by James Bennet
“Because doors are so last year,” he muttered, gruff in the still.
Looking around for sign of her, his eyes fell on an abandoned rucksack resting against the balustrade a few feet away. Through the dust, he could smell food, reminding him how hungry he was, his stomach bubbling and grumbling. He hadn’t eaten anything since Club Zauber in Berlin, and that had been yesterday morning. He fell upon the rucksack and tore it open, tossing sun cream, jumper and car keys over his shoulder until he found what he was looking for. He wolfed down the baguette, apple and packet of crisps with a monkey’s grace, finishing it off with a can of Coke that he guzzled in one long slug. Then he strained to hear the crunch of boots on glass, the click of a safety catch, but it seemed that the soldiers outside had yet to build up the courage to enter the museum. Distant shouts suggested they wouldn’t take long. As he lingered here, he guessed that the troops were manoeuvring into position, creeping with guns loaded along the rust-coloured walls. The thought raised a wry smile. It had been some time since men had hunted him, but this was an old game – one of the oldest – and he’d be damned if he’d let them win.
He tried to focus, calming his mind. His link with the Queen buzzed and thrummed, a harpist using his spine for practice, setting his teeth on edge. He turned and walked back to the rotunda, skirting the rubble and heading into the west wing. Yes, she went this way. The ghost of her fervour drew him on, an invisible leash around his neck. Exhibits loomed on either side of him, unearthed arcana and objets d’art, fragile scrolls and locked wooden chests, shabtis, amulets and beads. Between the cases were larger finds – a crumbling boat, a scarred chariot – both placed behind elastic rope. He didn’t stop to inspect them.
On his left, a shadowed archway. The soft glow of lights beyond. Atiya’s presence haunted the threshold, a phantom veil of age and desire. Under the arch, the smell of death, but not new death, Ben surmised, wrinkling his nose at the faint trace of vinegary odour. Shoulders set, he walked through the archway.
The room beyond was an open tomb. Coffins lined the walls. No, not coffins. Mummy cases. The downlights touched their faded faces, their features painted on old chipped wood. Kohl-lined eyes watched Ben blankly as he entered the room, his movements unconsciously slow and respectful. Hieroglyphs adorned the figures, describing the funerary images that ran in panels across their lids. Ben peered at spread wings, indecipherable spells and beast-headed gods. He recognised Anubis, the jackal god, his muzzle poised over a large pair of scales, a feather resting in one of the pans. The sight made Ben recall Winlock’s speech at the British Museum and he recognised the feather as a soul awaiting judgement, hoping to pass into the Fields of Yalu. Between the mummies, small statues rested on shelves. The professor had called them magic bricks, icons to protect the soul from its enemies, living or otherwise. Ben scanned cat, bird and human forms, and deduced that the statues were the Neteru; gods, not demons like the ones that Winlock had found in Kamenwati’s tomb. It came as a relief to him, but the feeling faded as he remembered the priest’s crimes, his jealousy, greed and ambition. Kamenwati was more than just a name now. He had a face and a purpose, a purpose strong enough to betray a pharaoh and murder a queen. No, a bona fide, straight-up serpent-cum-goddess. Coptic jars stood beside the bricks, and Ben wished he didn’t know what was inside them: the shrivelled organs of the ancient dead.
In the middle of the room was a long glass case. Inside the case, a withered corpse. Led by tingling intuition, Ben crossed the room and noticed the faint imprint of hands on the polished surface. Judging by the marks, Atiya had stood here very recently, gazing down at that stark, perpetual grin. The mummy’s skin was frayed and brown, preserved for centuries by spices and salt. The wrappings had all but rotted away, revealing stick-like limbs and ribs. There was nothing behind its sealed eyes. The mortuary priests had scooped out the goods long ago, preparing the body for entombment. Nice. The intestines, liver, lungs and heart would line the surrounding shelves, pickled in sacred clay. According to Winlock, the priests had intended the embalming process to grant the deceased immortal life, the ba living on in the Duat, the Ancient Egyptian underworld. Looking down at the mummy, into its worn, papery rictus, Ben wondered how it would feel if it knew where it was, its tomb plundered and put on display, immortality with a grotesque twist.
“No, not it,” he grumbled to himself. “Her.”
This was no ordinary corpse, its prominence in the centre of the room betraying its importance. More than that, the miasma of grief that lingered here, a fluttering moth around Ben’s heart, revealed the truth of her identity. This was a pharaoh before him, and not just any pharaoh, but the greatest of all Egyptian queens.
Hatshepsut, the Lioness, the Woman Who Was King.
Ben doubted that eternal life had ever looked so unappealing. This was death. Final death. Unlike Atiya, summoned from sleep to bring the rains to a famished land, there would be no such return for Hatshepsut. For all her power, her golden reign of peace and prosperity and her building of temples and tombs, she had still been a human woman. She was born mortal and, like a mortal, she lived out her span of years and then departed this world for whatever lay beyond. The mummy in the case was no Sleeping Beauty. No kiss, however true, would awaken her.
Thoughts of mortality stirred up his dread for Rose. Once again he remembered that day in Central Park when they’d wandered up to Cleopatra’s Needle, the memory of the obelisk ironic now, considering everything that had happened after. In that moment of violence, Rose had glimpsed the real him, the monster behind the mask. She must have already had her suspicions and he wondered if they had steeled her for the horror of the CROWS. He feared for her sanity as much as her life. And he could not escape the fact that he had failed her. His attempts at protection had come too late. And what future could the two of them have, even if he did manage to save her? The world was cruel and full of evil, and maybe Von Hart was right: he hadn’t learnt a damn thing from his affairs with humans. You’d think that losing Maud would be enough…
Ben pulled a face. When I fuck up, I really fuck up. He promised himself that if he ever got out of this, things would be different. He’d take more precautions, watch his back.
“First, you better get out of this…”
He rubbed his neck, apprehensive. Looking around, he realised that the museum was empty, the echo in his head just that, an echo. Atiya had been and gone, perhaps only minutes before his arrival, her purpose here as dead as the mummies lining the room. As he thought this, he noticed the display case set against one wall, a rectangle of jagged glass with a small placard screwed on the front. The case was empty, its contents snatched, and Ben didn’t need to guess at the prize. The Pschent. Having grabbed what she had come for, Atiya had stood over the mummy and whispered some kind of final farewell, a parting prayer for the long-dead Pharaoh. Yes. Ben could sense the Queen’s sorrow, a pall of mourning that chilled the room. She had paid her respects to Hatshepsut and left.
With time slipping through his fingers, Ben swore and did the same.
Interlude: A Shadow on the Sands
This world, the shadow thought, is an illusion.
As he followed Mahmud El Azhary, chief marketing officer of the East Katameya Oil Refinery, along the walkway between two feed tanks, he reflected that the ironwork under his feet might as well have been cobwebs. Time would blow it all away. For all the industry going on around him, the trucks in the loading bay fifty feet below, the smoke venting from the distillation towers and the pipework thrumming with crude, the shadow knew that it was all a façade, a shoring-up against the inevitable. Factory workers hurried back and forth wherever he looked, engineers and analysts bustling through the metal maze and tending to the grumbling machines with all the routine urgency of termites. The shadow granted them no more importance than that. The refinery pumped a temporary fuel from a temporary earth for the good of a temporary people. The pipes sucked up chemicals fathoms deep, the fossilised muck of the dead, animals
, plankton and algae, converting energy to run cars, ships and planes, harnessing heat and light. Like the workers busying below, the whole operation was chaff in the wind. It was all an illusion of permanence. None of it would last.
Mahmud, the marketing officer, had explained the refining process with thinly veiled pride during the tour, his fez sat atop his bearded face like an eraser on a pencil. He clasped his hands before him, a professional pose that barely concealed their subtle twitch. With an ambivalence he clearly didn’t feel, he informed his guests that visitors of note had taken the tour before, of course – executives from US sponsors, Arab tycoons with vested interest – but never a European dignitary. The shadow had allowed his guide to think him so, the sorcerous impression thrown like a hood over Mahmud’s head drubbing his rational mind into a deferential pulp. He encouraged the other staff to look away, pay him no mind. A petty parlour trick. It had all been rather last-minute. The shadow had arrived at midday, striding into the main office lobby in his sharp tuxedo and white gloves, his diminutive companion in tow. Setting his leather bag – it looked like the kind that doctors used – on the reception desk, he’d requested to talk to someone in charge. When El Azhary appeared, flustered and frowning, the shadow had spoken a single word – more of a symbol, really, hanging in the air – and then watched as the man’s frown melted into a smile. Breathlessly, Mahmud had agreed to show the dignitary and his six-year-old daughter around. Why, naturally he would. It was Sunday, after all, and his duties could wait. Besides, it was an honour.
For an hour or so, Mahmud had led the shadow and his supposed daughter through the refinery, the little girl’s plastic doll swinging from her chubby hand. He showed them the huge, bulbous hydrocracking units, the gas plant and the blending pool, their feet ringing on the walkways with all the clangour of a timpani drum. Their route was as crooked and labyrinthine as the surrounding pipework. Pipes wove everywhere, some arm-thin, some thicker than buses, so much so that the place seemed built solely from cylinders and rivets, the tanks in between stout steel prisoners. Navigating the maze, Mahmud told the shadow and the little girl all about the refinery, how his company had completed the plant just three years ago, out here in the desert south of Cairo, a few klicks from the rolling golf courses and luxury houses of Katameya Heights. He regaled his guests with his casual concerns about the environment, rising fuel prices and Middle Eastern competition, typical PR spin. They paused in the canteen for strong lukewarm coffee. The whole time, the shadow and his daughter listened to Mahmud’s chatter, murmuring replies through polite smiles. Drinking in the sights, their eyes canny and cold.
“Do you know we process fifty tons of crude every twenty-four hours?”
“Really? That’s fascinating.”
“We call the conversion method cracking because heat and pressure breaks the hydrocarbon molecules down into lighter ones.”
“How very…scientific.”
The tour drawing to an end, the three of them emerged on a mezzanine on the west wing of the plant, a wide latticed area overlooking the car park. Beyond the car park, the sands stretched, a yellow sea, to the skyline of the city. The shadow walked to the railings and looked down, his bag bumping against his leg, the afternoon breeze ruffling the strands of his thin white hair. The little girl sucked her thumb and clutched her plastic doll to the front of her dress, both stained with chocolate or some other sticky substance, dark blotches on the green material. Satisfied with the view, the shadow turned back to Mahmud, who was concluding his spiel with practised aplomb.
“Currently the refinery employs five hundred people, from engineers to corrosion specialists down to the secretaries in reception. EKOR isn’t as large as some plants, but our shareholders find it profitable. Egypt is still a key player in the oil game, you know. A recent survey estimated that there were roughly two point nine billion barrels of undiscovered crude left in the country, and our company has its sights set firmly on the future, happy to provide clean and efficient energy for the—”
“Two point nine billion,” the shadow interrupted, rubbing his chin. “Some might say that’s a limited resource.”
“But of course,” Mahmud said, knocked off kilter and trying not to show it. “The wells are depleting around the globe, which is why we’re investing so much in new technology, seeking out new reserves in our quest for an alternative—”
“And what happens when those reserves run dry? When all the reserves run dry? Forgive me, I don’t mean to sound rude. Remember you’re talking to a layman.”
“Well, hopefully by then we’ll have—”
“Hopefully?” The shadow arched an eyebrow. “That doesn’t sound very promising. When it all runs out, what then? Isn’t it fair to say that most of the world depends on this resource? Considering its finite nature, was that dependence wise in the first place? I mean, the ancients existed for thousands of years without the need for all this…” he flapped a glove, “siphoned underground shit.”
The marketing officer looked blank for a moment. It was clear he had not expected a debate, particularly one along these lines. Confused, he glanced down at the girl. She looked back at him, bored. Green ribbons fluttered on her head. Her pigtails bobbed in the wind, as black as the oil that they were discussing. He smiled, embarrassed, but she didn’t smile back.
He cleared his throat and took his chances with the shadow.
“Please, effendi, I’m sure one of our pamphlets will allay your concerns. Our company makes every effort to care for the environment. Speculation is not my, ah, department…”
“Indeed,” the shadow said. “Exactly my point. What you’ve described is a house of cards, built on shifting sands, and yet no one in these times seems willing to face the consequences. Technology advances on the back of greed and blinds you to your fate. It is a sorry thing to see.”
“Fate?” Mahmud El Azhary gave a little laugh, but it didn’t quite mask his annoyance. “My apologies. That is also not my field. I leave the future to our scientists and have every faith in the company. Now, if you’ll excuse me. As much as I’ve enjoyed your visit, I have work to do and the hour is getting late.”
“Oh, it’s later than you think,” the shadow told him. “The world would have been better off leaving these reserves well alone. Without divine guidance, without hierarchy, Man has slowly but surely engineered his own destruction. He has chosen to pursue the fleeting instead of the eternal. I will show you a better way.”
“If you say so,” Mahmud said. He obviously thought he was dealing with a madman, or worse, some kind of activist. He presented the shadow with a curt smile and turned towards the mezzanine staircase, his outstretched arm indicating that the tour was over. “Please, follow me.”
He drew up short at the girl in his path. She sucked her thumb like a subtle threat. Somehow she had managed to slip behind him.
“You see, Nan?” the shadow said, speaking to Mahmud’s back. “These people simply don’t care. They talk about alkylation and catalytic reforming as if these words held the deepest magic. As if they were spells to hold back the dark. They’ve reduced their history, their true history, to the status of myth, and they spit in the faces of gods. It’s high time someone took them in hand.”
“Little girl,” Mahmud said, his fez trembling. “Get out of my way.”
“A house of cards,” the shadow went on, unconcerned. “All it would take is a little push, a nudge, to bring the whole thing crashing down. Nan, why don’t you tell our friend here what will happen when it does?”
The little girl grinned. She removed her thumb from her mouth to say:
“Anarchy. Bloodshed. Revolution.”
The hunger in her words made El Azhary take a step back. The tour had taken a turn for the worse, and sensing the shadow standing behind him, he spun on his heel, his face a medley of fear. Standing at the railings, the shadow could see that the man no longer took him for some European dignitary, his wide eyes reflecting his peculiar appearance. The sharp tux
edo and white gloves. The fur draped over his shoulder. The pale, enervated skin.
Under the rumble of machinery, Mahmud gibbered something about security. The shadow put down his bag. He stepped towards his quailing guide and flung an arm around his shoulder.
“Come now, let’s not bicker. You know I have the right of it. This place is a temple of death. A poisoned chalice. An instrument of doom. You’re sucking up the blood of the earth.”
“Like leeches,” the little girl offered. “Like vampires.”
“Now, Nan. That isn’t polite. Our friend here was kind enough to show us around; the least we can do is mind our manners. This is a business matter, after all. He’s shown us the goods and we gladly accept.” The shadow gave a sideways glance to the man in his grip. “So tell me, where do I sign?”
Mahmud spluttered. “S…sign?”
“Never mind. The paperwork can wait. It’s quite exciting, really. I’ve never owned a refinery before.” The shadow’s smile vanished, eclipsed by an afterthought. “Although it pains me to tell you, I have some bad news. The new management has no need of your services.”
Before Mahmud had a chance to respond, the shadow turned again to the railings, wheeling the man around like a rickety stack of boxes on a trolley. Together they gazed a couple of floors down at the car park, where a Rolls-Royce waited on the tarmac, its sleek body parked between the bays. The westering sun gleamed off the paintwork and windows, rejected by the pitch-black vehicle. The Rolls – a Phantom IV – was a crouched panther, emanating patience. A silver figurehead crested the bonnet, twinkling in the afternoon light. It was too far away to make out the details, but the shadow greeted the sight with a nod. The bare-breasted hag on the broom had brought him south from the City of the Dead, flying through the desert with the speed of his purpose. Here, in this desolate place, that purpose was about to bear fruit. The hour of the syzygy was nigh.