by Stark, Jenn
Oman tilted his head. “The subterranean chamber, not as well as I would like. I’ve been there several times over the past few years, of course, the most recent visit perhaps two or three months ago. It never changes. It is a room about fifteen feet square and just over six feet in height. The people of that time were small in stature, and there would be no reason for a room of such height that deep underground, unless…”
“Unless they built it as a demon lounge,” Nikki said. She’d already removed her coveralls, leaving her in skintight black fabric from head to toe, with a slender draping tunic that managed to add another layer of discretion while still looking badass.
Oman glanced at her and blinked, startled. “We need to remain in uniform.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” I said. “Back to the access point and this gallery room. How well do you know that?”
He refocused on me. “Much better. I am there every day. I am convinced there are secrets in that room that will guide us down below. Secrets I have yet to find. Ahmad would not let me assign any ancient scholars to this task, for fear of the secret getting out. I respect that, but I am a historian and a guide, not a sorcerer. This room was not meant for me.”
“When was the last time you were there?”
He didn’t hesitate. “Yesterday morning.”
“Excellent. Could you give me your hand, please? I promise this won’t hurt.”
Oman stiffened, but he held out his hand to me. I took it, then turned to Nikki. Wordlessly, she reached for it as well and grasped it hard.
Oman jolted, doubtless taken aback not only by the intimacy of the gesture, but by Nikki’s strong grip, and his eyes shot wide. She grinned and nodded at me, and I reached for Danae, pulling her in close.
“So, I lied,” I said. “This part is probably going to hurt a little.”
And we crackled into nothing.
We rematerialized a second later in a dimly lit chamber of rock that ran about twenty feet long and ten feet wide, a gallery of sorts. The walls had been carved with interconnected pictures, roped off and marked by small makeshift placards at each new carving. A single tiny candle guttered in a lantern by the doorway.
“The welcome chamber,” Oman breathed. It was a testament to his excitement that he made no mention of how we arrived in what was clearly his favorite room in the world. “I should not have the candle or placards here, in case the room is discovered, but Sheikh Ahmad instructed me to set them up for you.”
Oman turned to us and noted that we were divesting ourselves of our heavy coveralls. Nikki was way ahead of us there, of course. Nikki usually was. Now she flipped her long black braid over her shoulder.
“We can use lights in here?” she asked.
“We can,” Oman said. “The guards do not venture this deep into the ruins at night. It is considered…”
“Haunted, sure, that makes sense,” Nikki said. She flipped on a second Maglite and handed a third to Danae, who headed for the wall.
I looked around. “Where is the trapdoor into the next chamber?”
“Hold up a second,” Danae said. She was moving from image to image, taking in the faint remnants of what had once undoubtedly been brilliantly colored art and scanning the placards. “Why are these so degraded?” she asked. “These images have been underground all this time, and you said they’d never been discovered.”
Oman brightened with approval, a delighted teacher encountering a particularly astute student.
“This room has been underground all this time, and I do not believe it has been discovered. The outer edges of these carvings have been purposely dulled. It is my best guess that it was at the request of Queen Makeda herself. She wanted to give the impression that the grave had been robbed and desecrated, everything of value taken away. It was not a bad idea. The problem of grave robbers was becoming more and more prevalent even in her age. And this was but one of her many palaces.”
“So why create a grand funerary welcome chamber, or whatever this thing is, at all?” Nikki asked. “Seems like kind of a lot of work for nothing.”
“There are many possibilities. One is simply that the queen enjoyed a game of misdirection. Another is that her pride would not allow her to bury anything of significance without proper rituals and respect. And then there is also the possibility that we’re wrong, and this site was, in fact, desecrated by real grave robbers who simply never got past these walls to see where the true treasure lay.”
He looked at Danae, ever the encouraging instructor. “Is there anything you are seeing that can lend us aid?”
“No, other than her entourage here are all members of the same coven. Which means she was a witch.”
“Probably explains why she was able to summon so many demons.” Nikki chortled, but Oman’s eyes widened as he stared at the images on the wall.
“What? No. There has never been any whisper of the Queen of Sheba being a sahira,” he insisted. “There’s nothing at all like that in any of the accounts of the time either. There would be.”
“Would there?” Danae asked. “It’s not exactly something I would advertise, I’ll tell you that right now. And if your assertions about the queen’s level of ability are correct, it only makes sense that she would have a few tricks up her sleeve. In this case, literal tricks.”
“The idea that she would employ witches—of course. But be a witch herself? No. No, I cannot believe it.”
“Oh, but you’re cool with her taking control of a djinn? Like, that doesn’t faze you?” Nikki observed drily. “Makeda wearing a pointy hat doesn’t seem all that far-fetched to me.”
I smiled, letting them banter, but I’d flipped open my third eye and was scanning the room with far more interest than I was following their chatter. There was something wrong here. Oman was correct—this was a dark place. The room had been covered in elegantly worded curses. And the general gist of those complaints? Over and over again?
Let no witch pass this threshold.
“Ah…guys?” I murmured, squinting to peer more closely. Was I reading this right? I didn’t even know what language it was, but it seemed like—
“Did you never notice this?” Danae asked, her voice rising with excitement. “It’s right here as plain as day. You have to look at the two images together, not apart. But this is definitely a queen, and she is definitely—”
“Guys,” I said more fervently this time. But Oman was already moving.
“That cannot be,” he said, nudging her to the side, trying to move past her to get to the wall. “You must be reading it wrong.”
Danae stepped out of his way, then seemed to stumble, the section of floor she was standing on dropping with an audible thunk.
“Uh-oh,” Nikki muttered.
With a loud, sickening scrape, the floor slid out from beneath us.
21
Our shouts of alarm were cut short almost immediately as we connected with a second stone floor a few seconds later, surrounded by smoke and darkness. Above us, the floor ground back into place, the sound deafening.
“You mean to tell me that nobody’s going to notice that?” I demanded, but Oman merely looked panicked in the light of Nikki’s Maglite. “This is not the correct way into the chamber,” he whispered. “Not the safe way, the way I know. This way is cursed.”
“Well, that’s reassuring,” Nikki said. She stood and dusted herself off, though with the rock dust still flying, it was a losing battle. I looked around, scowling at the room. It was roughly fifteen by fifteen feet wide, as Oman had explained. Even more interesting, the ceiling was easily seven feet tall, not six. Probably still kind of cramped for your average demon, but definitely something they could manage.
Oman was right on the third count as well. “Not much going on in here, is there, magicwise?” I asked. Even with my third eye firmly open, there was very little electrical signature happening at this depth. All the gyrating energy from the room above had been cut off. The place was…
“Oh crap,” I
muttered. I reached out my fingers experimentally, waiting for the familiar crackle of heat, but there was nothing.
Nikki turned to scowl at me. “A dead zone?” she asked, entirely too chipper. “You know, that’s happening way too often in this neck of the woods. I wonder if there’s some sort of kryptonite they’ve got buried in the bedrock here.” She kicked at the stone floor with the toe of her boot.
But Oman was shaking his head. “I have never experienced the touch of magic in this place, so I cannot tell you whether it is this dead zone you speak of, but I do know this: here, we are safe. Ordinarily, I enter through a trapdoor in the floor, and therefore, I can get out fairly easily. From all my research, it seems that unwitting explorers only come to harm in similar tombs if they attempt to leave the chamber through the wrong corridor.” He gestured to four archways, barely discernible in the gloom. “Of course, we didn’t use a trapdoor, so…” He frowned, looking upward, but had the grace not to finish the sentence.
“If you’re right, then we’ll be okay—until we leave this room,” I said. “Our theory still holds. The guardians of the Queen of Sheba can’t enter this particular chamber because they’re constrained as much as we are. They come in, they’ve got no mojo. We go out of the chamber, we’re fair game.”
I looked at Danae, who was peering at an inscription above one of the archways. “You got something there?”
“Something, yes. But nothing I like.” She pointed to the marking, then gestured to the archway on the opposite wall. “These openings each have a symbol etched over them. King, Child, God, Servant. There has to be a reason for that.”
I frowned. “None of them are female?”
“The servant is, and Makeda was a witch. The servant’s path would come naturally to her.”
“She was also a queen,” Oman said. “And to some, doubtless, a god.”
Nikki snorted. “I begin to see the problem. Sheba was no ordinary woman, and during her time, she was as revered as a king—and a god. But that sounds exactly like what a greedy gold digger would think, right? So you gotta go with servant.”
“Maybe—or you could go with child,” I countered. “The path of the curious leads to the ultimate reward. It’s a riddle, basically.”
“Not a king,” Danae contended. “She would have been too proud of her feminine strength for that. Or at least, most witches I know are.”
“And it wouldn’t be the god,” I decided, reaching into the pocket of my thick-knit black pants. They weren’t anywhere near as stylish as Nikki’s were, of course, but all I really needed them to do was stay up—and carry a Tarot deck. I drew my thumb across the edges of the cards as Oman spoke up.
“From the ancient texts we’ve been able to find in a similar riddle passage placed in another of her burial chambers, the path of god is by far the most popular route taken by grave robbers. However, there’s no record of anyone succeeding down that path. The path of the king then followed, with equally poor results. I am sure that over time, the other pathways were attempted as well, but we have scant information about either the servant woman or the child pathways. And we have no records of this place.”
“Nifty,” Nikki said. “But we’re gonna have to choose one of them, right? We can’t stay here all night.”
“We can’t,” I agreed. I pulled out three cards as she shifted toward me. She shone the light down.
“Huh,” she said. “The Sun, Moon, and Star? That seems…kind of heavy for what we’re needing.”
“Very heavy.” I grimaced. This wasn’t the time for the cards to be cute, but I couldn’t dismiss them out of turn, considering had recently shown up to the Arcana Council slumber party. So I ran through the options they suggested.
“Three Major Arcanas. Just on the face of it, you’re looking at a god option, full stop. If you’re taking the meaning of the cards, it could argue for the child, since the Sun is usually represented by a child on a white horse, or a young woman, given the traditional depiction of the Star. The Moon is murkier. Three creatures are represented, none of which seem to apply here, and the card itself is steeped in deception.”
Danae sighed. “So it could be the god corridor, or the child, or the servant woman. That doesn’t narrow it down all that much.”
“It does not. Unless…unless that’s maybe the point. There’s no answer to our question because our question needs no answer. Nikki, help me out here.” I moved toward the archway emblazoned with the child figure.
“Gotta say, I’m all for Team Answer here,” Nikki said, but she followed me, gamely swinging her light toward the corridor. The beam of light shone about twenty feet down the passage, and I glimpsed the barest shadow on the right.
“What is that?” I asked. “That shadow thing?” She angled the light farther, even as Oman walked up to us quickly, hissing a warning.
“Do not breach any of the openings until you are ready,” he urged, glancing over Nikki’s light, then frowning. “The old texts are clear on that point—and I see no shadow.”
“You don’t see that?” Nikki squinted down at him. “For reals? Because to me, it looks like another hole in the wall, maybe an opening to another corridor.”
“I’m seeing something similar,” Danae said, streaming her light into the servant corridor. Mine has openings to the right and the left.”
Nikki swung her light to the side. “Huh. Same here. Keep that light steady, Danae.” She crossed the room and peered over Danae’s head, then glanced back to me. “I’m thinking they’re connected, dollface. Which means ultimately…”
“Check the others,” I said, and as she did, I narrowed my eyes on Oman. “You mean to tell me you never stuck a flashlight down one of those corridors? You didn’t notice the openings?”
He lifted his hands helplessly. “I have shone powerful lights, yes. But I have never seen such entryways—it has always been flat rock, going on until the shadows take hold. I still don’t see what you’re seeing.” He bit his lip, and I belatedly noted he had begun to tremble. “I do not understand.”
“Something hidden,” I murmured, thinking about the Moon, even though I was pretty sure the cards were just screwing with me—or putting me on notice that the three “missing” Council members were what I should be focusing on.
I sighed. “Gotta get out of here first, guys.” I stuck the cards back into the deck, and pulled another one free. Technically, that was cheating, but I wasn’t about to split hairs. I flashed my penlight over the card, and sighed. “Freaking great.”
“Anything useful?” Nikki asked.
“Not really,” I said. “Five of Wands. We’ll have a fight on our hands no matter which way we go.”
“A fight would not go in our favor,” Oman said, a hint of fear in his voice. “We should have warriors with us.”
I wanted to roll my eyes at him, but he wasn’t Connected. He couldn’t see—
I frowned. Couldn’t see. A pathway that could only truly be seen by a Connected? Would that matter to Makeda?
“Another consideration…” Danae stepped back, turning in a tight circle. “If there are four corridors, and they’re all linked together with a passage that surrounds this room, that could be a sacred circle. We could be safe no matter which direction we take, so long as we stay within that circle.”
“Kind of a big ‘if,’” Nikki pointed out, but I liked Danae’s thinking. Regardless, there remained the problem of which passageway…Sun, Moon, Star. Heavenly bodies and ancient gods—but not Death, not the Devil…
“Up,” I said abruptly. “We should head up. Which of these is on the cardinal point of north?”
Oman pointed to the archway marked with the symbol of the god. “This.”
“Then that’s the one,” I decided. “Brace yourselves. Nikki, you good?”
“Always. Danae?”
“I still wonder if servant is a better choice,” Danae said, shaking her head. “If she was a witch, in the end, it’s how she would have seen herself. No mat
ter how great her personal strength or how mighty her influence.”
“She would,” I agreed. “But she didn’t set all this up for herself, I’m thinking.”
Danae shot me a quick look, understanding lighting her eyes. “Fair. Very fair. She set it up for a god to claim a god.”
“But—” Oman protested weakly. We didn’t give him a chance to object. We moved single file through the portal of the god. It was equally dark beneath the archway, and we stayed close enough to each other to touch the next person without resorting to holding hands. Nikki led, I followed, then Oman, and finally Danae, who had started to murmur quietly beneath her breath. I could see the opening up ahead, clearer now that we’d stepped into the corridor. It was definitely some sort of access hallway, and it definitely opened both to the right and left.
Something else resonated as well, and I perked up. “We’re back online,” I said. “I can call the—”
The walls exploded around us.
Nikki yelped in surprise and threw her Maglite. As it went skittering down the corridor, I realized the stone ceiling above the passageway wasn’t an arch of stone at all, but made of demons stretched into impossible proportions. They were tall and emaciated, wrapped in leathery skin, their arms and legs far too long for their bodies, their hands curved into claws. They dropped behind us, blocking our exit, then chased us forward as another pile of demons crashed down onto us. They leapt on us in a flesh-eating frenzy. I flung my hands up, desperately relieved that we’d apparently moved out of the dead zone, as I managed to get off a couple of fireballs to clear us a hole.
Unfortunately, the demons didn’t scatter. Oman howled with pain, and Danae started throwing spells strong enough to push back the demons nearest her, but no sooner did I catch my breath than a loud boom sounded from deeper in the ruins, followed by the unmistakable pounding of something racing up the access corridor.
“Seems like a good time for backup,” Nikki shouted.
“You do it,” I shouted. “He likes you better.”