Queen's Gambit

by Karen Chance

  I had wondered why Hassani’s court was smack in the middle of Old Cairo. Vampire enclaves tended to hug the outskirts of cities or be off in the hinterland somewhere. Wards were good, and the ones upstairs were next level. But they couldn’t hide everything as last night had proven. It was easier to make sure that any oddities were well beyond the range of prying eyes.

  But now I understood.

  Holy shit.

  “The ancient Egyptians knew how to build,” Hassani said, appearing pleased by my reaction as he helped me back to my feet. And kept a hand on my arm to steady me, which I actually appreciated since I probably would have fallen again otherwise. I still might, I thought dizzily, staring up and then around at a long, octagonal chamber that could have fit three or four football fields. And their stands. And parts of their parking lots.

  The damned thing was immense.

  The ceiling soared out of sight, claimed by darkness despite the fact that each of the dozens of huge stone pillars supporting it had lights branching off of them. The massive torches were at least ten feet tall, but they looked tiny in comparison to everything else, and were woefully inadequate. And, damn it, I wanted to see this.

  I fumbled in my jacket and came up with a small, golden bird that looked a lot like the spider I’d thrown at Hassani, which was probably why he eyed it apprehensively.

  But this one was for me.

  I tapped it against my temple, and the magical tat dissolved into my skin, leaving not so much as a raised outline under my fingertips. Had I had a mirror, I would have seen a faint blue outline of a hawk next to my right eye. And I would have seen every tiny feather of it, because my vision had just gone high-def.

  But the help came at a price, namely a hit to my reputation. Vampires didn’t need magical tats, which were mostly designed to improve areas they already had covered: sharper senses, greater speed and boosted strength. As a result, they tended to be viewed, at least by mainstream vamp society, as another example of human inferiority—needing magic just to compete with a bargain basement vamp.

  I expected, at the very least, to get a sneer or two.

  But I was surprised.

  “Ah.” Hassani nodded gravely. “It is good that you know of such things.”

  “What?” I touched the bird self-consciously. “Why?”

  “I will explain later. But for now,” he stepped forward, and threw out his arms in a gesture that would have been overly dramatic anywhere else, but here just seemed to fit. “Welcome to the House of Ra-Horakhty, the greatest temple in a city of temples, and the only one to survive intact from ancient times!”

  The words echoed impressively around the huge hall, then slowly faded into silence. Hassani waited another moment, then looked back at me expectantly. This was one of those times that I could have really used Louis-Cesare, who always seemed to have some flowery French compliment to fit the occasion.

  I, on the other hand, was speechless. It was like something out of an Indiana Jones movie, only with a better budget. Way better.

  I just stood there, staring around like an idiot. Unlike Lantern Boy, who put down his burden and began furiously to clap. Hassani shot him a dark look and he stopped.

  We eventually moved forward, the consul apparently realizing that I needed some time to take all this in.

  He was right.

  The sheer size of the place was breathtaking, but what it contained was even more so. There must have been a charm active in here, after all, or else an army of painters had been doing touch ups, because the faint images on the antechamber walls were nowhere to be found. Instead, dazzling murals many stories high blazed with color and hints of gold on both sides of the elongated body of the great, octagonal room, showing a panoply of ancient Egyptian gods.

  Closest was Taweret, the somewhat comical looking hippo-croc goddess, with her strange head and very pregnant belly, who protected women in childbirth. The murals were done in bas-relief, with the paintings protruding from the background slightly, and embossed with different types of semiprecious stones. In Taweret’s case, her crocodile-like snout gleamed with what appeared to be malachite, the dark veins in the rock convincingly replicating scales.

  Next in line was ibis-headed Thoth, the scribe of the gods, with a scroll clutched tightly in one jeweled hand. More jewels gleamed from his golden armbands and from the matching belt he wore, and glittered on the collar of the small baboon perched on his shoulder. The hair of his companion was made out of what appeared to be thousands of long, thin flakes of carnelian.

  Anubis was next, looking frighteningly like the creatures we’d fought last night, with the sleek black head gleaming in the firelight. The eyes looked like two huge yellow diamonds, although I assumed that they were actually some sort of quartz as each was as big as my head. They reflected the flames of the torches, giving them an ominous, life-like quality.

  Of course, that was true of all the gods, a seemingly endless procession on either side of the room, leading up to a long set of rock cut stairs at the far end. A throne sat at the top, with its gilt wood looking as fresh as if it had just been completed. And although it was empty, behind it was the biggest mural of them all, towering what had to be six stories high.

  “Ra-Horakhty,” I guessed, as we started the long approach.

  “Indeed.” Hassani’s voice was quiet now, as mine had been. It was that sort of place. I could easily imagine it awing the hell out of some ancient worshippers.

  It was doing a pretty good job on me.

  “Ra was the original sun god,” Hassani explained, “usually identified as the noon day sun, when it is at its most powerful. He is often depicted, as he is here, with a falcon’s head. Horus was another popular sky god, and the two became associated with each other over time. Thus Ra-Horakhty, ‘Ra who is Horus of the Two Horizons.’”

  I nodded, looking up at the figure of a young man’s sun bronzed, muscular body, with gold glinting on the neck and wrists and sandal clad feet, as well as on the elaborate, jeweled overskirt he wore. I didn’t know how some ancient sculptor had managed to make the skin look smooth and touchable, and the rock cut underskirt appear as filmy and diaphanous as fine silk, but he had. Ra was the very image of an ancient king, even with the huge falcon’s head growing out of his shoulders.

  Or maybe because of it.

  In most of the portrayals I’d seen, the combo had looked like a guy wearing a bad Halloween mask. But not here. The artist had carefully shown the transition from skin to feathers, with the color starting well down his chest and shading darker as it flowed up the fine muscles of his torso, to the huge pectoral he wore.

  The broad piece of gold was studded with what looked like genuine lapis, turquoise and red carnelian. Likewise, the plumage that started around the edges of the necklace and flowed up onto the head was carved from some kind of blue stone—agate perhaps? Whatever it was, the fine striations perfectly mimicked the look of feathers.

  The head itself was a masterpiece, fierce and intelligent in its expression, with a vicious looking beak and gleaming dark eyes. And even more than the rest of the murals, this one was done in deep bas-relief. To the point that it looked as if Ra was stepping out of the wall, about to descend on us puny visitors.

  I belatedly noticed that we had been included on the murals, too, or people like us. Small, brown humans, hunched over in deep obeisance, littered the area around the gods’ feet, not even coming up to their knees. No jewels had been wasted on them, nor any differentiation in the features. They could have been clones of one another, with the only variance being dresses for the women instead of the loin cloths the men wore.

  Way to let us know our place, I thought. Although, in comparison to Ra, the gods weren’t in much better shape. Not only were they smaller than the big, main mural, they were also bearing gifts, their hands clasped around boxes and baskets overflowing with grain, incense, gold or jewels, which they were about to present to their lord and master. Those near the front of the line, where
the upper edges of the octagon pushed them closer to the stairs, were already beginning their obeisance, sinking to one knee with their offerings raised high above their heads.

  The message was clear: gods they might be, but one was far above the rest, as much so as they were above the pathetic humans.

  “There, you see?” Hassani said, pointing, and jolting me out of the almost reverie I’d fallen into. “There is the sun disk, above Ra’s head. It was the symbol of godhood to the ancients, and became the royal emblem of pharaonic Egypt as well. The cobra that surrounds the disk was even added to the royal crown.”

  I nodded, but I was finding it hard to focus on where he was pointing, because the disk in question was blinding. Instead of the usual, plain, orange-red sphere that decorated tourist statues and tomb walls alike, this was a huge, polished bronze mirror, which reflected the firelight like the sun’s rays, spearing them out to all points of the hall. It was dazzling.

  But after a moment and some squinting, I finally located a black cobra wrapped around and then protruding outward from the sun. It looked like its scales might be obsidian, but I couldn’t look at it long enough to tell. It was also probably as big as me, but from this angle, it looked tiny.

  “Is there a story behind it?” I asked, because I assumed so.

  Hassani chuckled. “There are always stories in Egypt, and many for the Uraeus. I have my own theory as to its origins, but many believe it to be the symbol of Wadjet, a flame breathing snake god who destroyed Ra’s enemies.”

  I blinked. “That’s . . . pretty hardcore.”

  “Indeed. What I find most interesting, however, is that the pairing is similar across so many cultures.”

  “The pairing?”

  “Sun gods and serpents. Take the Aztec snake god, Quetzalcoatl, for instance. He vanquished an early sun god, Tezcatlipoca, and took his place during the second age of mankind—”

  “The what?”

  Hassani flipped a hand. “Part of the Aztec creation myth. Likewise, the sun god of the current age, Huitzilopochtli, was conceived on Mount Coatepec, ‘Serpent Hill’, and held a scepter in the form of a snake. And in Toltec mythology, the sky is symbolized by the sun god looking out of the jaws of a snake.”

  “That’s . . . very interesting,” I lied. I wanted to run across the hall, to examine a voluptuous version of the cat goddess Bastet, who was wearing a net-like dress that concealed basically nothing, but appeared to be woven out of genuine diamonds. They weren’t faceted like modern stones, but they caught the light in unmistakable ways, casting dancing prisms all around her, which I thought low-key hilarious.

  It could have been a coincidence, but I liked to think that some ancient sculptor had enjoyed the idea of her chasing the lights cast by her own dress.

  “It is, isn’t it?” Hassani smiled at me. “For their part, the Maya worshipped Kukulkan, a divine snake that served as a messenger between the king and the gods. He is still remembered among the modern Maya as a pet of the sun god.”

  “Fascinating.”

  “And we find the same sort of thing in other mythological traditions. The Babylonian god Marduk, a child of their sun deity, vanquished the great snake Tiamat and used her flesh to make the world. He also had as a companion and protector a "furious serpent" known as Mushussu. Indra, the sun god of the Hindu pantheon, likewise fought and defeated the great serpent Ahi.”

  “You don’t say,” I said, wondering how I ended up in this conversation, and how I was supposed to get out. There was so much to see, but Hassani was fixated on snakes for some reason.

  “Then there was Apollo—god of the sun to the ancient Greeks—who defeated the Python at Delphi, which afterward became one of his symbols. That is why the staff of Asclepius, his son, has a snake entwined around it. Likewise, Helios, the god whom the Greeks identified with the sun disk itself, had a chariot pulled by serpents instead of horses. And Sulis-Minerva, the syncretism of a Celtic sun goddess and the Roman goddess of wisdom, had a snake for an emblem.”

  I decided that it was just possible that Hassani’s devious plan was to bore me to death.

  “But it was here where the most references are to be found,” he continued obliviously. “There were many snake gods in Egypt, either helping or opposing Ra. However, you see a difference over the dynasties. In the earliest records, snake gods are almost always seen as helpful to Ra, and many are depicted wearing his solar disk above their heads, linking them to him and his children.”

  “His children?” I asked, desperate to change the subject.

  Hassani didn’t look at me that time, but something changed in the air. As if the rest of this had been a prelude, and we were finally getting down to business. Whatever the hell his business was.

  “Do you know how the pharaohs justified their rule?” he asked, his voice deliberately light.

  “Through armies, like everybody else?”

  His lips quirked. “That, too. But it helped to have some other basis as well, or else the next person with an army could come in and have just as much legitimacy as you. In Europe, that basis was normally a particular bloodline: the British royal house still claims the throne by right of descent from William the Conqueror, for instance. In China, it was the Mandate of Heaven, the idea that the ruler was divinely appointed and, as long as he ruled well, the people were required to obey. Whereas in Egypt . . .”

  Hassani, usually so loquacious, suddenly trailed off.

  “In Egypt?” I prompted.

  He had been staring up at the huge statue of Ra, which did tend to draw the eye. But now he shook himself slightly, and glanced at me. And his gaze was strange, almost . . . searching.

  “They combined the two ideas,” he said, after a moment. “In pharaonic Egypt, it was said that the queen was visited by the god Ra, who impersonated her husband. And that her child was therefore a demigod, divinely appointed to rule over the population.”

  “Divine right of kings taken to the next level,” I said dryly. “Not just appointed by a god, but sired by one.”

  “Exactly so. Although in Egypt’s case, it wasn’t mere propaganda. The creature who ruled these lands before me was such a man.”

  I blinked a little at that, wondering if I was being had. But it had been said so matter-of-factly that I doubted it. “You mean, a demigod?”

  “You sound skeptical.”

  “A little.” I knew a supposed demigod—although I had my misgivings. Poo emoji earrings do not inspire a lot of confidence. But even assuming that she was the real deal, the bastard kids of ancient gods were not exactly thick on the ground these days.

  But Hassani was nodding. “Understandable, but true, I assure you. An Egyptian of the lower classes, he was cast out of his family and would almost certainly have died had he not been taken by the god Ra to be experimented upon. He was infused with some godly DNA in a process that he once described to me as a rebirth, and in a way, he was right.”

  “In what way?”

  “Why, the same way that our Children are reborn, after the Change. He became the world’s first vampire.”

  I went another yard before what he’d said sunk in. I turned around to see Hassani standing there, in the middle of the puddle of lantern light, waiting for me to catch up. He was gonna need to wait a little longer.

  “I—what?”

  He smiled at me, and this time, there was a glint in those too-innocent eyes. “Oh. Would you like to see him?”

  Chapter Ten

  Dory, Cairo

  The entrance to the tomb was on the dais, through a small door situated directly behind the throne. The reception chamber was even more impressive from this angle, with the procession of glittering gods flickering in the firelight, giving them the illusion of movement. All those jeweled eyes gleamed knowingly at me, as if to say: “We were here before you, and we will be here when you are dust.”

  Yeah, but I can leave, I thought back, and damned if that didn’t sound like a good idea right about now.

>   And, for a moment, I thought we’d have to. Despite vampire strength, it took Hassani putting a shoulder to the wooden door to move it, which was painted to blend in with the stone and seemed almost as heavy. And when it did finally burst inward, it let out a breath of stale air like, well, like a tomb.

  After a brief hesitation, caused by what was left of my good sense, I followed the consul inside. And immediately regretted it. I stopped abruptly, staring around at a cave full of bodies, all of which seemed to be staring back.

  Okay . . . not expecting that.

  There were dozens of them, maybe more because I couldn’t see well in here. The torchlight from outside was little more than a thin veneer on the darkness, and Lantern Boy wasn’t helping. I glanced over my shoulder and saw him hanging back, just outside the door, looking unhappy.

  Vamps used glamouries so much that I’d almost stopped paying attention to their appearance whenever I met a new one. It was easier—and safer—to go by feel: how much power were they putting out? How much of an atmospheric disturbance did they cause? If it felt like a gravity well had opened up beneath my feet when I approached them, or like a couple extra atmospheres had suddenly descended onto my shoulders, then yeah. They were old.

  But this kid didn’t have a presence at all. He wouldn’t even have registered as a vamp except for the fangs he kept forgetting to hide. And, yes, there were vamps so good at concealing their power signature that they could fool anyone, including me. But I didn’t think he was one of them.

  He kept cutting his own lip on the aforementioned fangs, which were growing because he was nervous and sensed danger, and then being retracted because he was with his master and was supposed to show some decorum. Out in; out in. The result was a polka dotted lip that didn’t scream “ancient vamp” to me.

  Hassani shot him a longsuffering glance, but didn’t comment. Except to me. “Prisoners,” he said, before I could ask.