“Take it easy, take it slow,” I said. “I don’t need to tell you this. Stop and rest.”
“I can’t. We don’t have time. I’m going in circles trying to find clues as to where the king’s burial chamber is, and how to get in, and they all refer to each other on purpose, like a riddle...”
“Drink some water.”
“And half the words are missing, either buried or just worn away, and what if what I need is just under the sand? Do we dig? What if something collapses on us? What if I write down something wrong? What if—”
“Johnny! Drink your water. I brought the salt, have some salt.”
Instead of putting it in her water bottle, she poured some out into her dirty palm and darted her tongue into the little pile, like a snake testing the air.
“Weirdo,” I said. “Everything you do is weird. But everything feels kind of…”
“I feel it too. The salt might help.”
“I thought you got it for like, dehydration or whatever.”
“That too.” The bags under her eyes had gone from simply dark to actually black, like she’d been struck hard on the bridge of the nose and blackened both eyes. What were the spells taking out of her?
“What if a lot of things,” I said. “Just keep doing what you’re doing. We’ll get everything we need in time.”
“Yeah.” Her head was bobbing with exhaustion, not really nodding, the scarf slipping over her ears. “Yeah. We will. Yeah. Gotta.”
“Fix your scarf and let’s go.”
We copied from broken tablets and scribbled brick, ran black crayons over papers to take rubbings from the walls. They didn’t, to me, look as if they could be assembled to a coherent whole, but Johnny assured me that wasn’t what they were for. “They do form a picture,” she said. “Taken together, not separately. They did that on purpose—the sorceress and her assistants.”
“What was her name?”
“Nuphel-Don, I think would be the closest rendition. But she also went by Ben’nest Soth Nothnal, a transliteration of the Old Language, and also Brac-gha Nothnal. Those weren’t different titles and they didn’t refer to different people, as far as I can tell; she just kept using different names. I wish I knew why.”
“Would it help us?”
“Don’t think so. Knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Anyway, she loved the king—no, not like that—and didn’t want anyone to find his tomb. But she acknowledges—here, at the bottom of this stele—that one day there might be need, and so she has given us, the future, the tools to do it. I trust her.”
“Why?”
“Because she fought Them too.” She sighed, weighing a palm-sized piece of red clay in her hand, the writing still sharp and crisp, something we’d had to tug free from beneath a round stone written, she’d said, with terrifying warnings. “This says the entrance to the tomb’s labyrinth is underneath the statue of Nanna, but it’s locked for eternity. Another one—that one there, with the blue paint—says the statue was destroyed in the realm of Alalngar. So that doesn’t help us, unless we can find the old base—they often built a new statue on the same base as the old one, because this area is so poor in good stone. And that tablet says the statue of Nanna was located next to the shrine of En-Lil, so maybe it would be easier to find the shrine, which wasn’t destroyed.”
“Were those shrines and statues to the... to Them?”
“Some of them. Some of them are Elder Gods. Similar to but different from Them. Mostly dead now.”
“Are those Their real names?”
“No. I promise.” She ran her forearm over her face, scattering sweat-salt like snowflakes, and trudged off towards a low, broken white brick wall. “Somewhere here. Let’s just dig till we hit something.”
“My least favourite sentence today.”
But it took only an hour of careful digging, interspersed with excursions into the volcanic heat-sink of the dig site to steal timber to shore up our excavation, to find the shrine and then the door into the labyrinth. It was narrow, arched as all the doors were here, so that I wondered whether I might go back home and find rectangular doors strange. It was also heavily carved with writing on every available surface, so that the stone looked textured instead of written. Johnny stood panting as she scanned the door top to bottom, writing on her notebook without looking; I glanced down at it, but she wasn’t writing in English.
The broken bricks at the top and bottom of the door looked so much like jagged teeth that once I saw it I couldn’t stop seeing it, and I hesitated before following Johnny across the threshold. There was a faint suggestion of faces as we walked into the darkness, the daylight following us in for inches at most.
The floor was covered in sand, not very surprisingly, since it had been incidentally buried in sand rather than deliberately buried in dirt. Turned on, Johnny’s flashlight produced a white light that washed out all the writing on the walls, gleamed off the clean pale sand. I played it up and down, keeping it off her face, feeling my heart speed up.
There was writing everywhere, even the ceiling, except on the statues lining the walls, bearded men wearing elaborate headpieces, something severely wrong with their lower bodies. The earth above it seemed to press down on us; I swung the flashlight up and saw a dozen places, dark places, where the light never seemed to touch. I kept my arm still, training the beam on the darkness. Not a hole. Not a crack. Not a shadow. Just a place where the light couldn’t go.
Johnny caught my gaze and looked up. There was a long silence in which I thought I might just go screaming back out into the sunlight, but it was too late. The darkness shifted slightly as we walked, keeping pace with us. I took a deep breath. The darkness, the bullets coming through. All those years we had run and run and run and now we were somewhere we could not run from danger. Just like before. Helpless in the dark. A dark that shifted, following us.
“Ignore it,” Johnny whispered.
“What is it?”
“Don’t look at it.” Her voice was trembling; I felt the presence of the darkness as a physical thing following us, about to clamp around the back of my neck. Whether a thing of Nuphel-Don or Them, I didn’t know. I only knew, somehow, absolutely, that it was meant to push people out of the labyrinth, to give them the fear that emptied bowels and stopped hearts, and it would only get worse as we got deeper. Just like Akhmetov’s library.
“Do we have a map of this place?” I asked, keeping my voice down.
“No. It’s a labyrinth. And I do not like those statues at all.”
“You sure? I dunno, we could steal a couple, stick them in the Rover, put them on your lawn at home—”
“Scare the neighbours, yep, I’m down for that.”
“What does this writing say, all this writing? Why did they write on the ceiling and everything? They had a lot to say.”
“It’s a story,” she said softly. “About how King Suen-Ngir accepted the worship of these new gods; how a pilgrim came from the west and told them of it, gave them tapestries and statuettes. Then how the gods gave the king power and wealth in return for a few people a year, how the demands got more and more, and then the shrines were destroyed by the prince when he came to the throne. Finally, the gods destroyed the city, and Nuphel-Don and her apprentices flung them into a place of imprisonment and slammed the gate shut.”
“If the Gods destroyed the city, who wrote...? Oh.”
“Yeah. I’m sure there won’t be anything left of them by now,” she said, not entirely reassuringly. I thought of the brave Nuphel-Don, devoted apprentices at her side, in the elaborate draped clothing I’d seen in the frescoes outside, feverishly inscribing, lit by candles or torches, as the air ran out and the remnants of the city trembled outside, guardians forever of the king’s tomb, and forgotten or even cursed by everyone except Johnny, who had dug up her story.
After what seemed like forever in the long entrance hallway—and hang on, how big was this place, anyway? The site itself wasn’t that big—it finally branched, a Y-shape
rather than a T, curving rather than straight. Both branches held a blackness so solid it was like asphalt rather than air, and something deep inside me, seeing the light of the entrance recede, whimpered—a dark room, the sound of bullets resounding, echoing, a darkness punctuated only by lighters, matches, strange men.
It was so quiet I could hear Johnny’s watch ticking. Once we turned the corner, even the grey light from the entrance would be gone. We would just have our flashlight.
Johnny turned left, and I followed without protest. One way was as good as another down here. The air, amazingly cool after the furnace outside, smelled of dust or sand and nothing else. Johnny and I had been so thoroughly sandblasted that even our sweat smelled of the desert. If They tracked by smell I didn’t even think They’d be able to find us.
A slithering bump behind us; I whipped around with the flashlight, seeing nothing.
“Nicky.” Her voice steady again, though very high. “I need the light.”
“Sorry.”
I kept it on the walls and floor as we walked, taking turns at what seemed like random, often backtracking, our footprints already smudged by other tracks. From the corner of my eye I saw dark shapes moving and thought: Just do what she said. Ignore them. Do what she said. She’s got you this far. Plus maybe you can smack it with the shovel. Whatever it is.
I was very aware that we had no way out down here, that it would be the work of a moment if one of Them wanted to block the doorway. That we’d never leave.
Clicking, behind us, distinct now. I turned again, unable to help myself, shining the light quickly around, up, down—still nothing. But the air in the clay-lined tunnel felt different, had mass, weight, had pressure, the way you know someone’s home when you open the door whether you can see them or not.
“John. There’s something in here with us...”
“I know. Keep walking. Don’t run.” She sped up, though, so I had to lengthen my strides to keep up. “Not all of Their servants could be seen. That’s mentioned in some of the stories out of China and Egypt and the Aztecs. Atlantis, too. Numerous accounts later saying that what destroyed many homes and temples couldn’t be seen.”
“I hope it’s not one of those things. I hope it’s Boba Fett.”
“Me too.”
“I mean, not to say that getting caught by Boba Fett would suck more than getting caught by… whatever that is.”
“Yeah. And I wouldn’t have to pay out the reward money either.”
“That’s true.”
A left, a right, a left. Back again, the invisible presence receding, as if mocking us. A left, a left, a right. A room with a shining black table in the centre of an old, wavy-edged brown stain, tapestries in the background still bright and clean, gold threads winking like neon signs in the single pass of the flashlight. A room with stone chairs, carved with sea creatures, sharks and octopi, lobsters, things I didn’t know. A room with battle scenes on the wall, incised hard into clay, not carved into stone—horses, chariots, arrows, spears, an enemy obscured by the shadows as we rushed past it.
Something glittering in another room, barely glimpsed before we turned—vases, masks, horns, cups, all made of gold, clean and smooth and menacing, decorated with bright blue and green stones. The sand on the floor ran out and we were walking on bricks, the flashlight glittering off something in them, maybe flecks of mica, like Johnny’s granite countertops back home. Whatever was behind us, the legion behind us, grew; I felt the air grow crowded with their presence, refused to turn around and look. We doubled back, crisscrossed, circled.
“Are we lost?” I whispered at last. The air felt heavy, charged. Even if I had not known something was coming, the signs were becoming physical, impossible to ignore.
“Yep. And we can’t waste any more time on this. We’re going to have to ask for help,” Johnny whispered.
“Won’t that attract… attention?”
“I know, but there’s nothing else I can do. Help me get the sand off part of the floor.”
I held the light in one hand and helped her sweep with my foot, then her scarf, till we had a clean spot on the floor. Dark stains were still visible in the cracks between the flagstones. What had happened here? “Who are we... asking?”
“Marutukku,” she said. “He helped keep the gates shut. Nuphel-Don may even have called to him for help directly.”
“Is that what we’re doing?”
“No, I can’t summon him the way she would have been able to. And it would draw too much attention to where we are in the maze. I just need wayfinding help. We can’t do this alone.” She was drawing on the floor with a marker, bracing herself over it with one hand as if she might keel over. Her cardboard cylinder came out too; she rotated it, muttered, wrote. Brown dust fell onto the circle. How many spells was she running right now? I opened my mouth and shut it again. The sacrifice. Everything will be taken from you. They’d said so.
“Okay, here goes,” she said, and leaned close to the stone, whispering into the centre of the circle.
Nothing happened; the space between my shoulderblades prickled as the things behind us watched the spell fail. “Oh shit,” I said.
“No,” she said, almost a sob, catching in her throat. She leaned forwards, pressing the palm of her hand to the design. “Marutukku...” She gasped, pulled her hand back just a fraction, and then pressed it to the stone again, hard. As she whispered again, a plea in his language, I assumed, the circle on the floor glowed. Something hummed above us, smug, discordant.
“Come on, Johnny,” I said. “We’re on our own.”
“Wait...”
Finally she simply collapsed onto her side, the marker circle fading as if we’d poured rubbing alcohol on it. I stared at the empty space on the floor, then down at her hand, which was turning blue on the palm, a powdery sky blue as if she’d run out of air. Then lines began to coalesce on it, dark, sweeping in from wrist and fingers, into a new magic circle very different from the one on the back of her hand. The centre was a painful, bruised purple.
After several agonizing seconds, she got up, cradling her hand to her chest, steadying herself on the wall with her other hand. “Come on,” she said hoarsely.
“What just happened?”
“We’ll have guidance for a little while,” she said, stumbling along the hallway again, away from the noises behind us. “So we’re going to have to hurry.”
“How long?”
“As long as I can keep it up.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“THERE.” HER VOICE was barely audible. The wall we’d finally reached curved inwards like an eggshell, carved with something so complicated that my eyes couldn’t even follow the story. Bearded men with long curly hair, and more curls in the air, like smoke, or fog, or mustard gas, and everywhere people running, speaking, each carved figure in the clay matched with its little block of writing the size of my hand.
“Nuphel-Don said it would be locked,” Johnny said.
“This is it? For sure?”
Her small, dusty hands moved gently over the surface of the clay, tracing a particular inscription. She must have known it would be there, so tangled it was with all the other writing. I felt the old awe, the old envy, return. You are too young to know so much; you have always been too young; and yet here we are. The wise child, the holder of knowledge.
“She and her assistants left help. In case anyone made it this far—and, you know, knew what they were doing.”
“Do we?”
“I hope so. But you have to make sure, right? That only people who are… qualified. Can get in. And see it. Not just anyone.”
Her voice was muffled; I looked away from the carvings to see that she had slumped forward into the recess, forehead-first, breath ragged and slow. My relief turned into alarm. “Johnny? Are you all right?”
“Just tired,” she slurred, trying to push herself away from the wall; I hooked a finger into a beltloop and pulled, freeing her face. “Have to find the locks. Hav
e to get the locks open. They would have made them hard to lock. Hard to open, too.”
I trained the flashlight on the wall, seeing how pale her face was, how it too glittered like the floor, how she seemed actually translucent now—seeing veins in places I hadn’t seen them before, standing out sharply on the backs of her hands and on her silky temples, lavender and green.
A dark place, a long time ago, the smell of blood. I clenched my back teeth and tried to keep the flashlight steady. We were almost done. Home stretch. Just... get the spell, get back out, wait for the gate to begin to show itself, shut it. Lock it.
The sense of company in the hallway faded abruptly, as if blown away by a sharp wind; I turned my head, seeing nothing in the dark, but in the silence, far away, there was the distinct sound of screaming, as high as a whistle. Sweat broke out on my forehead. Where had they gone? What was the screaming about?
Something screeched so loudly that I dropped the flashlight, scrambled to pick it up while Johnny muttered against the wall. The walls or floor shook from invisible impacts hard enough to make us sway in place, followed by a string of words in the Old Tongue, far away but easily recognizable, freezing my blood in my veins. “The shit was that? They found us?”
“Sounds like it.”
I spun sideways and got my back to the tunnel wall, one hand on the flashlight, one hand on the cool ceramic, feeling the sharp edges of the writing under my fingertips. The entire place was shaking now, irregularly, as if someone were pounding on it with their fist. But the Sumerians had built the place strongly, and nothing came down on us. Clicks and clunks sounded behind me as Johnny worked on the locks, cursing quietly, either unbothered or not actually aware of the continuing commotion. Golden flecks swirled around her head in the half-dusk of the flashlight’s reflection. The carvings on the friezes seemed to crawl, their edges crackling with blue light, like static electricity on a dry day.
“One more,” she said. “Gonna need some blood though.”
Beneath the Rising Page 29
