The Honey Mummy (Folley & Mallory Adventure Book 3) (13 page)

“But why take Auberon and Virgil?” Cleo asked. “To force our hand?”

The queen’s smile deepened. “Men may be foolish just as women may, but your Mister Pettigrew wants more than you know. If a thing can create, it can also destroy, is it not so? Just as the stars sometimes fall to earth and destroy themselves…so too is life borne of stardust.”

“Wait. Wait.” Eleanor did not believe she could silence a queen, but Cleopatra fell silent when Eleanor lifted her hands. Perhaps it was the sight of the rings Eleanor still wore, but the smile upon the queen’s face told Eleanor otherwise. “Mister Pettigrew wants more than
we
know—but how do
you
know that, Highness?”

The smile upon the queen’s face grew chillingly distant and Eleanor shuddered as though serpent made of ice had slithered down her spine.

“It does not matter what it calls itself,” the queen said. “Come with me.” She plucked a burning torch from its wall bracket, before she rounded the lotus pool and moved through the hives.

Eleanor glanced at Cleo who remained rooted, but when Eleanor began to follow the queen, so too did Cleo fall into step. They followed her through the stone hives, under the shadow of a spreading tree, where they found a doorway. It was as any other Egyptian doorway, columns topped with a thick lintel. Stone steps led downward, into a dark passage.

“This thing is not a man, not entirely,” the queen said. She moved down the dark steps, her voice rising behind her in the dark. “It may take whatever shape it wishes, call itself whatever name sounds pleasing in its mouth. It has a mouth, to be certain.”

A torch sputtered to life in the depth of the dark stone stairwell, the queen having lit it with her own. Eleanor followed down, and Cleo after, loose debris crunching beneath their boots. At the bottom of the stairs, Eleanor could see the stone walls were marked, painted in some places, but there was extensive damage here, and she could read nothing clearly.

“You know Pettigrew?” Eleanor asked her.

The queen continued down the long hall before them. “Knew, is perhaps the better word,” she said. She lengthened her strides, moving down the hall rapidly; the floor angled beneath her boots, indicating they were going down. The queen’s torch flickered the deeper they went, the air thick and warm.

“He is not a man, though he knits himself together as such,” the queen said as she lit another wall torch. “You may call him evil, but this neither fully applies, as that implies there is an ultimate good to balance him. He is what he is and does what he does. Here.”

The hall turned a final corner before opening into a broader hall, this of columns and a higher ceiling. At the far end another doorway opened into another room, but the walls to either side of the door were decorated in images Eleanor knew far too well. Anubis and Wadjet stood at the ready. The sweet scent of honey and lotus filled the air and Eleanor could see that on either side of the path they now walked, there were pools of the golden stuff; no river, but one made of honey. Immortal-making honey.

“Here.”

The queen walked ahead and touched an image upon the wall. She drew a handful of cobwebs away from the carving and Eleanor sucked in a started breath.

“Are…” She crossed the distance that divided them, and touched the carving herself, the stone rough and damp beneath her fingers. The man’s face was one from history, refined and proud, and known well to this queen. “…you are telling me this man is Julius Caesar?”

The queen’s laughter was soft. “I am telling you he can take what form he will—that he has been this man and more besides—but should you unwrap him, he is nothing more than air and whispers. Ages will pass while he rests—he rests now, for Caesar was slain, was he not? But he will rise again, when he once again escapes the weight of years.”

“Was Caesar his last incarnation?” Cleo asked. She moved deeper into the catacomb behind Eleanor, toward more walls coated in cobwebs.

“If he has drawn you back to this point, perhaps. I cannot say how long he has been simply…nothing.”

Eleanor watched Cleo carefully pull more gossamer threads from more engravings, and as Eleanor was able to make out the words, she snatched the torch the queen held, to better angle the light so that she might read.

“Oh my god,” Eleanor whispered. Her fingers traced the words, knowing them from a poem that, in this year, had not yet been written. But here the words lingered, in an ancient Egyptian tomb. These words from Shelley himself—

“Look on my works, ye Mighty,” Cleo read aloud, “and despair.”

Dear Eleanor,

I read your letter with a heavy heart. These are questions I wonder myself. In a world where such things are possible—we stood beside Hatshepsut herself!—how can we know where we are truly anchored and what has come to pass? I wonder of the rings, too. The archive where the Lady took her rest all these years is now empty; Mistral has not recovered her body or her rings. Will this come to pass again? What will happen should someone else discover her? Perhaps these are questions we can only leave to future minds.

One of the hardest things we do is walk forward, when we wish to only look back. I look back at the years I have lived, especially those before the loss of my arms, and wonder at the way I spent the time. Wonder at the people I loved and pushed away. Selfishly, sometimes, yes.

I hope you have no doubt that your mother loved you, even if she pushed you away, even if she, in the end, came to live in a place you cannot reach. People are driven, by motives they cannot always explain. Pushing someone away does not make a situation any less painful, but it is, perhaps, how they endure. How they get through to the next day. She loved you and had her reasons for setting you aside. You understand some of them and may never understand more—this will be something you struggle with. It is something I struggle with—as you may well know.

There are ghosts of my own making in this world, Eleanor. They terrify me—I fear they will be torn apart in these still-awkward hands. No matter how I master this metal, I can still be careless with these fingers, paying little attention to the way they may poke through paper, fabric, or heart. Some days I do not know how to move forward and yet I do. I hope the same will prove true of you.

I look forward to seeing Paris at your side. Your friendship is something I have grown to cherish and I did not expect. Not because of you—but rather because of me. Whatever else these mechanical hands are capable of, they are so very skilled at pushing people away. Saying yes is impossible, whereas saying no is ever easy. Help me never do this again.

Christmas in Paris? Until then, I am your dear friend,

Cleo

“How
could
you?”

“How could I
not
? Are you proposing, Mister Auberon, that I should have let her perish when I, in my capacity as a doctor, had the ability to
save
her? The catacombs spelled out the solution—”

“You
cursed
her, Fairbrass.”

“With life?”

“
Gentlemen
.”

Under other circumstances, Virgil might have found it in himself to laugh at the circular argument, but he could not, given that he found himself dangling in the center of a cold laboratory, naked and dripping honey onto a clear glass platform beneath him. The honey was sprinkled with dark wolf hair, Pettigrew having hauled a half-transformed and fully-drugged Virgil into the contraption that now held him.

Auberon and Doctor Peregrine Fairbrass were strapped to stretchers nearby, though not near enough that they all might free one another and flee this captivity. Depraved, endless, captivity. Whether it was day or night, Virgil could not say; there were no windows that might reveal such information, nor clocks upon any of the walls.

Another glob of honey slid from Virgil’s back, tracing a gooey wet line down his hip before it broke free and landed with a plop on the glass below. He shuddered, every sensation heightened after his dalliance with laudanum.

“Are you telling me that this honey will have the same effect upon me? Upon any of us?” Virgil eyed Fairbrass, who quickly shook his blond head.

“I am
not
. It isn’t so simple as the honey—nothing is ever simple, is it? The honey is infused with healing properties on its own, as is any honey—it seals, it protects. But it requires a spark for anything more—the hand of the woman who first infused it with such m—”

“You will
not
call it magic,” Auberon interrupted, “not when you have cursed Miss Barclay to—”

“To what?” Fairbrass spat, a glob of spit joining the honey that pooled beneath Virgil. “A life
fully
lived when she would have very well died that day?”

“Gentlemen!” Virgil growled the word out. “You will cease, so that we may construct a way out of this prison. There is no sense in arguing over Miss Barclay. She is what she is at this point in time—as are we all.”

A laugh erupted from the doorway as Pettigrew made himself known, striding toward the glass platform where the honey pooled. He bent, and with bowl and knife, collected a generous blob of honey and wolf hair.

“You can certainly construct a way out, but this does not ensure its success,” Pettigrew said. His eyes lingered on Virgil a moment before he crossed the room and daubed honey onto a slide of glass. “You have no idea where we are, do you? What waits beyond these walls.”

“Whatever it is, I’m developing a rather…robust appetite,” Virgil said. Truth be told, the laudanum had left him drained and shaky. He wasn’t entirely sure he would be able to stand, given the way Pettigrew was intent on making him transform or keeping him doused with opium. Auberon and Fairbrass had not been drugged a second time; Virgil had been drugged four more times that he could count. Everything lost its focus after that. That he was conscious now was possibly debatable; nothing had a completely solid feeling to him.

“I am certain you are, Mister Mallory. Let us see what the honey is doing to you, shall we?”

“It hasn’t made me immortal, if that’s what you mean.” Virgil watched Pettigrew cross to his work table, where he tucked the slide into position beneath the lens of his microscope.

“Oh, no—we don’t want
that
, do we, Mister Mallory?” Pettigrew bent his head to the task before him and made a murmur before adjusting the magnification. “We spoke before of undoings, yes.”

The silence was uncomfortable for Virgil, the scrape of a steel nail against bare flesh. The longer Pettigrew studied the honey before him, the more Virgil began to shake, as countless possibilities scurried through his mind like mice beneath the growing shadow of an owl.

To ease the panic, he counted his fingers, he counted his toes; he double checked every body part and it did not appear had been undone, not until he touched upon the wolf inside him. The wolf was curled into a ball, small and soft, and Virgil could not rouse him. Whether caused by the honey or the laudanum, Virgil did not know.

“
Pettigrew
.”

“See here.” Pettigrew gestured to the microscope, even though Virgil could see little beyond the basic set up. “The fine hair begins to dissolve. They honey eats away what should not be there. Much as it would consume death, it eats this, too. As ravenous as you become, Mister Mallory, so has this honey always been. Eating away impurities, infections. Eating away the very demons that plague us. It needs only a spark to work more quickly…a spark your ladylove may yet provide.”

Virgil stared, silent. Pettigrew bent his head back to his work, and Virgil noticed then what he had noticed before—the man’s hands were not entirely solid, but looked as though they were fading from the world. It was not the laudanum this time, Virgil told himself; he could actually see the microscope through Pettigrew’s hand as he made another adjustment.

“… stamped up on these lifeless things, the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed,” Pettigrew murmured as he worked. “It’s all downhill from here boys, worry not. We get closer and closer.” Pettigrew freed the slide from the microscope and astounded Virgil by licking it clean, honey and hair and all. “I have waited so long and oblivion presses closer.” His eyes met Virgil’s.

Virgil pulled against the chains that bound him. “Let me free, you shall know oblivion intimately, sir.”

Pettigrew tossed the slide aside and it fell to the desk with a clatter as he rose. He crossed to Virgil, pausing to unbutton his boots and slip his stockings free, before stepping onto the glass that caught the falling honey. He left impressions in the honey, but to Virgil’s eyes, Pettigrew was still losing his form, until he fingered the jet tack that held his tie together. His hands and feet solidified.

For a moment, Virgil thought Pettigrew might actually release him, that he would be free to tear Pettigrew’s throat out and send him to oblivion. But while Pettigrew was eager for such things, he remained cautious in his play. He circled Virgil, fingers skimming over the honey that still coated him. He flung the golden sweet to the platform, rounding Virgil until they could once again stare each other down.

“It is nothing personal, Mister Mallory. And should your ladylove do what needs doing, she won’t be harmed. And you… What might it be like, to be freed of the wolf for once and all? What if we could undo this part of you?”

“…’tis only the laudanum that has—”

“Is it now?”

Pettigrew smeared a honey-wet hand across Virgil’s mouth, and where once the wolf would have lunged at that hand in an attempt to remove it from the wrist, the wolf was gone—simply gone.

“What if we could unmake that part of you? You cannot tell me this doesn’t thrill you, because what would it be to be only a man again? A man only, capable of producing a family, a normal life; a man with no concerns as to his temper, because the beast is gone, and gone, and gone.”

Virgil exhaled a shuddering breath. He could not comprehend that this fancy could be true. But for a moment, he allowed himself to believe it, that he was only a man, even-tempered in a neatly pressed suit with a perfectly folded tie. He did not wake shaking in withdrawal from either the wolf or the opium. Simple things. So simple. And to have a family with Eleanor—

“We could do the same for her, you know,” Pettigrew purred. “Free the jackal, send it on its way. These things were never meant to be—we were meant to be pure things, worshiping nothing but ourselves. What would you do, Mister Mallory, if you woke one day, to find all you hated had fallen to dust?”

Pettigrew’s hand faded again and he turned away from Virgil, striding back through the honey. Even as his feet lost their forms, he left honeyed footprints upon the floor.

“This will come to pass for you as it has for me,” Pettigrew said. “Until then, we chase dragons, gentlemen.”