I gave him a disbelieving look and whispered back, “I’m pretty sure you’re not powerful enough to counteract the spells of ancient Egyptian magicians.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“That’s depressing.”
While I fought to slow my heart rate, I wondered if this wasn’t an example of Samael’s dementia. He was alone out here. As his brain continued to lose itself in myths and magic, he had no one to straighten reality for him. That explanation was a lot more comforting than the possibility that an ancient demon had reached down and pulled a Roman lance from my hand while I slept. Was “it” the same demon that had killed Cleo? The thing that had leaned out from behind the tree to stare at me?
Roberto said, “Did you hear anything last night?” His eyes looked like wide blue moons.
“No.”
Moriarity put his arm around Samael’s hunched shoulders and guided him back toward the fire. “Samael, please, come and sit down by the fire. Let me make you a cup of tea. It will help calm your nerves. While I take care of Samael, why don’t you boys search for tracks?”
“Sure, we can do that,” Roberto said, and looked at me. “You go left. I’ll go right.”
“Got it.”
We began carefully walking in opposite directions around the circumference of the cave, searching for tracks in the main chamber, but also checking the adjacent chambers. Roberto stopped for an unusually long time in the guns and ammo cave before moving on.
It was hard for me to focus. I couldn’t quite get away from the scenery and scents of the Greek lowlands. I could still hear seabirds squawking in my ears and smell the salt in the air. The worst part was the certain knowledge that tens of thousands were depending upon me, and I didn’t know if I could save them. Strangely, it had never occurred to me that the legendary Marcus Antonius, the hero of Philippi, the man known as the new Dionysius, might have been frightened that day as he looked out across the Gulf of Ambracia at Marcus Agrippa’s fleet.
“Find anything?” Moriarity called.
“All the tracks in the cave belong to the four of us,” Roberto said.
I nodded in agreement, though I wasn’t sure I’d know a demon footprint if I saw it. Besides, Roberto was a much better tracker than I was. Every autumn he hunted deer and elk with his father.
Samael covered his elderly face with his hands and wept as though his heart were breaking. “It was in here! It was here!”
Moriarity crouched beside him. “My friend, are you sure you didn’t rise early and move your weapons? Perhaps you’ve forgotten.”
“How could I forget such a thing? It’s impossible. Someone or something took them. If it wasn’t you three, it must have been one of the monsters. Now I’m defenseless! They’re going to kill me. They’ll follow me until the moment is right and then—”
“You still have plenty of guns and ammunition in that rear chamber.”
“Those are for the extremists and thieves. Bullets won’t kill monsters, you fool. I need those ancient magical weapons!”
Moriarity dipped the old man a cup of last night’s tea from the pot and placed it in his hands. “Drink this. You’ll feel better, and don’t worry. Right after breakfast we’ll start searching for your weapons. I’ll bet we’ve found them within the hour.”
Samael clutched his cup hard and tried to take a sip, but his arms were shaking too badly. He lowered the cup to his lap. “Be careful. It’s waiting for one of us to step outside.” He shivered.
“Are you cold?” Pulling several branches from the woodpile, Moriarity placed them on top of the coals in the firepit. He blew gently upon them until flames fluttered to life, and firelight flickered over the walls and roof of the main chamber. “Give me just a few moments, Samael, and I’ll have breakfast made. That’ll warm you up.”
Samael sobbed. “James, you and the boys are not safe here. You must leave immediately.”
“Sure, that’s fine. Right after we find your weapons, we’ll pack up our things, and yours, and leave for Pelusium.”
Samael lifted his head and blinked up at Moriarity with tear-filled eyes. “Do you think the boys could search the boarded-up cave before breakfast?”
“Of course, they can. Can’t you, boys?”
Roberto and I stood like proverbial pillars of stone, glancing at each other. Clearly, neither of us wanted to search a cave that contained a captive demon.
“No, I’m sorry I asked. It’s too dangerous. Just leave me and go! Make me a wooden spear from an olive limb outside, and I’ll be all right. I’ve killed plenty of monsters before. I’ll break off their fangs and stab them in the livers. That’s how you do it. I’ve killed hundreds of them.”
“I will personally make you a spear, but I’m not leaving you here alone,” Moriarity replied in a soft voice. “You’re coming with us. We need you.”
“Yes, I’m sure I can find the grave again. Despite my blindness. I’ll find it.”
“While I’m making cereal for breakfast, the boys will search the boarded-up cave, won’t you, boys?” he repeated.
“Oh, yeah, sure,” I said. “We’ll do it.”
Roberto gave me a look like I’d lost my mind.
Samael stared blindly at the cave entry as though terrified of what might step through next. “Just you, Halloran. Leave Robert outside to stand guard. The instant you smell them, scream. Do you understand? You must not wait, or it will be too late to save you.”
“Oh, yeah. I will.”
Samael extended a crooked finger. “That small cave over there has a big stash of torches. I keep them for guests to use when they go out at night.”
“We have flashlights in our pockets,” Roberto said and drew out his motorcycle key with the pen light on the ring. “We’ll be okay.”
Moriarity rose to his feet. “While you boys get started, I’ll go fetch some water from the pond for cereal. If you’re not back in thirty minutes, I’m coming to look for you.”
He reached for the teapot on the tripod, unhooked it, and carried it outside.
When he was gone, I said, “Roberto, can you wait for me outside. I’ll be right there.”
“Yeah, sure.” He glanced suspiciously at Samael, then followed Moriarity out into the brightening dawn.
Samael was biting his lip, rocking back and forth, and whispering to himself in a language I thought might be ancient Egyptian.
I went over, crouched beside him, and said, “Sir, Cleopatra Mallawi asked me to give this to you.” I pulled the medallion from my pocket and placed it in the old man’s clawlike hand.
Samael sucked in a breath, then ran his fingers over the jewels and the Greek letters around the rim of the pendant. When he slowly lifted his blind eyes to me, I felt like I was caught in the frozen gaze of a long-dead magi.
Softly, for my ears alone, he said, “She’s been waiting for you for so long. It’s on the altar behind the pyramid. Hurry. Go. Before they understand why you are here.”
“What pyr—”
“Go.” He thrust a bony arm toward the cave entrance. “But the shabti must remain outside. If he tries to enter before you have completed her task, he will be lost forever. The demons will be watching you very closely now. Never forget that.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I stepped out into the faint lavender gleam of morning feeling completely confused.
The air was intensely fragrant, filled with the scent of olive blossoms and damp soil. Birds chirped. In every direction, the dunes glittered into infinity. I saw Moriarity bending down and filling the pot from the pond; Roberto stood about five paces away, hands on his hips, watching him.
When I started for Roberto, I saw sandal prints. The woven pattern, with gaps showing the holes in the bottoms, was pressed into the dirt. Samael’s missing sandals. The man’s trail led to the left, running alon
g the cliff face toward the demon cave.
“Roberto?” I knelt to get a better look at the sandal prints. “Did you see these tracks?”
He trotted back. “Yeah. Samael’s tracks.”
“He must have gone out during the night.”
“He’s old. He probably went out fifteen times to pee.”
As I rose to my feet, I said, “Why didn’t either of us hear him? He’s blind. He shuffles and makes noise. We should have heard him gathering up his weapons.”
“We were tired, Hal. Really tired. Especially you. For a while, I thought you were going to drop dead.”
“You weren’t the only one. I was having a really hard time at the end.”
A sudden thought struck me. Had I heard Samael gathering his weapons?
“Wait a minute. Last night, I had a really vivid dream. I dreamed of a battle, and I could hear clanking armor, jingling horse tack, crashing swords. Maybe I interpreted Samael’s noise as part of my dream.”
“Yeah, probably. Let’s follow these tracks, find the weapons, and get back for breakfast. I’m hungry.”
“Me, too.”
As we started walking along the base of the towering cliff, Roberto said, “I suspect the old geezer gathered up all the weapons and carried them outside to hide them. Poor old guy.”
“But why would he do that? He made such a big deal out of the fact that he needed them to fend off demons.”
Roberto studied the tracks that dimpled the sand ahead of us. “My grandpa used to do strange things, too. Toward the end, he was afraid my dad would take his guns away from him, so he’d hide them. I think he wanted his pistol as a last resort for when the pain got too bad. When he couldn’t find it, he’d call me up crying and begging me to come over to help him. I once found his Colt .45 stuffed in the toilet tank. Been there awhile. It had rusted up pretty bad.”
“That’s sad.”
“Yeah, well, he didn’t have much longer to worry about it. He’d be dead in a couple of months.”
“When was that?”
“Last year.”
I gave him a sideways glance. “You never told me about that.”
Roberto shrugged. “Don’t talk about it much. I still miss him. He was more my dad than my dad has ever been.”
I’d never heard that tone of voice from Roberto. He must have really loved the man. This was a side of my friend that I’d never seen, and I wondered why. Maybe he just didn’t want anyone to see him vulnerable. At school, he was always on the fringe, the kid who never fit in. It wasn’t just because he was a Biker Witch, Roberto seemed to go out of his way to keep his distance from other people. Of course, so did I. After all, our classmates had the skills of Torquemada, the infamous torturer of the Inquisition.
“Roberto, don’t these tracks look way larger than Samael’s feet?”
“Yeah, but even the slightest wind can blow out tracks, and when they refill with sand, they look bigger.”
“Oh, okay.”
The sun edged above the eastern horizon, and a wave of golden light rolled across the desert. The shadows cast by the dunes resembled long fingers, all pointing westward toward the village of Abu Katan. Already, I could hear faint voices on the wind. On occasion, they sounded really loud, and I realized that was probably the source of the man’s voice I’d heard last night when we first arrived. Voices carried unbelievably long distances out here.
My hiking boots sank into the sand as I swerved around a boulder that had cracked off the cliff and fallen across the old trail. The chunk of stone stood taller than I did and had to weigh at least a ton.
The braying of camels carried from Abu Katan. The village was too far away to make out anything except a white shimmer of buildings dotted with palms.
“You think it was somebody from Abu Katan?”
Roberto shrugged noncommittally. “Could be. They must know Samael lives here, right? He has to go into town every now and then for supplies. Over the years, somebody must have gotten curious and tracked him back here. I would have. Wouldn’t you?”
“You bet.”
“So they know he’s here. Do you think he trades artifacts for food and clothing?”
“Probably. A lot of people in Africa do.”
“That would give anybody a reason to follow him.” Roberto stood up and heaved a breath. “Why is he alive? By now, some unscrupulous character should have cracked his skull and cleaned out his cave.”
A gigantic whirlwind careened over the dunes in the distance, rising high into the morning sky. My gaze absently fixed on it. “Locals are probably scared to enter these caves. They’re sealed with magical spells, and people out here believe in magic. Whole villages have been slaughtered in Africa because some ignoramus thought the inhabitants were witches casting spells to make people sick.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah, so you might want to watch the pentagrams in the air bit. If somebody sees, you could wind up with an ax in your forehead.”
“Noted.”
For good reason, the image took me back to Actium, to the feel of the armor weighing down my shoulders, the tug of the heavy sword at my hip. I found myself marching along the shore past thousands of dead bodies and ship timbers that kept washing in . . .
“Did you hear me, Hal?”
“What? Oh, sorry.” I shook my head. “No, I didn’t. What did you say?”
Roberto sighed, “Nothing important. Where were you this time? Listening to some moldy Babylonian?”
“A Roman. Can’t shake a dream I had last night. It was so real.”
Roberto took great pains not to disturb any of the tracks as he carefully led the way along the cliff face toward the boarded-up cave. “What did you dream?”
“I was at Actium in 31 BC.”
Roberto’s gaze lifted, and he scanned the ledges on the cliff above, as though afraid something might be up there and preparing to leap down upon us. “What’s Actium?”
Worried, my gaze shot upward, but I saw only birds perched in the crevices. “It was a great sea battle that Marcus Antonius and Cleopatra lost to Gaius Julius, who would shortly thereafter become known as Augustus Caesar, Emperor of Rome.”
Roberto rubbed his fingers over the stone, as though feeling the cool morning temperature, before he slowly started tracking again. “Marcus Antonius lost? I thought you told me he was some great general?”
“Oh, he was, but at about three o’clock, Rome’s left wing moved to outflank Antonius. In response, Antonius veered northward. As the center of the line opened, sixty ships under Cleopatra’s command hoisted sail and broke through the middle of the battle, creating confusion on all sides. Antonius had no idea what she was doing. I think he panicked. Moments later, Antonius climbed into a small galley and rowed after her.”
“Wait a second? Are you telling me he abandoned his fleet in the middle of the grind?”
I nodded, feeling the same wrenching despair Antonius must have felt.
“What happened to his fleet?”
“It was destroyed.”
Roberto peered at me from the corner of his eye. “Some hero.”
I inhaled a breath and held it for a time, before I added, “Well, he never forgave himself. When Antonius boarded Cleopatra’s flagship, he walked to the prow and spent three days sitting with his head in his hands, refusing to speak with anyone, including Cleopatra. He loved her desperately, but he must have known in that instant that his love had cost him everything.”
Somewhere down in the village, dogs barked, then children laughed, as though playing with the dogs. They sounded so close.
Roberto said, “You really dreamed all that stuff about Actium?”
“And it was vivid. Like I was really standing there in 31 BC. I could smell the sweat of the army and Cleopatra’s perfume.”
Roberto scratched
his chin. A fuzz of brown beard had grown. At home, his parents refused to allow him to grow one, so he was obviously taking advantage of his newfound freedom. “You have to stop reading all those history books. They’re ruining your mind, bro. Try romances, instead. They give you much better dreams.”
“Yeah? What did you dream?”
“Oh, Jeez, it was awful.” Roberto knelt down to examine a scuffed place on the ground. Seemed satisfied it was nothing. But as he rose, a frown lined his forehead. “I dreamed I was locked in a museum with a bunch of Greek statues and I couldn’t figure out why all their penises were so small. I kept going from statue to statue, staring at them, over and over. It was exhausting. Like being in some kind of horror movie loop.”
It took a minute to reorient my thoughts, then I headed for the boarded-up cave twenty paces ahead. Roberto came along behind more slowly, which gave me time to study the old weathered lumber. Many of the outer boards had been nailed over others, crisscrossing in places, sometimes three deep. It was a poor job, done fast and furious, as though the builder had been eager to get the boards up and get away as quickly as possible. A moldering scent seeped through the cracks, like moss that had been growing in darkness for a thousand years.
Roberto walked up beside me and started scanning the haphazard carpentry.
I took the opportunity to say, “Aristophanes said small penises were a sign of intelligence.”
Roberto tugged his gaze from the boarded-up cave to give me a deadpan look. “Because he had a pinworm, right?”
“Historians didn’t record that, but—”
“You remember that football player, Barney O’Donnell? That guy had a pinworm and an IQ of twelve. After gym, I used to stare at it in the shower.”
“His IQ?”
“Oh, yeah, that’s what I meant.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Roberto stepped back from the boarded-up entry with a frown on his face. “Whoever did this was serious about keeping people out.”
“Or keeping the demon in.”
“Do you really think there’s a demon in there?”
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