by E. A. Copen
“The Valley of the Sphynx,” Osiris announced. “He resides at the center of the pyramid and drinks from the river of souls. Bring me a single feather from the sphynx, and I shall give you your key.”
I frowned out at the valley. There had to be hundreds of bones out there, each one belonging to someone who had died just trying to reach the pyramid. If it was that tough just to get inside, getting to the center would be even more difficult. I didn’t know a ton about pyramids, but I’d seen just enough Indiana Jones to know there were probably booby traps and pits of venomous vipers inside.
I put my hands in my pockets and nodded to the valley full of bones. “What got them?”
“Ammit.” He said the name as if I was supposed to know who that was and offered no further explanation.
What I wouldn’t give to have Beth by my side at that moment. She was into all that obscure Egyptian stuff. She’d know what an Ammit was and what to expect inside the pyramid. Instead, she’d moved to Chicago, and I was stuck in the Egyptian After with the soul of a cowardly pirate as my sidekick, about to walk into a burial pyramid that was probably full of gold and other treasures. Oh, boy, was I ever in trouble.
The platform suddenly jerked underneath us and slowly slid down like an elevator.
“The sphynx will not part with his feathers easily,” Osiris explained as we moved. “Each one was a gift from the goddess, Ma’at, whose attribute is truth. I cannot assist you, but I can offer you this advice, Lazarus. Speak truth.”
Our sandstone platform jerked to a stop even with the ground. The temple loomed maybe half a mile’s walk through empty desert.
I sighed and turned to Jean. “Let’s go, pal.”
“Me?” He put a hand on his chest. “I don’t see why I have to accompany you.”
“You could always stay and be processed.”
Jean glanced at Osiris, who showed him a mouthful of sparkling teeth. “On second thought, I’d love to go into the terrifying Egyptian death trap.” He shot out into the desert several yards ahead of me only to turn around and shout, “Well? What are you waiting for?”
I gave Osiris a quick salute and strode off into the desert.
Whenever I thought of Hell, I thought of lakes of fire and oppressive heat. Helheim had been close to the mental picture my Southern Baptist upbringing conjured. Yet Helheim was a cakewalk compared to the short trek across the desert.
The scorching sun above struck the white sand, baking it to well over a hundred and ten degrees. Every step felt like walking further into an oven. The air was dry enough to hurt my mouth and nose when I breathed it in, leaving the membranes sore. Sweat rolled down the back of my neck and my spine, and sand got into places it had no business being.
No matter how long we walked, the pyramid never seemed to come any closer. It was like we were back in the hallway, working our way down the line of souls waiting to be judged, only worse. At least in there, I’d seen some variation in color. The desert was just an anemic shade of brown that went on forever.
“Is it me, or are we no closer than when we began?” Jean panted next to me.
I wiped sweat from my forehead. It didn’t matter. More just rolled down and stung the corners of my eyes. “It’s not you. Something’s up. Maybe it’s a spell.”
“You don’t think Osiris would give us a truly impossible task, do you?” He eyed me with a deep frown.
I shook my head. “That feather would make his life a lot easier. With it, he could probably use the scales again and get his well-oiled death processing machine back on track in a matter of hours. I get the feeling his love of efficiency outweighs his dislike of me.”
Jean stopped and flopped against the sand. “Go on without me,” he moaned. “Save yourself.”
I sighed and rolled my eyes so hard it hurt. “Get up, Jean. You don’t even have a body. You’re not dehydrating, and you’re not dying.”
He threw an arm over his face in truly dramatic fashion. “Yes, I am. I’m dying of boredom. So much nude sand is an assault on the eyes.”
“Nude sand?” I rubbed my temples. “That sounds like a shade of makeup. Stop whining and help me think of a way out of this before I burn to a crisp.”
The sun had already baked my arms enough to turn them an angry shade of red. With all the sweating I’d been doing, I had to be dehydrated. Or I would be if I were in my body. I’d left it behind and only let my soul come here, which meant I wasn’t really sunburned.
The moment I thought that the red faded from my arms. I stared at my skin, unbelieving. Of course! All the damage I’d done to my body had to be psychosomatic. I believed I’d burned my feet and cut my hand open the night before, but I’d never actually done it. Because I believed it, my body accepted it as fact, and somehow, that made the injuries appear in reality. At least, I hoped that was the case. If I was getting a sunburn back in the sanctuary Sybille would be doing something about it.
I peered out over the desert at the pyramid and then back the way we’d come. Despite the pyramid remaining elusive, the giant sandstone palace we’d embarked from was way back on the horizon now. We must’ve made some progress, though I could’ve sworn the pyramid was exactly as far away now as it had been when we left.
A horrible braying sound cut through the air. I snapped my head around, searching for the source of the noise, and took a step back at what I saw lurking ahead.
The creature had the head of a crocodile, the mane and front legs of a lion, the rear legs of a hippopotamus, and wings like an eagle. A scorpion tail curled over its body, poised to strike its prey. It was the size of a minivan. It dug at the sand with its monstrous front paws like a bull preparing to charge and bounded awkwardly into a run.
I should’ve booked it out of there as fast as my legs could carry me, or at least prepared a spell to defend myself, but all I could think as it barreled toward us was, Huh, so that’s an Ammit.
It closed enough that I could make out the whites of its four eyes. The scorpion tail slashed through the air. I dove right, and it came down where I’d been standing half a second ago. It scuttled through a turn, crocodile jaws snapping, scorpion tail stabbing. It was all I could do to keep rolling out of the way, especially with Jean shrieking.
“Shut up and help me!” I called and jumped to my feet.
“What should I do?”
I put my hands to my mouth and shouted so Jean could hear, “See if you can find something to help!”
The tail pierced the sand between my feet. I jumped back and swung my staff. It connected with Ammit’s schnoz, forcing his head to one side. Ammit snapped at the staff and caught it between his powerful jaws. I had two choices, either try to free the only weapon I had from the crocodile’s jaws or let it go and run. I chose to let it go. It was the only thing that saved me from being skewered by the scorpion tail.
Ammit seemed surprised by the decision to leave the staff behind and struggled to snap it with its powerful jaws, but the staff held firm.
“Hey, buddy. You got something in your teeth.” Yeah, I know. I couldn’t help myself.
Ammit snarled and chomped down harder. The wood groaned. Oh, crap. He might be strong enough to break it.
“Lazarus!”
I spun and found Jean waving at me from behind a bronze plaque. How was that supposed to help us?
Wood cracked. Ammit’s crocodile teeth finally bit through the dryad staff, sending a spray of splinters raining into the sand. A concussive wave of magic exploded from the broken focus that sent both Ammit and me sailing backward. My shoulders hit the post holding up the plaque, knocking the air out of me.
“I found something!” Jean said, excitedly while I was still trying to blink the dancing flying hippos from my vision. “This plaque has something written on it!”
I grabbed the plaque and pulled myself up with a grunt. “That’s great, Jean. How about finding me a rock or even a sharp bone for this guy to chew on instead?”
Across the desert, Ammit rolled fr
om his back onto his stomach and shook his head.
Jean ignored me. “The first part says, ‘He who speaks the answer shall find his way without resistance.’”
Well, that sounded good. Maybe if we solved the word problem, Ammit would go away.
“Great!” I shouted and backed away. “What’s the rest of it say?”
Jean shook his head. “I don’t know! I don’t read hieroglyphs.”
“I can.”
Jean squinted at me.
“I said I can read it! Let me see.”
I’d absorbed the soul of an Egyptian funerary deity when a couple of the assholes tried making snacks out of the fae population of New Orleans. That had given me the ability to read hieroglyphics writing, one of the more useless side effects of using god souls to heal myself. At least, it had been until now.
I finally backed up enough to get a look at the plaque. All the little Egyptian picture symbols morphed before my eyes, slowly forming comprehensible letters.
Not fast enough.
Ammit roared and charged.
I had no choice but to move or die before the words had time to form themselves into letters. “Describe it to me!” I shouted as Ammit’s tail thrashed at me.
His poisonous stinger stabbed into the sand and swept sideways, knocking my feet from under me. I landed on something hard and grabbed it, bringing it up just in time. Ammit’s tail smashed the rotten skull instead of my face. I let go of the bone and dug deeper into the sand, coming up with a curved blade. It’d do.
“There’s a circle with two lines in it!” Jean shouted.
“Not enough! Try combining a few of them in a string!” I swung the sword at Ammit’s snapping jaws. It bit into the tough crocodile hide, drawing blood. He stabbed at me again with the tail, close enough to graze my arm.
“Okay, there’s one that occurs twice. It’s a trapezoid with a doodad!”
Ammit’s tail swept low, but I jumped over it this time. I’m onto you, buddy. “What the fuck is a doodad?”
“A horizontal line!”
“That’s a door! What’s the rest?”
“There’s only one more,” Jean shouted. “I don’t know how to describe it. It’s just a sort of squiggly slash with another one of those circles, except this one is empty. No lines.”
Ammit’s jaws closed on the sword. It bit into his tongue, but the monster chimera didn’t even seem to notice or care. Uh-oh. I let go just as the crocodile began its death roll, jerking the blade from my hands.
Two doors, a squiggle, and two circles, one with marks and the other without. Maybe I knew what that meant, but only if… “Jean, the line on the second door symbol. Is it pointing in the opposite direction of the first?”
“Yes!” he shouted excitedly. “What’s it mean?”
“Time is a door but also not a door.” It made no sense. I had to be wrong. That didn’t sound like any riddle I’d ever heard.
Jean frowned down at the plaque, muttering to himself. He gripped the sides of the plaque and leaned in.
Ammit recovered from his death roll and spat out the sword, stomping around to face me.
“Jean, a little help here!”
He held up a finger. “Maybe the word isn’t time, but a sort of denotation of time. And riddles should be questions, right?”
Ammit shook blood from his mane and scraped his claws against the ground, preparing one final charge.
“Jean!”
“I’ve got it!” Jean exclaimed and clapped his hands together excitedly. “When is a door not a door?”
Seriously? The riddle written on that plaque was the oldest one in the book? What was next? Two guards and two doors claiming one always tells the truth while the other lies? If only I could be so lucky.
“When it’s ajar!” I shouted just as Ammit prepared to charge and squeezed my eyes shut.
I braced for the monster to slam into my chest and snap every bone and for its huge stinger to stab deep enough to pierce my spine while crocodile teeth gnawed on my ankle. When it didn’t happen, I chanced opening one eye, only to find Ammit had turned to stone about three inches from my face.
Well, that was close.
With a sigh of relief, I collapsed on the sand and squinted up at the sun as it cast death rays down at me. “I fucking hate riddles.”
“Well, then it’s a good thing you have me.” Jean floated closer, his chest all puffed out as if he were expecting me to hail him as the conquering hero. “Riddles and puns were marks of wit and class back in my day. I made many a dollar over drinks betting over them. Since we are dealing with a sphynx, I suspect there will be far more riddles involved before we are done.”
I whimpered and closed my eyes. “Maybe I’ll just lie here and die in the sand.”
“No, you won’t.” Cold hands gripped my biceps and pulled me up to stand. “Your lady love’s soul is waiting for you to come for her, and you've got a child at home who needs you. A hero doesn’t quit when the going gets tough, no sir.” He dusted sand from my clothes.
“I’m no hero. I’m just a guy who’s going on vacation with the girl he’s about to rescue just as soon as we get the hell out of here. To somewhere snowy and cold because fuck sand.”
I stomped over to pick up the two broken halves of my staff. The wood, which had previously felt alive and sentient in my hands, was now nothing more than a dead stick. No magic moved within it, and the runes didn’t respond when I tried to wake them with a spell. A monster had broken my staff…again.
“That does it,” I growled, throwing the two bits of wood into the sand with all the other skeletons. “The next one is going to be iron and I’m going to lay so many protection spells on it, it’ll be unbreakable.”
A shadowy rectangle shimmered into existence beside me, the shape slowly darkening into a plain wooden door.
Jean floated over to examine the door. “I guess we’ve found our way without resistance. Maybe the door will take us right to the sphynx.”
And maybe I’ll get to ride a unicorn. “Only one way to tell.”
I grabbed the doorknob, pushed the door open, and stepped inside.
Chapter Twelve
Darkness. I couldn’t even see my hand in front of my face. It was more than just dark wherever we’d stepped into, it was devoid of light. The air felt thick and smelled like old decay. Not the putrid scent of rotting organs and flesh but of old, dry bodies breaking down. Like roasting bones picked clean in low heat over time.
Things skittered around us on hard surfaces, large enough that their movement caused a rustling sound. I knew there was a solid, dry floor only because I didn’t sink and because my ankles weren’t wet.
It felt like we were in a grave older than time itself.
“Lazarus,” Jean whispered right next to me, “can you see anything?”
“No.”
I stuck my hands out on either side of me, hoping to feel walls. It was strange but knowing there was an end to the inky black would be comforting. Unfortunately, I felt nothing but empty air when I extended my arms. I’d have to move to the right or left and hope I wasn’t standing on the only solid ground. In a pyramid full of traps? No way I was taking that risk.
I put my hands to either side of my mouth and called at the top of my lungs, “Hello!” The sound bounced off something to my right. Slowly, I slid my foot along the floor, testing the weight and reaching blindly. After repeating the same process three times, my hand finally touched something that crawled away. I reached forward and found a cold, grainy wall.
“Whew.” I let out the tense breath I’d been holding and leaned on the wall.
The chunk of stone shifted under my weight and slid away loudly. Shit.
“Lazarus, what did you do?” Jean said as the ground began to shake.
“I was trying to find a way out!”
The ground stopped moving, and nothing rolled down to crush us. Maybe I’d found a secret panel, a helpful one. Please don’t be full of venomous snakes, I
thought and felt for the stone that had moved. In its place, I found an alcove but nothing useful on the bottom stone, so I moved my hand up to check the others. There, etched on the wall on another plaque, were some raised letters.
“Another plaque,” I informed gene. “I can feel the writing. I think it’s still in hieroglyphs, but I can’t see them. It’s too dark.”
“Maybe you can figure out what they are by feeling the raised designs?”
I frowned. Even though I could read hieroglyphs, I didn’t know if I could decipher them like that. Hell, I didn’t even know if I could read English letters that way. I wasn’t trained to function without my eyes.
A large bug scuttled over my hand. I shook it off and cringed when it made an audible crack against the stone.
“What was that?” Jean whispered. He must’ve floated closer because the air around me chilled.
“Bug. Sounds like there are a lot of them in here. Back up. You’re freezing me.”
“Sorry.”
Something clamped onto my hand. “Ow!” I struck the wall, and another bug squished. Gross. Another fell from the upper stone and chomped on my arm. “Son of a bitch!”
I fought to keep them off me, but it was a losing battle. For every one I got off of me, two more found a way in. Before long, they were crawling up my pant leg, slipping under my shirt, and chewing on my scalp. Tiny, hairy insect legs crept over my face as I squeezed my eyes shut.
They’re not on you, I told my brain. Your body is lying on the altar in the mortuary chapel, and Sybille is watching over you. My brain refused to listen, continuing to register the feeling of them biting into me, burrowing under my skin, and moving around inside me. It’s not real! There are no bugs, and you’re safe. It’s all an illusion, designed to make you afraid. To make you quit. And you can’t quit, Lazarus. Not when you’ve made it this far. Emma needs you.
