The Staff of Moses (Oliver Lucas Adventures)

by Andrew Linke

  Oliver didn’t know what motivated her to remain in the shadows of the outer courtyard, be it a vague hope that she could escape from the mercenaries while they ventured deeper into the temple or a true fear of what might guard the inner chambers, but he thought her wise to keep her distance from Kyle and his men. They were skilled and remorseless killers, but had no experience delving into the sanctuaries of relics. If there was one place in the world Oliver would not want to stand, it was at the side of an overconfident neophyte tomb raider as they blundered deeper into the labyrinth of magic and traps that so many of these sites of power were.

  Kyle paused at the head of the steps down to the lower courtyard. His men lined up on either side, all gazing down into the area below. When they didn’t move to walk down the steps Oliver took a chance and ran lightly to the next supporting pillar, the closest to where the men stood.

  “...the hell is going on here?” one of the men, identifiable to Oliver only by the edge of a tattoo peeking up over his collar, was saying. “I’ve never seen to many bones in one place.”

  “They’re not human.” Kyle growled, placing his foot on the first step.

  “But... where did they come from? The ones on top can’t be more than a few days old.”

  Kyle didn’t reply. As Oliver watched, he strode down the steps and bent to inspect something on the floor. After a moment he stood and flicked something small and white at the nearest mercenary. “They’re frogs, or lizards, or something like that. There’s nothing to worry about here.”

  With that he strode forward, his boots making a disconcerting crunch and shuffle sound with every step, and disappeared behind the low wall that surrounded the lower court.

  The mercenaries exchanged glances. One of them nodded over his shoulder towards the shadows where they body of their comrade still lay, then stepped forward and followed Kyle. The others followed, their footsteps building the crackle and swoosh of shattering bones under foot to a brutal crescendo.

  Oliver crept up to the brick wall surrounding the lower courtyard and waited for the sound of combat boots crunching bone to fade. As he approached, a stench reached his nose, creeping in on his consciousness so slowly that he didn’t even notice it until he was almost to the wall. It was a smell of death and decay that reminded him of being a child and coming upon his dog playing with a rotten fish on the banks of the river. He swallowed bile and breathed through his mouth until, a minute or two later, he became inured to the odor. Soon enough the crunching sound faded as the mercenaries left the lower courtyard and disappeared into a dark hall beyond. When they didn’t return for a full minute, Oliver risked a look over the wall.

  The lower court was sunk about three feet below the level of the upper courtyard. In the places where the mercenaries had trod, he could make out the brick pavement, but everywhere else the floor of the court was covered in a layer of tiny white bones nearly six inches deep. The topmost layer of bones was thinly strung with bits of skin and viscera from thousands of frogs.

  “That’s not a good sign,” Oliver whispered to himself and the words of Sephor’s mad message returned to his mind: You will be faced with the plagues that befell our forefathers.

  A glitter of golden light caught Oliver’s eye and an empty brass bullet casing clattered to the ground a few feet from him. He ducked and raised his gun automatically, pointing it in the direction he had seen the light, even as his rational mind told him that he would already be dead if one of the mercenaries had fired at him from the other side of the upper courtyard. Sighting down the barrel of his gun, Oliver saw Diana crouching against the wall on the opposite side of the open walkway. He allowed himself a smile of relief and lowered the gun, waving for her to come to him. She moved forward to the edge of the open walkway between the statues of the gods, hesitated for a moment, set her shoulders back, and ran across the walkway into Oliver’s arms.

  As soon he had her, Oliver dropped, pulling them both down below the edge of the wall. Diana clung to him wordlessly for nearly a minute, her body shaking with repressed emotion, though she did not cry. Oliver felt himself breathing deeply as he was filled with joy that Diana had survived her time with the mercenaries. He had kept the thought locked away deep within himself, but now all of his guilt at leaving her behind in the helicopter, even though it had been forced upon him, broke over him like a wave and threatened to draw him down into a sea of shame. He took several deep breaths, allowing himself to enjoy the warmth of Diana’s body against his own, then pushed the emotion down and locked it away again. If they were to get out of this temple alive he would have to stay clear-headed.

  He bent his head until his mouth was beside Diana’s ear and whispered, “I’m glad you’re alive.”

  Her body shivered hard against his several times at that, then she spoke into his ear and Oliver realized that she was trying to keep from laughing. “Thanks, Oliver. Me too.”

  She leaned back away from him and whispered, “Can you get us out of here?”

  Oliver nodded, then hesitated, thinking of the words that Elder Layla had translated for him. “Diana, you lied to them about the inscription on the chapel wall. You only told them about the directions, not the warning.”

  She looked shocked for a minute, then nodded.

  Oliver smiled reassuringly. “That was quick thinking, and brave. They probably would have killed us right there if they thought there was no chance of getting to the staff.”

  He looked down at Diana. She was still wearing the climbing harness that she had used to descend from the helicopter about an hour before, though it was now covered with dust and grime from the temple and the destruction of the gates. “I’ve got a rope. We can go back to the plaza and you can rappel down to the desert and use my phone to find the jeep. There’s water there, and food, and another set of binoculars. If I’m not back in two hours...”

  Diana shook her head. “No way. If you’re still going in, I’m coming with you.”

  He looked at her uncertainly. He had never intended to pull her into such a dangerous situation and, while he was sure she was brave enough to follow through, he didn’t want to put her in harm’s way again.

  “This is all so new to me, Oliver. I’ve read your posts and listened to your stories for years, but this is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to actually live them. Do you have another gun?”

  Oliver nodded.

  “Alright. Give me your spare and a sip of that water. Those bastards wouldn’t let me drink since we got up here. Then I’ll go in with you.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  Oliver allowed a smile to creep onto his face as he unslung his backpack and pulled Frank’s gun from a side pocket. “You have a holster?”

  Diana nodded and patted her belt, which Oliver saw did indeed have a nylon sidearm holster attached to it. “I took it off the dead mercenary. I figured I might be able to snag a gun if one of the others had a run in with whatever traps or guardians are back there.”

  He passed her the gun and watched as she checked it and secured it in the holster, then handed her the drinking tube from his bag. “Remind me why we broke up all those years back?”

  “Because you ran off to the jungle with your cousin and I didn’t hear from you for two months.”

  “Right. After this, I might have to keep you with me.”

  Diana put the rubber nipple of the tube in her mouth and sucked deeply, a look of anticipatory relief on her face at the thought of finally getting a drink. Then the expression on her face turned to horror and disgust. She threw the tube town and spat dark liquid out on the ground, then gagged, spit, and retched at Oliver’s feet.

  Oliver picked up the tube and squeezed the nipple, letting a drop of the liquid spill out onto his fingertip. He pinched it between finger and thumb, feeling the smooth viscosity of it like oil against his skin. He sniffed the bitter saltiness of it, then wiped it off on his pants.

  “Why the hell do you have blood in yo
ur water bag...” Diana froze as the answer to her own question dawned across her face. “The plagues.”

  Oliver nodded, his face grim. “Napoleon’s men must have reached the staff and done something to unleash the power within it.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  Oliver pulled the note Hadiya had written for him from his shirt pocket and examined it again. Elder Layla had said that it would help him survive the temple and reach the staff, but he was beginning to wonder if she had simply been conveying the sentiment in Sephor’s half-mad scratches on the wall. He read the note over again, holding it low enough that Diana could read it as well, and looked slowly around the courtyard. The somber faces of the Egyptian gods gazed back at Oliver from their places on either side of the sunlit path, their stony eyes seeming to laugh at his inability to crack Sephor’s riddle.

  “That’s a good translation of the inscription.” Diana remarked. “Where’d you get it?”

  “An old priestess.” Oliver muttered absently, his eyes drifting down towards the lower courtyard and its morbid carpet.

  At the far end, nearly hidden in the shadows of the low roof, the wall was carved with a scene of judgment. Ancient Egyptian gods and goddesses were stacked in ranks above a relief carving of a balance scale. On the right side of the scale was a depiction of a man dressed in the garb of a pharaoh. On the left was a set of glyphs that Oliver thought he recognized. He let Diana take the paper from his hand and moved forward to stand at the edge of the foul expanse of rotting flesh and bones. He reached behind him and pulled his camera out of its padded pocket at the base of his backpack then held it up to his eye, using the zoom lens to inspect the mural while snapping a few quick photos.

  “I’d love to speak with this priestess of yours. She translated a few words that I couldn’t. Here, where she wrote ‘tip the balance’ I didn’t know how translate the phrase. Thought it had something to do with a scale.”

  Oliver nodded absently. He didn’t want to step into the bones until it was absolutely necessary because they would make such a loud crunching noise that the mercenaries were almost certain to hear them coming, not to mention the risk of snakes, scorpions, and traps. They had to find some way of getting to the staff before it could be brought out of the temple by Kyle and his men. He had never before encountered a relic with the power to sow destruction on this scale and hated to think what would happen if it were brought out into the world. Tracking the camera up across the mural, Oliver frowned at an odd dark patch under the radiating arms of a sun.

  “Odd, this, but it makes more sense.” Diana continued. “She translated the word ‘crawl’ as ‘pass’ in the last line.”

  That gave Oliver an idea.

  “Come on. I think I know how to get in there without them hearing us coming.”

  Without waiting for Diana to acknowledge him, Oliver slipped his camera into its compartment and descended into the lower courtyard. He kicked aside the rotting piles of bones and frog skins as he made his way directly to the mural. Diana pushed the paper into a pocket and jumped to follow.

  “How?”

  “The priestess who gave that to me said it might help me reach the staff before the mercenaries. I think I see...”

  He reached the wall and, feeling a twinge of guilt at risking damage to the ancient wall carving, used the forehead of an Egyptian god and the narrow ridge of the right balance to boost himself up high enough to reach the blank expanse of stone between the sun and the balance. His fist pounded against a thin layer of stone, giving a hollow thud. The stone between heads of the carved figures of the gods and the splayed rays of the sun seemed to be nothing more than a thin cap of slate. He pounded on it again cracking the stone, then shattering it and sending shards tumbling down over his shoulders to the bones below, revealing a dark crawlspace leading back into the temple.

  Oliver reached into the side pouch of his pack and pulled out small, but intensely bright, LED flashlight. He clicked it on and examined the entrance to the crawlspace. There would be plenty of room for Diana and him to move through, but he probably wouldn’t fit with his backpack on. He could push it ahead of him but that would make a loud scraping sound and slow their progress, negating the point of taking this path. He jumped down and turned to see Diana standing amid the bones a few feet away.

  “I’m going through that tunnel. If you still want to come with me you can follow behind. If not, you can take the rope from my pack, climb down, and head for the jeep.”

  “I’m coming.”

  Oliver stepped past Diana and set his backpack on the steps to the upper courtyard, then returned to the mural and laid a hand on Diana’s shoulder.

  “You think you can get up there on your own?”

  She shook her head. “No. Not tall enough.”

  “Right.”

  Oliver passed her the flashlight, then bent and cupped his hands. Diana got the hint and used Oliver’s hands as a step up to grab the edge of the tunnel. She pulled herself up into the hole and crawled forward. Oliver repeated his balancing act on the stone ridges and pulled himself into the tunnel behind Diana.

  They crawled down the tunnel in silence, the sound of their own breathing and the shuffle of their knees and hands loud in the dark stillness. There was remarkably little dust on the floor and walls, though Oliver did occasionally brush up against a sharp fleck of stone that had chipped away from the blocks as they were set into place and gone unnoticed in this cramped space. His initial concerns that they might encounter some dangerous pest were soon brushed away as they crawled deeper into the space between the walls without encountering any sign that this passage had played host to living things in the last five thousand years. The air was cool and had the intense, skin-pricking dry quality that is only felt in places surrounded by literally tons of moisture-deprived stone.

  Every few feet, the tunnel would slope abruptly downward, then continue on straight for a while before going down again. Reflecting on the layout of the temple courtyard, Oliver came to the conclusion that the chamber which housed the staff must have originally been located below the waterline of the lake that had once surrounded the island. He wondered if this had been done for ceremonial purposes, keeping the staff lower than the water to restrict its power, or as an act of religious politicking, placing it lower than the chambers dedicated to the gods of Egypt. There was no way to be sure now, unless they found an engraving or scroll that explained the purpose of the temple’s layout, but judging from the damage seemingly wrought by the staff, its power had been in no way diminished by its location within the temple.

  They proceeded several dozen yards down the passage and Oliver was just allowing himself to relax when a blood-chilling scream filled the passage. It seemed to seep through the very stone surrounding them, then echo down the passage from the opening behind them. The scream was followed by distant shouts and the noise of automatic weapons firing.

  “They’ve encountered the guardians!” Diana shouted.

  “Whatever they might be. Keep moving!”

  They continued down the passage, moving more slowly now, flinching whenever another scream of burst of gunfire sounded around them. Oliver knew that sound moved in deceptive ways in ancient temples, or any other place that consisted of a maze of corridors separated by stone of varying thickness. A noise that seemed to come from far away might be just on the other side of a thin wall of stone, while a seemingly close noise could have echoed from one twisted corridor to another, up through a hole in the floor, and into your ears from an incredibly distant source.

  “There was a warning inscribed above the gates.” Diana whispered when no more shots had come for over a minute. “It spoke of the eternal guardians of the temple, sworn to protect the people of Egypt from the wrath of a foreign god.”

  “Did it describe them?”

  “No. Do you think any of them are still alive?”

  “The mercenaries? Probably. The French soldiers got in
deep enough to break whatever wards kept the staff under control and they didn’t have machine guns. Of course... ” He paused, thinking of the bloody water, darkness, and countless dead frogs. “Who knows what happened when the two powers clashed.”

  “We might be about to find out. This is the end.”

  They had come to a solid wall of slate with a narrow bead of gray mortar running along the edge where the gray slate met the yellow sandstone. Diana knocked on it and it echoed hollowly. She put her ear to the cool stone and listened while Oliver waited anxiously, wishing that he had been at the front. He hadn’t traveled with a partner for several years, so he had grown unaccustomed to trusting the judgement of others when exploring.

  Diana twisted around and said, “I don’t hear anything from the other side. Maybe they’re all dead, or we’ve gotten ahead of them by running straight down the length of the temple.”

  “Get your gun ready and try to knock out the stone. See if you can just chip away a section of it with the butt of the flashlight and peek though.”

  Diana nodded and was about to jab the light at the stone when it dawned on Oliver that they might be about to break into a chamber guarded by the supernatural guardians of at least two pantheons. He called out and Diana froze, arm poised awkwardly in the air beside her.

  “Take this. It may keep the guardians at bay.” Oliver whispered. He passed her the engraved brass pyramid that Elder Layla had called the key. It had already caused the guardians of the gate to welcome him into the temple with the sound of trumpets and swing wide the gates, or what remained of them after Kyle and his men had blasted their way in, so he thought that perhaps it would give Diana a measure of protection against whatever lay beyond the cap of slate. In fact, now that he thought about it, that could explain how the French soldiers had managed to disturb the staff. If the key granted access to the temple, perhaps they had passed through unharmed until the moment that they touched the relic itself.