The Serpent Waits

by Bill Hiatt

  Nancy had been having a hard time getting a clean shot, as were the archers. The other warriors kept getting in the way as they dodged or struck at the frenzied lions. The room was small enough to force what might have been a much larger battle into a tangle of bodies and limbs in which a bullet or an arrow might easily take down foe and friend indiscriminately.

  After a couple of misses, one of which came perilously close to Michael’s neck, Nancy holstered the gun and tried to fight the lions barehanded, the way Lucas was doing—but without his supernatural speed.

  I was not used to the idea of women warriors, but a woman such as Nancy could have served with honor in the army of any Egyptian pharaoh. However, Egyptian didn’t normally have to face animals shaped by godly power or fight unarmed and unarmored. One of the lions clawed Nancy’s left arm. Blood sprayed, and she stumbled backward. The lion pursued, jaws wide and claws flailing. The other warriors were too entangled in their own battles to intervene, and my magic was still hobbled by the haze.

  Shahriyar, despite his lack of a weapon, threw himself in front of her. His armor deflected the lion’s claws, but the beast’s momentum was enough to knock him down, and those claws reached inexorably toward his unprotected face. Shar tried to push the lion back and almost succeeded. Then he fell back with a cry of pain, his head smacking the floor.

  Nancy, just behind him, was futilely trying to stop the bleeding of her arm. I had seen enough wounds to know that one that bled that much was usually mortal. She looked pale already, and she was shaking.

  Khalid managed to strike the lion with a couple of arrows, but their blasts of magic were ill-designed for this particular kind of foe. If anything, the solar one seemed to give it more strength. It shook itself, and the arrows fell from the tiny wounds they had made. There was a little blood, but not enough to slow the creature.

  Khalid flew over in a desperate effort to distract the beast from Shahriyar, but another lion leapt upward, snagged Khalid with one of its claws, and pulled him down, screaming, into the midst of the battle. Like Lucas, he was fast—but he was also caught. He might evade claws and teeth for a few seconds at most.

  Ill-equipped as I was for battle, I moved toward Shahriyar and Khalid, searching for a weapon of some kind. I could not stand by and let such people die before my eyes. I would not.

  I jumped in surprise when Morfran charged past me with a battle cry louder than a lion’s roar. Viviane, Carla, Creirwy, and Ceridwen cried out in protest and tried to keep the curse from following, but Morfran ignored them.

  He was not as fast of Lucas, but he moved swiftly enough to strike the beast on top of Shayriyar in the side before it even realized he was there. The wound would have been mortal, anyway, but green light as well as blood sprayed from it, and the lion dropped to the floor, instantly dead, its animating force disrupted by the sword.

  Morfran could not have been in too many sword fights recently, but he fought as if he had done so yesterday, rather than centuries ago. Throwing himself into the tangle of lions reaching out for the fallen Khalid, he struck the head from one, the hindquarters from a second, the right claw from a third. Even that one died instantly. The beasts were too magical to survive a wound from that blade.

  Khalid, slightly bloody, but not seriously wounded, flew up to the ceiling and back from the battle far enough to be out of claw reach before turning to fire on the lions again. Shar struggled to his feet, scooped up Nancy and carried her back to the healers. I prayed to Amun that they had enough power to spare to save her.

  Morfran continued to hack through two lions a minute. His momentum gave the others time to regroup, and they too had more success at bringing Sekmet’s creatures down.

  Hafez could no longer keep pace. The others found the heat and light oppressive, but it could not touch Morfran, who kept swinging as if he and not the lions were the instrument of Sekhmet. They focused on him, and Eva and Khalid each took one down with an arrow. Alex took a third with his sword.

  Hafez stood in the doorway. The staff glowed so brightly with the fire and sun of Sekhmet that at first, he appeared like a shadow. I mustered enough vision by the grace of Amun-Ra to see more.

  He was tall, brown-skinned, with hair and eyes as dark as onyx. He looked younger than when Amy had seen him, almost as young as Tal’s warriors, as if he had somehow rejuvenated himself before battle. Despite that, a feeling of immeasurable age radiated from him. His flesh seemed more than mortal. In the corona of godly power that surrounded him, he could have passed for a god.

  None of that surprised me. His clothing shocked me, though. He had discarded the modern clothes he must normally have worn in favor of a linen robe, belted at the waist, such as Egyptian men often wore. However, over his robe, he had wrapped a lion skin. That and the Pschent—the dual crown combining the red of upper Egypt with the white of lower Egypt—made it clear he was claiming to be Pharaoh.

  “Amen Hafez!” I yelled, both to warn the others and to draw his attention. “What right have you to parade around as a pharaoh when you have no claim?”

  “Be silent, god’s wife of Amun!” commanded Hafez, waving the staff at me as if he would engulf me in flames. “My claim I will prove—after I overcome my enemies.”

  One of Khalid’s arrows whizzed close, but Hafez deflected it with one deft swing of the staff. Then he batted aside one of Eva’s arrows. The others, still occupied with the lions, were unable to mount an attack on him. It was up to me—but I had no idea what to do.

  Shahriyar jumped at Hafez, intending to tackle him. Powerful as his momentum was, Hafez brushed him aside like a fly. Shar hit the floor with a disturbing cracking sound, as if the impact had shattered board and bone. He didn’t move.

  Looking closely, I could see that Hafez was shielded by the power of Wadjet, the goddess who protected pharaohs. A physical attack against him was unlikely to succeed.

  Hafez waved the staff and materialized five more lions, who flung themselves at the weary warriors. I expected him to follow up that attack with another assault from the magic of the staff, but instead, he turned to me.

  At first, I didn’t recognize the power Hafez was drawing from the staff. The wood sparkled with drops of primordial water, and I felt a wrenching sensation, as if I were being pulled out of the normal order of things.

  As I saw reality blur around me, I recognized the irresistible power of Heh, god of infinity. When my vision snapped back into focus, time had stopped all around us. Lions, warriors, and sorcerers were all as still as statues.

  For all practical purposes, I was alone with Apep’s chosen servant. He stared at me, and his eyes were the eyes of a serpent ready to sink its fangs into its prey.

  Unearthing the Past

  “Why do you fight on their side, god’s wife of Amun? They have served their purpose. Your place is with me.”

  Hafez glanced at my frozen allies as if they were ants to be crushed beneath his sandaled feet.

  “My duty is to oppose all followers of Apep—and all false pharaohs,” I said. He obviously wanted something from me, or he could have dispatched a lion to finish me instead of taking much vaster energy to enclose us in a ripple in the endless lake of Heh’s majesty. Perhaps if I distracted him with talk, he might exhaust the staff’s power.

  “I would not have expected you to recognize me, for I ruled nine centuries before you lived, and most records of my reign had perished by the time you were born. However, you must at least have heard of Pharaoh Apepi—that is who I am.”

  As Amy would have put it, I did not see that one coming.

  “His reincarnation, you mean? How could you prove such a thing?”

  “Strange question—coming from you,” said Hafez. But I am not the reincarnation. Apep, whom I worshipped above all other gods, came to me in my time of need. He had stolen a blessing from Tutu, the god who protects sleepers from nightmares and demons. Using that blessing and some other magic about which I am not clear, Apep put me to sleep and hid me away, prom
ising that he would awaken me when the danger had passed and that immortality would be the reward for my faithfulness.”

  That kind of planning sounded nothing like Apep, who knew only chaos, but I decided to let Hafez keep on prattling.

  “Something must have prevented Apep from awakening me, for I slumbered for millenniums. When I awoke, it was the year mortals in this strange country call 1951. The charm that kept me asleep must have been powerful indeed, but even it could not last indefinitely.”

  Was it my imagination, or was the power of the staff noticeably lessening? Yes, I could sense it ebbing.

  Hafez should have been assuring his victory—or at least planning his departure—yet he did neither. Instead, he held time in abeyance as his power blew away, grain by grain, like sands in a desert wind. Why was talking to me so important to him?

  “Don’t look so puzzled,” he said. “I’d rather have your willing cooperation for what must be done, and once you have heard my story, I know that I will have it.

  “When I awoke, it was clear I hadn’t aged, but it took a little while to get my body moving. I called on Apep for help, but he didn’t answer. I was alone in a strange Egypt totally unlike the one I had left behind. The gods were silent, their worship suppressed, the last pharaoh long dead, and my own pharaonic powers dormant.”

  “I will not trouble you with all the details of how I made a place for myself in this new world. Suffice it to say that the curator at the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, though puzzled by my lack of a working knowledge of Arabic, was most impressed by my facility with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. He taught me Arabic, and I repaid him with translation services involving the ancient inscriptions he worked with. Contact with the ancient texts somehow awakened my pharaonic powers, though I did not at first use them very much.

  “In the Revolution of 1952, I saw my chance.” Without using the power of the staff, he flashed an image in the air of himself fighting valiantly in the battlefield. “My military prowess, plus the occasional spell, brought me to the attention of Gamal Abdel Nasser, one of the leaders of the revolution. After the war, he was only too happy to help me find funding for my research. He didn’t know I was looking for a way to overthrow his precious Allah and bring back the gods I knew.

  “I devoured every ancient text I could find, and, with the help of my museum contacts, I learned of the staff. I located a seer, and she helped me piece together the location—Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes in California, a place I had never even heard of.

  “It had found its way there when Cecil B. DeMille, a famous movie director of the time was making a silent film version of The Ten Commandments in 1923. He had wanted to film in Egypt, but that time he had to be content with part of an Egyptian city built from scratch and a few authentic looking props.

  “He thought they were replicas intended for tourists, but somehow the staff, whose concealment spell had faded over the centuries, ended up in the hands of someone who didn’t realize its value, and it got shipped off to DeMille. It seemed he intended to keep it, but by accident, it was buried with the set in the dunes.”

  “And so you came to America?” The question I really wanted to ask was, “Are you insane?” He was wasting magic on a story that didn’t give me any reason to believe he was a pharaoh or that he could be trusted. If anything, the story of how he duped Nasser made him seem less trustworthy.

  Yet, pharaoh or not, he could command the staff. Somehow, he had acquired that power.

  “Eventually, I did come to America, but luck made the trip much easier. You see, DeMille came to Egypt to film the second version of The Ten Commandments in 1954. The man had a passion for authenticity, among other things. It was not hard for me, with my credentials from the museum and a letter of introduction from the Egyptian government, to gain access to the director. We became friends, and I came back to America with him.”

  “My…persuasive powers, shall we say, were sufficient to accumulate enough money to buy the dunes.”

  I was certain he meant that he had found a way to steal enough, but if I wanted him to think I might actually become his ally, I needed to keep such qualms to myself.

  “I needed an explanation for my interest in the dunes, of course, so I unearthed what remained of DeMille’s set and built a historical exhibit around it. That exhibit later became the center of Lost City Amusement Park. A little more persuasion, this time with property owners and government officials, and I bought Old Town Orcutt, making it into a tourist attraction.” He winced as he spoke the words.

  “That made me a good income, but it was also cover for my excavations, which eventually unearthed the staff itself.” He flashed images of himself drawing power from the staff for the first time. “You know what that means, of course. Only a pharaoh or an ancient priest could make the staff work. That alone should validate my claim—and give you all the reason you need to obey me.”

  “Since you have the power of the staff, what could you possibly need me for?”

  He leaned closer and spoke in a low, conspiratorial voice. “The staff has one flaw. Though it can create doorways into parallel universes, it cannot open pathways to other planes of existence.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “How is that possible? What I have learned recently is that, though both feats are hard, traveling between universes is much harder than traveling between planes.”

  “You forget how different the world was when we first walked the Earth. The gods did not need to be freed. They were free. They communed with men as they chose. They walked the Earth as they chose. And they reserved their own realms for themselves. To have entered any of them except at the invitation and by the direct power of a god would have been sacrilege.

  “The crafters of the staff had no way to know that one day the gods would be trapped behind walls too unyielding for them to break, that there would be an urgent need for their followers to rescue them. Had anyone raised such an argument, the person would have been accused of lunacy, perhaps even blasphemy.”

  “There is sense in that—but how did it come to pass that the crafters endowed the staff with the power to visit parallel universes. No one in my time knew of the existence of such places.”

  Hafez waved his hand dismissively. “Perhaps the gods knew of them—or perhaps the priests endowed the staff with such a power by accident, for it is by the mingling of the power of two gods that it may be accomplished. Whatever the case, I care not.

  “All I care about now is what you can do. I learned from my current seer that a god’s wife of Amun could use her power to invoke Amun in conjunction with the staff to shatter the barrier between this plane and theirs, liberating the old gods.”

  “But why take me from another world?”

  “At any given time, gods’ wives are in short supply these days. The Amy Monroe in this world died a few years ago. I could not find anyone else, but my seer was able to divine a world in which Amy Monroe lived.”

  “You owe your freedom to me, you know. The staff cannot reawaken a past life, for the priests who crafted it did not know of reincarnation. However, I learned that enough exposure over time to the right kind of magic might do it.

  “I spent years visiting your world, lurking near you, prodding you in the right direction.”

  “So you did manipulate events to bring Taliesin’s group and me together, just as Amy suspected. Why?”

  “Taliesin’s unique existence creates an especially highly charged atmosphere. That which is dormant or latent will be revived or brought to the surface. Usually, the process takes much longer and doesn’t reawaken previous lives, but I already had you primed. Just a few hours in Santa Brígida was all it took.

  “I kept you together with them just to make sure you would be strong enough to overcome Amy for good. Now that they’ve served their purpose, they must die. They’ll be an obstacle to our plans otherwise.”

  I knew they were an obstacle to my plans—but I hadn’t decided to kill them. Hearing Hafez discuss their dea
ths as if he were stomping on cockroaches made my blood run cold.

  “Our plans? Surely you do not expect a god’s wife of Amun to ally herself with a servant of Apep?”

  “Do you still not understand?” asked Hafez, glancing nervously at the staff. The primordial water still glimmered on it, but it looked drier than before. “All I want to do is restore things to the way they were. All the gods will be free to visit this plane again—and to rule it if they wish. Yes, Apep will be free—but so will Amun and all the others. Perhaps they will fight as they did of old. Perhaps not. They have common enemies now.

  “Do you not wish to restore things to the way they were? Apep is a part of that. All I ask is that he be allowed to play his part. What else transpires when all of them are free I do not presume to know. Nor can I control that outcome.”

  He made a good point. Still, I’d much rather summon back just Amun and receive his guidance. Hafez would never agree to that.

  He had leaned closer and closer to me, so close the conversation had begun to seem more like a seduction than an offer of an alliance. Moving with a swiftness he didn’t expect, I grabbed the staff. His grip tightened too fast for me to take it outright, but I felt its power through the hand that was touching it. It would respond to me.

  Before he could try to reimpose his will upon the staff, I canceled the power of Heh, dropping us back into ordinary time. The battle came to life, with all its roaring and blood.

  Switching Sides

  “I have a hand on the staff. Help me, and I can wrest it from Hafez!”

  I couldn’t tell whether they heard me or not. I had to focus on one thing—keeping at least one hand on that staff. I put the other one on it and pulled as hard as I could.

  Hafez was physically stronger than I—but not by as much as I had feared. Amy—may Amun bless her—had kept this body in shape.

  Hafez was still protected by the power of Wedjat, but neither he nor the makers of the staff had anticipated a situation in which more than one authorized wielder touched it at the same time and tried to use it for opposing purposes. I could feel the war within the wood as I kneed him in his maleness. His pained wince and the way he doubled over told me his defenses would not protect him from me as long as I clutched the staff.