by Gregg Taylor
“I see where this is going,” the Flying Squirrel said, “and I think I hate it.”
“Keep Max safe,” he ordered. “Make your way down to the river crossing. Stay hidden. I’ll meet you there when I can.”
“This is crazy!” she protested. “You don’t know that they cast that spell on you and not me!”
“I know the jackals didn’t come up here until I did,” he said seriously.
“Because you were punching them in the head!” she cried.
“Yes, well,” he said, “this is about to become slightly academic. Keep your Radio Ring open. If I was wrong, shout and I’ll double back. But I’m not wrong.”
“I don’t think I’m quite clear on what you intend to do,” Falconi said.
“This,” the Red Panda said simply, and ran directly at the beasts closing in on them. He made a mighty leap into the darkness, high over the heads of the jackals closest to them, and was lost to Falconi’s eyes. He could hear a series of cries, then the Red Panda’s footsteps racing away over the rooftops, and the scrabbling sounds of the unnatural pack of animals following him, ignoring the two of them left behind.
Kit shook her head. “I hate it when he’s right, I ever tell you that?” she asked.
Pushing through the darkness, the Red Panda could feel the desert hounds at his heels, could hear the guttural yelps of their confederates on the ground, and he felt sure that he had been right. Falconi’s rivals had targeted August Fenwick with an enchantment that brought this wave of death upon him, little dreaming that his true identity could run such a race and win, and certainly never imagining that he would laugh while he did it.
He threw himself over a ten-foot gap in the rooftops, his Static Shoes firing as he leapt. Barely one story off the ground, there was no room for error in such a leap, even catching himself part way down a wall would have him within striking distance of the baying horde at street level. He stopped hard and looked back. His rooftop pursuers had halted in their tracks, unable or unwilling to follow, but the pack at ground level was frothing in anticipation of his fall. The crowd was getting thick down there, and the view through his nightvision lenses was more akin to a den of snakes than anything mammalian. He shouldn’t stop, shouldn’t give up any advantage – he might run out of rooftops in a hurry, and if he did, there would be no escape. Still, he had to know.
Outside the crimson gauntlet on his right hand, there was an oversized ring that concealed a micro-transmitter. He tapped it to open the channel and spoke clearly into it.
“Panda to Squirrel,” he said. “Come in, Squirrel.”
“Shouldn’t you be running?” Her voice came through, free of static. After all, he thought, she is only a hundred yards away.
“Tell me I was right,” he said simply.
“Why?” she asked. “So you can lord it over me until the end of time?”
He grinned in the darkness to no one in particular. “Yes,” he said.
“Run, clever-boy,” she ordered.
“Yes, Boss,” he replied, dropping an oversized canister of knockout gas over the edge of the roof. May as well thin out the herd a bit. It wouldn’t get them all, but every little bit would help.
He waited a moment for the gas to take effect, then dropped to the street and bolted for the far corner. From there he knew he could make an unbroken rooftop trail to the heart of downtown Luxor. It wasn’t a big place, but it was big enough. There would be lights and tall buildings and policemen with service revolvers if it came to that. He hoped it wouldn’t. Certainly there didn’t seem to be much danger to others – the beasts were focused on him exclusively, and thanks to his Static Shoes he could keep out of the reach of the maddened pack of hunters. If he could just make that far rooftop…
He felt them, closer now, hard on his heels. Could almost feel their breath as they closed in from every side. He saw half a dozen animals racing straight toward him, newcomers to the fray, pulled from the desert by strange enchantments. This was going to get interesting. He reached down deep, and found another gear he didn’t quite know that he had. The blood was pumping in his ears, drowning out the cries of the killers just seconds behind him. Every iota of speed he threw at outracing them only brought him closer to the beasts lying in wait that much faster. From somewhere deep within, a strange, almost joyous laugh began to burble forth from the man in the crimson domino mask, ringing out throughout the deserted streets, crying a challenge to his tormented hunters and their cruel and cowardly masters far beyond the field of combat.
It was the battle cry of the Red Panda!
Eighteen
Kit Baxter was just about fed up with this. More than two hours had passed since she had found this spot – a reasonably sheltered bit of rooftop near the river crossing. Max had actually managed to fall asleep, relieved to be free of his limiters and out of hiding at last. Didn’t matter that they were headed into far greater danger, or that the Red Panda had yet to check in. His relief had been palpable, and he settled in immediately and slept sitting up in the corner with his back against the low walls that surrounded the rooftop.
She stood and looked over the Nile, if for no other reason than it kept her from looking out over the city again, watching for the Red Panda. Part of her seemed to register that this was actually the Nile, and that if she was going to be in Egypt, she really ought to look at it, but her eyes stared blankly without really seeing much beyond the cold facts.
The moon had returned from wherever Thatcher had hidden it about forty minutes ago, and the water shone in its low-hanging light. After a moment she sat down again with a thump and realized that the Red Panda was sitting beside her, silent as the grave.
She tried to keep a straight face. In fact, she tried to give no reaction at all, and only realized that she failed utterly at this when she saw his face break into a wide grin. He didn’t do a lot of that, at least not at close quarters like this. She wondered if he would do more or less of it if he knew how weak it made her in the knees. For a moment she said nothing, waiting for the impulse to kiss him to go away. After five or six seconds she realized that it probably wasn’t going to and she should just get on with her day.
“You could have called,” she said calmly.
“I could have,” he admitted, “but I wouldn’t have seen your eyes pop out of their sockets like that. That was nice.”
The Flying Squirrel’s heart was racing and it wouldn’t stop. She wondered if his lenses were set on infra-red. She must have been glowing brilliantly, with the heat she could feel in her face. The trouble was that in the act of surprising her, he had sat right next to her. When she had flopped back down to sit, they were shoulder to shoulder against the low wall. They never sat this close, but they were already sitting. Neither one of them could move casually. She swallowed hard and kept her tone calm and even. “How did the whole crazed death-jackal thing go?”
He shrugged casually. “About as well as you might expect,” he said. “Stayed out of their way. Disrupted traffic. Wondered a few dozen times how long this was going to go on, and then suddenly they all bolted. In every direction at once. I imagine the spell had worn off. It was quite a thing to see, really.”
He looked at her lips. It was hard to tell exactly where he was looking with those spooky blank mask lenses, but she was sure he had looked at her lips. Kit Baxter hadn’t exactly done a whole lot of kissing in her time, but most of the fellas she had ever met had strongly considered it, and she knew when her lips were under scrutiny. She was almost sure that she did. But why had he looked? Were they parted, invitingly? Had she leaned in toward him ever so slightly? Was she sitting there just begging to be kissed like some stupid girl, like one of the high-society trollops that threw themselves at him and were met with cold contempt?
She was almost certain that he was still looking at them. Or looking again. Maybe. What would the harm be? They were far from home on the banks of the Nile, he had just done some very fine death-defying… he certainly seemed to be
wondering what it would be like… would it really be the end of the world if she were to let him find out?
“Oh, there you are, dear boy,” the Stranger’s voice came out of nowhere and made them both jump slightly. Kit had forgotten he was there. Ten thousand miles to rescue him, and he had just kind of slipped her mind.
“How are you feeling?” the Red Panda asked Falconi.
“Better, I think,” Max smiled. “I drifted off there. Not long, but better than I have in days.”
“It might not be a bad idea,” she offered. “I know somebody else who is on his second straight night.”
The Red Panda smiled, but shook his head. “Plenty of time for that later,” he said. “Since Thatcher, Pavli and company tried to kill us rather than capture us, it stands to reason that they think they may have a way to find the Eye without Max’s help.”
Falconi nodded. “It would be best if we beat them to it,” he agreed in quiet understatement.
“Right,” Kit said, making it unanimous, “we need a boat.”
There are certain things that are almost universal. Things that do not change that much, no matter where you go. Men who work the waters of a river have a certain sense about them. An awareness of the smallness and fragility of the human form, for one thing. Most would never put it that way, but when your partner in daily life is a mighty, inexorable force of nature, it gives a man a certain sense of his real place, his true power, or the almost utter lack thereof. Other people may rush about like they are the greatest power on the planet, or under the illusion that they have the ability to control their own corner of the world, but a river-man knows different. There is a certain, almost philosophical acceptance of whatever comes, and a quiet confidence in his ability to deal with it. The boatman who took them across the Nile was just such a man. Cross in the hours before sunrise? With an old man, a young man in a red mask and a girl in a heart-stopping catsuit? Why not? The girl gave him a moment’s pause, for she had a shape that would distract the Prophet himself, but it was not for the boatman to wonder why this odd trio made for the Great Field at this hour. White people were all crazy anyway, and these ones paid well.
The walk from the landing was not long, but it was tense. The three heroes moved quickly and quietly, their eyes keenly peeled for any trace of their enemies. Should they fall into another surprise attack, there was a dearth of rooftops on this side of the river to escape to.
The edges of the sky were just beginning to creep back into color, traces of deep reds starting to form on the horizon. The Flying Squirrel could just see the shape of the valley stretched out before them, a hard, deep trench carved out of the rolling hills of rock beyond. From somewhere far ahead, they heard the ringing of voices and the flash of lights. They moved fast and kept low, and soon found themselves concealed behind a stone wall overlooking the valley.
“What are those idiots up to?” Kit wondered aloud.
“Locator spell,” Falconi said simply, straining for a better view.
“I thought you said that wouldn’t work,” the Red Panda frowned. “The magic of the Egyptians being on something of a unique frequency, or some such.”
Falconi smiled. Or some such was the Red Panda’s way of not quite believing what was going on right in front of his eyes. Falconi elected not to fight this battle again with his former student.
“They aren’t looking for magic at all,” Falconi said. “It looks like Pavli is trying to detect open spaces beneath the ground. It’s an interesting approach.”
“I thought we were looking for a pyramid,” Kit said.
“There aren’t any pyramids.” The Red Panda shook his head. “The Valley of the Kings is a New Kingdom site.”
She smiled sweetly. “Pretend I don’t know anything about Egyptology,” she said.
“It means the pyramids are much, much older than the tombs in this valley,” he replied. “The seat of Egyptian power did not shift to Thebes until long after the Great Pyramids at Giza were built.”
“But the Old Man told you we were looking for a pyramid,” she said. “The first and greatest of the pyramids.”
“Yes,” the Red Panda admitted. “But why… at that time, this was a provincial backwater. Why build such a thing so far from your civilization?”
Falconi thought about this for a moment. “Because you, or at least Pharaoh, are trying to contain a mighty relic that you’d just as soon never see again without offending the God of the Underworld, as Anubis was thought to be at the time.”
“All right,” the Red Panda nodded. “So Pavli knows what we know, and he has resolved this conflict by assuming that the pyramid is underground. Why?”
“Because it isn’t anywhere else?” Falconi offered.
“Well, there is that, yes,” the Red Panda said.
“There are many different kinds of pyramids in Egypt,” Falconi said, “and if the Pyramid of Anubis, as we may call it, was the first, it might be quite unlike any that followed. It could have been dug underground. Perhaps even inverted.”
The sun drew nearer to the horizon, and the sky began to blaze with deep and growing red light. It fell upon the valley and the majestic peak that dominated it.
Kit blinked at the mountain. “What’s that?” she asked.
The Red Panda turned his head only slightly. “Oh, that’s al-Qurn,” he said as if this explained everything. “Some scholars think that the Valley of the Kings became the Royal Necropolis because al-Qurn looks so much like a pyramid itself.”
“It does look like a pyramid,” Kit said simply. “A whole lot like a pyramid.”
The Red Panda and the Stranger looked at one another and said nothing for a moment.
“Is it possible?” Falconi said at last.
The Red Panda gave his head a small shake. “Build a pyramid and then bury it to look like a mountain?” he asked. “Why?”
Falconi shrugged. “If that’s how it happened at all,” he said. “The desert could have handled the hiding, I suppose. Or perhaps they were trying to contain a mighty relic that they’d just as soon have never seen again without offending the God of the Underworld.”
“It’s too fantastic,” the Red Panda said quietly.
“Okay, kids, well, here’s my thing,” Kit said, enjoying being the one with the actual idea. “Forgetting for a moment that the baddies are currently spread out all over the valley, and that we’d just as soon not get into a dust-up with Merlin and Merliner if we can avoid it…” She paused a moment to listen for opposition to this and found none. “If we assume that there is a pyramid here somewhere, we can either do what they’re doing and look for the whole entire thing underground, or we can walk over there and check out the big pyramid-shaped thing.”
Both men regarded her in mild astonishment. The Flying Squirrel smiled and looked back and forth between them for a moment.
“She’s quite clever, you know,” Falconi said at last.
“Yes, she is,” the Red Panda agreed proudly.
“And quite lovely,” Falconi added helpfully.
The Red Panda said nothing, but shifted uncomfortably.
“One of us should probably take her dancing,” Falconi continued, ignoring Kit’s unspoken desire for him to please shut up.
“Yes, well,” the Red Panda said, changing the subject just enough, “first things first.”
Nineteen
It took quite some time to make their way to the far side of the mountain, but once there, al-Qurn itself provided perfect cover for their efforts. With luck, the men spread out throughout the Valley of the Kings would never even know they were there. The Flying Squirrel tried hard to banish such thoughts from her mind, as they seemed to suggest a best-case scenario, and the Boss never seemed to rate those very highly. Still, there was no getting around the fact that, for the first time, it seemed almost possible that the Eye of Anubis might soon be within their grasp, and it was difficult for her not to get excited.
The Red Panda seemed less impressed. He presse
d a gauntleted hand against the rock surface of al-Qurn and pushed hard, as if that might tell him something.
“I don’t know, Max,” he said dubiously. “It seems like a lot of trouble to go to.”
“Burying a pyramid or building one in the first place?” Falconi asked, amused. “That’s the one thing you can safely say about the Ancient Egyptians. The fact that something was ludicrously close to impossible doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t try it.”
The Red Panda didn’t have a lot to say to that so he let it go, and the Stranger set about preparing himself to cast a serious spell for the first time in many days.
“Think you’ll be able to tell if the Eye is in there, Max?” Kit asked, her gaze playing about the top of the peak high above.
“Probably not at this range,” Falconi said with a shake of his head. “Not if it has that amount of rock between it and us.”
She frowned. “So what are we doin’ up here?” she asked.
The Stranger smiled enigmatically. “I thought I might have a go at Pavli’s method,” he said, “and try to find out if there is an in there for the Eye to be in, if that wasn’t too difficult to follow.”
The Red Panda nodded. “You’re going to search for open space inside the mountain,” he offered, “and see if there really is a pyramid under there.”
“That’s the idea,” Falconi said. “But it will take a bit of time, I’m afraid. I’m still not really at my best.”
The Red Panda took this as a hint and moved back a distance of twenty feet or so, taking a seat upon a large, reddish boulder. Kit joined him a moment later and the two of them sat quietly and watched the Stranger silently prepare.
He leaned over to her slightly. “Probably take a few minutes,” he said.
She nodded. There was silence for a moment.
“We’ll just have to wait,” he said quietly.
She looked at him and raised an eyebrow.