by Jenn Stark
“Oh, so you do speak. Excellent.” Mantorov nodded to one of the men, and a frequency filled the air, causing my bones to vibrate. So did the arrows embedded in Armaeus’s flesh. He scowled, his jaw clenched against the pain. “I need you to focus, though, dark priest. That is the purpose for this particular mix of base metals in these arrow points. As you are slowly bleeding out, you will remain stable. And I need you to translate for me.”
“No.”
“I don’t, importantly, need you to be alive to do it. Your voice will still work as long as one of the arrows remain inside you. The Egyptians truly were onto something with their death rituals.”
We were marched forward toward a bright rectangular opening at the far end of the room. I watched the dark pools spread across Armaeus’s back. He had to have known this was coming, right? The man read minds. He had to have known.
Mantorov pushed on. “Speak the words you were born to speak, then you may die in peace and comfort.” He snapped another command at his men, and they lit four torches at each corner of the room, then doused their flashlights. As steady beams were replaced by flickering torchlight, we saw the ancient underground chamber of the Temple of Thoth the way it was meant to be viewed.
I stared all around me. The room was walled in gold. The burnished panels gleamed in the incandescent light. At the center of the room, a large table stood. On it were the scroll cases, still closed. I should have been glad that I could get this close without the cases leveling me. I could sense the wards Mantorov had wrought to protect us, like layers of heavy air. The man knew his magic and wielded it well. But something else nagged deep in my brain, where Armaeus’s explanation lingered.
The original creation myth he had recited was born out of darkness, water, air, and eternity, he’d said. We were in an underground chamber, so yes, there was darkness, but very little air and no water. This setup didn’t seem quite right for the creation myth. What would that mean?
“Speak.”
Armaeus was pushed forward to the table, Mantorov reaching out to bear down on the edge of one of the arrowheads. Sweat dripped from Armaeus’s face as he grimaced in pain. I’d never seen him so taxed, the veneer of his cool civility completely wiped away. It was as if he was submitting, purifying himself in the fires of his own destruction.
A bead of his sweat dropped onto the table, and I blinked. Water.
“Open them.” Armaeus finally said, but his voice wasn’t the rasp I was expecting. Instead, it resonated through the space around us with primal force. He was wounded, yes. But he wasn’t quite dead.
Mantorov was no fool, however. “Open them yourself.” He nodded to one of his men, and the man pushed the scroll cases toward Armaeus with gloved hands. Amped as I was, I vibrated with the electrical jolt when the Magician touched the cases. Simon, with his wellspring of kinetic power, felt it too. Mantorov straightened, but the other men around Armaeus didn’t flinch.
Armaeus stretched his fingers over the hieroglyphs, so similar to the ancient markings of the Egyptians but fundamentally different to my eye, older, richer. I thought about the coinage I’d seen in the Devil’s antique shop, how it had also looked similar to and yet different from so many different things. Atlantis, Kreios had said. Could that be possible?
I glanced around the underground cavern of gold, and decided…sure it could.
Armaeus spoke. The chanting rhythm of his words was heavy and hypnotic, but it didn’t mask the sound that grew up from beneath him, a rumble of heavy earth.
No, not earth. Water. Small holes spat water from the corners of the room, and water leaked forth. First in a slow trickle, then stronger, until tiny streams began to slither across the room. Sweet Christmas, not another freaking flood.
Mantorov stepped forward and yanked one of the arrows out of the Magician. Blood sprayed, making my stomach pitch.
“Faster. I don’t plan on drowning down here while you gasp and mumble.”
Armaeus bowed his head and focused on the scroll case in his hand once more. But his energy had become erratic, unmoored. Four arrows, not three, were needed to ground Armaeus. Had Mantorov known? Had he deliberately destabilized Armaeus, or had he simply wanted to cause him pain?
At that moment, the first scroll case opened. Wind rushed through the cavern, putting out the torches—until nothing but darkness remained. Darkness and water and air. All that was left was eternity. From Armaeus’s grunt of pain, I realized Mantorov must have yanked another arrow out of him. He stumbled forward, and I realized what was happening here. Eternity. The breaking of eternity was needed for the spell to work, and how better to evoke that eternal element than killing a man who should not die?
Flashlights flared on again, all of them trained on Armaeus.
“Heard rumors of this, of you,” Mantorov said, eyeing him gleefully as the second, then third case snapped open. “Kreios was impure, his powers as dark and redolent with corruption as mine. He would be no good sacrifice to the gods. But you—you were their servant. Your immortality was a gift granted from them, not some elixir you forced down in the center of a screaming mob. You are a worthy sacrifice for me to make.”
He shoved the Magician down until Armaeus’s head was bowed over the final, smallest scroll case. “Open it!”
Armaeus’s hands spasmed on the scroll case, and it broke open.
A burst of roiling flame shattered the darkness, and all the creatures of Hell screamed forth.
Taking advantage of fiery chaos, I turned to the man beside me, who stood stupefied with shock at what he was seeing and hearing. I drew my hand back in a tight fist. The sound of my punch landing squarely on his jaw barely registered in the howling wind, but was far more gratifying than I’d hoped. Flames and sparks of electricity shot round and round the golden room. I vibrated with it, but Simon practically glowed. He turned to the man holding him and grabbed him by the throat. The redolent smell of burned flesh flashed through the air.
Armaeus and Mantorov still stood at the table. I dispatched a second guard, then turned, expecting Armaeus to be swept up in some kind of holy terror. But he wasn’t. He was staring at Mantorov as if he’d seen a ghost. No, not at Mantorov… Through him.
My gaze leapt to the wall beyond the Russian, who now stood transfixed, his eyes wide, his lips peeled back. And the wall…moved. Cracks of light arced out from its surface, the very stones on the verge of evaporating.
An unearthly whisper shuddered forth, filling the space.
“You cannot hold me forever,” it rasped, speaking through Mantorov’s mouth. “You cannot guard every portal back into the light. There are too many of them, Magician, and you are too few.”
“We will hold the line.” Armaeus’s voice had also changed—it was deeper, fuller. I turned at a sudden move to my right, then tackled a man fleeing down the room toward a far door—good to know, since that was probably the exit out of this hellhole—and worked his gun free. Except when I swung it back around, I didn’t know where to aim. Mantorov was in the middle of some kind of epileptic fit, and Armaeus was…well, disintegrating.
“Eternity…” breathed the voice, but it no longer spoke through Mantorov. It came directly through the wall. “It takes on a whole new meaning when you face it, doesn’t it? You are weakening, Armaeus. Your strength ebbing away.”
The wall bowed outward from fine slits carved into the gold, and Simon cursed, his electricity going dormant while more burned skin filled the air with acrid fumes.
“Finish the spell, Magician!” Mantorov struggled upright again, regaining his capacity for speech. He wheeled toward Armaeus. “You cannot stop now!”
“It is no longer the time of creation.” Armaeus closed his hands around the scroll cases. “You are forbidden!”
I could see light crackling through the bones on his skin and I stared, horrified. Armaeus swelled and seemed to come apart at the joints, pure light cascading from him as he worked to process the full weight of the magic he was wielding. Panic seared through me and I s
taggered forward, struggling to see whatever was coming through the wall.
And then I did.
Terror stilled the scream in my throat. In that moment, I was no longer in the subterranean chamber of gold. I was in my backyard, the wall of fire and pain behind me. And I was running, running, my eyes streaming with tears, my vision blurred, unable to escape the fire. It raged around me, and as I stared, a creature reared in the far distance. A blue dragon trapped on a field of red. Its wings spread wide and—
“No!” I cried before I fully realized what I was doing, and emptied a round of firepower into Mantorov’s body. He jerked with the blast, toppling toward the cracking wall. For a moment, he gazed at me with all-consuming shock in his face, and then his expression morphed to fury as the man who’d stolen so many children had something stolen from him. Something he also could not get back, no matter how he tried.
“I cannot die!” he roared. “I cannot!”
“The hell you can’t!”
“Nigin!” Armaeus’s command overrode all the noise. The wall seemed to draw back into itself, sweeping Mantorov with it in a burst of white-hot fire. The scream of the dragon was the last thing I heard—and only then did I notice another, closer roar.
“Not this again,” I groaned.
Water crashed onto us from all sides, swamping the room. Simon, closest to the door, was carried out in the initial burst before he started running of his own volition, screaming about stairs. Let no one ever say Simon wasn’t smart.
“Go,” Armaeus cried, half collapsing on the table in the center of the room. “Follow Simon.”
“You first!” I waded toward him until I stood next to him in front of the smoking scroll cases. “Or I won’t.”
The Magician cursed something in an ancient language I couldn’t make out, but when he turned toward the door, I swept the scroll cases into my jacket. I wasn’t coming halfway across the blasted world to watch people freaking disintegrate, and have nothing to show for it. Those scroll cases contained answers. Answers I was more than ready to learn.
The water flowed at a higher intensity, pounding from the walls. I splashed the final few feet toward the door, turning around one last time to scan the room. Mantorov really was gone, I realized. The portal had swallowed him whole.
But something else was in the chamber that I hadn’t seen before, something etched into the wall in sharp relief. I stopped and stared, despite the rising waters.
A dragon…with its wings spread wide.
“Miss Wilde.”
Armaeus ’s voice had the effect of a compulsion, and I turned around, suddenly aware the water was up to my thighs. This made running problematic, but the stairs beyond the far door beckoned, and I bent forward, racing for the exit.
Chapter Twenty-One
We ended up at the bottom of the basilica’s well. Sounds of continued destruction echoed through the passages.
“Can’t you teleport or something?” I muttered, angling my flashlight up. “Or maybe call upon the Power of Grayskull at least, for some heat? I’m freezing my brains off here.”
“I’ve summoned assistance.” Armaeus leaned against the wall, his pallor evident in the dim glow.
“And I’ve had enough fire for one day, thanks,” Simon’s voice echoed from the far side of the shaft. He was shaking out his electronics, a fruitless task given the fact we were surrounded by fifteen feet of water. “I’ve had pieces of my body fried that are specifically designated fire-safety zones. You could have warned me, Armaeus.”
“You had yet to tap your abilities sufficiently. It’s good for you to start practicing.” Armaeus’s voice held a breathiness I recognized all too clearly, having extensive experience with getting my ass kicked. The guy was feeling his age. And probably those four arrow holes.
Simon groaned. “Well, it’s not good for me to lose data. I couldn’t recreate that temple grid if I tried.”
Armaeus stayed silent, and I eyed him, trying to gauge how much blood he’d lost. Not to mention the whole disintegration thing after he’d opened up the scroll cases.
Cases that he’d then pretty much left for dead. “So what was the deal back there? I thought you wanted to preserve magic in the world.”
He winced, shifting against the rock wall. “Preserve the balance. Dark to light. Destruction, of course, is not generally the Council’s stock-in-trade. When one element of magic grows to excess, however, the other must be bolstered. We can usually count on civil or religious conflict to destroy. But even when that destruction happens by accident, it is not our place to stop it.”
“So you planned on leaving those cases behind?”
His smile twisted. “You have them, don’t you?”
I shifted. “Well, yeah.”
“So clearly I did not.” Ignoring my scoff, he continued. “But your concerns are unfounded, Miss Wilde. There will always be magic in the world. It cannot be completely destroyed—ever.” Armaeus shook his head as the great stone lid of the cistern above us moved with a loud scrape. “Magic is not contained in an object or a person. It is merely reinforced or channeled. Just as the waters of the deepest Earth transform into the crystal clouds of the atmosphere and return again as rain, it constantly transforms and regenerates. An endless cycle.”
There was something important here, I knew it. Something I didn’t want to miss. “So once magic is in the world…pure magic, or a pure magical entity…nothing can take it out?”
He hesitated. “Not without great cause. And great sacrifice.”
“Which is not exactly a ‘no.’”
A resounding scrape sounded above us, and hushed voices floated down. No one called out on either side, though, as a rope dropped into the dark space. I flicked the light up again, long enough to ascertain that no guns were being leveled at us. So far, so good. “Simon, you go first,” Armaeus said, pushing the rope to him. “Can you secure the devices?”
“For all the good it will do us.” Simon reached for the rope and pulled himself out of the water, wrapping his fists in the thick nylon as it was pulled taut. He swung toward the wall, bouncing off gently before getting his footing. Moments later, a second rope dangled down.
“Miss Wilde.”
“Not going to happen.” I grabbed the rope and stepped toward him. “Maybe you’re not noticing the giant gaping flesh wounds you’re rocking, but I am. Let me tie you up.”
The slightest hint of amusement flared past his pain. “At last, now we are getting somewhere.”
Still, he didn’t protest as I made a makeshift belt out of the trailing end of the rope. At the last minute, eyeing the seeping mass of his back, I wrapped it around both of us, my chest to his spine. The scroll cases shifted in my jacket, like stolen beer cans after a midnight Stop-N-Go raid. I slid to the right to avoid bruising a rib.
“I could imagine a better configuration.”
“Focus, Armaeus. I don’t want the rope to make things worse. You may want to warn the boys upstairs that they’ll be hauling up a heavy load.”
The rope cinched tight, and I winced, feeling it constrict me against Armaeus’s water- and blood-soaked clothing. My face buried into his back, my hands wrapped around him, I was surrounded by the scent of not only his blood, but cinnamon and heady spices, heat and fire and earth. My arms went naturally around his waist, my hands on his chest, and after a moment, his own hands came up, the warmth of his palms covering my fingers. He said nothing, his mental channel silent for once, but his hands cradled mine as if he was handling a rare and precious gem. The warmth he exuded filled me to the aching marrow of my bones, and I hung, limp and helpless as we were hauled out of the well.
I shouldn’t care that he was hurt, I knew. He’d inexplicably brought hundreds of Connecteds into harm’s way in Vegas. He was doubtless willing to sacrifice hundreds more to preserve his precious balance. He deserved to be hurt, deserved to suffer. And I shouldn’t care. I shouldn’t.
The ride back to the airplane in the Egyptian work
men’s SUV was all but silent. Fortunately, we were almost off the temple grounds before the first geyser of water from the ancient temple room broke the surface. The Nile wasn’t due to flood for another good two months, but hey, details. I’m sure the local utilities groups would come up with some way to spin the sudden deluge.
Simon watched a set of flashing lights crest the rise and raced toward the temple site. “Police? Really?”
The Magician’s voice sounded like a long stretch of gravel. “They would have been summoned eventually. I simply moved up the timetable to encourage Mantorov’s men not to return.”
“Okay, but…will there be anything left for them to find?”
Armaeus shifted in his seat. “The chamber was completely sealed off from above when we reached it. By the time we left, it was not. The accumulated weight of thousands of years of debris will crash through the cracked roof. Water will mix with sand, filling the chamber with mud. In time, the waters will recede, and the chamber will remain, perfectly preserved. It will be rediscovered, at length, reasonably intact.”
I frowned. “A length?” Dawn was starting to light the far eastern edges of the sky, and I could see the geyser now. It wasn’t big, it wasn’t strong, but for a land etched out of a desert, it was something of a miracle.
I sensed Armaeus’s gaze on me, but I didn’t turn his way. I couldn’t look at him directly, at the evidence of his trial. I knew his immortality didn’t preclude him from injury, or from death from deliberate action. But in all the jobs I’d worked for him, I’d never seen him bleed. I’d never seen him…vulnerable.
His words seemed more gentle when he spoke again. “I do not possess oracular powers, Miss Wilde, but it isn’t too difficult a guess. The first rushed thought of the authorities will be of buried treasure and national historical value, but that will quickly cede to the realization that a fissure of the Nile has unexpectedly found its way to El Ashmunein, well away from the main line of the river. The god of resources and utilities has more power than Thoth does in this century. Undoubtedly, there will be the Egyptian equivalent of a media uproar, as the two sides draw lines quite literally in the sand, over how the land should be excavated and the fissure both preserved and exploited. If history is any guide, it will be quite some time before the chamber is reopened.
