by Jonas, Gary
“If it comes to that, Jonathan and I will protect you. We are very good at what we do.”
“Your husband’s magic is strong. Even Aye says so, and Aye is not easily impressed. But I do not wish to delay your journey. I know you’re only passing through.”
We hadn’t told her Winslow was our man because it seemed wise to have her believe she was beholden to us. I didn’t expect Tut to live more than a few days, and from that point, it would be seventy days before he would be buried because his body would need to be mummified first, and they’d have a period of mourning. By the end of that seventy days, Ankhesenamun would need to choose a husband. I didn’t think anyone would try to kill her before that because they needed her royal blood.
Seventy days was a long time. Brand and Rayna were expecting us to finish sooner than that, but I couldn’t turn my back on this girl.
“I’ll speak with my husband,” I said. “He’ll see things my way. We will stay to protect you until you are safely married.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
JONATHAN SHADE
The next morning, I paced the room, thinking about whether or not I should have killed Winslow. Part of me felt I’d missed my golden opportunity. Part of me felt he wasn’t a bad guy at heart. He just wanted to live.
What he said made sense, but by the same token, he was here to gain power and once he had that power, he’d be impossible to defeat. As such, he could easily be tossing out a load of crap to keep me from killing him while I could.
But I kept going back to the idea that Sharon had tricked me.
There was no way home.
Kelly entered the room. “How’s your knee?” she asked.
“It hurts but I can walk on it. Where were you last night? I woke up and you were gone.”
“Talking with Ankhesenamun. Tut is going to die in the next day or two.”
“Well, he did die young. If he wasn’t supposed to die at this point, he would have kicked off soon anyway, so time will even things out.”
“What about Ankhesenamun?”
“What about her?” I asked.
“They’ll force her to marry someone, and they’ll probably kill her.”
“I’m not as up on Egyptian history as you are. Is that how things are supposed to go down?”
Kelly shrugged. “I don’t know but I don’t like that idea. I think we should stay here and protect her until she has a proper husband.”
“You just said they’ll probably kill her at that point. So are you really saying we should stay here and forget about getting back to Brand and Rayna?”
“She’s thinking about lining up a husband from another land. If we can make sure she’s safe until that marriage is secure, it would mean a lot to me.”
“How long would that be?”
“A few months.”
“Brand and Rayna are waiting for us. I feel like we should have already gone to them.”
Kelly gave me a guilty look. “I sort of promised Ankhesenamun that we’d stay here for her until she was married.”
I closed my eyes. “You did what?”
“She’s afraid. Our job is to help people, and Ankhesenamun needs our help.”
“What are you proposing?”
“We can take Ankhesenamun around Egypt and see the land. Then once Tut is entombed and she has a husband in place, we can go.”
“By ‘go’ you mean kill Winslow.”
“Just his aspect. He has two more.”
“You’ve had some time to think. Do you believe him?”
“About Sharon?”
I nodded.
Kelly frowned. “I don’t know what to believe.”
A knock sounded on the wall, and Winslow leaned in. “Sorry to interrupt,” he said. “Are you discussing when you’re going to kill me?”
“More like if,” I said.
“May I offer an alternative?”
“I’m listening.”
“I can go forward to my next aspect as soon as I can use the tablets. I can take you with me. That way, you won’t have to kill me.”
“And we should trust you why?” Kelly asked.
“I’m trusting you right now,” he said. “You could kill me at any moment and move forward in time, but you haven’t done that. Deep down you know I’m telling the truth.”
“And you think you can get us back to our time using the tablets?”
“No. But I can keep you young while you work out a way to get home.”
“How long will it take you to work out how to use the tablets?” I asked.
Winslow shrugged. “Hard to say. It’s complicated but I hope to be able to translate enough to make a go of it within a week or two. Of course, it might take months. I wish I could give you a better answer, but it’s very draining to work on it because it draws power from me as I study it. I need to draw from it instead.”
“What do you know about this time period?” I asked. “Do you know what happens after King Tut dies?”
“I have no clue. I remember all the fuss when they uncovered his tomb. Howard Carter was quite the celebrity for a few years. But I don’t know anything about what happened to Tutankhamun or his wife.”
“I trust you overheard our conversation?”
“Most of it. Sorry. Voices carry in here.”
“Then you know my dilemma.”
“I do. You have a choice to make, Jonathan. Do you want to kill me now?”
“I don’t want to kill anyone, but technically you’re already dead.”
He grabbed my hand and pulled it to his chest. “Really?” he asked.
I could feel his heart beating.
“You died in 1926.”
“And I’m alive right now. Is my life forfeit so you can go kill me again?”
“It’s not like that.”
“It would be murder, Jonathan. I’ve done nothing to you, and you’re talking about ending my life.”
I turned away from him. “Damn it,” I said. “This whole situation sucks ass.”
Winslow put a hand on my arm and pulled so I’d turn around. “You have a gun,” he said. “Take it out and put a bullet in my head right now.”
“No.”
“If you’re going to kill me, just get it over with already.”
“No!” I said.
“You want me to do it?” Kelly asked.
“No,” I said.
“Good because I think we should help Ankhesenamun.”
I sat down on the bed. “Fine. Whatever. We can help her.” I looked at Winslow. “You can see if you can translate the tablets, but if you try to leave here without us . . .”
He smiled, clearly amused. “I can’t leave here without you. Charon linked you to me. I could feel that pull the moment you arrived here. That’s why I came to Thebes. If I leave here, you’ll be pulled forward too. So you needn’t worry about me leaving you stranded.”
“So what do we do now?” I asked.
Kelly looked at the floor. “We wait for Tutankhamun to die.”
***
The next day, King Tutankhamun released his final breath and moved into the afterlife.
***
The mourning began.
The women in the palace tore their hair and clothes in grief, and they tossed sand on their heads. And I mean they tore their hair in a literal sense. Some of these women actually yanked out tufts.
For the next few days, Tut’s body remained in the palace. A steady stream of mourners went in to view it. Kelly and I were admitted because Ankhesenamun insisted. She joined us in the bedchamber.
She stared at her husband for a time then cast her eyes to the floor.
“I miss you, my love,” she said.
“We’re very sorry for your loss,” Kelly said. “Tutankhamun was a great king.”
“To speak the name of the dead gives them life in memory,” Ankhesenamun said.
“People will be speaking Tutankhamun’s name thousands of years from now,” I said. “He will never be fo
rgotten.”
“Thank you.”
“Is there anything we can do for you?” Kelly asked.
“I have hired a man to weave fresh linens for my husband’s mummy. I want him to have new wrappings.”
Kelly nodded and for my benefit, she said, “As I understand it, mummies are normally wrapped in the bed linens their families tear into strips so the deceased can go into the afterlife with something familiar.”
Ankhesenamun nodded. “That will not be the case for my beloved Tutankhamun.” She turned to me. “I fear that the embalmers may damage or destroy my husband’s body, and he will need it in the afterlife. Would you be willing to oversee the mummification?”
“Uh,” I said, trying to think of a way to respond.
“I will command the Men of Anubis to allow you to witness the mummification. As you are a foreigner and won’t be using their knowledge, they will permit it. I have many duties to which I must attend, and I would be grateful if you would do me this courtesy.”
How could I say no to her? Answer: I couldn’t.
***
I don’t know how much of a stink the embalmers made, but the queen would not be denied, and a few days later, I found myself in a tent on a hill with three men who were there to mummify their king. They were known as the Men of Anubis. One of them was a priest, and he wore a big black jackal mask as if he were Anubis himself.
The process fascinated me. I’d never witnessed a mummification before. I did my best to stay out of the way. I knew the family of embalmers didn’t want me there, so I didn’t want to further upset them.
They positioned Tut’s body on a wooden embalmer’s board, and they had several boards running perpendicular beneath his corpse like railroad ties.
First, a man entered the tent and drew a red line about two and a half inches long on the left side of Tut’s stomach.
“Slitter,” the Anubis priest said.
A young man holding an obsidian knife stepped forward. He moved with gentle precision and sliced open Tut’s stomach with a quick incision that matched the red line the previous priest had drawn.
Four stone jars stood on a small table, and the lids were painted to look like Tut’s face, including his crown right down to the cobra jutting from the front. I’d seen a documentary about mummies on cable a few months before, but in the show, the canopic jars had lids shaped like a falcon, ape, human, and jackal. They were the four sons of Horus. Tut got his own likeness for his canopic jars, though. I didn’t ask why.
The priest removed Tut’s spleen, speaking prayers so softly as he worked that I could not make out the words. He pulled out all twenty-two feet of intestines, the kidneys, and the liver, which was a lot bigger than I expected. They put each organ in a separate jar. As Egyptians believed they thought with their hearts, the priest did not remove Tut’s heart but left it in place. Tut would need to be able to think in the afterlife. The priest filled the stomach cavity with packets of natron, which was like a blend of baking powder and table salt. It would help to dry out the body. Another priest put some incense into the stomach cavity too. Myrrh.
The next step was to remove the brain.
The priest took a long iron rod with a hook on it. He pushed it up through Tut’s nose, broke through the bone behind the eyes with a squick sound, and twirled the rod around like a whisk to break up and liquefy the brain. Again, they believed the heart was the location for thought, so the brain had no purpose.
They flipped Tut’s body over and let his brain drain out through the nostrils. I’ll spare you the details, but watching it made my stomach turn a couple of flips.
They rolled him over again. Now the priest wrapped the rod with clean linen and inserted it into the nostril. He pushed it in, moved it about, and pulled it out. Needless to say, the linen came out soaked in blood and brain matter. The priest swapped the dirty linen for clean and repeated the process until he could insert clean linen and have it come out white.
They poured a resin mix into Tut’s nose, which would solidify and help keep any bacteria from having a field day. Next they scooted Tut’s body up a bit so his head hung off the board and his chin aimed at the roof. The priest poured still more resin into Tut’s nose. After that, he shoved some frankincense into the skull, probably to help with the smell.
The final step for the first day was to bring in massive amounts of natron. They put some beneath the corpse then buried the body in natron. They must have used six hundred pounds of it.
“We shall leave him in the place of cleansing for thirty-five days,” said the priest.
I was impressed with myself because I didn’t toss my cookies during the entire procedure.
BRAND EASTON
Brand wanted to kick himself for trusting Priscilla, but he couldn’t because the weird plants growing out of the train’s floor held him securely in place. Priscilla danced around him, sprinkling dust and chanting some sort of spell. That didn’t bother him so much. She wore a gray dress with white ruffles at the sleeves and collar.
“Well, at least you’re not naked,” Brand said.
She ignored him and kept chanting.
He didn’t know whether or not Edward was present because he wasn’t touching the pocket watch, but he also couldn’t see Esther.
“Esther!” Brand said.
“She’s indisposed,” Priscilla said.
Priscilla sprinkled one more batch of dust on Brand.
She knelt beside him. “I’m really sorry to do this to you, but we need your body.”
“If I had a dollar for every time a woman told me that,” Brand said with a grin.
“For someone who’s trapped, you don’t seem particularly fearful.”
Brand glared at her. “You might think about that.”
“You simply don’t know how powerful I am.”
“But, Grandma, I was nice to you,” Brand said.
“I’ll be nice to you too. This will be over quickly.”
“Let me guess. You want to put Edward’s spirit in my body so you two can have wild monkey sex.”
“There’s much more to it than merely sex but yes. You’re going to go to sleep, and Edward will be guiding the buggy, as it were.”
“Good luck with that,” Brand said. “I’m not that easy to vanquish.”
“The spell will work its magic, and you’ll go to sleep. Then Edward will take over.”
“Lady, you’ve snapped so far from reality that I don’t even know what to say to you.”
“Flattery will get you nowhere,” she said.
Brand tried again to pull free of the vines, but they were too strong. He figured his best bet was to allow Edward to try to possess him. Then he’d simply pretend to be Edward, and Priscilla would set him free. A solid right cross would solve his dilemma. Except now he noted another little problem. He was getting sleepy. Very sleepy.
“Well, shit,” Brand said right before everything went dark.
RAYNA NOBLE
Rayna moved along a row of books in the library. She wanted to know more about what she might encounter at the Alpha et Omega meeting. Would Winslow be there? Did she need to seem knowledgeable about the occult? She scanned the titles in the section she considered to be pseudoscience at best: Occult Chemistry by Annie Besant and C. L. Leadbeater, The Occult World by Alfred Percy Sinnett, A Dweller on Two Planets by Phylos the Thibetan as told to Frederick S. Oliver.
She started to pull the Oliver book off the shelf when a young man pushed it back into the row. “You don’t want that one. Silliness about Atlantis.”
Rayna turned to face the man. He stood nearly six feet tall but seemed taller because he was slender and wore a suit with thin vertical stripes. His dark hair was slicked back, and his mustache looked so thin, it might have been drawn on with a pen.
“Perhaps I want to read about Atlantis,” Rayna said.
The man gave her a small shake of his head. “Not in that book. Stick with Timaeus and Critias by Plato.”
“Wh
ile I appreciate the advice of strange men, I rarely take it.”
“Am I a strange man?” he asked.
“You’re a stranger to me.”
“Then please allow me to introduce myself. I am Carlton J. Penick.”
“I’ve never heard of you.”
“I would be surprised if you had. May I inquire as to your name?”
“My name is Rayna.”
“No last name?”
“I gave it up for Lent.”
He smiled. “As Easter is long past and you don’t strike me as a Christian, I’ll take that as you telling me it’s none of my damn business.”
“I don’t strike you as a Christian?” Rayna asked.
“You wouldn’t be haunting the occult section if you were.”
“Know thy enemy?”
“I think not. As it happens, I am well versed in all things Atlantis, so if you have any questions, I would be delighted to answer them for you.”
“I’m not sure I believe in Atlantis,” Rayna said.
“I didn’t say I was a believer, simply that I have accumulated a great deal of knowledge about the subject.”
“I don’t really want to know about Atlantis,” she said and began scanning titles again, running her forefinger across the spines of the books.
Carlton placed a hand on hers, stopping her on a book titled All about the Occult Arts by Carlton J. Penick.
Rayna looked at Carlton. “Why, Mr. Penick, this can’t be a coincidence.”
He met her gaze with confidence and just the hint of a suggestive smile. “As I said, I have accumulated a great deal of knowledge.”
“So you stalk women in libraries in hopes of impressing them?”
“I detect a dismissive attitude.”
“Then you’re very perceptive. Have a nice day, Mr. Penick.”
“You, too, Ms. Noble.”
He turned and walked toward the exit.
“Wait. I didn’t tell you my last name,” Rayna said.
He held up a hand and waved back to her but did not turn around. She considered going after him but frowned and pulled his book off the shelf instead. She flipped it open to the introduction and began reading about how Carlton Penick was a Freemason who graduated to other groups as his knowledge grew, and he was seeking the source of magic in the world.