He ran to her and knelt down. “What happened?”
“It was a short fight,” Tenzin said, instinctively reaching for her sword. “Inaya, not Ziri. She lived. I lived. It was amusing, but it mostly felt like a distraction.”
“Do you think your firestorm hurt one of the elders?”
She cocked her head to the side as Ben took a handkerchief from his pocket and wet it in the fountain.
He started cleaning the blood off Tenzin’s face. “Yours?”
“Inaya’s.” She pursed her lips. “Why didn’t Ziri come himself?”
“I don’t know. Are you insulted?”
“A little bit. Inaya and I parried for a short time, but it was… a distraction, as I said.”
“Ziri was getting the others away.”
She nodded. “Probably.”
“You didn’t say whether you think your fire tornado hurt anyone.”
“I suspect if anyone was injured, it was the earth vampire who was digging for them.”
“Expendable?”
“For them? Perhaps.”
“Saba wasn’t the one doing the digging,” Ben said. “Why would they get someone else when the world’s most powerful earth vampire is on your team?”
Tenzin snorted. “I’m sorry, were you expecting Saba to dig in the ground like a commoner?”
He raised his eyebrows. “I guess you’re right.”
“You really don’t understand royalty, do you?”
“I’m American,” he said. “And I don’t even watch The Crown. I really don’t get the fascination, to be honest.”
Tenzin pushed his hand away. He’d cleaned up the blood and was just fussing over her. He knew that; it didn’t make him want to fuss any less.
“They’re searching for Aksumite treasuries,” she said. “Just as we are.”
“So neither Saba nor Arosh knows where the bone scroll is.”
“No.” Tenzin sat up straight. “What if it was destroyed?”
“How?”
“Saba and Arosh destroyed all the Aksumite treasuries they could find. They killed the princes who could claim the throne and even burned churches after they ransacked them. What if one of the things they burned was the bone scroll?”
Ben sat back on his heels. “So we’re wasting our time?”
“No, that doesn’t make sense. She would have taken anything of real value before Arosh started the fires.” Tenzin shook her head. “I’m feeling lost, Benjamin. There is something we are not seeing, some purpose behind all this that doesn’t make sense.”
“Maybe you’re just tired.” Ben tucked her hair behind her ear and lowered his voice. “Take some of my blood, Tenzin. Get some rest. Maybe you’ll think more clearly if you sleep, even for just a few hours.”
Tenzin shook her head. “She knows where we are.”
“She can’t get to us during the day. Even Saba isn’t immune to sunlight.”
She turned her head. “Beatrice has discovered something.”
Ben followed her eyes and saw his aunt waiting on the edge of the courtyard, leaning against a stone pillar. “What’s up, B?”
“Come into the library,” his aunt said. “I have a theory.”
Ben waited in the library while Tenzin went to change out of her bloodstained clothes. He stared at the books his aunt had laid open, mulling over what Tenzin had said.
Saba and Arosh were searching for old treasuries too, but wouldn’t Saba know where all of them were?
Unless she’d simply forgotten. It had been well over a thousand years since she’d sat on the Ethiopian throne.
Or perhaps there were treasuries that she’d missed; that was probably the most likely. The one they’d found in Amba Guba was obviously untouched, and it was definitely Aksumite. There could be more.
Saba could have razed the mountain they had battled on with Arosh. While the Fire King couldn’t re-form the earth, Saba could. She pulled islands from the sea and remade the earth on a whim. She could have had the earth swallow them in one gulp if she wanted.
But she hadn’t.
None of it made sense.
Beatrice spoke. “Tenzin said you saw Saba in Addis.”
“Yes, in the garden with Hirut.”
She shook her head. “Giovanni and I were there, Ben. Neither one of us saw her.”
“I don’t know what to tell you. I know it was strange, but I’m positive it was her. I remember…” His mind reached back to the first time he’d encountered the mother of the immortal race. “I remember her from Rome. The scent of her. The feeling of her otherness. I’m positive that the woman serving us coffee in the garden that night was Saba.”
Beatrice shook her head slowly. “It was a human woman.”
“No.” Ben’s eyes didn’t waver. “It was her.”
“Why would she… reveal herself to you and not to Gio and me?”
“I don’t know that any more than you do, B. But I’m telling you, I know who I saw.”
Beatrice frowned, but she said nothing else. “Tenzin is coming. I’ll explain what I found when she gets here.”
It annoyed him that Beatrice could often sense Tenzin before he could. Her sire had been Tenzin’s mate, so the blood tie between them was unusually strong. Tenzin’s blood mixed with Beatrice’s sire was the likely reason that his aunt didn’t sleep much. Of course, like fire vampirism, day-walking was also a genetic quirk that simply appeared in some vampires.
It often led to insanity and could be passed through the blood. Tenzin had told him once that many day-walkers didn’t live very long and they rarely sired immortal children. Who wanted to pass on the curse of never-ending wakefulness?
His partner arrived seconds later and went to him, sitting next to him on the short sofa and snuggling into his side.
“Hi. Feel better?”
She nodded and rested her chin on his shoulder. “I took a shower. I had blood in my hair.”
“I hate it when that happens.”
“It’s very annoying.”
He kissed the tip of her nose. He couldn’t help it; she was lethally adorable. “Beatrice has something she wants to tell us.”
“Is it something that’s going to lead us to this damn scroll? I’m starting to get sick of this search.”
Beatrice said, “Yes, it might. And you’re only saying that because Ben didn’t let you loot that Aksumite treasury you found.”
Tenzin scowled. “I knew you and Giovanni would take his side.”
Beatrice smiled and picked up a book. “Give me a few minutes of your brain space and I think you might feel better.”
29
“How did you first hear that Arosh had found the bone scroll?” Beatrice asked.
“Zhang came to us in New York and told us,” Tenzin said. “Just the rumor of it was enough to put the elders in Penglai into a panic.”
“The bone scroll could alter the entire balance of the immortal world,” Beatrice said. “I’m not surprised Penglai was concerned. But how did Zhang hear about it?”