Bektaten walked to the open window and stared out at the sea. "You know this man?"
"I believe so," he answered. "I believe he is a doctor named Theodore Dreycliff."
"A doctor," she whispered. Surely she did not find the word unfamiliar, but she exercised care in whispering it, as if she found it exotic. "And how did you come to know him?"
When neither Ramses nor Julie answered, she turned and gave them a long, steady look. "I see," she finally said. "And so we have yet to establish trust."
"Is that not what we have come here to do?" Ramses said. "Establish trust?"
"Let us begin to do it, then," Bektaten said. "I killed this man. The blow you saw me give him, he did not survive it. It was not my intention to end his life. I believe it was not your intention either, for the blows you threw at him were cautious and reserved. Am I correct in this?"
"You are," he answered. "I wanted only to prevent him from harming the woman--"
"Sibyl Parker," Julie whispered.
"How do you know her name?" Ramses asked.
"She's an American, a novelist," Julie said. "She writes popular romances." Julie eyed Bektaten warily. "My father thought her very clever and clipped an article written about her in the Daily Herald. It's still in his study." Again, Julie looked uneasily at the queen.
Another long, uncomfortable silence passed, filled only by the pounding of the surf against the cliffs outside.
"This will not serve us," Bektaten finally said. "This suspicion, this concealment of our histories."
"I agree," said Ramses. "May you take the lead here just as you have
taken the lead in so much of what has occurred today."
"Ramses, please," Julie whispered, caution in her tone.
"You fear me, Julie Stratford," Bektaten said.
"I fear your poison," Julie answered quietly.
"This was not my intention, to fill you with this fear," she answered. "The plot that I disrupted today, Julie Stratford, was to have seen you placed in a pit with trained fighting dogs who had been given a version of the elixir. They were to be starved, these dogs, so that they would set upon you again and again with ravenous hunger and terrible strength."
Ramses felt his heart beating silently in his head. Who would do this to his beloved Julie? He felt a tremor pass through his body, a mounting rage.
"To what end?" Julie asked innocently. "What have I done to make enemies such as these?"
"It was to force your beloved king to reveal the formula for the pure elixir, the one that has made us all what we are, and what we forever shall be."
"Of whose design was this plot?" Ramses could keep silent no more. "Who are these possessors of a corrupted elixir?"
"Come," Bektaten said quietly. "To the tower. To my library. Allow me to once again take the lead, as you so put it."
28
She was being chased and giving chase.
The labyrinth through which she ran was occasionally pierced by great shafts of sunlight that came from odd angles. She pursued the raven-haired woman from her dreams; she chased the woman as she rounded corners and slipped down alleyways.
Then she became the raven-haired woman.
She was no longer Sibyl.
She was being chased by Sibyl.
It repeated again and again, this pattern, with sinuous regularity, a continuous dance of pursuing and being pursued. And all of it was far more vivid than a dream, and much more substantial than the fleeting visions that had plagued her since she'd started her journey.