Bastet’s gaze narrowed on the Feathered Serpent. “And you’re sure they have no other allies in the city?”
“Everyone else is on the island.” He grinned. “Hopefully, providing a tasty snack for something hideous.”
Bastet rubbed her hands together. Her nails sparked off one another. “Simple, then. We divide their forces. We send in something to engage the warriors, Prometheus and Niten. Without them, Nicholas and Perenelle are little more than immortal humans who will age with every use of power. I know their auras are waning.”
“What can we send? I have no resources left.”
“Ah, but I have.” She reached into a pocket and produced a leather bag. It rattled as she shook it. “You remember these? Drakon’s teeth?”
“The Spartoi,” he said.
Bastet nodded. “Indestructible earth warriors.”
“Perfect. Just perfect.” Quetzalcoatl checked his watch again, the luminous dial painting his face green. “In five … four … three … two … one.”
The entire city went dark.
Across the city, burglar alarms went off as their battery backups took over. In the all-enveloping fog, they sounded like mice squeaking.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Who are you?” Dr. John Dee wheezed. He was aware that he was lying on the metal floor of a vimana and that its vibration trembled through his entire body. With his faded eyesight, his surroundings were a blur, and the figure sitting at the controls before him was little more than a shadow.
“I told you, I am called Marethyu.” A half circle of metal gleamed in the light before Dee’s face. “I am sometimes called the hook-handed man. Though it’s really more of a sickle than a hook.”
The Magician found he was still wrapped in the sweatshirt Josh had put over him. He pulled it closer around his shrinking frame and attempted—but failed—to straighten up. “I feel I should know you,” he whispered.
“You should. We’ve met often enough.”
“We haven’t,” Dee disagreed. “I would never have forgotten the hook.”
“I guess you wouldn’t,” Marethyu said enigmatically.
“Young man,” Dee began, at which Marethyu burst into laughter. “What is so funny?”
“It’s been a long time since anyone called me young.”
“You look young enough to me. You sound young, and you’re strong enough to carry me. I am old; almost five hundred years. How long have you lived upon the earth?” the immortal demanded.
But the hook-handed man remained silent as the vimana hummed through clear blue skies. Then, just as Dee was beginning to suspect he would get no answer, the man spoke, and his voice was unbearably sad. “Magician: I have lived upon this earth for ten thousand years. And I have spent perhaps ten times that walking the Shadowrealms. Even I do not know my true age anymore.”
“Then you are Elder?… Great Elder?… Archon? You’re not an Earthlord. Are you an Ancient, perhaps?”
“No. None of those,” Marethyu said. “I am human. A little more than a normal human, a lot less, too. But human born and bred.”
The vimana’s engine whined down and the craft dipped.
“Who is your master?”
“I have no master. I serve myself.”
“Then who made you immortal?” Dee asked, growing only more confused.
“Why, I suppose you did, in a manner of speaking, Dr. Dee,” Marethyu laughed.
“I don’t understand.”
“You will. Patience, Doctor, patience. All will be revealed in time.”
“I do not have much time left. Osiris saw to that.”
The vimana dipped lower, its engine slowing to a dull buzz.
“Where are we going?” Dee asked.
“I’m taking you to meet someone. He’s been waiting for you for a long time.”
“You knew I was coming?”
“Doctor, I have always known you were coming here. I have followed your progress from the moment of your birth.”
Dee was tired; a leaden exhaustion threatened to overwhelm him, but he knew that if he closed his eyes, he would probably never open them again. He found the strength to ask, “Why?”
“Because you had a role to play. In my long life, I have discovered that there are no coincidences. There is a pattern. The trick is to see the pattern, but that ability is a gift—a curse, perhaps—that is given to few.”
“And you can see this pattern?”
“It is my curse.”
The vimana suddenly settled on the ground. The top of the craft slid back, and Dee shivered as a wash of chill, damp air flowed over him. Even with his faded hearing, he could make out the roar of the sea, nearby breakers foaming and crashing. He saw Marethyu’s arms reach down for him and feebly brushed them away.
“Wait a minute …,” he protested.
“As you so rightly pointed out: we do not have much time.”
Dee reached up and caught Marethyu’s arm. “I cannot feel your aura.”
“I don’t have one.”
“Everyone has an aura,” Dee murmured, confusion once again coming over him.
“Everyone living,” the man answered.
“You are dead?”
“I am Death.”
“But you have powers?”
“Yes, vast powers.”
“Could you restore my youth?”
There was a silence, and with his short sight, Dee could just about discern Marethyu watching him. “I could,” he said eventually. “But I will not.”
Dee couldn’t understand why this man would rescue him, yet leave him to die. “Why not?”
“Call it consequences, or maybe justice. You are not a nice man, Dr. Dee, and you should pay something for your terrible crimes. What I will do however, is restore a little of your strength and allow you your dignity.” Marethyu put his hand on top of the doctor’s head and pushed.
A shock, like pins and needles, rippled through Dee. He felt heat bloom in the pit of his stomach. It flowed up, across his chest and down into his arms, while simultaneously surging through his thighs, along his calves and into his feet. He immediately felt stronger.
“And my sight,” he pleaded. “Give me back my sight and hearing.”
“Greedy, Doctor, greedy. Always and ever your failing …”
“You’ve brought me to this wondrous place, the most amazing city in the history of Earth. And yet I cannot see or hear it. If you have followed my life, you know that I have always been driven by a thirst for knowledge, by an insatiable curiosity. Please. Let me see this place, so that I may remember it for whatever time is left to me.”
Marethyu leaned forward and rested his index and little fingers against Dee’s eyes, pressing lightly. Dee felt a single moment of pain—an intense stab through his skull—and then Death lifted his hand and Dee opened his eyes. The shadows were gone and everything was in sharp focus. He could see. He looked up at Marethyu. The bottom half of the figure’s face was wrapped in a thick scarf, above which a pair of bright blue eyes regarded the Magician with something like curiosity or amusement. “Satisfied, Doctor?”
Dee frowned. “I have met you,” he said slowly. “You are almost familiar to me.”
“We have met many times. You simply did not know that it was me. I was the face in the mirror, the voice in the shadows, the shape in the night. I was the author of those unsigned notes you received, and later, the anonymous emails. I was the voice on your answering machine, the badly spelled texts on your phone.”
Dee stared at the figure in horror. “I thought it was my Elder masters speaking to me.”
“Sometimes it was. Not always.”
“But you are not associated with them?”
“I have spent millennia thwarting them.”
“You manipulated me,” Dee accused him.
“Oh, come now, don’t look so shocked. You’ve spent lifetimes manipulating other people.”
Dee came slowly to his feet. He was still elderly. He guessed his bo
dy was probably that of a spry eighty-year-old, but his sight and hearing were those of a youth. He climbed out of the vimana and looked around.
They were standing on a broad platform close to the top of a scarred crystal tower. The ground was strewn with the remains of weapons and pieces of armor, and the stones were awash with black and green liquids, but there were no bodies.
Marethyu strode toward a doorway in the tower, his black hooded cloak flapping behind him. The frame and stones around the door were pocked and chipped, and the ground was slippery with more of the sticky green and black fluids. There were speckles of what looked like human blood spattered on the ground and splashed onto the torn white crystal walls.
“What happened here?” Dee asked.
“There was a fight. A massacre, really. Recently.” Marethyu’s voice was a hoarse whisper. “Don’t slip,” he called back over his shoulder. “It’s a long way down.”
Dee bent and picked up what he thought might be a broken spear. The head was missing—it looked like it had been sliced clean off. Using the length of wood as a walking stick, he followed Death through the door and into a small circular room. The chamber was empty. “Where are you?” the Magician asked, his voice echoing as he looked around. He noticed that there was more blood on the floor, and when he ran his toe across it, the liquid smudged. It was fresh.
“Up here.” The answer came from a concealed stairwell.
“Where?”
“Here!” Dee followed the sound of Marethyu’s voice and found the stairway. He balanced the broken spear on the first step and looked up into the gloom. “Where are we going?” he called.
“Up.”
The Magician heaved himself onto the step. “Where? Why?”
Marethyu’s face appeared above Dee, and even though his mouth was concealed, Dee knew that he was smiling. “Why, Doctor, we’ve come to see Abraham the Mage. You do know the name, of course?”
The Magician’s mouth opened and closed in astonishment.
“I see you do.” Death’s blue eyes crinkled. “He wants his book back.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The room was enormous.
Sophie Newman sat on a bed that was bigger than her room in Aunt Agnes’s house in San Francisco. In fact, she thought it might be bigger than the entire top floor of the house. She had no doubt that this room had been specially prepared for her. Everything—from the huge sunken bathtub to the deep walk-in wardrobes to the flagstones on the floor—was either silver metal, silver cloth or burnished with silver. Even the bed frame was cast from a solid hunk of metal. Three of the walls were polished to a gleaming sheen; the fourth was a sliding wall of glass opening onto an enormous courtyard. An ornate silver frame sat on top of a silver bedside table. It held one of her favorite photographs—a snapshot of the entire Newman family standing in the ruins of Machu Picchu high in the Peruvian mountains. Everyone was laughing, because Josh had stepped in a pile of llama dung and it had squirted into his shoe and sock.
Without even having to see it, she knew Josh’s room was going to be decorated and outfitted in pure gold.
But what convinced her that this room had been prepared in advance for her was the ceiling. It was painted a deep, rich blue. Leaning back on the bed, she looked up. Silver stars formed the constellation of Orion, and a huge luminous half-moon filled the corner directly opposite her bed.
Her mother had painted an identical ceiling in her bedroom at Aunt Agnes’s house.
Sophie walked the length of the silver room and pulled open the double doors to the enormous wardrobe. She gasped in surprise: neatly lined up on two rails topped by shelves were all the clothes she’d left in San Francisco: jeans, sweatshirts, dresses, underwear. But when she ran her fingers across a pair of jeans, she discovered that they were stiff and realized they were unworn. All the clothes were brand-new, some still with the labels attached. Stepping into the deep wardrobe, she walked between the rails, trailing her fingers across the clothes. She recognized everything: every piece of clothing she had bought or that her mother or aunt had given her as presents over the past year was here, even the green, white and gold Oakland A’s sweatshirt Josh had given her. Shoes, boots and sneakers were lined up in racks on the floor. She suddenly laughed out loud: she never would have guessed that UPS delivered to Danu Talis.
“Hello?” There was a knock on the door and she turned as Isis—or was it Sara, her mother?—slid open the door and peered into the room. “There you are. I was just hoping you were finding everything okay.”
“Yes … yes, everything’s … fabulous,” Sophie said, though her voice was less than enthusiastic. “I was just looking at the clothes.”
“Your father thought it might be an easier transition if you had all your familiar stuff around you.”
“Thank you. It’s just a little overwhelming. Well,” she added, “maybe more than a little.”
“Oh, Sophie.” Isis stepped into the room. She’d taken off the white ceramic armor and was wearing a simple linen shirt and pants. Her tiny feet were bare, and Sophie noticed that her toenails were painted black to match her fingernails. She’d never known her mother to paint her toenails before. “I know—truly I know—how hard this must be for you.”
Sophie’s laugh was shaky. She was suddenly angry. Did they expect her to just accept all this without question? “Unless you’ve recently discovered that your mother is a ten-thousand-year-old Elder from Danu Talis named after an Egyptian goddess, I don’t think you have any idea how I’m feeling.”
“Actually, I wasn’t named after the Egyptian goddess; I was the Egyptian goddess.” The woman smiled, and in that moment, with the corners of her mouth and eyes crinkling, she looked like Sara Newman. “But I am your mother, Sophie, and I want you to know that all of this was done to protect you and your brother.”
“Why?” Sophie demanded.
Isis crossed the room, her bare feet leaving damp footprints on the silver tiles, and slid open the glass wall that led outdoors. A wash of exotic perfumes flooded the room. Water tinkled, and in the distance there was the vague murmur of Osiris’s voice and Virginia Dare’s brittle laughter. “You have the Witch of Endor’s knowledge within you?” Isis asked.
Sophie nodded slowly. Even as her mother was speaking, flickering alien images danced just at the periphery of her vision, and Sophie knew that these were not her own memories.
… Isis and Osiris in white armor at the head of an army of anpu, on the backs of huge lizards, riding out of a blazing city. None of the bearlike corpses littering the road were human, and none of them were armed.
… Isis and Osiris in the costumes of ancient Egypt—though this landscape was a lush, verdant jungle rather than desert—overseeing long lines of human slaves dragging slabs of stone toward a half-finished pyramid.
… Isis and Osiris in white smocks and masks standing in a gleaming laboratory watching creatures resembling huge hairless rats crawl from bubbling vats of viscous pink liquid.
Isis smiled, lips pressed tightly closed. “And I suppose I better warn you that Zephaniah the Witch was never our friend, so no doubt you’ll learn some unpleasant truths about us. But remember, what you are experiencing—remembering—those are the Witch’s interpretations. They’re not necessarily the truth. There are two sides to every story.” The woman’s eyes closed and the dry hint of cinnamon seeped into the room. “Sometimes all one needs is a little perspective.”
Sophie shuddered as new memories tumbled and spun through her mind.
… Isis and Osiris in white armor at the head of an army of anpu, riding on the back of huge lizards, protecting a village overflowing with small bearlike humans against a vast army of slavering lizardlike monsters.
… Isis and Osiris in the costumes of ancient Egypt overseeing long lines of laughing and singing humans as they tore down a pyramid and cast the stones into the sea.
… Isis and Osiris in white smocks and masks standing in a gleaming laboratory watching creatures
resembling huge hairless rats crawl from bubbling vats of viscous pink liquid. The couple gently helped each creature out of the vat, wrapped it in silver foil and carried it over to a bed. Above the bed, narrow rectangular windows showed a water world where the ratlike creatures darted and swam. In the distance was the suggestion of a vast white city.
Isis opened her blue eyes. “Take the time and check through your memories—Zephaniah’s memories—and see if what I am telling you is true. In this place, in this time, the twins of legend have few real friends.”
Faces, some human, others bestial and a few caught in transition between the two, flickered, and Sophie knew she was seeing her enemies and that Isis was telling the truth.
“Danu Talis is ruled by the Elders and the descendants of the Great Elders. There are powerful factions in the court who would strive to kill you or control you.” Isis stepped up and pressed her hands to Sophie’s face.
The girl tried to pull away, but the woman’s grip was too strong.
“Everything we have done has been to protect you both.” The woman quickly leaned in to kiss Sophie’s forehead, but the girl pulled back at the last moment and hugged her mother instead. The prickle of dry cinnamon intensified, catching at the back of the girl’s throat. “So get dressed, then come and eat. Your father and I will answer all your questions, I promise you.”
“All our questions?” Sophie asked.
“Everything. The time for secrets is over.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
“This tunnel runs under the prison yard,” the ghost of Juan Manuel de Ayala said. “It connects with another tunnel, which leads to the water tower. There are steps that will lead you upward.”
A tiny spinning ball of white energy created by Niccolò Machiavelli illuminated the low narrow tunnel, tainting the air with the musty odor of serpent. The stained walls were coated with a thick, glutinous slime, and water dripped incessantly from the ceiling. “Man, this is so ruining my boots.” Billy’s voice echoed off the walls.
Machiavelli turned to glare wide-eyed at him. Water sizzled off the energy ball above his head.
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