by Andrew Linke
“What about you?”
“I’ve got something as well, though I don’t know if it will protect me. Even if mine doesn’t work I have more experience dealing with, well, this sort of thing.”
She nodded and tucked the brass pyramid into the pocket of her khakis. It bulged awkwardly against her hip, but appeared secure against falling out.
Oliver nodded and Diana flipped the flashlight over and stabbed the rugged metal end of it into the slate. The thin stone shattered where the flashlight struck it, sending a spray of shards into the space beyond and spidering cracks across the surface of the slate. Diana lowered the flashlight to the floor in front of her and Oliver saw, through the random speckling of yellow dots still clouding his vision, a pale blue light pouring into the tunnel through the crack. She put her eye to the hole and Oliver heard her breath catch in her throat.
“What is it?” he whispered.
Diana’s voice, when she finally replied, was barely audible. Her eye remained fixed to the crack as she said, “I can see the staff.”
Chapter Nineteen
Oliver felt a familiar grin creasing its way across his face. He recognized the tone in Diana’s voice from the dozens of times he had felt the same joy at the discovery of a true relic in some ancient tomb or long abandoned temple. No matter how hard he had to work to find the place, how far he had to crawl through mud, how many armed rivals he faced, or how many supernatural wards stood between him and escape, that moment of first beholding a genuine fragment of refined cosmic power always brought a grin to Oliver’s face and a chill to his spine.
“It looks like the tunnel opens just above some sort of viewing platform, behind a statue of some sort. I can see the chamber through the statue’s legs. Below the platform there’s an altar. The staff is laying on the ground beside the altar, amid a pile of bones.”
“Break through. We’ll see if we can get to the staff before Kyle and his men get here.”
Diana did as he said, smashing away the remainder of the slate with the butt of her flashlight and slipping out to crouch behind the left leg of the statue. Oliver followed her and knelt behind the statue’s right leg to survey the room.
It was as she had described. They knelt upon a raised stone plinth, which supported a larger than life statue of a man. Oliver could not see the face from where he crouched, but looking up past the man’s back he saw that the man was depicted wearing the headdress of a pharaoh. Over each shoulder he could just see the tops of the crossed scepter and flail that were the symbols of his rank.
This must be the Pharaoh Ramesses II. Oliver thought. Standing here in the room where the symbol of his ancestors’ shame was kept subject to the power of all the gods of Egypt.
Another statue, smaller, but still larger than life, stood a dozen or so feet to the right of the one they crouched behind. Oliver immediately recognized the proud profile of that effigy as Sephor, an assumption supported by the oversized bronze sword clasped in the hand of the stone general.
Looking out beyond the Pharaoh’s leg, Oliver saw that the room was built in a perfect square, with a high observation platform surrounding a depression in the center. Eight stone pillars stood around the central area, two on each side of a set of wide steps leading down to an altar of cast bronze. Spaced out around the edges of the platform, only faintly visible in the dim light that gleamed out from narrow slits in the ceiling, were a number of shadowy niches cut into the stone of the walls. At least a dozen scorched and shattered skeletons, some bare and others swathed in layers of tattered cloth, lay in various poses of disarray around the platform and down the steps. Many of the clothed skeletons lay beside the rusted and splintered remains of French army swords and muskets.
At the center of all this stood the altar, bathed in the soft glow of daylight that had traveled far through numerous passages too narrow for any man to crawl through, at the lowest point of the room. The altar was built of a pure white stone and inscribed with densely packed hieroglyphs running in rows across its surface and sides. Atop the altar rested two simple curved stones, each notched at the top as if to hold a rod in place so it would rest without rolling away. But that rod, the very shepherd’s staff that Moses had carried with him into Egypt and used to call down the wrath of the Hebrew god upon the Egyptians, had then carried with him through their sojourn in the desert, had used to draw forth water from desert rocks and channel divine power to strengthen his troops in battle, did not rest peacefully upon the altar.
The Staff of Moses lay atop a pile of bones and tattered cloth at the foot of the lowest step, surrounded by long streaks of soot scorched across the stone, as if the man holding the staff had been struck down by blast fire as he turned away from the altar.
Oliver couldn’t make out the details of the staff from this distance, but it appeared to be nothing more than a simple length of yellowish wood, one end blunted from pounding against thousands of miles of sand and rocks of the desert, the other polished to a dark sheen from years of being grasped the the hands of its owner. For all its simplicity, the staff emanated a sense of potency and command that Oliver couldn’t help but believe to be real power.
They waited in silence until Diana took a deep breath and whispered, “I can hardly believe this is real.”
He nodded, but remained silent as he surveyed the room.
“Should I...”
“Stay here.” Oliver interrupted. “I’ll go get the staff, then we can take the tunnel back up to the surface and get out of here.”
Before she could protest, Oliver jumped down from his position behind the Pharaoh’s leg and dropped into a roll on the stone floor seven feet below. He glanced up at Diana and was not surprised to see that she was fuming.
“Relax. I’ll need you to pull me back up when...”
His consolation speech was interrupted by the look of horror crossing Diana’s face. She opened her mouth to shout and Oliver dove to his left, pulling his gun and spinning around to face the room as he came up out of the roll.
From the shadows of the alcoves around the perimeter of the platform, they emerged. Men and women, their naked skin shriveled to thin leather over their creaking bones. Their eyes glowed a pale blue, and streaks of dark blue light, like faintly glowing smoke, streamed out from holes and slashes in their leathery skin. They were accompanied by ferocious dogs with mottles of white and red fur and eyes like glowing embers. The dogs began to growl and Oliver could have sworn he saw white smoke drifting out between their teeth and smelled the faint reek of sulfur.
The desiccated human form nearest to Oliver opened its dry lips and growled out something in a language he didn’t recognize, its voice screeching past dry vocal cords and lips like wind rushing through dry branches. The fiend finished speaking and waited silently, as if it expected a response, its hollow eye sockets glowing with a dim blue light that seeped out and dripped down its sunken cheeks like smoke. Oliver raised his gun and centered his sights on the fiend’s skull. He slipped his left hand slowly into the outer pocket of his vest and pulled out the guide stone.
“I come in the name of Sephor,” he shouted, holding the stone out in front of him. Though he didn’t look through it, Oliver could see that the fleck of mica at the center of the stone was awash with flickering flames.
At the sight of the guide stone, the nearest fiend nodded silently and raised its left hand in salute and rattled out a string of words in the dead language of ancient Egypt. The other creatures likewise saluted, the dogs sitting back on their haunches, and stopped advancing towards Oliver.
Keeping his gun trained on the nearest fiend, Oliver took a hesitant step forward. None of the creatures reacted, so he took another step with the same result.
Oliver had reached the steps down to the altar when one of the dogs growled fiercely and gave a deep bark that echoed throughout the chamber and spewed flames across the stones before it. The other fiends turned as one and Oliver froze, thinking they were about to charge him. There were four
teen human-shaped fiends, as well as seven dogs, and he had only fifteen bullets in his magazine and one spare clip loaded in a vest pocket. He was just deciding whether he should shoot at the undead humans or dogs first when he heard the same words that had been spoken to him uttered again.
He turned and saw Kyle standing in the shadowy doorway between the statues of Ramesses and Sephor, an assault rifle clutched in his hands, his clothes and face streaked with blood. His face was pocked with bright red welts, as if he had been bitten by dozens of horseflies. Oliver imagined that Kyle must have faced several other rooms of fiends and plagues before reaching this chamber. He had left the courtyard with four other men, only two of which appeared behind him, each staggering out of the dark doorway with wild eyes, guns pressed to their shoulders prepared to shoot anything that moved.
Kyle’s eyes found Oliver’s and they locked. Neither spoke for a long moment.
Then Kyle laughed. There was no mirth in the laughter, only a deep hysterical irony that convinced Oliver that Kyle had snapped.
Oliver dove down the steps and rolled behind the altar as Kyle roared and began firing bursts of lead from his gun.
The fiend nearest to Kyle jerked backwards and flopped over onto the floor, its body folded at an unnatural angle as a burst of bullets shattered its spine and ripped through its frayed muscles. The unholy blue fire that animated it blazed bright in the fiend’s eyes and it dragged itself across the floor towards Kyle on rigid fingers, roaring hatefully before Kyle silenced it with another burst of gunfire that shattered its skull. The glowing blue smoke burst out of its body and drifted away into nothingness.
Reacting to the scream of their fellow, the other fiends roared, filling the chamber with a skin-prickling blast of noise like a hurricane ripping through a forest of dead trees. The dogs howled, spewing gouts of red fire that blasted into the stones of the floor and spread out in burning arcs, leaving dark cones of charred stone in their wake. The monsters threw themselves at Kyle and his last remaining man, screaming and barking as they charged across the platform. Strangely, not a one of them descended the steps to cut across the low area in which the altar stood, instead they all ran the long way around the upper platform.
The mercenaries remained in their place by the door, firing around the base of the statues at the approaching fiends until their magazines ran dry. Five human fiends and one hound fell under the force of their fire, but that did not stop the remaining creatures from charging towards them. Kyle met their assault, leaping forward into the room and slashing the bayonet of his rifle across the neck of nearest fiend, then slamming his booted foot into the chest of the creature as it clutched at the gout of blue smoke pouring from its throat. One mercenary, his face already bloodied from wounds sustained somewhere along his journey through the temple, followed Kyle out into the platform, only to be smashed in the face by a fiend that emerged from behind the statue of Sephor. He lashed out with the butt of his rifle, shattering the fiend’s skull. The undead guard roared, blue smoke oozing out through cracks in its skull, and threw the man across the platform to strike with a crunch against a supporting pillar, then fall down into the shadowy corner between two sets of steps. The final mercenary slammed a new magazine into his rifle, took aim, and shot at one of the fiery hounds as it charged towards him. The beast dropped and rolled forward over itself, spewing flame in all directions before collapsing into a pile of dry skin and bones.
As the barrage of automatic gunfire slowed, Oliver risked a glance around the side of the altar and saw the two mercenaries fighting off the undead. They fought fiercely, though Oliver couldn’t tell whether they were driven by desperation to live or absolute madness, but it was not enough. The fiends plowed forward towards them, the human ones slashing cruelly with unfeeling fingers and snapping with preternaturally strong jaws without a care for scraped skin or shattered teeth, while the dogs darted around, barking out flames as they attempted to roast or bite the mercenaries without being shot or clubbed. As Oliver watched, one of the dogs blasted the remaining mercenary with a spurt of flame. The man screamed and dropped to the floor, rolling and slapping at the flames on his clothes to put them out. The man slammed into the wall of the chamber and slapped away the last flicker of fire on his leg just in time for one of the dogs to pounce onto his chest. Oliver looked away, but not before he saw the beast growl and dart its massive jaws down at the man’s face.
He saw that Kyle was now a quarter of the way around the perimeter of the room, still fighting hand to hand with the fiends. He had managed to slip a new magazine into his gun and was using short bursts of bullets to keep the fire-breathing dogs at bay as he dispatched human fiends with merciless slashes of his bayonet and rapid kicks to the chest.
Oliver decided that this was probably his best chance. He darted out from behind the altar and grabbed the staff with his left hand as he ran towards the statue of Ramesses.
As his fingers closed on the wood of the staff, worn smooth by years of hard use in the wilderness, Oliver felt a surge of energy shoot up his arm and into his brain like an electric shock. Everything around him and inside of him seemed to slow down until, in a moment of utter silence between heartbeats, he could hear the scrape of a fire hound’s claws on the stone and trace the slow arc of a cartridge as it was ejected from Kyle’s rifle. His entire body convulsed and he suddenly felt as if he was standing face to face with the most charismatic person he had ever met, blubbering his way through an explanation of his quest to track down relics and re-assemble the bronze mechanism and prove, if only to himself, that a powerful agency lurked in the shadows of the world. His perception was drawn to the staff, still gripped in his frozen hand, and his mind went blank except for thoughts of the staff and what he could do with it if he were to wield its power. He fought back, reaching for memories of Diana, Amber, his quest, and even his father, focusing on them instead of the staff, which had begun to grow hot in his hand.
Oliver was struck with guilt as he considered that his hunt for relics was selfish and had caused him to hurt himself and others, but the guilt faded as he focused on his motivation for the quest. The thing that drove Oliver was an insatiable hunger for knowledge, not greed or the desire for power. The image of the staff grew large in his mind again, this time held in the hand of another man, who appeared to flux constantly between the forms of Senator Wheeler and Kyle. Even as the world around him continued to slow, with the flames spurting out of a hound’s open mouth seeming to stand still in the air, Oliver saw the men rising to power as they summoned the magic of the staff to defeat their enemies.
In that moment, Oliver knew what he had to do.
Then the world snapped back into action and Oliver charged up the stairs, staff in hand, screaming Diana’s name. He reached the platform and skidded to a halt beside the statue of Ramesses II. Diana appeared beside the leg of the stone Pharaoh and he hurled the staff up to her.
“Go! Meet me at the gate.”
Before she could reply, Oliver had spun away and dashed through the doorway and up the stairs.
“Get back here!” screamed Kyle, sending another burst of gunfire into a fiend and turning to follow Oliver. The remaining fiends and their canine companions gave chase, screaming and howling in rage as their quarry disappeared up the slanted ramp on the other side of the dim doorway.
Oliver had no idea where he was going, but he knew that he needed to keep Kyle away from Diana as she carried the staff up the tunnel to the courtyard. Still running up the steep stone steps, he reached into a side pocket of his vest and pulled out an emergency chemical light. He bent and slammed the plastic tube against his knee, bursting it to eerie green life in the dark of the tunnel.
Gunfire sounded from behind and Oliver dropped to the ramp. He threw the light stick down behind him and lurched to his feet, firing his gun blindly down the ramp twice as he pounded upwards in the dim green light. Kyle scream a curse at him from below, then let out a string of profanity as the green glow of the che
mical light was washed away by the hellish blaze of fire spewing out of the mouth of a hound that had reached the doorway. Oliver risked a glance back and saw Kyle, simultaneously silhouetted against the red fire and illuminated by the glow of the chemical light, leaning against the wall of the ramp and firing his rifle down at a press of fiery hounds and reaching, screaming human fiends pushing their way through the narrow doorway. His maniacal laughter joined in a cruel chorus with the din of gunshots and the screams of the fiends.
Oliver turned away and kept running. In the dim light he could see the end of the ramp leveling off into dark room.
The instant he reached the end of the ramp, Oliver leapt sideways to put the heavy stone blocks between himself and Kyle. He pulled his last chemical light out of his vest and hurriedly cracked it, to reveal a small room with statues of Egyptian gods arrayed around the edges, all facing inwards towards a stand on which rested a large bronze bowl. Oliver searched the perimeter of the room for an exit, his gaze faltering over bloodstained floor and the mutilated corpses of the last mercenary and five large dogs with pointed ears and black, heavily muscled arms where their front legs should have been. The mercenary’s throat had been torn out by the jackal-headed monster that rested atop him, nearly shredded by dozens of bullet holes ripped into its back and side.
Oliver spotted the exit and ran, the noise of Kyle laughing and shooting echoing up the ramp behind him. He had to trust that Diana would carry the staff up to the courtyard, and that whatever force had infiltrated his mind when he first touched it would leave her unharmed and allow her to carry the staff to the surface. That was a risk, but one he had to take. There had been no time for him to climb up to the tunnel and if he didn’t escape Kyle and the guardians she might still manage to escape with the staff, or at least destroy it before Kyle could find her.