Key to Conflict

by Talia Gryphon

  A large chamber lined with lapis lazuli, lit by torches, was before them. Deeper blue than a late evening sky and shot with gold, the lapis reflected in the torch light, making the room seem warmer. Bas-relief scenes of ancient Egypt were carved into the semiprecious stone. The furnishings were sparse but ornate. Gilded benches and chaise lounges were placed here and there on a floor of polished black marble. Scents of frankincense and other exotic oils filled the air. It looked and smelled like an ancient ballroom of Cleopatra’s.

  “Aleksei, you and Tanis will go to rest. I will see to your lady.” Sekhmet’s voice was pure and lovely.

  Gillian shivered as the black eyes of the stunning goddess turned to her. “Come with me, little doctor. I will see to your safety while we Vampires sleep.”

  A hand on her shoulder made Gillian pause. She turned to see Tanis’s concerned and lovely face. “You will be all right, Gillian. You are safer here than anywhere else on the planet.”

  His voice was deep and full of concern and affection. Bending quickly, Tanis pressed a gentle kiss on her lips, then stood back as Sekhmet led her away. Gillian waved to the two handsome men who watched after her with worry etched on their ageless faces. Aleksei watched Gillian’s departure, tension written on his body.

  “She is intriguing, your guest.” A deep, echoing voice startled Tanis and Aleksei and they spun toward the sound. Anubis, Lord of the Underworld and Osiris’s right-hand Vampire, came to them across the polished floor, his arms open in welcome.

  He glided, floated, strode purposely, a contradiction in physics, a dream, a solid presence…astonishing even to the eyes of other Vampires; Anubis was breathtaking in his sheer beauty. His hair was long and plaited, black, luminous, brushing his shoulders with the glitter of tiny golden beads. A heavy golden collar encircled his neck, resting on his bare but massive chest. Like the figures in the bas-relief carvings on the walls, Anubis wore a linen kilt, belted with heavy gold and jewels. His feet were bare. Reaching Aleksei, he offered his arms in greeting, palm to elbow, a gesture of good will. The raw energy flowed from him, raising the hair on Aleksei’s arms. Anubis’s fathomless black eyes missed nothing.

  “It has been long since you have come to us, Aleksei. You have forgotten the power of our companionship. I am sorry it is under circumstances such as these.”

  The voice was so like Osiris’s. It held the wisdom of ages in those deep echoing tones. Anubis’s power radiated from him, energizing both the men. “You need an infusion of our Lord’s strength; you are both drained from worry.”

  Turning to Tanis, he held out his arms in a duplicate gesture. “Welcome, my friend.” His smile and greeting was genuine as he dropped all pretense of formality, pulling the other Vampire into a brotherly embrace. Anubis and Tanis had formed a close friendship during Tanis’s stay in Egypt.

  Returning the greeting and the hug, Tanis replied, “I have been too long away. I have missed the monuments and the colors.”

  Anubis smiled. “Come. Let us retire; you are not used to being awake so long after dawn. This evening, we will talk.”

  He took them to opulent chambers lined with obsidian and semiprecious gems, lit by torches, smelling of incense. There were golden beds styled after those of the pharaohs. Flat, hard daises with elevated headrests. The exception was that sandwiched between the structure of the beds’ flat surfaces was an inch of earth; rich, black earth. Enough to keep a Vampire at full strength, but not entirely necessary for their survival. Direct contact with earth wasn’t obligatory for them, nor was earth essential for each and every rest period, yet with the threat of Dracula’s presence hanging over all of them, no chances would be taken. Day was now hard upon all of them, Aleksei and Tanis being more affected than the ancient Anubis. They settled in to let the torpor take them.

  Gillian spoke with Sekhmet briefly after getting to her room. The female Vampire was lovely and enigmatic and she answered Gillian’s questions politely. The power radiating from her was immense. She was one of the ancients, one of the original pantheon of Osiris’s advisors and friends. It made Gillian wary of just what she’d face when they finally stood before Osiris. She thought she’d rest for a bit, then go explore the pyramids.

  Sekhmet gave her a golden scarab key, with which she could freely leave and reenter the underground complex. In a soft, compelling voice, she explained that Gillian was a guest, not a prisoner, and could come and go as she liked. If Aleksei and Tanis had brought her there, she was a trusted and valued Human and would be treated with the utmost respect and care.

  There was a warning too. Sekhmet assured her that while in Cairo, throughout all of Egypt in fact, she was safe from Dracula and his lot. There was, however, always the possibility of a rogue Vampire or another less-than-savory entity seeking her out. She was to take care when she went exploring and let them know where she went and when she went out. Sekhmet added that an appropriate Daywalking guide and escort would be found by the next rise, but for now, Gillian was free to do as she liked within the complex or immediate vicinity, just to be careful doing it. Sekhmet accepted Gillian’s assurances that she would be careful and departed.

  Settling in, Gillian was in awe of the chamber she occupied, actually in the entire structure itself. It was a phenomenal feat of architecture to have this building below Cairo’s busy streets. She had no idea how large it was, based on what she’d seen. The entrance through which they’d come wasn’t the only way in or out; she was sure of that.

  Her tactician’s mind was sorting through what she knew and what could be speculated. As a captain in the Marine Corps and a special operative, she’d had to wrap her mind and logic around both the known and the unknown. It had saved her life and the lives of those under her command more than once. She knew she’d sort everything out. It would just take time.

  The room was lovely. Painted traditionally with hieroglyphics and stylized drawings, it rivaled anything she’d ever seen in a documentary of ancient Egypt. The floors throughout the areas she knew were polished black marble. The walls inlaid with lapis, coral, turquoise and other semiprecious stones. The bed was raised on a platform, covered with linen. There was the traditional Egyptian headrest as well as pillows, the choice left up to her.

  A linen throw was laid across a chair, dyed a deep indigo blue. Gillian was sure it was authentic dye. Picking it up, she discovered it was a gown. Lightweight, very sheer and perfect for the heat of the desert; however, it wasn’t hot down in the chambers. It was delightfully cool. Shrugging, she took off her own clothes and slipped the garment on. A polished mirror gave her the reflection of a small but determined-looking woman. The indigo color enhanced the yellow in her hair, toning down the reddish cast it generally had and making her green eyes glow with a blue undertone. She looked delicate. Shit. This would not do. Irritably, she peeled it off and grabbed an oversized T-shirt from her bag, dragging it over her head. Now she looked like herself. Tough and capable. Much better, she thought as she lay on the hard but extremely comfortable bed, put the headrest aside in favor of the pillows and drifted off to sleep.

  When she woke hours later, she was relieved to find that nothing in her room had been disturbed. Apparently the Egyptian Vampires weren’t concerned with invading her privacy. It gave her some solace. Intuitively, she’d realized she could trust Tanis and Aleksei. They would never deliberately lead her into harm’s way. Trusting Sekhmet so completely within seconds of meeting her both scared and impressed her. The Vampire was enormously powerful, much more so than Aleksei or Tanis. She could have used mind control, compulsion, any manner of things to control Gillian’s thoughts and emotions without her awareness, make her trust them, make her into food. Yet she hadn’t. Apparently absolute power did not necessarily corrupt absolutely. Osiris indeed must be either an honorable or a scary fucking leader if his people had opportunities to misuse their gifts but did not.

  Feeling secure, she dressed, checked her watch, found it was still daytime and prepared to explore. Surely she wou
ld find food from a street vendor. Opening her door, she found a tray with chilled fruit, cheese and icy cold water in a gold pitcher. Pleasantly surprised, Gillian brought it in, setting it on an ornately carved table with a little stool beside it. She ate lightly, then, feeling refreshed, set off to discover Cairo while the sun still shone.

  Sekhmet had told her which passageways to take, and showed her how to read the hieroglyphs that decorated every wall. The bright paintings and bas-relief carvings were actually a map, directing anyone who knew how to interpret them through the honeycombed maze of corridors. The figures changed, but it was the background that subtly indicated direction. The pyramids were represented as tiny triangles farther away. The closer you got to where they were located aboveground, the bigger they became until they dominated the background behind a picture of the Pharaoh Khefre and his slaves. There was a door a few feet beyond.

  Gillian pressed her scarab key into the depression in the middle of the door and it slid back noiselessly. Up a long incline that curved slightly so that no sunlight could accidentally penetrate, then to another door. Again, Gillian used her key and again, the door slid open, shutting noiselessly behind her as she climbed out into an archeologist’s hut at the feet of the Sphinx. A kneeling man brushing sand out of pottery pieces glanced up at her, smiled and went back to work. Apparently he was used to his hut being utilized as a exit ramp.

  Gillian moved out, awed by the gigantic figure of the Sphinx and the monumental pyramids. It was autumn in Egypt, hot but not entirely unpleasant in the late afternoon sun. Gillian was dressed for the weather—white tank top, long khaki cargo pants, desert boots and a hat. She had a Thermos she’d brought with her full of the icy cold water that had been left in her chamber, her Glock 22C semiautomatic pistol, a flashlight, a knife and a lightweight fifty-foot cord with rappelling equipment, in case she wanted to climb. Once a marine, always a marine, Gill thought. She was used to efficiently packing for whatever need should arise.

  There were soldiers here and there, guns shouldered and ready. Gillian unconsciously patted the pistol she had in her pocket. It wouldn’t do a damn thing against a Vampire, but it would take down anything short of an elephant. Buying a guidebook at a vendor’s tent, she went to the pyramids. Entering the smaller two, Khefre and Menkaure, was out of the question. They were closed to the public. Khufu, the Great Pyramid, was still open. Or at least parts of it were.

  Following the line of the structure, Gillian was impressed by the sheer size of the thing. The huge limestone blocks were as tall as she was. Each had been cut and fit so precisely that a sheet of paper wouldn’t fit between them. No mortar had been used. It had endured due to exact calculations and measurements of placement and balance. She climbed the steps to the entrance, already lightly sweating from the dry heat. Upon entry, the passage went up into the center, to the very top where the King’s chamber lay.

  The Queen’s chamber—or so it was called—lay to the left and down. The corridor roped off against visitors’ entry with a “Danger” sign in English, French and Arabic. Turning back to the upward slope, Gillian climbed to the top. The corridor was steep and had little ventilation. She was bathed in sweat by the time she reached the top. It opened into a large room, bare, unadorned. Off center from the middle of the room was a mammoth sarcophagus, also unadorned. The lid had been pushed back and was broken in one corner. Air moved freely around her here. The ingenuity of the ancient Egyptians resulted in ventilation shafts in the stone behemoth.

  Opening her Thermos, she drank, letting the breeze cool her and the fluid replenish her. She was able to stand on tiptoe and look out one of the openings, enjoying the full view of Cairo. There were few tourists out, and Gillian was able to enjoy the peace and serenity of the ancient chamber for awhile before a French couple slogged up the incline. She left them to their own enjoyment and traipsed back down to the entrance. Some internal devil made her slip under the guard rope and hurry downward, taking out her flashlight and flicking it on. “Just a quick look,” she thought.

  Slipping and stumbling down into the growing darkness, Gillian pulled her flashlight out and snapped it on. The lower chambers had been open for years but the air remained stale and still. She was below the earth, and there was no wind here. Lower she went, but it became cooler as she went down, the layers of sand insulating and protecting from the sweltering heat. Gillian looked carefully at the walls as she entered the lower chamber. Devoid of any artwork, they still had interesting grooves that looked carved. She brushed at the embedded sand, looking for what, she didn’t know, only that it fed a secret desire of hers for archeology.

  The chamber was dark save for her flashlight beam. An opening in the floor was a black forbidding hole and she had no desire to crawl down into something she wasn’t assured of getting out of. Straining, sweating and swearing, she went back up the way she came, emerging into the late-afternoon sunlight and still air.

  There wasn’t time to do much else, so she decided on a brisk walk around the other two pyramids. There were fewer people here, no soldiers with guns. The smaller pyramids were still monumental, farther away from each other than they appeared in photographs and movies she had seen. Khefre’s monument, built for the son of Khufu was closest; Gillian went around it, noting its dimensions and height, impressive even near the larger Khufu. Khefre stood taller. The section of desert where it rested was mounded higher, making it appear larger than it was. The Sphinx, silent, massive and mysterious was in a direct line with it. The recent excavation of a mortuary temple yawned before her.

  Once, thousands of years ago, the Nile had run right by the pyramids. Scholars figured that the mortuary temple and the lower levels of the pyramid would be flooded, via a trench, with the sacred water of the Nile once the mummified body was placed within its sarcophagus, then sealed for eternity. Unfortunately, over the course of time, the Nile had shifted and the lower levels dried up, affording an opportunity by less scrupulous individuals to profit from the deceased ruler’s tomb.

  Gill wandered into the excavation, fascinated by the setup. Embalming platforms carved from granite, a deep bathtub-shaped receptacle for holding the body in its natron bed. Natron, a naturally occurring salt-like substance also known as bitumen, was readily found in the desert country. It had been used by the ancient Egyptians to desiccate and preserve the bodies of their more affluent dead.

  As Pharaoh, Khefre’s body would have been wrapped in the finest linen. Amulets, jewelry and religious symbols would have been placed among the endless wrapping, ensuring that the body was protected and blessed. He would have been placed in his inner coffin, arms crossed over his chest, hands holding the crook and flail of his rank, symbolizing shepherd and master of his people. A mask or crown would have been placed over his face or on his head, and the inner coffin sealed. The entire container would have been placed within the granite sarcophagus, his treasures assembled around him when the tomb was sealed and flooded. Khefre was supposed to remain undisturbed for eternity. Obviously that hadn’t happened. There were no known royal tombs in Egypt, with the exception of the boy king, Tutankhamen, that had remained unplundered.

  Easily picking her way through the rubble, Gillian found the back of the mortuary temple connected directly to the pyramid. Makes sense, she thought. Less chance of anyone viewing the king’s body being moved, or what exactly went into the tomb. Not that it mattered. A royal tomb was simply too much temptation. Deeper within the ancient structure, she noted the wall carvings telling the story of the king’s life, accomplishments and death. It was fascinating to see the precision with which the ancient artisans had worked. The flashlight beam illuminated key areas as she traveled under the sands and finally under the pyramid itself. Khefre’s pyramid had two entrances, one literally on top of the other. Gill was in the lower passage, traveling at a fair pace. She needed to get in and get out. This might be her only chance to look at some of the renowned wall paintings some of the tombs had as she had no idea how long they would
remain in Egypt.

  Angling down steeply, the passage opened into a burial chamber, dark and foreboding. Gillian swept the flashlight beam around to assure herself that nothing was there. Her empathy clicked on suddenly and crawled over her nerves relentlessly. Uneasiness increased as she made her way forward. At the opposite end of the chamber was an opening. Stepping through, she discovered it went up at the same grade as the last had gone down. Practically sprinting up the incline, she found herself at a junction. Right or left? Both passages looked equally unappealing at the moment but she couldn’t force herself back through that lower room right at the moment. There had been nothing that she had seen, but her senses were on full alert. Some “thing” was either there, or had been there recently. Gillian didn’t want to find out what it was.

  Reaching into the deep pocket of her cargo pants, she extracted the pistol, slapped the magazine in, automatically chambering a round. She was being ridiculous, she knew, but there was a crawly feeling between her shoulder blades that wouldn’t go away. Even if she had to put the gun back, there was no danger of it going off. The Glock 22C had three safety features built in, plus antirecoil. It wasn’t standard military issue but she preferred its sleek design and felt more comfortable with its weight in her hand.

  Taking the left-hand passage, she moved on. The incline smoothed, becoming level, and she went cautiously. She walked as quietly as she could, trying not to imagine additional footfalls. The ceiling lowered abruptly but she was short enough to pass beneath it. Still, it made her feel slightly claustrophobic and she hurried. It opened into another burial chamber, this one holding a sarcophagus. The feeling of dread behind her increased and Gill bolted around the granite burial box, her light and gun locked on the opening she had just come through.

  Undead, reborn, raised, reanimated, transformed or transubstantiated, all creatures who rose again after death had an aura. It was different than the auras of the living; the soul’s vibration shifted a little after the death of the physical body but it was still an indicator of a presence. Gillian had experience with how most of them felt. Whatever was in that tomb was not in her realm of experience. She had no illusions about the gun in her hand. It would stop living flesh, but generally each and every type of Paramortal required a specific method to ensure true and permanent death.