Many Words

He spun the volume knob down until Rule Britannia could barely be heard and waved for quiet from the others. In the near-silence, he could just make out beeps, standing out better against the lessened background noise. They stopped for a second, then started again. Cannon wrote down four letters: ECKS.

“Who’s Ecks?” said Burr.

“Not a name,” said Cannon, “the letter X. Something’s gone wrong.”

“Something else,” Burr corrected.

Cannon gave her a half-hearted glare. “Right. The Brits had Alexandria locked up tight on the way in. We’re better off keeping a low profile here and trying the radio again later.

The two men who had taken the camels burst through the door. Behind them, the camels waited outside. On the best of days, Cannon could barely follow spoken Latin. Masaracchia and his men spoke it so quickly that he had no chance at all.

After asking a few questions and receiving terse replies, Masaracchia turned to Cannon. “It isn’t safe here any longer. British soldiers are searching the town for your plane.”

“Something else,” Burr said.

Ignoring her, Cannon said, “Sounds like we’re better off getting out of Dodge now instead of later. Can we borrow your camels again?”

“We can do better than that.” Masaracchia headed for the door. “Follow me.”

Outside, in the gathering darkness, they kept watch for British patrols. Masaracchia led them down the street and around a corner. A heavy wooden door blocked access to a large house’s courtyard. One of Masaracchia’s men produced a key and turned it in the lock securing the iron bar across the gate. The other lifted the bar up, and together, they swung the door open. Masaracchia and his men rolled up the tarpaulin off of the shape within.

Iseabail burst into laughter, clutching at her sides and nearly tearing up.

“Did I miss the joke?” said Cannon.

Iseabail caught her breath and looked from Cannon to Burr and di Giacomo, who wore expressions of equal befuddlement. “Ye dinna recognize it? Na’ even you, cap’n?”

Cannon’s camel spat, and Cannon gave it a dirty look he was sure it was returning. Masaracchia’s men took the camels further into town, and Cannon and his crew followed Masaracchia into the house. Crates filled the interior, mixed in between neat piles of things the monks had seen fit to cover with sheets. Narrowly, Cannon decided against wondering aloud what monks had to hide, and sat in front of the radio set to which Masaracchia pointed him. Cannon pulled a piece of paper from his pocket, spun the tuning knob until the frequency dial matched the numbers he’d written down, and tapped out a sequence of letters with the Morse key.

“Rule, Britannia! Britannia rule the waves!” blared the headphones attached to Inconstant‘s main shortwave set.

“What do you make of it, Willie?” said Joe.

The radioman turned the volume back down. “It means they know we’re out here somewhere,” he said. “I remember the RAF started this sort of thing toward the end of the war. Play a signal loud enough, and the other guy can’t send or receive from near as far away as he’d like.”

“Does that mean they know the boss is on the ground?”

“Maybe,” Willie said. “I don’t think they think they’ll keep us from talking to our scouts, anyway. They probably think we want to talk to someone further away.”

“Which we do. Send the abort signal, and keep sending it. Better the boss knows something’s not right.”

“Aye aye.”

“Thanks, Mr. Wiggins.” Joe took the two steps from the radio room door back to the plotting table. The clock read six in the evening. Another hour, and he would turn south.

The radio set’s speaker produced a tenor’s voice, piercing the static on the airwaves: “When Britain fi-i-i-rst at heav’n’s command!”

“Four times,” Iseabail said.

Cannon looked skyward. “If it wasn’t for the accent, I’d swear you were Emma. Wait—did you hear that?”

“So, your guess is what, that a bunch of ancient corpses got up and came after us?” Cannon said.

“If the burial wrapping fits.”

“I’ll stick to the explanation that doesn’t take magic,” said Cannon. “Come on. Let’s back to the village, so we can call Inconstant before anything else goes wrong. I already had to leave my bag of loot behind. At this rate we won’t get paid at all.”

He headed for the sunlight spilling through the open door to the temple courtyard. While the others followed him, Iseabail hung back for a moment, studying the hieroglyphs on the wall. Something about them drew the eye—she tore herself away and hurried to catch up with Burr, who walked a few steps behind the men. Cannon and di Giacomo were talking logistics and navigation, working out when they’d get back to El Balyana and when to call for pickup.

Watching Cannon, Iseabail spoke quietly out of the corner of her mouth. “Ye werena thinkin’ mummies?”

Burr blinked. “Yes.”

Satisfied, Iseabail nodded. “Aye.”

The sky reddened as the sun inched toward the horizon. Five camels in a line approached a small house on the outskirts of El-Balyana. Two men on the roof hauled a radio antenna upright by means of cables attached to its tip, then tied their ends off to loops at the corners of the roof.

As the camels drew closer, Masaracchia hopped down from the one in the lead. In Latin—ecclesiastical, going by the occasional ‘ch’—he had a short conversation with the men on the roof. As Cannon and his crew dismounted, Masaracchia’s men came down the stairs on the house’s outside wall and took the reins.

Burr stepped up beside him. A figure clad in sand-colored garments appeared in the gloom at the last corner. Burr and Cannon opened fire. Two more figures followed it, then another five.

Cannon looked over his shoulder and saw the door start to swing closed. He shoved Burr toward it, and she scrambled through as the door picked up speed.

“Cap’n!” Iseabail shouted.

Cannon judged the distance. He wouldn’t make it on the run. He took two steps, then launched himself into a dive, shooting through the opening and landing hard on the far side. A heartbeat later, the door slammed shut behind him with a final, reverberating thud.

Cannon rolled onto his back and sat up. di Giacomo offered him a hand up, and he took it. He reholstered his Mauser and put a hand against the wall. The door was nearly invisible again, but he could just feel someone pounding on the other side.

“Poor devils,” Cannon said.

Masaracchia barked out a laugh, but quickly swallowed it. Iseabail looked up at him inquiringly.

“You’ll have to run that by me again,” said Burr, “because I don’t have a lot of sympathy for—well, you know—who were trying to kill us.”

“The cultists?” Cannon said. “I wouldn’t have a drink with one, but I didn’t see any other ways out, and sealing them all into an ancient tomb seems a little crueler than just shooting them.”

“Cultists—oh, for crying out loud.” Burr pointed at the front of the temple and the desert beyond. “Unless they took their camels in with them, I don’t see how they got here, and they’d have had to be sneakier than anyone I’ve ever seen—or haven’t seen—to have given us the slip until they decided to attack.”

Spreading out, they searched the wall. After a moment, Burr said, “Here.”

Cannon followed the sound of her voice, running his hand along the wall until he came to open space.

Blindly questing hands found his back. Behind him, Iseabail said, “Who’s tha’?”

“Me.”

“Glad you’re nae dead, cap’n.”

“Me too. Where are the rest of you?”

Burr said, “Someone just bumped in to me.”

“Si, that was me,” said di Giacomo. “My cousin is with me.”

“All right,” Cannon said. “Through the door.” He stepped over the threshold and said, “Burr, strike a match.”

Light flared, burning an after-image into Cannon’s eyes. He slipped a torch from its loop on his pack and held it over the match. The torch caught, fire slowly spreading over its head. Burr smiled at it. “Nice to see you again, skipper.”

From the cavern they’d just left came a deafening shriek, followed by the rising rumble of thousands of footfalls drawing nearer. Cannon ran off down the hall, working under the theory that he had already blundered into all of the traps. At each cave-in, he jumped up atop the rubble to hold the torch up while the others climbed over. As he tailed them around the corner, movement at the door from the cavern caught his eye.

Ignoring it, he looked forward to see the two flickering candles marking the tripwire. He stepped gingerly over it as the others waited for him, then picked up speed again. The five of them skidded around the final corner. Twenty yards ahead, light spilled through the door to the temple’s main gallery. A noise like a swarm of bees echoed past them.

“Yon trap!” Iseabail said.

Only a few yards from the door, Cannon stopped and raised his pistol. “Keep going!”