Hoarfrost (Whyborne & Griffin Book 6) (11 page)

Whyborne

I awoke
the next morning to the murmur of voices. My mind still half-fogged with sleep,
I froze, my heart leaping with a blind panic because I snuggled against Griffin’s
back. Then memory caught up: we were expected to be in bed together in this
freezing, rough place.

And the
other voice belonged to Iskander, who would
not
think our close contact
innocent. My face burned, and I wondered if I could crawl under the covers and
hide.

Griffin,
who lay to the outside of the bunk, had propped himself up on one elbow and cheerfully
discussed archaeology with Iskander. How could he be so casual, talking to
someone else with me lying right here beside him, as though there was nothing
at all out of the ordinary about it?

“The
permafrost would present a challenge,” Iskander said. Thick leather scraped
against one of the wooden rafters as he pulled down his parka. “At this
latitude, the ground is frozen year-round. Even if we returned in the summer we’d
be faced with some of the same difficulties.”

“Not to
mention the problems of getting workers and supplies to such a remote location.”

“That as
well.” One of the chairs shuffled against the floor. “This is all assuming the
site can be made…safe.”

“Whyborne
will see to it,” Griffin said, with utter confidence. I wasn’t certain whether
to be appalled or gratified. “If we can only find these seals in the next five
days, he’ll make certain they hold.”

I opened
my eyes and saw only the back of his union suit and the red straps of his
bracers. “I certainly hope you’re right,” I said.

Griffin
climbed out of the bunk and availed himself of the water warming on the Yukon
stove and the small mirror to shave. Beards, Jack had informed us, were for the
summer months, to help keep mosquitoes off as much of one’s face as possible.
In the winter, a man’s breath would quickly turn any hair near the mouth into a
single mass of hardened ice. Given I’d never been able to grow much of a beard,
I’d been rather glad to hear it.

When Griffin
finished, I reluctantly followed suit, exchanging the warmth of the furs for
the chilly air of the cabin. We ate our daily ration of tinned tomatoes, heated
to a tepid temperature over the stove. I’d become heartily sick of the things,
but suspected I’d like scurvy a great deal less, so I choked down my portion
with a minimum of complaint.

We met
Christine in front of the cabin she shared with the two female miners. Even
though the only light came from the stars and the aurora, the camp was already
abuzz with activity. Miners used snow to douse the pit fires that hadn’t burned
out on their own. The first buckets filled with a slurry of ash, mud, and
gravel, were hoisted to the surface as we passed by. Dogs barked and men
shouted, both to their partners in or out of the shafts, or to those working
neighboring claims. The frigid air reeked of smoke and black mud.

God,
what an abominable place. I couldn’t wait to return to Widdershins. Although
the feeling of being off-balance had gradually decreased—or perhaps I’d
simply grown accustomed to it—I missed the sea, the comforts, our home,
and our cat. With any luck we’d find these seals restraining the umbra,
strengthen them as Griffin said, and leave before the truly horrid weather of
January and February trapped us here.

As
promised, Turner and Jack waited for us beside the large tent stretched over
their claim. “Good morning,” Turner said jovially. “I hope you slept well and
warm.”

“The
cabin is quite sturdy, thank you,” Griffin replied. “We certainly can’t fault
the care you’ve taken for us.”

Turner
smiled. “Anything for a brother of Jack’s. Let alone our other distinguished
guests.”

“Yes,
yes,” Christine said. “Let’s get on with it, shall we?”

“Of
course.” Turner untied the tent flap and held it back with a bow. “Ladies
first.”

I
followed Christine into the confines of the tent. “Watch your step,” she said,
hefting her lantern to give us better light. I took it from her, as my greater
reach allowed me to lift it higher.

The warm
orange light reflected from the pale canvas and revealed a large, rectangular
pit hacked from the permafrost. Shadows seemed to pool in the hole, revealing
only suggestive fragments: a carved line here, a cluster of dots there.

“We need
more light in here!” Christine barked. “Griffin, Jack, see to it. Iskander, I
want photographs before anything is further disturbed.”

Everyone
scurried to do her bidding. Soon, half a dozen oil lamps burned inside the
tent. When the angle still left too much shadow in the digging for her liking,
Christine sent Jack on a mission to collect mirrors and any gold pans with
sufficient shine. While Turner watched in bemusement, we set about rigging up a
series of reflectors to direct the light where we wished it to go.

Soon the
pit was illuminated even to Christine’s satisfaction. It was perhaps twelve
feet deep, and for the most part revealed ordinary mud and gravel, threaded
through with deposits of gold dust. The gold increased as it went down, until a
thick vein lay directly atop the exposed bedrock.

Embedded
in the golden silt lay chunks of greenish stone, utterly unlike any of the
surrounding geology as far as I could tell. As in the photograph Jack sent, the
object was clearly a stele of some kind, snapped off near the base and shattered.
Thankfully, the elements had only slightly scattered the broken stones.

“Thoughts,
Whyborne?” Christine asked, while Iskander began to photograph the artifact,
first from the pit’s edge, then clambering down the ladder to record closer
images.

“It’s
rather like a jigsaw puzzle, isn’t it?” I said.

“Do you
think you can make anything out of it?” Turner asked.

Christine
snorted; the cold air made her nostrils steam like a charging bull’s. “Bah!
Whyborne has pieced together cuneiform tablets shattered into a hundred pieces.
This is barely an afternoon’s entertainment for him.”

“I
wouldn’t put it quite like that,” I said. “Is there any way to temporarily gum
the pieces together? It’s far too cold for mortar to set I imagine, and I
wouldn’t wish to do anything permanent before transporting it back to the
museum, but it would make viewing it easier.”

“We
could use a mix of mud and moss, like the chinking for the cabins,” Jack
suggested. “It wouldn’t withstand a good rain, but rain isn’t much of a problem
this time of year. And the mud freezes hard as granite in these temperatures.”

It
seemed as good a solution as any. “So long as there aren’t too many pieces
missing, I believe I can fit it back together.”

“Good
man.” Christine clapped me on the arm. “Are you done, Kander? Then let’s get to
excavating!”

Whyborne

The
excavation proved to be cold, miserable work. The chunks of broken green stone
were still embedded in a frozen conglomeration of silt, gold, and gravel. To
extract a piece, the surrounding matrix had to be warmed and thawed. To avoid
damaging the artifacts, we poured boiling water over the mud, then hastily dug fragments
out before everything froze again. I helped surreptitiously, using my fire
spell to speed up the thawing process.

I’d
never used my arcane abilities in such a way before—small, controlled
bursts, repeated again and again and again. After an hour, I developed a
nagging headache, and felt as though I’d been moving heavy loads about. After
two, the headache grew to blinding proportions, and I stopped to keep from
becoming utterly useless. In Widdershins, with the maelstrom to draw upon, I
probably could have kept it up for days.

Even
thawed, the muck was cold, and my fingers were soon reddened and numbed from
helping to pry the fragments loose. Once a broken bit of stone was pulled free,
it was washed, photographed from both sides, and labeled so its original
position could be easily referenced if needed.

Christine
began to give me impatient looks. After unearthing a dozen or so fragments, I
turned my attention to the painstaking job of piecing the stele back together.
Whenever I found where a piece went, Jack cemented it into place with a layer
of mud. As promised, the stuff froze to the hardness of cement in a short time.

When the
first day ended, the stele was perhaps a third complete, including the fragment
Jack had originally mailed to us. As we climbed out of the pit, Turner said, “I’m
glad Jack thought to call on you folks. I’m pretty sure we couldn’t have done
this on our own.”

I might
not be able to split firewood or dig through feet of muck in the hopes of
finding gold, but at least I could do this. “I’m glad my talents have been of
service.”

“Quite,”
Christine agreed briskly. Like the rest of us, she was smeared with stinking
black mud. “Archaeology is a business best left to the professionals.”

“I for
one will be glad for dinner,” Iskander said, pausing to help her off the
ladder.

“And a
shot or two of whiskey,” she added.

“Come
along,” Turner said with a grin. “Dinner and whiskey await you at the saloon.”

Exhaustion
ate at my bones, and I would have preferred to return to our cabin and
collapse. Still, a hot meal might drive away the chill that seemed to have
settled in every limb. As we left the tent, however, Jack said, “A word with
you, Griffin?”

I paused
and glanced back over my shoulder. Griffin didn’t look at me, though, only
nodded to his brother. “Of course.”

I turned
away and followed Christine and Iskander. But as I did so, I had the oddest
feeling Jack watched me over Griffin’s shoulder, his gaze boring into my back
until the tent flap fell closed between us.

Griffin

“Is
everything all right?” I asked, once Jack and I were alone. I wished he’d
chosen some other venue for this talk. We’d extinguished all the other lights,
so the mirrors only occasionally sent back flashes of illumination from the oil
lamp in his hand. Shadows seemed to lurk in the corners, and the pit in the
middle of the tent was nothing but a dark, foreboding shape.

I
couldn’t identify the designs on the broken fragments, nor had the slightest
idea what they meant. And yet…they haunted me. As if I’d seen them before, in
some distant dream I no longer remembered.

Whyborne’s
explanation, that I’d seen the designs of the Eltdown Shards in some newspaper
article as a boy, had seemed sufficient up until now. But standing here in this
wild place, with the stone fragments before me, it rang hollow. The feeling of
recognition was too deeply seated to have come from a few inches of print in a
newspaper column.

But was
it real? There was no reason I, of all people, should have such a presentiment.
My Ival was magic; it was in his blood and bones. Whereas I was entirely
ordinary.
Common,
as Theo Endicott had said, hoping to seduce Ival away
from me.

I wasn’t
mad. The dreams, the voice I’d heard the other night, the stele…it didn’t mean
anything. The doctors hadn’t been right. I wasn’t going mad.

“Everything
is fine.” Jack flashed me a grin, but it faded quickly. “I only had a question
for you. Have you ever been on one of Dr. Whyborne’s expeditions before?”

“Whyborne
doesn’t have expeditions,” I corrected. “This is entirely Dr. Putnam’s affair.
If it were up to him, he’d never leave Widdershins at all. Why?”

“I see.”
Jack looked away, and his fur-edged hood hid his expression from me. “The
papers gave Dr. Putnam credit for her Egyptian discoveries, but I assume Dr.
Whyborne’s hand was behind them?”

“Dear
lord, don’t let Christine hear you say such a thing!” I stared at him in shock.
“I understand it may seem strange for a woman to make such discoveries on her
own, but how can you think such a thing having travelled with her?”

Jack
turned to me, and the light revealed an oddly uncertain look on his face. “His
studies into Nephren-ka didn’t lead her to the tomb?”

“Of
course not. Why would you even ask such a thing?” Surely Jack didn’t have some
hidden interest in archaeological proceedings, or else he would have spoken of
this earlier.

Jack
shrugged. “I don’t know. I suppose, watching them at work…Dr. Whyborne seems
rather competent.”

I
snorted. “Of course he is. Do you really believe Christine would let him
accompany us otherwise?”

“I…I don’t
know.” Jack shook his head. “Forgive me—this line of questioning must
seem very strange to you.”

“You’re
right, it does.” Did this have something to do with the argument we’d overheard
between Jack and Turner? But surely Turner didn’t think Christine had deceived
Jack in some way, when she obviously knew her business well. Could the man
harbor a deep prejudice toward Iskander for his brown skin and Egyptian
features? But that wouldn’t count as deception either. Nor could I imagine how
Turner would have come to the conclusion Whyborne was secretly in charge of the
expedition, or why he’d try to convince Jack of it.

“Is
something wrong?” I asked finally. “Have you and Whyborne quarreled? Or you and
Christine?”

“No!” He
shook his head empathically. “Not at all. Dr. Whyborne saved my life on the way
here. Why would I quarrel with him?”

Did it
bother Jack, to feel himself in debt to Whyborne? Did he still think Ival
something of a fop, soft and useless compared to the rugged men he normally
interacted with? “I don’t know. You tell me.”

Rather
than answer, Jack said, “You called him something different that day, didn’t
you? Ordinarily you use his surname, but I thought I heard you shout another
name when you ran to save us.” His lip twisted ruefully. “Although perhaps I
misheard. I was rather occupied with not plummeting to my death at the time.”

The
chill seemed to seep through my layers of clothes to gather around my heart. I
thought we’d been careful, but perhaps we’d done something since arriving to
give ourselves away. Was that why Jack suddenly decided to ask questions about
Whyborne’s place in the expedition? Did he imagine Whyborne was here only as my
lover?

Had I
lost Jack already, the same way I’d lost Pa?

I willed
my face to remain neutral. “Not at all. Ival is short for Percival. His
intimate friends use it for him.”

In
truth, of course, the name was mine alone to say. He hated Percy, and Whyborne had
seemed too formal when I laid in bed at night, imagining it was his hand and
not mine on my cock. Thankfully, it pleased him when I gasped it out
involuntarily our first night together, or else I should have felt a fool.

“Oh.”
Jack nodded. “That makes sense.”

Did it?
What was going on with him? “Jack, if you have any doubts about Dr. Putnam, or
Dr. Whyborne, anyone in our party, please allow me to lay your mind to rest.
And if you have doubts of me, speak them aloud.”

“No. I
don’t have any doubts about you,” Jack said firmly. He put a hand to my
shoulder. “I’m sorry I led you to think otherwise. Forgive my meandering
thoughts—these endless nights play havoc with a man’s mind.”

“Of
course,” I said, relieved. Whatever troubled him, at least he didn’t seem to
suspect the truth of my relationship with Whyborne. “Think no more of it.”