easy task, as he soon discovered. Following a goat track, he slowly climbed the barren slopes and was soon panting with the exertion. The heat bounced off the pale rock all around, scorching through his clothing. Sweat ran down his face and neck, the fat drops raising little dust puffs with every step. Mina had given him a skin of water for the journey, but as the heat took hold he worried that it would not be enough, so he nursed it carefully, taking only tiny sips of the now-warm, slightly brackish liquid.
To take his mind off his hike, he thought about where he was going and what he might find when he got there. He wondered what year it was, and why he had remained in Egypt when always before when using a ley, the traveller ended up in a startlingly different location. It probably had something to do with the length of distance travelled along the ley, he decided—for lack of any better explanation. Maybe that was why Mina had been so adamant about making the leap between the fifth and eighth sphinxes. If he had missed that mark, where would he have ended up? More to the point, without a map, how would he have found his way back?
That was the question. Finally, if somewhat belatedly, he was beginning to gain a more fundamental appreciation of Arthur Flinders-Petrie’s singular courage and the awful importance of his Skin Map. “Don’t leave home without it,” Kit mused aloud to himself.
Other questions bubbled to the surface: What era had he landed in now? There was no way to judge from his bleak surroundings—the desert had not changed in a few thousand years, so far as he could tell. What epoch was it? Here was another poser: How had Wilhelmina found her way to rescue him and Giles from pretty near certain death at the hands of Burleigh and his goons? She did not seem to have a map—even a paper one—or any other sort of guide. How had she accomplished this feat? More to the point, how had she become such an expert on ley travel? The last time Kit had seen his former girlfriend, she had been bawling in a London alley as a freak storm drenched her head to heel. They had been separated then: he went one place, and she ended up . . . who knew where? And Kit still didn’t know, because she had not had time to tell him.
These and other questions occupied him to such an extent that he was surprised when he looked up and saw, shimmering like a mirage in the near distance, the Nile: a gently undulating line of silver nestled between two verdant strips and cradled by bone-coloured hills and desert highlands on either side. The sight was so arresting that he paused to treat himself to a long drink of water before starting the climb down. In the shade of a rock overhang, he sat and closed his sun-dazzled eyes.
Instantly the image of the corpses in High Priest Anen’s tomb came winging back to him: the bodies of his poor dead great-grandfather and Sir Henry Fayth, laid top to tail in the lidless sarcophagus. Shocked by their deaths, and mindful of his own close call, he still felt a little stunned. In their haste to make a clean escape, he had not yet had time to mourn them properly. Instead, what he felt was not grief exactly, but was closer to a churning animosity towards Burleigh at the wicked waste of those good men’s lives. So far as Kit was concerned, the earl and his men were vile low-life scum, evil through and through. In his burgeoning fantasies of revenge, Kit concocted inventive and agonising punishments for them all.
This was the first sign of the new attitude rapidly crystallising in Kit’s character: call it stalwart determination. Perhaps, at last, one could detect the vestiges of a sturdier, more robust backbone. Although it took little more than the form of a swiftly hardening resolve to discover the secret of the Skin Map, still, it was a beginning. Taking up the quest in dead earnest, he decided, would be the best tribute he could offer Cosimo and Sir Henry. They deserved that much, at least.
Whatever else could be said, they did not deserve to die like that: stricken down by the contagion of the tomb, some airborne plague germ or something—wasn’t that what killed Howard Carter and those other archaeologists