by Tanya Huff
“Good. Now, can we get back to work?”
Deliberately not touching the body, Dr. Shane stroked on a little more of the solvent. “This is the damnedest funereal setup I’ve ever seen,” she muttered. “No Osiran symbols, no tutelary goddesses, no Ded, no Thet, no hieroglyphs at all except on this strip.” Her brows drew down. “Shouldn’t we . . . shouldn’t we be studying the strip before we remove it?”
“It’ll be easier to study once it’s off.”
“Yes, but . . .” But what? She couldn’t seem to hang onto the thought.
Suddenly Dr. Rax smiled. “It’s lifting. Stand back.”
He could feel the end of the linen lifting, each separate hieroglyph a weight of stone rising off his chest. The spell stretched and tore as it was pulled more and more out of alignment. Then, with a silent shriek that cut through bone and blood and sinew, it ripped apart.
He welcomed the pain. It was his first physical sensation in three millennia and a joyous agony. Nothing came without price and for his freedom, no price was too high. Had his limbs been capable of movement, he would have writhed, but movement would come slowly, over time, and so he could only endure the waves of red that raced the length of his body pushing all else before them, pounding all else beneath them. He only wished that he could scream.
Finally, the last wave began to ebb, leaving behind it a stinging of nettles in his flesh and the red glow of two eyes in the darkness.
My lord? He should have known that if he survived his god would have survived as well.
The eyes grew brighter until by their light his ka could see the birdlike head of his god.
The others are dead, it said.
This confirmed what the taste of the laborer’s ka had told him.
There are gods, but not the ones we knew. Its beak wasn’t built for smiling, but it cocked its head to one side and he remembered that meant it was pleased. I was wise when I created you; through you I survived. The new gods have been strong in the past, but they are not now. Few souls are sworn. Build me a temple, gather me acolytes until I am strong enough to make others like you. We can do what we wish with this world.
Then he was alone again in the darkness.
Nothing held him now except millennia-old fabric already beginning to rot under the pressure of accumulated time, but he would remain for a little longer where he was. His ka had one more short journey to make and then he would gather his strength before he confronted his . . . savior.
Build a temple. Gather acolytes. We can do what we wish with this world. Indeed.
He had not really planned beyond gaining his freedom, but it seemed he would have much to do.
Rachel Shane stepped out of the elevator on the ground floor, the rubber soles of her shoes making very little sound against the tile floor. She was worried about Elias. He’d always been an intense man, determined to make the Egyptology Department at the ROM one of the best in the world despite budgets and bureaucrats, but in all the years she’d known him—and they were a good many years, she admitted silently to herself—she’d never seen him this obsessed.
She paused just inside the security door to pull her trench coat closed. Although the looming bulk of the planetarium limited the lines of sight from the staff entrance, water glistened on the pavement between the two buildings. If it wasn’t raining at this moment, it had been in the recent past.
Recent past . . . She thought back to the workroom and the almost dreamlike way they’d unwrapped the linen strip from around the mummy. No documentation. No photographs. Not even a notation of the hieroglyphs. It was very stra . . .
The sudden pain snapped her head forward and exploded red lights behind her eyes. She sagged against the security door, the smooth glass pulling against the damp skin of her cheek as she fought to stay on her feet. Is it a stroke? And with that thought came a terrifying vision of complete and utter helplessness, so much worse than death. Oh, God, I’m too young. She couldn’t catch her breath, couldn’t remember how her lungs worked, couldn’t remember anything but the pain.
As if from a great distance, she saw the guard run for the other side of the door and manage to open it without throwing her to the ground. He slipped an arm around her waist and half guided, half carried her over to a chair.
“Dr. Shane? Dr. Shane, are you all right?”
She grabbed desperately onto the sound of her name. The pain began to recede, leaving her feeling as though she’d been scoured from within by a wire brush. Nerve endings throbbed and for just an instant a great golden sun blotted out the security area, the guard, everything.
“Dr. Shane?”
Then it was gone and the pain was gone as if it had never been. She rubbed at her temples, trying to remember how it had felt, and couldn’t.
“Should I call an ambulance, Dr. Shane?”
An ambulance? That penetrated. “No, thank you, Andrew. I’m fine. Really. Just a little faint.”
He frowned. “You sure?”
“Positive. ” She took a deep breath and stood. The world remained as it always had been. The tension went out of her shoulders.
“Well, if you’re sure. . . .” He still looked a little dubious. “I guess you must’ve been working too hard, what with the cops keeping you away from your stuff until this afternoon.” He went back behind his desk, still watching her with a wary eye. “So, they gonna take the mummy away?”
“Mummy?”
“Yeah. They say Reid Ellis bumped into a mummy up there in the dark and it scared him to death.”
“Oh, that mummy . . .” It was amazing how rumors got started. She smiled and shook her head. With the police in and out of the workroom there was no real point in the department keeping quiet to save face. They’d just have to convince the scientific community that they’d meant to buy an empty sarcophagus. “There never was a mummy, Andrew. Just an empty coffin. Which I suppose is frightening enough in the middle of the night.”
Andrew looked a little disappointed. “No mummy?”
“No.”
He sighed. “Well, that certainly makes the story less interesting.”
“Sorry:” Dr. Shane paused with one hand on the outside door and fixed the security guard with a look she kept just on the edge of intimidating. “I’d appreciate you spreading the real story around.”
He sighed again. “Sure thing, Dr. Shane. There never was a mummy. . . .”
His fingers had torn through the bottom sheet and his heartbeat echoed off the walls of the bedroom. He’d woken again to the memory of a brilliant white-gold sun centered in an azure sky.
“I don’t want to die!”
But then, why the sun?
One night he could force himself to ignore; wash it away in the hunt, in blood. Two nights made it real.
He fought himself free of the sheet and sat up on the edge of the bed, hands turned up on his thighs. His palms were moist. He stared at them for a moment, then frantically scrubbed them dry, trying to remember if in over four hundred and fifty years he’d ever sweated.
The stink of his fear filled the room. He had to get away from it.
Naked, he padded out into the condo and over to the plate glass window that looked down on Toronto. Pressing palms and forehead against the cool glass, he forced himself to take long, slow breaths until he calmed. He traced the flow of traffic down Jarvis Street; marked the blaze of glory a few streets over that was Yonge; flicked his gaze over the bands of gold in nearby office towers marking where conscientious employees worked late; knew that as dusk deepened to full dark, the other, still human, children of the night would emerge. This was his city.
Then he found himself wondering how it would look with dawn reflected rose and yellow in the glass towers, the interlacing ribbons of asphalt pearly gray instead of black, the fall colors of the trees like gems scattered across the city under the arcing dome of a brilliant blue sky . . . and wondering how long he would last, how much he would see, before the golden circle or the sun ignited his flesh
and he died for the second and very final time.
“Jesu, Lord of Hosts, protect me.”
He jerked himself back off the glass and sketched a sign of the cross with trembling fingers.
“I don’t want to die.” But he couldn’t get that image of the sun out of his head. He reached for the phone.
“Nelson.”
“Vicki, I . . .” He what? He was having hallucinations? He was losing his mind?
“Henry? Are you all right?”
I need to talk to you. But he suddenly couldn’t get the words out.
Apparently, she heard them anyway. “I’m on my way over.” Her tone left no room for argument. “You’re at home?”
“Yes.”
“Then stay put. I’ll grab a taxi. I’ll be right there. Whatever it is, we can work it out.”
Her certainty leeched some of the tension out of his white-knuckled grip on the phone and his mouth twisted up into a parody of a smile. “No hurry,” he told her, attempting to regain some control, “we’ve got until dawn.”
Although guilt was a part of the reason that Dr. Rax remained at his desk plugging away at the despised paperwork long after Dr. Shane had gone home—he had let the pile achieve mammoth proportions—it was more a vague sense of something left unfinished that kept him in his office, almost anxiously waiting for the other shoe to drop. He scrawled his initials at the bottom of a budget report, slammed the folder closed, and tossed it into his out basket. Then he sighed and began to doodle aimlessly on his desk calendar. If only it wasn’t so damned hard to concentrate. . . .
Suddenly, he frowned, realizing his doodle hadn’t been that aimless. Under the day and date—Monday, October 19th—he’d sketched a griffinlike animal with the body of an antelope and the head of a bird crowned with three uraei and three sets of wings. He’d sketched the creature who had been watching his dreams.
“And now that I think of it,” he pushed his chair back so that he could reach the bookcase behind the desk, “you look awfully familiar. Yes . . . here we are . . .” His drawing matched the illustration almost line for line. “Amazing what the subconscious remembers.” Ignoring a cold feeling of dread, he skimmed the text. “Akhekh, a predynastic god of upper Egypt absorbed into the conqueror’s religion to become a form of the evil god Set . . .” The book slid out of hands gone limp and crashed to the floor. The eyes of Akhekh, eyes printed in black, had, for an instant, burned red.
Heart in his throat, Dr. Rax bent forward and gingerly picked up the book. It had closed as it fell and he had no desire to open it again.
Elias. Come. It is time.
“Time for what?” he called before he realized the voice he answered was in his head.
He carefully put the book on the desk then rubbed at his temples with trembling fingers. “Right. First I’m seeing things. Now I’m hearing things. I think it’s time I went home and had a large Scotch and a long sleep.”
The weakness in his legs surprised him when he stood. He held onto the back of his chair until he was sure he could walk without his knees buckling, then made his way slowly across the room. At the door, he grabbed his jacket and flicked off the light, trying not to think of two eyes glowing red in the darkness behind him as he made his way across the outer office.
“This is ridiculous.” He squared his shoulders and took a deep breath as he started down the hallway to the elevators. “I’m a scientist, not some superstitious old fool frightened of the dark. I’ve just been working too hard.” The dim quiet of the hall laid balm on his jangled nerves and by the time he reached the door to the workroom his heartbeat and breathing had almost returned to normal.
Elias. Come.
He turned and faced the door, unable to stop himself. From a distance, he felt his hand go into his pocket for his keys, saw them turn in the lock, heard the quiet movement of air as the door opened, smelled the cedar that had been filling the room with its scent since they’d opened the coffin, tasted fear. His legs carried him forward.
The plastic over the coffin had been thrown aside.
The coffin itself was empty save for a pile of linen wrappings already beginning to decay.
The physical compulsion left him and he sagged against the ancient wood. A man stooped with age, eyes deep sunk over ax blade cheekbones, flesh clinging to bone and skin stretched tight, walked out of the shadows. Somehow, he had known that it would come to this and that knowledge kept the terror just barely at bay. From the moment he had first seen the seal, he had felt this moment approaching.
“Des . . . troy those.” The voice creaked like two pieces of old wood rubbing together.
Dr. Rax looked down at the linen wrappings and then up at the man who had so recently worn them that the marks still showed imprinted on his skin. “Do what?”
“There must be . . . no evi . . . dence.”
“Evidence? Of what?”
“Of me.”
“But you’re evidence of you.”
“Des . . . troy them.”
“No.” Dr. Rax shook his head. “You may be . . .” And then it hit him, finally broke through the cocoon of fate or destiny or whatever had been insulating him from what was actually going on. This man, this creature, had been entombed in the Eighteenth Dynasty, over three thousand years ago. Only his white-knuckled grip on the coffin kept him standing. “How . . . ?”
Something that might have been a smile twisted the ancient mouth. “Magic.”
“There’s no such . . .” Except obviously there was, so he let the protest die.
The smile flattened into an expression much more unpleasant. “Des . . . troy them.”
As he had been while opening the workroom door, Dr. Rax found himself shunted off into an enclosed section of his mind while his body obeyed another’s will. Only this time, he was conscious of it. The fog was gone.
He watched himself gather up the linen wrappings and carry them over to the sink.
“That . . . too.”
Fighting to stop himself, he lifted the strip of hieroglyphs from the worktable and added it to the rest. When he went into the darkroom, he knew the creature was using his mind—fire would have been an Eighteenth Dynasty solution, chemicals were not. A bottle of concentrated ascorbic acid dissolved the rotting fabric sufficiently to wash the entire mess down the drain and although his hands trembled, he couldn’t prevent them from pouring it. His heart ached at the destruction of the artifacts and the anger gave him strength.
Slowly he jerked his body around and met eyes so dark there was no telling where the pupil ended and the iris began. “That wasn’t necessary,” he managed to gasp.
The eyes narrowed, then widened. “A good thing for me . . . your god has not recognized . . . its power.”
“What the hell . . .” He had to stop to breathe. We sound like a couple of badly tuned transistor radios. “. . . are you talking about. My god?”
“Science.” The ancient voice grew stronger. “Still only an aspect. Not strong enough . . . to save your ass.”
Dr. Rax frowned, his thoughts tumbling over themselves in an attempt to pull order out of the impossible—that was not a phrase a dynastic Egyptian would use. “You speak English. But English didn’t exist when you were . . .”
“Alive?”
“If you like.” The son of a bitch is enjoying this. He’s allowing me to talk to him.
“I learn from the ka I take.”
“From the ka . . . ?”
“So many questions, Dr. Rax.”
“Yes . . .” A hundred, a thousand questions, each fighting to be first. Perhaps the loss of the artifacts could be made up. He began to shake with barely suppressed excitement. Perhaps the holes in history could be filled. “There’s so much you can tell me.”
“Yes.” Just for an instant, something very like regret passed over the ancient face. “I’d enjoy . . . shooting shit with you. But, unfortun . . . ately, I need what you can tell . . . me.”
Dr. Rax started as an ancient hand w
rapped around his wrist, the grip almost painfully tight. I learn from the ka I take. And the ka was the soul and a young man had died this morning and English hadn’t existed . . . “No!” He began to slide into the black depths of ebony eyes. “But I freed you!” There’s still so much I don’t know! And that gave him the strength to fight.
The grip tightened.
His free arm flailed, slamming his elbow into the cupboards, knocking the empty bottle off the counter, accomplishing nothing.
But he fought all the way down.
He lost the fight question by question.
How and why and where and what? And finally, who?
“I don’t think you’re crazy.”
“But how can you know?”
Vicki shrugged. “Because I know crazy and I know you.”
Henry threw himself down beside her on the couch and caught up both her hands in his. “Then why do I keep dreaming of the sun?”
“I don’t know, Henry.” He desperately wanted reassurance, but she didn’t know how much she had to give; this was going to take more than a “poor sweet baby” and a kiss on the nose. He looked, not frightened exactly, but vulnerable and his expression sat in a knot at the base of her throat, making it hard to swallow, hard to breathe. The only comfort she had to offer was the knowledge that he wouldn’t face whatever this turned out to be, alone. “But I do know this, we aren’t going down without a fight.”
“We?”
“You asked me for help, remember?”
He nodded.
“So.” She traced a pattern on the back of his hand with her thumb. “You said this has happened to others of your kind . . . ?”
“There’ve been stories.”
“Stories?”
“We hunt alone, Vicki. Except for during the time of changing we almost never associate with other vampires. But you hear stories. . . .”
“Vampiric gossip?”
He shrugged, a little self-consciously. “If you like.”
“And these stories say that . . . ?”
