Heart of Light (16 page)

But now the question remained—should Nigel trust Peter?

Lord Widefield had told Nigel not to trust anyone but himself and the men in the safe house, but all those people were now dead. Nigel was alone, his mission already compromised, perhaps beyond repair.

He must seek help. Or else surrender entirely, here and now.

“Mr. Oldhall,” Emily said, her voice imperative. “Why should any secret African organization be interested in us?”

Nigel looked at Peter, who said nothing, only raised his eyebrows.

“Peter,” Nigel said, “you know what we are about.”

It was an appeal. He wanted Peter to explain to Emily that Nigel had not lied to her. That he hadn't brought her, blithely and blindly, into harm's way. That Nigel was no more than a pawn serving the might and the needs of the empire.

Peter raised his eyebrows again. He flicked ash from his cigarette onto a conveniently placed ashtray. “Somewhat,” he said. “You could say I've been . . . briefed.”

It was, from the tone in which he said it, a confirmation that Nigel had deduced his motives correctly.

Peter had been sent in to judge the trouble in the organization and— And what? To help Nigel? Then why had Peter said that Nigel should leave? Was he testing him again?

Nigel wiped his forehead with his sodden handkerchief. “Well, you know I was sent . . . by Lord Widefield. He said Emily and I should . . . You see . . . I was Carew's only full-blood relative, and both our mother and our father are descended from Charlemagne's servant who first impressed the compass stone. We're the only ones they could trace with such blood. That we were ideal for—”

“Searching out the Heart of Light, yes,” Peter said.

Emily stared at Nigel with disbelieving eyes, obviously having understood what his words meant. He'd come here for reasons beyond the honeymoon.

“Emily. They . . . Lord Widefield approached me after our engagement was announced. He said with your great power you could help me in this mission. This is the mission my brother disappeared on.” He looked at her, searching for a sign of understanding, a sign of empathy. “Remember the legend that centuries ago an emissary of the great Charlemagne found a jewel in Africa that he used in a ritual binding to the great king the magical power of everyone in Europe?”

“Soul of Fire. It was in my primary reader, but expert taumathurgs think it never existed. That it is no more than a mythological explanation for why, in Europe, the magical power follows a single familial line more strictly than it does anywhere else in the world.”

“It's not a myth. There is a temple in the heart of Africa and in that temple there lies the remaining jewel, Heart of Light, onto whose physical form the strength of mankind at its beginning was bespelled.”

“You mean . . .” Emily started. Peter stood by quietly, looking at both of them attentively.

“My brother, Carew, worked for the secret service . . . as . . . as I think Peter . . .”

Peter nodded and Nigel went on. “In the present day, the power in Europe has become so diffuse and fallen into the hands of all the rabble that there are revolutions and insurrection all over and violent attacks on the rightful rulers of various lands. So the queen, having discovered among her late husband's effects the compass stone and an account of the discovery of the Soul of Fire, has ordered that some of her friends, secret service leaders, contrive a scheme to acquire the remaining jewel from the heart of Africa, and with it bind magic again to our royal line, to put power in the hands of our most worthy sovereign.”

Emily went pale, and her eyes glistened with tears, but she was taking all the revelations like a true British wife, her features hardened into an expression of stoic courage. She nodded once.

“Carew disappeared,” Nigel said. “And apparently no one else had the necessary power. Or the necessary type of power, which no one quite knows what it might be. They tried to activate the compass stone, but it didn't work, so they sent me and . . . and you . . . Because, you see, to reach this shrine where the jewel resides, we need to use the compass stone and have it activated. Carew had a large enough power to do it. And . . . and so do you . . .”

Emily swallowed. “I cannot use most of my power. I told you that. Long before we became engaged.” She looked distraught. “It is locked within me and I cannot reach it.”

Nigel nodded. “Lord Widefield thought you . . . He thought it would be different after we married.” He blushed a dark red, thinking of Widefield's actual words and that Nigel had not actually done what Widefield had said would free Emily's power. “He thought that you'd be able to activate the stone, with the help of some people at a safe house here. That's where I went when I left the carpetship. There was no one to receive me in the quay and there should have been a man. I thought perhaps they'd misunderstood the details of the rendezvous.” He swallowed frantically, remembering the dead men around the table, the smell of charred flesh. Their families wouldn't know yet. In their comfortable drawing rooms they'd speak of their boys in the foreign service, quite as if they were still alive. They'd expect them to return home any day. Nigel thought of his mother, surrounded by portraits of Carew, daily awaiting a letter, a message or her favorite son, himself, to come riding back home. “They were dead,” he said, refusing to tell his wife the details of the carnage he'd encountered. “And there was nothing I could do . . .” He nodded. “But you have activated the compass stone anyway. Even without their help.”

“And got attacked by the Hyena Men,” Peter added.

Emily said nothing. She swallowed several times and a couple of tears escaped her eyes. When she finally spoke, her voice wavered a little. “So you brought me to Africa, on this mission, without telling me? Shouldn't you have told me, Mr. Oldhall? Shouldn't you have told me what you meant? You brought me on an enterprise that could cause my death, and you didn't think me worthy of knowing why and how and of judging my danger on my own, the way you judged your own danger? With your eyes open and your mind alert? Consciously weighing duty and risk?”

“You are my wife,” he said, confused and lost. “Under my protection. I am supposed to be your guardian and make decisions for you as I would for my child.”

Emily opened her mouth, then closed it.

Nigel had always believed that Emily had a better mind than his own, had always doubted what men like Emily's father believed—that women were children. He couldn't believe what he'd just said. Panic at her anger had fueled his words.

Emily looked pale as a woman who'd suffered a mortal injury but her expression seemed to say that men thought like this and—no matter how inane—she'd been trained to obey them.

“So will you take her to England now, the safest place for her, as it would be for your child if you had one?” Peter asked. He raised his eyebrow and his lips twisted in something more mockery than smile.

Nigel, his mind intent on his wife, had forgotten Peter's presence and now looked at him. “Should I?”

he said. “Go back to England?”

Peter shrugged. “It would get you out of reach of the Hyena Men. It would ensure you'll live.” He stubbed his cigarette out and lit a fresh one.

“And abandon my mission?” Nigel asked.

“Is there anyone else who can imprint the stone to himself?” Emily asked. “Anyone with a strong enough power?”

“Power has nothing to do with it,” Peter said. “You've bonded to the stone. While you live, no one else can command it.”

“It doesn't signify,” Nigel said. He seized now at this opportunity to show Emily that he loved her above even his mission and his duty. “I will take you back to England. I will come back on my own, and without the stone try to find my way to the shrine, and I—”

“No,” Emily said. “If the cause is so important that my life must be risked without my knowing, we'll go on.” She swallowed again, but now her voice trembled not at all. “I have, through my own decision, on my own head, against the manner and education of a British lady, looked through my husband's trunks, and that way I have imprinted the compass stone to me. As such . . .” She swallowed. “As such, I think I should follow through. I should help my husband and master,” she said, without irony, “and I should prove his worthiness to our queen and help him make the world a safer place.”

“Emily, are you sure that we—”

“Quite sure,” she said. “We will go on.”

“We will?” Nigel asked. He looked at Peter. “I was supposed, you see, to have support on this mission, only all at the safe house were dead. You know that.” He took a deep breath. “I don't suppose . . . I mean?”

Peter hesitated. He looked from one to the other of them. “It was not what I was sent to do,” he said, at last. “But . . . if you're asking for my support, for my help in this mission . . .”

“I am,” Nigel said, embarrassed.

“Well, then . . . it would certainly make everything easier.”

Nigel realized Peter had meant to shadow them anyway. He nodded toward Emily. She tightened her lips and looked severe, then nodded, like a woman taking bitter medicine. She looked at Peter and Nigel with the same cold, distant look, as if both of them had wronged her. “You gentlemen may work out the details of our progress and how we can travel without being followed by the Hyena Men. I will be in my room.”

Turning, Emily walked out of the room. As she passed Nigel, he smelled her scent of rosewater and another undefinable fragrance—lilac, perhaps. And he saw that her face was tense, as if she was using all her strength and willpower to keep from crying, like a wounded child who refused to show her pain in front of her tormentors.

“Emily,” Nigel said. But Emily had already closed the door between their rooms. Nigel took a step toward it and heard her slide the bolt home. In front of Peter, he could not pound on the door and beg to be let in and retain any sense of honor and dignity. Instead, Nigel turned to Peter, resigned to working out with his old friend—his minder?—the details of how to continue with the mission that he wished he'd never undertaken.

A CONSCIENCE OF GUILT

Kitwana came out of his trance with his hands
clenched into such tight fists that his nails bit into his palms and drew blood. Before he was fully awake, sensations came at him—confused sensations like those received in a dream. Or a nightmare. He was in a room full of people, and even half-conscious, he knew what that room was. The tiny, too-English front parlor of that home in Cairo that the Hyena Men had commandeered. Before the ceremony to set the bind on the Englishmen, many Hyena Men, complexions ranging from mocha to midnight black, had trickled into that house, silent and determined. For the ceremony they'd sat all over the room.

Kitwana smelled too many human bodies pressed close. He could feel all the Hyena Men in the room, breathing as people in a trance—or just coming out of one. And he could still sense their minds, so recently joined with his own to form the collective mind and power of the Hyena Men.

They had succeeded in setting the bind, though the actions of the spirit hyena seemed foggy and clouded in his mind. Like a dream, or an episode of drunkenness, or even a memory of a story or a song. Still, he remembered touching the woman's mind, and the man's, and . . .

He felt as if a cold finger drew slowly down his neck. There had been another power there, another . . . thing with the Englishmen.

Not a man—or at least Kitwana dreaded calling the creature such. Oh, it was human, or at least it once had been, but it was also something else—a mass of fractured scars and cold, shifting power, deep like a bottomless ocean and just as mutable and unpredictable. Something that seemed to meld human and alien in shifting amounts.

Just thinking about it sent the chill creeping down Kitwana's back.

Around him, the other Hyena Men stirred, looking bewildered, like children awakened from a dream. Kitwana wondered if the others had felt it also, that immense power near the man and woman whom the Hyena Men had marked. Strange as it was, it had not been physically linked to them, so it had escaped the power seal. And perhaps that was a good thing.

Kitwana was not sure that the Hyena Men together could have controlled it.