by James Comins
“Eeeeeeee!” came from far away.
“Ono. Please come back.”
There was a broooom sound. Out of the semicircle of candleflames stepped Indaell. He opened his hand, and in it was the mouse, who still went “eeeee” with its eyebones shut.
“You saved her!” Lenna exclaimed.
Indaell held Lenna’s gaze as he stretched his arm out to deposit the bones onto her shoulder. The bones snuggled against her long fuzzy weasel neck and cheeped.
Lenna turned and looked at the wondrous little mouse, whose long incisors had bat blood on them.
“Oh Little Mousebones. Please tell me you won’t become a wampire mouse.”
The mouse shrugged nervously.
“You’re so brave, Little Mousebones.”
Indaell stepped forward over the crusted brown blood basin. “Listen quickly, Child of Grace,” he said. “The three creatures will return soon. There is a ceremony called the Opening of the Mouth. It will crack the maze apart and allow all of us to return to the world beyond. But we three will be judged. Will you perform it with me?”
“I--”
“Quickly! They will return,” Indaell hissed.
“I command time to stop.”
The mousebones froze; the sounds at the bottom of the tunnel ceased.
“Take her hand,” Indaell told her. Lenna reached her floppy white paw up to her shoulder and touched the mouse, who blinked her eyesockets sleepily.
“Will you do a ceremony with us?” Lenna whispered to the mouse. “It’ll get us away from the wamps.”
“Mm-hm!” hummed the mouse.
From thin air, the dark angel took a glass phial like a test tube wrapped at the top with gold foil, a royal crown design. Removing the glass stopper, Indaell dipped his finger into an amber liquid and touched it to his own forehead, then to Lenna’s fuzzy forehead and the mouse’s skull.
“Thus are we anointed into the Egyptian pantheon, until our choices take us elsewhere.”
Indaell flicked his fingers and the phial evaporated. He faced the wall of candle teeth and spread his thin arms straight out like a capital T. His fingers were oddly shaped, long, and they pointed up in crooked lines with flashing pink fingernails. His toga hung loose under his underarms like bunting. His long black hair hung down his robe greasily. Sandals were decaying on his feet. He muttered sonorously to the thick white candles.
A painted mask glowed on the wall. It hadn’t been there a moment ago. The mask had an orange expressionless face with elegant eyes painted with black kohl eyeliner. It hung on the side of the cave, emitting light that made the cave hazy and vapid. It was the light that bad dreams are lit with.
Lenna heard a voice from the closed mouth of the mask.
“Say with me--” it said.
And without thought, without mind, she knew the words to say. They were unavoidable, unstoppable. They were the words she was saying. She said them with Indaell. The mouse cheeped them.
Be opened the mouth of Pthaa
Untie the bandages which are upon the mummy’s mouth
Follow Thoth and his book of spells
Hold tight the bandages of Osiris
Undo the blinders of Horace
Follow the boat of Ra over the lake of the underworld.
As they spoke, the mask shone brighter with its alien dreamlight. A shimmery vision appeared around it. Lenna saw the scrolled prow of a narrow boat, as if Indaell, Lenna and the mouse were bobbing up and down across an underground lake instead of standing in a bloodstained cave with candles.
I remember my name
In the House of Osiris
The House of Names
the chant continued.
I am Llenowyn Dinas Emrys.
She heard “Sabine Mouse” in clear, high-pitched mousetones, as well as a bursting, ringing “In-dai-el, of the House of the Fallen” from Indaell.
I open my heart
In the House of Hearts
she recited.
Let my heart
Sail up the Nile
To the lake of flowers.
The deep vision of the underground lake kept swimming past them, rocking softly. In the pale, misty distance was a brief shore before a far cave wall. On the shore was a pavilion of many colors inside a railing covered with large-petalled blue flowers draping over the side of the swoopy painted wooden gazebo.
I will not eat the pepper tarts of Osiris
they recited.
Don’t be afraid of this
I won’t eat them.
Don’t put me on trial for the tarts
But put my heart on trial
And let Osiris
And Thoth
And Horace
And the wives of Osiris
Judge it justly and not send us away.
Lenna felt funny, the way you feel after not being able to sleep all night and finding out it’s time to get up already. She looked down. Through the black spiky dress, through her white bellyfur, something red glowed, pulsing with each pulse of her blood. The boat they seemed to be standing on hit the shore, tunk.
Seated under a painted canvas draped over six wooden pillars was a solemn man. His knees were wrapped up against his chest with white linen. He had a black, curling beard and a tall white hat like a bowling pin. He sat on a throne with golden lions for armrests. Standing beside his throne were two women: a sly, smiling woman with long, long, long gray hair and a vulture hat, and a pretty, short-haired woman wearing a totally see-through dress and totally naked underneath it. The faintly lit stone wall behind them was scrawled with hieroglyphics. Two birds sat on a stand, a hawk and something like a vulture. In front of everything was a wide black scale arm. It was made of wood and decorated with turquoise-blue faience and gold resin and it hung on thin ropes between two of the posts. Two silver scale platforms stuck out from the ends of the arm.
“Welcome to Duat,” said the wrapped-up man with the curly beard. “I am Osiris.”
Chapter Nineteen
Seth
or, Probably Poison, Probably Poison
“Omigoodness.”
“Take out your heart, Llenowyn Dinas Emrys,” Osiris said softly. His eyes were rimmed with the same black shiny kohl eyeliner that the mask had worn. His skin, olive-hued and once rich with life, was pale and faded and sallow-dead. His arms were folded under the wrappings; only his elbows could be seen under the papier-maché.
Goggling at the weirdness, Lenna put her black boots firmly on the floor of the bloodbucket cave. The boat and the shore were still an illusion. Looking out through the wall at the underground lake, she put her fuzzy paws through her body, got a floppy no-thumbs grip on a diamond-shaped thing in the middle, and carefully pulled it out. She felt floaty and empty without this red diamond inside of her. It felt how Andvar the ghost dwarf must have felt, poking himself through the midsection. Strands of light waved like undersea kelp around the red crystal that she balanced on her paws.
“Come forward. Place it on the scale,” Osiris said.
The two birds watched carefully as Lenna slid her feet forward across the cave and felt a magic circle woggle in front of her like a rippling mirror. A smell like rancid water. Pushing through the intense church magic that separated the cave and the boat, she stepped through the wall of the mouth-shaped cave and into the vision. The hull of the boat hardened beneath her spiky black shoes, lurching her, and she scrabbled to hold onto the red crystal. As the world of Duat solidified, the dreamlike shimmer left the scene, although the mist stayed.
The side of the boat was low, weighed down by her presence. It slid across the water, bumping into the shore and drifting back into the night lake. The inexorable current pushed it back to the foot of the pavilion. Holding the red crystal tightly to her chest, feeling the spikes of her dress scritch against the red see-though surface, she got a boot up onto the side of the boat and weasel-jumped. Leaning forward, she landed on a marble landing and tripped. The crystal flew out and skidded across th
e platform into a blue-floppy-flower vase and stopped.
She got back to her feet, steadied herself and picked her heart back up. She felt ill.
Lenna approached the pavilion in the darkness, climbing up from the landing into the hazy sourceless light of Osiris and his retinues. Red and green and gold stripes decorated the drapery. The scale arm was perfectly still. She walked up the last few low marble steps of the dais. Osiris, the two women and the birds observed her. The woman with long gray hair squinted oddly; the almost-naked woman tipped her chin up. One of the birds, a hawk with huge eyes, made a “rawwwk” gurgle in his throat.
The other bird, a grumbly, pheasanty brown hunched ball of feathers with a long vulture beak, spoke.
“You aren’t dead.” The voice was dignified and bland. The vulture beak opened and closed as he spoke, moving like the mouth of a ventriloquist’s dummy.
Lenna slowly shook her head.
The bird hopped. “That’s all right. That’s just fine. I have no problem judging the living. I like it, in fact. It’s not as if there’s a line of dead behind you. In fact, there isn’t. You’re alone in Duat and we’re clowns and there’s nothing we like better than--”
The hawk leaned over and snapped its arched beak at the stuffy bird’s wing.
“Ooh! That’s just fine, Horace, it really is.”
Horace the hawk snapped again.
“Quit that, would you? If she’s so keen on being judged, have her get on with it.”
“I advise you to ignore Thoth,” said the gray-haired woman. “Myopic and testy. A scholar in every way. Come forward.”
Lenna carried her heart forward. Behind her was the scrolled prow of the boat and the sighing of water. Sabine Mouse and Indaell didn’t seem to be there right now. They must be back in the cave.
She lay the red diamond on the left platform of the scale. The crystal balanced on its point and tipped the scale down, glowing wobblyily.
“Horace?” said Osiris.
The hawk leapt from its perch and swooped over the scale. A single reddish-copper feather, bent in the middle, drifted down from under its wing and landed on the opposite platform from the crystal. Horace glode back to his perch.
As the scale arm straightened, a drop of shiny green fell from the canvas ceiling onto the round silver disk and tipped the scale to the heart’s side. The drop sizzled slightly.
“She’s guilty,” said a nasty voice. “Throw her to the crocodile.”
Thoth bustled himself up and cleared his throat. “Let the record reflect that Llenowyn Dinas Emrys has been found guilty of unforgiveable sin and will be dealt with as it is, was and always will be written in the Book of Thoth. Which is to say, my book.” The long-beaked bird kicked out its foot and a massive leather book coughed out a plume of dust and swung along its chain onto a podium that hadn’t been there a moment before. It opened mustily, and the bird put its toe out and turned the pages, shhlip, shhhhplip. It tapped the toe against the creaky page.
“Right here, right here,” said Thoth. “He, or I suppose it might as well be she, whosoever committeth sin of a dark enough character, ipso facto unforgiven or unforgiveable, which is to say a deathly sin, that one shall rightly and presently be fed to the crocodile.”
“No!” shouted Lenna.
“Such evidence shall be provided by the tipping of the scale, partially or absolutely. For each soul in its pure and unsullied form is precisely the weight of one, that is, (1), feather of Horace. QED.”
“But it did weigh the same! It was the drip,” said Lenna. She looked over her shoulder nervously. Sabine and Indaell must have stayed behind in the mouth-shaped cave. She was alone.
Thoth pheasanted about, rumpling his brown dusty feathers into a heap. “Drip? Drip? What’s this about a drip? My eyes are the eyes of Thoth, the eyes of Tmu-that-createth. I see no drip.” The bird lifted its majestic white eyebrows blearily and peered around. “No drip at all.”
“Feed her to the crocodile,” said the nasty voice again.
“Who is that?” Lenna said, stepping forward and peering up at the dark underside of the canvas. It rippled, but nothing was there.
“Who is what?” said Thoth.
“Seth,” said the woman in the see-through dress.
“What?” raged Osiris. He wriggled angrily in his wrappings. “Seth is here? He, embraced with flame? He, eater of shades? He, breaker of bones? He, whose face is behind him? Seth has come before the throne of the double lions?”
“I think so,” said Lenna, still peering up into the shadowed folds of the gold and red roof. “Someone is up there, anyway. He dripped poison onto the scale.” She pointed to the ...
“Don’t touch the scale!” shrieked Thoth. “Mercy, I just calibrated the thing.”
“There’s green. Look,” Lenna said, pointing with a weasel paw.
Thoth bustled forward to the floor of the dais and stretched his neck up, up to look over the silver line of the platform. His beak twitched far right, then far left, then to the center. His head jumped back.
“Mercy mercy me.”
He returned to the roost, flutter.
“My princely one,” he said to Osiris. “There is, indeed, a drip. Green, you know. Probably poison, probably poison.”
“Seth’s?” Osiris asked with violence in his voice.
“Oh, probably.”
“Cast him out, Neftis,” said Osiris to the white-haired woman.
The sly woman with the vulture hat lifted her fingers and bent a leg back in an arabesque. Slicing snow burst whitely into the space, accompanied by a shatter of painful industrial grinding sounds and streaks of light. Lenna, covering her ears and squinching her eyes, thought she saw something squirm on the ceiling. Did she? It might have been the wind ...
The snow blew itself away and vanished.
“I am Doubt,” snarled the voice on the ceiling. “I cannot be banished.”
“Cast him out, Isis,” said Osiris. Neftis let her arm and leg down.
Wide sleeves like waggly nylons rose up as Isis bowed. She let the transparent cloth sweep around her like hummingbird wings. Her hair was flung down; Lenna saw it was short black, cut severely and studded with lapis lazuli hairpins. Blue light with gold sparkle-bursts lit up the pavilion. Lenna felt very warm and calm and trusting, like nothing could ever go wrong in the world. Joy like unmeltable ice cream filled her, a steady assurance of the goodness of things. Delicate music played, circusy and gentle.
And yet ...
Lenna risked a glance at the ceiling, doubting that the spell would work ...
Oh. Right.
Pickles.
The light and music faded.
“This one knows not how to trust,” boomed Seth. Echoing dark laughter filled the ceiling. “I remain.”
“Sorry,” Lenna whispered to Isis, who glared.
“We could have been rid of him,” she hissed.
“I’m sorry!”
“If only she had trusted everyone and everything all the time,” said Neftis sadly.
“But you shouldn’t!” Lenna exclaimed. “You shouldn’t trust lots of people! I probably shouldn’t even trust Indaell.”
Neftis gave Lenna a brief pixie smile. Isis crossed her arms under her breasts and glared.
“Are you two sisters?”
“Yes”“No”
they said together. It wasn’t clear who said what.
A thought occurred to Lenna. She looked up at the gently waving cloth ceiling with her hands on her hips.
“Are you Loki?” she demanded. “Or Indaell?”
More of the cracking, sparking dark laughter echoed. “I know Lucky,” said the vicious voice. “I know Indie Ale. They are of classes of spirits who are gods and who are not gods. Without speaking falsely, you could state that they my family.”
Osiris wriggled angrily in the mummified starch linens.
“Let him talk,” whispered Thoth out of the corner of his beak. “We might learn what he’s doing here.�
�
“I am here to instruct,” said Seth, who was still an invisible snake somewhere on the ceiling. “This machine you have made, this so-called scale, is useless to judge the girl. The heart only records the past. If you could take a heart of her future out of her, place it beside the heart of her past, then you might have an accurate picture of Llenowyn Dinas Emrys. But you don’t. And you can’t.”
“Are you suggesting that I, Thoth, the Judge of Hearts, have been judging people wrong for four thousand years? And if,” the bird blustered, hopping back and forth on his perch, “and if, let us say, let us just say, and if I have indeed been judging persons incorrectly for thousands of years, why in the name of the golden double lion Tmu-that-createth would you wait until now to tell me so?”
Heavy dark laughter echoed.
Thoth hopped up and down and up and down.
“Settle yourself,” Isis said. She breathed out a blue mist from her red lips. The mist dove into Thoth’s little bird-nostrils and he took a deep breath.
“Thank you, Isis my dear,” he said, relaxing and settling down.
“And,” said Lenna sternly to the shape on the ceiling. Everyone waited a moment while she figured out what she meant to say.
“And,” she went on, “my heart balanced the feather the way it was supposed to.”
“Yes,” said Thoth, nodding. “Precisely so.”
“If your heart of the past brought the scale into balance, what would this tell you?” Seth’s nasty voice asked.
“That I’m a good person!” said Lenna.
“Do you understand the ongoing implications of all that you’ve done wrong?” said Seth.
“Um,” she said.
“You will.” Seth’s vicious laugh faded from the room, leaving an afterimage of horrible uncertainty.
Lenna breathed in, breathed in, breathed in.
“Aaaaaaa!”
“Eeeeeee!”
“Sabine Mouse!” Lenna spun around and let the pile of bones hop up her fuzzy paw onto her brown and white shoulder. The mouse rubbed her skull affectionately against Lenna’s long neck. “Little Mousebones, I missed you.”