by Kevin Hearne
Unfortunately, he couldn’t get his until he showed up. I checked my cell phone on the way down: no messages from Yusuf in Cairo.
I parked myself next to the stairs on the floor where I’d found Hamal and settled down to wait. Elkhashab would be coming, I felt sure, to try out the Grimoire of the Lamb as soon as possible. And he’d do it at the altar with the Amun idols, not anywhere else, and when he did, I’d take a pound of flesh for Hamal and those other poor kids.
If Elkhashab didn’t come back soon, the authorities might swarm down here and take care of everything, because Hamal would eventually start talking. I’d rather inform the authorities myself, though, after the grimoire was safely back in my hands.
It occurred to me to wonder why archaeologists had never found these chambers. They were buried deep, no doubt, and there wasn’t a convenient pyramid above ground shouting, “Here’s where all the plunder is!” but they had all kinds of little electromagnetic radar scanner doodads these days to search for chambers like these. My guesses were that Elkhashab had spoofed their findings with his ritual practice or greased some palms—or else the real Sobek was exercising himself to keep his treasures hidden. Considering how eager Bast was to have her book returned to her, I didn’t think it unreasonable to expect Sobek to be just as protective of his legacy.
During the archaeological orgy at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Egyptian gods reveled in the attention they were getting around the world. But I knew that not everything had been found, and I’m sure the joy of the gods ebbed away when they saw that the new attention they received did not translate into new worshippers. They were still keeping plenty of secrets. This place was one of Sobek’s.
The more time I had to think, the more I began to respect Elkhashab’s cleverness. He clearly had the talent and the stomach to do what was necessary to deal with demonkind, but he must have realized that continuing to kidnap and kill kids was simply unsustainable to do all he wanted to do. But if he could accomplish basically the same sorts of things by dispatching lambs instead of children, well, he could continue that ad infinitum. Nobody cared if you slaughtered lambs. They expected you to slaughter them when they sold them to you.
A splash and a terrified bleat let me know that Elkhashab had finally arrived, lamb in tow. He’d feed his giant croc and then enter the room directly below. I drew Fragarach as silently as I could to get ready and crouched near the staircase.
The bleating continued and grew louder, and Elkhashab’s quiet cursing could be heard underneath it.
“I’m going to tranquilize the next one and have done with it,” he muttered. “Can hardly wait to sacrifice you. There. Stay there.”
More bleating, then a soft plop as Elkhashab dropped something—perhaps the grimoire?—on the altar. “There, Nebwenenef. I have brought it, you see?” he said, his voice full of victory. There was rustling from what sounded like several plastic bags being set down and dull impacts from the contents inside hitting stone. A sharp metallic ring announced a knife being yanked from its sheath.
“But, first, I have older business to conduct. Hamal!” He crooned the name, lengthening the last syllable. I nearly snarled aloud. Most serial murderers don’t want to know the names of their victims. It’s easier to sleep at night if you have killed only victims instead of people with names and families. Elkhashab was a different kind.
I hadn’t planned on him coming up here—I imagined sneaking down while he was busy doing something else—but if he wanted to stick his head up through that hole, so be it. It would be a cleaner and quicker death for him than I’d anticipated.
Silently shifting so that I’d be behind his head when he came up the stairs, I cocked my sword hand back. His boots made a dull, hollow sound on the stairs. His white cap rose out of the hole like a giant marshmallow, then the back of his neck, and I swung—but he must have heard or sensed something, because he ducked back down and Fragarach whiffed, clanging loudly against the staircase’s main support.
“Shit! Who’s there?” Elkhashab cried.
I cursed silently and moved away from the stairwell. Only an idiot stays where the enemy can locate him.
“Is that you, Hamal? How did you escape?” The sorcerer thought about it and then realized that didn’t make much sense. A ten-year-old boy wouldn’t hang around to ambush him when he had an escape route handy. Elkhashab’s conscious mind slowly caught up with what his subconscious had absorbed.
“No. That was a sword. It’s you. The American wizard.” He switched to English. “I know you’re there, O’Sullivan. I don’t know how you found this place, but you’re going to die here.”
He didn’t say anything else, and I was faintly disappointed. I’d been hoping for a longer monologue. Perhaps he was waiting for me to respond? Fat chance of that. I wasn’t going to sneeze or fart or do anything else to give away my position, least of all stick my head down the hole. Nor was he going to give me another free strike. It was something of an impasse.
He was listening hard. I heard nothing but the occasional bleat of the lamb. Elkhashab grew weary of that after a while and began to move. He struck a couple of matches to light some candles on his altar. A bowl or two got picked up and put down again. He muttered unintelligibly; either it was just very low volume or it was a language I didn’t understand.
A sharp intake of breath—a hiss of pain. What the fuck was he doing? The mumbling resumed, but it quickly rose in volume until it was distinguishable as a chant in an absurdly old language, one with lots of gutturals and fricatives.
Gods below! He was summoning a demon, using his own blood so he could send it up here to off me. If he was occupied doing that, then he couldn’t be watching the stairwell to take a potshot at me; he had to concentrate on the ritual. I decided to risk a peek.
Padding forward to the well, I stretched out prone on the floor, then held on to the edge with my right hand as I dropped my head and left shoulder down into the stairwell far enough to steal a quick look.
The light coming up from the lower chamber was a yellow-orange, but as I descended it turned red, and a sound like someone slamming a refrigerator door really hard foomped and rattled the staircase.
“Yes!” Elkhashab cried, and the light turned yellow-orange again. My eyes dropped below the ceiling to catch the crocodile priest in the midst of an ecstatic fist pump. He faced a demon in his circle of summoning, ignoring the choking brimstone fumes that filled the chamber. I could tell he was winding himself up for a cackle of glee before he told the spawn to eat me, but then a deep-fried gravel voice answered in much the same tone of victory, and Elkhashab’s face went slack as he realized something had gone horribly wrong.
“No!” His tone had changed to the raw falsetto of pants-crapping panic. He was discovering that he could not cow his personal demon into submission with a broken seal, or coerce it to do his bidding with the seal of coercion broken as well, or indeed even banish it now. The scratch of my fingernail and his hurry to kill me had slain him. All he could do anymore was scream as the demon’s claws opened up his belly and his guts slithered out. He screamed for a long time. The demon made sloppy chewing noises as he ate Elkhashab alive.
Justice.
I pulled myself up as silently as I could, but the demon had to know I was there. A demon’s ability to sense prey was unmatched. He’d come for me next, but if I tried to escape up the stairwell, he’d come for me sooner and I’d be in a poor position to defend myself. As it was, I had a couple of advantages most mortals did not: I had a cold iron amulet bound to my aura, which protected me from most magic, and my sword cut through any armor. Demons didn’t wear chain and plate or any other kind of traditional armor, but some of them had magical armor that made them immune to conventional weapons. Fragarach wasn’t conventional.
I backed away from the staircase, because I had a feeling the demon was faster than me, even if I juiced myself up. I went ahead and did that, of course. If I made him come all the way up and locate me b
efore he could charge, I’d have enough time to take my own shot. He might, in his hubris, even let me take a free swing at him.
Elkhashab finally died, and the demon seemed to lose interest. No fear and pain there anymore. The lamb, I realized, hadn’t bleated in a while. I didn’t know if it was dead or if it was hoping the demon wouldn’t notice it. I hadn’t seen it when I played peekaboo, but neither had I looked for it.
The demon was free to do as he wished. The one who had summoned him was dead; all bindings were off. The lamb, if it was still around, wasn’t much of a soul. The demon came after me instead.
He made no noise on the steps with anything that could be called feet; there was simply a sort of deep drumroll and he was there—glowing orange like banked embers around the edges, a mouth and a distended stomach and two pairs of huge arms to shove food down the maw. He didn’t have any legs at all; his black body was rounded like a balloon. He moved on his knuckles, and his mouth sneered at me.
“Khaja gorl mahka …” the demon began. The voice sounded like a grumpy Tom Waits mixed with an acetylene torch. I didn’t let him finish. I didn’t understand him anyway. I lunged much faster than he expected and lopped off his front left arm at the elbow.
The creature was shocked but utterly savage in reply; he roared and swung at me with his right, able to stay balanced on the back two arms, and my attempt to block cost me a broken left wrist. Both of us staggered back, wounded and wary now. I decided that attacking was my best strategy; the demon was probably unused to playing defense, and I had to make the most of my few advantages, especially since I was operating on a limited supply of magic.
I brought the sword around high on his left, precisely where it would be most difficult for the demon to block. He rotated to his side to avoid the blow and countered with a swing from his back right arm. I’d anticipated this and pivoted away, much as he had. Those back arms didn’t have huge claws, I noticed. Those were used primarily for movement.
He was faster than me but crippled and unused to fighting against swords. All the demon had seen so far was two slashes. He might have concluded that this was all I could do. I feinted another hack at his left side and then twisted my wrist, sweeping the sword down and across my body to meet the right cross I knew would be coming. As Fragarach arced up, it caught the demon’s wrist from underneath and severed the clawed hand. This move left my right side exposed, however.
The demon lost his shit. Down to just the two back arms and seeing an opening, he launched off his back right, and his left fist hammered my ribs. They cracked and I went down, wondering what happened to all the air in the world.
I didn’t know how I was ever going to get up. My left wrist wouldn’t support me. My ribs wouldn’t let me roll to my right. I couldn’t breathe. I supposed it was okay, though. This seemed the type of demon to bring the fight to you—especially if you were vulnerable.
He had not landed gracefully, but the creature was shifting for a charge. I lifted Fragarach’s blade to make sure it couldn’t be trapped against the floor, then folded up my legs to reduce the target. That was about all I could manage without any air. I gasped for some and kept an eye on the demon.
He let loose with a thunderous roar scented with all the joys of ass and pestilence. The faint whiff I got made me grateful that I couldn’t inhale a lungful of it. The beast’s teeth were mismatched ebony punji sticks, showcases of rot and an example to all who refuse to floss.
One massively knuckled hand swung forward, planted itself, and then seemed to buckle at the elbow. It stopped and swayed. The loss of blood—ichor, rather—from two severed limbs was taking its toll.
The creature spat, “Barg rah!” That was a “Fuck it!” if I ever heard one. His back arms churned and his damn black teeth were sunk into the side of my calf before I could move. I grunted and swung Fragarach at the top of his head, shearing off a slice like a cantaloupe. The blow rocked him back, and the teeth popped out of my leg before he fell over and dissolved into a sulfurous puddle of goo. The corporeal form of demons never lasts long once they’re unbound.
I expelled a sigh of relief and relaxed for a moment—or at least as much as I could, considering my injuries. But the stench of the room and my pressing need to get in touch with the earth drove me to action. Despite being fully charged when I came back down, I had burned a lot of juice to boost my speed, and I didn’t have enough left to do any serious healing. I compromised by shutting off the pain so I’d be able to move and concentrate. My calf, while probably infected with something nasty from the demon’s teeth, was still capable of functioning. Getting up was a bit of a chore, with cracked ribs and a broken wrist, but the legs weren’t in terrible shape, and I could go back downstairs and retrieve the grimoire—or, better yet, destroy it along with the writings of Nebwenenef.
Figuring I was all alone, I kind of clomped down the metal stairs when I should have kept quiet. It prevented me from hearing the noise in the next room until I reached the stone floor. I froze at the bottom of the stairwell and heard the chalky grind and thud of stone scraping against stone. The jaundiced light of yellow bulbs revealed a disturbing shadow moving on the floor. It grew as it approached the door to the chamber I thought of as the crocodile lounge. Being careful to make no sound this time, I minced behind the altar. Elkhashab’s torn and partially eaten remains littered the front, I noticed, along with his plastic grocery bags. The grimoire lay open between the candles he had lit before his death. A tiny noise of fear drew my eyes to the wall on my left, back near the door. The lamb was still alive and cowering near the boxes of untold treasures. The shadow took on a solid presence at the doorway, and I crouched down out of sight as it entered with heavy, grinding footsteps.
Whatever it was scared the bejesus out of the lamb, for it screamed and quite probably shat where it stood. I risked a peek around the corner of the altar, figuring that whatever had entered the room would be focused on the lamb.
It was one of the Sobek sarcophagi—or, rather, the front of it—the lid now ambulatory, a lurching stone-and-metal horror with its backside missing and much of the paint worn away, but possessing a full complement of limestone teeth in a maw of basalt that it was now able to open. The legs functioned like articulated action figures, with stiff movements allowed by cracks in the stone around the knees and hips. The gilded bronze scepter of power that looked so fascinating when it was art turned abruptly sickening when it was wielded on living flesh. That’s what the unholy thing did—it crushed the lamb’s spine with the scepter in its right hand, then tossed away the ankh in its left, and picked up the body.
I had a lot to process and little time to do it.
First, how had this thing come to life? Was it, in fact, living, or was it undead? That was an important distinction for me, since Druidry forbade me to harm living things through binding or unbinding. On the one hand, its stone body and the fact that it had torn itself free of a sarcophagus suggested something undead or animated along the lines of a golem, but on the other—what if it was a manifestation of Sobek?
That was possible but unlikely to my mind. Back in Cairo, Bast had manifested first as a cat and then took a semi-human form, so it would have made more sense for Sobek to take over the living crocodile in the next room than to animate the sculptured lid of a sarcophagus.
Said sculpture didn’t pause to provide me with an explanation. It placed the head of the lamb between its black jaws and tore it off with limestone teeth, then spat it out hurriedly and lifted the carcass above its head, letting the blood drain from the body into its mouth.
It didn’t swallow because it didn’t possess a throat, just a closed-off surface like a hand puppet—but the blood didn’t spill out the sides either. Instead, it was absorbed into the stone. I silently triggered my magical sight, which drained my magic down to dangerous lows, but it revealed to me that this thing wasn’t Sobek—it didn’t have the blinding white aura of a god. Instead of being suffused all over with the white power of magic,
the sculpture had its power centered at the back of the mouth, where the blood was pooling and disappearing. In other words, it was ordinary rock and metal animated by an extraordinary spirit. I would ponder later whose spirit it might be and why and how it had animated that sarcophagus at that particular time. A better question to ponder right then was how I was going to prevent it from tearing off my head too and gulping my blood like an energy drink.
Running away sounded attractive. The sheer size of the thing—seven feet tall and the width of a bookcase—would make navigating the spiral staircase difficult. But I didn’t want to leave behind the grimoire—nor did I wish this thing to grow any more powerful than it already was. How to defeat it?
Fragarach wouldn’t do me any good. It was great against armor but not so good against rock. Few martial arts were great against rock, now that I thought of it. Probably because one so rarely sees possessed sarcophagi.
Perhaps I could unbind its feet—which were only half feet anyway—and it would fall down and go boom. It was worth a shot, especially since I’d have nothing left afterward but some dregs to keep my injuries from distracting me.
I banished my magical sight mentally by using my charm, but there was no way to perform the unbinding silently. I whispered the words, of course, but even that sound echoed in the stone chamber and alerted the thing that it wasn’t alone. It stopped drinking blood, cocked its head, then turned my way. It spotted me peeking from behind the altar as I finished the unbinding and energized it.
The lamb dropped from its grasp, forgotten, and its mouth opened wide. I think it would have bellowed or hissed if it had any vocal cords, and I kind of wished it did, since its silence was creepy. It whipped its left hand down to point at the floor near its ankles. Nothing happened—visually, at least. I could imagine very well what had happened in the magical spectrum, for that gesture was familiar to me, thanks to Elkhashab. My earth magic had just been canceled out by Sobek’s water magic, a small flood drowning my bindings, and now I had nothing of significance left.