The Honey Mummy (Folley & Mallory Adventure Book 3) (14 page)
Read The Honey Mummy (Folley & Mallory Adventure Book 3) Online
Authors: E. Catherine Tobler
Eleanor and Cleo walked alongside the queen, the last pharaoh of Egypt, through the quiet night after having left the catacomb behind. Somewhere, two crickets made a chorus. Eleanor couldn’t help wishing they were here during the day, to see the bees going about their business, to possibly open a hive and taste the honey.
“It is simple enough, Highness, that if I don’t track you down, there is no spark to provide that which Pettigrew wants so badly.” Eleanor watched the queen’s face, curious. “Would you not have him back, after all these years?”
The queen laughed. “I would not. It is another my heart yearns for. He who will return to these shores and then we will go, he and I.”
Eleanor pictured again the body within the honey, the man wearing Cleopatra’s meteor ring. Was it her Antony? She shook her head at Cleo when she was about to speak. They could not tell her of the possibility he had not survived without possibly changing the future. It might yet be changed, as it was.
“Even given what we know, it’s hard to say what may yet come,” Eleanor said. Still, the words on the catacomb wall troubled her. Had Pettigrew written them so long ago, only to write them again under the guise of Shelley when the statue of Ramesses II emerged from the sand? And if he had been Caesar? And who else, down through the years?
“I must await Antony—and then may begin my journey. Find me in your time,” the queen said to Eleanor as they came again to the lotus pool. “Find me, for I will not stray far from my home, and together we shall silence Pettigrew once and for all.”
Saying goodbye to the queen was strange, the way she embraced both Eleanor and Cleo; it was as though Eleanor had known her longer than she had. Maybe this was an effect of having studied her, her likeness, her history. In flesh, she was not who history had made her out to be—a woman chiefly known for her beauty—but then, Eleanor wondered, who in the world would be?
Eleanor and Cleo left the palace, each stealing glances backward. Eleanor wondered if it would vanish into the ocean or crumble to dust before them. It did neither, only wavering out of view the more they walked. Eleanor concentrated on going home, hoping this didn’t land them in Ireland—but the rings were tied to Egypt, as much a part of her as they were the stars, and they soon found themselves walking nearly into a wall of the Twelve Palms Hotel as they emerged into their own time once more.
Once there, Cleo clung to Eleanor’s hand and Eleanor clung back. Eleanor had no idea what she might say—how she could lend comfort. She supposed they didn’t know for certain—had only the queen’s word, but the queen’s word was her own for a reason; she believed the honey and the rituals performed by herself and her oracles could see a person down through the ages.
“Oh, Eleanor.” Cleo clung and trembled as a cool air blew in from the harbor. “Where are we supposed to find a queen? She can’t possibly be here—can she?”
Eleanor wrapped an arm around Cleo’s shoulders, confident for the first time in a while. “She is here, and I think you know where.” She looked down the length of the street running past the hotel, then turned Cleo to face the opposite direction, into the streets that led into the Arab Quarter. “Where it all began.”
She gave Cleo’s shoulders a squeeze, and no choice but to follow when she began walking. Cleo fell into step beside her.
“The catacombs?” Cleo asked. “Why is it always the catacombs?”
Eleanor smiled and thought that it was always catacombs because it was always squirrels. They all had lessons to learn, and would repeat them until they did. “At least this time, you don’t have to fall through the street to reach them.”
Through the night, they walked in silence to the entrance to the catacombs. They paused in the marketplace, to buy a lantern and candles, having no idea what they would find at the catacombs themselves. The entrance had been pinpointed a year prior, while Cleo was still recovering and healing. It was an unassuming doorway notched into the side of an equally unassuming building, standing as most of the ancient world did in this place, largely unnoticed as modern Alexandria went about its daily business. Eleanor and Cleo stood upon the threshold, the shadowed doors notched open, as if someone had come before them, and Eleanor waited for Cleo to enter first. Cleo did not move.
“I can stand here forever, Eleanor, and according to the queen, never age,” she whispered. “I have no desire to enter that place.”
Eleanor studied the entrance, brushing her hand down the curve of one column. Sand moved beneath her palm in a low whisper, gritty and, she fancied, still warm though the day’s sun was long set. “I’ve no doubt that’s true,” Eleanor murmured as she silently admired the way the door was cut into the wall. Precise, confident. “I suppose you will be forced to watch me turn to dust if we really are going to stand here forever. Mallory will be quite cross with me, and imagine the look on Auberon’s own face, hmm?”
“You are the worst friend,” Cleo said.
“Agreed.”
With a scowl that said a thousand foul things, Cleo stepped into the catacomb, lantern held high. It wasn’t the entry the queen had shown them, that one likely flooded as had been her palace over the ages. Earthquakes and floods and Eleanor wondered about the lotus and the hives, and if either existed still in this time. Pettigrew was here, so she allowed it was possible. So much didn’t vanish, but was only buried until someone dug it up.
This entrance was all long stairs down and down, into a never-ending darkness. Cleo’s lantern threw light, which threw shadows, every step taken by her making each stair move as though alive. When they left the stairway, Eleanor marked their progress in her head, counting as they walked down twisting halls. When at last the halls widened into spaces of columns and decorated walls, Eleanor breathed a little easier. It was strange to see Anubis again—shown wearing Roman finery and not his usual Egyptian.
Daughter
.
The rumble of his voice startled Eleanor. She drew in a sharp breath and expected the dark god to emerge from the wall carving, but nothing moved save for the flame of Cleo’s lantern.
“Here, Eleanor—ahead.”
Cleo walked more quickly and Eleanor hurried to follow so she didn’t lose the path. They passed into another room, this one larger than any they had seen before. The ceiling opened high above them, implying it would be a long fall indeed.
“This is the room,” Cleo whispered. “Here.”
Here was where she had lost her arms, where her life had changed. Cleo’s breath came in a soft sob, but she kept moving forward, to the statue that had not been moved very far from the place it had fallen. Eleanor followed, watching the lantern light spill across the stone and Eleanor found herself looking at the familiar face of Anubis, who stared upward into eternal darkness. Dried blood and honey splattered him, the pool of honey was long since dried into the dirt. Rotted caskets, shattered sarcophagi, and broken pottery littered the floor, but amid all this, three amphorae stood uncracked, each marked with a tiny bee.
“Cleo?”
Eleanor studied her friend in the firelight, not surprised to see her standing tall and proud. She was not bowed in this moment, the lantern steady in her hand.
“I’m… It’s going to be all right, Eleanor,” she whispered, and moved toward the statue.
As Cleo moved closer, the lantern illuminated a woman crouched beside the enormous statue. While her once-white robes were filthy and showing their age through frays and holes, her hair as dark as it had been earlier that night when they had left her in 30 BC. Queen Cleopatra VII Philopator stared up at them with her undying eyes. Her mouth cracked apart in a ragged laugh.
“Was but a dream,” she said around the laughter, lifting her hands to shield her eyes from the light. “Both of you, in a dream, and the young doctor…and my oracles… Dreaming the undying dream.”
“No dream, Highness,” Eleanor said. She kneeled down, extending her hands to the queen, to show the rings she still wore. “I would have you reclaim these and help me make that spar—”
At the sight of the rings, the queen didn’t only shriek. She shook so badly, Eleanor thought Cleopatra would fall apart, thought that the shock of their appearance would turn her to ash as the past caught up to the future. She sprang into motion, running down the length of the Anubis statue, her robes fluttering behind her. Eleanor followed, calling for the queen to come back, and while she paused, she stared at Eleanor with eyes that were unfocused. She did not seem entirely here, but lost between the world she had known and this she found herself in. Her eyes were wide in the lantern light, her hands held before her as if to ward them off.
“Demons,” she hissed. “’Twas a demon-borne dream and a lie, and this…none of this is real.” Her eyes shot to Cleo and another cracked laugh escaped her. Her hands dropped, only to fist into her robes where she tore at the thin fabric. It ripped under the assault, but the queen didn’t notice or care. “And you… We wanted to make it right, but could not. Touched by the honey, tainted by
creation
. The snake springing from the lotus—to swallow the world in its own time. Never free, for even when night falls, it begins anew. Starlight into sunlight, no boat carrying the sun. No god’s damned boat. Cursed by
creation
. Eternal. Undying. Gave you my spark and this fire…this fire gutters out.”
“Highness—”
“Once, but not now!” Her eyes flicked to Eleanor and she charged.
Eleanor braced herself, uncertain what the queen meant to do. The queen’s hands—ragged and bloodied and shaking—took Eleanor by the shoulders. Eleanor returned the hold, ready to fling the queen to the ground until she saw the tears. Unabashed, the queen cried.
“Go back,” she sobbed. “Go back and tell me no. Go back and tell me the snake will not matter—Antony will be dead no matter where I go. When I go. Antony’s life will be taken before he can be made undying… Before we can… Go
back
. Farther than you did, and tell me no. Lay my lotus beneath flame, turn every root to ash, and say it cannot be so. It cannot…be…so. I could bury him in honey and it would not matter…”
Cleopatra VII Philopator fell into Eleanor’s arms, wracked with sobs. Eleanor held her, not knowing what else to do, her eyes slowly lifting to Cleo. Cleo stared, wide eyed.
“Highness—”
“
No
. Not now.” The queen did not push herself from Eleanor’s arms, nor did her crying ease. “Or if I am…only queen of this dark space. There is no Antony. There is only…him. Whatever he may call himself in this time.”
“Pettigrew,” Eleanor whispered, but the name of the thing did not matter. They could not travel so precisely to undo what the queen had done.
“S-should you unwrap him…air and whispers,” the queen said and pulled again on Eleanor’s arms. Hard, insistent. “Go back. Go back and tell me no. Let me die as I was meant to die, for surely I go…I go… I go and return and can never leave.” Her sobs were broken by a laugh and she shook Eleanor once more. " Nothing beside remains! Round the decay of that colossal wreck…boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away. Far away. Only ever that. Nothing beside remains."
“Highness—”
The queen thrust Eleanor away from her and with a shriek, fled into the darkness beyond the reach of Cleo’s lantern. Eleanor stared, uncertainty filling every space inside her. Then, she screamed for the queen to come back. But command as she would, the queen did not return. Eleanor and Cleo walked the space of the catacomb, as best they could over the debris that remained, but turned up no sign of the undying queen, save for footsteps that circled back on themselves.
“She gave me her spark?” Cleo whispered. “Did such a thing make her mad, Eleanor?”
“What of this wouldn’t make a person mad?”
The failure tasted bitter against Eleanor’s tongue as they emerged back into the night. The city rose immense around her, the sky an impossibly wide eye staring down. Judging her the way Anubis would. Unblinking, she stared back.
What now,
she asked herself, but there came no reply, only the fathomless, steady gaze of the universe back upon her. Cleo’s metal hand slid into hers and Eleanor squeezed it.
“We still have the rings,” Cleo whispered.
Hope shot like quicksilver through Eleanor and they ran, ran the way they had run before, to the hotel where they trespassed into Virgil’s quiet room once more. Where they traced every step, and hoped the hotel would fade into time—but it did not, and they did not. The modern world loomed around them and would not be vanquished.
Dear Cleo,
The snow I last wrote you of has turned to rain; the trees have begun to shade themselves in hints of green, looking like bright smudges against the gray sky. The rain suits my mood.
I have given much thought to you over these past months; I have difficulty in believing that your injury was more than a year ago and that you have yet to permit me to visit you in Alexandria again. This is the last time I shall ask. This is not meant as a threat, I simply believe that we have reached an impasse—that the things I find myself wishing for have likely passed on. I would eat with you again, and likely attempt to talk you into eels. I would sit in that small café where the fire smoke darkened the ceiling and we were never asked to leave, not even when sunrise came (do you remember the barkeep, asleep amid the sacks of coffee?). I would dance you barefoot on the sand as the tide went out.
But each of these moments belongs to the past and the past alone. You have placed them there, have held me at a distance. I respect your wishes, I shall not press, but I miss you, dear Cleo, and all the things we shared, discussed, hoped.
I shall only hope now that this letter finds you well and that I remain your true and constant friend,
M. Auberon
George Pettigrew’s house was as ever, a blight upon the city. Eleanor had no great and terrible plan as she and Cleo stepped out of the carriage that had brought them. She wore Virgil’s second revolver beneath her long duster, but hoped she would have no need of it. If Pettigrew had actually taken the form of certain people over the course of his lifetime, it was possible a bullet would not even kill him. What might he turn into before their very eyes? She could not say what he was, if he was solid matter at all, and supposed talking to the man would be right out; if time had made him as mad as the Cleopatra in the catacombs, if his spark dwindled to an ember, what chance did logic stand?
The grounds stood quiet when they arrived, the gate unlatched and hanging open. Eleanor didn’t like that, but supposed were Pettigrew busy with Mallory and Auberon, perhaps he had kindly left the gate open for them. He had been so very helpful all along…
“Helpful,” Eleanor whispered as the carriage wheeled away. She looked at Cleo, who frowned. “Pettigrew seemed as interested in the honey as we were. As if he actually did value whatever we might find. Is it possible he’s been after knowledge all along? The queen implied that if a thing could create, it could also unmake. We are still missing a piece.”
“Perhaps I am that missing piece, Miss Folley. Miss Barclay.”
Pettigrew stood at the gates, looking every inch the gentleman he always had, though today, Eleanor allowed that his tie was somewhat rumpled, much as Mallory’s ever was. Pettigrew’s eyes held an exhaustion that Eleanor found new, curious.
“Perhaps you are. Perhaps without all this stagecraft, we would have found that piece much sooner than now?”
Pettigrew’s eyes narrowed a little, as if he were giving the notion actual consideration. “Perhaps, but… It’s all I’ve known for so long, Miss Folley. When one has lain in wait… It’s strange what one will crave, what a body will long for. And it wasn’t sunlight or the touch of another’s hand, or even fresh bread. It was the experience one knew upon a stage, when all eyes are upon them, when they are in control of the show.”
“That’s what you want, isn’t it, Pettigrew?” Cleo asked. “Control. Become undying and controlling the stage of Egypt.”
“Not given what she has become, a place where people wander the splendor that was, where people admire the way a great and thriving culture has been unmade and swallowed by the years. Surely she told you…”
Here, Pettigrew paused, looking farther down the driveway, then back to Eleanor and Cleo. “You did not bring her?” He moved swift as a striking snake, to grasp Eleanor’s hand and pull her toward him. His thumb glanced over the rings she still wore. “Did you go at all? I did not take you for a simpleton, Miss Folley—I
brought
you the ring, you
know
rings, and you can move through the hollow spaces they reveal. You
are
a daughter of Anubis, are you not?” He let her hand drop. “Was Cle— Was she not moved? Would she not listen?”
“We went,” Eleanor allowed, “but if you believe undying is a solution, you are incorrect. The years have had their way with her, Pettigrew—she is not as you knew her, or as history even remembers. That queen has been unmade.”
“Undying.”
Pettigrew whispered the word and his face reflected a myriad emotions; Eleanor watched him and could not say what was worse: when he realized Cleopatra was not coming, or that she had lived here all along, and still did, and that everything she had once been was gone.
“Unmade,” he said. “Oh, don’t you see? This is what I long for, but it never comes. Oh, Miss Folley.”
If the years contained a weight, and this weight could be conveyed within a voice, Eleanor was aware of it now, pressing upon everyone and everything around them. She thought at first she was hallucinating that the gate and stone wall were sinking into the ground, but when a clod of dirt rolled free and Cleo also noticed it, panic rose around Eleanor like a cloak. She could not do this, because she did not know what Pettigrew meant for her to do.
“Miss Folley, you must help.
You
are my only hope.”
Pettigrew grasped both Eleanor and Cleo by the arms, pulling them toward his house, also in apparent danger of sinking. Was the entire world going to swallow him and his collection, Eleanor wondered. Inside, the walls of the house vibrated; the deeper into the house he pulled them, the less intense the vibrations, but underground, it was hard to say. Perhaps the earth confined some of the motion, as they sank ever downward.
“Only you,” Pettigrew cried as they circled down a staircase, into the dark. Eleanor’s free hand sought the stair rail, but there was none; she found Cleo’s free hand instead, her other clinging to Pettigrew. She could only trust that each step would come, that he would not lead them into an abysmal pit.
When the stairs gave way to floor, Eleanor exhaled in minor relief, aware of the way her legs trembled, the way she staggered into a wall. The edge of the wall caught her shoulder, but Pettigrew pulled them ever on, toward a faint light source at the end of a hall. He took them to a room that was like nothing Eleanor had ever seen; here, the darkness parted for the illumination of lamps, to expose an intricate room of honeycomb, smelling deeply of the lotus she had known in the queen’s palace.
The room resembled the innards of a beehive—there was no surface that was not devoted to bees and their manufacture of honey. For a moment, Eleanor thought the bees and comb were loose inside the room, but she gradually became aware of the glass walls—the same way Pettigrew displayed his mummies, he also kept his bees. Separate hives flourished within panes of clear glass, honey pouring into lower cells that—
“Pettigrew.” Eleanor snarled.
Beneath the room of hives, beyond the glass floor, Eleanor saw the ring of glass cages and the men hoisted on racks inside each. She knew Mallory at a glance and Auberon too. Mallory’s scent reached her and it was sharp and sweet, and like opium all over again. She blanched at the smell of it, and despaired at the idea that Pettigrew had kept them drugged this entire time. What had that drug done to Mallory when he was only just beginning to shake its influence?
“What have you done?” Eleanor fought for the words through her horror, advancing toward Pettigrew.
“This ends here,” Cleo said, breaking from Eleanor’s side. She came at Pettigrew from the other side, effectively closing him in so he had nowhere to escape.
“You misunderstand!” Pettigrew cried.
“I don’t think we do,” Eleanor said. “You’ve kept these men here, drugged while you experiment with this honey—this honey that will do nothing without a spark. What now, now that you have failed?”
Pettigrew moved more swiftly than Eleanor had ever seen him. He lost his human shape entirely—air and whispers, the queen had said. He did not move toward Cleo, but came for Eleanor, vaporous on approach, and solid once more when his hands latched into her hair. He hoisted her into the air and in one violent move, swung her over the edge of the catwalk. Eleanor shrieked at the tearing of hair, unable to do little else but latch onto his forearms. She tried to haul him over the rail, but found to her consternation that Cleo held him from behind, keeping him anchored on the platform.
“This never should have been so complex,” Pettigrew spat, hands tightening in Eleanor’s hair. “
You
—” He stared down at her with a sneer. “Call to him. If you have not brought me a queen, you shall summon me a god.”
Eleanor’s fingers curled hard into Pettigrew’s arms. The walls beneath the platform were glass, filled with honey and hive, and she braced her booted feet against them, trying not to think of Mallory in the room below, in a drugged haze. What had Pettigrew done, what had he— She shoved the panic into a box and locked it tight. That panic was only a squirrel, a squirrel she could not afford to chase. It wouldn’t do to run, not with Pettigrew’s fingers ripping at her hair. She kicked the glass wall, annoying both the bees inside and Pettigrew.
“Miss Folley!”
“You really have lost your mind,” Eleanor spat. “I will not—”
Pettigrew’s hands tightened in Eleanor’s hair again and twisted, pulling another shriek from her. “You will call him and he will come and this will cease! You will watch all you love be unmade.”
The jackal was close; Eleanor fingers vanished under the swift arrival of claws, claws that latched into Pettigrew’s jacket—but only his jacket, given that his arms beneath had gone to vapor again. Vapor should not be so solid, she thought. Eleanor hooked herself in, his jacket straining across his shoulders as her weight shifted.
“Cleo,” Eleanor said.
Beyond Pettigrew’s shoulder, Eleanor found Cleo’s panicked eyes. Cleo’s metal hands were curled hard into Pettigrew’s tweed jacket, each precise finger locked into place, as hard as Eleanor’s own claws were. Her hold did not waver. Even as Eleanor pulled, meaning to yank Pettigrew over, Cleo anchored him, refusing to let them fall.
“Cleo, listen to me.”
“I will not let you go,” Cleo said. As if to prove her point, she dug in, mechanical fingers tightening, each making a pressure mark in the tweed he wore. “I won’t let you fall. Not the way—”
Eleanor could finish that sentence—“not the way I did”—and could picture the riot of panic and emotion inside her friend, because she felt it too. Squirrels running everywhere, distracting. The idea of giving into the jackal here, when Cleo had no idea what she was, was repellent, but the jackal was closer with every breath. The time for decisions was wearing thin.
“Call him, Miss Folley,” Pettigrew said. “
Now
.”
“Cleo,” Eleanor said, pointedly ignoring Pettigrew, her voice edging into a growl as her jaw began to distend, “you
will
let us fall. Something is going to happen and I—”
“I will
not
.”
The last word was wrenched from Cleo and Eleanor felt it as a pull on her own heart, as if the hand of Anubis had reached inside her. But there was no hand, there was only Pettigrew’s sneer and Cleo’s rising fear, and the idea that Cleo would see Eleanor’s true nature. There would be no coming back from it, but this Eleanor realized, was already true. She was what she was. They all were.
All around them, the house
moved
, as if the earth were swallowing it, as if the British were shelling Alexandria all over again, despite the fact they now occupied it. Everything had to go…everything…
Eleanor closed her eyes and reached for Anubis, but the place she normally found Anubis was empty; they had not spoken since she had found Cleo outside the hotel, and now that she had need of him, he was gone. As far distant as her mother. She could not bring the queen, she could not summon the god; she could do nothing in this moment but hang on—
And that’s when her eyes opened, to stare at the twisted wreck of Pettigrew above her; he did not look human in that moment as he snarled his demands at her. Anubis, Anubis, Anubis. Eleanor had no desire for Anubis—but knew he was part of her even so. The part of her she tried to embrace; the part of her she tried to push away.
Now, she did not allow the jackal inside to swallow her, but reached for the jackal willingly, fusing her logic into the animal’s relentless nature, saturating the jackal’s appetite for the hunt with her own appetites: work, discovery, revelation. Preservation. The jackal did not burst out of her this time; she willingly became what she had constantly refused in polite society. It felt like throwing a corset off and breathing deep for the first time. When done, Pettigrew no longer held her by the hair, but by her ears; this was more painful than Eleanor thought possible. She snarled anew and glimpsed Cleo’s wide eyes beyond the villain between them. There were no apologies for being what she was. Eleanor pulled hard on Pettigrew, and Cleo’s mechanical hands opened, letting them fall.
Eleanor and Pettigrew crashed through the glass that divided the hives from the cells. Cracks fractured the glass, the cracks widening ever more as the house continued to sink into the earth. Bees and honey were loosed into the rooms, Eleanor sharply aware of both as they splattered her jackal coat. Thousands of tiny lotus-scented feet pressed into her cheeks, the scent of honey and flower billowed into the air by thousands of panicked wings. In the crush of glass and honey as they landed, Pettigrew refused to relinquish his hold on Eleanor.
“Summon him!” he screamed.
Eleanor gave no vocal reply, but neither did she release him, finding a new focus in the rings that she still wore, metal from the stars wrapped around her jackal toes. She focused on these the way she had the rings of Anubis, the rings she had commanded with her blood.
There would be no oblivion—surely Pettigrew knew this. Eleanor knew this, as the rings around her toes were warmed by the honey, as the rings seemingly swallowed the sweetness. The rings
knew
this honey, reacted to it, and blinded Eleanor with a spark of light that shattered the world.
In this space, there was no Anubis, but at the end of a long corridor of light—along which she and Pettigrew rushed—there was a queen, young and sane, and she lifted her chin to the pair before her. Pettigrew stood transfixed—by the idea of the woman he had once loved, or by the moment itself, Eleanor did not know. Pettigrew lifted a hand, reaching for the queen, but never quite able to touch her. He howled his anguish across this world and every other and Eleanor remembered the queen’s words—air and whispers. In his moment of distraction, she narrowed in and lunged for Pettigrew’s neck, for the tie and jet tack he always wore.
Anubis was not coming—but she was here and could do this.
The stone shattered beneath Eleanor’s jackal teeth, sharp and bitter jet cutting her tongue, and the world fell to pieces once more. A cascade of honey and glass erased the queen from their sight and at last Pettigrew’s hands eased against Eleanor’s ears—mostly because his hands had vanished again. Eleanor sensed him vanishing as a whole, as the honeycomb around them caught fire and burned. They fell for a long time—surely, she thought, they should have hit the ground floor—but the house was sinking, and the hole grew endless, and Eleanor could not look from Pettigrew as they fell.
