was only three buildings ahead now and he’d been reduced to a stumbling jog. And he was shouting in Eranian. “Gold! Twenty gold darics for the woman’s head! Silver! Ten silver shekels for the man’s gun!”
“What’s he saying?” Kenan asked.
“Nothing good.” Shifrah squinted as the cold air whipped in her eye. A shadow moved on her left. And then another. “Stop-stop-stop!” She grabbed Kenan’s arm and hauled him to a staggering halt. She stared across the street where the shadow had moved.
Just twenty yards away, Aker continued walking drunkenly down the street, shouting.
“Which way did we go?” she asked quietly. “From the arena. Which way?”
Kenan glanced at the stars. “East. Why?”
Shifrah took a step back as two shadows emerged from a distant alley and started walking toward them. “Feel like running some more?”
“Why? Who are they?”
“We’re in the Bantu district.”
“So? I’ve got plenty of bullets.” Kenan leveled his revolver at the shadow men.
“So Aker over there has just put out a contract on us. And the Bantu like bounty hunting. They like it a lot.”
Kenan shrugged. “Are Bantu bounty hunters bullet-proof?”
“No.” A small thundercrack across the street erupted from a small puff of smoke. Shifrah heard the bullet whip by her head and thump into the stone facade of the old shop behind her. “But neither are we.”
A second pistol fired, and then a third.
“Suddenly I feel like running some more,” Kenan said.
They turned and ran. But Shifrah grabbed Kenan’s arm and yanked him sideways into an alley. As they sprinted down the narrow corridor, she said, “Don’t worry. We’re not going to lose Aker again. We’re just going to have to do things the hard way.”
“What’s the hard way?”
Shifrah grimaced. “Bloody.”
Chapter 23. Qhora
She nestled inside her dead husband’s old coat, teasing out the faint smells lingering in the fabric. Wine. Cheese. Beef. Sea salt.
They had followed Shifrah and Kenan through the dark corridors of the Temple as far as the cellar, almost certain that they had not been noticed. They had seen Shifrah and Kenan leave through the shop upstairs, but at the cellar Salvator had insisted that they wait for a daylight crowd outside rather than try to escape as two running figures in the deserted streets in the night. With her injured leg aching and her arm throbbing, Qhora had agreed. The Italian had proven a deft field medic in dressing the gunshot wound, which was only a graze, and as she lay in the dark, the pain had faded.
Qhora sighed for the tenth time.
“Trouble sleeping?” a woman asked.
The nun again.
Qhora swallowed. “Enzo always said you had a bad habit of appearing behind him, back before you were trapped in the medallion. He said you scared him half to death, popping up behind his back in the dark with no warning. I hope you don’t plan on doing the same to me, Sister.” She rolled over and looked at her visitor.
Sister Ariel stood at arm’s length, her hands folded demurely in front of her, her dress and habit as immaculate in death as it had been in life. “I’ve been afraid for you nearly every minute of the last two days, Dona Qhora. Hm. And I thought Lorenzo was reckless. He gave me more than a few frights over the years, but he was only as reckless as a little boy who refuses to believe he can be hurt. You, on the other hand, are an entirely different sort of lunatic. Charging in blindly, surrendering to your enemies, leaping into the darkness.” The ghost stepped closer. “I’m scared for you, Qhora. And I’m scared for your son.”
“I know.” Qhora lay flat on her back and stared up at the cobwebbed ceiling of the cellar. She wrapped her fingers around Enzo’s old triquetra medallion on her chest. Its warmth sank softly into her flesh. “So am I.”
“Did you mean what you said before?” Ariel asked. “That you no longer want to find Lorenzo’s killer? That you’re ready to go home?”
Qhora nodded. “Yes. I miss my baby. And that old man was right. Javier will need a father. A living father. And one day I may even be ready to take another husband.” She paused. “I can’t imagine that. Even now, when I think about going back to Madrid, I keep thinking that Enzo will be there, as always. And now…I can’t remember the last time we didn’t spend the night together. Not since Cartagena. I think we’ve spent every single night together. Except for this one. And last night. Two nights without him. Tomorrow will be another, I suppose.”
Ariel nodded. “There were others, you know. There was a certain evening in a jail cell in Zaragoza, for one.”
Qhora glared across the room at Salvator’s sleeping form.
I can’t believe I’d already forgotten that.
Then she looked away. “I was stupid,” she said. “I was angry, and that made me stupid. I gave Javier to Alonso and just left them behind so I could kill some filthy idiot. And now I might die before I see my baby again. Mirari might never see Alonso again. Taziri might never see her family again. Even Tycho lost his foster father because of me. Because I was angry and stupid.”
“That’s hardly fair. Philo was killed by men. It was their fault, not yours,” Ariel said. “So what will you do now?”
Qhora yawned. “In the morning, we’ll find the others and go home. And then when we’re safely home, maybe I can hire someone to find this Aker El Deeb and his sword. I don’t know about that part yet. I can’t save Enzo. But I can still save everyone else. So I will.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” the ghost said. “And Lorenzo would have been glad to hear it, too.”
Qhora nodded. She felt the slight rise in temperature that signaled the ghost’s departure and she closed her eyes and slept.
Chapter 24. Taziri
“No, we’re not going to build anything tonight. It’s already way past my bed time,” Taziri said. She lifted up a few loose boards in the rubbish pile to peer at the older trash underneath the newer trash, but the pale starlight didn’t reveal anything useful. She let it all fall back down to the ground again. “Let’s just try to scrounge up some materials while everyone with an ounce of sense is asleep, and then we’ll pick things up in the morning where we left off.”
Bastet sighed. The girl with the cat mask on her head hadn’t actually been helping so much as just following and talking. “So what exactly are we scrounging for?”
“A cowl and a hose.”
“What’s a cowl?”
Taziri paused, balancing precariously on top of the wobbly trash pile at the end of the alley. “It’s like a funnel, but we need it to fit over the entire propeller assembly. Like a hood. It could be metal, or wood, or sealed leather or even canvas.”
“Oh.” The girl stood well away from the trash and walked up and down a long crack in the bricks in the ground, balancing with her arms as though on a high wire. “Did you always want to be an engineer?”
“I think so, yeah.” Taziri continued flipping through the loose bits of wicker and moldy fabric. “I always liked building things. I spent a lot of time in my mother’s shop. She was a seamstress, and she had one of the first mechanical sewing machines in Tingis. One night when I was about nine, I snuck into the shop and opened up the sewing machine to look inside it. I didn’t take it apart or anything, but for a whole week I would go downstairs to
