she could feel the other prisoners watching her worriedly.
She had to keep him talking for a while longer—no matter how she managed it. In that moment, she could think of only one thing to say that would be sure to hold his attention.
She swallowed thickly against a suddenly dry throat.
“I supposed I had better think on how I answer that,” she replied carefully. “Given that you will know if I am lying.”
Jacobs’ habitual stillness deepened, turning into something darker. His focus on her intensified until she could feel the weight of it like a stone against her chest.
“Will I, then?” he asked in a voice like black silk.
Ellie fought against the urge to sink into the wall and disappear. “I therefore propose a deal,” she went on carefully. “I will answer your question, Mr. Jacobs, if you answer mine.”
Jacobs’ black gaze was as cold as the end of the earth. “You are awfully sure of yourself for a woman tied up on the floor,” he noted in a dry, flat drawl.
Adam stiffened beside her at Jacobs’ words. She deduced that he was fighting the urge to do something extraordinarily stupid. She hurried on before his anger won out over his good sense, agonizingly conscious of his bound hands and missing knife.
“You can’t kill us,” Ellie retorted quickly. “Mr. Forster-Mowbray won’t let you.”
Jacobs… laughed.
The sound was bizarre—a note of helpless, involuntary humor threaded through with dark frustration.
The reaction made not the least bit of sense.
It lasted for only a breath before his eyes flashed with fury, and his cool facade slid back into place.
“This is a waste of my time,” he determined.
He turned away. Zeinab coughed pointedly, and Ellie made another desperate jab.
“You despise him, don’t you?” she called out. “And yet you keep doing whatever he tells you to do, even when you disagree. It can’t be because you need the work. You are obviously very competent at your—er, particular area of expertise. I’m sure there are other ne’er-do-wells you could ally yourself with if you chose. Yet you keep bowing to Mr. Forster-Mowbray’s whims, even when it obviously infuriates you. I wonder why that is?”
Jacob’s attention was like a dagger. Ellie braced herself against it even as a cool line of sweat trickled between her shoulder blades.
“Careful, Miss Mallory,” Jacobs’ tone was light—and dangerous. “I don’t think you want to make this personal.”
“Make it personal?” Ellie burst back, startled into frankness. “You have already tried to kill me four times!”
“Was it four?” Adam’s tone was casual, but his blue gaze was like ice as he studied Jacobs. “I was counting three.”
Ellie bit back a huff of exasperation. “First, he planned to murder me at the hotel in Belize Town,” she listed. “Then he threatened to flay me to force you to cooperate when we were caught on the trail. He tried to shoot us both when we were fleeing from the temple. And then there was that attempted stabbing when he caught me by the mirror. That is four!”
“I dunno if I’d count the flaying,” Adam hedged. “That was more of a bluff than an actual murder attempt.”
“Are you saying you didn’t mind that one?” Ellie shot back, infuriated.
“Of course, I minded it!” Adam returned. “I minded it a lot!”
Jacobs pinched the bridge of his nose as though fighting a rising headache—then with a smooth, practiced motion, he grabbed hold of Constance’s hair, dragged her to him, and set a dagger to her throat.
The blade seemed to have slipped into his hand out of thin air.
“Unhand me, you reprehensible, loutish—” Constance snarled.
“Connie!” Ellie pleaded.
Constance closed her mouth, though her eyes still blazed with fury.
