APEX
By Sean Ellis
The sands crackled with blue and violet arcs of static electricity as dusk brought a stiff wind to the desert and still the camels pushed on. The voice of the guide, Ali, was a low plaintive wail, barely audible over the din of shifting dunes and the cry of the wind, but the tall figure astride the second beast, swathed in a faded djellabah, paid no heed. Ali's supplications were merely a formality; the blue-eyed shaitan had put a curse upon his son.
"Guide me into the desert, or your firstborn will die!" Even as the stranger had spoken the words in halting Arabic, the young boy had clutched his abdomen and groaned in pain. Ali had complied—what choice did he have? He had implored the stranger to release his son from the curse ere they depart, but this request to had fallen on deaf ears.
"We must reach the plateau of Giza before the full moon rises," the man had reiterated. "Your son's life is held as a pledge of your good faith. If I complete my quest, the curse will pass."
"The desert is a dangerous place, efendi. My son should not be made to pay the price if we fall before robbers. Please, efendi, release him."
"The hour grows late. We must make haste."
And so they had set out, driving Ali's camels faster and faster into the crackling sands. The sun had finished its journey across the sky, plunging the plateau outside the city into a deepening twilight, but the moon had not yet crept over the far horizon, where the trinity of pyramids erupted up from the landscape like the jagged teeth of some great beast. Ali breathed a tentative sigh of relief; they would make their destination before moonrise, fulfilling at least part of his oath to his diabolical master.
They did not relent with the goal so near; if anything, the stranger became more insistent. Finally, with the camels on the verge of exhaustion, the man called for a halt. He swept down from his mount and paused only long enough to demand that the Arab guide remain outside with the camels until his return. Then he turned away and scrambled onto the exposed outer flank of the Great Pyramid.
Adam Garral paused on the threshold of the upper entrance to the Great Pyramid and gazed off to his left. The moon had not yet broached the sky; he had won the race against time but the night was far from over.
From the depths of his Arab garment he withdrew a torch of reeds and a cigarette lighter then plunged into the dark maw of the opening. Once there, sheltered from the wind, he lit the brand, casting smoky orange illumination on the rough walls of the descending passageway.
The claustrophobic confines did not greatly concern him; he had come here several times during the course of his adventures in Egypt, becoming intimately familiar with every inch of the hewed tunnels and chambers that lay beneath what had, for millennia, been the tallest manmade structure in existence. So comprehensive was his knowledge that he could have navigated the artery in the dark. But no amount of reconnoitering could provide him with the answers that he hoped to find on this night—only this night: Walpurgisnacht.
Walpurgis night and a full moon, he thought. Thank the stars.
It was a source of no little amusement to Garral, in those rare moments when he paused to reflect on the events of his life, that only five short years ago, he would not have been able to explain what Walpurgis night was, much less its significance to the pagans of the world, carrying out their secret, forbidden ceremonies under cover of darkness. A child of wealth and privilege, Garral had aspired to nothing more than the life of a libertine, nominally devoted to his studies at Oxford on Avon, but rarely awake before mid-afternoon following a nightly ritual of carousing and debauchery. But his reckless life course was forever altered one night when, in a drunken stupor, he had wandered into the den of a fortuneteller and at the urging of a friend, purchased a reading.
There had been little use for pretense; the gypsy had known that the men cared little for her art, and she in turn cared about nothing but their silver. Nonetheless, she had shuffled and dealt the cards, turning them over in the prescribed fashion and reciting a bit of mystical claptrap that hinted at everything but promised nothing... and then everything had changed.
The crone had turned over a card, her fingertips resting lightly on the painted pasteboard, and then, just when she was about to murmur some vague platitude, she had stiffened and stared in disbelief first at the card then at her customer. Before he could think to examine the card for himself, she slapped a hand across the spread, scattering the entire deck all over the floor. She had then thrust out a gnarled hand, forefinger and little finger extended in a sign of warding and commenced screaming at them in her native dialect. Garral and his friend had retreated, laughing as drunkards are wont to do, and moved on to the next distraction but later when he had sobered, his blurry memory of the encounter prompted him to investigate further. Yet, when he had returned to the fortuneteller's shop, he found it abandoned.
The mystery surrounding those events had proved as intoxicating as absinthe, and soon Garral was spending his nights, not in the public houses and brothels, but in the enclave of a group of Theosophical Society aspirants. The more he probed into the riddle of the gypsy's reaction, the more his hunger for knowledge grew. Blessed with a sharp mind, Garral excelled in his studies and soon outgrew Blavatsky's followers, even as he outgrew all the other cabals and covens scattered throughout Europe, who promised secret knowledge of the left hand path. Ironically, his carnal appetites did not diminish; if anything, his forays into the shadow world of the occult seemed to awaken within him a magnetic attraction to members of the fairer sex. Now, sharpened with purpose, he cut through his world, taking whatever he pleased along the way of his quest for greater knowledge.
One night, more than a year after his strange journey began, he found himself in the company of an English expatriate living in Prague, who claimed to be none other than Edward Kelley, the famed medium and alchemist, still alive and well more than four hundred years after his reported death. Garral regarded the claim dubiously, but there was no denying that the man had the Sight. After a night of drinking, he had asked the pretender about the gypsy fortuneteller's reaction. The so-called Kelley, eager to show off, had made a show of murmuring incantations before settling down to business and giving his new companion a good hard look... and then had run screaming from the room. The only thing Garral had been able to comprehend from his babbling was a quote from the Book of Revelation:
"Then I saw another beast which rose out of the earth; it had two horns like a lamb and it spoke like a dragon."
That was when Adam Garral had finally begun to grasp who and what he was.
He had been in Egypt for six months in anticipation of this night—a full moon on the eve of the spring equinox—learning to speak Arabic and more importantly, studying the customs and habits of the locals. By day, he worked in the foreign office, ostensibly writing briefs concerning the activities of some local revolutionaries—the area was a hotbed of intrigue, with both Marxists and Prussian Imperialists vying for the hearts and minds of impressionable young Arabs who had grown tired of the British yoke—but his real life began at the close of the day, when he would don the garb of a mendicant and roam the streets, begging for alms and learning the language and ways of Cairo's dark underbelly.
He soon understood that he could not trust the Arab guides to take him to Giza by night; they would surely murder him and drag his body far into the deep desert to be picked clean by vultures. If he was to survive his adventure, he would have to gain the upper hand. He had chosen Ali because the man was a widower, with only one young son for whom he would do anything. By himself, Ali probably would not have betrayed him, but the camel herders kept no secrets from each other; Ali's friends would know of the nighttime sojourn and set an ambush, unless Garral could find some leverage.
In the end, he had chosen a simple ruse. Introducing a mild emetic into Ali's son's food, he had then pronounced a terrible curse upon the boy; if Ali betrayed him, Garral told the man, the boy's intestines would turn to blood and burst from his mouth. Of course it was all a lie; the "curse" had probably already passed, but Ali did not know that. And Garral's reputation as shaitan, the Devil, was already the subject of much discussion in the coffee houses and alleys of the Old City.
Garral paused at the entrance to what Egyptologists had taken to calling "the King's Chamber." A carved rectangular cube, the room which lay at the end of several long passages, was thought to have been the burial chamber for Khufu or Cheops, the ancient ruler who had commissioned construction of the monument, but there was little real proof to substantiate that claim. It was just as easy to believe what the spiritualists had claimed—that the pyramid was more than 10,000 years old and built by otherwordly architects using uncanny power. Garral did not favor one explanation over the other, but there was no denying that this structure, built as it was with mathematical precision on the very spine of the earth—a powerful tributary of the Telluric currents that followed the course of the world's longest river—was a place of immense power. Moses had once used that power to crush the gods of Egypt with ten catastrophic plagues and subsequently to open a passage through the heart of the Red Sea. That final, climactic event had occurred on the first full moon of spring.
Garral did not seek to part the sea; his ambitions were on a higher order of magnitude.
In the light of his torch, he hastily completed his arrangements, drawing runes and pentacles on the floor with a piece of charcoal. Only then did he begin lighting the candles placed at strategic intersections in the design. After snuffing out the torch, he took a seat in the center and took out his watch.
Perfect. The moon should be rising. It won't be long now.
He closed his eyes and began chanting an atonal primitive incantation. Time lost all meaning as the rhythmic murmur transported him into a trance state. Yet, the euphoria which flooded through his body and tingled in his fingertips was merely preliminary; he had done this before many times, and while it had lost none of its thrill, what he sought would make this simple ritual seem like child’s play.
A loud crack—the sound of stone breaking—abruptly snapped him out of his reverie.
Who dares intrude…?
Even as his eyes flew open, a black rage descended upon the wandering magician but it sublimated just as quickly when he realized that he was still alone. The runes had not been disturbed and the candles, now firmly anchored in hardened puddles of melted wax, still cast their flickering light into every corner of the chamber. Biting back the curse that had formed on his tongue, he turned his head to the entry—nothing—then scanned the opposite wall.
A second tunnel mouth gaped before him, a black wall of shadow in the orange stone of the anteroom.
A smile of elation changed places with his rage; the opening had most certainly not been there before. Though he had not known exactly what to expect, he now understood that this was the sign he sought, the singular event which could only occur on this night.
Garral retrieved his firebrand, lighting it from one of the candles, and unhesitatingly ventured into the virgin passage. The tunnel wound upward, turning at right angles and remaining parallel to the outer slope of the structure. Scholars and spiritualists had long debated whether the massive monument contained other rooms and tunnels, or was simply a solid mass of limestone and basalt, built merely to attract the attention of passersby; who could have known that answer was wonderfully so much more complex? His mind was abuzz with the possibilities that now lay before him; what secrets had the ancients concealed in this most powerful of monuments, behind a door that could only be opened with the strongest magicks and only on a specific night when all of the universe’s energy was perfectly focused?
The tunnels dimensions began to close in as he moved higher, forcing him to crawl. He continued on hands and knees, pushing the torch ahead as he went, more acutely aware now that the air was growing stale; already, the torch’s flame was faltering. With growing anxiety, he took a candle stub from his pocket and rubbed out the brand against the wall.
The shadows closed around him as the relative brilliance of the torch was replaced by the flickering glow that burned from the wick but once the smoky remains of the torch were behind him the air quality improved dramatically. To his surprise however, the way ahead seemed to grow brighter as he progressed. On the cusp of yet another corner he realized that there was another light source directly ahead. He stopped there, peeking cautiously around the bend before proceeding, and that was when he heard the voices.
A strident cry tumbled down the cramped tunnel—a woman or perhaps a young child. He did not recognize the speech—it might have been an Arabic dialect—but he had no difficulty comprehending its meaning: the speaker was begging for mercy.
Garral’s heart began to pound in his chest; he was not alone. His fingers dropped to the knife in his belt, but the worn hilt offered little comfort. He would certainly be outnumbered. He pinched out the candle flame, letting the light beyond guide him on, and edged stealthily around the turn. One wall of the passage reflected light from an opening in the opposite side of the tunnel, only a few yards beyond.
Intuitively, he grasped that this was the ultimate goal he sought; the long ascending tunnel ended here in a chamber that must, he reckoned, be situated directly beneath the apex of the Great Pyramid. As he neared the entrance, he could see that the cavity beyond was indeed much larger than the confines of the passage. It walls, plastered over with smooth white limestone, reflected firelight in an eerie dance, and as he advanced, he discerned a bronze brazier alight with the remains of a small fire.
A harsh voice erupted just beyond his line of sight, the same unfamiliar language, but unmistakably a demand. It was answered again with a plea from the soprano—a child, Garral decided. He peeked around the edge of the entry.
His caution, while not unwarranted, was somewhat unnecessary. The two men in the vaulted chamber had their backs to him and were wholly focused on coercing a young boy of perhaps eight years to undertake some task. The men had the swarthy complexion of Arabs, but their heads and beards were shaved. They wore dirty shifts of an unfamiliar style and the boy was completely nude, save for a length of rope tied around his waist.
Tomb robbers. But how did they get past me?
One of men snarled at the boy, then raised a fist in which he held a frayed reed. When the boy did not move, he began raining down blows on the boy’s back, spattering the limestone with flecks of red. Garral winced as shrieks filled the air. Egypt was a hard place, and he had witnessed many acts of cruelty among the locals, but somehow the torture of this innocent touched him.
Pathetic, he chided himself. The Great Dragon feeling sorry for a weak, foolish child. When the world is yours, you will deal cruelly with all men; what need have you of compassion? This is none of your concern.
Indeed, he was more curious to know what it was the men wanted from the boy, and how it was that these brigands had gained entrance to the secret chamber at the heart of the pyramid. The answer to the first question became clear when the man with the flail abruptly let off punishing the boy and simply gave him a hard shove. The child stumbled backwards then vanished.
Garral started involuntarily. His impulse had been to rush in—why? To rescue the child? Of course not. Merely to see what happened to him—but he fought it back, reasoning that it was better to keep his presence a secret. After the initial shock of the moment passed, he saw what had become of the boy.
The defilers stood on the edge of small opening in the floor—a hole into which the boy had been thrown. One of the men was leaning back at an impossible angle and Garral now saw that the other end of the boy’s tether was wrapped around his waist—he was belaying the child into the pit. The fog began to lift for Garral; using children to plumb the depths of narrow fissures was a common practice among both respected archaeologists and relic hunters alike. He continued watching, eager to see what treasure the boy would bring forth from the bowels of the pyramid.
For several minutes, the men conversed with their proxy, shouting orders but also encouragement. Then, at long last, elated whoops filled the vault and the man with the rope began hauling in the catch.
"They found it," Garral muttered. "Whatever it is."
And then it hit him. The object of their search was surely also the object of his, and once they had it in their possession, his chances of laying hands on it, to say nothing of escaping the passage with his life, would be almost nil. He had to act... immediately.
Act? You mean kill, don't you. He had survived his share of brawling and had even been considered for the Olympic fencing team, but murder? Was that in him?
You are the Great Dragon, lord of destruction; what are these insignificant lives before you? Besides, these are brutal, unlawful men; surely they deserve to die.
He drew the knife, feeling its heft in his palm as he rehearsed what he would do. The man with the rope would be hampered by his labors, unable to effectively assist his comrade. The other man therefore would have to be his primary target.
He stole forward, believing every moment that the soft scrape of his boots on the stone would betray him, but the grave robbers were lost in the oblivion of success. Even when he was directly behind his victim with his knife hand drawn back to strike, the men took no note.
Do it!
He leapt high over the man's shoulder and swung the blade in a wide arc that ended with the knife ramming dead enter into the man's chest. Garral felt a vibration as the blade pierced through the hard cartilage of the sternum, and then the knife was ripped from his hand as the man pitched backward, throwing Garral aside in his death throes.
The second man—the belayer—spat an oath and tried to take a step toward him, but the rope held him fixed in place. His eyes flashed from the attacker to the rope and back again, then he began pulling in the rope with renewed urgency.
Garral dove after the knife, but his hands could not find purchase on the blood-slicked haft. He struggled a moment longer, feeling his victory slipping away with each pull of the rope that brought the boy to the surface. The grave robber's hands were raw and bleeding with exertion, but his countenance wore the look of a man possessed. Garral's eyes widened as the top of the boy's head came into view.
Now! Strike now!
He abandoned his efforts to liberate the knife and instead launched himself across the room, driving his fist into the man's exposed throat. In his frenzy, the man did not even think to let go of the rope long enough to block the punch, and Garral's knuckles slammed into his windpipe, crushing it instantly. The man's crazed expression changed to one of fear, even pleading, as his breath was stolen away but his fate was already sealed. Garral grabbed a length of loose rope off the floor and whipped it like a Texas lariat around the tomb robber's neck, hastening his demise with the makeshift garrote. As the fellow went limp, Garral hauled in the rest of the rope, pulling the boy to safety, then collapsed on the floor with his victims.
With his eyes closed, he felt awash in a maelstrom of emotions. He was elated at his victory and horrified at the violence he had wrought. He wanted to dance in the pools of blood and feast on the hearts of the men he had slaughtered. He felt like throwing up.
A touch on his arm brought him back to the moment with the abruptness of a guillotine. Startled, he backpedaled away from whoever had touched him, fearing that one of the raiders was perhaps not as dead as he believed, but found that it was only the boy. He managed a half-hearted smile which quickly turned into a determined grimace when he saw the amulet.
“What have you got there?” He pointed to the relic in the boy’s hand.
Though his words were incomprehensible, the child hastily passed over a pendant, wrought of gold with inlays of lapis and other precious gems, even as he cowered before this new master.
Garral took the necklace, examining the hieroglyphic inscription on the cartouche. He was not literate where the ancient language of Egypt was concerned, but he recognized the image at the center—the ibis-headed god Thoth, scribe of the Underworld and moon deity in the Ogdoad tradition—and knew intuitively that this was more than just an expensive bauble. The relic’s provenance bespoke certain talismanic properties; he felt certain that the ancients would not have gone to such extraordinary lengths to conceal the amulet if it was not a token of extraordinary occult power. His turmoil over the violence that had brought him to this moment quickly waned, replaced by pure exultation. So ecstatic was he that he almost failed to notice that the child was making a juvenile attempt to conceal something held in his left hand.
Garral focused the full intensity of his stare on the child and the extended an open palm. “Give it to me.”
The boy’s face fell but he meekly complied, holding out his treasure without meeting Garral’s gaze. The latter reached for the object but then stayed his hand; the relic was nothing more than a piece of lapis lazuli carved into the shape of a pyramid. It was so small that its square base did not quite cover the lad’s palm.
Garral sighed. The blue stone block was unquestionably an artifact of no small value but its smooth flanks were unadorned. It was a toy—a toy fit for a Pharaoh’s child, but a toy nonetheless. He drew back his hand without taking the pyramid. “Keep it.”
The boy seemed to understand and began to offer effusive praise to his new master, but Garral waved him off; he had the Amulet of Thoth now, nothing else mattered. He reverently lowered talisman over his head, allowing the centerpiece to rest upon his heart, and turned to the exit with the boy at his heels.
He was barely aware of crawling through the cramped passage; his mind was wrestling with the mystery of his discovery. That he had been fated to find the amulet on this night seemed beyond question, but what was its value in the greater puzzle of his life? If he was indeed the Great Dragon of prophecy, the creature with the horns of a lamb who compels men to worship the image of the Beast whose number is six hundred and sixty-six, how would this ancient Egyptian charm help him to fulfill his destiny? He was eager to learn the answer.
After several minutes of crawling, he reached the place where he had abandoned his torch, the point where the tunnel’s dimensions had forced him to crawl. He relit the torch with the candle stub, though he was now barely aware of his physical surroundings, and hastened on. He had only gone a few steps when the unmistakable sound of stone scraping on stone snapped him out of his apocalyptic musings. Behind him, the boy began to chatter nervously.
The noise repeated, becoming a constant grinding sound, and Garral now saw that the square cut walls of the tunnel were sliding across the stone floor, closing in. A wave of trepidation crashed over him as his rational brain supplied the explanation: just as moonrise had opened the way to the vault, so too would Luna’s descent on the far horizon trigger its closing.
He ran, and the child ran too.
His fear triggered a surge of energy but robbed him of coordination. He caromed between walls that were relentlessly moving inward, stumbling as he rounded the corners, sprawled headlong more than once. The winding labyrinth seemed to have grown disproportionately long; he was certain that he should have reached the exit already, yet still it eluded him. His shoulders were now scraping the walls with every step, the cloth of his Arab robe shredded by the rough stone and the skin beneath likewise scrubbed away. A bloody streak marked his progress intermittently on one wall, then the other, then on both simultaneously.
The boy’s screams were deafening—panic, not pain—and underscored the simple fact he could not longer deny: I’m not going to make it.
He turned sideway, awkwardly sidestepping, but this afforded only a momentary reprieve. The inexorable movement of the walls quickly closed in, tearing the cloth from his chest and back. He turned a corner, spying the narrow opening to the King’s Chamber and exhaled the last of his breath, but it wasn’t enough. He pushed his hands impotently against the walls, but all that happened was that the embrace of stone tightened against his ribs. He was stuck fast.
Something inside him broke; despair gave way to acceptance. He was going to die and there was nothing he could do to prevent that fate. Destiny had brought him to Egypt, to this hidden place within the Great Pyramid, and so also had it decreed this finale.
And the boy?
He could feel the child beside him, frantic but unable to get past him.
The boy might yet survive.
There was just enough room for him to reach down and grasp the child’s naked arm. The boy felt impossibly light as Garral lifted him off his feet and all but hurled him through the narrow space above his head. The child tumbled through the fissure, leaving bloody trails on the wall, but as he regained his feet, he turned his head to his savior as if wondering what to do next.
“Run!”
A look of concern or guilt crossed the child’s countenance, but then the urgency of Garral’s voice or perhaps just an atavistic survival instinct gave him the impetus to move. The hesitation cost him. The tunnel was now so narrow that he could not run straight ahead; his shoulders were too broad. He turned, sidestepping as Garral had done, and scrambled toward freedom.
The pressure against Garral’s chest transformed from extreme discomfort to agony as his ribs bent then broke, driving daggers of bone into his chest cavity. A vise closed on his head…pain, such pain…Garral felt an eruption growing behind his eyeballs and then….
Darkness.
His consciousness guttered but did not go out completely. Instead, he hung in the pervasive black, clinging to the agony of his death throes until the burning in his lungs forced him to gasp for breath….
He nearly choked on a lungful of musty, but otherwise fresh air. The pain was still there, burning in every fiber of his being… the darkness remained absolute…yet he was breathing.
How?
He took another breath, more cautiously this time, attentive to the pressure on his chest—it was gone! He experimentally raised a hand; no resistance at all. His shoulders still burned where the skin had been scoured away on the tunnel walls, but he had complete freedom of movement. He tried taking a step and found that he was sitting cross-legged in the yoga position known as ‘the Lotus.’
I’m still in the King’s Chamber, he realized with a start. I never left. It was all a dream.
A dream so real that even now he could still feel the clamp of stone crushing his body and could still hear the plaintive cries of the boy….
The boy? What happened to him?
Nothing, it was just a dream.
His fingers brushed against the cloth of his shirtfront; he felt a pang of disappointment but no surprise when he felt nothing but fabric and flesh underneath. The Amulet of Thoth was gone; it had never even existed.
He fumbled the lighter from his shirt pocket and struck the flint, throwing a muted yellow glow onto the elaborate maze of runes he had drawn. Irregular smudges of wax marked the places where his candles had melted away to nothing, revealing the time span of his incorporeal journey. The torch lay exactly where he had left it, most of its length still unburnt, and he set it alight in order to get an answer to the question uppermost in his mind.
The passageway to the secret vault was gone. He arose unsteadily, his legs stiff from hours of inactivity and crossed the chamber for a closer inspection. Not even a split line in the rock remained to mark the place where it had been… if it had been.
But there was something there; something resting at the joint between wall and floor, exactly where the opening had been. He knelt to pick it up, but it remained fixed in place like a creeper vine that had sent roots deep into the tiny fissures in the stone…except there were no fissures and it was no plant. He tugged harder until it broke loose. Even as his fingers felt the uneven outline of object he knew what it was: bones.
Specifically the tiny bones of a hand—a child’s hand—curved around a solid object. In the glare of the torch, there was no mistaking the ancient skeletal outline, aged to a yellow ivory color, wrapped around a block of blue stone. Time had fused the digits into the lapis, even tinting the edges of the bone a light azure. He made no attempt to pry them loose.
Garral stared at the object for a long time, trying to divine its significance. His first reaction was to grieve for the boy; he had not escaped after all. His conscience was quick to chide him; after all, what did the Great Dragon care for the fate of a child? He paid no heed.
The age of the bones hinted at a truth he had only begun to ponder; everything that had happened, whether dreamt or in some other reality, had truly occurred in the distant past. The unfamiliar language of the grave robbers could only have been a dialect of ancient Egypt. Though his travels had been on the astral plane, his journey had not merely been through space, but also time.
The child was real. His death was real, not just a dream.
But he was dead ages before you were born.
A multitude of inner counselors fought within him, but he shouted them all down. He was the Great Dragon; if he deigned to save an innocent, or chose to weep over the death of one, what did it matter? He was under no obligation to anyone to do a single thing?
And yet, am I not the Lord of Cruelty and Master of Evil? Am I not?
Am I indeed?
It occurred to him that Amulet of Thoth might yet remain in the secret crypt, awaiting discovery by a modern archaeological digger or a sorcerer powerful enough to open the secret door without waiting for the correct alignment of the heavens. Perhaps that had been the purpose of his coming here this night: to learn of the Amulet’s existence so that he might bring it forth once more into the world and rule by its sign. He nodded slowly as he considered this, absently dropping the odd relic into his shirt pocket.
The upper entrance to the Great Pyramid framed a patch of violet—the predawn sky—and he hastened toward it. He was eager to quit this place. Though he felt he had completed the task set before him by the fates, the night’s events had left him shaken. Part of his soul had been left behind in that dream state, crushed between the walls of the passageway, and he could feel the pain as acutely as some men feel the ghost of an amputated limb.
He passed through the entry and onto the bough of the Great Pyramid dedicated to Khufu, and swept down the steep slope, hailing his guide. “Ali! Ready the camels.”
“Stay where you are, devil!”
The harsh command stopped him in his tracks. The voice did not belong to the camel driver. He raised his eyes and saw Ali held by the arms between two men, swathed in litham veils. They were not alone. Another man likewise garbed pressed a curved dagger to Ali’s throat, while a fourth held a diminutive figure captive in his embrace.
The knife wielder’s eyes flashed with the insanity of the devout. “See the fate that befalls all who willingly serve the devil Iblis!”
Garral saw what was about to happen and shouted a protest, but his words—ineffectual though they would have been—were too late. The knife blade pierced the guide’s throat opening a fountain of blood that looked almost black in the twilight. The murderer whirled on Garral, brandishing the stained blade.
“We learned of how you cursed the household of Ali Abu Hassan, and compelled him to become your servant. You are known to us Iblis Shaitan. The blood of all who serve you shall fall beneath our feet.”
The men holding Ali released their burden, drawing their own knives and advanced in support of their spokesman, but all of them stopped several paces away, as if fearful of contamination. The leader gestured with his dagger to the remaining man in the group. “We witnessed how the child’s sickness magically left his body, proving beyond all doubt that he is your willing foot servant. This shall not be tolerated.”
The small captive was thrust forward, his garments torn away in the same motion to reveal a small dark haired boy, quivering in terror. Garral recognized him immediately: Hassan, the young son of Ali, whom he had used as leverage against the guide. Garral felt the weight of Ali’s blood settle upon his shoulders. My fault.
Ali’s slayer stalked over to the boy, grasped his shoulder to expose his bared chest, and raised the dagger once more.
“No! You will not harm the boy.”
What are you doing?
Something hot began pulsating over his heart… The lapis pyramid….
The veiled killer stared back defiantly. “Will you take his place Iblis?” He spat a mocking laugh then thrust down with the knife.
“No!” Garral thrust out his hand, and this time, his protest was full of power.
Fire blossomed against his breast. Blue flame erupted from his outthrust fingertips, arcing across to blast the knife from the killer’s hand. In that instant, azure fire engulfed Garral, transforming him into a something like a creature of myth.
Iblis, a djinn of smokeless fire who had defied Allah and become chief among the shaitan, the evil spirits who tempt men.
The veiled men fled. This was what they had feared most, but distance afforded no salvation. Lightning stabbed out from the center of the blue gyre, burning their bones to dust within their bodies. Their carcasses fell to the sand, smoking like roasted meat as the thunder of their execution echoed against the pyramids.
Garral blinked, as if struck blind. The fire had fallen, plunging the world into darkness. The brilliance of the lightning had robbed him of his ability to see, but he could just make out the silhouette of his hand against the predawn sky. His memory of what had just happened was fractured, but he remembered that it had something to do with….
He tore the blue pyramid talisman from his pocket. It remained quiescent, warmed only by its proximity to his flesh. He held it thoughtfully, his fingers curling unconsciously over the ancient bones fused to its surface.
Did that really happen? Is this too a dream? The sound of a child, softly sobbing, reached his ears and he knew that this time, it was real. He blinked a few more times. The first thing he saw was the lumpy outline of several camels, hobbled and kneeling a dozen paces away. Ali’s body lay where it had fallen, but there was no sign of the mob of killers. Off to his left, Hassan Ibn Ali cowered in the remains of his djellabah, weeping.
Garral took an uncertain step toward the boy. “I’m sorry,” he said softly in Arabic. “I’ll take you back to…” To whom? The boy is an orphan now. Worse, he is a pariah, touched by the evil Iblis. He wouldn’t survive a day.
Leave him. You know what you are now. The fate of one child is nothing to you.
He unconsciously rotated the pyramid amulet in his hand. “The fate of a child,” he murmured.
Had he not made the effort to save the child slave of the ancient tomb robbers, the talisman would have remained lost to the ages. What difference did the fate of one child make?
Sometimes all the difference in the world.
He extended a hand to Hassan, his voice no longer sympathetic but commanding. “Rise. You belong to me now.”
