The Secret of Abdu El Yezdi (2 page)

Sister Sadhvi Raghavendra. Her beautiful face blurred into Burton's memory then swam away.

“It wasn't luck,” he murmured. “Is she aboard? I want to see her.”

“She was here but half an hour ago. I'll call her back if you wish it.”

Fragments. Broken recollections. Cascading water falling from the great lake—almost an inland sea—to begin its long journey to the Mediterranean. Standing on a hill overlooking it, his companion at his side.

Burton sucked in a deep, shuddering breath, feeling his eyes widen.

“John! My God! How is John?”

Oliphant looked puzzled. “John?”

“Lieutenant Speke.”

“I'm afraid I don't know him. Half a mo! Do you mean the chap who was with you at Berbera back in 'fifty-five? The one who died?”

“Died?”

“I was in the Far East at the time, but if I remember the reports rightly, he took a spear meant for Lieutenant Stroyan. It pierced his heart and killed him outright. That was four years ago.”

“Four years?” Burton whispered. “But Speke and I discovered the source of the Nile.”

“The fever has you befuddled. As I say, Speke copped it during your initial foray into Africa. It was you, William Stroyan, George Herne, and Sister Raghavendra who solved the puzzle of the Nile. You'll be remembered among the greatest of explorers. You've made history, sir.”

The information fell between Burton and the Other Burton and they fought over it. The Burton here, now—the
real
Burton, blast it!—knew the fact to be true. Lieutenant John Hanning Speke had been killed in 1855. The Other Burton disagreed.

That is not when he died.

It is. I was there. I saw it happen.

He died later.

No! He died defending Stroyan.

He sacrificed himself for you.

Get away from me! Leave me alone!

You need me, you dolt.

The argument melted into Burton's overheated blood and raged through his body. He felt his limbs thrashing and heard a wail forced out of him. “I've made history, you say? I've made history?” He started to laugh and couldn't stop. He didn't know why it was funny, but it was.

Funny and agonising and terrifying.

I've made history.

Dimly, he felt Oliphant rise from the bed and—through tear-blurred eyes—watched him cross to the speaking tube beside the bureau. The young man pulled the device free, blew into it, and put it to his ear. After a brief wait, he placed the tube back against his mouth. “This is Oliphant. Can you have Sister Raghavendra sent to Captain Burton's cabin? I think he's having a seizure.” He clipped the tube back into its bracket, turned to face Burton, then raised his right hand and made an odd and complex gesture, as if writing a sigil in the air.

“You say you have a mania for exploration, Captain Burton, but to me, you appear to possess all the qualities of a fugitive.”

Burton tried to respond but his vocalisation emerged as an incomprehensible bark. Flecks of foam sprayed from his mouth. His muscles spasmed.

“Perhaps,” Oliphant continued, “you should consider the possibility that, when a man struggles to escape his fate, he is more likely to flee along the path that leads directly to it.”

Burton's teeth chattered. The cabin skewed sideways, righted itself, and suddenly he could smell jasmine and Sister Raghavendra was there—tall and slim, with big brown eyes, lustrous black hair, and dusky skin burned almost black by the African sun. Eschewing—while she still could—the corsets, heavy dresses, and multiple petticoats of the civilised woman, she was wearing a simple, loose-fitting Indian smock.

She said, “Has he been at all lucid?”

Burton closed his eyes.

She's here. You're safe. You can sleep.

Oliphant's voice: “Barely. He was in the midst of one of his delusions. It's just as you told me. He appears to believe himself a divided identity—two persons, thwarting and opposing each other. Will he be all right?”

“Yes, Mr. Oliphant, he'll be fine. It's a normal reaction to the medicine I gave him. The stuff brings the malarial fever to a final crisis and burns it off with great rapidity. This will be his last attack. In an hour or two, he'll fall into a deep sleep. By the time we arrive in London, he'll be weak but fully recovered. Would you leave us, please? I'll sit with him for an hour or so.”

“Certainly.”

The creak of the cabin door opening.

The bunk shifting as Sadhvi sat on the edge of it.

Her hand removing the flannel from his forehead.

Oliphant whispering, “As the crow flies, Captain Burton. As the crow flies.”

Oblivion.

Burton opened his eyes. He was alone. Thirst scratched at his throat but something else had yanked him from his sleep. He lay still and listened. The
Orpheus
thrummed beneath him, the noise of the airship's eight engines so familiar he now equated their background rumble with silence.

There was nothing else.

He pushed the sheet back, struggled out of bed—
Bismillah! So weak!
—and tottered over to the basin where he gulped water from a jug.

The mirror had been waiting. Hesitantly, he scrutinised the fever-ravaged countenance he saw in it: the sun-scorched but yellow-tinged skin, still marked with insect bites; the broad brow, beaded with sweat; the angular cheeks, the left furrowed by a long, deep scar; and the wildly overgrown forked beard that ill-concealed a forward-thrusting, aggressive jaw. He peered into the intense eyes.

My own. Just my own reflected.

He sighed, poured water into the basin, splashed it over his face, then closed his eyes and tried to concentrate. Employing a Sufi technique, he withdrew awareness from his trembling legs, from the ague that gnawed at his bones, from every sense but the auditory.

A few minutes passed before it impinged upon his consciousness again, but—yes, there it was, extremely faint, a distant voice, chanting.

Chanting? Aboard the
Orpheus
?

He gave the mirror a second glance, muttered an imprecation, then crossed to a Saratoga trunk, opened its lid, lifted out the top tray, and retrieved a small bottle from one of the inner compartments.

The label read:
Saltzmann's Tincture
.

Five years ago, when an inexplicable impulse had led him to first purchase the cure-all from a pharmacist named Mr. Shudders, his good friend and personal physician, John Steinhaueser, had warned him off the stuff. Its ingredients were a mystery, but the doctor was certain cocaine was principal among them. Burton wasn't so sure. He knew well the effects of cocaine. Saltzmann's offered something entirely different. It imparted the exhilarating sense that one's life was ripe with endless options, as if all the possible consequences of actions taken were unveiled.

“Richard,” Steinhaueser had said, “it's as insidious as opium and almost as addictive. You don't know what it might be costing you. What if it permanently damages your senses? Avoid. Avoid at all cost.”

But Saltzmann's Tincture had cured Burton of the various ailments he'd brought back from India, saved him from blindness during his pilgrimage to Mecca, kept malaria at bay throughout his ill-fated penetration of Berbera, and had—despite Sister Raghavendra's seconding of Steinhaueser's opinion—sustained him while he led the search for the source of the Nile. For sure, in the final days of the expedition, he'd succumbed to the fever that was currently burning through his veins, but it wasn't half as bad as those experienced by the members of the Royal Geographical Society who scorned Saltzmann's and relied, instead, upon quinine. Livingstone, for example, was very vocal in his opposition to it and suffered as a consequence. In his most recent dispatch, sent from a village near the headwaters of the Congo and received at Zanzibar four years ago, Livingstone had reported himself “terribly knocked up” and predicted that he'd never see civilisation again.
If only I had my faith to sustain me
, he'd written,
but the terrible things I have witnessed in these wicked lands have stripped it from me. I am no better than a beast
. He hadn't been heard from since, and was now presumed dead.

Saltzmann's. If Livingstone had taken Saltzmann's, he'd have maintained his health and seen a way out of whatever predicament he was in.

Burton broke the bottle's seal, popped out the cork, hesitated a moment, then drank half of the clear, syrupy contents. Moments later, a delicious warmth chased the ache from his joints.

He turned and lurched across the room to the door, lifted his
jubbah
—the loose robe he'd worn during his pilgrimage—down from a hook, wrapped it around himself, then pushed his feet into Arabian slippers.

A walking cane caught his eye. It was leaning against the wall. Its silver grip had been fashioned into the shape of a panther's head. He picked it up and realised it concealed a blade, which he drew and examined: an extremely well-balanced rapier.

Sheathing the weapon and using it for support, the explorer opened the door and stepped out into the passageway beyond, finding it warmly illuminated by bracket-mounted oil lamps. His cabin was on the lower of the
Orpheus
's two decks, in the middle of the mostly unoccupied rear passenger section. William Stroyan's was a little farther along, closer to the stern observation room. He hobbled toward it. The corridor wavered around him like a mirage, and for a moment, he thought himself trekking across African savannah. He shook off the delusion and whispered, “Fool. You can barely stay upright. Why can't you just leave it be?”

He came to Stroyan's cabin and found its door standing partially open.

“Bill?”

No reply.

He rapped his knuckles against it.

“I say! Stroyan?”

Nothing.

He pushed the door open and entered. The lieutenant's bed was unmade, the room empty and lit only by starlight glimmering through the porthole.

Burton noticed his friend's pocket watch on the bedside table. He picked it up and angled its face to the light from the passage. Eight minutes to midnight.

Perhaps Stroyan was having trouble sleeping and had left this quiet area of the vessel to join the crew on the upper deck.

No. The bedsheets. The lieutenant is as neat as they come. Army training. He'd never leave his bedding twisted and trailing off the bunk like that.

And—

Burton grunted, took a box of lucifers from the table, lit one, and applied the spitting, sulphurous flame to a lamp, which he then lowered over the thing he'd noticed on the floor.

A pillow, darkly stained.

Blood.

He straightened, looked around again, saw the speaking tube, crossed to it, whistled into the mouthpiece, then put it to his ear and waited for a response.

A tinny voice said, “Yes, Lieutenant? What can I do for you?”

It was Doctor Quaint, the ship's steward and surgeon.

“It's not Stroyan, Doctor. It's Burton.”

“Good Lord! I thought you were incapacitated.”

“Not quite. Do you know where Stroyan is?”

“I haven't seen him since dinner, sir.”

“I think someone struck him on the head and dragged him from his bed. Would you have the captain come down here, please?”

“Struck? Bed? Are you—?”

“I'm not delirious, I can assure you. Will you—”

“The captain. I'll tell him at once, sir.”

“Thank you.”

As he returned the speaking tube to its housing, the muted chanting touched his senses again. He cocked his head and listened. It was louder now, a single voice, generally low and rhythmic but occasionally increasing in volume, as if impassioned and unable to fully contain itself.

Curiosity got the better of him, turned him around, and drew him back out into the passage. His balance was off and he stumbled along as if drunk, but pushed himself onward, spurred by a growing impatience with his own weakness and an almost vicious determination to conquer it and discover the origin of the mysterious sounds.

As he passed the passenger cabin doors, each summoned a splintered recollection, as if they opened onto memories rather than empty chambers.

Number 35: Lieutenant George Herne. Like Burton, down with fever. He'd been left at Zanzibar, where, when he recovered, he'd be taking over as the island's new consul. Burton would miss him. Herne was a good sort. A little stolid and unimaginative, perhaps, but loyal. Unflappable.

Number 36: Gordon Champion. The airship's chief rigger. Dead. He'd crawled out along one of the engine pylons to investigate the inexplicable power failure that had immobilised the vessel just north of Africa's Central Lakes. He'd lost his footing. The slightest of misjudgments and—snap!—gone. That's how quickly, easily, and apparently randomly a life could be extinguished.

Number 37: John Hanning Speke. A beetle had crawled into his ear and he'd permanently deafened himself while trying to extract it with hot wax and a penknife.