Not that I wouldn’t consider coming back.
Carpe winced. So did Michigan, I noted. “Byzantine—” Carpe started.
“Can you not take no for an answer?” Texas said. “Is that what’s going on here?”
I needed to have a long chat with Carpe later about what constituted negotiations and what was a fucking waste of time. “How about you stop trying to fuck me over and give me the goddamn map? That we agreed upon.”
“Jesus, no wonder we keep getting censorship notes on you,” Michigan said.
“Give me my fucking map.”
“You’re here to negotiate, not hold us at gunpoint,” Texas said.
You know, I wasn’t going to say it, but if the shoe fits . . .
I grabbed Carpe—or the Byzantine Thief grabbed Carpe; my brain was having trouble keeping track of what was real and not real right now. “Give me the map or World Quest gets it—”
“Hey—” Carpe started to argue.
“Do you want your spell book or not?”
Carpe gave a disgruntled sigh but settled out of his argument.
Texas looked like he might punch me, and I readied my poisoned daggers. I’d get a good hit on him if he swung first.
Michigan took the opportunity to step between me and Texas. “Enough, both of you—”
“But she—” Texas started.
“She’s got a mouth worse than a sailor, and you’re offering up a bar fight. What did you expect was going to happen?”
Michigan turned his attention on me next. “All right, Carpe took the liberty of explaining your predicament. We get why you attacked World Quest, and I even get the whole give-the-IAA-the-finger thing you’ve been doing. We both do, but we also don’t want any more attention than we already get. You raiding every site we’ve mapped out in game is causing us some pretty fucking huge problems.”
“To put it in terms and words you might be able to understand, we’re real inclusive that way,” Texas added.
Michigan glared at Texas before continuing. “Because of the extenuating circumstances—namely, someone letting loose cursed artifacts into the public and you dying—we’ve agreed to help and not ban your asses. Got it?”
“I’m waiting for the but.”
I must have picked up some kind of cue from the audio, because Michigan’s avatar looked as if he’d aged a few years where he stood. “All right, here’s the problem; we don’t have the entire map to give you because we never finished the level. We’ve never been inside.”
“On account of us being sane and the whole city being cursed,” Texas added.
“Let me get this straight—you two knew you didn’t have the map and brought me here anyways? Why didn’t you just say that in the first place and save us all the time?”
“Alix—” Carpe started.
I turned on him. “If I’d have known there was no complete map, I’d have never wasted time with your damn book.”
Carpe winced.
“Jesus—is she always like this?” Texas asked.
He fidgeted. “Well . . . sort of, but right now we’re kind of under extenuating circumstances—”
“Enough, Carpe.” Oh why, universe, do you derive so much pleasure setting me up for disaster? “All right, what can you give us?”
“The only one we figure has been inside the city is whoever is removing the items,” Michigan said.
“If they aren’t dead yet,” Texas said.
“We’ve got a decent layout of the tunnels and rooms, including the cistern you’re in right now and most of the big outer traps. Basically anything the IAA had in their archives and a few they didn’t.”
“Wait a minute—how do you know I’m in a cistern?”
Michigan smiled and pointed at Carpe. “Because he’s not the only person here who can hack. Now, I’ll send you the file, but we want your word no more breaking World Quest.”
“Deal,” Carpe said, a little too fast for my liking.
“And no more using our game to steal stuff,” Texas added.
“Yeah, I heard you the first twenty times. For the record, I wasn’t even trying to steal anything this time—”
He snorted. “Yeah, and the guy in the Mexican whorehouse is just visiting his sister.”
Goddamn it . . .
“We’re in agreement, then?” Michigan asked.
Carpe and I both nodded, and Michigan extended his hand.
I knew it wasn’t really there, but what the hell. It felt so real . . .
And then the Buddhist ski chalet was gone, as was Shangri-la. My character, the Byzantine Thief—or me, if you want to get into validating my hallucinogenic delusions of grandeur—was left standing in the Himalayas.
“Carpe?” But Carpe was nowhere to be seen or heard. Son of a bitch had already left. The temperature dropped, and snow that hadn’t been there before started lashing at my face . . .
“Hey, assholes, how do I get out of here?” I yelled.
“Walk down the mountain like everyone else,” I heard Texas say.
Walk down the mountain. Damn it, I was not leaving Byzantine here . . .
I turned around to see if there was a portal or launch pad to get the hell out.
I heard a cross between a roar and a growl behind me.
“And watch out for the abominable snowmen,” came Texas’s voice.
Damn it. I started to run down the mountain path and heard something crash after me.
Come on, brain, positive thoughts, we are not running away from abominable snowmen in the Himalayas . . . I closed my eyes and willed the hallucination to disappear. The cold faded, as did the growling, and my screen came back into focus.
I was back in the catacombs—but the growling had been replaced by yelling . . . Benji’s.
“What’s wrong with you?” he said, his forehead scrunched.
“What’s wrong with me?” What wasn’t wrong with me was more like it . . . “I’m fine. Just tired. The last few days of no sleep catching up with me.”
Benji stood up and took a step back. He wasn’t buying it this time. “Yeah, unh-hunh, and that’s why your nose is bleeding.”
I held my hand to my face and pulled it back. Sure enough, there was blood. Damn it. I glanced back up at Benji. Oh what the hell . . . “All right. In amongst chasing down cursed artifacts, I may have cursed myself—accidently.”
The color drained from his face.
I rolled my eyes. “I’m not contagious—”
His pallor wasn’t from fear though, as I soon discovered. It was rage. He threw down his flashlight, cracking the plastic on the stone floor. “I don’t—You’re not here to save everyone from the artifacts, you’re here to save your own neck!”
OK, it was my turn to get angry. “I’m here to do both. Hell, I don’t want to see anyone else die—”
“Oh and you’d have come here anyways, I suppose? If you weren’t trying to cure yourself?” Benji ran his hands through his hair. “Un-fucking believable.”
“I got cursed retrieving the artifacts to get them out of circulation—and you should talk. You’re helping them excavate, for Christ’s sake!”
He made an exasperated sound. “I don’t have a choice.”
Funny how five small words I’ve said myself carried that much weight.
It’s when I think I’m at my worst that things click—what Rynn, Nadya . . . hell, even Oricho . . . had said.
“Yeah, you do. You can’t stomach the consequences, so you pretend you don’t have a choice. It’s not the same thing.”
The look on his face was still furious, but it wasn’t aimed at me anymore—or not entirely.
I took a gamble. “Look, you’re more than welcome to try and find your own way out. I won’t stop you, but I won’t stand half as much of a chance if you don’t h
elp me—and I’d really like to make sure nothing else leaves this place.”
He swore but grabbed his flashlight and continued back towards the cistern. I checked my phone. The map from the World Quest developers still hadn’t downloaded. “Owl?” came Carpe’s voice.
“Carpe, Nadya—the World Quest map isn’t showing up on my screen.”
I heard Carpe typing on the other end. “Sorry, I’m having trouble pushing the file through.”
Shit. “All right, I’ll need you two to walk me through—meaning traps—sooner rather than later.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Carpe said.
“With descriptions.”
I hoped Carpe got the message, then I set off after Benji. Let’s see if we could find out where the hell these artifacts were coming from.
We stepped out of a small rectangular room into another forked section. We’d found inscriptions in the previous rooms, but nothing referring to the sword or the other cursed artifacts.
Looking at the wall, I could have sworn I needed to go left, not right, like Carpe said. “Carpe, are you sure it’s a right turn here? It’s a dead end—it’s the left tunnel that keeps going.”
“That’s what the map says,” he said.
“Hey, Benji. See anything on this right wall, like a lever that might open a door?”
He gave a cursory examination to the wall, cracked floor tiles—even the ceiling. After he checked the seams between the wall and floor, he stood back up, shaking his head. “It’s just a wall.”
Damn elf . . . “Carpe, it’s a dead end—the only way out is to the right.”
“Alix, Carpe’s right, I can see it on the map—left tunnel,” Nadya added.
I sighed. And while I was telling them that wasn’t possible, there was a rock wall . . . We’d have to find another way around to the Neolithic chamber.
“Where did you say you found those items again? The ones that went missing from the inventory?” Benji asked.
“Daphne Sylph’s private collection in L.A.—two of the pieces, at least. The third one—the bronze sword—reappeared in an L.A. vampire den.”
Benji shook his head at the mention of vampires, and I felt no need to elaborate. “Give me Cooper’s phone,” he said.
“There’s no point; I can’t download anything.”
“No, but you know how he is. He takes more pictures on that thing than is healthy.”
“So?”
“So, maybe he took a picture of the place where he took them from? I mean, why not? If he was going to go to all the trouble of having the artifacts stolen—which he must have, because he went to the trouble of filing the reports in the first place. There’s no advantage to not keeping a record. Besides, I’m pretty sure he didn’t expect you to show up and lift his phone. And besides, the photos would be on his phone’s memory—here, give it to me.”
I passed Benji Cooper’s phone, and he scrolled through the pictures. “Bronze sword—that’s the one, isn’t it?” he said, holding the phone back out.
I took the phone back and focused in on the image. “That’s it exactly.” There were five or six more pictures showing the flint and stone bowl, along with some long shots of the room the three had been found in.
“Wait a minute,” Benji said, grabbing the phone back and zooming in on the room. “Shit, son of a bitch . . . that’s what Cooper wanted with those translations.”
I froze. “What translations?”
Benji shook his head and showed me a picture of an old room.
“Cooper asked me to do some translations on some old Aramaic inscriptions he pulled off one of the burial mounds. I didn’t think of it at the time because it was way past the Neolithic time point. Figured they were added by the next batch of people who moved in and started building the monastery foundation. There was a lot of term discontinuity though, and parts had been added a hundred years apart—as if someone was making notes.”
“And you’re just telling me this now?”
“I figured it was a translation mix-up, all right? I didn’t think it was related to the cursed items. The items were long gone by the time I got there—and you said yourself they were from the Neolithic sites.” He pointed to the image. “That room’s not Neolithic; it’s ancient, but built during Aramaic times.”
“All right, what was in them—disjointed shorthand?”
“They were run-of-the-mill burial spells—similar in nature to the Egyptians’, but much less refined; not as much detail, and a lot more room for ad-lib.”
That made sense—the Egyptians had picked their mummification spells off the supernaturals. From there they’d spread out to other regions, but a lot was lost in ancient games of telephone.
“It was talking about the dead,” Benji continued, “but there was some funny stuff that kept slipping in—modifiers and descriptors. It was weird.”
Supernatural spells in general were a bad idea. When humans started ad-libbing them, things went worse fast. “What kind of funny stuff?” I asked.
“Ah, images and words I’d associate with recruiting an army. I figured it was just a strange way of referring to a burial site for soldiers—and some stuff on the afterlife I thought might have traveled over from Egypt.”
I thought back to what Mr. Kurosawa had said about armies of the dead marching across the plains. There was only one reason ancient humans obsessed about burial rites. The Egyptians, the Norse, Nubians—you name it, all ancients had the same agenda. “Resurrection,” I said.
Benji frowned. “Well, yeah, that goes without saying—”
“No, that’s the thing I was missing. I figured this place was lived in by some ancient supernatural who used to control humans and terrorize the neighbors. Cooper’s forte was never Neolithic cultures in this region. He was always way more interested in the cultures who came after: the Egyptians, the Sumerians, the Aramaics. All the cultures who’d obsessed with the afterlife and obtaining immortality through death.”
Oh man, my head hurt considering the implications: it wasn’t the supernaturals we needed to worry about, it was what the humans had done with all the cursed and magic garbage the supernaturals had left behind when they’d gotten bored and moved on or died.
I’ve always said supernatural spells are way more dangerous in the hands of humans, and Cooper had stumbled onto the ancients figuring out a way to get them to work. . . .
Jumping onto that logic, what better way for the supernaturals to get a free pass to come out in the open? If someone like Cooper and who knows who else was running around raising an army of dead, the supernaturals and IAA could kiss the anonymous supernatural underworld good-bye. It’d be well and out in the open.
But how did the three artifacts fit into it?
“Benji, I need to see that room now,” I said.
He nodded. “Down the right hall. I think it loops up with one of the other rooms Cooper had me translating—or should.”
“Carpe, did you hear that? Change of plans—I need you and Nadya to look for traps on the fly.”
“I thought we decided you were going to the Neolithic chamber one level down?” he said.
“Trust me, this is a better idea.” That chamber, the original resting place of the knife, would give me a better chance of finding the original curse instructions, but Benji’s chamber would tell me what the hell the ancient Aramaeans had been doing and what the hell Cooper was trying to replicate . . .
“Alix?” Benji said.
I ignored him for the moment. “Just make sure we don’t stumble into a trap,” I said to Carpe.
“Seriously—Alix,” Benji said, this time with more trepidation.
I muted my earpiece. “What?”
“What the hell is your cat doing?”
I glanced to where Benji was pointing. Captain was hunched in front of the right-facing tunnel, growl
ing at something past the shadows.
Something growled back and reached out with a corpse’s rotting hand.
Dr. Sanders—or what I figured was left of my old supervisor—stepped into the light cast by our flashlights and reached for Captain. He was still wearing the tweed suit and tie I remembered from lectures and team meetings.
He growled and shambled towards us. I scrambled back out of sheer instinct.
Well, now I knew what had happened to him and why he hadn’t been more concerned about an ancient cursed dig site being opened up under his name. I doubted he cared much at all what Cooper was doing with this place anymore.
“Is that a-a-” Benji stuttered, stepping back.
“Zombie? Yeah, I was hoping that was obvious.” Unfortunately, what I know about the undead can be summed up in World Quest experience.
“What’s happening down there?” Nadya said.
“Found Dr. Sanders. He’s a zombie.” Well, he wasn’t rushing us yet. Maybe real zombies didn’t rush people like they did in World Quest.
He growled and bared his teeth.
No such luck.
“Do you know anything about them?” I asked Benji, forcing optimism I didn’t feel.
He shook his head and opened his mouth, but no words came out. At least he wasn’t trying to wedge himself between me and the zombie, like some other archaeology postdoc I know. “Do you think he’s contagious, like in the movies?” he asked.
“Those are movies, not real life.”
“Then why are you backing up?”
“Because now is not the time to find out.”
Captain was still sniffing at Dr. Sanders, curious more than anything why something that was dead was still moving.
The zombie moved faster than should have been possible for something in the throes of rigor mortis and lunged for my cat.
Captain took one look at the zombie’s outstretched arms and turned tail. His legs just about skidded out from under him as he propelled himself down the right tunnel.
For once I agreed with my psychotic cat. I grabbed Benji and bolted after Captain. I think the one bonus about fever is you stop noticing mild disturbances, like pain in the legs or shortness of breath. We kept running, Dr. Sanders growling in pursuit.
Owl and the City of Angels Page 35
