by L. A. Banks
“No offense taken,” Isda said, sounding calm. “BK gets like that with his visions, so does Paschar … like big ole huntin’ dogs.”
Celeste took off running, unable to wait. The guards at the door let her pass but held up Isda and Azrael for the tickets. Something was pulling her past thirty-foot columns deeper and deeper into the temple. She spied a room with a metal ladder that went up two stories to another high, open-air room, but kept running. Then she made a hard bank right and ran right into a blue-robed guard.
Seeming amused by the collision, he smiled until he saw Azrael and Isda come around the corner. He held up his hands, clearly not speaking English, but appearing as though he wanted to show the men behind her that there was no attempt to inappropriately touch her. Even though he had an AK-47 draped over his chest, for the guard it appeared to be a matter of good-humored honor.
Celeste dropped to her knees and began touching the floor, ignoring the men as she frantically felt around for a break in the stone seal there. Her fingers caressed the large, carved ankh embedded in a stone disk and surrounded by sunrays and symbols she couldn’t understand with her mind, but could comprehend with her being. This was a source of Light and life.
Almost on the verge of tears when the man began to protest, she slapped the floor with her palm and looked up at him, frustrated by the language barrier.
“There’s steps!”
The guard shook his head and struggled to find words. “Not for tourists. Dangerous. Is close now.”
Celeste scrambled to her feet, and before Azrael could stop her, she thrust her hand in his pocket and pulled out everything in it and shoved it toward the guard. The guard clutched at the falling dollars laughing and looked at Azrael, clearly expecting him to either slap her or protest. But when Azrael shrugged, the man extended his hand.
“Nubian brother!”
“Yeah, yeah, Nubian brother,” Isda muttered, picking up $100 bills and handing them off to the ecstatic guard.
The guard looked around, then went up into his sleeve to produce a long brass key shaped like an ankh. He placed his automatic weapon down carefully on the floor and put his finger to his lips. Celeste stooped down beside him and nodded, understanding that, bribe or not, he could get in trouble or possibly lose his job.
Flipping back a small, oval-shaped stone, the guard revealed a lock, inserted the key, and gave it a hard turn. Then with a grunt he lifted up what looked like the reverse of attic stairs.
Pleased with himself, he smiled a tobacco-colored grin, waved before the steps like a game-show host, then added, looking in Azrael’s direction, “Dangerous.”
“Cool. Cool,” Isda said, talking with his hands.
Unable to wait, Celeste headed down into the darkness on the rickety, sloping steps that were barely Azrael’s shoulder width wide. When she got to the bottom, she made the sign of the cross over her chest, sat on the cool stone, and slid beneath the lip of a huge granite block. Thankfully, the guard had flipped on the modern emergency lights that had been added for the convenience of archaeological work.
Regardless, her prayer had been simple: Please, God, let there be no snakes, scorpions, or anything else really creepy or deadly. Nothing was between her and the frightening but blind faith as she entered the chamber feetfirst and then drew a breath. Twelve chambers were carved into the stone, connected by a long stone hallway that featured divinely inspired markings of priestly processions bearing offerings of fruit and incense, with celestial patterns covering every conceivable inch of the ceilings, floors, and walls.
After a moment she turned and looked at Isda, who’d been followed in by Azrael, as both men strained to get their bulk through the narrow opening.
“Like coming through the birth canal,” Isda said, brushing dust off his arms. “Everyt’ing was symbolic.”
Azrael brushed off his jeans and glanced around. “But judging from the size of that opening, Imhotep’s sarcophagus couldn’t have been hidden down here in the early days or even now.”
Celeste touched the walls and closed her eyes. “Yes, it was, not inside but outside.” Her breathing again became shallow as her words stuttered out in short bursts of information. “What you’re looking for was inside this whole complex, just not inside this specific building … but the walls here somehow … I don’t know how to describe it … the stones are telling me that we should be looking outside, but within the complex itself. The walls say there were a lot of different cultures here.”
“What she’s saying makes sense,” Azrael replied, touching the walls with the tips of his fingers. “This place is a nexus of cultures … Nubians, Christians, Romans, Muslims, all built chapels here. There was Hebrew and Coptic influence to the complex as well. There’s hallowed ground all around—therefore a perfect hiding place against evil. Father Krespy was here. He was a Christian priest—and if he felt like he was on a divine mission, he would come somewhere he felt he could pray in the way he needed to according to his faith, but a place that would also be certain to block out evil. When a person of faith, especially a cleric, prays a prayer of Light—a message sent to On-High—it creates a barrier to darkness. So with all these representative faiths having prayed here, it should have been like a spiritual Fort Knox.”
“That’s what I’m feeling,” Celeste said, taking in a long, slow, deep breath. “The man was here, prayed down here, and then decided where to hide everything next.”
“Then why didn’t the man just take it to da Vatican, or have Daoud take it to Mecca?”
“These men obviously didn’t trust existing power structures and hierarchies or organized bureaucracy. They went directly to ground … didn’t trust any human in power not to be swayed by corruption. There was something here in the dirt, in the sand.” Azrael ran his hand along the length of the wall. “This place is humble, un-adorned by comparison to the Vatican and other places … therefore would be completely overlooked by humans doing the bidding of the other side. Brilliant.”
Celeste opened her eyes and Isda came over to her.
“There’s a necropolis on this site that runs along the eastern ridge of the western hill and over the northern plain,” Isda said carefully. “The ridge, which is like a little dirt hill, has flat-top, mastaba tombs that go subterranean, sealed in stone. That’s definitely in the ground, sis, like you said. Someone could have easily gone to those tombs built into the hills within this complex and stashed a coffin, no problem.”
“Twelve tombs … twelve crypts,” she murmured. “That’s what’s out there in the hills just beyond this building. That’s the ground.”
“Sacred number, twelve,” Azrael said, becoming absorbed in touching the walls as he pressed both palms flatly against them.
“That sarcophagus was there.” Celeste began to walk away from both warriors, but Isda stopped her.
“But before,” Isda argued, becoming agitated as she still moved forward, “they were just filled with jewelry and offerings and grain and urns and—”
“Already excavated,” she said flatly, looking at him. “It was safe here. People who visit this temple mainly come in here, as opposed to the outer temple grounds and hills, which are closed off to tourists now anyway.” She ran her hand along the wall. “Krespy’s apprentice knew that … had to know that.” Celeste stopped walking. “The elderly cleric would definitely say a prayer of Light for protection from On-High here. He would also leave his apprentice a clue or some kind of coded message to follow the Light within the darkness. The only place in this temple that is pitch-black is down here. The rest of the temple gets sunlight because of the way the stone windows are set, the skylights … don’t you see, he would have led his apprentice to come into this space to receive whatever message he’d left in prayer.”
Azrael glanced around. “Without these emergency lights in here, it would be pitch-black.”
“The clue is down here somewhere, Isda. Move! I can feel it tingling in the palms of my hands!” Walking quickly along
the walls as though reading braille, Celeste kept her eyes closed and then half fell, half stumbled into a new, tiny room covered in reliefs that was adjacent to the one they’d been standing within, then gasped.
“Lights!” she shrieked, then touched the walls in awe.
Azrael and Isda stepped back and stared at the five stone reliefs that depicted a djed pillar and a lotus flower spawning a snake within what appeared to be a giant balloon or bubble. Celeste went to the right side of the small vault where it looked as if two long fluorescent lightbulbs were touching one another.
“Damn if Celeste wasn’t right, Az. Okay, I stand corrected.” Isda looked at Azrael and traced the fine granite carving with his fingers as he spoke. “Mon … this is profound. The snake is kundalini energy,” Isda said quietly. “The djed is the spinal column, from which the energy springs forth. With this awakened, there is light. We brought the Light, literally and figuratively. This is one of the few places where that truth was revealed.”
“This has to be the place where Krespy’s apprentice was sent.”
Azrael nodded. “It’s the only tomb and crypt complex that depicts the actual makeup of true Light.”
“Crazy, mon.” Isda just shook his head as he stared at the walls. “And our locator found it.”
“But this was done thousands of years ago. They had light down in these crypts, I mean, like, regular electric, back then?” Celeste gaped at Isda and Azrael when they nodded.
“There is no soot on these walls from torches,” Isda pointed out. “You cannot clean that off. Look around. There are no windows, and this subterranean chamber, like many of the temples, was carved out of pure granite. How could men get down here and work, huh? How could they see to put such details on eve’y inch of da walls, without light? Slaves did not build this stuff—that is the big lie. Master craftsmen did. Masons from the original Masonic orders that came out of Kemet did. So think about it. Where did the light come from to help humans see?”
“But in school they never taught us about—”
“Of course they didn’t teach you about dis!” Isda shouted. “How can you tell people they’re subhuman, strip away the true merits of their heritage, and make them accept that for hundreds of years, if you reveal that through deep meditation and awakening they can bring their own Light—that they built a civilization yet to be rivaled? Show her, Az!”
Azrael nodded and closed his eyes and allowed the blue-white spill to spread along the edges of his body and then widen until the small room looked as if it were being flooded by halogen lamps.
“That was the dark side taking hold of the worst in humanity, creating unnecessary prejudice, and corrupting that which was good. Imagine what could have been accomplished everywhere in the world if humans worked together collectively to awaken their spirits, pooled their resources to breakthrough on new discoveries, honored each other’s cultures and histories, and harnessed all their knowledge and will for the greater good? Racism, prejudice, false history, just divide and conquer. The dark side loves it, and humans worldwide buy into that lie every time. On our end, it is truly frustrating,” Azrael said quietly, then slowly began to allow his light to dim. “This is also part of the inner Light I told you was turned off when they reduced the human DNA strands down from twelve strands of inner Light to a very weakened two.”
Even though their words held her rapt, Azrael’s brilliant display had hit a speck of something metallic, and that glint had caught in her peripheral vision. Moving toward the far corner of the room where she’d seen the shiny object, she gently swept at a pile of dust, gravel, and sand and came away with a prize.
The men surrounded her as she stood, then opened her palm out flat to reveal what looked like a small, gold wedding band. The center of it was steel and spun on some type of ball bearing in a layered band above the gold. The center steel ring had words written on it in a foreign language that she couldn’t make out. Azrael lifted it from her palm and lit it between his fingers. He glanced at her, then turned his attention to Isda.
“It’s the Lord’s Prayer in Latin.”
Isda snatched the ring from Azrael and stared at it in disbelief.
“It was Father Krespy’s,” Celeste said quietly. “Daoud Salahuddin used it as his ward. As long as he had it on him, it probably kept him safe somehow … kept demons from snatching him maybe? What I’m feeling is they definitely kept the remains of Imhotep here and separate from the book, but someone dropped this ring here—this was just lying in the corner, not purposefully hidden. With all that was riding on this, it doesn’t make sense that Daoud or someone in charge of guarding the sarcophagus and book of tablets would be so careless … but it had to be a human, because no demon could get down here.”
“Nor could any of the fallen enter here with the protective barriers that have been here for thousands of years,” Isda said, glancing around.
“Some human brought him here, threatened him maybe.” She felt along the walls. “I don’t know. But I can’t see or feel that any blood was spilled in here.”
“Nor do I,” Azrael confirmed. He looked along the wall where Celeste had found the ring and shook his head. “No butchery took place here.”
“But how much you wanna bet that the man who last owned this ring, Daoud, lost his life at the site of the tomb that held the sarcophagus somewhere on this campus?” Isda looked at both of them. “In this land, any land to be fair, money talks and bullshit walks. You can’t hear a man scream down in a tomb, mon.”
“I don’t think we should try to find that desecrated crypt,” Celeste said, touching Isda’s arm. “We have the ring. Me, BK, Aziza, and Paschar should be able to hold it, maybe all touching it at the same time, and find out where Daoud might have been before he so-called vanished. We might even be able to find where they left his body. I don’t think the man survived if they got to the sarcophagus.”
“I don’t think so either, love. Sad and very fucked up.” Isda let out a hard breath. “But you are right. With four strong seers, one of you for each of the cardinal points, we should be able to pick up a direction.”
“I think we need to get out of here,” Azrael said. “I don’t like one-way-in, one-way-out scenarios.”
Chapter 10
Rounding up the group took the better part of a half hour, since everyone was spread throughout the vast campus of buildings and ruins, but finally they convened in the parking lot—hot, dirty, irritated, and exhausted.
Aziza looked as if she’d been weeping. Bath Kol was dirty from head to toe. Maggie seemed about to pass out from heat exhaustion, and Melissa was having difficulty breathing.
“We found something,” Azrael announced. “Down in the vault rooms, the twelve crypts under the Flame Room floor in the main temple.”
Bath Kol nodded and bent to pour a bottle of water over his head, then shook his head, flinging water like a golden retriever just back from a marsh hunt. “Yeah, we found mastaba tombs over on the western hill—the eastern ridge of it.”
“We also saw soot on the roofs where temples had burned to the ground,” Aziza said, hugging herself and beginning to rock.
Bath Kol nodded and looked away. “And a fresh kill. Not the actual body, but the heavy vibration of blood and death was down there. A man recently lost his life there for sure.”
Azrael held out his hand, drawing Bath Kol to the ring without words. Aziza came in closer and then backed away.
“That man’s blood spilled on the ground by the tomb I went into with BK,” she whispered in horror.
Bath Kol took up the ring. “No … this belonged to the priest—and then was passed down to his apprentice, the one man not of his same faith but of his same cause. Daoud.”
Paschar nodded as he touched the ring with Bath Kol. “He gave his life in the tomb you entered, brother.”
“They tortured him until he begged to die,” Aziza said in a quiet rush. “But he was trying to get to a major knowledge center of some sort … like a museum or
another temple, a huge one, a colossal library or university even, when they abducted him.”
“Karnak,” Bath Kol said, nodding. He walked in a circle raking his hair. “Damn … if that’s it, and my sense is that it is, do you know how huge that campus is? It took them like seventeen hundred years to build, through twenty-five or thirty different pharaohs. It’s got two hundred buildings on it or more. Shit! Plus that’s several hours’ drive south of where we are now—through these little streets? Could be longer. You’ll have to ask Isda to see how long it’ll really take.”
“Given the size of that campus, it would make sense, brother,” Azrael said, injecting a more positive viewpoint to the group. “Think about it. If you had a tablet, something so magnificent that it would stand out, you’d have to hide it somewhere either massive or remote. Looks like Daoud went for massive.”
“But how did they get to Daoud if he had the ward … Father Krespy’s ring?” Celeste looked around the group and her gaze landed on Aziza.
“He was robbed of the ring,” Aziza said, going to it slowly. She reached out to touch it, then retracted her hand, appearing to think better of doing so. “They found him and tortured him until he brought them here.”
“We found this down in those chambers under the floors, but there was no blood even in the cracks between the stones in the floors,” Celeste said. “So … how …?”
“One of the guards,” Bath Kol said, nodding to the main temple. “The prayer ring has gold on it, was valuable. Those guys go down in the temple hidden areas and do whatever … drink, screw, smoke. Dude probably got drunk and lost part of his prize. A blessed object like this will repel itself away from the unclean, even a human. The fallen can’t touch one of these and a demon would burn from it. This was definitely claimed by a human—humans don’t fry if they touch holy water or any kind of religious icon, even if they’re dark in spirit. The fact that they have a soul and have a choice to change until the bitter end gives them the power to walk through the gauntlet of any barriers. But the man that took this ring off Krespy’s apprentice was a very stupid human who couldn’t even hold on to it for a night.” Bath Kol placed the ring back in Azrael’s palm and spat on the ground. “That some sellout even had it in his possession and helped an innocent man die for a few bucks, whoever the ignorant bastard is, makes me sick.”
