The Fire-Moon

by Isabel Pelech

  “In Abajahn they call it a thief’s lantern or a tomblight. Grave robbers are supposed to use them. It casts a narrow beam and it doesn’t ruin night vision. Keep it shut for now; we’ve got enough moon. And follow me. Stealthily.”

  They left Beket peering nervously over his shoulder at the stick Aeret had left to “guard” him.

  Aeret kept to the deep shadows and uneven ground beside the road. With his long desert cloak muffling his human shape, he blended in more than Teshar would have expected. She didn’t know about herself, but with a bit of concentration she at least didn’t make the rocks clatter as she followed him. They paused under the arch, a smooth, eerie thing that no human hand had made, and yet seemed fantastically unlikely for nature. “Wind-carved,” Aeret murmured. “The wind shaped all of this, wearing it away with sand. They say this is what Amon Wind-god does for his amusement, down through the centuries. His priests say he’s the oldest god of all, you know.”

  Teshar shivered. She didn’t want to think of the span of time involved in such carving, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to envision the wind as a personality, the mad sculptor of these hills. Amon was a greatly worshipped god, but he was also mysterious, enigmatic. Much less humanlike than Oseros, or Eset. The god of secrets.

  Aeret stopped her with an outstretched hand and a low, “Hah!” He went on, “That’s the hill, I imagine?”

  “Yes.” Now that Teshar looked at it again, it was—peculiar. An oddly shaped hill even in this landscape.

  “Indeed. Amon had nothing to do with that. And I imagine you must have been well-dizzied by the control spell, to miss it the first time. Take a closer look, girl.”

  Teshar narrowed her eyes and traced the slope’s worn outline. Then she blinked. “It’s built. It’s . . .”

  “It’s a primitive pyramid.” Aeret started moving again, apparently meaning to work his way around the base.

  “Wait—wait.” Teshar scurried to catch up with him. “There’s some sort of temple-thing on the top. Temples don’t go on top of pyramids. And who built it—for which Emperor—and why here? And—”

  “I said primitive pyramid. See how the sides were made like steps, and not smooth? This isn’t Khemtesh work. I think it’s from before. Before the Emperor. Before the Empire. We have no idea how such distant ancestors might have used pyramids.”

  They crept along a bit further. Teshar couldn’t help glancing up at the too-regular shape beside them. Perhaps this wasn’t a Khemtesh pyramid, but everyone knew that a pyramid was a Emperor’s tomb. Before they had Emperors, presumably they had warring kings, or desert chieftains.

  Desert chieftains wouldn’t like their rest disturbed anymore than a Emperor did.

  Maybe that’s what Utsepekt is.

  Beket called him a prince. Maybe he’s a barbarian king.

  Maybe they put this pyramid so far out here because he was a wicked sorcerer-king, and they wanted him far away from everyone. What does he really look like under that mask, if he’s been dead for a thousand years?

  They rounded one of the back corners, coming up behind a huge stone cube that had tumbled from the structure. Teshar stifled a squeak and grabbed Aeret by the back of his robe. “Down! Soldiers!”

  He crouched down readily enough, but twisted to give Teshar an incredulous look. “Soldiers here?”

  Teshar poked her head back around the side of the stone. “Two men, standing with their backs to the pyramid. They aren’t moving. They have drawn sickle-swords. And . . .” There was something wrong with the picture. Teshar stared at them, moving her head from side to side to get the best angle. “Ha! And they’re stone, just stone statues.” And you raised the alarm for nothing, silly girl. Nevertheless, the feeling of danger danger danger was still flooding through her, and she added, “I think maybe he put the stick-snake spell on them, to scare people off.” Teshar edged around the block. “I think there might be a door right behind them.”

  “Teshar, be—”

  Teshar stood up.

  In slow unison, both stone faces turned to look at her.

  They were larger than humans, and carved completely from stone, down to the details of their armor. Their eyes were just eye-outlines chiseled into expressionless faces, but it didn’t seem to stop them from seeing. Teshar froze instinctively, like a frightened rabbit, and noticed that the sickle swords were real steel, glinting like darkened silver in the moonlight.

  Then they came at her. Not deadly-slow as she had expected, like a stalking cat. This was more like a crocodile’s final lethal surge up from the water.

  Absurdly, Teshar flung her hands up to protect her eyes.

  It was lucky that she did so. Instead of a descending blade, she was hit by a solid wave of sand. It pummeled her and forced its way into her mouth, beneath her clothes; for a moment, Teshar felt that she was being assaulted by the desert itself. And then she landed on her backside—on sand—and looked frantically around even as she spluttered the grit out of her mouth.

  Aeret was standing between her and the remaining statue. As she watched, he made a tiny gesture and the unnatural thing began to crumble. Its sword fell from fingers suddenly made sand, and its feet dissolved beneath it. The carven face didn’t change expression or react in any way as it toppled forward and shisshed apart, becoming nothing more than a part of the desert.

  Teshar got to her feet. “Um. What were—”

  “Ushabtis.” Aeret glared at her, and Teshar ducked her head in wordless apology. “Guardian ushabtis. Sorcerers make them to guard the most important tombs. And to guard the tombs in the Valley of the Nameless—to keep anything from getting out. In fact, those two looked like they might have been stolen from the Valley.” After a moment, he added, “You’re right. There is a door.”

  Teshar picked up her tomblight. For a wonder, it hadn’t even gone out when she fell.

  With the worn, tumble-down state of the pyramid, the doorway looked almost like a natural cave. The door itself was wooden, and thick, and, as far as Teshar could tell in the red light of Aeret’s lantern, new. Perhaps he’s not a barbarian prince. Perhaps he just moved in here. He certainly seems to have done some renovation—ush-whatevers from before the Empire wouldn’t have steel swords, would they? Teshar remembered from her brief temple education that steel was a fairly new thing in the world, although there were already “traditional” secrets to its production.

  Those faces . . . brr! She would have nightmares, she thought, about being looked at by sketched-on eyes. “Aeret?”

  “What?” There was a click, and Aeret made a noise of satisfaction and eased open the door.

  “What’s the Valley of the Nameless?”

  “It’s where they inter criminal sorcerers. Most of the tombs are just sealed with spells, to prevent the spirit from going anywhere but onward to Oseros’s judgment. A few of the people have had their names ritually erased, in hopes that the spirit will forget everything it once knew and be less of a menace.” Aeret played his light inside the door and stepped through. “I worked there for a year. A sorcerer-acolyte has to. Normally, I rather like a necropolis. Quiet. No idiots asking stupid questions. But that valley—” In the heavy blackness beyond the door, Teshar could barely see him shake his head.

  She swallowed, eased inside, and opened up her own tomblight. “Wow.”

  “Wow what? The carvings?” Worn bas-relief figures were interspersed with hieroglyphs—at least, Teshar thought they were hieroglyphs. As in a temple, not even a handspan of space was left uncovered. But there wasn’t a trace of brightening paint on the scenes, and they were in an unfamiliar style, so much so that Teshar could barely follow the stories they were telling. Here, a group of people—men? women?—carried something on their backs. Next, they were lying down, in an angular, tumbled-together sort of way. A man in robes brandished a knife over someone kneeling, and a woman with a lion’s mane snarled in the sky above him.

  “Sephret,” Teshar murmured. “Or something like her—but . . .” />
  “But a shadow, or a dark reflection.” Aeret was looking over her shoulder. “Your goddess can help or harm; this is a more limited creature. In the countries far to the east, they call her Lamash. In Haieln, Manticora. I hope this is just informative art, designed to show the darkness as well as the light. Otherwise, I begin to be quite nervous about what they might have worshipped here.”

  He moved onward. Teshar followed, deciding not to ask any more questions for a while. The answers so far had consistently failed to reassure.

  She was silent for several ‘lengths of hallway. Then, “Aeret? Wait.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. I’m nervous all of the sudden—nervous-er, I mean. A different sort of scared.” She edged forward. “I know I was wrong about the ush-whatevers but I wonder—”

  The flat stone beneath her forward foot stopped being floor and went downward. Teshar pitched forward, arms wheeling, and felt Aeret’s hand on the back of her robe. He jerked her to a tooth-rattling stop and pulled her backwards, just in time to avoid being hit by the other end of the stone, descending on her from above. It was attached to the floor only by some sort of pivot in its middle; any pressure sent it wheeling end over end.

  And then it clicked into place, looking almost consciously malevolent to Teshar, and smugly indistinguishable from the rest of the floor.

  Aeret put her down. “Teshar?”

  Teshar found her voice. “Yes?”

  “I appreciate your strength of intuition. Next time, I would like you to appreciate it. And I acknowledge your great help in finding the traps and dangers of this place—but please stop.”

  “A-all right.”

  They went onward. Mindful of her narrow escape, Teshar concentrated on playing her narrow sliver of light back and forth across the floor. Beyond the two tomblights, it was darker than anything else she could think of. And the silence—had she really once thought the desert was silent?

  “Aeret?”

  “Whatever it is, please don’t set it off. What?”

  “I think—I think someone already did that for me. There used to be a side passage here, but look at it.”

  Aeret inspected the jumble of rocks. “Indeed. The traditional problem with a deadfall; once it’s down, it tends to stay down.”

  “Deadfall?”

  “Somewhere underneath that was a switch in the floor or some other sort of mechanism. When someone activated it, a nice portion of the ceiling came down, hence the ‘fall’ part. I’m sure you can deduce the ‘dead’ bit for yourself.” Aeret moved on. “I think we can safely say our adversary isn’t down that way. He would have to be a snake. The other direction . . . hmm.” There was the hallway they had been using, and then there was an archway to their right.

  “I think straight,” Teshar said, and then thought, which is a great way to make him choose the right-hand one, considering how I’ve been doing tonight.

  “Why?”

  “I think . . . in an ordinary pyramid, the Emperor would be at the center of things. Right? Because the Emperor is the most important thing in the pyramid. Whatever the important thing was here, I think it would be in the center—I think he’ll be in the center, because it would have the best room. And maybe passages leading out in all different directions.”

  “I would have to agree with you. And I would add that we almost certainly found a back door, or an escape route. I think it must have been fairly well concealed when this place was new.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of the traps. You haven’t noticed, but I think I spotted a place that was supposed to be a trip-rope-and-arrow setup. No string left, of course, either for the trip rope or the bowstrings, so it was harmless. But no-one puts traps where they intend people to walk every day. Either this was a back entrance, intended for an emergency and memorized only by a trusted few, or no-one living was supposed to use this pyramid.”

  “That makes sense.” Although, from what Teshar had heard, every pyramid was intended to be entered. People would want to bring offerings for the dead Emperor, servants would want to tend things every once in a while; a lot of people prayed to past Emperors, because they were easier to talk to than the pure gods, and more accessible than the living Emperor or Empress. The thought of a totally sealed pyramid—it sounded something like the tombs in the Valley of the Nameless. A prison for the unimaginably powerful.

  Teshar’s light crept across a place where a long bronze blade protruded from the floor. “And that was another one, wasn’t it? It’s supposed to stab you in the foot.”

  “Indeed. I think we should consider ourselves lucky that so many of these things have been disarmed by time. I may have served my time in the cities of the dead, but I am not an engineer. Much less the twisty-minded sort of engineer who is generally best at this kind of work.”

  “I don’t have to tell you not to touch anything, do I?” Aeret muttered. His lantern was just slivered open, but the contents of the room still glittered back at him. Some bronze, some silver, but mostly golden. It was, Teshar decided, a light like nothing else in the world, as mysterious and beautiful as a veil dancer.

  “Don’t worry.” For all their splendor, there was something disturbing about many of the statuettes and treasures in this room. Teshar saw a sun-mask, not gold, as one might expect, but covered entirely in little scaly chips of turquoise. The expression was contorted, as if the sun were snarling or screaming. Elsewhere, a woman statue made of gold struggled with a snake carved out of dark stone. The creature had a sort of lizard’s ruff, its face like a fanged and earless dog. There was no rhyme or reason to the way the riches were arranged; this was, Teshar thought, like some kind of Emperor’s garden shed. Everything was just piled. “Do you hear something?”

  “I might if you stopped talking.”

  Teshar stuck her tongue out at his back, but didn’t retort. She wasn’t entirely sure she had heard anything either. The silence in this place could get into a person’s mind, make you hear clickings and whisperings when they weren’t really there. Or else, perhaps, it amplified normal sounds to the level of alarm. She had thought, a little while back, that she heard a snake behind her, the regular shusshh-shusshh-shusshh of its coils keeping perfect time with her footsteps. It stopped when she stopped, and it moved when she moved, and she was just working up a bit of serious panic when she realized that the back hem of her cloak was brushing the stones.

  You never realized exactly how loud your pulse was before you went underground. Or the tick of a heating lantern chimney, which sounded like the clunk of some millennium-old trap.

  Or the irregular chhhrrrr . . . chhhrrr . . . chhhrrr of—what was that?

  Coins. Coins slipping down a pile of coins, right next to Aeret.

  Who hadn’t touched it. Aeret was inspecting another mask, a ferocious bearded man with six ruby eyes. “Some of this,” he remarked to himself, “belongs several seas east of here. And some of it, I’ve never even heard of. I wonder—raiding, trading, or—”

  “Aeret!”

  She saw the thing burrow out of the scintillating heap of golden money, exploding forth like an ant lion out of the sand. Except this insect was easily the length of her body, tarnished bronze, with a head like a caricatured human man. And it wasn’t an ant lion. It was a scorpion.

  Aeret was turning, but the tail was coming up faster.

  Teshar threw herself forward and grabbed the tail just below the stinger. And then she hung on it, using every particle of her weight to slow the deadly thing. She thought hope it’s not poisonous please don’t let it be poisonous, and, it’s not working, it’s too strong, as the tail lifted her entirely off the ground—

  And fell into unconnected sections, which rang shockingly loud against the tiled floor. They sounded like someone had dropped a hundred cowbells off a temple roof, all clang and clong and tunk and one “Ow!” as a particularly sharp-edged piece caught Teshar on the way down.

  “Are you all right?”

/>   Teshar looked down at the scorpion bits around her. Inside them, copper wire turned greenish and corroded even as she watched. “I’m fine,” she said shakily. “You know, you’re not bad at breaking things yourself.”

  “I do my humble best.” Aeret held up a hand suddenly. “Do you hear that?”

  That was faint, but there were clanks of purposeful activity in it, and human-sounding moans that nevertheless sent cold water down Teshar’s spine. “What is it?”

  “I’m not sure. But something knows that someone is down here.”

  They crept out of the treasure storehouse and into a room of stone.

  Teshar eyed the giant statues nervously, but even if they were ushabtis, they had already been assigned the job of holding the ceiling up. In a way, they were only the suggestions of human beings, the jagged outline to imply a face, a wide angle that evoked the bend of a knee. If the room had any sort of good light, it would have been impressive, even awe-inspiring. As it was, it was just another forbidding, disturbing space between them and— “Aeret?”

  “I see them,” Aeret snarled. Teshar looked up at him in shock, and then back at the objects in the middle of the room.

  They were sarcophagi.

  Sarcophagi—but not, Teshar realized, the right sort of sarcophagi. Richly painted, roughly human-shaped, with a stylized mask at the head to show who was inside—but the masks should have been serene, solemn. Instead, the mask nearest to Teshar had little stylized tears sliding down her cheeks, inlaid beads of blue-grey lapis lazuli. Her hands were crossed on her chest, as dignified as any Empress, but the metalworker had carefully depicted ropes around her wrists, so skillfully that Teshar felt she could make out the fibers.

  Without exception, the coffins were too short to belong to adult men and women. And there was writing. Sinuous writing, like the kind she had glimpsed for a moment through Inoheni’s mask.