Author's Note:
Sorry for the delay in update.
LadiSwan- Thank you so much for that vote of confidence! ;-) Well, we really are about to come to a close, sequel somewhat unlikely, sorry.
Deana - hehesorry about your shock when it comes to Ardeth, I seem only capable of dealing out angst, not mush, unfortunately!
And Aathiya Lia! Thank you for 'crossing over' from the realm of the Phantom and reading my Mummy stories! Glad you liked 'em - wowhaving received such comments from you, must be very high praise indeed! ;-)Research and background reading was quite a pain and to be completely honest, is *still*(ugh!) a pain, especially when trying to slip the characters in between. Andwho knows, I just might give in and write perhaps a short 3 or 4-parter to 'Air'! (Want to help me with it? ;-)) But first, I must really stop this bad habit of starting stories and then working on all of them simultaneously. To discipline myself, Sketch of Distrust must be finished first!
Corrupted-innocent: grin You're somewhat right. Severige is a charming snake indeed. And guess who rescues Ardeth? ;-p
Anyhow, an update once more (Ugh! It was so so difficult to write this chapter - there's a bit of fun in here without the usual thick prose, promise!), hopefully up to what must be high expectations of this story already. I like Jonathan very much actually - and have made him a complex character, rather than the usual jokester that he normally is.
We are almost done! Yaay! Promise, there'll be a timeline and a character sheet at the end so hopefully no more confusion.
Chapter 15: In Haste
Sei in dieser Nacht aus Übermaß
Zauberkraft am Kreuzweg deiner Sinne,
ihrer seltsamen Begegnung Sinn.
Be in this night of a thousand excesses,
magic power at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning of their rare encounter.
-Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus
She could not afford to lose sight of him, no, not now; a tingling sense of urgency had grown so exponentially that it now surely mirrored the pounding of her heart.
What games are you playing, Severige? What cards have you dealt yourself? How many rounds have you won, how many players destroyed? Evy wondered, peeking around a corner, seeing his hurriedly disappearing form that slid itself easily through a side door of the Museum of Antiquities.
A mere thirteen seconds thereafter, she followed, silently clicking the door closed. The museum was strangely quiet, a welcome pleasure from the lingering humidity. They had entered a darkened corner of the ancient Sumerian exhibits, the door cleverly and partially hidden by an abandoned, dusty drapery.
Made of shadow, he blended seamlessly into the smattering clumps of the chirpy tourists, lightly shouldering his way past pillars, keeping curiously close to the walls, fingering the heavy wainscoting absently. Sparing a quick cursory glance upwards, he moved down another door and down an old spiral stairwell.
An old storage room perhaps, in the disused basements of the museum?
She stood by the doorway, peering down the stairwell with great frustration, for what lay beyond her sight.
Voices...there were voices. Evy heard disembodied, angry voicesthey spoke in Arabic, flowing, guttural words of anger.
"...kept alive, you fool!"
"...for being weaker than I thought he was -"
She furrowed her brow, lost in a cornucopia of confusion. The ability to hear mere wafting snippets of conversation that took place below strained her nerves to snapping, yet enticed strongly and swayed over by the disturbing instinct that pieces of the puzzle have had yet to fall into place.
The abrupt slam of a heavy door made her shrink deeper into whatever shadows permitted by the doorway and the surrounding pillars.
Severige emerged from the stairwell, slightly ruffled, bent under the fresh weight of meting out cruelty, disappearing onward; she saw him now, from the top of the stairwell, hidden by the advantage given her higher position, listening carefully to his receding footsteps.
She trod down the exact path he took, peering downwards past the half-open doorway, taking a step in the direction of the stairs. Its mournful creak reminded her of the need for stealth.
"Water..."
The dismal whisper of the dying, the helpless, floated past her heightened auditory sense, a feeble plea on broken wings that never took flight.
A lone guard stood, disgruntled, outside the heavily barricaded door, her last hurdle to leap over into hell.
It was impossible to cross the threshold, she reflected, unless she downed the sentinel and incapacitated him in a miraculous feat, something, which looked near impossible if she judged by his sheer physical size and forbidding expression.
Then again, perhaps not. There was always the oldest trick in the book which, if performed convincingly.
A deep breath, and a momentary closing of her eyes to steel her courage, Evy descended the steps gingerly, bringing her hands to fan her neck as she feigned surprise.
"Oh, good afternoon!" she tittered and laughed gaily, greeting the suspicious guard cordially with widened eyes. "I think I must have taken a wrong turn while walking the numerous hallways of this museum! It is rather large don't you thinkI particularly enjoyed the Sumerian exhibit that led me down herewell, a girl always longs for some adventure and oh well, it looks like I'm not going to find it anywhere close!"
Theatrical, Evy, think theatrical, she instructed herself hotly, releasing a barrage of words now, not caring that they barely made sense.
"Ah, you look like someone who might know something," She trilled and winked conspiratorially, before placing the back of a hand to her forehead. "Oh good gracious, I feel that the temperature has positively soared ever since I stepped in this museum! Would you happen to know the fastest possible way to get to the foyer of this museum? You see, I don't quite have any more desire to look at the dizzyingly number of displays anymore!"
"Madam," He replied in halting English, seemingly pleased with her infectious mood and pointed in the same direction that Severige had disappeared in. "You are not very lost. Follow this path."
It was not as easy as she had anticipated; method-acting was not something that she particularly excelled in, given the excruciating circumstance she found herself in - there was no time to lose; she ignored her rising panic - Severige might return!
"Could you show me the way?" She entreated immediately, smiling, inwardly cringing at the renewed pump of adrenaline through her veins. "Oh, you don't have come all the way with me, until I walk into something familiar at least and can find my own footing once more?"
She noticed his hesitation, the hurried glances at the barricaded door and the almost imperceptible nod of acquiescence, after he reassured himself that a mere 5-minute accompaniment of a lost female tourist would not distract him from his main task.
"It is this way, Madam," He answered her stiffly, with narrowed eyes, before striding in front of her.
"Thank you so much sir; you have my gratitude indeed...oh, I'm from England, you know and I find Egypt completely fascinating! What better place than a museum to see history come alive!"
She filled the sullen silence with inane and clichéd talk, chattering mindlessly as an empty chattel would, hurrying to keep up with him...noticing sharply that they were indeed approaching the foyer of the Museum; they were soon going to walk past the ancient warfare and armoury exhibit which brought them into full view of everyoneit was now, or never.
A pitiful whimper escaped her lips as she sank toward the floor clutching her stomach, positioning herself strategically beside a heavy sarcophagus surrounded by its canopic jars; her beseeching wail had caused him to whirl around in surprise.
He stumbled, face foreword when he leant down to help her up, several canopic jars smashing through his skull in rapid succession.
She was dimly aware that she breathed heavily now.
There was no time to lose. That thoughtresounded through her mind stubbornly as a mantra would, and she grabbed the half-exposed, thick bunch of keys from his trouser-pocket, retracing their steps to the obscure door where contact was first made with the dying.
"Water..."
There it was again, the ragged, fledgling whisper unto salvation that sounded like a death-knell to the selected few who heard, the perplexing and dramatic constriction of the outside world to a keyhole.
Curiosity propelled her forward; the creak of the heavy steel door sounded suddenly loud to her ears when it gave reluctantly beneath the force of her hands, gasping in unbending horror at the sight before her.
A filthy prisoner lay sprawled on uneven ground, his blood-soaked brow and sweat-streaked body a consequence of the upholding of his ideals.
Evelyn Carnahan dropped to the floor, her own knees weak, aghast to witness the lost glory of the Medjai chief, and the mad, cruel evolution of the political struggle that he had been trapped in, physically reduced to the deplorable state of a condemned prisoner.
He only cried out for water and nothing else, dullness and the lack of recognition in his opened eyes.
"Ardeth!" She whispered harshly, crawling towards him, heedless of her soiled clothes, her fingers gauchely knotting themselves in the jangling keys, suddenly overcome by the colossal outburst of weeping and sorrow for this man who had fought the battle for Egypt's resurrected glory, and had, up to this point, lost.
She now cried as he did before, for his own redemption from the brink of death, dragging him, with the torrential drip of her tears, away from the clutches of Anubis and the insistent intrusion of Horus, fleeing from their accusations, invoking a humane protest against his Allah.
Water...
She burned to give him the ancient life-giving liquid, but had no water skin with her.
The tears had blurred her eyes - she did not feel the loosened grip of the keys from her fingers, but there was another presence that had walked into this dreary spot, a presence that had laid a comforting hand on her shoulder, shaking her gently.
"Evy! You must get up," She felt herself hoisted up insistently, turning, open-mouthed, into the frowning face of Jonathan Carnahan. "There is not much time! Cut his bonds, and get out of here!"
"Jon! But how did you...yet I thought you..." She laughed, trying to hug him until he asphyxiated from the tremendous squeeze.
"Explanations later, my dear sister! I am most appalled at your method of giving someone the boot; you took his keys, but left his poor unconscious form on the floor!" He took the keys from her hands in a smooth motion and talked as if he was merely purchasing a commodity from the streets of Cairo, easily loosing Ardeth Bay from his shackles.
"Oh God."
"Evy, have you little faith in your poor brother?" He asked smugly. "Surely you thought that I would have a greater sense to cover your tracks, messy as they are and exceedingly difficult to brush over."
"Jon, I don't know what to say. There have been so many things -" She could not say more, bending over the still form of Ardeth Bay instead, passing her hand over his ravaged shoulders tenderly.
"Evy," He stooped down where she kneeled over Ardeth, and wiped her tear-stained face sheepishly with his bare hands, staining them slightly with the soot of the ground before gawking at his own clumsiness. "I do believe I have more of the entire picture than you do but now is not the time. Bring him outside, by the back way you came in. there will be a car there. He will drive you to Lyanka's. Hold Ardeth there, until I send you news."
"He is not able to walk, I think." She despaired quietly, imploring. She needed his vigour now, to add to hers, to add to what she had already lost.
"Then you must support him," Jonathan hoisted Ardeth up with great difficulty, draping the warrior's limp arm over her shoulder, placing her arm firmly around his waist.
He watched them painfully and slowly stumble past the doorway, towards the back of the museum. Satisfied with the albeit sluggish progress they were making, he threw the bunch of keys in the air and caught them deftly in midair as they fell, muttering calculated choice words before moving outside to drag the fallen guard's body into it, locking it securely behind him.
He hoped she succeeded; he hoped Ardeth Bay would recover under the bizarre but effective Gypsy ministrations of Lyanka; finally, he hoped to God that they would be on the first ship that sailed in the coming month, back to London. Ardeth Bay's rescue had appeared like a simple, picturesque boat-ride down the Nile in the calmest weather; surely it would not be as simple as it all seemed, at least for now - as fickle as the fine day that would unpredictably turn wrathful.
It had been all too easy for him, to become a dandy who disappeared into the world of pleasure-seeking that lasting from the early hours of the morning into the late hours of the night, yet it had all changed one day when he had encountered Rick O'Connell in the streets one day with his wife; he had somehow made the fatal leap into Medjai territory and their activities when he had tumbled into a deep discussion of political stirrings with Rick in the half-drunken state of his, when he had learned much more than he knew he wanted to know, sobering immediately at the reeling implications of what he had just absorbed.
He had known of the hazardous consorting that Evy had done with Severige, the thin string on which she balanced herself.
They were playing a dangerous game - more dangerously terrible than he cared to admit, but it was never him to give any more concern than needed to the odds and the risks; he needed to finish the game - needed to win back the security of the lives that he and Evy had led back in England in the final spin of the Russian roulette. But many demanded their own rights to the game; perhaps it was that they spun different roulettes, threw in different stakes and parried their way through, driven by their own desperate intent on winning.
Jonathan Carnahan groaned softly.
He was not cut to be a detective; neither was he exactly stellar at arms administration - neither did he want to throw in his loyalties quickly to any side yet it had seemed, to his great amazement and irritation that it was automatically assumed he was now an additional resource for Medjai means. Defying them would probably earn him the most barbaric form of execution - possibly the literal roll of his own head in front of Rick O'Connell and Ardeth Bay.
Jonathan sighed cynically. His sister was the only one who mattered now - the rest could just hang themselves, but he had not banked on the possibility that she would have developed this cursed emotional attachment to the Mahadevas, and now, the even greater possibility of attaching herself to the injured Ardeth Bay. He rolled his eyes - Evy had grown into a mystifying combination of strength, impulse, giddiness and weakness, the epitome of an incomprehensible female, a deadly entrapment to easily bendable men, an intoxication to the solid suitorand most importantly, the nightmare of a concerned brother.
God, he suddenly even missed the harsh but familiar English winter and hated the Egyptian heat that he had initially welcomed with great enthusiasm.