Page 216 of Tomb of the Sun King

Zeinab met Ellie’s gaze, her green eyes glittering with quiet approval.

The dog flopped down by their feet.

Something glowed warmly inside Ellie’s chest, and she let herself settle against Adam’s side.

The sky blushed with the warm rainbow of an Egyptian dusk as the call for the sunset prayer echoed musically through the close-packed rooftops. The jasmine vines twining through the meshrabiyeh screens had opened, their scent mingling with a muddy hint of the great river on the evening breeze.

“Well, then,” Ellie began. “Now we are all here, I suppose it is time to tie up our loose ends.”

Constance stuffed another date into her mouth. “It seems Aai has covered for us with my parents—though I am frankly terrified to think of how many favors she will add to her tally for that.”

“What about the Staff of Moses?” Adam prompted.

“Julian will keep trying to retrieve it,” Constance pointed out.

Ellie looked to Zeinab, who had stuffed the two bronze pieces of the was-scepter into the voluminous pockets of her abaya back in Amarna.

Sayyid let out a puff of breath. “My father concealed the arcana he discovered within the collection of the Egyptian Museum,” he reminded them. “Though of course, when he did that, nobody but him realized they were anything other than ordinary artifacts.”

“I’m sure the museum has an extensive collection of was-scepters,” Ellie mused. “But if Julian or one of his minions got a good look at this one, it’s possible they could identify it from among the others.”

“Or it could be sold off,” Neil admitted.

“Which would be perfectly legal,” Sayyid added grimly.

“Not the museum, then,” Constance concluded. “What if we brought it back to the Ibn Rashid? From what I gather, they’re constantly moving about, and those men looked quite ferocious.”

Her mouth widened into a dreamy smile, and Ellie knew she was thinking of what else the men of the Ibn Rashid had looked like besidesferocious.

“They may be quite fierce, but heaven knows what influence Julian Forster-Mowbray’s masters might bring to bear on them,” Ellie warned.

“Quite a bit, I should imagine.” Constance reached for another date. “Considering that Lord Yardborough is one of them.”

“I beg your pardon?” Ellie said, straightening with surprise.

Constance’s eyes widened. “Oh, I never did mention that, did I? We were simply swept right into all the tomb raiding and daring escapes, and it completely slipped my mind. While I was on theIsis, I quite cleverly lured Julian into confessing who is actually behind all of this. Not that it was very hard to do—he has always been quick to brag about how well-connected he is. It’s some organization that is pulling all the strings—a club of sorts who call themselves the Order of Albion.”

“Aclub?” Ellie echoed, aghast.

“That matches up with what Dawson was yammering about back in Tulan,” Adam offered. “He kept telling me he worked for some super-secret important organization.”

“Julian rattled off a whole list of names,” Constance went on. “There was Yardborough—he’s Lord President of the Privy Council and quite the higher-up with the Tories. Someone by the name of Northcote, which I can only think must be one of the financial Northcotes. They’ve the Bank of Suffolk and half a dozen others. And he mentioned a Prendergast, who sounds like some sort of paper-pusher.”

The blood drained from Ellie’s face. “Henry Augustus Prendergast is the assistant to the director of the British Museum.”

“And of course, Lord Aldbury must be involved—Julian’s father. That’s the only way I could see any of that lot coming to rely on Julian to do their dirty work for them,” Constance deduced. “And then there is Lady Hastings. She’s related to half the ton and likely knows the dirty secrets of the rest of them.” She gave a little shudder. “You wouldn’t think a five foot tall woman in her seventies would be such a terror, but she’s nearly as bad as my Aai.”

“But what could they possibly want with the arcana?” Ellie demanded, her mind spinning.

“Back in British Honduras, Dawson made it sound like some grand battle of good versus evil,” Adam reminded her. “The good side being the oh-so-civilized British Empire and the bad side being—well, everybody else.”

Ellie was still reeling at the discovery that the mysterious forces she had been battling for the last several weeks had names and identities—faces that she had seen in the newspapers.

“So our enemies are… a social club?” she filled in awkwardly. “A social club of extremely influential people united by the notion that the world’s arcana should be secured for the use of the British Empire.”

“I hope you realize how dangerous that sounds,” Zeinab observed flatly, her frame taut with tension.

A chill crept up Ellie’s arms despite the warmth of the evening. “There would be no accountability,” she said carefully as she put it together. “It isn’t like a branch of the government, which might conceivably be called to turn out its pockets if there was a change of administration. They would be completely free to pursue the arcana however they liked, so long as they have enough influence to deter anyone from paying attention to any…inconvenient consequencesof their efforts.”

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