Tales of the Red Panda: Pyramid of Peril Read Online Free PDF Page B

best of relationships with butlers, and didn’t really expect that to change. “With all due respect, Weston, those giggle-birds are still going to know how to make a bed when we get to Cairo. It may not make a lot of sense to bring your entire staff on holiday with you-”
    “Many people of the Master’s position do,” Weston said simply , “if it makes them feel more comfortable. It is a holiday for him, but not for us.”
    “Right,” Kit nodded. “And I’m no good to him if I don’t know where I’m goin’.”
    Weston smiled and nodded. “He was asking for you,” he said quietly.
    “What’s that?” she asked.
    “Something about the car that he wishes you to hire upon our arrival,” Weston said, before leaning in toward her slightly and speaking much more quietly. “He is quite restless. I expect he is bored of being by himself.”
    Kit blinked in surprise. “You’re up there with him,” she said.
    Weston nodded. “He does not really know me,” he said with a smile and a nod toward the curtain that separated the plane. Kit stood and walked up the aisle. She heard the change in tone of the whispers behind her as she did so and did her best to ignore it. She moved past the curtain and saw him there, surrounded by books of his own. Everything on Egyptian legend and mysticism he could lay his hands on at short notice. They had all been opened, cast aside as useless and later retrieved when they were found to be no less useless than anything else. One of the planet’s most powerful sorcerers was up to something in Egypt, and got in over his head. Nothing they could find in a pile of books was going to properly prepare them for whatever lay ahead.
    They were both straining at the leash – a mystery awaited them to which they had not a single clue and which they could not even discuss, not with the entire staff straining to hear from the other side of the curtain. He passed her a note with some instructions that made her smile, and they spent ten minutes engaged in an entirely pretend conversation about cars, mostly for the benefit of the listeners, and because neither one of them wanted her to go back to her seat just yet.
    Kit made her way back down the aisle to her books. Soon they would land in Cairo and their work could begin. In the meantime, she had one tiny scrap of fact that she kept in tight to keep from grinning like a maniac.
    He had missed her too.

Five
     
    August Fenwick paced restlessly in his vast, airy room atop the Imperial Hotel. The instructions he had passed to Kit on the plane had been based on the presumption that within an hour of checking in to the hotel he would be alone in the room he intended to take, the suite on the South-West corner of the building. But the time was getting close, and Weston seemed determined to unpack every item in Fenwick’s cases himself, right down to the false bottoms, of which Fenwick was now very glad. Were it not for the possibility of a customs inspection, he might not have used them at all, and Weston would now be wondering in which drawer his new master would like his throwing stars and combat boomerangs.
    Fenwick stepped out onto the landing and felt the hot, dry air hit him as if he had been struck in the chest. The sun was high in the sky and seemed impossibly close. Below, the wide streets and avenues of the city’s downtown were teeming with life. Cairo. It had been years since he had been here, but it was just as he remembered, at least this part of it was. A thoroughly modern city, bustling with activity that somehow still seemed to belong to another world. He wouldn’t have to step very far away from the newer sections of the city, with all of its British influence, to find that other world. Ancient and fascinating at times, backward and crushingly poor in places. At night this city seethed with the danger inherent in the darkness as much as any other did. But now there was a new hunter in the night, and one who would not quit until