“He didn’t.” She smiled but said no more.
Taziri wiped her hands on her pants and climbed out of her chair. “All right then. Time for us to build something. Are you going to help or just watch?”
“Uhm. I think I’ll just watch for now.” The girl winked and flopped down on the nearest passenger seat.
Can’t say I’m entirely surprised by that answer from a girl who says she still wants to be a princess.
Taziri went to the back of the cabin and picked up her leather-clad basket and coil of horse gut. “Do you think it will be safe for me to work outside? Will anyone come looking around back here if they hear me working?”
“No, my four-footed army is sleeping on the freight cars and the rails and platform,” Bastet said. “No one will be bothering you today.”
“All right then.” Taziri climbed out the hatch and found the early morning sun bright but still cool. She tossed her gear on the ground, rolled up her sleeves, and popped open the little compartment on the bottom of her arm brace to get a wrench. She climbed up on the nose of the Halcyon and started loosening bolts. “First I’m going to reverse the propeller to turn it into a fan.”
Bastet stepped out onto the gravel. “Do you ever get a bad feeling right before something terrible happens?”
Taziri kept working. “All the time. Why? Are you getting a bad feeling right now?”
“No. But I think I will in a little while.”
Taziri removed the propeller, flipped it over, and bolted it back on. “All right, now hand me the basket, our new cowl.”
For the next quarter hour, Taziri fumbled with her shining steel tools and her flimsy wicker basket to fix the cowl over the propeller to catch the blasting air and funnel it into the hole in the bottom of the basket. The next half hour after that was a foul-smelling pantomime as she tried over and over to tie, staple, and bolt the end of the slippery horse intestine over the hole in the basket. Time and again she would step back and pronounce the job done, only to watch the pale pink gut slip free and fall to the ground. When it was finally attached, Taziri’s shirt was plastered to her back with sweat and she could feel the sun’s heat radiating up from the gravel through her shoes. “First part’s done!”
Bastet sat up, blinking and yawning. “Oh good. Now what?”
Taziri pursed her lips.
Four thousand years old and she’s still a teenager.
“Go back to sleep. I’ll wake you up when I’m all done.”
“Okay!”
Chapter 25. Shifrah
Lying on the rooftop, they had an unobstructed view of the universe. A million stars on the left and a million more on the right. Shifrah sighed. A colorless blur was invading the eastern sky, swallowing up the stars beyond a gray veil.
“Are you awake?”
She smiled. “No.”
“You had me worried for a while back there,” Kenan said. He lay an arm’s length away on the hard roof tiles. The slope of the roof was very slight and they had both stretched out with their heads near the peak of the roof and their feet pointing down to the stone lip where the roof ended. “It must have been hard, fighting with just one knife.”
Two short hours ago, a dozen Bantu bounty hunters had emerged from the shadows to answer Aker’s call. They each came alone, but they were all nearly identical in the dark. All of them tall and lean, armed with an inventive arsenal of throwing weapons, and judging from the soft whistles and clicks that two of them had exchanged during the fight, they were probably from one of the Shona or Zulu kingdoms.
The chase had been a blur of running and hiding, the hiss of a slender spear through the air, or the warble of a throwing axe, and the bullwhip crack of Kenan’s revolver.
We got three of them, at least.
Shifrah sighed. “It was hard enough. Is he still in there?”
Kenan rolled to his left to look down over the edge of the roof at the house across the intersection. From their vantage point, they could see both the front and right side of the building, while the other two sides sat wall- to-wall with the neighboring houses. He rolled back. “No sign of life yet. It’s still early. He probably thinks we’re dead.”
“We will be dead if those other bounty hunters find us up here. How many bullets do you have left?”
“Fourteen shots in all, if there’s time to reload.”
“Not a lot, is it?”
“Nope.”
Shifrah arched her back to stretch her arms and legs. As she tilted her head back, she saw the dark bare foot just above her hair. “Kenan!” She sat up with her stiletto in hand and heard the revolver yanked free of its holster. Then she saw the man standing on the peak of the roof clearly and realized that he was not who she had expected. “Wait. Who are you?”
He had looked Bantu at first, both tall and dark, but as she looked at him right-side-up now, she saw that this was a very different sort of person. His skin wasn’t merely dark but absolute black, so impossibly black that she could see no lines or shadows or textures on his face or hands, which made him resemble the marble statues of the Roman saints she had seen in Italia.
He wore a simple white garment that folded across his flat chest like a robe, but it had no sleeves and so the corded muscles of his arms rippled down his sides in sharp contrast to his clothing. The garment continued down to his knees where his bare legs emerged. Thick golden bracelets covered his wrists and a thick golden belt hugged his robe tight around his waist. He wore his black hair braided back into a thick mane and each braid ended in a golden bead, and they clicked against each other as the morning breeze swept over the roof. A small golden pendant rested on his chest at the end of a black cord around his neck, and he held a slender black staff in one hand.
Slowly, he lowered his gaze from the distant horizon to look at her and Shifrah saw a strange shape on his head.
A hat? No. A mask!
The mask too was perfectly black, but from her angle she could see nothing more about it.
“A woman with a blade and a man with a gun. You are the two travelers from the west, are you not?” he asked.
Shifrah blinked.
His voice. He’s not a grown man yet.
“Yes, we are. Who are you?”
“A messenger. And a guide. I was sent to help you.” He gazed down at her without a trace of emotion in his eyes. “You are searching for a murderer named Aker El Deeb and for his sun-steel sword?”
“Yeah.” Kenan kept his gun trained on the man. “Who are you? Who sent you?”
“A friend of a friend.” The man turned to look at the detective. “Strange. Are you ashamed of your love for this woman because of what she is or because of what she’s done? Or are they the same thing to you?”
Kenan’s hand faltered and he glanced across at Shifrah. “What? What are you talking about?”
“For a lawman and manhunter, you are surprisingly careless with your body language,” the man said. “Regarding your task, you will find that El Deeb is in that house there.” He pointed across the intersection.
“Yeah, thanks, we know.” Shifrah lowered her knife. “That’s why we’re here, watching him. We can’t just go in there. We’ve got half a dozen bounty hunters prowling the streets down there looking for us, and we don’t know which room Aker is in, and if he pulls that sword on us, we’ll probably be dead in half a minute.”
“Indeed.” The stranger grimaced. “My cousin asked that I help you complete your task so you might safely return to your home. But if you are too afraid to act, then I must act in your stead.”A sudden gust of wind rose from behind him, whipping his white garment and his black braids forward. And then the man himself simply dissolved into an outline of white mist, which was whisked away on the wind and off the roof.
