Tales of the Red Panda: Pyramid of Peril

by Gregg Taylor

  She looked past him and saw Falconi, standing with his hands on his knees, his face looking ashen, the remnants of the rope he had been bound with still hanging around his wrists. He had knocked their enemies down with a blast of… something… and it looked very much like the next thing he had done was punch a pretty fair-sized hole in the side of the mountain. The air still reeked of dust and sand, but they had their way in.

  “I think that might be all for me for a bit,” he said, clearly spent.

  The Red Panda nodded. “It’ll be enough,” he said.

  Twenty-One

  Stepping into the chamber, the darkness fell so suddenly that they had to stop and hold their position while the spots danced before their eyes. Only the Red Panda seemed unaffected, and Kit wouldn’t have liked to guess if he had a setting for just such an emergency in his mask lenses or if he was faking it.

  “Look at this,” he said, before either of the others really could. The Flying Squirrel felt her way forward and found herself standing beside a massive stone that took up most of the passageway and stood almost four feet high.

  “What the heck?” she asked, turning back toward the rubble-strewn entrance. She could now see that there had been doors under all of that rock, and they were shattered now. Thrown aside like toys behind the furious blast Max had unleashed. That must have been something to see. But all of the other stones that had been thrown this far were smaller… football-sized at best. This one was a monster.

  “How did this thing make it this far?” she said, amazed.

  “It didn’t,” the Red Panda said gravely. “Touch it.”

  She did. It was perfectly smooth. This wasn’t rubble at all. She looked up. The chamber seemed endless. She plied her flashlight up and still could see nothing. If this stone fell from above, it would have been travelling at a heck of a clip when it crashed to the ground.

  “As near as I can tell,” the Red Panda said, “the debris from the blast must have triggered something in the floor. Or perhaps the blast itself did it. Doesn’t really matter which. The point is that if anyone did get past those doors, the first thing that was meant to happen to them was getting squashed like a bug.”

  “If they had one trap,” Kit said, “there’ll be more. Probably lots of ‘em.”

  “Under the circumstances, I hate to point this out,” Falconi said with a glance behind them, “but I think that time may be of the essence. They’re down, but they won’t stay down for long.”

  “I wish we had more handcuffs,” she said crossly.

  The Red Panda shrugged. “Doesn’t come up that often,” he said. “We had enough for Pavli and El-Nemr. That’ll slow things down a titch.”

  “And then Thatcher’s sportin’ them pretty bands, Max,” she said. “You remember how much you enjoyed ‘em.”

  “Pavli can remove them,” Falconi warned.

  “Ah, but will he?” the Red Panda asked. “Thatcher showed his true colors there. If I were Pavli I would find an excuse to leave them on until I was holding the Eye of Anubis in my hand, at the very least. Come on… there’s not much room on the side, it’s probably easier to go over.”

  He leapt up onto the rock and reached down to help Falconi up. Kit followed behind, scrambling up the smooth surface easily with a boost from her Static Shoes.

  “I did smash the locks pretty good,” Kit offered. “That might give Pavli an excuse to keep them on. And while they thrash this out, we’ll get the Eye and head for the hills.”

  She dropped to the floor beside them and noticed that they were not moving. Floating six or eight feet ahead of them was a glowing orb of pure light, floating delicately like a will-o’-the-wisp. Her hand was to her utility belt before she realized that Max was controlling the movements of the orb, which he had clearly just created. Kit returned the throwing star to its pouch and grinned sheepishly but neither of them seemed to have noticed. Their attention was on the passage ahead of them, which was enormous and seemed to branch off in a number of directions.

  “All right,” the Red Panda said at last, “forget everything you knew about pyramids.”

  “That shouldn’t be difficult,” Kit said brightly.

  The Red Panda ignored this and carried on. “Most pyramids are solid right through because they’re tombs. A single, massive gravesite fit for a king. This is something different.”

  “A temple,” Falconi offered, “and a maze. A place where they could venerate great power and not displease the God whose power it was, but also keep that power out of the reach of… well, anyone.”

  “And you don’t think they assumed the big rock took care of that?” Kit asked, not especially hopefully.

  “Let’s find out,” the Red Panda said and took a step forward.

  Suddenly the floor gave away beneath his weight and he was hanging above a black abyss of open space. For a moment he teetered there, both hands in the air in a gesture of astonishment. For an instant he wondered what had stopped him from plummeting to his doom, but then he felt the tension on his coat and turned his head. The Flying Squirrel had two fistfuls of his jacket gripped in her hands and her jaw was set firm against the strain of holding him back.

  “You got anvils in your pockets or something, Boss?” she groaned.

  “Just a few,” he said, regaining his balance. “All right, let’s try this.” He tapped the hidden control on the side of his domino mask several times as he examined the sprung trap before him, and then continued the process as he looked down the passage. His mask lenses flashed, and his face was an impassive study of concentration. Falconi tried not to look nervously toward the opening in the side of the mountain just a few yards away.

  “Well I’ll be,” the Red Panda said at last.

  “What is it?” Kit asked.

  “There’s another one right beyond. Literally a single step past the first trapdoor,” he said. “I imagine that you’d feel rather silly on the way down.”

  “Let’s try not to find out,” she said, firing up her Static Shoes. “And let’s try to leave this trap intact. I’m sick of clearing a path for those mooks.”

  “Agreed,” the Red Panda said. “Come here, Max, let me give you a hand.”

  Moments later they were past the trap and on the threshold of the next chamber. The Red Panda held them there for a moment while he scanned ahead on every setting he had.

  “I’m afraid we don’t have the time for this, old friend,” the Stranger offered.

  “I know it,” the Red Panda said, “but that’s three deathtraps in about eighteen feet of passageway, and I’m feeling a little skittish. All right, let’s go.”

  The chamber was about sixty feet across and thirty deep. The walls were covered with hieroglyphs and there were four doorways, each with slightly different shapes and markings above. The Red Panda played the beam of his flashlight over the markings and stared at them intently, while Falconi closed his eyes and reached out with both arms before him, muttering unintelligible words under his breath. The orb of light dimmed as Max spent his power elsewhere, and Kit waited quietly for a few moments.

  “Eeny, meeny, miney, moe?” she suggested.

  The Red Panda sighed. “It might not be the worst idea in the world. It would take weeks to decipher these markings and still more time to properly interpret their meaning. And in the end, I still doubt very much that any of them say, ‘this way to the enormously powerful relic’. How are you doing, Max?”

  Falconi opened his eyes, and the orb’s glow grew once again. “The locator spell I am using is not without its faults. It doesn’t really suggest a direction, merely detects energies on certain wavelengths. The walls of the pyramid and the tons of rock that covers them did an admirable job of containing those energies and preventing their detection. So admirable that this must surely have been the point. But the net result is that all of that energy has been contained within this structure for thousands of years. Everything is quite literally bathed in it.”

  “So you can’t te
ll us which way to the Eye?” the Flying Squirrel asked.

  Falconi shook his head. “Not definitively,” he said. “All four passages may very well lead to the Eye of Anubis for all we know. But when I sent my energies down this path,” he said, indicating the second one from the left, “the residual energies did not disperse before me as easily.”

  “Which means the power is stronger that way?” the Red Panda offered.

  “Possibly,” Falconi said, “but that’s about the best that I can do at this distance.”

  They could hear the sound of voices from far behind them.

  “Meeny it is then,” the Red Panda said, plunging forward into the darkness.

  Twenty-Two

  The Flying Squirrel was completely turned around. They had been walking through the underground passages for an hour and Kit could no longer tell which way was out, except that process of elimination said it must be a direction other than the one they were walking in. She hoped that her companions had a better sense of where they were going. Max was leading the way, his hands outstretched, but he had dismissed the glowing orb of light he had created in order to conserve his still-limited power. Kit followed him, playing out the beam of her flashlight ahead of them as best she could. He came to another doorway on the side of the passage and paused for a moment, turning from the doorway, back to the passage, and back to the doorway again. He hesitated and Kit began to wonder just how much of this came down to him flipping a coin. She cast her beam forward along the passageway.

  “I think there are more stairs up ahead, Max,” she offered. “Do you think it would be higher?”

  “I think it very well might be,” Falconi said, grateful for the prompt. “Besides, we’ve been in this main passage for quite some time. I don’t know why the great prize of this temple would be hidden in an antechamber.”

  She wrinkled her nose in worry. “Maybe we oughta be checking them out as we go,” she offered. “We’re taking some pretty big chances here.”

  “I may not be doing much to inspire confidence,” he said, “but I feel fairly sure of our route. Magic isn’t an exact science.”

  “That’s deep,” she said. “You should write Burma-Shave signs. Where’s the Boss?”

  “I’m right here,” he said from the darkness.

  “Geeze-louise, Boss!” she exclaimed. “You give a girl a fright, you know that?”

  “Sorry, Squirrel,” he said sheepishly. “You had Max covered with your flashlight, so I switched to nightvision for a moment. You get a wider field of view.”

  “If you’re away from other light sources,” she said, frowning. “You know how I feel about you wandering off. Just ‘cause we haven’t seen a deathtrap in a while-”

  There was a sharp intake of breath from both men.

  “I just jinxed it, didn’t I?” she said ruefully.

  “Of course not,” the Red Panda said, lighting his flashlight. “There’s no such thing as a jinx. Just try not to do it again, all right?”

  “Yes, Boss,” she said. “Max says this way.”

  “Lead on,” he said with a wave of his light, and they set off once more into the darkness. He checked the stairs quickly for obvious traps and cleared them, though he took the lead along the narrow passage as they climbed.

  “So where did you disappear to anyway?” she asked. “Were you off readin’ hieroglyphs again?”

  “You know, it’s a funny thing,” he said. “I can’t seem to read these. It’s a terrible disappointment when you spend untold hours as a boy pouring over ancient languages, to finally be in an undiscovered pyramid and not be able to make any sense of the writing. There are symbols I just don’t recognize, and others that look familiar, but are styled differently.”

  “This place is ancient, my friend,” Falconi said. “It makes many of the oldest known treasures of antiquity blush.”

  “Once we have the Eye out of here, I imagine archaeologists will have a field day.” He sounded almost wistful.

  “You could fund an expedition,” she offered. “Come back and potter around to your heart’s content. As long as I can come with.”

  He smiled, though no one could see it in the darkness. “Don’t we mostly fight crime?” he asked. “Besides, all this sun is making you freckle.”

  She frowned. He couldn’t have known that she was a little sensitive about the freckles, and normally tried to avoid getting them whenever possible. “Well, just don’t go wandering off, was my original point,” she scolded.

  “I wasn’t exactly wandering off,” he said. “I was dropping breadcrumbs.”

  “You were dropping what?” Falconi sounded incredulous.

  “Breadcrumbs,” he said, pleased. “Well, metaphorical breadcrumbs anyway. Tiny radio micro-transmitters. Built for just such an emergency. I’ve been placing them strategically on the way in to help illuminate the way out later… just in case we’re in something of a hurry.”

  The Flying Squirrel felt a flood of relief and silently forgave him for the crack about the freckles.

  They came to the top of the stairs and found themselves at the mouth of a long, narrow passageway. The Stranger muttered something under his breath and blue smoke appeared to flow from his fingertips coalescing into another glowing blue will-o’-the-wisp that illuminated the path ahead of them.

  “Not much detecting to do if there’s only one road,” he explained.

  “Fair point,” the Red Panda said, “but everyone remember, they seem to favor putting traps in narrow places like this. I can’t think of anything much worse than coming this far and failing.”

  He lowered his foot as if to step forward.

  “Wait a second,” the Flying Squirrel hissed. “Max, can that thingus float on ahead a little ways?”

  The Stranger obliged, sending the orb twenty feet down the passage. In the spill of pale blue light, it was clear what had got her attention. The floor positively writhed with crawling life, all drawn from their crevices by the first appearance of light within these walls for many thousands of years.

  “Nope,” she said, as if by reflex. “Nope, nope, nope. Going home now. Good-bye.” The Flying Squirrel did not move away, but she certainly did not move forward either.

  “Now don’t get out of hand,” the Red Panda said with infuriating calmness.

  There were so many insects that the Flying Squirrel was certain she could hear them crawling over the stones of the floor and walls. “That is a lot of bugs,” she said simply.

  “Well,” the Red Panda chimed, “technically the scorpions are arachnids. Like spiders. Oh, and so are the spiders, sorry I didn’t see those.”

  “And the giant beetles the size of my fist?” she asked.

  “Those are bugs, yes,” he agreed.

  “How can they live in here?” Kit howled. “What do they eat?”

  “I think mostly each other,” the Stranger offered.

  “Good-bye,” she said. “This has been fun.”

  “All right,” Falconi said, recalling the orb. “Let me see if I can’t start earning my keep here.” He closed his eyes a moment and his hands began to circle one another in an almost hypnotic manner. His gestures were rapid but precise, and an instant later his voice called out as if from a great distance away.

  “Resquillium, varathnor, incentos,” he said, and the passageway was suddenly an inferno of searing flame. Both of the masked heroes stepped back, but the heat did not seem to reach them where they stood, only the bright, white light.

  “It sounds like they’re screaming,” the Flying Squirrel said, her hands over her ears.

  “I think it’s just water vapor escaping through their exoskeletons,” the Red Panda said.

  “You’re just a barrel full of laughs, anybody ever tell you that?” she asked.

  A moment later it was all over. An unholy stench filled the air, and the floor was even thicker with insect corpses that had fallen from the walls and ceiling, but they were unmistakably dead. Falconi looked a little spent,
but not severely, and seemed pleased with how well that had gone.

  “Not bad, Maxwell,” he said, smiling at his own fingers. “All coming back to me.”

  “All right,” the Red Panda said, “let’s go.”

  He stepped forward and there was a spine-shivering crunching below his feet, followed by a gelatinous squishing sound.

  “Okay, I’m gonna be sick,” the Squirrel said before she could stop herself. She didn’t want to be too girly about this. The Red Panda and the Stranger pushed their way forward, dragging their feet like they were walking through dead leaves to cut down on the revolting sounds and sensations, to say nothing of keeping solid footing. It was still too much for the Flying Squirrel though, and in the end she took to the ceiling with her Static Shoes and walked the length of the passageway quickly, with her fingers in her ears and singing “Blue Skies” to herself. She leapt down to the floor, landing solidly on the remains of an enormous beetle and reacting with flesh-crawling horror before righting herself and looking through the doorway into the next room.

  “No bugs in here,” she said. “How come there’s no bugs in here?”

  “No idea,” the Stranger said, and the three of them stepped into the chamber.

  The chamber was unlike any they had passed through before. It was circular with a single exit directly ahead of them, not more than twelve feet from the one they had entered. The ceiling was low by the standards they had seen so far, only a few feet above the Red Panda’s head, and the bricks in the walls were small, narrow and tightly packed against one another. There were no carvings or adornments on the walls apart from eight small statues shaped like stylized crocodiles’ heads that surrounded the room at floor level, their mouths wide open but in a posture that suggested vomiting more than it did any sort of attack. The Red Panda guessed what they were just an instant too late.

  Suddenly there was the heavy sound of stone grating upon stone, and both entrance and exit were sealed by tremendous blocks which rolled into place. The Red Panda sprinted ahead in a futile gesture to stop the doorway in front of them from closing, but it was far too late, and even had it not been, he could never have halted the progress of the enormous stone. He turned and looked behind them quickly, but the stones had moved in perfect sync and they were sealed in.