The Unburied Secret
LIKE MADAME DESTINE, Cornelius Quaint also relied upon an element of prescient awareness, but his was nowhere near as refined as the Frenchwoman's gifts had been. He relied solely on instinct. He still had no idea where the poison was, nor from where the Hades Consortium planned to use it. Umkaza was miles away from the Nile, far too far for any effective demonstration of the poison's power. Yet, his gut feeling told him that the place was an essential part of the plot somehow – and Cornelius Quaint's gut feeling was seldom wrong.
Outside the Bara Mephista tavern, he and Aksak Faroud finished preparing for their journey to Umkaza. They fastened saddles to their horses, and stocked the panniers with enough food and water for the long ride. Faroud slotted his curved sword into the scabbard affixed to his horse's saddle. He glanced up as he caught Quaint looking at him.
'It is not for you,' he said, nodding towards the weapon. 'You have earned my trust, Cornelius…as I hope I have earned yours.'
Quaint nodded firmly at Faroud. He did trust him. He had to. He had no one else left to trust. The Aksak was risking his standing within the Council of Elders by throwing his lot in with him. That was firm proof of trust as far as Quaint was concerned.
'Your plan is foolhardy…but its recklessness suits you,' said Faroud. 'However, if we are to clash with the Hades Consortium, we had best make sure we have more than just courage in our hearts. We shall need a great deal of cunning and a lot of good luck! So, what of the Professor whilst we are gone?'
'She's coming,' answered Quaint.
Faroud stopped what he was doing.
'Why, is that a problem?' Quaint asked.
'Are you certain that you wish to be saddled with her on this journey? I much preferred her with a sack on her head,' grinned Faroud, raising one in turn from Quaint. 'I can ensure her safety here in Bara Mephista, if you fear for it. She will be treated like visiting royalty.'
'Which I'm sure she would just adore, but no one knows Umkaza like the Professor,' replied Quaint. 'Until we can figure out the Hades Consortium's connection to that dig site, I want her where I can keep an eye on her. I'm certain that Umkaza is crucial to working out the mechanisms of the Consortium's plot…then once we've figured it out, all we have to do is stop it!'
'You make me nervous,' said Faroud. 'I have no idea what you are thinking.'
'You'd be amazed how often I hear that,' said Quaint.
Just then, there was a sound of shuffling of feet behind them, and Polly North appeared from the rear exit of the tavern.
'Talking about me?' she asked of Quaint.
'Heavens, no!' he lied. 'We were just discussing our plan.'
'Plan?' Polly laughed mockingly. 'Oh, well, I'd love to hear it. What is it? Are you going to sell your soul to Satan and ask him if he wants to accompany us on this little jaunt as well as this Scarab dog?'
'I could always get that sack, Cornelius,' muttered Faroud.
'Keep it on standby just in case,' said Quaint from the corner of his mouth.
Faroud knew that he was only aggravating the situation, also he was reluctant to be in Polly's company for long. 'I have a few things to finalise with my men. I will leave you two to it,' he said, as he removed himself from the stable and re-entered the tavern.
The Professor eyed him devilishly all the way. 'Mongrel,' she hissed.
'I thought we'd been through all this,' said Quaint, as he tried to break through the brittle carapace of her anger. 'The Aksak's help is essential to-'
'To what? To torture me some more? To remind me what I've had to sacrifice?'
'Professor, I really don't think that-'
'Don't you "Professor" me, Cornelius Quaint!' seared Polly. She flopped herself down on an upturned wooden barrel and gazed disconsolately at the barren landscape around the encampment. 'I really don't understand you at all. One moment these Scarabs are nothing but scavenging animals picking at the carcass of life, and then you're prepared to fight alongside them as if they were your brothers! Does that not even bother you?'
'Bother me? Of course it bothers me! I don't relish throwing my lot in with the sort of people that on any other day I would probably be up against – but this is not any other day.'
'The enemy of my enemy is my friend?'
'Something like that,' said Quaint. 'The Hades Consortium is a big foe to fight, Polly, and I cannot do it alone. Allying myself with the Clan Scarabs was a hard choice to make…but it was also a necessary one.'
'And you're an expert in necessary choices, are you?' asked Polly.
'I don't expect you to understand, Polly,' Quaint replied, unsure if he really wanted to win this argument. 'I've learned a lot about human nature…particularly the darker side. I've travelled the world and I've seen much that turned my stomach – things that I could not just stand by and watch. So I interfered in matters that I knew little about. I intervened because I thought them to be wrong. But I wasn't qualified to make that judgement, don't you see? I judged them on my terms, by my ethics!'
'You're only proving my point for me. You're allowing your judgement to be impaired by circumstance, Cornelius. You talk about things like ethics, and yet where are they when you make a deal with the Devil?'
Quaint glanced down at the ground, kicking at a clod of dried dirt. 'Professor, this is a fight that neither of us can win unless we have walked in each other's shoes. I have experience with the Hades Consortium. Close up. I know what they're capable of, and the Clan Scarabs are insects compared to them! When you understand that, maybe you'll understand why I choose to lay down with dogs. Desperate times call for desperate measures.'
'And uneasy alliances,' said Polly.
'Sometimes,' said Quaint. 'But make no mistake, Professor – these are most desperate times indeed.'
Soon after, three streaks of dust cut a path through the desert sands towards Umkaza. The afternoon sunlight cast long shadows across the uneven territory as Cornelius Quaint, Aksak Faroud and Polly North rode side by side. The conjuror had been forced to change many of his opinions about the Clan Scarabs of late, and was now convinced the band of thieves at least had a semblance of civility about them. They had allowed him to change his ragged, bloodied clothing for some of their own garments. Clad in much more suitable attire for a desert trek, he wore a pair of loose-fitting khaki trousers and a plain white cotton collarless shirt, with a scarf wrapped around his head to shield himself from the unrelenting sun. Quaint did not ask where the clothes came from, guessing that the answer might sit uneasily on his mind.
Riding at his side, a disgruntled Polly North took every available opportunity to scowl at the hooded Scarab leader. She had an intense dislike of him – that much would have been obvious to a blind man, but she had been notably silent on the journey from Bara Mephista. Despite the fact that Faroud had joined Quaint on his mission, it did nothing to change her opinion of him.
Soon, Aksak Faroud raised his hand into the air, signalling the trio to stop.
'Umkaza, dead ahead,' he said to the conjuror.
They rode through a semblance of a wooden gate, wide enough for two carts side by side and twenty feet high. Quaint dismounted and took a slow look around.
'Dead ahead, indeed,' he said.
The ground was strewn with personal belongings of all kinds, an obvious sign that the inhabitants left in a hurry. A pair of spectacles lay bent and crushed in the sand, and notebooks, various pieces of ceramic pottery and a range of personal effects were discarded where they had fallen. A row of canvas tents up on the rise had been slashed into rags, the material flapping loosely from bamboo frames in the wind.
As his eyes gradually took in the sight before him, Quaint was numbed at how ghostly the place felt, how silent. It was hard to believe that just the day before it had been a thriving excavation site, buzzing with excitement. He looked cautiously at Polly, who had also dismounted, and he wondered how on earth she felt. She was uncharacteristically quiet, and now he understood why.
Polly was near to tears. She walked forwards slowly up the gentle incline, past several pits that had once been areas of excavation, now nothing but empty holes in the ground. She collapsed onto her knees at the edge of the pit. Her own notebook was lying in the dirt, the corners bent, the pages torn. After so many dead ends, so many fruitless searches, it had been her dream to uncover the resting place of the fabled Pharaoh's Cradle. Now, that dream was lying spreadeagled in the dust.
Quaint rubbed the back of his neck, uncertain what to say. 'Look…this doesn't have to be the end, you know. I'm sure you can put another crew together…start digging afresh.'
Polly's voice was upset. 'Not enough time.'
'Oh, come on! The treasures in this place have laid here for hundreds of years, what's a couple of weeks going to hurt? We can get you to Cairo, or Mos Nettair or somewhere to get a new crew,' offered Quaint. 'I know a few folk at the British Museum, surely they can-'
'No, Cornelius!' yelled the Professor. 'You don't know what you're talking about! It's too late, all right? I don't have the time to crew up. The paperwork alone takes weeks out here! It's over, don't you see?' She stood and kicked a crooked spade into the pit. 'The only thing I ever found even the remotest bit interesting in this place was a pile of bones anyway! And not even ancient ones…at least then I might have been able to salvage something from this trip. Stumbling across a mass grave only twenty or thirty years old is hardly a great historical find, Cornelius. No…it's far too late to repair the damage now.'
Quaint quietly approached her side. 'If it's a matter of cost-'
'Cost has nothing to do with it! Cost is the least of my troubles. It is time that is against me…and not even my sponsor's vast fortune can buy any more of that. It's almost laughable really,' Polly continued, rising to her feet, striding away from him. 'I can still recall him telling me about the wonders of this place. He was so confident, so driven. He said that I'd unearth the greatest find of my career…a find that would cement my name in the annals of archaeology for ever. How wrong he was…how wrong we both were. And now I've got no time left. I've got a ship bound for England to catch. I have to attend a celebration…in my honour, would you believe? A celebration? What do I have to celebrate? Now I've got no choice but to return to the Queen as a failure!'
'The Queen? As in…Queen Victoria?' asked Quaint.
'The one and only,' confirmed Polly.
'It sounds like your benefactor has quite a pull with aristocracy,' noted Quaint.
'Cho-zen Li is one of the richest men in the world,' Polly said. 'He has quite a pull with everyone. He was so sure that I'd find the Pharaoh's Cradle that he organised a celebratory gala dinner for me at Buckingham Palace. The fifth of February, just over a month's time. I'm supposed to present my treasures as a gift for the Queen. I'm in luck if she thinks that nothing but bones and dirt are treasure!'
'Cho-zen Li? Now, where have I heard that name before?' Quaint rubbed at his jaw, like an angler feeling for a bite on his line. Once he felt that familiar tug of curiosity, he would never give up without reeling in his prize. But this time, the truth seemed to slip free off his hook and it was gone. 'And this treasure, this Pharaoh's Cradle…I suppose it must be valuable.'
Polly stared at him as if he were a simpleton. 'Valuable? It's the very crib that held the infant Rameses II, dating back to the thirteenth century BC – of course it's valuable! It is supposedly made from solid gold, adorned with hundreds of precious stones – emeralds, rubies, sapphires, diamonds – the lot!'
'No wonder you were so keen to find it,' Quaint said.
'Cho-zen Li had such faith in my abilities. He spent a small fortune hiring the best archaeologists that the world has to offer. His confidence inspired me…no, it fooled me…into believing that I would uncover it. I've let so many people down,' Polly said, her eyes glazing. She believed every word of what she was saying. She believed that she had failed. For a scientist, that was a hard blow to recover from. 'Cho-zen has donated hundreds of exhibits to the Cairo Museum of Antiquities, the British Museum, and the Paris Archives. It was his love for the reconstruction of history that drew me to him, and I've been trying to do him proud since the very first day I disembarked in Alexandria's port.'
'That's it,' exclaimed Quaint, snapping his fingers. 'Alexandria!'
'What?' asked Polly.
'That's where I know that name from!'
'Alexandria? Well, it is a fairly well-known port.'
'Not Alexandria – Cho-zen Li!' barked Quaint. 'It all makes sense now.'
'Not to me, it doesn't,' said Polly dryly.
Quaint shook his head impatiently. He hated being interrupted when he was rambling. Finding coherence within incoherence was a gift he had cultivated since a child, and he was exceptionally good at it.
'Alexandria is a friend of mine. A seamstress from Hosni, and I recall seeing this coat that she'd tailored for a client in her workshop,' he explained breathlessly, his black eyes twitching left and right as he sifted through recent memory. 'It was his order! His coat – Cho-zen Li's coat…right there in a backstreet tailor's shop…and now here we are…on an archaeological dig in the middle of nowhere with his name cropping up again.'
'Well, I have to admit…that is a bit of a coincidence,' muttered Polly.
'That's what worries me,' said Quaint, his face the picture of discontent. 'But surely it can have no connection to this. Let me think.' The conjuror plucked at his ear lobes impatiently, and then began to stroll around in circles, all the while drilling his stare into the ground, as if trying to sift the truth from the sand beneath his feet. 'Joyce wanted you gone from this place. Joyce works for the Consortium. But archaeology holds no interest to them…unless…unless they want to sell the Pharaoh's Cradle to the highest bidder – which could be this Cho-zen Li chap if he's as rich as you claim. Maybe they're trying to get their hands on the treasure first! But that's still out of character for them. They don't need money. There's more to it than that, there just has to be! Joyce went to a lot of trouble to scare you away, but if you'd been digging here for as long as you had, why all of a sudden take umbrage? Could it be that you were close to unearthing something…or perhaps already had done so?'
Polly coughed loudly into her hand. 'Sorry to disturb your mad ramblings, Cornelius, but I've already told you – I found nothing! The Pharaoh's Cradle could be anywhere underneath this desert, or it could be nowhere here!'
Quaint ground his teeth. 'I wasn't referring to the Pharaoh's Cradle, Professor.'
'Then…what else is there of value here?'
'Not value necessarily…but importance,' answered Quaint, with not a small degree of displeasure. All of his five senses were operating at a rate of knots and it was painfully exhilarating. He hated it when his gut feeling was right. 'Did you not say that you'd uncovered a mass grave full of bones? What if that's the link? What if that's why Joyce wanted you scared away from here?' Quaint called over to Faroud, silently astride his horse nearby. 'Aksak, you know Joyce better than any of us. What is his history in Egypt? Was he in the country twenty or so years ago?'
Faroud raised a cautious eyebrow. 'Why…yes, I believe so. He moved here in the late twenties as the port administrator in Alexandria prior to being assigned the role of British attache to Egypt. If it helps…when Joyce ordered my Scarabs to apprehend the Professor, he did not claim that it was for the benefit of the Hades Consortium. I merely inferred that, knowing who his masters were. He just said that he had a few "skeletons in his closet" that he did not wish to be unearthed.'
Quaint's face lit up. 'By someone whose job it is to dig for secrets, perhaps?'
'Oh, nonsense,' said Polly. 'I'm still not convinced that Joyce is involved in any of this. We've only got this Scarab's word for it, remember? The man is the British attache to Egypt, for crying out loud! He could have been speaking figuratively.'
'But what if he wasn't?' countered Quaint without missing a beat. 'That's why he wants you gone from this place, on account of those bones you found! No wonder he doesn't want that grave made common knowledge. People might start asking awkward questions of him, and then where would he be? He would expose not only himself but the Hades Consortium too!'
'Quaint, if you keep talking long enough no doubt you'll end up convincing yourself that you're right, but you're forgetting one thing – proof. Something you lack!' snapped Polly. 'This is all just some incredible story, and I'm not swayed by it for one moment.'
'Trust me on this, Professor…unravelling these sorts of webs is my speciality,' said Quaint. 'As a conjuror, I have an insatiable hunger to work out what makes things tick…why things are what they are. I wanted leverage to use against Joyce and this is it!'
'This is madness! Not to mention slander,' Polly stormed, throwing her hands up into the air. 'If you're so convinced that Godfrey Joyce is guilty, why don't you just trot on over to the British Embassy in Cairo and ask him?'
'I like the way you think,' said Quaint. 'We can make it by nightfall if we hurry.'
'What?' asked Polly, aghast. 'I was joking!'
'Aksak, what do you think?' Quaint asked him.
Aksak Faroud bunched his fingers into a fist and gnawed on his knuckles as though he was trying to force his words back down his throat.
'Joyce is a dangerous man,' he said eventually. He had only wished to help the conjuror discover a clue as to the Hades Consortium's plot. By going up against Godfrey Joyce, the Scarab leader was risking far more than just his own neck. 'If you set foot in that Embassy, you will be on his territory. If you really are going to face him, you will need an airtight plan.'
'Don't worry, Faroud.' Quaint gripped his horse's reins and pulled himself up into the saddle. 'Airtight plans are my speciality!'
'I thought you said that unravelling webs was your speciality?' asked Polly.
'I diversify in my specialities, Polly,' said Quaint. 'Come on, folks! Let's go and put our friend Mr Joyce in an awkward position that he can't wriggle out of.'