Tales of the Red Panda: Pyramid of Peril (16 page)

An instant later there was a roar like thunder, a mighty fall of stone and earth, and the great Hall of Anubis passed from this world into history and legend.

Al-Qurn looked more or less the same from the outside. There had been some shifting as space within collapsed, the doorway at the base had been buried in a rock slide and Max had taken care of the fissure in the rock they had crawled out of by causing another small one. The sun was blazing with the heat of the late afternoon and the world turned as if it were entirely unaware of how close it
had just come to ending.

“Well, Max,” the Red Panda said
, “I’m sorry that we failed to retrieve the Eye.”

Falconi smiled grimly and shook his head. “I’m not sorry in the least. The Council of Mages may think that they are above the temptations of power, but the safest place for the Eye of Anubis is buried under tons of rock
. Al-Qurn hid the stone for thousands of years, I feel certain that it may continue to do so.”

“You know,” the Red Panda said hopefully, “although the great hall was destroyed, it is entirely possible that much of that pyramid survived the blast intact.”

“Though you couldn’t really excavate it without someone discovering the Eye, could you?” Falconi said gently.

“Ah, no,” the Red Panda agreed. “Well, there it is.”

“You daydreamin’ about a career change?” the Flying Squirrel asked.

“Not for me,” the Red Panda protested
, “for Fenwick.
Renown Egyptologist
sounds better than
Wealthy Playboy
, doesn’t it?”

“You’d have a heck of a commute for night patrol,” she grinned, showing an alarming number of teeth. The Flying Squirrel was not sorry to see the back of this particular adventure.

The Red Panda surveyed the slope. “You know,” he said, “we can’t really assume that no one will notice all of this shifting. The Valley of the Kings is a pretty closely observed site and it is right next door.”

“I agree,” the Stranger said
. “Once the two of you have secured a boat to take you back to Luxor, I thought I might whip up a little sandstorm to hide any features that might provoke interest.”

“You aren’t comin’ with us?
” the Flying Squirrel asked, surprised.

Falconi shook his head. “No, my dear, I thank you for the offer, and for c
oming all this way to rescue an old fool, but I really am feeling more like my old self. The Great Falconi touring show is
en route
to Australia, and I must meet it there.”

“That’s a long trip,” the Squirrel said, concerned.

“Yes,” the Stranger seemed gently amused, “it might take me twenty minutes.”

“Show-off,” she grinned.

“Darn tootin’,” he replied.

The three of them began to walk down the slope, skirting the valley, toward the river crossing. “This sandstorm I was thinking of starting,” Falconi began
. “I’ll probably let it run for hours. You two probably won’t be able to leave the hotel at all until morning.”

The Flying Squirrel glared daggers at the sorcerer and mouthed the words
“Stop it!”
behind the Red Panda’s back, but she needn’t have worried.

“Suits me,” the man in the mask said
. “I haven’t slept in days.”

“Ah
, yes,” the Stranger said sadly, shaking his head.

“What about Pavli’s clients?”
the Red Panda asked. “Do you think they will try and excavate the mountain and retrieve the Eye? That would be as bad as losing in the first place.”

Falconi shook his head. “I doubt very much that Pavli kept them that closely in the loop for fear of being cut out entirely. And searching the mountain was something of an improvisation, as you may recall. But I feel certain that the Council will put a watcher on it, just in case.”

Falconi stopped walking. “This is where I shall say
adieu
, my friends. Take care of each other. Until the next time.”

The Red Panda shook the Stranger’s hand. “You’ll have a devil of a time explaining away that dirty old robe when you get to Australia, Max,” he smiled.

“My dear boy,” Falconi said, “I am in Show Business. I don’t have trouble explaining anything.”

The Flying Squirrel looked down at her catsuit. “Hey, talking about explanations, how the heck am I supposed to get across the river and back to the hotel like
this
? It was one thing in the middle of the night, but-”

“Take off the mask,” he offered, and removed his own, along with his gloves. “Easy.”

“Easy for you,” she protested. “You’re a man in a suit.”

“No one knows us here,” he said, removing her flight goggles and putting them in his pocket. “It’ll be fine.”

She thought for a moment that he was going to remove her mask for her, which would probably have been a little more excitement than she could stand without making some appallingly girlish noise, but then they both seemed to remember the safety device in her cowl that would give him a painful electric shock if he tried. She pulled her cowl back herself and freed her hair, which fell about her face in the mortifyingly mop-like manner she called ‘cowl-head’. He removed his fedora and plunked it on her head gently, then removed his long grey coat and held it out for her to put on. It was like a tent on her, and even as she rolled up the sleeves, she looked like a child playing dress-up. But the Squirrel Suit was effectively hidden.

“There,” he said proudly
, “you look-”

“Like I stayed out all night and forgot my clothes somewhere?”
she offered.

“No one knows us here,” he said soothingly.

“No,” she said, looking up at him from under the brim of his own hat, “I guess they don’t.”

For a moment neither one of them said anything.

“Well,” he said at last, breaking the spell, “I suppose we should see about a boat.”

“Right,” she said.

“Youth is wasted on the young,” Falconi said softly.

“What’s that?”
the Red Panda asked, turning back to him.

“I said thank you again, old friend,” Maxwell Falconi said with a twinkle in his eye. “And good-bye.”

Weston had the entire squadron of servants packed and ready to go when they got back to Cairo. Kit hadn’t known quite what Fenwick was up to when he sent the telegrams, both in code, one to someone she had never heard of in Alexandria, the second to an operative in Toronto. The respon
se, he had explained, would be two pre-arranged messages, one telling Weston that Fenwick was through visiting his non-existent friends in Alexandria and would be back at the Hotel Imperial within a day, and the second advising Fenwick that vitally important business required his attention and his signature immediately back in Toronto, forcing their return after what was, after all, quite a brief stay. In the end it had worked even better than he had thought.

“I hope I didn’t overstep my bounds, sir,” Weston said
, “but the man at the desk said the telegram was very urgent, and I did not want to be responsible for any delays it was in my power to avoid.” Weston had assembled the staff, got them packed, made arrangements with the hotel and for their charter flights and packed his master’s effects. Fenwick read the telegram, looked very grave and nodded to his new butler.

“Very good, Weston,” he smiled. “Very good indeed.”

The net effect was that three hours later, having scarcely had time to process the fact that she was apparently not going to die in an undiscovered pyramid, or at least not this week, Kit Baxter was back on an airplane headed for home. As relieved as she was, with no mission to prepare for this time she was bored to tears.

“May I sit down, Miss Baxter?” It was Weston. He had been up front with Fenwick since the plane took off, and she couldn’t imagine what had provoked him to wander back now, but she wasn’t sorry to see him. She was, as usual, sitting apart from the rest of the staff, and while they were more subdued than on the trip in, there was a good deal of whispering going on, and Kit was fairly certain that none of it was about her for a change.

“Oh, hello, Weston,” she smiled. “Please do. Is there any chance of you calling me Kit?”

“The master generally refers to you as ‘
Miss Baxter’
, at least when in company,” Weston said with a pleasant smile. “It seems improper for me to be more familiar than he is.”

Kit said nothing about Fenwick being a good deal more familiar than he let on, mostly because Weston wouldn’t know that she meant in a painfully platonic, fighting gangsters, killer robots and the undead sort of way. Instead she just smiled, also pleasantly, but wait
ed for the other shoe to drop.

“Is something the matter?” Weston asked her.

“No,” she said, surprised, “why do you ask?”

“You seem to be, how can I explain it… you seem to be
steeling
yourself against something.”

Kit blinked at him in astonishment. Why was it that the only man in her life
who could tell what she was thinking had to be the butler?

“Perhaps you are expecting a scolding of some kind?”
he asked.

“Yeah, well, that would be the norm, I guess,” she replied. “Or a lecture, or a vague threat.”

Weston’s brows knit. “Have you done anything to deserve such a thing?” he asked.

“That’s never mattered before,” Kit said ruefully.

Weston smiled and settled back into the seat beside her. His voice dropped a touch to avoid being heard by any of the others over the steady drone of the engines, but Kit could hear him just fine.

“You do, occasionally, put a butler in an awkward position, you know,” he said. “Through no particular fault of your own. Really, when one thinks about it, it is quite unfair, saddling the head of a household staff with this sort of responsibility for the personal lives of those under his command. It isn’t the part of the job that I particularly enjoy. But someone has to do it. Indeed, some days one should really be issued a tranquilizer gun.”

She blinked at him again. Sometimes she was so wrapped up in the business of being the Flying Squirrel that the people around her became mere obstacles. Things to steer one’s life around. She had to stop that, especially if she was to keep more of Kit Baxter in her than the Red Panda had kept of August Fenwick.

“Weston,” she said
, “is it just possible that you’ve had a tough time lately?”

He smiled. “I don’t know if you enjoy the theatre, Miss Baxter,” he began
, “but I have always been partial to a good farce, myself. Lots of running about, lots of doors slamming. I enjoy a good laugh. But I must say that they are less amusing when you are actually living one. Particularly when your role seems to be that generally reserved for the vicar or the policeman. They never seem to enjoy themselves.”

“That bad, huh?” Kit grinned.

“I think I can comfortably say that your mildly unsupervised trip to Alexandria would not be on a list of the ten most potentially scandalous goings-on of this mercifully brief holiday,” Weston said, seriously. “And I say this to you in a degree of confidence, but these are facts that everyone knows and no one will likely ever mention again. Except that David and Elsie are getting married, you really ought to congratulate them at some point.”

“Davi
d and Elsie?” Kit was mentally trying to sort out which one Elsie was. “I didn’t even know they were… oh… I think I see.”

“Yes,” Weston said. “It was most sudden. To be perfectly honest, I’m quite astonished that you didn’t return to find half the household staff in some sort of mass-wedding ceremony, like one of those cults. But for the precise timing of a few slammed doors, it might very well have been as unavoidable as it was for David and Elsie. That would have put me in solid with the Master, I’m certain.”

Kit was astonished. She had never thought about any of the other butlers as a man with a job, and one as worried about keeping it as anyone might be in tough times.

“I beg your pardon, Miss Baxter, I do not mean to burden you with lurid details,” Weston said, his moustache drawing to attention as his upper
lip re-stiffed.

“No,
it’s fine,” Kit said, sorry that her silence had been interpreted as an offended one.

“The point of all of this is just this,” Weston began. “I am considerably older than you, and therefore I hope I may be allowed
to observe in a somewhat clinical fashion that you are a very beautiful girl.”

“It’s a bit stuffy,” she said, her face growing hot
, “but I’ll allow it. If only because it is not the sort of thing that is observed very often.”

He frowned at this. “I beg your pardon, Miss Baxter, but I promise you that the observation is made more than daily. I would expect that it has been made to one degree or another by virtually every man that you have met for most of your life.”

She laughed a little and knew that she was bright red. “Weston, please, I don’t do praise very well.”

Weston smiled. “No
, you don’t. And that is a small part of what makes me so entirely certain of the sort of person that you are, and that you do not need quite as much minding as this pack of silly geese. But the fact is that you present something of a problem to someone in my position.”

Her smile faded at this.

“I do not know precisely how to say this without risking offense, which is not my intent,” Weston began. “If a young lady who is in my charge is… if her reputation is suddenly much more than simply called into question, then I have failed her. Even if she was, like Elsie, going to considerable lengths to thwart my attempts to protect her interests. Now in this case, the young man has done the proper thing and all is well, but…”

Neither of them said anything for a moment.

“I never really got the feeling that the other butlers were trying to protect
me
,” Kit said.

“No,” Weston agreed. “They did not merely suspect your misconduct, they considered it a virtual certainty. They regarded you as an adventuress.”

“Well,” she said, “I like the sound of that, but probably not the way they meant it.”

“No,” Weston agreed
, “probably not. They expected that somewhere along the line there would be a public scandal and excessive financial demands would be made by you for your silence. They expected that people would look at it as a failure on their part to maintain discipline within their households, and a failure on their part to protect the Master, which is also a part of the job. They expected you to ruin them, and they tried their best to ruin you instead.”

Kit blinked hard and was surprised to find there were tears in her eyes. Not running down her face in some stupid girlish way, but they were thinking about it.

“But,” Weston said with a smile, “we work for a good man with a keen sense of justice.”

“What makes you so sure of that?” Kit asked, surprised.

“His conduct toward yourself,” Weston said. “There’s a bit of a routine he plays for others, and I imagine it is to keep people at arm’s length. That’s his business, not mine. But I know a good man when I see one.”

Kit nodded. She
did too, and she was looking at one.

“I know a good girl when I see one too,” Weston said. “And I do trust you. But it is nearly impossible
for me to maintain discipline at times, and having one staff member with extraordinary freedom is not exactly conducive to that.”

Kit frowned. “So what happens?”

Weston was all business. “I have already spoken to the Master and he agrees with me that it would simplify matters a great deal if you were transferred.”

“Transferred?”
she blurted. “To where?”

“To nowhere at all,” Weston smiled. “You
already maintain your own apartment, keep your own hours, so there really is no particular reason that you should be considered a member of the household staff at all. From this point on, you shall be an employee of one of the Master’s corporate divisions.”

“I work at Fenwick Industries now?”
she asked, astonished.

“You do just what you have always done,” Weston said. “But you do not work for me, and our relationship does not have to consist of me looking over your shoulder and having you dislike me, which I should not enjoy.”

He smiled broadly, which he could do now, because she did not work for him.

“Deal?” he said, offering his hand.

“Deal,” she grinned, shaking it.

He stood up and returned to the front of the plane.