“Mother, whatever happens, you must not say anything or cry out. You can hear the dogs, which means there must be an exit, but if we are caught …” Sam didn’t finish. The dwarfs were powerful Void-users. Sam didn’t see how she could defeat them.
“What about Faris?”
“I’ll carry him. No more words.” She crouched and maneuvered Faris to her shoulder. Her thighs burned as she stood from a squat. Faris might be slight, but he had wiry muscle that weighed like lead. He moaned as she gripped his injured leg.
The barking continued, but at a distance, a blend of excited yelps and low-pitched woofs. They passed the fork in the tunnel and the barking clamored. Pale jarlight emanated from the passage’s farthest reach. Sam looked at her mother, who nodded back.
“Go on, go on,” Tara signed.
Sam shifted Faris to her other shoulder, her movements slow and gentle. They halted at the edge of the light. Sam strained to see around the bend. A low brick wall cut the tunnel in half, beyond which a series of cages stretched on either side. Sam straightened. The kennels were the domain of the handlers. Sam had never seen the pens, but there had to be an exit from them. Her pace quickened.
She signed her thoughts as they crept to the low wall. The stench and snarl of dog filled the otherwise empty hall. A score of hounds jammed each cell. The dogs caught their scent and the barks switched to growls. Sam swung over the barrier and helped her mother.
Snouts lunged beyond the bars, and Sam shifted her cargo out of the reach of snapping jaws. In one cage, hounds chewed at each other’s throats until one broke away yipping. Cell after cell passed by, a gauntlet of teeth. Where the snarling halted, wagging tails and soft-eyed puppies greeted. Sam stopped and gasped with joy.
“Abu,” she called and searched the pens. The puppies’ naked skins were pink and downed like a piglet’s, their ears and tails long, not yet cropped. One puppy scrambled over top the others.
“Abu.” Sam sighed, and struggled with the latch, which rasped as she worked it. The door groaned open and a flood of puppies crowded their feet. Her mother rolled her eyes. Sam plucked Abu into her arms. The dog squirmed and nibbled at her wrist. With Faris over her shoulder, holding Abu was awkward, and she handed the dog to Tara. Abu struggled, overlarge in her arms until he wormed out on to the floor. The puppies scattered around their legs. Sam grimaced and let Abu tail them. Puppies yowled and chased ahead.
The kennels ended, and the hall split. From here, the walls were square, shaped by hand, rather than millennia of erosion. The only aspect still craggy was the narrow, lowering ceiling. After a hundred yards, it forced Sam to her knees; Faris’s weight strained her lower back and ground her knees into the mortar of rock. A passing puppy licked salt from her face.
Sam took all passages that led to the right, with the exception of those that sloped upward. She hoped the method would serve to skirt any of the central areas where the dwarfs might congregate and keep her from becoming lost. After a time, however, she grew disorientated. A series of doors lined another hall and Sam could stand again. Behind each door, more dogs barked. The passage continued on the ledge of a large cavern. Where the tunnel ended, the puppies also stopped.
“Go on, Abu,” Sam ordered as she moved into the greater chamber. The dog whimpered and peed.
“What is it, Sam?” Tara asked.
“Abu won’t come,” Sam whispered. Her back knotted under Faris’s weight.
On Sam’s right, the cavern wall rose beyond her sight, but to her left it sloped into a shadowy pit. Within, crocodiles of all sizes slid over each other—the nurseries.
Sam waved one last time at Abu, then shook her head and tugged her mother along.
The dwarfs raised crocodiles, feeding them meat and honey cakes. Sam hadn’t known how many reptiles they kept. Evidently, Seth needed a pestilence to herald his coming. Only Pharaoh would be able to halt this swarm. Crocodiles scraped over backs and tails and snapped grumpily.
Abu barked at Sam’s side.
“Hey!” The shout followed the bark. It came from beyond even Sam’s sight, on the far side of the pit. “Identify yourselves.”
“Run,” Sam said, feeling the dwarf draw deeply from the Void.
They ran along the narrow ledge. The jarring elicited murmurs from Faris. The wall began to curve toward the nearing dwarfs. Gunfire struck the rock around them. Tara cried out when shards of stone struck her face.
Abu disappeared, and Sam glanced around to find the cleft of rock into which the dog had scrambled. The heavy footfalls of the dwarfs pounded toward them. An axe flared, bright with Void. The light cast a deadly tint on the hides of crocodiles that levitated up from the pit to challenge the intruders.
Sam dashed into the fissure, pulling her mother with her from the ledge. The rock chimney led steeply upward. Sam pushed her mother’s thighs and scrabbled over rubble behind her. Sam tossed and kicked back loose rock. Exclamations of pain and frustration resounded. She urged her mother on, expecting a spray of bullets from behind. Abu struggled at Sam’s side. A hole breached the tight chamber, and they climbed inside. Tara stood paralyzed by darkness, but Sam could make out the cylindrical room: a shaft tomb.
The shaft tomb came into favor in late ancient Egyptian dynasties for fear of gravediggers who had plundered early dynastic crypts; the deeper the tomb, the greater the secrecy. A sarcophagus leaned against the wall beside a ladder.
Sam knelt and let Faris sag to the floor. The sound of the dwarfs’ huffing breath rose from the hole. Abu barked down at them.
“Help me, Mother,” Sam said and placed Tara’s hands on the coffin. It was wooden and rotten. She shifted it, and together they set it teetering on the edge of the hole. When the first dwarf popped his head up, Sam kicked him in the temple. The dwarf thudded below. The sarcophagus followed, clattering and wedging into the fissure. Its bulk muffled the yells.
Sam heaved Faris across her shoulders. Tara struggled with Abu. Sam began to climb the nearly vertical ladder. After about a hundred feet, her head bumped against boards and she pushed. They shifted aside, and she listened for movement. Nothing. She cleared the exit and climbed out. Faris fell from her shoulders and struck his head.
“Damn,” Sam swore under her breath and dropped beside him. Their fight with Sobek, the river journey, the trek through the nurseries, she shut her eyes and drew breath.
Tara’s head popped out of the hole. “They’re on the ladder,” she said.
Sam levered herself upright. The square chamber appeared to be a mastaba or bench tomb designed to misdirect robbers from the real shaft tomb. Six statues stared, as if angry she had discovered their secret. Beyond a hieroglyph-inscribed arch and pillar was a steel door. Sam stumbled to it, grabbed the latch and pulled. Her vision swam in white light, and she paused for her eyes to adjust. Outside was a stairwell, which she climbed.
The tomb was nearly flush with the desert, and she could see in all directions. Drenched in sunlight, Sam faced the massive eastern necropolis of the Giza plateau. As she blinked, the pyramids materialized. In front of her, Khufu cast a shadow over its three Queens’ Pyramids in the early dawn. Khafre’s pyramid stood to Khufu’s left, the limestone-dressed top like a snowcapped mountain. In the distance rose Menkaure’s smaller prism. Shouldered by the Valley Temple of Khafre and Temple of the Sphinx, the Great Sphinx seemed small. The modern concrete and asphalt city of Giza beyond provided a strange, but welcome, contrast.
They had exited at the site of the overseer Qar’s tomb, set in the eastern cemetery.
Heat draped across her skin. A falcon called out high on the thermals. At the corner of the mastaba, a black-robed man slept on the roof. Sam bent to the ground and retrieved a sharp stone. She stood over the man and whipped him with the rock, striking his skull. He rolled from the roof, his face kissing the sand. Sam stumped back into the t
omb, hauled Faris over her shoulder, and ushered her brood into the light of day where the dwarfs dared not follow.
Half naked and battered, Sam and Tara picked their way through the necropolis. Sam staggered under Faris’s weight. They threaded through a dozen tombs. Tara checked over her shoulder.
“They won’t follow us into daylight, Mother, at least not into public areas,” Sam explained. “Soon the tombs will swim with tourists and—” The rhythmic beat of hooves on sand caught her tongue. She held up a hand for Tara to stop.
Three horses with brown-robed riders rounded a nearby mastaba. Sam turned to run around the tomb’s opposite wall, but tripped and fell to her knees. Faris slipped. Her arms knotted under the strain of his weight. Three more riders turned the corner. Dust clouded around them. Faris dropped to the sand. Sam reached for the Fullness and rose with a rock in her fist. But an invisible force held her fast.
The first rider, his robe fringed in silver, leaped from his horse and rushed forward. Sam hauled at her bonds but was paralyzed. The rider knelt and grabbed Faris’s head.
“No,” Sam yelled, veins prominent on her face.
“Faris,” the man cried. The voice was familiar. He cradled Faris’s head. Sam ceased to struggle and hung limp.
“Who are you?” Tara asked.
“We are the last companions,” the man stated.
Chapter Twenty-nine
David tottered through the halls toward Pharaoh’s voice. Blue threads of electricity trailed his fingertips. He grinned at the physical manifestation of power, but still he could not harness it at will. Zahara followed close behind, still clutching the wound of her missing thumb. Her face was the color of ash and she shied away when the gauze of energy leapt at her.
While dressing in the chamber, David had asked Zahara if Pharaoh had touched her. She had held up her injured hand in response. But David repeated the question. Her downcast gaze had furnished his answer. He had not hugged nor consoled her.
Clothed in finely woven pants and tunic, David soon gained his balance and strode through lightless halls. Pharaoh’s garbled words rumbled through the stone. When the passage ended, David entered a large room; beyond, another portal glowed awash with crimson light. He crept forward, fingertips no longer brushing stone. Zahara’s hand pinched the hem of his tunic, and he jerked the cloth from her grip. Pharaoh’s voice was still obscured by echoes. At the arch, the red glare pulsed, lighting hieroglyphic script carved as deep as David’s fingers were long.
“Welcome,” Pharaoh greeted.
David stepped beyond the gateway and into the room. Black, red, black, red—the light beat and David lifted his palm to block it.
“The dwarfs dislike light, David, my apologies.” Pharaoh pulled a cover from several blue vials and illuminated the room with a diffuse glow that dulled the pulsations emanating from the interior of the anthropoid sarcophagus.
Inscriptions covered the room’s rectangular walls. At the centre, before the coffin, stood Pharaoh dressed in a simple black robe. Red hair cascaded down his shoulders. His eyes glowed like the vials, but yellow. “How’s your chest?”
Hair rose on David’s neck, and his pupils contracted.
“I am better, a little tired and hungry.” Empty cups had littered the room where he had convalesced. Zahara had fed him, but the liquid diet had left him drained. His fingers probed his stomach. Muscle flexed under his robe. He had not felt muscle there in a decade.
Pharaoh clapped his hands, and a dwarf entered.
“Trand, the beast wishes food. Bring it,” Pharaoh ordered.
David looked into the white eyes of the dwarf. He sensed awe in them and was pleased.
Pharaoh grunted, his molars grinding. Trand bowed and obeyed.
“Beast is not very appealing, is it?” Pharaoh asked, standing over the person-shaped crypt. “And David is too North American. Not right for the chosen one, and Chosen One is pedantic.” Pharaoh looked pensive, but a smile curled at his lip. “How about Seth?” His fierce gaze grilled David.
“Why did you let me live?” David asked.
Pharaoh smiled. He leaned onto the sarcophagus’s rim, its contents hidden from David. “I am a powerful leader. I lead hundreds, and a horde of creatures, a host of terror you cannot imagine.” Pharaoh’s tone carried no pride, it stated fact. “I have the strength of chaos.” Pharaoh reached first into the crypt to clutch something. Then he gathered the Void and blue flame burst in his palm; next he stretched to lift a massive stone table. It tapped rhythmically upon the floor.
“Do you know what is more powerful than this, Seth?” Pharaoh straightened.
David’s eyes warmed to an orange glow.
“Myth,” Pharaoh answered. “Myth raises armies. Myth builds empires and civilizations. My hounds and crocodiles are not the deadliest scourge I could unleash on Cairo, but they frighten.” His arm swept the room. “Upon these walls are the ancient Egyptian myths.”
David’s gaze absorbed images of Isis, Horus, Seth, Sobek, Re—the pantheon of Egyptian gods.
“You were martyred by Sam, by a false judge and a betrayer. You died and were reborn before witnesses. The prophecy speaks of a beast that shall rise. Already, the myth of the beast, Seth reincarnated, is begun. I cannot stop it, but I can wield its power.”
David smirked. “If you think you can use me as a figurehead, Pharaoh, you are mistaken.”
Pharaoh’s laughter echoed.
David flushed. Zahara touched his hand, and he shook it off.
“I did not wish to embarrass you, but you misunderstand. The creation of a myth requires many players, and you are but one player on the Senet board.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Osiris.” Pharaoh reached deep into the sarcophagus. “The myth—it requires an Osiris.”
A cold chill ran through David. Zahara loosed a stifled gasp. “I thought you were trying to halt the Fullness from returning. You have killed all the potential prophets.”
David’s mind began to churn.
“You don’t believe I can be the prophet?” Pharaoh’s eyes danced.
“You?” David spluttered.
“Me. I am Osiris.” Pharaoh lifted the golden staff from the tomb. Its central red heart throbbed. The staff, the Spine of Osiris, was symmetrical and perfect. Cloth wrapped its vertebrae. The staggered light penetrated the material.
“Seth killed Osiris.” David pointed to the coffin. “Maybe you want to get in?”
“And Horus defeated Seth,” Pharaoh replied. “Let’s see if we can’t change that outcome too. I offer you godhood, David. You will rule chaos, but I will rule all.”
David looked from the throbbing staff to the stone altar. Zahara cowered behind the arch. Power tingled at the tips of his fingers.
“Yes, Osiris.” David bent his head.
“Good. Let us discuss your first failure.” Pharaoh indicated the cloth wrapping.
“You could not translate the tablet?” David lifted his head.
Pharaoh twisted the staff and his face darkened. “The spinal cord—Horus’s piece—remains unknown.”
“The tablet—”
“The hieroglyphs were copied accurately.” Pharaoh hurled the tablet.
It spun and cracked into a panel. Stone fragments showered the floor. Zahara screamed and shrank back.
David walked over to the tablet. The gold felt cool. His fingers traced the inscription, as if he were blind and read Braille. When they stroked over the sides, he paused and smiled. He stared at the Wedjat and peered into the deep carving of the glyph. Suddenly, his eyes flared, and he exalted in his access to Void. Ankhs, falcons, pillars, and a clutter of images peeled from the Wedjat. The heiroglyphs drifted toward the Spine of Osiris.
“The eye, Osiris. The power of Horus is i
n his Eye.”
Where the cloth binding halted, Pharaoh, like he collected a drool of honey, rolled the glowing strip of letters onto the diamond pyramid. Fractured light lanced over the walls. Pharaoh’s eyes burned brighter.
“The Sphinx shall roar.” He laughed and twisted the staff as he read the inscription.
“The Sphinx …” David whispered.
Pharaoh stood silent.
David wondered, was the Sphinx far older than Egyptologists suggested? Did it hide subterranean cavities?
“Beneath the Sphinx?” David asked. He looked to Pharaoh for confirmation.
The corner of Pharaoh’s mouth rose in satisfied appraisal. “The Sphinx guards the spinal cord.”
Comprehension whisked the seams from David’s brow. A month ago, to solve the mystery of the Great Pyramid’s purpose would have seemed a great achievement; now it barely registered.
David looked to Zahara, who had regained a measure of her composure and stood at the arch with a hand on her hip. Trand stepped into the room. Saliva flooded David’s mouth at the sight of food piled high on the platter. He clutched handfuls of shish kabob, mezze, and falafel. He waved to Zahara with greasy fingers that he cleaned on his linen shirt. She took some fragrant hummus and pita, her gaze flitting from the food to the spine. David’s stomach burbled. Then it rebelled and heaved up most of what he had swallowed.
“Trand, it seems Seth has to recover before he will have an appetite.” Trand grinned beneath his beard. “You will help him in his recovery.”
“Yes, Pharaoh,” Trand replied.
“Osiris,” David corrected and wiped vomit from his lip. “He is Osiris.”
“Yes, Osiris.”
Pharaoh regarded David a last time. Then he turned to leave. Zahara started to follow.
“Zahara, stay,” David commanded.
24 Bones Page 20