The Glass Falcon Read online

  “Do you have work to attend, Miss Baker, or might I steal a few moments of your time? I’m so new here, I could do with some guidance.”

  Miss Baker looked surprised at the idea—Eleanor wouldn’t have been surprised if the woman was thinking Eleanor meant to ask her about the social structure of an organization such as Mistral, of how a lady navigated the halls and day-to-day doings with the outspoken men Mistral was known to hire. Pure nonsense, Eleanor thought, and smiled at Miss Baker’s nod.

  “I have time.”

  Eleanor closed the archive door softly behind them, already considering.

  * * *

  The dining hall was warm and packed with more agents than Eleanor had yet seen in one place; she didn’t have trouble picking Virgil and his partner, Michael Auberon, out of the crowd, however, for they, among all the agents in the hall, had commandeered the largest meal present. Eleanor silently thanked Mallory at the mere sight of the food, given how hungry she found herself after a transformation. He was the same way, saying the body needed to properly restore itself and if one could not sleep, one could always eat.

  “Agents,” Eleanor said as she approached their table. They had left a seat for her, which Mallory pulled from the table. Eleanor did not miss the way he leaned in, as if intending to kiss her cheek. He clearly thought better of such behavior in such a public venue and pulled back at the last moment, clearing his throat.

  “Miss Folley,” he said.

  “Miss Folley!” Auberon said with a poorly concealed laugh at Mallory’s near miss of a kiss. “Perhaps you can bring some civilization to our table.”

  Eleanor thought things looked civilized as it was, Auberon decked in a cranberry and gold waistcoat, his tie pinned into place with a tiny pearl. Eleanor glanced at the food lain out upon the table and her stomach growled, loud enough for surely both of them to hear. She sat and folded her hands in her lap, forcing herself to not devour everything immediately.

  “Oh, I doubt that, given we have…oh, is that meat pie for me, Mallory?” The pie was perfectly sized, small and crisply crusted and positively not worth sharing with anyone, she was certain.

  “Indeed,” Mallory said as he slid the pie closer, “Mrs. Gonne has outdone herself, leading me to question if she saw us practicing in the garden—I trust the pie does not contain squirrel or rabbit.”

  Eleanor grinned. “I would not be adverse to rabbit, Mallory.” She eyed Auberon, Mallory’s partner of a good many years, who looked well content with his own pie. “Is that eel pie?”

  “As if it could be anything other,” Auberon said. “Tea, Miss Folley?”

  Eleanor nudged an empty cup closer and felt wholly normal as Auberon poured the fragrant, steaming tea. It were as though this place was something she had worked toward her entire life when in truth she had never once imagined herself within these ranks. Her mother had never spoken kindly about Mistral, nor had any in her archaeological circles, giving rise to a long-established suspicion within Eleanor. But Mistral, as with any group, had its good and its bad; Eleanor hoped her work now would be a start toward setting what bad they had done right.

  “I hope you gentlemen have has as productive a morning as I,” she said, breaking through the perfectly flaky pie crust with her fork. Within, she found perfectly cooked beef and heaps of onions, carrots, and potato, fragrant with dark beer, held together by melted cheddar. She hoped she wasn’t salivating, but shoved a bite into her mouth regardless.

  Mallory watched her with open amusement. “The bad news is—”

  “Who leads with bad news?” Eleanor interrupted, speaking around the bite of pie she lodged in her cheek.

  “I lead with bad news, Folley,” he said, “because it’s the best place to begin. The bad news is, no one we have spoken with on the premises has seen anything like that seal.”

  Eleanor looked from Mallory, to Auberon, who confirmed with a nod.

  “They’re baffled by it,” Auberon said. “I’m not entirely certain I would attach it to any Horus cult at this point, given such activity was centered in Nekhen, whereas we know the glass trade would have been more costal oriented. Doctor Fionnlagh’s notes cannot even confirm where the seal was discovered; he only connects it to Nekhen because of the falcon, however that…” Auberon shook his head. “It’s unlike any other rendering we have ever encountered. It’s more…” He paused, considering.

  “Casual,” Mallory offered.

  “That’s the word,” Auberon said. “It’s not a hieroglyph in the least, more like a sketch the artist made in hot glass, which is surely not possible. Glass was often ground and carved as stone would have been, but this rendering is also not that—it’s just too…tidy, given what we know of the technology of the time.”

  “Can we confirm how the glass itself was made?” Eleanor asked, intrigued more than she had been even the day before. “Slag from a copper foundry, perhaps?”

  Auberon nodded. “That is most likely, especially given its blue color. It might also be a byproduct of making faience, but its production was probably quite distant from Nekhen.”

  Mallory stabbed a fresh sausage from the plate in the center of the table. “It isn’t outside the realm that something so valuable might have been carried to Nekehn. A gift from lower Egypt to upper? Given what we know…perhaps a gift for Horus himself?”

  Given what they knew about Anubis, Eleanor thought, and gave a little start at the idea of a living, breathing Horus in the world. “Mallory, that’s…entirely possible. There are those who believe Horus is a kind of Christ figure, you know? What better gift of the age than something as remarkable as blue glass?” She leaned forward, warming to the idea. “Maybe it’s not a seal at all—but only resembles such, so the good doctor presumed and carried on from there.”

  Mallory grunted, but nodded as he bit the sausage link in half.

  “It may well not be a seal,” Auberon murmured. “If such seals had been made in quantity, surely more than one such would have survived, given how accomplished Egyptians were at preservation. It certainly doesn’t appear to have been poured into a mold. And the reverse of the artifact…”

  Auberon pushed his notebook across to Eleanor; he had sketched the seal from all angles and she studied the bottommost, where the seal looked to have been held in a hand.

  “When I saw the piece, those ridges looked like impressions,” Eleanor said, “of fingers. As if held when the glass was warm?”

  “When examined closely enough, you can see the mark of skin left behind,” Auberon said with a nod. “But I cannot explain them; no one would have been holding hot glass.”

  No human hand, Eleanor thought. It was thrilling and alarming both. Her mind turned to the archive, and how many more such mysteries might await them within its jumbled boxes and shelves, but tried to focus herself on the here and now, and the oddity that was the glass artifact.

  “Can we estimate how old it is, by the condition of the glass?” Eleanor asked, but wasn’t surprised when Mallory and Auberon shook their heads.

  “It’s filled with air bubbles,” Mallory said, skewering a third sausage, “which does push the glass further into the past, given how techniques evolved, but beyond saying ‘probable Bronze Age artifact’…”

  “Early Bronze Age?” Eleanor pressed. “If we’re presuming it originates from a copper foundry?”

  “I would say early is a better guess than late,” Auberon said. “But at this point, we possess many guesses and few facts. My least favorite portion of any investigation.”

  It was early yet, Eleanor told herself, then looked at Mallory, who had scooped another helping of potatoes onto his plate. “So if you began with bad news, is there also good news to accompany it?”

  Mallory looked at Eleanor as if he hadn’t the faintest idea what she meant, then his face slowly transformed, from baffled to knowing. His mouth curved up in a clever smile and he nodded.

  “Oh, indeed. I’d certainly not lead with bad news if there was no good
follow up.”

  When he said nothing else, Eleanor glanced at Auberon who gave no indication he knew what the good news was. His face was as impassive as the Sphinx. She leaned toward Mallory. “And?”

  “You received the list of assistant candidates I sent down with Miss Baker?” he asked.

  “I did.” Eleanor nodded, but thinking back to the list couldn’t remember seeing any one name that had stood out as especially suspicious when it came to their attempt to ferret out agents possibly in cahoots with Howard Irving. “Have you discovered someone yet linked to Irving?”

  “No.” Mallory shoveled potatoes into his mouth and chewed slowly. His eyes twinkled, his expression mischievous.

  Eleanor’s eyes narrowed. “You are positively the worst thing,” she murmured. “Tell me!”

  But Mallory, who had seemed in a great hurry to deliver the bad news, appeared less eager to give the good. He took his time in chewing and swallowing, leaving Eleanor to wait, her curiosity gaining weight and momentum the longer he said nothing.

  “Mallory—”

  From the far side of his plate, he picked up a slim paper package, the edges of which appeared dotted with grease. It had been tied with twine, to keep the paper folded over, the contents fresh. It remained warm when he placed it in Eleanor’s hands, and smelled like apples and cranberries.

  “Virgil.” Pocket pies were one of the first things to run out in the Mistral kitchens and Eleanor had made it somewhat of an unintentional habit of missing them. Given their work this morning, she knew she would yet be hungry after this meal.

  “If I can’t secure the best things from the cook for my lady, what kind of beau would that make me?”

  Eleanor leaned closer, to press a kiss against his cheek, despite the unchanged quantity of agents in the room. “Positively the worst thing.”

  * * *

  The shriek of talons on glass woke Eleanor.

  She sat upright in her bed. Had she dreamed it—for in the stretching dark that filled her rooms, all was quiet. And then the sound came again: a rattle and shriek that set her nerves on edge. She shuddered, refusing to move from the bed. It wasn’t just that the bed was warm, it was the idea of confronting whatever was making the noise in only her nightclothes.

  But when the window leading to the balcony rattled, and she found herself staring at a man-shaped shadow, anger propelled her out of the bed’s warmth, barefoot and snarling. The jackal pressed close inside, territorial and fierce as she crossed to the window. The shadow, perhaps seeing movement, retreated, and when Eleanor pushed the window open, it was only the November night that greeted her. She climbed over the sill, anger erasing all fear.

  There, slithering down the side of the building without aid of fire escape, balcony, or drainpipe, moved the shadow.

  “You there!” she called.

  The figure looked up in surprise—

  Its right eye held sun, the moon cradled within its left.

  The shadow detached itself from the building, free-falling. From the figure’s outstretched arms there spread wings—wide and glorious, and under the moon’s cool light, the colors of green, gold, and the Nile’s own black flared. The figure looked at her, its face as hawkish and familiar as its eyes were alien, and Eleanor gaped. It could not be and yet it was. The figure turned its belly toward the ground, beat its wings once, and soared upward, against the night sky before moving up and over the townhouse wall, for the roof.

  Eleanor moved not nearly so swift; the balcony was narrow, and so too the fire escape, but it allowed her to climb to the roof, bare feet pressing into each cold ladder rung. She was well-acquainted with the upward route and moved easily to the cold roof tiles. On the roof’s far edge, the figure crouched much as a gargoyle might, wings spreading in great abundance down its back and over the roof tiles. Why did it wait?

  “Horus?”

  The head turned, sharply beaked in profile against the Paris rooftops. Eleanor stopped in her tracks, finding it difficult to believe what she was seeing. Perhaps she should have been numb to the idea that Egyptian gods were actual living and breathing beasts, but no. The marvel of it had not left her. As a child, she had pictured them this way, moving through the world as anyone did, but to have it be a genuine truth was something she was coming to terms with.

  She crossed to his side and Horus did not move, his sun-eye tracking her the entire way. Eleanor held her breath, thinking he might startle as any other bird, but he was unbothered by her approach. When she at last stood at his side, only then did she take a breath. She stood beside Horus—he was larger than she had ever imagined, framed by his abundant wings; sharp talons curled over the roof’s edge, hard and gleaming in the moonlight.

  Much as with Anubis, his body, from the shoulders down, was that of a man. Where Anubis was black skin, Horus shone with countless feathers, and smelled not of death, but of the crisp night air, of clouds about to shed rain. And what did one say to a god? Eleanor wasn’t sure she knew, no matter that she had spoken with Anubis.

  You cannot speak to him as you do me, Daughter.

  Eleanor startled at the sound of Anubis’s voice in her mind. She looked and found him emerging from the deep shadows thrown by a tall stone chimney. It was as if the shadows themselves pulled apart to fashion his shape as he approached and joined them.

  You are of the ground and he the sky, and they speak only in a horizontal line.

  Eleanor had no good idea what that meant, but didn’t question. “Why have you come?” Eleanor asked Horus, as if Anubis were not even there. She stayed focused on the remarkable being before her, transfixed when Horus lifted a hand. Had Anubis translated her question? She did not know.

  Horus held his hand out to Eleanor. She stepped closer, to see something within his grip. She hoped it would be the broken half of the seal, but when he released it to her, she saw it was not glass, but bone. It looked like a broken vertebrae and Eleanor shuddered, the bone warm from Horus’s own hold.

  She expected Anubis to explain, for Horus to chatter at her in whatever manner of speech he did possess, but there was only silence as she stared at the bone. It was pale where it had been broken, and darker across its normal edge. Eleanor lifted her eyes to the pair of gods, waiting. Waiting. They looked at her in return, as if all should have been made clear by the bone in her hand. It was, however, not.

  “Gentlemen,” she said.

  With that one word, Anubis fell back into shadow, and Horus pushed himself from the edge of the roof, reeling into the sky with a shriek. Eleanor closed her eyes in the uprush of air from his wings, feeling the tip of one graze her cheek before he was completely gone. When all stood motionless, Eleanor stared at the empty roof tiles, one small feather resting there to give testament as to the certainty of the moment.

  She stared at the bone she held and exhaled. “Supremely helpful, that.”

  * * *

  What did one say, Eleanor considered as she left her rooms the following morning. She carried with her the suspected vertebrae, neatly wrapped in a linen handkerchief.

  “Horus brought me a bone in the night,” she murmured and felt her cheeks warm at the very idea of saying such a thing to Mallory and Auberon. She hoped the thing would evaporate overnight, proving she’d only experienced a strange dream, but alas. It was not to be that easy.

  Why on earth would a bird bring her a bone? Weren’t dogs more likely to engage in such behavior? What was she supposed to do with a broken—

  She stopped at the lift that would take her down to the archive and considered the wrapped bone in the pocket of her skirt. She folded her hand around the lump and found it to be quite comparable in size to the glass seal. Was that relevant? Her heart hammered in her chest and she reached out for Anubis.

  Anubis?

  Silence greeted her and she grumbled in disappointment, if not surprise. Had they wanted to tell her outright, surely they would have told her last night. Where were the grand speeches, the simple instructions, the
things that would not involve blood or travel into the distant past, or encounters with more strange creatures.

  Yet—as she waited for the lift, she pondered Bastet, and Thoth, Nut, and Set, and she wanted to meet them all. Ridiculously wanted to invite them in for tea and cakes and talk to them about Egypt, beautiful Egypt with her desert wastes and flooding Nile. She wanted to ask them what it had been like—wanted to be guided into that very world they had been birthed from, so that she might see the temples when fresh, might watch the pyramids grow. She ached to go, even though she had been and had not wanted to stay.

  For the time being, she stepped into the lift, and pressed the button for the lowest level. As with all things Mistral-controlled, the lift moved smoothly, without a hitch or a sound. Eleanor clearly heard her own sigh within its confines. This was a different ache than she had known when searching for her mother. It was not the ache to discover a thing she could not rest without knowing, but simply the desire to know about what she loved so dearly. What historian would not wish to travel to places they had only found fragments of? To see the kings she had only known as paintings or mummies.

  The memory of the pharaoh Hatshepsut jolted her from the daydream, for in person she had been fierce and regal, a strong force that anchored Eleanor’s family in time. She had never wanted to stay, but only to witness the life that was but history to most. Was it the coward’s way out, to glimpse and not experience? She did not care. She knew her work was here, in this time, ensuring that what was left of that prior world was not swept thoughtlessly away.

  The lower level of the building was cold and Eleanor shivered, despite the warmth of her velvet bodice. She stepped into the archive to find Mallory and Auberon already there, walking slow paths through the assorted debris.