by Andrew Linke
Diana nodded solemnly and unholstered her gun. She checked the chamber and put the gun back in the holster. Then she shrugged out of her backpack and pulled out a yellow notepad and a pen. She settled into a position from which she could see both the inscription and the doorway and began sketching out the lines of hieratic on her pad.
Oliver nodded in approval and slipped out through the passage into the main chamber of the chapel. Something felt missing in all of this, but he wasn’t quite sure what.
He bent to examine the long dead bodies of the French soldier once more. The soldier had clearly been killed by a sword thrust to his gut. The presence of a French soldier in this tomb would have been utterly inexplicable were it not for the clue Diana had provided in the form of Gabriel de Pujul’s half-mad letters to his artist brother. He had been part of an expedition sent to scout the desert and ascertain the hostility of native tribes living around the desert lakes. Somehow, they had blundered into this place and, if the descriptions that inspired Abel de Pujul were to be taken at face value, continued on to a place where the staff of Moses was hidden.
Oliver picked up Sephor’s sword and began poking it through the larger drifts of sand throughout the chapel. It only took him a few minutes to find the next body. All told, there were seven uniformed corpses of French soldiers scattered throughout the chapel. They all bore marks of a violent death by sword. As Oliver uncovered each man, he saw that some still lay beside the brittle remains of muskets, the chipped stocks of which appeared to have been used as improvised quarterstaves in hand to hand combat against an opponent wielding a large sword.
That explained some of it. A picture began to form in Oliver’s mind of the French expedition discovering this canyon and the unspoiled estate located at the far end. They would have begun to explore it, just as their great leader Napoleon had explored the tombs and temples of northern Egypt. Then they came to this chapel and... Oliver pondered what it must have been like for those men to be confronted with the raging corpse of Sephor, armed only with muzzle-loading muskets and bayonets. They must have been courageous to not immediately turn and run. But why had they stayed? Standing against the fiend when it first charged, or even after one or two men fell to it, was one thing, but the soldiers had stayed and fought Sephor long enough that seven men had fallen to him in this place.
What if they hadn’t been simply exploring? What if they somehow they knew of the “keys” contained within the chapel’s inner sanctum and this scene of supernatural carnage was not the result of a blundering exploration, but a suicidal battle charge?
Oliver searched the bodies of the soldiers and gathered what letters and journals he found, but his cursory scan of each object didn’t reveal any clues to the soldiers’ mission. These were simple combat soldiers, not officers. They had known nothing of their mission, except that it meant more days of traveling through the torturous heat of the desert.
Disgusted, Oliver tossed the sword aside and strode towards the doorway into the courtyard. He had left Diana with the intent of searching the main house, so he would do just that. Perhaps he would stumble across the body of a French officer bearing a packet of orders, or even a journal in which he described his intended course of action.
Oliver had just stepped out through the chapel entrance when a sudden movement in the corner of his eye caused him to dive forward and reach for his gun. He was too late. A weight slammed into his back and in the same instant an arm, clad in desert camouflage covering living human skin, wrapped around his neck. He landed hard on his chest. The arm around Oliver’s neck tightened, cutting off his breath. He flailed ineffectually at his captor, but the unseen assailant was too strong for him. The last thing Oliver saw as his vision darkened was the sandy yellow stone of the garden path.
Chapter Thirteen
“...it mean?” The voice was strangely familiar, but Oliver couldn’t place it.
“I don’t know. You’re looking at the ravings of a dead man. It might not mean anything?” Diana’s voice. She sounded afraid.
Oliver’s head felt heavy. He was laying face down on a hard surface covered in sand. How had he gotten here?
Another voice. This one also strangely familiar. “Let us give her some incentive.” A pause. Oliver heard the sound of feet crunching on sand coming close to him. A sharp pain bloomed in his side and he jerked sideways, letting out an involuntary shout. Oliver’s eyes popped open and he found himself looking at Diana.
She was sitting with her back against the wall, her feet bound with white plastic zip ties and her arms behind her. He assumed that they were bound as well. The side of her head was bloodied and the blush of a bruise was already developing just below her hairline, but she didn’t appear to have been severely injured.
Turning his head slowly back and forth, Oliver saw a familiar man dressed in bloodied desert camouflage sitting against the opposite wall while a similarly dressed man finished applying a bandage to his right shoulder. A set of booted feet stood beside Oliver and, as he watched, one drew back and swung forward sharply to kick him in the side again.
He coughed and groaned.
“What about it Miss Jordan? Does this bring any thoughts to mind?”
Oliver recognized the voice now. He looked up past the booted foot that had kicked him, along the thick leg, and past the protruding belly to the face of Rais Karim.
“How the hell did you get out here?” Oliver croaked.
Rais looked down at Oliver and grinned. Despite his clean-shaven face and white teeth, the curve of his lips and glint in his eye made it an unpleasant sight. “So our little tomb robber decided to wake up at last. Looks like I’m still a bit more than a deposed bureaucrat after all.”
Oliver blinked and tried to clear his head. How had Rais Karim got here? And why was Frank getting his shoulder bandaged? That name brought it together for him. The man on the floor was named Frank. He was a mercenary who had been part of the scheme to sell relics captured from a secret vault in the Cairo museum. Frank and his cohorts had double crossed whoever paid them to retrieve the relics and attempted to sell them on the black market instead. All of this came back to Oliver in a rush, but it still didn’t explain how they had known to come here.
Another voice spoke. Oliver turned his head and recognized Frank’s partner in crime and business, Kyle. “What about it, Ms. Jordan. Still having trouble translating that text?”
Diana twisted in her restraints and looked pleadingly at Oliver. He did his best to smile and give her a little nod. “There’s no point hiding anything, Diana,” he said. “If they plan on killing us, there’s nothing we can do to stop them. Make yourself useful, and you might get out of this alive.”
“A sensible viewpoint.” Kyle said, nodding his head slightly.
“Speak for yourself, I’ll kill the bitch.” Frank grunted.
Kyle laughed and threw a glance towards Frank. “Shut up man. It’s your own fault for blundering into the back room without checking it out first.”
“The girl was supposed to be some sort of language nerd. I didn’t exactly expect her to be sitting back there waiting to plug me.” Frank scowled and pushed the medic away, then pulled himself up with his good arm. “Get her working for us, or I’ll kill her.” He stalked out of the chamber, wincing once as his wounded shoulder brushed the wall.
Kyle waited for Frank to leave and turned back to Diana. “As I was saying, tell us what this inscription says and we’ll let you go. It’s not as if you can go and report us to the authorities. Even if you can find someone who is willing to listen, I’d love to see how you tell this story without confessing to illegal relic hunting yourselves.”
Diana sighed and closed her eyes for a minute. Finally she took a deep breath and said, “What you see on the wall there is little more than the mad ravings of a man driven to insanity by time and rage. I can’t promise you that it will be of any use.”
“Go on.”
“I assume you saw the bodies in the chapel as yo
u dragged Oliver in here?”
Kyle and Rais both nodded and Rais said, “One of them was most certainly a man preserved by supernatural forces. In my early days with the secret police, we encountered one such creature. It killed three members of my squad before we managed to subdue it.”
“Oliver knows more about that sort of thing than I do, but yes, I believe that the... thing out there was once an Egyptian general named Sephor. The first line of the inscription appears to be a formal statement of his lineage, like the opening lines of ancient court testimony, but it’s hard to make sense of it without any supporting documents.”
Diana paused and took a deep breath. She looked to Oliver and he nodded encouragingly, then winced as Rais kicked him in the side again. Diana got a hard look to her eyes, then continued to speak.
“Sephor then refers to the murals on the walls of the inner sanctum, where we are now, as evidence of his greatest victory. After returning the staff to Pharaoh, he was rewarded with this land, where he ordered this estate built and brought his family and retainers to live in luxury. Though he was retired from making war, Sephor was entrusted with the protection of a set of relics that would guide the holder to the temple where the staff was kept, so that he could always find his way to the temple of the staff. But then something went wrong.”
Diana shifted uncomfortably in her bonds and took a deep breath, then explained, “Even if the narrative hadn’t been written by a madman, you have to understand that it was composed in the mind of a man from a different time. Nothing is written in terms of personal failures, so what I’m about to tell you comes from reading between the lines of an already fuzzy story.”
She paused, waiting for some indication that Kyle and Rais still wanted to hear her story. Good, Oliver thought, She’s making them hungry for her information.
Kyle crouched down and looked Diana in the eyes. “Go on.”
“Well, some time after retiring to this place, the family was attacked by their own guards. At Sephor’s command, the priests who served the family in this chapel had created undead guardians to protect the house, but one night, these creatures turned on their masters. Sephor’s family and servants were slaughtered or driven away and he was wounded grievously. He fought his way to the chapel, where he forced the last remaining priest to perform a ritual that bound him to the inner sanctum as eternal guardian of the relics.”
Kyle snorted and took a step closer to Diana. “Do you really expect me to believe that crap? This is the real world, honey, not some fantasy story.”
“You asked me to tell you what the inscription says. I’m explaining a bit of the context, as much as I understand it, but every bit of this is written on that wall.”
Rais Karim cleared his throat and interjected, “Don’t be too quick to discredit her story, Kyle. You saw that corpse out in the chapel. And you know how well-preserved that scroll was, at least until you destroyed it.”
“Shut up old man.”
“I will not. You violated a relic of my people that had survived for centuries, all because these two fools outwitted you by pretending that it was not authentic. To my mind, that makes you the greater fool.”
Oliver wasn’t exactly sure what was going between the two men, but he was beginning to suspect that they were not working together entirely by choice. He had been surprised to see them at first, but as Diana related the translation of Sephor’s engraving, he had started to put the pieces together in him mind. After he and Diana had pulled out of the deal in Cairo, Rais must have made contact with the mercenaries again. But that didn’t make sense. He didn’t have the resources to buy the scroll from them, and he had just accused Kyle of destroying the scroll after Diana told him that it was a forgery. What could have brought these men together?
Kyle’s hand slipped down to the holster strapped to his thigh. He stepped closer to Rais, momentarily ignoring Oliver and Diana. “I’m warning you, Rais. You’re here to ensure delivery, nothing more.”
“Warning me?” Rais’s face darkened and he took a step closer to Kyle. “If it wasn’t for my intervention, you would have been out on the streets now, begging for work and hoping to find a patron before your old enemies hunted you down. I gave you the name of the hotel where Mr. Lucas and Ms. Jordan were staying. I arranged the trace on their vehicle’s navigation system. Without me you’d have no chance of recovering the staff before your employer...”
Kyle pulled out his gun and shot Rais in the chest. Rais stumbled and fell backwards against the wall. His blood splattered across the mural and formed a bright red streak running down the wall as he slid down and came to rest leaning against the wall, just a few feet from Oliver’s bound legs. His face was a twitching mask of shock and confusion. He raised one hand to the bloody hole in his chest, probing it with his fingers as if he didn’t believe it was actually there.
Kyle shot him again. The old man’s head slumped down as he gave one last shuddering gasp, then fell silent.
A loud pounding of booted feet on stone sounded from outside the chamber. Oliver craned his neck around the corner and caught a glimpse of a large man in desert camouflage dodging behind the altar. At the end of the short passage that led out to the main hall of the chapel he saw the tip of a boot poking out around the corner of the wall.
“Commander Sanders, what happened?” a rough voice shouted. “Are you alive?”
“Stand down men.” Kyle said, holstering his gun. “Just dealing with a little problem.”
“Yes sir,” the same voice replied. Oliver caught another glimpse of movement in the chapel as the men out there moved away from the narrow passage.
Oliver looked over and saw that Rais’s chin had settled down on his chest. He didn’t appear to be breathing, which was no surprise given the two holes in the center of his chest and the pool of blood spreading out around him. Oliver turned to Diana and was relieved to see that she was remaining calm. He knew that she was strong, but anyone could be excused for getting upset in present circumstances. The wet streaks of tears had etched bright lines of pink in the dust covering her face, but her mouth was firm and her eyes were open.
“Now, about you stopping the bullshit and telling me what I need to know about that inscription,” Kyle said, stepping close to Diana. He squatted in front of her and pointed back at the lifeless body of Rais. “I said that I would let you go, and I still might, but only if you don’t jerk me around. I’ve got a lot riding on finding that staff. Got it?”
Diana nodded.
“Good.”
Oliver cleared his throat and waited for Kyle to turn and face him. When the mercenary commander looked around, Oliver said, “Look, Kyle, you’re obviously angry. I don’t want to upset you any more, but Diana’s not screwing with you when she talks about undead guardians and ancient priests. I can’t read that inscription, but I’ve had a lot of experience with getting in and out of magically guarded tombs. If you let us help you, we can all get out of this alive.”
Kyle appeared to ponder this for a moment. His face remained harsh, but he kept his hand away from his gun, which was good enough for Oliver. He could imagine that it was difficult for a man like Kyle, accustomed to dealing with the gritty realities of modern warfare, to accept the existence of such things as undead warriors and skeleton guards.
“What sort of tomb robber are you if you don’t even read the language?”
“The sort who usually stays far away from Egypt, and will be happy to return to that modus operandi if allowed to keep breathing.”
That got Kyle to crack his glowering expression just enough to let a crooked smile through. He let out a short chuckle and said, “I almost like you, man. Even if your girl here shot Frank.”
“Listen, Kyle, I don’t know what your situation is, and really don’t want to if it’ll make me end up like that old bastard.” Oliver nodded in the direction of Rais’s body. “But I’ve got this hunch that you’re under a lot of pressure to find a particular ancient staff. Diana and I were in a
similar situation when we met you in the book shop. What do you say we put the past behind us, figure all this out without any more killing, and go our separate ways?”
Oliver was playing a close game here and hoped that he hadn’t pushed too far by mentioning the pressure Kyle was under. It seemed to work though, because Kyle nodded his head and looked thoughtful, then said, “Help me get to the staff and I’ll keep my word on not killing you both. If you screw with me though...”
He let that hang in the air as he looked between Oliver and Diana. They both nodded.
“Good. Now, tell me where to find that temple.”
Diana sniffed and cleared her throat, then squared her shoulders and said, “Sephor describes the temple as being located on an island in the middle of a desert lake, three day’s journey west of his estate.”
“That can’t be far from here. That was thousands of years ago, they couldn’t have traveled very fast.” Kyle said. He paused and looked thoughtful for a moment. “But I don’t know of any lakes in this area except those three lakes north of here.”
Diana looked to Oliver. Oliver didn’t like giving the mercenaries the location of the temple, but at the moment, he was more concerned with staying alive. He shifted his legs to get Kyle’s attention, then said, “I don’t know for sure, but if we looked at some satellite imagery we might be able to find a dried lakebed that matches the description. You’ve got to remember that this inscription was written by someone who was trapped in this chapel for nearly five thousand years. That’s plenty of time for a spring to dry up, or a stream to shift course.”
“Alright. Let’s go take a look.”
Kyle stepped up to Diana and pulled out a long knife with one serrated edge. He bent over her and set the knife against the plastic bindings around her ankles. Then he paused and looked up at her. “No funny business. You try to kick me, or run away, or anything else, and I’ll shoot you.”