Warrior:. Zoe Archer
be forbidden to leave the country until the matter of Morris’s death had been resolved. That could take weeks, weeks that Morris had assured him he did not have. So Huntley carefully lay Morris’s body upon the ground and used the man’s coat to cover his face. His own clothing was utterly soaked in Morris’s blood. Getting on a ship in gore-drenched clothes was not an attractive or likely option. He had gone through his pack and found a fresh change, wrapping the ruined garments in a small blanket and stuffing them back into his pack. No point in leaving any clues to his identity when the constabulary did finally discover Morris.
Huntley had felt not a little guilty, leaving Morris alone in that dank alley, but there was nothing to be done for it. When he had presented the papers to the steamship Frances’s first mate, he was taken at his word to be Anthony Morris, of Devonshire Terrace, London, and was shown to a cabin far more luxurious than the one Huntley had voyaged in on his return. As the ship raised anchor and prepared to sail, the elegance of the cabin, with its brass fixtures and framed prints, could not compete with the restlessness of Huntley’s heart, and he found himself standing on the deck with a few of the other passengers, watching the shore of England recede.
“We’re going to Constantinople.” Huntley looked over and saw a young, genteel woman at his shoulder beaming at him. A sharp-eyed mama stood nearby, watching the flirtation of her charge, but had evidently gleaned enough information about “Mr. Morris” to render him an appropriate target for a girl’s shipboard romance. Huntley felt the stirrings of panic.
“This is my first international voyage,” the girl continued brightly. “I cannot wait to get away from boring old Shropshire.” She waited, smiling prettily, for his suitably charming response. A light sweat beaded on his back.
“Knew a fellow from Constantinople,” Huntley finally said. “Excellent shot. I once saw him shoot a mosquito off a water buffalo’s rump.”
The girl gaped at him, flushed, then turned and walked away as quickly as she could toward the protective embrace of her mother. After the mother glared at him, both females disappeared. Presumably they were off to spread the word that Mr. Morris was the most uncouth and ill-mannered man on the ship, including the one-eyed cook who was both a drunkard and an atheist.
Perhaps a little more time away from England would be for the best. Huntley would have to start his bride hunt when he came back, and, if that last exchange was any indicator, he sorely needed some refinement where his conversation with ladies was concerned. Fifteen years out of the company of respectable women tended to leave a mark on one’s manners.
He had an even larger enigma on his hands than the workings of the feminine mind. Reaching into his pocket, Huntley pulled out the remarkable compass and stared at its face. He rubbed his thumb over the writings that covered the case as if trying to decipher them by touch, then flipped open the lid to look at the four blades that comprised the four directions. Priceless and old, even he could see that. And full of mystery.
Yes, things were about to get very interesting. No Leeds and job and wife, at least, not yet. A wry smile touched his lips, and he turned his back on the receding English coastline to make his way back down to his cabin.
Chapter 2
A Mysterious Message Delivered
Urga, Outer Mongolia. 1874. Three months later.
An Englishman was in Urga.
The town was no stranger to foreigners. Half of Urga was Chinese; merchants and Manchu officials dealt in commerce and administering the Qing empire. Russians, too, had a small foothold in the town. The Russian consulate was one of the only actual buildings in a town otherwise almost entirely comprised of felt ger tents and Buddhist temples. So it was not entirely unexpected to hear of an outlander in town.
But Englishmen—those were much more rare, and, to Thalia Burgess, more alarming.
She hurried through what passed for streets, jostling past the crowds. Strange to be amongst crowds in a land that was mostly wide open. Like a typical Mongol, Thalia wore a del, the three-quarter-length robe that buttoned at the right shoulder to a high, round-necked collar, a sash of red silk at her waist. Trousers tucked into boots with upturned toes completed her ordinary dress. Though she was English, as was her father, they had both been in Mongolia so long that their presence was hardly remarked upon even by the most isolated nomads. No one paid her any mind as she made her way through the labyrinth of what approximated streets in Urga, toward the two gers she and her father shared.
She tried to fight the panic that rose in her chest. Word had reached her in the marketplace that an Englishman had come to this distant part of the world, which, in and of itself troubled her. But the worst news came when she learned that this stranger was asking for her father, Franklin Burgess. Her first thought was to get home at once. If the Heirs had come calling, her father would be unable to defend himself, even with the help of their servants.
As she hurried, Thalia dodged past a crowd of saffron-robed monks, some of them boys training to become lamas. She passed a temple, hearing the monks inside chanting, then stopped abruptly and threw herself back against the wall, hiding behind a painted pillar.
It was him. The Englishman. She knew him right away by his clothing—serviceable and rugged coat, khaki trousers, tall boots, a battered broad-brimmed felt hat atop his sandy head. He carried a pack, a rifle encased in a scabbard hanging from the back. A pistol was strapped to his left hip, and a horn-handled hunting knife on his right hip. All of his gear looked as though it had seen a lot of service. This man was a traveler. He was tall as well, half a head taller than nearly everyone in the crowd. Thalia could not see his face as he walked away from her, had no idea if he was young or old, though he had the ease and confidence of movement that came from relative youth. In his current condition, her father couldn’t face down a young, healthy, and armed man with an agenda.
Thalia pushed away from the pillar and dodged down a narrow passage between gers. Whoever he was, he didn’t know Urga as she did, and she could take shortcuts to at least ensure she arrived at her home before him. Thalia had been to Urga many times, and, since her father’s accident, they had been here for months. The chaos still did not make sense to her, but it was a familiar chaos she could navigate.
As she raced past the light fences that surrounded the tents, she had to thread past herds of goats and sheep, horses and camels, and dodge snarling, barely tamed dogs that stood guard. She snarled at a dog who nipped at her leg, causing the animal to fall back. Nimbly, she leapt over a cluster of children playing. As Thalia rounded past another ger, she caught one more glimpse of the Englishman, this time just a brief flash of his face, and, yes, he was young, but she did not see enough to ascertain more.
Perhaps, she tried to console herself, he wasn’t an Heir, merely a merchant or some scientist come to Outer Mongolia to ply his trade, and in search of the language and faces of his homeland. She smiled grimly. It didn’t seem likely. No one came to Urga without a specific purpose. And the Englishman’s purpose was them.
At last, she reached the two gers that made up the Burgess enclosure. Thalia burst through the door of her father’s tent to find him reading. The furnishings here were exactly as they might be in any Mongol’s ger, with only books in English, Russian, and French to indicate that she and her father were from another country. She allowed herself a momentary relief to see him unharmed and alone. Franklin Burgess was fifty-five, his black hair and beard now dusted with silver, green eyes creased in the corners with lines that came from advancing age and nearly a lifetime spent out of doors. He was her sole parent, had been for almost her entire twenty-five years, and Thalia could not imagine her world without him. She might as well try to picture what life might be like without the sun. Cold. Unbearable.
At her hurried entrance, he set aside his book and peered at her over his spectacles.
“What is it, tsetseg?” he asked.
Thalia quickly explained to him what she had learned, and her father frowned. “I saw him,” she added. “He didn’t know where he was going, but he wasn’t panicking. He seemed used to dealing with unfamiliar situations.”
“An