The Staff of Moses (Oliver Lucas Adventures)

by Andrew Linke

  By seven-thirty, they were in a rented Range Rover streaking up the Cairo Aswan Road with the Nile on their left and a wide strip of fertile farmland stretching away to the west on their right. They followed that road for about three hours, though the time seemed to pass quickly as Oliver regaled Diana with stories about his latest efforts at tracking down the mysterious shards of metal that had become his obsession. For her part, Diana provided Oliver with a detailed summary of the book she was writing based on her research at the Louvre.

  Soon enough they arrived at Faiyum, the nearest large city to the expected location of Sephor’s estate. There they refueled the Range Rover, including filling several extra containers in the cargo bed with gasoline, and purchased a freshly cooked lunch. Once they had finished eating and their legs were no longer cramped, they climbed back in the Range Rover and headed south west along a regional highway with Diana at the wheel, following a path that Oliver had plotted into the GPS.

  This course would take them through several small towns along the wide loop of highway that encircled Al Fayyum Lake. They followed this loop to its southernmost point, skirting the southern edge of the long lake, then drove off the side of the road and headed out across the desert. Oliver had already loaded maps of the region, supposedly updated within the last two years, into a GPS app on his phone. They also had a collection of printed maps ranging from the hand-drawn work of the archaeologists who had first discovered the site to which they were traveling to a topographic map of the desert. Determining where to look for Sephor’s estate had been difficult, but now that they had selected a location, traveling to it, even across the desert, was proving to be a simple exercise in following the paths worked out by the archaeological expedition that first discovered the site twenty years before.

  As Diana drove, Oliver pulled out his phone and posted several updates to his secure tweet stream, letting Amber know where they were and giving instructions on where to find them if they didn’t get back online within three days. She replied almost immediately, wishing them good luck and joking about his prospects of rekindling a romance with Diana in the desiccated remains of an ancient Egyptian temple. He ignored her jokes and slipped the phone into his pocket.

  According to the maps they had examined, the distance from their highway turn-off to the dig site was only about a hundred miles. Their route, however, turned out to be far from a straight line. According to the notes that the previous archeological team had submitted to their university sponsors, the best route would take nearly an hundred and fifty miles of twisting along canyon ledges and around rock piles. That had been twenty years ago, however, and as they drove Oliver had to continually seek out new paths through the shifting sands as Diana came across insurmountable sand dunes and unmarked gullies formed by the flash floods that occurred whenever the rare, but violent, rain storms struck this region. All told, it took nearly six hours for them to arrive at the the mouth of the canyon that he had marked as the likely location of Sephor’s estate.

  They drove through the mouth of the canyon and parked the Range Rover in the shadow of a rocky wall. Looking out through the window, Oliver could see a long wall of mud brick, about twenty feet high, encircling a compound of ancient stone and brick buildings of obviously Egyptian design. The wall was breached in two places. The first was at the gate house, where stone towers rose on either side of a wide gateway. The gate had long ago given way to time and Oliver could see a paved courtyard within the gateway. The second breach was in a place where the wall had collapsed above and around a dry stream bed.

  “Think this is the place?” Diana asked, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel.

  Oliver shrugged. “Only one way to find out. There’s still some daylight left. Let’s go take a look.”

  They climbed out of the car and both spent several moments stretching before Diana opened the back of the Range Rover and pulled out the spare fuel canisters and her backpack. She deposited the canisters beside the car and checked that the vapor locks were functioning before standing up and shrugging her bag on over her shoulders.

  Meanwhile, Oliver pulled his own bag from the car and slipped it on. He checked the water tube that peeked out through a hole in the bag and ran up to a clip on his shoulder strap, verifying that he could draw water from the rubber bladder stowed in a zipper pocket within the pack. He reached back and worked the zipper along the bottom side that would let him slip his hand into the bag and pull out his camera. Even if this little expedition didn’t work out on the relic hunting front, he might be able to get a few photos that he could sell to National Geographic or a travel website. Finally, Oliver pulled his Glock out of the side pocket of the pack and pulled the slide back part way to verify that there was no round in the chamber before clipping the gun to his waistband.

  “Expecting trouble?” Diana asked, stepping back from the car and pushing the door shut behind her. She had the GPS in her hands and was tapping the screen, saving the coordinates of their vehicle.

  “Not expecting, but preparing. You remember that time Amber and I went to South America?”

  “Your first time in the field.”

  “That’s right. One thing I’ll never forget about that little jaunt is that I was completely unarmed most of the time, and that’s a big part of the reason Amber and I barely got out alive.”

  Diana nodded and slipped the GPS into her bag, then adjusted her own water tube. She turned to face down the canyon and said, “I don’t see anyone else here.”

  “Nobody alive.” Oliver agreed.

  Diana gave him a surprised look, then shrugged and started to walk toward the wall.

  They hiked down the canyon, keeping to the shadow of the high wall as much as possible while navigating the wash of boulders and heaped-up sand strewn along the floor of the canyon. According to the archaeological reports that Oliver had read, the canyon was thought to have once been the site of a small oasis, with a winding stream running out from a small lake at the end of the canyon. An unknown nobleman, who Oliver hoped would turn out to be Sephor, had built his estate around the oasis. The estate had thrived for an unknown period of time, the size of the central house and its numerous outbuildings was testament to that, but eventually the oasis spring had dried up and the estate had been abandoned. The site had only been excavated by a single crew of archaeologists, since being discovered on satellite scans thirty years before, and that team had spent less than a month at the site before rumors of a curse and lack of funding drove them away. Nobody had conducted a serious investigation of the site in the nearly twenty years since.

  A ten minute hike along the dry stream brought them to the broken segment of the wall. Shards of metal poked out of the sand near the wall, remnants of an iron grid that had once prevented anyone from sneaking into the estate through the tunnel under the wall where the stream flowed out. Through the gap they could see the paved surface of the courtyard, still visible in places where the archaeologists had dug away the drifts of sand. Statues of men and animals were placed throughout the courtyard, some standing and others toppled into broken humps, their bases surrounded in drifts of sand. Inside the walls the stream bed became a brick-lined depression in the sand, meandering back and forth across the courtyard, occasionally widening into areas that must once have been calm pools of water, before it disappeared around the corner of the house at the far end of the yard.

  “So, I know where I’d begin if we were preparing a proper excavation, but what does my favorite grave robber suggest in moments like this?” Diana quipped as they stood on either side of the broken down wall.

  Oliver kicked at a small stone with his toe, then bent down and hefted it in one hand. “Generally I’ve got a better idea of what I’m looking for before I go in. In this case, however, we don’t have much to go on. We don’t really even know for sure that this is the right place.”

  “So, what then?”

  Oliver tossed the stone through the gap in the wall and watched it skip across t
he sand and clatter to a stop against the shoulder of a shattered statue.

  He waited, listening.

  After a minute or more passed with no sign of movement beyond the wall, Oliver stepped carefully over the rusted iron grid and toppled stones to stand within the walls. He held up a hand for Diana to wait where she stood outside the wall.

  After another minute of quiet observation, Oliver turned to Diana and said, “Let’s head in while its still light out and get some photos of the place, especially any wall carvings or mosaics. It’s too late to do much exploration, but we can at least get a head start on translating anything we find.”

  He turned back towards the house and began walking across the courtyard, pausing every few feet to listen. He heard nothing but the sound of their breathing and the crunch of sand beneath Diana’s boots as she followed him. Oliver didn’t expect to encounter any traps here in the courtyard, but it never hurt to be cautious. The archaeological team that had discovered this site twenty years ago had spent two weeks mapping out the exterior of the estate in detail and carefully examining several unusual piles of bones and weaponry scattered throughout the courtyard, but they had only just begun exploring the interior of the buildings when their leader disappeared.

  The official report stated that Dr. Herbert Yancy, leader of the team, abandoned the expedition and eloped with a young graduate assistant. Without his leadership, the team abandoned the site. Oliver couldn’t prove that the story was false, but it struck him as odd that the missing professor and his lady were never seen again by any of their family or colleagues. Nobody from the expedition ever returned to the site and in the years since, the site had been all but forgotten.

  To Oliver, these circumstances raised the possibility that maybe, just maybe, the team had encountered some form of defense, be it mechanical or supernatural, when they entered the main house. He didn’t want to alarm Diana over what was little more than a hunch, but as he moved across the courtyard, Oliver was resolved to proceed cautiously and be prepared for any threat that might arise.

  They approached the carved stone walls of the central house and paused for a moment to inspect the pillars that stood on either side of the yawning front door. These supported a heavy slab of cut stone that served to shade main entrance of the building. Diana took Oliver’s camera and enthused over the intricacy of the carvings on the pillars, as he edged closer to the doorway and inspected the structure for any sign of traps. Finding no sign of dangerous mechanisms, Oliver turned to look back across the courtyard they had just crossed. He could imagine what it must have been like to stand here in the shade and gaze out down the length of the canyon five thousand years ago. The stream would have poured through the paved channel in the courtyard, filling at least five pools with fresh water and irrigating the raised beds that lined portions of the channel. Standing here it would be possible to see anyone coming from several kilometers away and send word for the servants, or house guard, to prepare an appropriate reception.

  Turning his back on the view, Oliver saw that Diana had already entered the house and had pulled a powerful flashlight out of her backpack and clicked it on. She played her beam along the floor, checking for any desert creatures that might have entered the room to hiding from the sun, but there didn’t appear to be any living thing in this place except for Oliver and Diana. That was a little unusual and he was about to remark on the absence of snakes and scorpions when Diana suddenly sucked in a deep breath and froze, staring at something that was blocked from his view by the edge of the doorway.

  “Oliver...” she whispered, but he had heard her inhalation and was already hurrying towards her, his gun drawn and held at his side.

  “What is it?”

  Diana slipped her flashlight beam sideways, revealing the thing that had made her gasp.

  It was a human skull. The desiccated flesh was drawn tightly across the bone, revealing grinning teeth between the dry lips and shriveled stalks hanging from the holes of its eyes.

  She moved the flashlight slowly past the skull to a lumpy pile of rags covered in dust and sand a few feet away from the skull. After looking at them for a few seconds, Oliver realized that the pile consisted of a body, the dry skin and muscles shriveled tight around the bones, still wrapped in the tattered remains of modern work clothes. The body lay just outside a black doorway that appeared to open into a long corridor leading deeper into the house.

  Oliver pulled out his own flashlight and approached the body cautiously, playing his flashlight beam around the room to search for any sign of a trap that might have killed the person. The room in which they stood was about thirty feet wide and half as deep. At the midpoint of the outer wall was the open doorway through which they had entered. He noted the large brass hinges, still projecting from the stonework even though the doors they had once held must have crumbled millennia ago, as well as several stone and brass lamp fixtures jutting out from the wall around the interior of the room. Several pieces of furniture, desks, stools, and daybeds intricately carved from wood and banded in bright lines of silver and brass, rested against the walls around the perimeter of the room. Directly across from the front doors, against the interior wall, was a carved stone altar. It was flanked by inlayed carvings of Egyptian gods, which Oliver recognized but could not immediately identify. Hieroglyphic symbols were engraved in the wall above the altar, a dozen or more lines of stylized creatures and household objects running down the wall between the two household deities. Two doorways were set into the inner wall of the room, leading deeper into the house. It was outside one of these doorways that the skeleton lay.

  Oliver put an arm around Diana’s shoulders. “You ok?” He asked.

  She shivered briefly under his touch, then nodded firmly and replied, “Yes. It just surprised me. It’s not like I haven’t seen plenty of skeletons in the museum, I’ve just never stumbled across one like this before.”

  Oliver grinned and squeezed Diana against himself briefly before dropping his arm and stepping over to the corpse. “It doesn’t look as if it’s been disturbed by anything. The fabric of the clothing is worn, but it’s not chewed through by mice or bugs. Even the skin and flesh don’t seem to have decomposed. It’s just had all the moisture sucked out of it, almost like a mummy.”

  “There’s no telling how long it’s been here I guess.”

  “Probably not. I hear that a few weeks in the desert could turn just about any body into a mummy that would take expert analysis to distinguish from the old ones.”

  “That’s true. One of my advisors at the Louvre was involved in an experiment like that.”

  Oliver nudged the sleeve of the robe with the toe of his hiking boot. It shifted up and he chuckled. “Well, whoever this guy was, he’s not ancient. He’s wearing a Casio.”

  He pointed with his toe to the black plastic band of the watch, still encircling the withered skin and dry bone of the body’s left wrist. Diana smiled at the incongruity of the situation, then crossed her arms and shivered again.

  “Sure you’re alright?”

  “Really, Oliver. You don’t have to play all chivalrous with me. I... I was just wondering why the head is so far from the body.”

  Oliver flicked his flashlight back and forth between the body and its head. “No idea, but it’s worth being careful. I doubt that there are any traps here in the common rooms of a house, but you never know what smugglers or soldiers might have added over the years.”

  “I wonder who he was.”

  Oliver nodded, but didn’t say anything. He had been wondering that himself and was beginning to wonder if this might be the missing Dr. Yancy. But if the professor had died here, so close the entrance of the house, why had the rest of the team left his body here and reported that he had run off with his assistant?

  He stepped to the side of the doorway and shone his light around the frame, inspecting for any sign of hidden blades, trip lines, or garrote wires. Oliver had evaded his own fare share of such traps over the last decad
e, but the relic hunting community was small and everyone in it knew of someone who had been killed by a trap while exploring some ancient temple or tomb. Oliver didn’t see any signs of traps in the doorway or as far down the corridor as his flashlight could show him. This only increased his unease, however.

  A bright flash popped at the edge of his vision and Oliver spun to see Diana standing in front of the altar, snapping photos of the hieroglyphs and household gods. Calm down. He told himself. You’re the one whose been investigating tombs for a decade, shake it off like she did.

  “Odd combination, this.” Diana said, gesturing with the camera Oliver had loaned her at the two relief carvings of Egyptian deities.

  “How so?” Oliver asked. “I’m familiar enough with Egyptian mythology to recognize names, but I couldn’t point out any of the gods in a lineup.”

  Diana rolled her eyes and gestured to the statue on the left of the altar depicting a man with a long beard holding a crooked staff and a stylized whip. “This is an image of Osiris, the Egyptian god of the afterlife. It’s a common enough feature in homes from the seventh dynasty onward that even the poor Egyptians would commonly have a small statuette of him on their family altar at home. The odd thing is the pairing of deities.”

  She pointed at the statue on the right of the altar, which depicted a dog-faced creature with long pointed ears sprouting from the top of its head. “This is Setesh, the Egyptian god of chaos and darkness. According to Egyptian mythology, Setesh was the mortal enemy of his brother Osiris. In some myths he even kills his own brother, leading to epic adventures in which his nephew Horus hunts Setesh down to exact revenge for the death of his father.”

  Oliver moved to where he could see the two statues and examine the hieroglyphs between them. He couldn’t read the symbols, but the placement and pictographic tone of the engravings didn’t give him any sense of enmity between the two statues. They were of equal height, except for Setesh’s ears, which reached almost to the stone ceiling of the room.