Clan Novel Setite: Book 4 of The Clan Novel Saga

by Kathleen Ryan

  “Good evening, sir. I’ve brought you breakfast.”

  “Local bank?”

  “Your own vintage, sir. I had it driven up with the car. We’re in upstate New York, by the way.”

  “You’ve been busy. Report.”

  “Yes sir. Pauline Miles and her team tracked Kettridge here. Presumably, Chicago was a blind by Khalil, and I hope the left-luggage office opens that skunk’s crate in the daytime.” Thompson ran a hand through his grizzled hair.

  “Pauline’s team has been weakened by the losses you already know about. I sent all but the die-hards home for a break. They need it…they saw more than they should have. Kettridge has been amazingly popular these three weeks.

  “I kept Pauline here; she’s in the know now, for certain, and she’s weathered the storm well enough. She’s still my top pick to manage the detective work if I buy it, but there’s a lot to be said for brute force and the ability to manage that. So I’ve brought in Matthew Voss for a tryout. He comes from the executive-protection side of the business. His team is fresh and ready to come in, but so far I’ve kept his people away from what’s left of Pauline’s squad to minimize the risk of Family rumors spreading. We have a small army of security, a fair-sized arsenal, both the cars, Miles and Voss, the Asp—who has already sighted in half the guns for his own aim—Janet taking care of the baggage difficulties, myself, and you, sir.”

  “Where is Elizabeth?”

  “Awake and in her right mind,” said Ron with satisfaction, “having dinner with the others.”

  Hesha rose, stretched, and selected a map from a pile on the unfinished table. “As your replacement, are you suggesting Miles, Voss, or both?”

  “Both, I think.”

  “I am inclined to agree with you.” Hesha pored over the country as represented by contour lines, tree cover, water table, fault zones, stratification, highways, local roads, footpaths, fire breaks, school districts, police jurisdiction, zip code. At last, he picked out an ordinary trail map showing points of natural interest, and sat staring at it. “When the others have finished eating, we will go. Voss’s team for back-up. You, the Asp, Pauline, and Elizabeth will travel with me.” His shoulders twitched. “I can feel your disapproval, Thompson, but she has proved to be an invaluable sensitive. If there is trouble, she will know; probably before we do.

  “Also,” said Hesha, “if these two are satisfactory, you might look forward to joining the ranks of Set once the Eye is secured.”

  Thompson sat very still. “Thank you, sir. I will certainly keep thinking about it.”

  Elizabeth hiked last along the steep, winding trail. No clouds marred the night. The full moon shone so brightly overhead that none of the hikers had turned on their flashlights. Hesha appeared for a moment, above her, on a switchback of the path. She looked up at him, admiring the figure he cut as he moved—proud, silent, sure-footed—his skin gleaming blue-black and the whites of his eyes glowing like stars. He vanished beyond the curve. Thompson filed into view close behind, and Liz could see every gray hair silvered by the moonlight; she saw, and pitied, the bent back, the tired set of his shoulders. The Asp, lighter-stepping, stealthier, more sly in every movement, passed his partner at the turn. He pulled Ron’s pack open, dug something out of it, and stuffed the item into his own gear. The older man marched more easily, and his thick hand reached up to Raphael’s shoulder. The Asp pretended not to notice, and moved out of sight.

  In front of Elizabeth, Pauline Miles kept steady pace. While it was hard to hear the Asp make his way along the path, it was difficult to see Pauline. She was short, thin, naturally dark, and her dull, dark-blue clothes blended easily with the shadows.

  The track widened just after the bend, and the two women matched step for the last few yards. Their three companions had stopped ahead of them in a break between the trees. Pauline and Elizabeth caught up, found places opposite Ron and Raphael, and held their position quietly. Hesha waited, stock-still, for a full minute, and then moved across the meadow in a straight, unfaltering line.

  Elizabeth brushed through clusters of some plant that smelled terribly sweet, and picked a branch from one to carry with her. She looked at their destination—another climb, she supposed—a majestic, tumbled mass of stone and forest rising above the shallow valley. Hesha was two-thirds of the way to the foot of it already.

  “Liz—watch your laces,” Pauline whispered.

  Elizabeth stooped to one knee to tie her shoe. For a brief second, she felt a wave of heat. The earth beneath her hands felt more like asphalt than anything else. Liz blinked and saw stars—shook her head, and felt the ground again. Grassy, rooty soil. Her fingers dug in and found a worm, a few pillbugs—she knelt until her cheek nearly touched the dirt, and no scorching sensation came to her face. Liz rose in doubt and walked the rest of the way trying to see out of the corners of her eyes.

  Hesha approached an opening under a tilted rock, peered inside, and then confidently beckoned to the others. He led them around and to right, pulled himself up and over a sizable boulder, and looked down into a passage the width of a city sidewalk and the height of two men. A wall of rock had, long ago, split in two. The forces that had riven it had forced the pieces closer together at the top, wider apart at the bottom, forming an irregular tunnel sloping down into the earth. The “floor” was dirt and rubble washed in by water. The walls sported moss and small plants only so far as light might enter the crack.

  The Setite observed all this without pausing. He turned on his light and led the others into the hill. One by one, four lamps clicked on behind him.

  At the end of the descent, the tunnel opened out into a large, ungainly chamber. The five lights—very small and dim in comparison to the dark expanse they had to contend with—played over the billowing curves of the cave. Elizabeth recognized the smooth, weird shapes of water-cut and water-built limestone. She fanned her flash’s beam out as far as it would go, and turned it on the ceiling, which soared to the right past the limit of the light. To her left, it swooped down to within four feet of the floor. A bizarre combination of claustrophobia, agoraphobia, and vertigo washed over her. She looked to her footing, sharpened the focus again, and tried to keep the light on the same level as her eyes. The others stepped out, each taking a slightly different route to avoid the stalagmites and columns jutting up from the floor. Hesha picked his way to a narrow, nearly invisible opening and the team followed—though it was a tight and difficult squeeze for Thompson.

  On the other side was a disturbingly familiar chamber. Elizabeth felt as though she had walked into a natural chapel, the cave’s roof vaulted like a cathedral’s. More stalactites, stalagmites, and columns had formed here than in the first room, and the largest of them formed two uneven lines…like rows of pillars in a ruin. The few formations down the center of the room lay low; pillows, rope coils, and buttons dotted the gently rolling floor, and the icicles and curtains suspended from the ceiling hung no lower than the tops of the “pillars” on either side.

  “Wait here,” said Hesha. His voice echoed. He lowered it, and went on: “The professor will be easier for me to handle by myself. I don’t care to have him harmed by one of you,” he said, glancing toward the Asp, “even by accident, and I do not want any of you shot or burned by him in an attempt on me.”

  Elizabeth clambered up and found a damp seat on a stone stump. She watched as Hesha picked through one of the packs, strapped a large and heavy rubberized-canvas sack to his back, and set out across the “chapel.” He traversed the slippery, rounded terrain without a misstep, selected a deep shadow in the right rear corner of the cave, and headed unswervingly toward it. By the moving shadows, she realized that what she had taken for the “back wall” of the cathedral must be a free-standing column of enormous size. She squinted to see better.

  Hesha reached the side passage he had chosen and turned back to look at the giant pillar himself. His lamp caught the thing in sharp profile, and Elizabeth gasped. For an instant, the sidelit for
mation had seemed to move; an optical illusion gave it a hundred monstrous faces and distorted limbs. The Setite moved on and darkness settled on the far end of the cavern once more, but Liz dropped off her perch. She knew that ghastly image; she had seen it last in a mural under a tenement in Calcutta. She popped the filter off the powerful lens in her hand, and started running along the “aisle” of the chapel.

  The hot halogen bulb flooded the huge hall with light. It stripped the shadows away from the pillar and threw them into the corners of the room. It picked out dirt and rust imprisoned under the translucent calcite film. But the faces were gone. Elizabeth studied the surface of the hundred-headed demon—of the natural, two-story, stone pillar that must have grown for eons and stood for millennia—and tried desperately to find an angle from which she might see the faces again. The harshest light refused to bring out the contours that could have fooled her eye. The softest light, filtered again, as Hesha’s lamp had been, failed to duplicate the conditions. Thompson, confused but willing to help, took the flash and stood where Liz thought their employer had been, and though she returned to the stump and called out directions to him, the faces never reappeared in the stone.

  Ron came back, curious and slightly worried. He asked, “What was it?”

  “I thought I saw something.”

  “Moving?” The Asp jumped in.

  “No. Just…there.”

  Elizabeth said nothing more, and Thompson stayed by her while Raphael and Pauline went off to search the room for more practical things, like exits. Their voices ricocheted up and around and back to Ron and Liz’s ears, and the girl flinched.

  “You’ve got a feeling about something?” The old cop asked softly.

  She grimaced. “No. It’s just…the echoes…sounded as though there were more than four people in here. Can we go back to the first cave?”

  “Sure,” said Thompson, and they jumped down off their stumps together.

  Hesha followed the trail of the red eyestone easily— almost smugly, with a full-belly kind of contentment. The bead around his neck seemed to tug him along the track, and the sensation of cool, carved, blood-colored chalcedony hovered like a beacon when his steps aligned with the correct direction.

  The Setite savored the potential for triumph. He had nothing, yet, and he knew the danger of assuming victory before the battle had been fought—but by night’s end, he might have accomplished his goal. It was possible that the Eye would be Set’s by daybreak. It was possible that his quest would end, and that was an astonishing possibility.

  He cherished, too, the confrontation ahead. Hesha could admit to himself that he looked forward to seeing Jordan Kettridge again. The young man—no, not so young, realized the creature—was an unusual specimen. Rarely did Hesha encounter a human so hard-headed, so unshakable. Kettridge could be won over, but not bought. He could be convinced by evidence, but not turned by anything Hesha could find to tempt him. Any mortal could be broken, of course, but they were of so little use afterwards. So for the past sixteen years, Hesha had made Kettridge’s career into something of a hobby. The Setite amused himself by funding Jordan’s work, supplying him with grants and minor clues to support the archaeologist’s theories. He smoothed over governmental difficulties, kept the academic wolves at bay, and used his influence to help the professor obtain any visa to any nation he wished.

  Someday, he might tell Jordan all that he had done for the man—but he liked the picture of a dead Kettridge standing before Osiris (if Osiris ever regained proper control of the underworld again), faced with the feather of Ma’at, reciting the list of his deeds, being questioned by the gods about his relationship to a Child of Set called Hesha Ruhadze…and giving, innocently, all the wrong answers.

  The red line fell to a level below. Hesha wedged himself into the corners of a ladder-like, easily climbed chimney, and descended carefully to the slick stone beneath.

  He found a dead end.

  In a den-shaped space the size of a double bed, a man’s body lay prostrate on the rock. The Setite braced himself for what might come, and touched the outflung arm of the ragged figure. His fingers gripped flesh as cold as stone, but not rigid. An old corpse? It smelt very dead…but the texture of the skin suggested withering flesh beneath, not the corruption of the grave. A Cainite…dormant…or meeting Final Death in a way Hesha had never seen before.

  The Setite swung his light around to examine the carcass. The stick-thin, haggard shape was bare-chested but wore loose trousers, sneakers, and a belt. Filth, caked mud, and dried gore hid the original colors of his clothes and encrusted most of the body. More significantly, to Hesha’s mind, an old swath of something paler overlaid the other stains like a sash. The fat-yellow stream began at the man’s swollen, ravaged left eyesocket and dripped down his face, neck and shoulder as if a tallow candle had melted out of the blinding wound. Some of it still glistened as if fresh, and new drops of the stuff had fallen onto the cave floor as though the candle had been wrested from the corpse very recently.

  Hesha leaned over the body and picked up the red eyestone. He held the bead between his palms and attuned himself to it for a moment, then attached it to the cord that held the white eye and the amulet. He retraced his steps as far as the top of the chimney, turned completely around twice, and realized that he had a new problem. The white stone was as good as a bloodhound for tracking the red ones. The red one around his neck felt the call of the Eye itself, gave a location, and general bearings—but only as the crow flew. In the labyrinths of a limestone cave, Hesha could not walk a straight line toward the source.

  The Setite pulled out a compass and his phone.

  “Either the professor is being very, very clever,” he said to his team, “or we’re dealing with someone else altogether. Someone more dangerous. There is a dormant Cainite here. The prize is gone, but there’s no sign of a struggle. How our friend might have managed that, I don’t know, but he has the object we are looking for. I want you to have the backup team come up and cover the cave entrance. They are to prevent any other persons from entering the caverns. If our subject tries to leave, allow him to do so, but alert me immediately, have him trailed, and keep him closely guarded. Do not, on any account, fire on him.

  “In the meantime,” Hesha continued, “you and the others are to split into even groups and begin a search for our friend. His position at the moment is to my southwest, up roughly eighty feet, and half a mile away. From the point at which I left you, I approximate him to be due west, forty feet above you, and just under a mile away. Concentrate in that area and mark everyone’s feet before you go. I will contact you again if I scent any of your paths or if our target alters his position.”

  Thursday, 29 July 1999, 12:41 AM

  Upstate New York

  Ron Thompson slid warily down a steep incline. It was scattered with loose stones and extremely treacherous. He knew this because he had spent the last half hour climbing carefully up it to see whether the shadow at the top led anywhere.

  “Blind alley,” he said to his partner. “Let’s go back to the junction and try the center.”

  Liz tried to move like the Asp. She discarded the example and tried moving like Pauline Miles, and felt better. Bare rock to bare rock—loose stone was bad; it slipped under your shoes—avoiding damp places and pools—she could still hear herself, but not so loudly as Thompson’s heavy footsteps.

  The middle way went nowhere, but quickly. The crevasse at the end of it was too wide and deep for them to cross; logic argued that Kettridge could not have crossed it either, and they returned to the junction. The first of the left-hand holes descended. They believed they were still underneath Kettridge’s level, so they took the second. An hour later, mentally exhausted by the vast variety of hiding places in the honeycomb they had just explored, they turned to the down-slope. That, at least, was wide, smooth, and easy to walk along.

  It looked as though it would dead end in a pit, but Thompson flashed his light around the bottom of the
tunnel, found another shadow he couldn’t explain, and the two of them scuttled down into it. The light revealed the shadow as more stream-bed; they crawled beneath the low but narrow, knife-like knee of the ceiling, and stood up in a chimney with a near-perfect ladder wall rising higher than the lights would reach.

  Thompson clipped his flash to his chest and started the ascent. He pointed, ordering Elizabeth to another route, not directly beneath his. She took hold of a ledge, got her feet beneath her, and mounted the steep stairs. Reach, step, reach, step…her light bothered her, her fingertips chafed on the rough stone, and her jeans weren’t as loose, climbing, as they had seemed while hiking. Liz began to lag behind. She looked over at Ron, realized he had two full lengths on her. While she watched, he stopped moving straight up and started pulling himself forward—he’d reached the top. Elizabeth grinned and picked up the pace. Twelve feet to go, at the most…

  Sounds from above:

  “K—”

  Spang. Thwack. Thud.

  Elizabeth froze.

  “Shit.” A man’s voice—familiar, but not Thompson.

  “Liz—” Thompson, sounding strange.

  She fairly ran the last eight feet to the top, slipping twice in her haste, pushing her head over the top without thought for the consequences. Thompson lay there, twisted to one side, lying in a curled, half-fetal position. His right hand, speckled with sticky crimson, touched the blunt end of a golden-brown stake in his chest. Liz shoved her light above the edge and saw another man—Jordan Kettridge—running to and kneeling at, the body of her friend.

  “You’re a rotten shot,” said Thompson angrily. “Feels like all lung.”

  Jordan choked. “I thought he’d come alone. Oh, shit. Ron…I dropped the aim when I saw it was you, I swear to God…but the trigger—”

  “Save it, Jordan.” Ron coughed, and Elizabeth swarmed up beside him. She held his head off the ground and tried to keep his body still. Tears poured down her face. She fumbled frantically with the buttons of her phone. “Wait,” Ron groaned. “Stop. Don’t call him.”