Tales of the Red Panda: Pyramid of Peril

by Gregg Taylor

  “Oh good,” Kit deadpanned. “What now?”

  The Red Panda turned and quickly felt along the edges of the doorway for any gap, any open seam that might convince him that he was wrong. Nothing.

  “Please just tell me it doesn’t involve bugs,” she said.

  “Good news,” the Red Panda said grimly. “I don’t think it involves bugs.”

  “What’s the bad news, then?” Falconi asked.

  There was the sudden and unmistakable sound of running water.

  “That is,” the Red Panda said.

  The Flying Squirrel looked down and saw that the stones at her feet, which had been bone dry since human civilization was in its infancy, were thirstily lapping up a running stream around her ankles.

  “Okay,” she said. “This was a little unexpected.”

  “It’s the crocodiles,” Max cried excitedly. “They’re water pipes!”

  It was true. The stone heads around the room were flooding the sealed chamber with icy cold, stagnant water.

  “Where is this coming from?” Kit yelled.

  “Does it matter?” the Red Panda said, struggling against the door, which was clearly unassailable.

  “Help me try and stop up the pipes,” the Stranger called.

  “There’s too much pressure,” the Red Panda protested, “unless you have a spell that generates eight enormous corks.”

  “That would be oddly specific, wouldn’t it?” the Stranger quipped. “Can we get through that door?”

  “Doesn’t look that way,” the Red Panda said ruefully. “Even if we had enough explosive to shift this stone, the blast would turn us all to jelly.”

  The Stranger looked at the water, which was already up to his knees. “Not the worst way to go though, is it?” he said to no one in particular.

  The Red Panda wondered at the sudden silence of his partner and looked around quickly. He found her at the top of the wall, quietly scrambling around the edge of the room, playing her flashlight near the join between the ceiling and the walls, and leaning in close to look as she did so. She moved quickly, and looked a bit like an even larger version of one of the beetles they had just roasted, though he decided that was probably one of those things he ought to think and not actually say.

  “Did you drop something?” he asked, as much as possible as if he weren’t in freezing cold water up to his knees.

  “Just looking for loose mortar,” she offered. “Don’t mind me. You go on with your swim if you like.”

  “Loose mortar?” Falconi asked, puzzled.

  “Of course!” the Red Panda exclaimed, leaping up the side of the room and playing his flashlight along in a similar fashion. “Age hasn’t made the rock any lighter, and whatever mechanism they constructed for flooding the room still seems to work. But if the stones have shifted… if we can get just a few of them loose…”

  “Do you really think we can open a large enough hole to escape in time?” the Stranger asked.

  “Don’t know,” he admitted, his fingers digging desperately. “Don’t know what else to try.”

  “I think I’ve got something!” Kit called excitedly from the other side of the room.

  The Red Panda leapt down to the floor and gasped as he hit the water, which was almost up to his waist. His flashlight submerged, flickered and the light was lost. An instant later he was across the room and up the wall at her side.

  “Tell me you packed something that goes boom,” she demanded.

  “I packed you,” he offered.

  “Oh!” she said, smiling in spite of impending doom. “I like that.”

  “If we could return to the subject at hand,” the Stranger prompted genially from the floor, where he was nearly ready to begin treading water.

  “Two flash grenades,” he said. “That’s about all that might help, and they did just get wet.”

  “They’re waterproof though, right?” she asked, taking his offering and adding it to her own distressingly small arsenal.

  “Well, in theory,” he said.

  “Swell,” she grinned, fixing the charges to each other with wire stripped from one of her belt pouches. She hung the whole mess from one of the tiny cracks she had found between the stones. “You’d better get back,” she said. “I got a flare delay for a timer, which means I have about two seconds between striking and kablooey.”

  “You’re going to dive for cover?” he asked.

  “Sure,” she nodded as he crawled around the wall to get clear. “It isn’t gonna be much of a boom. That’s both the good news and the bad news. Everybody get ready… now!”

  An instant later there was a small roar and a blinding flash, and some small crumbling noises which passed for encouragement. The Red Panda hurried back to the blast site and began pounding on the loose rocks with his fists. She swam over to him, gasping at the sudden chill after days of heat and clawed at the bricks with gloved hands. At first, not much seemed to happen, and then all at once there was a crash as bricks and dry, broken mortar began falling backwards into some unseen open space beyond. They fought for several minutes more without succeeding in making the hole any bigger, and at last were forced to concede to the solid construction of the wall.

  “It isn’t large enough to get through,” the Stranger said, swimming now, and near the ceiling as they all were.

  “Maybe it doesn’t have to be,” the Red Panda said hopefully. “Maybe this room isn’t supposed to stay flooded. If the trap is meant to reset after we drown.”

  “You’re a barrel of laughs, you know that?” the Flying Squirrel asked, her own flashlight sputtering out in the deluge.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I’m pretty sure that you know what I mean.”

  The water was higher now, and it began to flood over the broken space in the wall, the strain of the rushing water taking still more bricks with it making the hole a little wider, a little deeper. But would it be enough? There was more cracking of mortar, more crashing of bricks into the space beyond. The Red Panda struggled to get enough purchase on the opening to add any force to the equation, holding on with his left and kicking furiously with his feet, but he couldn’t tell if he was making any difference and as the water continued to rise, conserving oxygen became more important. Falconi seemed to be tiring and the glowing orb he had created dimmed in intensity as it fell beneath the rising tide, but thankfully it did not vanish altogether leaving them in total darkness.

  The opening they had created was just enough to stem the flood of water before reaching the ceiling, but for ten long, cold minutes the three adventurers treaded water grimly, wondering how long they could hold out, and if there was a second act forthcoming. With only the roaring of water in their ears, they kept their mouths turned desperately toward the ceiling, gasping at what little air remained.

  All at once, when they were certain they could take no more, the sound in their ears changed. It grew louder and grew in urgency, and they could feel the brackish water begin to flow around their legs, faster and faster. The water was dropping, and quickly, carrying the three of them in a long, slow circle as some unseen drain in the floor opened. It took less than a minute, and as they felt the solid floor beneath their feet, they knew that they were not falling away with the flood into some unseen, unimaginable abyss. It was then that the Red Panda began to laugh. His ringing peals of unbounded joy were unexpected and infectious, and the Stranger could not help but join in.

  The Flying Squirrel was too miserable to laugh. She was chilled to the bone and soaking wet through her Squirrel Suit. She thought ruefully of the closet full of specialized costumes hanging in her change room in their underground lair many miles away. Insulated suits for winter. Special suits for diving. Anything other than the lightweight summer models she had packed for a trip to the Sahara. She clasped her hands together as she rose to her feet, her hands shaking visibly however much she tried to stop them. She flipped her hair back out of her face as the stones blocking both doors rolled away and they beat a hasty
retreat before they could trip the deluge again.

  “Are you all right?” the Red Panda asked as he caught her eye. He couldn’t tell if it was just the light from the Stranger’s orb or if her lips were turning blue.

  “Me? Oh, I’m swell,” she said. “I’m in the desert, soaked to the skin and I’m freezing cold. What’s not to like?”

  “Good girl,” he said, giving her a chuck on the shoulder.

  “Yes, Boss,” she said, rolling her eyes just a little.

  Twenty-Three

  The chamber they stood in was broad and open with enormous statues acting as pillars, each depicting a god with what appeared to be the head of a cobra, with its enormous hood spread wide as if to strike.

  “Who’s that supposed to be?” Kit asked, still shivering as they checked their gear. “Is that Anubis?”

  “No, Anubis had a jackal’s head,” the Red Panda said, pulling sodden equipment from his pockets. “Could be Geb, he was sometimes depicted with a snake head. Not usually a cobra, though.”

  “I thought you knew all about this stuff,” Kit said, surprised.

  He shrugged. “I know a little,” he said modestly, “but this pyramid is from a vastly different era. The Pantheon of Egypt evolved a great deal over thousands of years. Even major players like Anubis. When this was built, he was the God of the Underworld and King of the Dead. Then he was supplanted by the Osiris myths, and relegated to a relatively minor function in the process of judging the dead. He mostly showed the newly dead in to an audience with Osiris.”

  “Oh, Anubis, ouch,” Kit smiled.

  “This terrible fellow is quite unknown to me. Could be an early variation of a god we know, or a minor deity who faded from mythology.” He looked around in amazement. “Just think about where we are,” he said quietly. “It’s really quite incredible.”

  “You love your job, don’t you?” Kit said shaking her head a little.

  “I really do,” he said with a smile.

  “I fear that we have little time for wonder,” Falconi said, rising to his feet. “How are we?”

  The Red Panda took inventory of the small pile of gear that he was leaving behind. “Well, we used everything we had with any kind of concussive charge blowing the hole in the wall. We used all of our gas grenades on the jackals, of course. And the flashlights are finished. I admit I wasn’t really expecting to take a bath with my equipment. Some of it is a little the worse for wear.”

  “Isn’t that the pouch you carry those breadcrumbs of yours in?” the Squirrel asked.

  “Ah,” he said, “you noticed that. Yes. They’re more water-resistant than give them a good, solid dunking.”

  She tried not to look worried. “Will we be able to find our way out again with just the ones you’ve already dropped? I guess it depends how much further we go, right?”

  He looked uncomfortable. “Well, yes,” he said, “also that.”

  “The detector was also ruined, wasn’t it?” Falconi asked.

  “Well, yes,” the Red Panda replied sheepishly.

  Kit Baxter felt frightened for the first time in longer than she could remember. “Oh boy,” was all that she said.

  Both men tried to think of something comforting to say that she wouldn’t immediately see through, and came up empty. They stood in silence for a moment.

  “I’m all right,” she said at last.

  The light from the orb flickered and faded slightly.

  “Except stop doing that,” Kit said seriously.

  “Is maintaining that light taxing, Max?” the Red Panda asked.

  “It shouldn’t be,” the Stranger said, a little frustrated, “but it is. I keep… I don’t quite know how to express it… I keep emptying the tank before it gets full. Makes it difficult to maintain even the simplest of energy fields.”

  “Well, let’s do something about that,” he said, reaching for a torch on one of the pillars.

  “Red Panda, wait!” the Flying Squirrel said. He froze, obligingly.

  “Let’s just say that you were an ancient Egyptian deathtrap designer,” she said, “and you’re wondering what to put in after your water-pit trap. Anyone who somehow lived would be wet, they’d be cold, and they’d have no light.”

  He paused. “You think the torch is a trap?”

  “I think the torch is a trap,” she agreed.

  He looked at it quickly. “I think the torch is a torch,” he said, “but could be pressure sensitive, I suppose.”

  “Just don’t touch it, okay?” she asked. “I really don’t want this room to fill up with snakes or something.”

  He looked around and saw several more torches on pillars further away from the water trap. “Are they all traps?” he asked. “Can I grab a pair from over there?”

  “Yes, fine,” she agreed, though she held her breath while he did so.

  He held the torches in his hands and looked at her. He waited a moment, listening, and then smiled. Nothing. A moment later, Max had lit the torches, extinguished his magic orb and they were prepared for the next leg of their journey.

  As they turned toward the winding staircase that led out of the chamber, the Red Panda looked back at the first torch, a bit wistfully.

  “Well, now I’ll never know,” he said.

  “Tell you what,” she said, “if we live, I’ll let you spring the trap on the way back out.”

  He beamed. “That’s tough but fair,” he said.

  “We must make haste,” the Stranger said. “As we near the Eye of Anubis, I can feel its power grow. I no longer need to search for it, it calls to me.”

  “Well, that’s good,” she said brightly.

  “Good and bad,” Falconi was grave. “If it calls to me, then Thatcher and Pavli will be able to sense it as well, even if they are less in tune with the frequencies involved. They may have divided their forces at the entrance, and it is very possible that all four paths lead to the Eye eventually. They may, in fact, be ahead of us.”

  “Fenwick!”

  The cry came from behind them and rang over the stone walls like thunder. They turned back and saw two men, carrying lights, standing in the chamber they had just left. The speaker was unmistakeably El-Nemr.

  “Oh, not this hockey puck again,” Kit sighed.

  “Now, now,” the Red Panda said, “perhaps he’s learned his lesson.”

  El-Nemr quickly pulled a revolver from his coat and fired two shots in their direction. They were rushed and fell to no effect, but his intent was clear.

  “Or not,” the Red Panda shrugged.

  “Three, two, one,” Kit said as the stone door closed sealing the men in the water trap.

  “I wonder if there’s any water left in that thing?” she asked.

  An instant later they could clearly hear the terrified screaming, muffled though it was by tons of stone.

  “Yep,” she said, “I guess there was.”

  They turned to the stairs once again and climbed into the darkness above.

  Twenty-Four

  At the top of the stairs, the passageway narrowed still more. The walls on either side of them were only about ten feet high, but above them was open space and what looked like a great deal of it, though the light from their torches would not penetrate far enough to tell precisely. The walls were smooth and angled toward each other slightly as they neared the top, no doubt to make it nearly impossible to climb over them. The entire length of the passageway was covered with hieroglyphs, but after a cursory glance near the entrance to this new environment to look for obvious warnings, the Red Panda had ignored them in favour of making speed.

  They travelled in silence for a time, knowing they were getting close but equally sure that their approach would not go unchallenged by the long-dead builders of this place. At last the Red Panda froze and held up his hand to stop his companions from speaking. They listened together and could hear voices talking excitedly… arguing perhaps, though the words were indistinct. He peered ahead, but turned back to see what the
others thought, as the voices did not seem to be coming from ahead of them. The Flying Squirrel pointed straight up to the space above them and the Red Panda could see at once that she was right. The angry voices were carrying over from a nearby passage that shared the same ceiling somewhere far above. Kit pointed to herself and then up toward the ceiling, suggesting silently that she should climb the walls to take a look, but he shook his head and pointed ahead.

  They moved quickly and with new urgency, but still in silence. Twenty feet further down the passage they came to an opening to the right. The Red Panda turned to Max, who after a moment’s concentration pointed straight ahead. There were quite suddenly voices that seemed to come from the passage to the right, different voices, but arguing once again, and that seemed to settle everyone’s opinion to avoid the turn. Soon there was an option to the left, and another to the right. While the Stranger considered the options, the Flying Squirrel crept on ahead a dozen feet, returning quickly.

  “Looks like this road dead-ends up ahead,” she said, “though there might be another door to the left before it does.”

  “Oh, spectacular,” the Red Panda said quietly, “this is a labyrinth.”

  “It’s this way,” the Stranger said, pointing to the right.

  “You’re sure?” Kit asked.

  “Quite certain,” Falconi replied, sounding it. “The Eye of Anubis seems quite keen on the idea of leaving this place. It is calling most distinctly now.”

  The Red Panda tried very hard not to sound incredulous. “Does this calling include providing directions through a maze?” he asked.

  “It does,” came the reply.

  “That suggests an intelligence at play,” the Red Panda said.

  “It does,” Falconi agreed. “If that seems difficult to believe, try and remember where we are and what we are doing, not to mention that we have done at least six impossible things before breakfast.”