"A tunnel?" Saqnos asked, with an authority that silenced the man. "Explain all this."
He wore the sheen of a recent resurrection: the brightness of the eyes, the lush pinkness to his lips. She had seen these qualities in herself after an awakening, and she recognized their source now. They did not age visibly, but long sleeps could be restorative nonetheless.
"It is perfect for us, Master. There was much debris in the tunnel. Apparently the present earl used it in his debauched youth to meet there with friends his father despised. All that has been removed by us."
Saqnos rose to his feet.
"Get to the point!" he said. "You weary me with all this. What is the actual plan here?"
The entire group took a step back. This, along with the manner in which the elderly, supercilious man leading this meeting had referred to him as Master, was proof that Saqnos was the creator of these beings.
A mistake, she realized now, with equal parts dread and fear. A mistake to give this island of Britain to Saqnos, to allow him to create legions of his broken children, his fracti. How many generations had there been? How much trouble had they wrought?
Why had she not struck him down in Jericho when she had the chance? Or in Babylon, when her spies had found his secret alchemical workshop? Why had she chosen to rule him by one decree and the fear of the strangle lily? There was only one answer, and she had wrestled with it for centuries. To destroy him would be to destroy her most powerful connection to Shaktanu.
There was a coldness to these people, these fracti slaves of Saqnos. A coldness and a qui
et, restrained delight in the mechanics of this business they now discussed. Were these qualities intrinsic to his fracti, a product of the corrupted elixir?
So many questions. Too many to answer in this moment.
She must bear witness now, and nothing more.
And what she witnessed was that despite the vitality provided to him by his recent resurrection, Saqnos was vacant eyed. Exhausted. Broken. When he rested his hands against the edge of the table and gazed down at the schematics his child had been using to give this little presentation, nothing but weariness radiated from him. He was far from being the energized madman she had spied on in his various secret laboratories over the years.
Yet these slaves of his were frightened of him.
"And so, Burnham, you plan to lure her to this temple and abduct her through its very floor?" Saqnos asked. "Is that it? And this during some gala affair in which guests roam the grounds? How do you propose to achieve this?"
"Master," said the one called Burnham. "As I mentioned there is a statue in the temple, before the trapdoor. It is a statue of Julius Caesar which functions as a lever. Several of us will ask Julie Stratford to give us a tour of the grounds. We shall be most insistent. Once we've surrounded her in the temple, we'll open the floor and send her through. Others will not see this."
"And then what?" Saqnos asked, brow furrowed, staring down at the schematics as if they had offended him.
"More of us will wait in the tunnel below, where we will at once confine her in a coffin. We shall seal her inside of it with our collective strength, and transport her to the distant opening near the pond. Close to there lies an access road. We'll have taken her from the party before anyone notices."
Saqnos smiled. "Very well," he said. "Not such a bad plan. And a coffin, a coffin will terrify her, this newborn immortal."
"Yes, Master. And with all light shut out, she will begin to weaken."
Saqnos looked away, as if he could not make himself attend to these plans. "It will take time for darkness to weaken her," he said.
"Yes, but she will be afraid. And she will know that she has been deprived of all light. And she will know that if she does not cooperate with us in future, she can be buried alive easily."
Saqnos smiled wearily. "Yes. And you will be sure to tell her beloved Ramses the Damned that she is in a coffin."
"That is our plan, Master," said Burnham. "We will most certainly tell him that she has been sealed within a coffin. But we will not be keeping her in this coffin all that long. Only until we reach our final destination."
Burnham smiled with delight as if inviting his master to smile with him.
"It is the Cage that we have in mind for her," he said, and he could not stop himself from laughing. "Come, we will show you, Master."
20
It was too much of a risk to follow at the heels of this group, so Bektaten commanded the cat up the grand staircase and out the window through which she'd come.
From the ledge, Bastet watched the group round the side of the massive house and begin their short trek towards the lone three-story building in the distance, the one they called the Cage. Once they were a safe distance away, Bastet descended the ash tree and began to follow them from the shadows.
They walked in silence, this man Burnham and Saqnos in the lead. Their shoes crunched the grass underfoot. The swells in the surrounding landscape were too modest to be called hills.