The Monster Hunter Files - eARC

by Larry Correia

  The second was a Luftwaffe-designed, out-the-front gravity knife, meant for paratroopers to cut tangled chute shrouds one-handed.

  The third trembled when he touched it. It was a flat disk of stone with the hole in the center, small as a Chinese coin.

  Fox did not look up from loading the pistol. The green bullet seemed to be slippery. “The Spaniard’s? She deserves a proper wake. Nice girl.”

  Without taking his hand from his pocket, Scrope flipped open his phone and pushed the speed-dial for his partner. The phone in Bill’s pocket rang.

  A second sign of weakness. Procedure was to turn off all electronics during a mission. But, no doubt, Fox was hoping for a last-minute reprieve.

  One cannot hold pistol, bullet, and cellphone and still block a blow. Scrope flicked the blade of the paratrooper knife open with the same semicircular motion that caught Fox right under the chin.

  Dimly through the walls, he heard churchbells ringing, fireworks igniting, automobiles honking horns, the roaring of countless people crowing and cheering the New Year. It drowned the gargling, whistling shriek William Fox made as he died.

  The hour had struck. The witching hour. Scrope knelt, drew out the small black stone and placed it in the mouth of the corpse. The forbidden words were few and terrible and burned his throat.

  The dead eyes flicked open. “I see before me the mortal man who, sixty-five full moons ago, spared me, when he was ordered to see me slain. Ask of me what I shall give you.”

  * * *

  In the gloom of the vault, Scrope lurched as rapidly as he could, shoulders tilted, lugging the huge weight now hanging from his right stump.

  He had two holsters, one under each armpit. His Webley, with its single green bullet, was strapped under his right. Fox’s piece was a beautiful Heckler & Koch VP70 with an eighteen-round clip. It was a double action semiautomatic able to fire a three-round burst. That was under his left. Fox also had owned a fountain pen that contained an injector. The needle capsules were white and black. Black was a thiocyanate compound, for humans. White contained holy water, for vampires. That was in Scrope’s coat pocket. The paratrooper knife and small round stone were in his pants pockets.

  These dark vaults were the national gold reserve of the City of London. Behind each barred cell door rose empty rack upon empty rack. The gold long ago had been spent, and MI4 now used the facility to store unsafe anomalies. The financial world would collapse if rumor of this leaked out. One more secret kept from the public for their sake.

  The cell nearest the main vault door held no empty shelves. Nor was there any cot, sink, chamberpot. Not even a magazine to read.

  Standing motionless in its center, beneath one small pale bulb, was a dark man in a fez. His tunic was ochre, and his sash was white. On the second finger of his right hand was a ring with an onyx stone adorned with the image of a scarab.

  The dark man was six and a half feet tall. Half circles of fatigue and grief were scars beneath his eyes. His nose was a hook. His mouth was a sardonic slash, like a knife cut in the trunk of an oak stump. And every inch of face was wrinkled and sunken, as if his flesh were parchment a thousand years old that had been crushed and crumpled, and left in the desert to desiccate.

  He stood with his hands folded over his breast, unbreathing, unmoving. The eyes were open, staring. So dark were the pits beneath those lowering brows that the whites of his eyes seemed to glow.

  “Well, Lord Scrope,” said the mordant voice, which hummed like a pipe organ in a cavern. “To what do I owe the honor? You know that I one day will escape this place and find your heirs, no matter how remote the generations, and kill them all. I don’t expect these bars to rust and walls to rot within your lifetime. But one must be patient about these things.”

  Scrope spat quickly: “Ardeth Bey, Agnes Grosvenor will die unless we save her. If I free you, will you help me?”

  Very slowly Imhotep raised one eyebrow. “Most interesting. Of course I agree. Until she is safe from harm, you are safe from me.”

  Scrope reached for the barred door, and then paused.

  Imhotep did not laugh, but a slight darkening of the shadows around his eyes communicated his amusement. “You hesitate? You wonder that I am so swift to agree? Look upon yourself. The blood still wet upon your coat cries out for vengeance. You have betrayed one of your own. The limb of silver is an ushabti, an animate thing, crafted brilliantly, affixed clumsily. I have seen wax crocodiles made thus, or servants, but never an arm, never of so noble a metal. That you wear that stain of blood and this unliving arm speaks loudly enough.”

  Scrope looked down at the silver hand. In the dim light, the fingers and thumb looked perfectly made, with wrinkles at the joints, tiny black hairs on the back of the hand, and indentations of tendons and veins. The arm was solid metal and weighed at least sixty pounds. The mass was immense, making his whole body crooked.

  He had never stopped regretting. Even years later, some new thing would reopen the sorrow: seeing a child twiddling his thumbs or learning how to tie his shoelaces, or glimpsing an old woman knitting, or watching an old man wind a pocket watch, or hearing people applauding a pianist—

  Imhotep said, “Also I know the name of the prince of the midnight air who cleared his debt to you by bearing you here swiftly, and who adhered to you that silver arm. The hand has power over things of iron or metals mortals mine. Break the door! In a circle about my feet are the sacred words written from the Book of Going Forth by Day. Scuff them out.”

  “And you don’t care to know what her danger is?”

  The ancient voice was sardonic. “I slew nine acolytes who guarded the Sacred Scrolls of Thoth, printed in gold, and read the words it was forbidden men should read; and I loved a Pharaoh’s sacred daughter—a virgin consecrated to Isis it was forbidden I should love—both treason and blasphemy at once. Whom would I fear?”

  “I want it understood, one gentleman to another. As soon as she is safe, the truce is over.”

  “I quite understand. You alone, Lord Scrope, robbed me of the love and life I waited four thousand years to consummate. You will not outlive the dawn.” Imhotep smiled an odd smile, his eyes half open. “The spirit in you yearns to boast that you can prevent me; but if I believed you, our alliance is stillborn. I do not. Ankhesenamon sleeps: Agnes is but her dream; Death, her waking.”

  “You don’t want my word?”

  Imhotep’s eyes glittered like the eyes of a snake. “You have also killed your acolytes and betrayed your Pharaoh, have you not? By what name would you swear?”

  Scrope had no answer. For the first time, he realized that he held nothing sacred.

  “Make haste. The guards work the lock.”

  The bars felt oddly soft and brittle beneath his silver fingers. He pried the cell door out of the frame easily and sent it clanging to the floor with a noise like a train wreck.

  The main vault door hissed and swung open. The light was blinding. Three men in riot gear peered over the round lip. More men, armed with pistols, were behind. Scrope leapt into the cell, to get out of the line of fire, but the sixty-pound weight of his arm made him fall heavily, almost at Imhotep’s feet. There were hieroglyphs chalked on the concrete around his sandals.

  Bullets struck Imhotep and rebounded. Scrope, on the ground behind him, was not hit. He spat on the nearest hieroglyph, an image of a crane, and rubbed it away with his left thumb.

  That was enough. Imhotep stirred into motion, and came hugely forward. The men switched to automatic. Imhotep should have been cut in half. Instead he was driven to one knee.

  With his silver hand, Scrope drew the H&K. He aimed. A trio of shots knocked the closest man backward out of the vault.

  Imhotep, in wrath, strode forward, seized the other two men by their throats, held them aloft, and choked the life from them while they emptied their clips into him.

  “To me!” He called to Scrope. “And close this door, lest we be whelmed!”

  Scrope loped toward the door
, dragging the heavy arm. When he reached the great steel plug of the vault, he merely touched it with his silver hand. It clanged shut. He rotated the central wheel, extending the radial pistons. He gripped one piston with metal fingers, preventing it from retracting.

  Scrope said, “We cannot leave by the way I came in.”

  Imhotep threw the two men he held against the concrete wall, shattering their helmets and the skulls within them like eggs. “No matter. You know my arts.”

  “Do you have handy a temple to your gods built atop a sacred pool?”

  “A bowel of wine consecrated to Anubis will do.”

  “What about whiskey?” Scrope drew out a hip flask.

  Imhotep unscrewed the flask, sniffed it, and nodded. Then he bent over a corpse and fished around inside the bloody hemisphere of the helmet. Out he drew a section of skull bone, still intact, and wiped it clean of brain stuffs with his fingers. He set it on the ground and uttered a prayer. Into this impromptu bowl he poured the whiskey.

  Scrope felt the vault door tremble under his metal fingers, but whatever engine they were using to crank it open was not strong enough.

  Looking back, he saw the whiskey in the skull was glowing. An image formed in the depth.

  Here was Agnes in her nightgown, head thrown back, lips parted, the line of her throat exposed. Her dark hair was spilled across two pillows, her bosom was not moving, and her shapely white limbs were haphazardly flung on the wrinkled sheets as if she had struggled madly to rise while the drug took effect.

  The viewpoint drew back. There were eight agents and one doctor. A body bag was on the floor. A plastic sheet was under her, to prevent blood from staining the furniture.

  Imhotep stared down. He spoke a word from some language not meant for human throats, passed his hand that bore the scarab ring over the image, and then, with a ghastly grimace, he closed his fist.

  One agent in the tiny image now stiffened, eyes wild. His arms and legs were as fish flung onto land, jumping and writhing frantically.

  The name of the dying man was Carstairs. He was a ready man with a joke, always willing to lend a cigarette, and was going through a messy divorce just now.

  Scrope said, “It takes fifteen minutes for a man to die from oxygen starvation. There is a better way. If you incapacitate one, it will take at least two healthy men to see to him. Blood-choking three for five minutes without killing them neutralizes all nine men in the amount of time it would take you to kill one.”

  Imhotep smiled a crooked smile. “Mercy…? Your love for her is weak. It will prove no barrier when I cast the memory of Agnes Grosvenor into oblivion.”

  “You know I would destroy any monster that threatened her, Ardeth Bey. Including a Manticore.”

  The dark gaze was magnetic, aloof. “Your ka, issuing from your heart like a miniature sun, and the ka of this arm cannot mate properly, not in the sunlit world. Tendrils of silver even now grow through your form, like the roots of a deadly upus tree, seeking your heart. You will die when sunlight strikes that arm, at the dawn of this day. But she will be safe by then with me.” He gazed back at the wine-filled skull and made another gesture. “Even now, I force the drugs from her blood; I command her limbs. She rises, she walks. I call her here. You must make a path for our escape.”

  “Ah—I have fifteen bullets and one knife.”

  “You have power over cold iron, which are the bones of Geb. You may part these walls.”

  Madhouse Harry twisted the piston, so that it could not move. He walked over to one of the vault walls and tapped it experimentally. There had never been anything so solid and thick ever made by human beings. This vault could withstand an atomic bomb.

  “Do not doubt! She is beyond this wall.”

  He did not doubt, but struck. His fingers dug in through metal slabs and reinforced concrete, and closed on a fat girder. He closed his fist and felt the steel length, sensing where it was connected to the cross bracing, where it was strong, where it was weak. He pulled and…

  The beam twisted in half and came free. An avalanche deafened him. Dust choked him. Imhotep tossed him through the hole.

  Scrope was blind and strangling. He crawled, he stood. He began to blink and cough. Through blackest clouds, he saw a slender figure in white, half nude standing in an empty corridor. Stepping closer, he saw the cascades of dark hair; the strong, narrow face of her English father; the high cheeks; the vivid red of her lips; the wide, dark, deep eyes of her Persian mother.

  It was she.

  She wore only a sheer silk nightgown. Her feet were bare.

  He cried out her name in joy, but when she turned, her eyes were blank, and she stared at him without recognition.

  * * *

  He met Agnes Grosvenor in Cairo, at the ambassador’s ball, a young and willful dark-haired beauty with smoldering eyes and a silver laugh. A month later, on a rooftop of the embassy compound where they retreated to escape the oppressive heat of rooms during a power blackout, she helped him remove his jacket with its stubborn buttons, and then, to his surprise, his shirt. The shouts and gunshots of rioters rose in the distance, frightening her. He hugged her with one arm. She put her lips to his ear and said that life was brief.

  They became lovers in the oven heat of an April midnight beneath the stars above a darkened city, and the wind from the great river carried the scent of jasmine from the northern plantations to their nostrils.

  * * *

  Unceremoniously, Scrope hoisted the nonresponsive Agnes across his shoulder, Tarzan-style, and fled. When confronted by a locked door or a blank wall that barred his way, Scrope tore out any metal beams, hinges or locks. Imhotep followed, his face a stormcloud.

  They reached the street. Snow was falling. Heading riverward, they were engulfed by a mob of partygoers in festive hats or costumes, blowing noisemakers and snapping crackers. In the distance, Big Ben read a quarter past midnight, and the merrymaking was still cresting.

  Men whistled and shouted lewd advice when they saw Scrope hoisting high a shapely, callipygous girl in a flimsy nightgown, rear end first through the throng.

  Imhotep towered behind. Perhaps his great height and outlandish costume, torn with bullet holes, would have attracted attention elsewhere. A man dressed as a teddy bear stared at him and so did a teen in a neon red afro, but no one else noticed.

  Scrope saw three faces he recognized, glimpsed in the crowd behind. Petrie, Youngblood, Lestrange. Then he saw two, then none. Manticore was pulling back, unwilling to open fire on an inhuman target where eyes could see. That meant Monoceros was coming.

  Imhotep spoke, “Release her. Your hands are unclean.”

  Scrope said, “You release her! Undo this spell!” He put her down. She stood there, as empty-eyed as a waxwork doll.

  “Oh? And for what reason should I do this thing?” Imhotep smiled.

  Scrope popped the top button of his shirt, pulled on a fine gold chain, and drew out a small ivory figurine of a woman crowned with the moon.

  The circles beneath Imhotep’s eyes grew darker as they wrinkled with sarcasm. “Your charm may be potent to prevent me from stopping your heart with a mere gesture. It has no power to dismay me. Am I one of the lesser beings of the dark world, that I should be stopped with an intersection of sticks, like some blood-drinking corpse?”

  With a flip of his wrist, Scrope tossed the chain over Agnes’s head. She drew in a breath, blinked, looked down at her semitransparent nightgown, looked up at Imhotep, and screamed.

  Scrope seized and kissed her. He felt the tension drain out of her body. He drew his head back. Some of the yobs circling them whistled and clapped.

  Those gorgeous eyes were blazing with dark fire and she said softly, “Your grip is hurting me…but…how do you have a grip?”

  Imhotep said angrily, “Unhand her. You demean the pure flesh of Ankhesenamon!”

  Scrope stepped back. Agnes gazed at the silver hand in awe.

  “Sorry,” said Scrope, “This is a…a prosthet
ic that…experimental…ah…”

  Imhotep said, “He has drenched his soul in darkest magic, shamed to be a cripple before you. With murder he betrayed his masters, who commanded him to kill you.”

  Agnes said playfully, “Universal Exports asked him to commit murder? They must be very serious about trade balance.”

  Imhotep dropped his voice and spoke with burning urgency, “Many times he has deceived you! I have never, my princess!”

  She said scornfully, “He never made me walk hypnotized through London in January in the snow! Barefoot! Nor tried to stab me with a behemoth horn!”

  “I would have revived you, shed of mortality as a snake sheds it skin!”

  She sniffed, “You were equally sure the Pharaoh would guess nothing.”

  “I have sacrificed all things for you!” protested Imhotep, his dark, sardonic face for the first time showing signs of helplessness, bewilderment.

  “And if your all things are not enough? Ardeth, you are hopeless. Henry, give me your coat. Take me someplace warm. Did you think to bring a pair of shoes for me?”

  Scrope doffed his coat and threw it over her shoulders. Eyes were turning toward them. He realized that both his holsters, one beneath each armpit, were visible to passersby. He wondered what was wrong with the English, that they would ignore a four-thousand-year-old Egyptian necromancer standing in their midst, but stare aghast at an armed man.

  Scrope took Agnes’s hand and wormed his way through the crowd, with Imhotep striding behind, cuffing partygoers out of his way.

  Scrope said over the clamor, “Agnes, I’ve planned this out. There is a warehouse fronting the river not far from here, where I’ve had a boat ready…I have friends in Goa who can hide us.”

  She said, “Goa? It is filled with nagas. You did not think to discuss the plans with me?”

  He said, “It’s the Official Secrets Act. My mouth was sealed. If I told, and they found out…”

  She laughed. “What would have happened? What? We’d be running through the streets at midnight in the snow with a crazy dead Egyptian, being hunted?”

  Scrope saw a small green glitter flicker through the air. He turned his head. A dragonfly landed on Agnes’s wanton black curls and twitched its forelegs.