He was not well; something had oozed up from the bowels of this godforsaken continent on the bottom of the world and gotten into his guts. The temperature under the towering evergreen forest of the Parana Region should have had him feeling just right. But cold unsettling chills rode his spine and spread icy claws into the base of his skull. He sweated profusely, as if overheated, but was chilled to the bone.

Why, it is the dry season. I should not be suffering from fever.

Could it be the case?

Bah, they are savages.

His every hair hurt, his every ache accompanied by nausea. Finally though, his torment was about to abate. The fanatical aborigine cultists be damned! He would soon be ensconced with The Great Captain, savage of savages, in the bosom of this vast allied army, their mission all but accomplished. He stood just within the shadowed tent of Captain Richard Burton, late Counsel for the Queen to his Brazilian Emperor at Saul Palo, now attached to the Brazilian Army as an observer.

The man servants of the famous explorer and controversial diplomat—and renowned spy—had ushered him in under the spacious tent and had refreshed him with wine and fruit, while The Captain finished his business with The General.

In just a moment or two I will be allied with The Supreme Player in The Game, the two of us bound for coast and eventually Queen—or at least His Lordship—with this astounding treasure!

Yes, he comes!

Douglas Peake held the black robe, stolen from those who had once trusted him, and donned as a disguise while in their territory, in his left hand. Within this ages-old garment was now wrapped the coveted spiral case, that most odd leather satchel with the brass handle. To go about dressed in such a robe in allied territory would have meant death. His torn dress pants and jacket hung about him in tatters, and his feet were barely contained by the remnant of his riding boots; eight of his ten toes exposed to the elements. He did still, however, projecting the haughty air of a British officer, and a gentleman.

Douglas had been on the run through the humid bush lands of the Matto Grosso, and now beneath the towering subtropical evergreen forests of the Parana Region, for a month. Hostilities between cultic landlocked Paraguay on one side, and massive Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay—with whom Paraguay did not even share a border—were now years old, and the conflict had taken a brutal toll on the Paraguayan population. Even so, a handful of their best men pursued him through enemy territory.

As attaché to the British Counsel at Asuncion he had supposedly been on hand to assist his superior in advising their hosts against this ruinous war, and then in seeking a less than ruinous settlement. For four years he had served as a military advisor for an ostensible peace mission. He had been mistrusted by the President’s men, but accepted by the Black Robes, the tight-knit cult of homegrown ‘Jesuits’ who saw themselves as the suicidal stewards of their nation; a mere thirty fanatical primitives battling the might of the modern world in the insane hope of triggering the Second Coming. It was these remarkable men who he had betrayed. In their eyes he had literally spit upon God.

In reality Douglas Peake was a player in the Great Game, a spy for Queen and Country…

The chills were nearly unbearable, preventing him, as his knees buckled, to even properly consider the briefing and request for aid he was about to level at the Great Man—the intrepid explorer of dark continents and expert on everything to do with the inferior races.

Douglas was becoming delirious, repeating and reordering and sifting recollections real and imagined in his faltering mind’s eye.

He recalled vaguely—with a chill of guilt, perhaps—that he had earned the trust of the Thirty Robes, the secret order of homegrown Jesuit militants who had assumed the mantel of cultural stewardship—or so they claimed—a century gone, when the Pope had recalled the Jesuits from Paraguay so that the Indian peoples they had shepherded for over a century would be more easily exploited by the slave raiders of Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina.

No wonder rational calculation was not in the offing. Those wretched browns fight a defensive crusade.

Yes, and you have stolen their Ark of the Covenant!

It was nothing Lordship, I assure you…

Even his fantastical, fever-shaded hopes of official recognition could not escape the shivering of his pain-wracked body.

Have I been damned by their infernal Catholic enchantments?