‘Charlie. The note.’
‘Now you're interested,’ he teased, gesturing his pint towards the bar. ‘Gorgeous girl, cracking figure? Nothing. Piece of paper in an old wooden toy? All ears. Okay,’ he said, and raised his hands as Julius glared at him, ‘so the note. On it, written in Cyrillic, was the following message; “The family egg is in the first doll”.’
‘It's probably nothing,’ said Julius.
‘There's more. I called up the old lady, Zofia, and asked if she remembered where the outer doll was. She said her brother-in-law had it. The brothers had fallen out and their grandfather had said families should stick together. He gave Filip the outer doll and Jan the inner set. He sealed both of them and said the boys should bring them together and heal their rift. I asked if that was typical of him, but she said she had never met the old man. She did say he’d been a soldier during the Russian revolution!’
‘Oh,’ Julius said, and leant back in his chair and crossed his arms. He looked up at the ceiling as he thought about it, a small, excited grin lighting up his face. It was simply impossible to not hear eggs, Russia and hidden clues without homing in like an Exocet on the inevitable conclusion.
A Fabergé egg.
Could it be that one of the famed missing imperial eggs was about to be found? Or at least that a genuine clue might have come to the surface. So many treasures of the Russian imperial court had been lost following the revolution. The jewelled Easter eggs made by Carl Fabergé for the Romanov royal family were the most sought out of them all.
The two men talked excitedly, guessing what the purple one might refer to, if indeed it even was a Fabergé that the note was referring to.
‘So that's what I need from you,’ announced Charlie. ‘I don't know anyone better than you at research. Can you investigate our babushka’s husband's grandfather? Everything you can find. Also, I need you to find the brother. But, you know, don't mention this to anyone. Not even, what was her name, Rebecca?’
Julius gulped. Rebecca! Checking his watch, he realised he was late. So much for not being distracted.
#3 Neith – Alpha Earth
Stepping through the Q Field was disconcerting. Until you became used to it, it usually resulted in vomiting or screaming or fluency in French or Mandarin. Some came through convinced they had tails which had failed to materialise. Others thought they were fish. Some never recovered and became gardeners. Some died. Although deaths were rare, the pre-vetting process was thorough. I liked to think of us as the best of the best. Others liked to think of us as unhinged psychopaths.
As I stepped onto the landing apron, Clio was standing to my left and we both stepped smartly away from the quantum field. A perfect transition. In the past, quantum curators would have been greeted with a round of applause, but these days that was considered showy. Personally, I liked showy. I looked up to the guys on the gantry, who flashed us a thumbs up. A couple of officers with guns stood at the other side of the room, and we smiled at them. It was always a good idea to let the people pointing guns at you know that all was well.
Then the glass doors opened and medics walked in, giving us restorative jabs and broad-spectrum antibiotics. Excalibur may not have been the only thing we carried back with us. Finally, the archivists came forward and removed the sword.
We headed to the changing rooms, where Clio had to drag me away from the gloriously hot shower, before we went upstairs and away from the Q Zone to give our report.
The Q Zone consisted of the Q Field itself, which was, to all intents and purposes, a blank wall; the large empty room, or landing apron; and then the lower and upper gantry for the personnel, with changing rooms and an emergency triage station to the side. Due to the side effects of the Q Field, most other departments and offices were located further away. It used to be a lot smaller, but an accidental incursion by rhinos had changed that. They’d had to pretty much rebuild the entire room after a terrified rhino had gone on the rampage. Now the Q Field opened onto a large empty room with the technicians on overhead gantries.
As soon as we stepped into the corridor I breathed a sigh of relief. I loved the warm, dry Alexandrian climate and I couldn't wait to get outside and bathe in the warm air, maybe even take a quick swim in the Mareotis. Proper clean water. In the meantime, we discussed how we would approach the report.
‘Which bit do you think we'll get bollocked the most for? Miscalculating the weight of the sword or not packing proper scuba gear?’
Clio thought about it. ‘It's going to be the weight thing. The lack of full scuba gear didn't actually impact on the mission, and as it turned out we were able to successfully weave into one of the established Arthurian myths.’
I frowned. Both of us should have spotted the weight problem, but it was just the sort of thing that I was expected to overlook, forget about or miscalculate. Therefore, the onus of responsibility would fall unfairly on Clio's shoulders.
We headed into the chief's office, where the sword was already laid out on a preservation board. Once our report had been submitted, verified and approved, it would be attached to the board and then the two would be filed together in the vaults a few hundred metres beneath our feet, ready for further processing.
The Library of Alexandria was one facet of our mouseion complex, and I might be biased, but our mouseion was the best in the world given that it was home to all the unique and lost items from
