by Paula Guran
Security guards’ bodies were scattered along the way once I passed the Hathor-headed columns and entered the Egyptian wing—each and every one lacking the top of their head, torsos torn open. All presumably without their innards—I stopped examining them after the first few. The hair on the back of my neck prickled as I sensed myself followed, but all I caught were glimpses of dark formless things from the corner of my eye.
The corridor was set up as an avenue lined with sphinxes, and the walls held a range of reproduction weapons from the Nile Valley. A weird curved thing—the label advised it was a khopesh, a sickle-sword—looked handy, so I took it. The replica was so accurately rendered that the outer curve of the cruel blade was sharp enough to shave with, although you’d be a fool to try. Miraculously, I didn’t cut myself, and I tucked the handle into the back of my trousers. Reaching the open gallery doors, I took a deep breath, then stepped into the breach.
The chamber was half the length of a football field and packed tight with objets. I passed sarcophagi of basalt, metal inlaid with enamel, others of painted wood; chairs and chests and chariots in ebony and gold; statues of jackals and winged women, of animal-headed humans. Obviously removed from their protective glass cases, small mummies of cats, mice, ibis, and larger ones—gazelles, bulls—sat in neat, attentive rows facing toward a carven throne decorated with lapis and other gems.
Two things stood out: Izolda Kolchak, a lot less glamorous now, draped across the broad golden seat; and the bulk of a huge Nile crocodile—Crocodylus niloticus—at her feet.
Mrs Kolchak looked well over fifty and maybe closer to a few thousand. She was finishing a meal, dipping her fingers daintily into the cranium of Abel Mannheim’s disembodied head, and slowly changing from a wrinkled crone into the vision I’d seen less than twenty-four hours ago. Her skin plumped, whitened, smoothed; her hair became lush and shiny, lips reddening, eyes sparkling; her body filled out and did justice to the long white silk gown. A jeweled dagger hung around her waist on an intricate chain.
The crocodile was over twenty feet long, its torso thick as a barrel, tapering off at the head and tail ends. The armored skin was a mottled mix of bronze, yellow-green, and black; its teeth had turned sepia with age but were still long and sharp. It looked like a gigantic desiccated sausage with blue glass beads for eyes in its ugly head. The fact that it was also twitching, stubby legs scrabbling at the marble floor, was less a point of interest than a matter of terror. The movement seemed to increase the closer I got. I held the stolen urn a little tighter in my sweaty hands.
Oh, boy.
To its left was a table bearing the alabaster shards of three canopic jars. To its right, a canoe for the afterlife, and in it the glint of auburn hair. I froze until I saw movement, assured it was still attached to Liam’s head.
“Good girl,” she said, tossing the head aside and licking her nails as she rose. Kolchak crossed to the boat and effortlessly hauled Liam out. I heard him grunt and guessed she’d dislocated something, or nearly so. He had a black eye, a cut on his forehead, and the gag in his mouth was stained with blood. “This is yours?”
I put the jar on the floor and backed away. “Send him over.”
“But of course.” She gave Liam a gentle push, remaining where she was as he navigated his slightly concussed way past the squirming crocodile. I noticed a flash of red on Kolchak’s right hand.
“Nice ring,” I said, wondering what Queen Tera might pay to know where her missing ruby was.
“This old thing?” She fluttered her fingers so the Jewel of the Seven Stars caught the light on its points.
I pulled the gag from Liam’s mouth and he stuck his tongue out, spitting bits of old linen. He leaned heavily on me. How hard had she hit him?
“So,” I said, “a resurrection gem and a giant crocodile. What might you be doing with these?”
“What won’t I do?” She laughed. “All the wannabes, all the snobs . . . all of them. Certain rewards will flow for nothing more than prayers. But what might a monstrous god like this do for the woman who followed it across thousands of years and offered a fresh start, and the chance to feed on all life in such a city?”
Liam leaned over and asked quietly, “Why are we not running?”
“Because she’s not alone. Look at the doorway.” From the intake of his breath I knew he’d spotted the columns of black mist that shimmered and shivered at the entrance behind us, crimson eyes flaring with hunger. “Besides, she’ll only send that thing after us, and I’m guessing it is very fast.”
“You’re a perceptive creature. It’s a shame I can’t leave you alive—or indeed him, he’s so pretty, but terribly heroic. You’d be thorns in my side, and that gets old very quickly. But I thank you for bringing what I need.”
“She poured blood from the guards on the organs from the jars then put them inside that overgrown alligator,” Liam managed to say as we stepped backwards and Kolchak came to claim the last urn. The ruby ring began to pulse. She didn’t notice the new wax around the lid, just smashed the vessel against a statue of Bast, then poured the contents into her hand.
The withered apple left her perplexed for a few moments while I dug into my jacket pocket and pulled out the even more withered liver I’d removed from the jar. Sure, I could have left it at Liam’s but I suspected Kolchak would know if it wasn’t brought into proximity with the great reptile—its increased mobility on my arrival seemed to prove me right. Now, the lump of flesh was dry and friable between my fingers as I held it up. “As I understand it, you need this too.”
Izolda Kolchak screamed as I crushed the ancient thing and it crumbled from my palm, motes swirling like a dying universe.
She rushed at us. Much to Liam’s surprise, I pushed him aside, then whipped the sickle-sword up toward Kolchak’s throat. Kolchak tried to stop but her momentum carried her forward and that, as much as my swing, embedded the blade in her neck. Unfortunately for me she’d managed to unsheathe her dagger, and the very same momentum helped her ram it under my arm, sliding between the ribs.
I got to briefly enjoy her look of astonishment before we both fell. She crumbled to dust. Behind her the juddering Petsuchos shrank and then disintegrated; without its component parts and the driving will of its mistress there was nothing holding the crocodile together. The black shadow shapes at the door seemed to explode then dissipate. I found myself deep in a pile of sandy particles, hunched in agony, cursing, fighting for air, and clutching at something sharp beneath my palm.
Liam scrambled over and held me, kissing me as if that might help, rocking me like a baby. A big, sweary baby. “Don’t you die, don’t you dare.”
“Will you miss me?” I stopped struggling to breathe and sighed.
He didn’t answer, but tears dropped hot on my face as the pain in my side lessened. Murphy lifted my arm to try to stem the bleeding with his handkerchief, but, though the jacket and shirt were ruined, there was no longer a puncture in my skin, no welling blood. No wound. He checked the other side. Same.
“What the—”
I held up the now-dull Jewel of the Seven Stars I’d found in Izolda Kolchak’s remains. “Resurrection gem.”
He glared, but I noticed he didn’t let me go. “And you let me worry?”
“In all fairness, I didn’t know I wasn’t dying until a second or two ago.” I sat up, made myself comfortable in the circle of his arms, rested my head against his shoulder. “So.”
“So.”
“So, it’s a good news-bad news scenario.”
“What’s the good news?”
“Well, for starters, I’m alive.”
Though he looked as though the nature of that was up for debate, he tightened his grip on me. “And?”
“Plus we saved the city and maybe the world.”
“And?”
“I’ve already banked a sizeable fee, plus I know someone who’ll pay a pretty penny for the return of this.” I slipped the ruby ring on my finger, waggled it a little. “And
that first dried-out corpse was Louie the Louse, so he won’t be a problem any more.”
“Well, that is undeniably good news.” He nodded. “What’s the bad news?”
I glanced over his shoulder at the dead guards. He nodded in acknowledgement. While Kolchak and Louie definitely deserved what they got, and Constantine and Mannheim maybe had too, sadly the museum security guys lost their lives just trying to do their jobs—like good cops.
“There’s one more bit of bad news-good news . . . ”
“What?”
“One of us has to write up a police report on all this supernatural stuff—and it isn’t me.”
The late Kage Baker’s The Company series of stories and novels involves a group of future scientists who master time travel and proceed to plunder the past for profit in their present. As it is impossible to modify the past, The Company must work sub rosa to acquire “lost” valuables they know have been destroyed. Company operatives find ways to preserve these vanished treasures and sell them in the twenty-fourth century. Since time travel is costly, The Company creates near-immortal cyborgs to act as operatives. Baker wrote eleven novels, four novellas, and a number of short stories set in The Company universe; it’s all much more complicated and a great deal more fun than this description, but perhaps you’ll get a hint of it in this story of the 1914 discovery of a Twelfth Dynasty royal burial by none other than Flinders Petrie, the Father of Archaeology.
The Queen in Yellow
Kage Baker
The lady waited in her motorcar.
It was a grand car, the very best and latest of its kind in 1914, a Vauxhall touring convertible with a four-liter engine, very fast. It was painted gold. Until recently the lady would have been waiting on a horse, by choice a palomino Arabian stallion. She preferred her current transportation system, because she did not particularly care for living things. She did admire machines, however. She liked gold, too.
Her name was Executive Facilitator for the Near East Region Kiu, and the sleek golden motorcar in which she waited was parked on a deserted road in the middle of a particularly ancient and historically significant bit of Nowhere. Not so far behind her, the Nile flowed on through eternity; above her, the white moon swam like a curved reed-boat across the stars, and it and they shed faint soft light on the rippled dunes of the desert and the green garden country. Lady Kiu cared no more about the romance of her surroundings than the Sphinx, who was her junior by several millennia.
She did not show her eleven thousand years, almond-eyed beauty that she was. She looked no older than a fairly pampered and carefree twenty-two. Her soul, however, had quite worn away to nothing.
Lady Kiu was impatient as she waited. Her perfect nails tapped out a sinister little rhythm on the Vauxhall’s steering wheel. You would think such an ageless, deathless creature would have long since learned to bide her time, and normally Lady Kiu could watch the pointless hours stagger past with perfect sangfroid; but there was something about the man for whom she waited that irritated her unaccountably.
The man was standing on a ridge and staring, slack-jawed, at the beauty of the night. Moon, sand, stars, gardens, the distant gleam of moonlight on the river: he had seen a lot of moons, stars, sand, gardens and rivers in his time, but this was Egypt, after all! And though he too was a deathless, ageless creature, he had never in all his centuries been to Egypt before, and the Romance of the Nile had him breathlessly enchanted.
His name was Literature Preservationist Lewis. He was a slight, fair-haired man with the boyish good looks and determined chin of a silent film hero. He was moreover brave, resourceful, and terribly earnest about his job, which was one of the things about him that so irritated Lady Kiu.
He also tended to get caught up in the moment to such an extent that he failed to check his internal chronometer as often as he ought to, with the result that when he did check it now he started guiltily, and set off at a run through the night. He was able to move far more quickly than a mortal man, but he was still five minutes late for his rendezvous.
“Sorry!” he cried aloud, spotting Lady Kiu at last, sullen by moonlight. He slid to a halt and tottered the last few steps to her motorcar, hitching up his jodhpurs.
“Sand in your pants?” enquired Lady Kiu, yawning.
“Er—actually we’ve all got sand everywhere. We’re roughing it, rather. The professor doesn’t go in for luxuries in the field. I don’t mind, though! He’s really the most astonishing mortal, and I’m used to a bit of hardship—” said Lewis.
“How nice. Your report, please.”
Lewis cleared his throat and stood straight. “Everything is on schedule and under budget. I guided the fellaheen straight to the shaft entrance without seeming to, you see, quite subtly, and even though it’s been blocked with debris, the excavation has been going along famously. At the current speed, I expect we’ll reach the burial chamber exactly at twilight tomorrow.”
“Good.” Lady Kiu studied her nails. “And you’re absolutely certain you’ll get the timing right?”
“You may rely on me,” Lewis assured her.
“You managed to obtain a handcar?”
“All I had to do was bribe a railway official! The princess and I will roll into Bani Suwayf in style.”
“The mortal trusts you?”
“Professor Petrie? I think I’ve managed to impress him.” Lewis hooked his thumbs through his suspenders proudly. “I heard him telling Mr Brunton what a remarkable fellow I am. ‘Have you noticed that fellow Kensington?’ he said. Petrie impresses me, too. He’s got the most amazing mental abilities—”
“Darling, the day any mortal can impress me, I’ll be ready for retirement,” said Lady Kiu, noting in amusement that Lewis started and quivered ever so slightly at her use of the word darling.
“I can expect you at Bani Suwayf at midnight tomorrow, then,” she added. “With the merchandise.”
“Without fail!”
“That’s a good boy. We’ve set you up a nice workroom on the boat, with everything you’ll need for the restoration job. And in your cabin—” she reached out a lazy hand and chucked him under the chin “—there’ll be a bottle of well-iced champagne to celebrate. Won’t that be fun?”
Lewis’s eyes widened. Struck mute, he grinned at her foolishly, and she smiled back at him. She expected men to fall in love with her—they always did, after all—but Lewis fell in love with anything beautiful or interesting, and so he wasn’t worth her time. Still, it never hurt to give an underling some incentive.
“Until tomorrow,” she said, blowing him a kiss, and with a roar her golden chariot came to life and bore her away toward the Nile.
You will find the pyramid of Senuseret II west of the Nile, near Al Fayyum. It is an unassuming little Twelfth-Dynasty affair of limestone and unburned mud brick. It is quite obvious how it was built, so no one ever speculates on how on earth it got there or who built it, or argues morbidly that apocalyptic knowledge is somehow encoded in its modest dimensions.
To the south of Senuseret’s pyramid is a cemetery, and on this brilliant day in 1914 it had a certain holiday air. The prevailing breeze brought the fragrance of fields, green leaf, and lotus surging up in the brief Egyptian spring. Makeshift huts had been put up all along its outer wall, and Englishmen and Englishwomen sat in the huts and typed reports, or made careful drawings with the finest of crow quills, or fanned flies away from their food and wondered plaintively what that furry stuff was on the tinned pilchards, or fought off another wave of malaria.
Within the cemetery walls, several shaft tomb entrances admitted sunlight. In such shade as there was, the Egyptian fellaheen sat sorting through fairly small basketfuls of dig debris, brought to them by brown children from the mouth of another shaft. Lewis, his archaeologist ensemble augmented by a pith helmet today, stood watching them expectantly. His riding boots shone with polish. His jodhpurs were formidable.
Beside him stood a mortal man, burned dark by the sun, who wore mismatched n
ative slippers without socks, patched knickerbocker trousers, a dirty shirt that had lost its buttons, and a flat cap that had also seen better days. He was white-haired and gray-bearded but had a blunt powerful form; he also had an unnervingly intense stare, fixed not on the fellaheen but on Lewis.
William Matthew Flinders Petrie was sixty years old. He had laid down the first rules of true archaeology, and that made him very nearly a patron saint for people who invested in history as much as Lewis’s masters did.
Though invested is not, perhaps, the correct word for the way the Company got its money.
Lewis never thought about that part of it much, to avoid being depressed. He had always been taught that depression was a very bad thing for an immortal, and the secret to happiness was to keep busy, preferably by following orders. And life could be so interesting! For example, one got to rub elbows with famous mortals like Flinders Petrie.
“So you think this grave hasn’t been robbed? You have an intuition about this, have you?” Petrie said.
“Oh, yes, Professor,” said Lewis. “I get them now and then. And after all, theft is a haphazard business, isn’t it? How systematic or careful can a looter be? I’d be awfully surprised if they hadn’t missed something.”
“Interesting,” said Flinders Petrie.
“What is, sir?”
“Your opinion on thieves. Have you known many?” Actually Lewis had worked with thieves his entire life, in a manner of speaking. But remembering that he was supposed to be a youthful volunteer on his first visit to Egypt (which was half true, after all), he blushed and said “Well—no, sir, I haven’t, in fact.”
“They have infinite patience, as a rule,” Petrie told him. “You’d be astonished at how methodical they are. The successful ones, at least. They take all manner of precautions. Get up to all sorts of tricks. Sometimes an archaeologist can learn from them.”
“Ah! Such as wearing a costume to gain access to a forbidden shrine?” Lewis enquired eagerly. “I have heard, sir, that you yourself convinced certain tribesmen you were mad by wearing, er, some rather outlandish things—”