Alexander C. Irvine by A Scattering of Jades Read Free Book Online Page B

them over quickly. Three young Negroes, eighteen, twenty, and thirty-one years of age; healthy, capable guidess, worth perhaps a thousand dollars apiece. Stephen’s reputation alone, to say nothing of his skills, was worth more than all three together.
    “As soon as you find him,” Croghan said as they reached the entrance, heavily shadowed in the thick purple predawn darkness, “send Nick out to tell me.” Nick was the least experienced caver of the three, but he was also the fastest. “Do you have rope? Bandages and splints?” They nodded, their faces harshly lit by the glaring lamps.
    “Won’t need them,” called a voice from just under the looming overhang.
    Mat, Nick, and Alfred dropped their packs simultaneously and ran into the cave. Croghan started to follow, then remembered his position. A man of his stature couldn’t be running around like a schoolboy simply because a slave had gotten himself lost, but still, he barely checked himself. Stephen represented a lot of money and no little prestige.
    An excited jumble of voices rolled from the cave, so riddled with echoes that they might have been speaking any language in the world. Dignity be damned, what was going on? He took a step under the overhang and nearly collided with Nick. “Mr. Croghan—”
    Croghan cut him off. “Stephen is there? He’s uninjured?”
    “He look like somethin’ the cat drug in, but he okay,” Nick panted. He was lighter than Croghan’s other slaves—even Stephen, whose father had been white—and a flush was visible under his caramel skin. The phenomenon piqued Croghan’s medical interests, but he shoved the thought away.
    “What’s all the jabbering about, then? Bring him out.”
    “He’ll come in a minute,” Nick said. “He found a mummy, just makin’ sure Mat and Fred don’t bust it up none.” Before Croghan could frame a reply, the rangy youth turned and loped back into the cave.
     
     
    Stephen sat on a rock just off the path and watched Alfred and Mat carry the carefully wrapped mummy to the hotel. They disappeared around the corner of the building, and Stephen slid gingerly to the ground, trying to ignore the throbbing in his right ankle and the high, persistent whine of fatigue keening at the base of his skull. Every muscle in his body twitched and trembled, and his hand shook as he drank from his flask.
    He tried to remember how he’d gotten the mummy up out of the cave, but his memory of the trip back was gone, lost somewhere in the exhausted maze last night’s excursion had become in his mind. Stephen heard Dr. Croghan’s apologetic voice explaining to Professor Tattersfield that all tours would be postponed a day, the professor graciously accepting the delay. He rubbed his hands across his face and walked himself step by step through the previous night. The lead away from River Hall, the winding crawl, the gold coin and the rush of exhilaration at having conquered Bottomless Pit, the triangular opening that looked too regular, too made. Reaching the lamp in and hearing the cacophony of the ghosts, feeling certain that it led somewhere, scrambling through the short tunnel into the domed chamber beyond …
    The room. Everything became confused in the room. Stephen placed his palms flat against his temples and massaged gently, trying to paint a coherent picture of the room in his mind. It wouldn’t come. Disconnected images thrashed in his head, fragments of odor and sight and sound, but he could make nothing of them.
    He remembered walls, squared off into terraces rising beyond the range of the lamp, the wall opposite him completely lost in the darkness. A stone block, its top face slanted with the high edge toward the invisible far wall. A dead man, a mummy, reclining on its slanted top, head sunk into its chest and hands cupped over its stomach, bare feet dangling over the block’s lower edge. Feathers, he remembered feathers. Long and green, they sprouted from the mummy’s shoulders and flowed