Mr Impossible (11 page)

She knew she could
not continue holding his hand while traversing the small tunnel. One
part of her mind—the small part still functioning—understood
the necessity. But the rest was too chaotic to understand anything,
and when she let go, she felt wretched and lost and alone.

Telling herself to
stop being so childish, she followed as closely behind as possible,
listening to his footsteps while she slid her hands along the passage
walls. What seemed a very long time later, though she knew they could
not have traveled many feet, he put his hand back, touching the front
of her turban.

“
We’re
at the shaft, I think,” he said softly. “There’s
room for you to stand upright, at any rate. But stay a moment while I
find the ladder.”

Another long wait.
Daphne heard rustling, then his familiar rumble, too low to
understand. Then a degree more audibly he said, “You’d
better let me carry you.”

“
Have the
villains broken the ladder?” she said.

“
No. Where
the devil are you?” His voice was clipped and distant. One
large hand found her forearm, the other her hip. “Where’s
your waist, confound it?”

Though the
pyramid’s interior was far from cool, she was acutely aware of
a very different warmth where he touched her, and of a strength that
the childish part of her wanted to lean into.

She retreated. “I
can climb up the ladder without aid,” she said. “I
climbed down it, did I not?”

“
As you wish,
madam. Try not to step on the bodies.”

“
Bodies,”
she repeated.

“
They’re
human, they haven’t been dead for very long, and they’ve
fallen or been flung onto the pile of stones near the ladder,”
he said.

“
Good grief,”
she said.

“
Don’t
faint,” he said. “I’ve pushed them out of the way
as much I could, but space is limited. If I can get you onto the
third rung, you should be clear of them.”

She quelled a
shudder. If she gave way, she’d soon be trembling
uncontrollably.

“
Very well,”
she said. She groped in the darkness, about where she reckoned his
shoulder must be. She found it, rock hard and warm. Only the thin
linen of his shirt lay between her palm and his skin. Within her a
welter of unnamable feelings stirred, a hurrying and a prickling and
a piercing recollection of her youth and its not-quite-forgotten
longings.

She beat them down
and quickly worked her way from his shoulder to his hand. She grasped
his hand and brought it to her waist. “Here I am,” she
said breathlessly.

Two big hands
circled her waist. “What in blazes is that?” he said.

“
My waist,”
she said.

“
I mean the
sash thing you’ve wound about it. Have you rocks in it?”
He patted a place near her left hip.

“
It is called
a
hezam
,” she said.

“
Yes, but
what
is
it?”

“
A scarf
girdling the waist,” she said. “Useful for stowing
things. Like my knives.”

“
Have you the
least idea how to use them?” he said.

“
I know that
you hold it by the handle and the sharp end is the part you stick
in,” she whispered impatiently. “What else do I need to
know?”

“
Hold it with
the sharp end aimed upward rather than downward,” he said.
“More control, better aim that way.”

“
Oh,”
she said. “Yes. I see.”

“
Good.”
He grasped her firmly about the waist—or the
hezam
,
rather—and lifted her smoothly up. He held her until she had
her feet firmly planted on the rung and her hands clutching the
sides.

Then, “Don’t
move,” he said in an undertone. “We don’t know
what’s up there.”

“
I don’t
hear anything,” she said.

“
I’d
better go first all the same,” he said.

“
There’s
only one ladder,” she said, “and I’m on it.”

“
I’d
rather not climb over the corpses,” he said.

“
No, no, of
course not.”

“
I’ll
have to squeeze by you, then,” he said.

“
Will the
ladder hold two persons?”

“
We’ll
soon find out.”

She felt his hand
travel up her back and along her arm to where her hand grasped the
ladder. She squeezed to one side, to leave room, but there was little
room to leave. A moment later, she felt his hard torso against her
back, then a long, muscular leg pressed against her thigh. She sucked
in her breath. Flames raced up from the place of contact, and even
the cold shame instantly following couldn’t altogether douse
them.

Then he was past,
and she concentrated on getting out of this beastly place and away
from the horror a few inches away. She listened to him climb out,
then to the muted sound of his boots moving away from the shaft. She
became aware of her own breathing, too fast, and the matching tempo
of her heartbeats. Her mind darted to the bodies nearby, then to
unknown others, still alive, lying in wait for him.

Panic flooded in,
and with it a mad grief. Finally she heard his returning footsteps.
Relief wiped out panic, and the wild grief sank back into whatever
dark cave of her be-ing it had come from.

“
All’s
clear at the moment,” he said.

The ladder was
nearly perpendicular. Daphne all but ran up it. At the top rung, she
paused and released her death grip to feel for the floor of the
passage. Her searching hand found his knee.

Then strong fingers
circled her wrist, and she grasped his in the same way. “Hold
on,” he said. “I’ll steady you.” His other
hand slid down from her shoulder over her breast, then caught her
firmly under her arm. If he lost his hold, her madly working mind
told her, she’d fall to the bottom—or on top of the
corpses. But his grip was firm, and in a moment she was clambering
over the edge of the shaft and sinking onto her knees, while her
heart raced and her breath came in racking gasps.

“
Steady,”
he said. He did not let go of her.

She tried to steady
herself, but her hands trembled, and she couldn’t seem to catch
her breath.

“
Don’t
faint,” he said.

“
I. Never.
Faint.” Four heaving, irate syllables.

“
The way
seems clear as far as the portcullis,” he said. “Beyond
that is the first passage. I doubt anyone would lurk there, so near
the entrance.”

She directed her
churning mind to practical rather than hysterical thoughts.
‘Twenty-two feet seven inches to the portcullis,“ she
said. ”The portcullis section itself is six feet eleven
inches.“ But while her rational mind calculated the remaining
distance, the other, darker part of her being was engulfed in
physical awareness: the size and strength of his hands holding her
steady… his nearness, a breath away in the small space…
the musky scent of Male, mingled with faint traces of smoke and soap.

The thin shirt
under her jacket clung damply to her skin. She was swimming in heat
and confusion, and she longed, desperately, to be anywhere else, safe
and clean, with her brother.

She was aware as
well of a darker longing, one she’d rather not examine too
closely. The two feelings tangled, and she understood only that she
was weary and confused an desperately unhappy. She bowed her head and
leaned toward the man who wasn’t her brother or even her
brother’s trusted friend, until her turban touched his chest.
He grasped her shoulders. “No fainting,” he said. “No
weeping, either.”

Her head shot up.
“I was not weeping,” she said. “Oh,” he said.
“Were you finding me irresistible? Sorry.” He tried to
draw her back.

Daphne pulled his
hands from her shoulders and retreated as far as she could in the
small space. “You are impossible,” she said.

“
If you were
not fainting or weeping or making an advance, what were you doing,
then?” he said.

“
Succumbing
to despair,” she said. It was true enough, if not the whole
truth. “But it was momentary. I am fully recovered. Shall we
proceed, and ought I do so with my knife drawn?”

“
You’d
better keep it where it is for the moment,” he said. “Otherwise
you might stab me to death accidentally.” .

“
If I stab
you to death,” she said, “it will not be accidental.”

AS IT HAPPENED,
neither Mrs. Pembroke nor anyone else attempted murder or mayhem on
the way out. Rupert emerged with her into the sunlight unscathed.

Then followed a
chain of events with which he was more than familiar. A large body of
men closed about them and, despite Mrs. Pembroke’s furious
protests in what seemed to be five different languages, arrested
them.

* * *

GHAZI, WHO STOOD
among the onlookers, found it amusing that Chephren’s pyramid,
which had not housed a corpse in thousands of years, now held two.

The police found
the two guides, their throats slit, on the stones piled alongside the
ladder. That was all they found. They could not discover who had
screamed. No one in the vicinity had heard or seen anything.

This was because
everyone had been gathered about and listening raptly to a Cairene’s
tale of the evil genie who lived on his neighbor’s roof and
played cruel tricks on passersby.

The Cairene was one
of Ghazi’s men.

Ghazi had sent
another to the district police with a tale of a mad Englishman—the
one who’d tried to kill a soldier the other day—bent on
evildoing at Chephren’s pyramid. Ghazi’s associate had
gone well-supplied with money, to encourage the police to act
quickly.

Ghazi had had to
improvise, and swiftly, because matters had not proceeded as planned.

Two of his men had
hidden in Chephren’s pyramid just before dawn. They’d
been awaiting the Englishman, in order to help him have an accident.

No one was
expecting the woman.

Luckily, Ghazi had
not sent stupid men into the pyramid. They knew the Englishwoman was
very important to Lord Noxley—the man they knew as the Golden
Devil. The men knew they must not harm her. They also realized—as
stupid men would not—that it was unwise to harm the Englishman
while she was about. She would make a fuss—much as she did at
present—and force the English consul general to make a fuss,
too. This would annoy Muhammad Ali. When the pasha was annoyed,
people’s heads and necks went separate ways. Sometimes there
was torture first. Occasionally, a disemboweling.

Consequently,
Ghazi’s men had reassessed the situation and killed the guides
instead. No one would make a fuss about a couple of dead Egyptian
peasants. But word of the incident would quickly travel, and other
Egyptians would decide it was healthier to stay away from the English
lady and her concerns.

This, Ghazi
decided, was more than satisfactory. She would have no one to turn to
but his master.

Meanwhile, Ghazi
would look for another opportunity to get the man called Carsington
out of his master’s way.

MEANWHILE, IN
BULAQ,Cairo’s port, Miles Arch-dale’s servant Akmed was
applying for work on one of the finerNileboats. Nearly as well known
as the pasha’s barge, the
Memnon
belonged to a foreigner who had lived inEgyptfor several years.

The captain studied
Akmed’s bruised face for a long time. “A fighter?”
he said at last.

“
I had
trouble with some soldiers,” Akmed said. It was true enough,
though not the cause of his injuries. The soldiers had been ready to
give him trouble—though the tall Englishman who’d so
bravely intervened got the worst of it. The English had been very
good to Akmed. He wished he could repay them in some way. But for now
all he could do was run away.

Yesterday, when the
false policemen came, he’d recognized one of the voices. It
belonged to one of the men who’d taken his master captive the
day before. That was when Akmed remembered they’d looked for a
papyrus among his master’s belongings and had been furious when
they couldn’t find it. They’d beaten Akmed and left him
for dead because he would not tell them where it was. They would have
done the same had he told them. They wanted him dead. He was the only
witness to the kidnapping. As soon as they discovered they hadn’t
killed him, they’d be after him—and any who tried to
protect him would suffer.