Many Words

“Why d’ye think?” Iseabail paused. “I dinna think it was tae tarry, so if ye could maybe ta’ it a wee bit faster—”

“One roar is worrying,” Masaracchia said, “but not dangerous in itself. If the captain thinks it valuable, the diary is here, and so are we.”

“It’s nae just him who thinks it’ll pay,” said Iseabail. “Hidden secrets an’ lost treasures—tha’ was van der Hoek’s currency.”

“I can’t find it,” Masaracchia said, slipping the diary out from under van der Hoek’s arm and into a side pocket on his pack. “We should go.”

“I’m nae disagreein’ in principle, but I cannae see a thing.”

Masaracchia stood and let the cross dangle from its chain. It swung gently, a little further in one direction than the other. “God is faithful,” he said. “Take my hand.”

“—and move out!” Cannon shouted. Once he was satisfied that there was no further guff forthcoming, he felt for his pack. “Well try the other torch,” he said. “Do you have another match?”

“Four more,” Burr said. A nervous edge colored her voice. “How far away are the others? A few hundred feet? How come you had to shout?”

Cannon pulled the other torch from its loop on his pack. The scent of oil descended around them. “That’s not the strangest thing we’ve seen today. Strike a match.”

It rasped, and for a moment, Cannon saw Burr’s face, drawn and lined with worry, before the guttering light flickered to nothing. “I told you, it isn’t the torch,” she said. “I can’t even get a match going.”

“Give me the matches, and I’ll try.”

“Skipper, I know how—”

The sound of grinding stone cut her off, and a rising cacophany of moans and wails echoed from wall to wall.

“Give me your gun!” Cannon shouted.

Burr knew an order when she heard one. She held the Thompson out in Cannon’s direction. He groped for it, then snatched it, rested it against the crook of his arm, pointed it upward, and squeezed the trigger.

Cannon would have been very keen to see Michaelangelo Masaracchia’s response when the lights went out. The ostensible monk jumped, but it was an artifact of surprise more than fear, and once he recovered, he looked heavenward. He’d known something like this was going to happen, and had said as much when the Brother-Captain had proposed this expedition.

“Surely, this Cannon must be different—a gentleman by all accounts, and a man with experience in these matters!” he had said. As much as Masaracchia had protested, he hadn’t expected it to be this bad. An ox, charging carelessly around an ancient locus of the Enemy’s power, who had just unleashed who knew what demonic forces upon himself and his allies—that was the captain.

And so Masaracchia would have to bail them out, to his very great lack of surprise, without a sword or a shield, or indeed any symbol of the faith beyond the golden cross clutched in the hand of a corpse he could no longer see. Typical. At least it was the symbol best relied upon when all else failed. This situation qualified.

A switch clicked a few times, and Isea laughed a nervous Scottish laugh. “I think this woul’ be the time the cap’n would ha’ wanted us tae head for the exit.”

“Can you see in the dark?” said di Giacomo.

“Nae, tha’s one I’ve na yet solved.”

“Capitano!” di Giacomo shouted.

“We’re all right!” came the answering shout. “We can’t get our torch going! Head for the stairs, and we’ll meet you there!”

“Canna get a torch to light,” Iseabail snorted. “It’s nae hard if ye try a match, cap’n!”

“Pipe down and get moving!”

Masaracchia ignored them, crouched, and felt for van der Hoek’s corpse. A little to the left—there it was. Shirt, Masaracchia thought. Thank God for small mercies. His fingers came across a row of buttons, and he went due right from there. He found a skeletal arm beneath a tattered shirt, and pushed his hand into the air beneath it. He encountered something heavy and metallic, swinging freely.

“Who’s tha’ with the chain? Mr. Masaracchia? If ye’d like tae be in the cap’n’s good graces, grab the diary, too.”

Masaracchia gave the cross a sharp tug, and it came free. Bones clattered against the stone floor. “Why?”

Cannon followed the flashlight’s beam with his eyes down to the bottom of the flight, which the stone block, hollowed out on this side, covered. He could make out a sarcophagus in an open space, before the narrowness of the stairwell blocked his line of sight.

“How big is it down there?” he wondered.

“I don’t see any walls,” Burr said.

“That doesn’t make it big.”

“It does mean it’s not small. Look, skipper, I’m all for a big score, but—” Burr pointed down the stairs “—either that’s one something they thought they needed to bury deeper than the rest of this, which they already put in a cave behind a bunch of traps, or it’s a whole lot of somethings like this.” She swung her arm around, holding onto the Thompson with the other. “Either way, I don’t think we should stick around. We got what we came here for, and I don’t want to end up like van der Hoek.”

Cannon looked away from the stairwell. Something lingered in the air here, something he hadn’t felt in Panama or, more recently, Pitu. The nearby sarcophagi drew his gaze, their black, malevolent eyes staring undyingly at the ceiling. Maybe Burr had a point—

Beside him, she froze, whispering. “I saw something move.”

Cannon dropped to a whisper himself. “Where?”

“Down there. It went past the stairs.”

Cannon only took a moment to weigh his decision. Burr was not given to hysteria, and he heard genuine fear in her voice.

“All right, I’m convinced. Let’s get out of here.”

At that very moment, three things happened: a chill gust blew out Cannon’s torch, Burr’s flashlight flickered once and died, and an inhuman howl split the darkness.

“Si, capitano. Are you sure we should split up?”

Somewhere far off in the chamber, a few pebbles fell. Cannon glanced over his shoulder at the noise. “We’re poking around. For that, I want more firepower and fewer people in the line of fire. Let’s go, Burr.”

They struck out toward the far end of thechamber. Cannon stopped every now and then to root through the small piles of antiquities scattered between the rows of coffins.

“This would be worth something to a museum, maybe,” he said, turning over a fragment of stone painted with hieroglyphs, “but I think we might have cleaned out the Louvre’s scoundrel fund last month.”

Burr, keeping watch nearby, shifted uneasily from foot to foot. “This place still gives me the creeps.”

Cannon wrapped a figurine in rags and put it in the sack. “It’s a graveyard inside a cave. It ought to give you the creeps.” He stood, looked left and right, and pointed. “Over there. If this place has any charms, I’m not coming around to them either. We’ll find a few more things to unload on collectors and get out of here before anything bad happens.”

“No argument here, skipper. Why over here?”

Their destination was a rectangular block of stone, about eight feet tall and wider at its base than its top. “Because big means rich, and rich means treasure,” Cannon said. “Anyone who could have a monument this big, hauled somewhere this remote, could have all sorts of nice things for the next life brought along, too.” He passed a row of sealed clay jars, the knelt next to the remains of a box.

Burr watched him for a moment, then took a few steps to circle the monument. As Cannon put a golden plate and a few coins into the sack, she said, “Captain.”

That got Cannon’s attention—any time one of his pirates called him by something besides a jaunty nickname, it meant trouble. In an instant, he was on his feet, pistol in hand. He joined Burr on the other side of the obelisk.

She pointed with her flashlight. “Not a monument, captain,” she said, sotto voce. “Stairs.”