by Vivian Shaw
“It’s not her,” he said. “The magic stela thing is—gone—but—she doesn’t have it.”
“What? How?” said Amitiel, tilting his head. White-gold curls bounced.
“I can’t see—oh. Oh. Oh.”
“Oh?” Amitiel came to sit beside him, put a hand on his knee. Both of them were in pale grey silk pajamas. “What is it?”
“I couldn’t see because there’s been a—an incursion. Huge. Two demons, right here, right here in this awful city, it’s—they have it, the echoes were interfering with my perception—oh, Amitiel, the monsters and the demons have the magic stone, everything’s going wrong—” He sounded miserably confused. Thinking really wasn’t what they were for.
“But the—the incursion,” said Amitiel, looking into his face with huge violet-blue eyes. “That’s weakened the wall more, surely? That’s—better than nothing, even if she isn’t using the stela as we intended?”
Zophiel blinked. “It has. Weakened the fragile places. That was huge—the demons left and came back, that’s set up echoes—”
“Then that’s all right, isn’t it? Surely? The woman still has the spell, she still needs to use the spell or—”
“Yes,” said Zophiel. “She still needs to use it, and more now, to keep the effects she’s achieved—even if she doesn’t have the special stela to use it on, she still has to use it, and she has hundreds of objects in her godless house to drain.”
“Then this is just a setback, isn’t it?” said Amitiel. “We’ll still get there, the barrier will be breached, our heavenly hosts will be able to pass through to destroy this world’s blasphemous mockery of Heaven, it just—will take a little longer.”
Zophiel sighed, and leaned over to rest his head on his compatriot’s shoulder. “You are wiser than I,” he said. “Your faith is greater, and faileth not.”
Amitiel put his arms around him, sheltered them both in the white curves of his wings. “Have courage,” he said, “we are so close, Zophiel, you’ve worked so hard, soon we can go home.”
“Home,” said Zophiel with another sigh. “To the real Heaven, our Heaven, everything white and gold and pure and holy, and the host singing on and on, for always, and—nothing sinful, nothing stained—everything righteous and true…”
“Soon,” said Amitiel with the surety of unshakable faith. “Soon the day of reckoning will be at hand, and the unrighteous will go down quick into Hell, for wickedness is in their dwellings, and among them.”
The Hermopolis Stela had been hastily set up in the spa’s sunroom, as far away as possible from the heavy imaging equipment, in case there was some kind of interference between the CT or linac and Tefnakhte’s magic. It stood on a low table, a narrow thin tongue-shaped piece of dark greenstone frosted pale with line after line of delicate incised hieroglyphs. The relief carving of Thoth with crocodiles under his feet and a serpent in each hand was exquisite, even after so many centuries, as precise and unmarred as it had been the day it came from the sculptor’s workshop.
Varney, Greta, Cranswell, and Sister Brigitte watched as the mummy Tefnakhte—stiffly, unavoidably stiffly, but with about as much grace as a mummy could hope to muster—genuflected before it. He was wearing jewelry over his wrappings, pieces Greta hadn’t seen before, and the pinpoints of his eyes behind the bandaging were brighter than usual.
In his dry, raspy voice, Tefnakhte began to chant, reciting his spell in Egyptian, the vowels and consonants strange and incomprehensible to Greta, even after so much exposure. She knew perfectly well she’d never be any good at languages, and mostly managed not to mind, but there was a crawling kind of unease at not knowing what was being said. It was some small comfort when Varney’s cold, smooth hand slipped into hers, squeezed it gently.
This isn’t going to work, Greta thought as the strange words went on and on, accompanied by what looked like ritual gestures. This isn’t going to work, we sent them to New York to steal this thing for no reason and I’m still no closer to finding out why any of this is happening, I don’t know what else to do—
And the air changed. Pressure, like a wave; the shimmering, crawling sense of electrical charge, the roots of Greta’s hair trying to stiffen, sending goosebumps down her arms and legs. The air tasted metallic, strange, and then hot: hot and dry, sun-warmed dust and stone.
She looked up at Varney, saw the same apprehension on his face, and squeezed his hand again—and returned her gaze to Tefnakhte and the stela in time for the strangest sight of her life. Between the mummy and the stone slab, something she couldn’t quite see was taking shape in the air; it looked like blurred lines of ink, shifting and swirling, as difficult to follow as the jagged patterns of a migraine aura.
Tefnakhte’s chanting took on a triumphant note, and he stepped aside as the thing taking form clarified itself a little. It was still hard to look at, like a magic-eye picture right before the illusion slid into place, and it seemed to be more than one thing at once, flickering in and out of perception: the form of a man, bare-chested, copper-skinned, in a white linen kilt, his dark hair in a mass of neat tight curls with golden bands around them, and the form of a bird, an ibis, black and white and bald-headed with a long curving beak, and the form of a man with that bald inquisitive head and long beak, black liquid eyes examining them with interest.
And behind it all, shimmering in and out of visibility, ink. Liquid ink, spread on the air as if the air were parchment, and could hold it.
That’s a god, Greta thought dimly. That is a god who was last worshipped long before the birth of Christ, standing in the middle of the sunroom, looking at us. Looking at me.
What do I look like, to those eyes?
Tefnakhte said something to the god, and this time she did catch one word: Djehuty.
“Huu,” said the god, a soft birdlike sound, and replied in the same language, and then looked from the mummy to the rest of them. He closed his ibis eyes for a moment, and reopened them, and Greta could have sworn for a moment she saw the reflection of the moon in those clear dark pools. “Where… is this place?” he asked in quite passable English, the pronunciation rapidly improving. “I have been asleep for… a long time, I think.”
“A very long time,” said Tefnakhte. “O noble Ibis. O god who longs for Khmunu, O dispatch-writer of the Ennead, the great one of Unu—”
“You speak with a strange accent,” said the god, “and you consort with the dead. Has so much changed?”
“More than you could imagine,” said Tefnakhte, sounding less in control than Greta had ever heard him. “I—we—have summoned you to beg for your advice, O Djehuty.”
“Huu,” he said again, and stepped down off the platform on which they had set the stela, turning to run a long finger down its face. “I remember these. It has been—” He closed his eyes again, and was to Greta’s eyes for a moment not a mostly man-shaped creature at all but moving, shifting columns of handwritten calculation in the air. “—a very long time indeed.”
“We need your help,” said Greta, still blinking against the instant of vertigo that transformation had induced. “This place is a—a hospital for mummies. I’m a physician, I treat them—”
“But you are human,” said the god, and tilted his ibis head. “Come forward.”
Greta let go of Varney’s hand and took an unsteady step toward the god, and in a single too-quick motion, he reached out his hand and set his palm against her chest, flat on her sternum, between her breasts. Behind her, she heard Varney’s sharp gasp.
Once before, she had looked into the eyes of another being of great power and felt his blazing, merciless attention, a searchlight reading everything written on the inside of her skull, knowing her, all there was to know. Djehuty’s hand over her heart felt a little like that, only kinder; she could not have pulled away if she’d wanted to, his palm was fast against her chest, warm, like sun-heated stone, like desert winds, and all that she was, all that she had been and wanted to be and could hope to become, was drawn out of he
r through that contact, examined, tabulated, and recorded in some unknowable library of the mind.
He nodded once and let her go, and she stumbled backward into Varney’s arms; he caught her, steadied her while she remembered how to breathe. The place where the god had touched her felt icy cold without that strange warmth.
“Greta Helsing,” said Djehuty. “Your heart does not rise up against you as a witness, nor does it make opposition against you in the presence of the keeper of the balance. I will go with you to visit your patients.”
“… oh,” said Greta, still a little dazed. “I’d appreciate that a great deal.”
“Can you heal other dead people?” said somebody behind them, and she turned in Varney’s steadying grip to see Grisaille, grey in the face, leaning against the door frame. “’Cause I’d really appreciate a jolt of the good old-fashioned godly magic right about now.”
“Huu,” said Djehuty. “I will see what can be done.”
The thing about money was that it made everything so simple. What might have posed an insurmountable obstacle to someone with limited funds simply found itself thrust aside by the oncoming ram of Leonora Irene Van Dorne’s personal bank account and the personality behind it. No, there were no more first-class tickets to Paris available at all out of JFK, the representative was sorry, it was simply not possible turned into Um, well, perhaps it might be possible to arrange a first-class ticket if Ms. Van Dorne was willing to—okay, would that be miles or credi—okay, what was the number?—um, well, your reservation is confirmed, please enjoy your flight, we’ll make sure the gate agent knows to expect you—
Money was also among the reasons it had taken her only about four hours from the time she’d made the first call to the time she was settling into her seat: Ms. Van Dorne had acquired a thoroughly efficient network of people whose purpose was to find things. Things, and sometimes people.
August Cranswell did, it seemed, actually work at the British Museum, but his field wasn’t even close to late-period Egyptology. What was interesting about that was the way in which someone had gone through recent search results and deliberately adjusted them to imply that he was a scholar of ancient Egypt; her people hadn’t been able to immediately identify the method whereby this had been done, but it went back only a few months. Their journey to New York to obtain the stela had clearly been planned ahead of time.
She wondered how they’d planned on actually pulling it off, prior to meeting her. Without her help, there wouldn’t have been an easy way to get in, snatch the thing, and get out before security caught them, and Ms. Van Dorne was absolutely sure that at least Cranswell was not an experienced thief. His friend with the long hair and the Goth contact lenses, though. That one felt different. That one had felt a little bit dangerous, in a way she rather found attractive.
And the other thing about Ms. Van Dorne’s network of associates was that it served as something of a who’s who of thieves. She had met only two or three of them, but she knew the names of every high-end professional art thief currently operating in the fields she was interested in, and “Grisaille” was not one of them. The prearranged return tickets to France had been stupid of them, too: she’d found out quite quickly where they’d been planning to go.
Where are you from? she thought as the runway fell away beneath her window, as the hand of inertia pressed her back against her seat. That accent hadn’t been French, despite the French name. Where are you from and what do you want with that piece?
She knew what she’d have done with the stela, if she hadn’t meant to use it for her peculiar and secret beauty routine: she’d have had a copy made and store that in her private vault, and put the real thing on display; if anyone ever came looking for it, she’d assure them she didn’t know it was hot, that she’d bought it in good faith, and that she knew it was sufficiently valuable to need to be stored securely, so she’d had a copy made to put on display—she could, of course, give them the original, which was in her vault, this way please, gentlemen, I’m mortified, of course, it must go back at once…
Leonora Van Dorne smiled, and reclined her seat, and ordered champagne from the flight attendant when she came round to be obsequious; and it wasn’t until she reached out to take the glass that she realized the veins and tendons in the back of her hand were much too visible. Much too visible, and the skin was—the skin was slightly wrinkled—the skin was spotted brown—
“Is something wrong, ma’am?”
“Oh—no—not at all,” said Ms. Van Dorne through a fixed and artificial smile, and took the glass with a hand that only slightly shook, thinking, My ring, the lapis scarab, it’s the only thing, I’ll have to use the scarab, it’s so small it won’t be powerful but it’s something—I can go to the restroom, I can do it quickly, I know the spell by heart—
Her hand, her crepey, aging hand, crept up to her chest, and touched warm gold and polished stone: the Middle Kingdom pectoral, which she’d forgotten she was wearing; and with a kind of angry miserable certainty, she knew what she had to do.
Greta wished she could have given her patients more warning, prepared them for the sudden appearance of an actual living god at their bedsides; but there simply wasn’t time.
She took him—and the others, who trailed along as if unable not to follow—to see Antjau first. The mummy’s shock upon seeing Djehuty made her heart hurt—it set him off into a wracking fit of coughing, which sent scraps of linen raftering to the bed linens, to the floor—but just as he had done to Greta, the god set his narrow brown hand on Antjau’s chest, and his coughing stopped at once.
“This is a disease I know well,” said Djehuty. “It meant death.”
“It’s treatable today,” Greta said, feeling absurd. “We’ve got his lungs in another room undergoing therapy, he’s responding quite well—I can show you if you like—but he’s had one of these attacks recently on top of the TB and it knocked him back a bit.”
“Huu,” said the god, and blinked his large black eyes. They had the nictitating membrane common to birds, which Greta found both disturbing and logical. “Let me see.”
Greta stepped back from the bed; that strange charged feeling had begun again, some kind of potential energy building up. Djehuty was bending over Antjau, hands hovering over rather than touching the bandages of his chest. As far as she could tell, the mummy was too awestruck to do anything other than lie perfectly still and let himself be—what, examined? Assessed somehow?
She wasn’t precisely surprised when Djehuty did that dizzying phase-change again, turning to ink, rapid calculations on the air. It was incredibly hard to look at, because he was still there, still a physical presence, visible at the same time as the brushstrokes of his analysis, like two layers of holograms seen at once. It went on for longer this time before he settled back into one consistent form and took his hands away.
“This is strange,” he said. “Very strange. I must see the other patients who have experienced the unknown sickness.”
That wasn’t reassuring in the least. Greta nodded to hide her reaction. “Maanakhtef had a particularly bad episode; he was walking when it struck and he—well, he collapsed, and broke.” Not just breaking a bone; parts of him had gone to powder.
“Take me there,” said Djehuty, straightening up. “I must see them all, to be sure of my calculations.”
“Of course,” she said, and was glad when Varney came silently up and slipped his arm around her shoulders. She was so tired, and so completely at a loss, and for a moment the simple kindness of the touch brought a prickle of tears to her eyes; she swallowed hard, blinked several times, and the threat receded. “This way.”
She led the little group from room to room, visiting each patient who’d suffered an episode. At each bedside Djehuty repeated his peculiar analysis, without saying anything other than a few words of comfort in Egyptian, which clearly did for her mummies what a good shot of scotch did to Greta. If nothing else, she thought, at least he can give them that, and was grateful t
o the god despite her exhaustion and concern.
When he had finished the strange round, Djehuty beckoned to Greta. “I would speak with you alone.”
“Anything you can say to me you can say to my team. There’s a conference room big enough for all of us,” she said, appalled at her own daring, and for a moment the black bald bird-head turned to look at her, eyes narrowed—and then he clacked his beak once, managing to convey exasperation and patience at the same time.
“Very well,” the god said, and gestured for her to lead the way.
The ordinariness of the conference room with its long table and the flying-saucer speakerphone sitting on one end, the quiet framed prints of tomb paintings on the walls, looked absurd with Djehuty in it. He sat down, steepled his fingers, and obviously decided to make an effort to put them at their ease: all the other forms flickered out of being, leaving him simply man-shaped.
“Good eyeliner,” murmured Grisaille, sitting down beside Greta across the table from the god. “I mean, excessive, but good.”
“Shhh,” Greta said, glad of Varney settling on her other side. Tefnakhte, Cranswell, and Brigitte joined them, and the silence waiting for Djehuty’s diagnosis felt almost as electric as the performances he’d shown them hitherto.
“It is indeed magic,” he began. “What has occurred to these people is without a doubt the result of a spell being worked; the result of the spell is to consume the energy, the spiritual force, of an object sacred to the individual, and in doing so draws that force from the individual themselves.”
“Like the teletherapy,” said Greta. “What happens to Antjau’s lungs in another room happens to him.”
“In a sense,” said Djehuty. “What you are doing for Antjau is to heal part of him and in doing so provide healing to the whole entity. What has been done to your patients is—destructive. A small fraction of their selves is being destroyed, somewhere else in the world. Deliberately.”
