I knew that couldn’t be the only entrance, though. A sneaky bastard like Elkhashab had to have some other escape route, especially since he was smuggling artifacts out of the country. He probably had a Scooby-Doo bookcase inside that revealed spiral stairs, and if you followed them down, you’d be in some creepy catacombs and eventually find a ladder that led to a trapdoor hidden in a warehouse or someplace else innocuous.
The chances of finding his secret passage inside were much greater than finding his exit point, but I had to get in there without tripping his wards. He had to come home to happy, undisturbed wards on his gate if I was going to ambush him properly.
I took one last look around and then allowed myself to slip down off the wall, disappointing the residents of the moat.
“All right. I’ve seen enough. To the casbah!”
Oberon trotted beside me, tail wagging.
“Um. Right. And we need to find a place for you to hang out for the day. It’s going to be impossible for you to come inside.”
“Can you swing paw over paw on a rope without falling into a moat full of crocodiles?”
“Yes, there is. We’ll hide you well. I don’t want anyone to think you’re up for grabs.”
I bought some food and water for Oberon and a few bones for him to gnaw on, and then we found a nice roof—there were plenty of the flat kind in Al Fayyum—where he could lounge unseen and undisturbed. After wishing him an excellent nap, I returned to the bazaar to purchase a good length of rope, a small anchor, and a single length of steel rebar. These would allow me to negotiate the moat.
Back on top of Elkhashab’s wall—this time with camouflage cast on myself—I set the steel rebar about halfway into the hardened mud, with a little magical encouragement. After tying one end of the rope to the rebar and the other to the anchor, I created a binding between the steel of the anchor and the wall of Elkhashab’s back patio; his house was constructed of the same adobe material. Once I energized the binding, the anchor flew to the house and stuck there without me having to throw it.
I had rather a lot of slack to take up—I’d overestimated the distance—and had to retie the rope on my end to make it taut.
All this activity had drawn the attention of Elkhashab’s crocodiles. Even though I was in camouflage, once I began to swing over their heads they threw off their customary torpor and became quite excited, scrambling over one another and trying to position themselves underneath me. They smelled what they couldn’t see. Hissing, snapping fights broke out. I have never felt so potentially tasty.
Once I had passed over the moat and it became clear that I wouldn’t fall into their waiting mouths, most of them gave up, but a few pursued me onto land, cleverly deducing that I’d have to drop down at some point. I slowed and found the small, hungry threads of their conscious minds and told them I wasn’t breakfast. Really. Go away. Back to the moat, there’s a good croc. They obeyed sluggishly, but they obeyed, one at a time, and I was able to make a soft landing next to the crocodile priest’s patio and dissolve my camouflage.
A quick glance at said patio in the magical spectrum revealed that—besides being expensively furnished—it was warded. So were all the windows. I didn’t intend to use any of them, anyway. I snuck around counterclockwise, to the side of the house where there was a thin strip of glass block high up in place of a full window. My guess was that this was a bathroom. Chances of plumbing being right on the wall beneath the blocks were slim. The chances that Elkhashab had warded his bathroom were even slimmer.
This adobe made of river mud was precisely the sort of thing I appreciated in construction materials. Though it took longer than I may have wished, it was not difficult to unbind it and watch a me-shaped hole appear in the wall. I still had to cut through some insulation with a dagger and then kick through some thin drywall inside, but it was easier than trying to dismantle an accomplished magician’s wards.
The first of many shocks in Elkhashab’s house came in a whiff of cinnamon apples. He had one of those plug-in air fresheners glowing softly next to the sink. Neat patterned towels, fluffy and folded, waited to complete hand-washing rituals. Not what I expected from a crocodile priest. Apart from that, the room looked unused—far too clean for an evil warlock’s daily use. I concluded with satisfaction that this was a guest bathroom and Elkhashab wouldn’t check it when he came home.
I stepped back outside for a moment to top off my bear charm. Fully charged, I crept back in with my faerie specs on, looking for more wards, and worrying a bit about mundane security as well.
I closed the bathroom door behind me, hoping he wouldn’t notice in his hurry to play with the grimoire. Outside, there was a short hallway leading to what I presumed were bedroom doors. Elkhashab didn’t strike me as the sort to share the same side of the house with guests, so I ignored these and moved on. There was a spacious living area with a giant TV and shelves lined with priceless figurines of this god or that goddess. On the opposite side of that, I found a foyer leading to the front door; I searched for a security system but found none. I could see wards around the front door instead.
An arched passage led to a kitchen, but there was likely little of interest in there. Another arch seemed to do nothing but give a view of a magnificent statue of Sobek set in a lighted niche, but once I got closer I saw that another hallway beckoned. These might lead to Elkhashab’s private rooms. I checked the door and doorjamb of the first one before opening it. No juju. No hairs across the threshold. And unlocked.
It was a study. A writing desk sat facing the wall shared with the hallway and door; the other three walls were lined with bookshelves. Centered between them was a comfy chair with a table and reading lamp next to it.
I clapped my hands together and rubbed them. Scooby-Doo’s legacy had to be here. Pull the right book and one of those bookcases would move aside. Or … I pranced over to the reading light and pulled the dangling chain. It turned on!
But nothing else happened.
Damn.
I began to systematically pull on every book he had on his shelves. Some of them were interesting, some were genuine grimoires I might enjoy snagging later, but most were dreck. None revealed a secret passage. I moved aside the comfy chair. I lifted the rug to look for trapdoors. Nothing. The writing desk, a long shot due to its placement, was similarly uncooperative. I sighed heavily and admitted that I could have been wrong.
There were other rooms to check. The whole house, if necessary.
I exited the study and closed the door behind me. I turned right to the next door and examined it as I had the first one. This door had nothing in the way of magical traps, but it did have the old hair-across-the-doorjamb trick. I opened the door and then bound the hair back into place as I closed it. Feel secure, Mr. Elkhashab. Nobody opened this door.
The room was an art studio. Canvases of ugly splatter paintings rested against the walls, five or six deep. An easel near the window had plastic sheeting spread underneath it with liberal staining. Despite this precaution, the floor of the studio—cheap linoleum tiles—had been anointed with droplets of various colors. A low countertop with cabinets underneath held his art supplies—lots of paint tubes and a container of paintbrushes, along with turpentine. A sink waited nearby to wash away the excess. On impulse, I tried the faucet. It sadly provided naught but hot and cold running water.
The canvases hid no secret doors behind them, and I was starting to get seriously frustrated. I’d been searching for an hour and had nothing to show for it. I moved the easel. I picked up the ceramic pot full of paintbrushes. I pulled up the edges of the plastic sheeting. I got a whole lot of nada.
Desperate, I began picking up the mess of paint tubes scattered about the counter, one by one, feeling intensely stupid as I placed them back exact
ly as I’d found them. Something clicked after I picked up the tube of phthalo blue. My eyes darted around the room, looking for canvases falling away. Nope. Behind me, the easel rested serenely, except for the ungodly mix of colors scattered about the legs.
On the other side of the countertop, however, a neat little square of darkness beckoned. There was a set of stone steps leading down to something that was no doubt very naughty.
I circled and took a few steps down, looking for a way to close the door. Elkhashab would never leave it open when he wanted to perform his dirty deeds. There was a rather large button labeled CLOSE in Arabic script, but it had an odd white glow around it, so I hesitated. A few more steps down and I lost all light from the studio, but there was a dim glow from some light source farther down, whether a tunnel or a room I could not tell. I cast night vision and scanned the area carefully with my improved sight. I spied a smaller, unlabeled, and non-glowing button at the base of the stairs and pushed that instead. The door mechanism slid shut and a set of dingy old incandescent bulbs winked on, illuminating what turned out to be a tunnel after all and making my night vision unnecessary. I dispelled it and proceeded cautiously down the passage, which had smooth walls of the same adobe material used in the rest of the house.
I really was walking down the tunnel; there was a fairly steep grade, almost to the point where I wished there had been a staircase instead. Clearly this delved underneath Elkhashab’s moat and continued on from there. After a few hundred meters it dropped again, even steeper, and soon the wished-for steps appeared to ease the descent. Once the tunnel leveled out, a brief three or four meters led me to a stunning room that Elkhashab had very little to do with constructing. He’d put up the lights, no doubt, and his presence was smeared over the chamber like a greasy film, but there was no doubt that this room was at least twice as old as I was. Far beneath the well-documented and preserved ruins of Crocodilopolis, a grand hall stretched before me, supported by massive pillars of stone. Sarcophagi stared at me with four-thousand-year-old eyes, not with the heads of humans or Anubis but with Sobeks, unlike any ever seen before. They didn’t rest prone but leaned upright against the wall. It was an archaeologist’s dream. Or a dark wizard’s. I had never seen a Sobek sarcophagus before, but in this room there were at least twenty, each seven feet tall. I wondered if the mummies still remained inside and if they were well preserved. I paused to take a closer look at one that seemed to be in particularly good shape.
On top of the crocodile head was the tall yellow headdress and red disk signifying Amun-Ra. Instead of the customary crook and flail held by the pharaohs, this carved figure held a was scepter in the right hand, signifying power, and the ankh in the left, held by the loop and with the base pointing up to the figure’s right shoulder. The human body was carved from limestone with tiles of colored stones inlaid, mosaic fashion, to provide color. Some of these were gilded, and jewels still gleamed around the neck. The crocodile head was polished basalt and skillfully carved. The teeth were limestone but had been painted white at one time. Much of that paint had deteriorated, but a few discolored flecks hinted at what it must have looked like when new. The scepter and ankh were not carved of stone but appeared to be gilded bronze.
I wasn’t an expert on Egyptian artifacts by any means, but these sarcophagi couldn’t be older than the Middle Kingdom period—and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were from the time of the New Kingdom, judging by the craftsmanship on display. Normally the limbs and feet on sarcophagi were mere suggestions, painted on or highlighted with the slightest of bas-relief sculpting, but these were fully sculpted.
Miraculous that it hadn’t been plundered—not only by Elkhashab but by centuries of grave robbers. Yet there was no other treasure in the room, so if it was a traditional burial chamber, then quite a bit of stuff was missing. But why take everything else and leave these untouched? Most curious.
I was about to reach out and touch the ankh when I heard the swirl of water and an animal grunt from the next chamber down, traveling and echoing the way sound will when water and stone is involved. I froze.
There was much more than Elkhashab’s handiwork to fear here. Aside from whatever made that noise, untold ancient hoodoo could be waiting to descend upon my head—perhaps from this very sarcophagus. Though my cold iron aura would most likely protect me, prudence dictated that I shouldn’t touch it without checking it in the magical spectrum first, and I let my hand drop. These weren’t going anywhere; I could come back to examine them later. I had much more reconnaissance to conduct.
I crept down the hall in front of the line of sarcophagi, my eyes toward the center of the room. Elkhashab’s string of bulbs, spaced at odd intervals, created puddles of yellow like streetlamps, allowing the edges of the room to languish in shadow. Past the first set of pillars, I saw some familiar markings on the floor: a circle enclosing another circle, and inside that not a pentagram but a mixture of lines, Hebrew characters, and mystical symbols straight out of The Greater Key of Solomon. The White Knife and the Black Knife were there, the Sickle, the Sword, and all the rest too. Elkhashab was definitely more than a crocodile priest. He dabbled extensively in the dark end of the magic pool, like Nebwenenef before him.
A supporting wall forced me to move toward the center. A doorway there led to another room, decorated with bas-relief doodads heralding Sobek’s spiffiness. At least, I inferred as much from the gaping maw of a crocodile sculpted at the top.
The next room was poorly lit. A single light made a half-assed effort at fighting the darkness from the edges. The scent of water and fetid rot twitched at my nostrils; something had died in there. Maybe many somethings. The pervasive miasma was enough to make me draw Fragarach from its sheath.
Two steps into the room, I heard the water gurgling again. Cursing the weak effort of the token bulb, I recast night vision to better see what I was missing. The chamber was of a similar size to the one I had just left, except that in the center of the room there was no floor with mystical symbols scrawled across it; rather, a black pool with ripples betrayed recent movement. Pillars rose out of it to support the ceiling.
There was no great mystery about what awaited me in the gloom. Elkhashab, that pantweasel, had left me with one or more crocodiles to deal with. A faint electric hum drew my attention over my left shoulder.
A large old-fashioned freezer lurked there, a thick cable snaking from underneath it to the room I’d just vacated. He must have run the electricity behind all the sarcophagi. I opened the lid and saw that it was full of steaks and roasts. Oberon would have approved. I took a few out and threw them to the edge of the pool, then tossed a final one into the pool itself. Something responded in the dark, and I slid along the wall counterclockwise, holding my sword point in front of me. Anything that wanted to eat me had to eat my blade first. Once I’d started to move along the longer wall, a splash sounded from the space I’d vacated, followed by serious macking noises. I saw gold glinting in the dim light, and then an enormous pocked back stretched sinuously into the water: It was the largest crocodile I had ever seen, festooned with enough metal to make reestablishing the gold standard plausible. I hurried to the next supporting wall and another doorway. There was nothing that I could see to keep the crocodile from entering the next room, but perhaps it didn’t want to leave its comfy mini-swamp with easy-to-hunt rump roasts.
The subsequent chamber was fairly well lit, like the first one, allowing me to dispel night vision, but its contents were entirely different. Instead of sarcophagi along the walls, there were boxes—the wooden kind you used to see a lot of before the planet started to run low on trees and people figured it might be better to use recycled cardboard instead. They were probably full of the treasures missing from the burial chamber. I left them alone, figuring it was best to leave it all conveniently packaged for the Ministry of Antiquities. I was much more interested in the creeptastic vibe coming from the far side of the room.
Elkhashab had repurposed an ancient stone wo
rktable, perhaps originally intended as an embalming station, by turning it into a makeshift altar. It was stained with fluids that were supposed to stay on the inside of bodies, and there were a couple of smallish skulls on either end. Around the altar itself he’d drawn a couple of large circles, symbols of invocation and protection written along the circumference and ritual materials placed carefully inside. Adjacent to these were other circles—the summoning kind. Circles of binding with pentagrams. A telltale whiff of sulfur confirmed that he’d successfully summoned physical demons here, not just the spirits suggested by the first room’s circles. He had the seals of calling, binding, coercion, submission, and banishment painted perfectly between the points of the stars. Almost too perfectly.
I scanned the altar again with a new suspicion. The two skulls were facing at exactly the same angle. He had some bowls full of ritual ingredients—salt and salamander tails, that kind of thing—and those bowls were precisely equidistant from one another. The candles were brand new and of the same kind. The ritual knife was placed perpendicular to the edge.
I thought back to the guest bathroom with the air freshener and the primly folded towels. The order of the library. Even the studio, meant to look sloppy and spontaneous, had been carefully arranged that way. This guy was an obsessive–compulsive.
It made sense. The precision required to be a practicing magician was no joke.
I decided to mess with him. A fingernail’s scratch across the seals of coercion, submission, and banishment would drive him crazy. He’d spend hours repainting just to make sure everything was perfect. That is, if I didn’t kill him first.
Golden figurines of Sobek, Amun, and Amun-Ra stood impassively on the altar, their dead painted eyes calmly awaiting tribute and sacrifice. I smirked; Elkhashab appeared to be hedging his bets on which form of Amun would get all the love. Amun had been a headliner in the early Egyptian dynasties, but he had to share top billing with Ra later on, and Sobek was considered in some tales to be a manifestation of the combined god Amun-Ra. Elkhashab must be harboring doubts about which was to receive sacrifices from the Grimoire of the Lamb.