Gary Gygax - Dangerous Journeys 1 - Anubis Murders

by Gary Gygax

  Magick to return to normal form—that of Setne Inhetep. More dweomers to wipe out all trace of the transformation and to prevent tracking by scent. That was over too swiftly for the pursuing beasts to stop. Then the Egyptian made a point of sending himself elsewhere very rapidly. Now he could be seen far away at about the same time the chase was on in Scathach; there would be a different sort of hunt when the pack came up with an empty bag. Meanwhile, Setne had a lot to accomplish. The kidnap of Rachelle was a complication he most certainly didn't need! He had to locate the girl and rescue her first, and the Master of Jackals would have to wait.

  "That's what they want!" he said suddenly aloud, taken by the obviousness of the whole event.

  "What's yer trouble?" the surly waitress demanded.

  Setne grinned his most evil grin. The "Phoenician's" look was more than enough to make the woman jump back and clutch at herself. "I'll 'ave yer waggin' worm of a tongue, I will, next time ya speaks thatta way, bag!" he growled menacingly. She fainted, and Inhetep strolled out of the place. He no longer cared if anyone remembered the Phonecian. "They know why I am here, what I am meant to do, and will stop at nothing to see that I fail," he said to himself as he stepped into the street. He saw a peripheral movement and managed to jerk his head aside in time. A thumb-thick bolt from a crossbow, reeking of venom, stood buried in the timber frame of the building. It was an inch from his ear.

  = 8 -

  HIGH ROAD, LOW ROAD

  There was nothing to do but run. Setne ran as fast as he could, bobbing and weaving as he went. Another of the quarrels zipped by his head, its passage making a nasty humming in the air as if it were a live and hateful thing. He fumbled in his garments. The assassin was indeed using living missiles. No. More properly, the killer was seeking the Egyptian's life with bolts enchanted to a state resembling that of life. These missiles would seek him out as would hungry mosquitoes, only their sting would be as poisonous as an asp's. Inhetep invoked the force of the talisman he had drawn from one of the little pockets inside his tunic. It was fashioned of hard, red stone—a carnelian shaped into a cobra's head. Even as he called forth its power, the wizard-priest continued his evasive running. Turning a corner, which he was certain was out of sight of the crossbow-armed assassin, Inhetep flattened himself against the wall and held the red-hued serpent form up before his face, as if he were peering at it.

  Another of the buzzing missiles shot round the corner, the quarrel seeking him out as if tied to Inhetep by a cord. The thick shaft touched the talisman as it sped to pierce the Egyptian's eye. Both bolt and stone evaporated in a little puff of smoke. "Rot you!" Setne cursed, aiming the useless words at the unseen attacker. There was no time for him to work up anything really effective against whomever it was, and the magick cast upon the little arrow had been so strong as to destroy his prized ward against poisonous attack! Without hesitation, Setne again began running, ducking into an alley, pounding along a covered passage, thus eluding further missiles and possible pursuit—for the moment.

  His enemy knew him as the "Phonecian," and that meant that Inhetep was now in an impossible situation. If he shifted to some other guise, he would be draining yet more of his precious reserve of heka-power needed to survive the lethal assaults which were sure to be forthcoming. Yet he had no time to rest and restore his energy until he could manage to hide himself. In this form or his own, the Egyptian would be recognized and hunted. Probably any other physical guise he took would likewise be identifiable to those who were seeking him. The forces being used against him were impossibly great; the foe was employing dweomers of a sort not possible to humans. To combat the threat, Setne had to get back to his own lodging, get to his belongings somehow, and arm himself for the contest. How to do so without being seen? There was an easy but obvious method. It was so obvious (and dangerous) that the wizard-priest opted to try it. The Master of Jackals and his thugs would probably dismiss the possibility of Inhetep trying it.

  A little brown sparrow winged just above the tall rooftops of Camelough, arched upwards for a minute, circled, and then sped straight ahead, diving as it went. A sparrow hawk nearby gave chase, thinking to take the prey unsuspecting, but it vanished into an open vent in a gable, and the raptor gave a frustrated "kreeep!" The hawk flapped up and then shot down into an enclosed courtyard where it changed into a brown-robed man.

  The rats in the walls of the inn scurried aside to make a wide berth for the big, reddish one that scuttled along their avenues. Something about it was unnatural, and it was too fierce-looking to approach. Ignoring poison and traps, Setne-the-rodent located the area of his room and found a narrow opening that he could just squeeze through. He peeped out with beady black eyes first, just in case. . . .

  "Don't touch anything!" the blond man said to the pair of armed soldiers in the room. "It is dangerous to probe the effects of any mage, let alone a wizard-priest's things." The two guardsmen grumbled a little at the thought of not being able to filtch anything but were careful to avoid even the furniture. "You two, stand watch outside. Give the alarm if anyone comes in—or even if you so much as hear noise from this room! Clear?" Both soldiers assented. The man with straw-colored hair tarried in Setne's bed chamber, eyeing the various objects scattered about.

  Even as a rat, the Egyptian could sense that the fellow was a practitioner of some sort. The man was probing for auras and magickal emanations. The rat scurried beyond range. He waited until the blond police official left, then, he squeezed his rat form through the narrow opening. Setne performed the little dance and accompanying chitterings to negate the transformation, and if the pair of guardsmen heard the rat sounds, they ignored them. It took only seconds. "That's better," the wizard-priest whispered to himself as he stood once again in normal form. It was an easy matter for him, then, to lay a casting which muted all sounds in his chamber, even though it took nearly all of his remaining heka to do so.

  In a matter of moments, the wizard-priest had gathered everything he needed, including his personal reservoirs of magickal energy. Then he changed his garments, slipped a few clean clothes into a small leather valise, and headed straight for the door, where the pair of soldiers stood guard. The magister was, frankly, in high dudgeon. Their backs were turned away from the bedroom as the two stood chatting idly, attention focused vaguely upon the entry to the suite. Inhetep stepped forward, touching each man on the neck with either hand. "You are alone together," he said softly. The cloaking spell existed only in the inner room, and the guards nodded as they heard the Egyptian's voice. "You have seen nobody at all, have you?" Each man agreed with that, too. "Good!" Setne said with hearty comradery. "But you must be ready, because the next person to enter through that door will be the fugitive, Inhetep!"

  "We'll knock him senseless the moment he comes in!"

  "Be careful. The Egyptian is tricky," Setne said, his hawk-face smiling. "He might appear as a woman—even your superior!"

  "We attack anyway, don't we Flynn!" It wasn't a question, and Flynn nodded his concurrence with hard face.

  Inhetep returned to the inner chamber. He rubbed his hands together, the coppery flesh nearly glowing in the subdued light of the room. Inhetep smiled broadly. "I do so love a real challenge! Well, my so-called Master of Jackals, you think to order the course of things, but I shan't comply. No, no indeed I shall not. You think to chivvy me about as a hare, or at worst have me running about seeking for Rachelle. That is what you wish. That is of no import, for Magister Setne Inhetep does as he wishes. We shall meet anon. Sooner than you think, too, Master Jackal. Until then, dear fellow, you might have a bit of care. You won't enjoy our meeting in the least bit when it comes."

  The wizard-priest pulled a cowl over his head, kept his hands concealed beneath his commodious cloak, and whispered a few syllables. There was a rippling in the atmosphere, a faint soughing of air as if a wind blew into the room from some hot desert. Inhetep stepped ahead a pace and vanished. He was gone from Camelough, Lyonnesse—all of Eropa, in fact. H
e had used his arts to step from the room to his own private place in Egypt as one would step from house to street. That took care of his immediate pursuers. The police and various minions of the government of Lyonnesse could blanket city and country looking for him. It was high time to seek answers to certain important questions. Then he might return to Camelough, or he might not, but he would locate both Rachelle and the Master of Jackals—undoubtedly the former held prisoner in the lair of the latter.

  The enemy would certainly have sufficient powers available to scan the immediate past. They would see how the wizard-priest had entered the bedroom, taken care of sounds, guards, and then left. They would not know exactly what he had taken, how Setne had left, nor to what destination his dweomer had carried him. The Master Jackal, however, would certainly be able to eventually trace Inhetep's trail to this place. Setne cast a carefully screened trap just in case he was followed. He laid a spell of duplication, so that if anyone conjured themselves into this place—or sent some nasty visitor from a nethersphere to attack him—that casting would be deflected and shunt the intruder away from his sanctum. In the event it was a dweom-ercraefter attempting to visit him, Setne's magick would flip the other right back to his starting point. However, if it was a heka-binder sending a demon or the like to handle the business, the energy would shift. The assassin would then step instead into the immediate proximity of the one who tried to send the monster elsewhere.

  "A nasty little surprise however it occurs," Inhetep said aloud as he completed his work. "Now I'm off to see about this impersonation of deities."

  He exited the hidden room and entered his own study. No one was around because it was near midnight in Egypt. That suited Inhetep, for he wanted neither company nor suspicion of his being there. Leaving the villa by a side exit, Setne slipped past a flock of geese. The least disturbance and the birds made more noise than ten times their number of dogs. The gaggle was silent. Then he strode into the wastes which ran westward from the village. His long legs carried him quickly, and soon his sandaled feet were pushing along in loose sand. A mile ahead was a small pyramid, one which was relatively new in terms of this ancient land, for it had been constructed only some two millennia ago by one of Inhetep's forebears, one Neteranubi-f-Hra, to be exact. It had been done ostensibly as the "Eternal House" of the ancestral mage, but in actuality it had another purpose altogether. The secret chamber in the heart of the pyramid was most magickal.

  There are many means of moving from one reality to another, to journey from sphere to sphere, plane to plane. The "underworld" of Egypt, the place of many of its most powerful deital and entital beings such as Osiris, Ptah, and Seker, is that nether-realm known as the Duat. Getting from anywhere else in the multiverse to the Duat is a very difficult matter, unless one happens to profess the Egyptian ethos, accept one or more of their pantheon, and then dies. Setne qualified for two of the three conditions, but he had no intention of dying—at least, not soon! Neither had his great-great-great-ump-teenth-great grandfather, Neteranubi-f-Hra. The pyramid had been constructed specifically to allow the passage of a living person from this world, called Yarth, into the manifold planes and their attendant spheres, called the Duat. There the strong and daring dweomercraefter might meet and converse with deity, fiend, serpent, and all manner of strange and mighty beings. Of course, that individual risked much, but that is the nature of the most powerful magicks used by mankind. In such a high stakes game, the rewards were great, but failure could mean death—or worse.

  Inside the pyramid, safely through the protective traps and secret passages, Setne Inhetep began the family Ritual of Transference. At the proper moment, he spoke the word of power coupled with the place he wished to go in the Duat, Amenti. This was the key to the entrance of the planes of the underworld. Twelve great divisions existed in the Duat. Each was ruled by a deity, Osiris being nominal overlord of all, an emperor of sorts. This headship, such as it was, came as much by dint of force as anything else. Many of the planes comprising the underworld of shadowy nature were gruesome places, ruled by Evil, populated by monstrous beings. By entering the Duat in the heart of Osiris' domains, the wizard-priest avoided the terrible places both before it and deeper within the whole. But in Amenti was a judgment hall, as well as that place where the spheres of Osiris' own habitation began.

  "Who would stand before the Throne and the forty-two Assessors of the Hall of Judgment?" demanded a savage-faced neter, a being of power and neutral disposition.

  "It is Setne Inhetep, a faithful priest of Thoth, worker in heka, who seeks to pass," the Egyptian responded to the challenge. Then he named the name of that Watcher, his Doorkeeper companion, and the Herald, too—all of whom kept safe the gateway to the Hall of Maati. "But I have not come except as a supplicant to speak with Lord Osiris, and Lord Anubis, and my own Lord Thoth, too, should he be therein. Living am I, and alive will I remain, Eyes-as-Piercing-as-Spears. My flesh is proof against the knives of the fiends, my shadow so strong as to grapple with serpents, my heart so fierce as to make pale the face of monster or demon hungering for it. Soul and spirit and double are threefold proof against any devil who would have at them. My name is proof against fiery uraei."

  The strange and terrible ones before the tall doors opened them. "You may enter then, man. Know that you have but little time in this place, for living flesh cannot survive long here. Beware lest you have to return again for judgment!"

  "I am conversant on all matters pertaining to that, too, guardian of this portal. If that should eventuate, you may be assured that the balance will not dip against me." Setne spoke the names of the doorposts, lintel, threshold, and door, then strode through the open entry without further ado, looking neither right nor left, and keeping tight control over his mind and bodv. One falsp word or step could be fatal. When he entered, he found the endless hall dimly illuminated and deserted. Of course, those who were outside wouldn't know of the conditions inside. There were two means of egress. One led to the Field of Reeds, home of those spirits who were true and just and sought an afterworld of twilight. The place was called Sekhet-Aaru and its viceroy was Menu-qet. The second gateway led to the place called Sekhet-Hetepet. That plane was directly overseen by Osiris. This place was but the first of many "halls" in Osiris' own demesnes, each such place a sort of quasi-sphere. In the multiple planes of Osiris' personal realm, there were also many other, larger spheres, places not unlike Yarth and places very unlike it. The Opener of the Duat, Anubis, could be anywhere therein, or even further off in one of the other planes of this portion of Pandemonium. Thoth might not be here at all.

  When the mighty sun deity, Ra himself, journeyed through the Duat, he progressed only with the company of powerful beings to assure safety of passage. How could a mere priest and wizard of mortal sort manage such a trek should the ones he sought be afield? "Which portal must I pass?" he asked aloud.

  From the shadowy depths of the hall stepped a darker figure. "You shall pass neither, ur-kheri-heb," a baritone growl informed him.

  Setne started, his hand bringing up an ankh of copper as he whirled. "Oh! My Lord Apuat," he said, visibly relaxing. The wolf-headed deity was the friend and companion of Anubis and the "Opener of the Southern Way." That is, Apuat was a guardian for all good folk deceased and bound for this place.

  "You are not welcome here, Setne Inhetep," the wolf-headed god said. He came closer, adding, "It is not for want of merit in you, servant of Thoth."

  "May I ask you a question?"

  Apuat nodded. "That you may do, for my sole command is to see that you do not enter the planes here."

  "I need ask of you, then, my lord, what offense have I given to Lord Osiris?"

  "None at all, albeit it was that Great One who sent me forth here to watch for you."

  Inhetep was puzzled. "There is gross slander and falsity in the lands west of Egypt that Lord Anubis has been made into a dark and vile tool of Set. . . ." The tall deity seemed unmoved, but Inhetep plunged on. "There is great power bei
ng used to mask this evil work, machinations which seemed directed to establish the red-eyed one as greatest in Eropa. Should he gain such energy from that, the whole balance of—"

  With a hand outstretched to rest on the wiz-ard-priest's shoulder, Apuat interrupted Setne's sentence. "It is as it is. Osiris has forbidden Anubis to speak to you, and even Thoth has chosen to withhold converse. It is not as it seems. I cannot say more about that."

  "Set! I will seek out the Lord of the Lowest if need be." He looked at the wolf-headed entity whose visage belied heart and purpose. "Is that permitted?"

  The fanged head shook slowly, almost sadly. "There is much power, and it would never permit your entry into the Eleventh Plane, to Jessert-Baiu where the Ass dwells." Apuat referred, of course, to Set's realm in the Duat, not to his domains among the stars. "The ship of Ra travels there with utmost difficulty, Setne Inhetep. You are not ready for such a journey. Yet, perhaps all of the gods of Egypt depend on your work. Do you think it strange that deities must place their hope on a mortal?"

  All his words were laden with hidden meanings. Setne was sure that Apuat was somehow constrained from revealing what he knew just as the others were. This was indeed something beyond murder and extortion, but perhaps there was also less to it than might appear. "Then I must locate the one foe, the liar who claims to be Master of Jackals."

  "It is always wise to remember that what is falsehood today might be truth tomorrow," the wolf-head said slowly. "Your own instincts must guide you now, Magister Setne Inhetep. Let your five senses take you quickly to the heart of the problem."

  Setne bowed. When he looked up, the hall had vanished, and he was again within the hidden chamber in the pyramid. He sat there for several minutes, reviewing and contemplating all that had just occurred. "So," Inhetep said at last, standing up and walking purposefully toward the hidden exit from the stuffy little chamber, "I think the abortive visit to the Duat was fruitful after all."