Demon's Fire (5 page)

“Watch your step,” Herrington said, taking her arm as they descended.

She’d known his spirits were high, but it wasn’t until he touched her that she felt the wound-up buzz of his energy. Her heart kicked a fraction faster. If Herrington was this stirred up, whatever his team had found was big.

“It’s that good?” she asked, just a little breathlessly.

Herrington’s mouth twitched on one side. “Wait and see.”

There wasn’t much to see at first, just a roughly square, sandy, compacted tunnel, stabilized by thick wooden ties. The air was close and musty, the shadows strange as their electric torches caught on irregularities in the excavated walls. Here and there they passed hints of doorways or building blocks, but Herrington had obviously known they didn’t lead where he wished to go and hadn’t instructed his workers to dig there. She’d heard whispers that he’d taken special pictures of the landscape from a flying car, but unless his demon camera could peer through dunes, she didn’t know what good that would have done.

And then she could see a door that wasn’t filled with sand, its lintel and frame constructed of black-veined gold marble.

“Here,” said Herrington, his voice hushed but excited as he gestured her ahead of him. “Welcome to the Old Kingdom.”

She hadn’t known her heart could beat so hard. This was what she’d come to Bhamjran for, this blood-pumping glimpse of a forgotten world. Her kidskin boots scraped on the marble lintel. She swung her powerful Yamish torch up from the floor…

And promptly lost her breath.

“Heavens,” she said when the musty air agreed to fill her lungs again. “I can scarcely believe it’s real.”

Though a layer of fine, sandy dust coated everything around her, she stood in a clearly recognizable bedchamber. An ornate ebony couch, large enough to sleep four, stretched across the center of the room. One of its pillows lay on the carpeted floor, its bejeweled silk tassels hanging in a tangle. The covers on the couch—very fine dyed linen, from the looks of them—still bore the imprint of a female body, as if the long-ago sandstorm had interrupted the great queen’s nap. A pair of elegant beaded sandals had tumbled under the couch’s foot, suggesting there’d been no time to put them on. The leather looked desiccated but hardly two millennia old. In truth, the shoes were stylish enough that Beth wouldn’t have quibbled to wear them herself.

She could see they had interested the other excavators, because fresh foot tracks led through the dust to them. Deciding it was safe to follow their example, Beth stepped farther inside.

What her light fell on next went beyond fashion: The most beautiful drinking cup she’d ever seen sat on an adjacent table. Big enough to be the Old Kingdom version of a loving cup, it was made of soft yellow gold and shaped like a pair of intertwined swans. The artistry of it awed her. The birds were so realistic, she could see the ruffling of each gold feather. Dried brown dregs stained the cup’s bottom.

“I’m afraid to move,” she said, her hand pressed to her mouth in wonder. “I don’t want to break anything.”

Herrington had come up beside her, his warmth and size a comfort in the dark. “The conservators have removed anything that looked too fragile. It’s safe enough to walk around.”

“But it looks as if the queen just stepped out! As if she drank from that wine cup mere hours ago!”

“Luckily for us, the sandstorm sealed that door as soundly as a tomb. Better, really, because so many burial sites have been looted. And there are no windows in this room—for defensive purposes, we think, from the records that were left behind. Apparently, Queen Tou had enemies.”

“Queen Two?”

He spelled it for her. “We think that’s how it’s pronounced. Scholars have been able to link the Old Kingdom hieroglyphs to a modern dialect, but we don’t know how much drift there’s been in vocalizing sounds.”

Beth was no linguist, just a stunned admirer. Feeling as if she were dreaming, she moved toward a painted wall. Its colors shone vividly beneath the dust. The paint followed the carvings: delicate, precise shapes worked into sandstone. She found the image of an egret, then a snake and a crocodile.

“Those pictures spell out a warning,” Herrington said from behind her. “‘Let any man who breaks the sanctity of this chamber feel my eternal wrath.’”

The muscles along Beth’s spine shuddered. “That sounds like a curse.”

“I wouldn’t worry. The desert broke the sanctity of this chamber long before we did.” Herrington panned his own torch slowly across the writing. “Tou-Hhamoun was a powerful queen by all accounts, even allowing for official exaggeration. Bit of a mystery, actually. Scholars have been puzzling over it for years. She went from being an orphan, cast out by her tribe for theft, to supreme ruler of Upper Southland in a mere decade. She married thirty princes, each from powerful families. According to legend, they all begged to marry her.”

He gestured toward a line of blue and gold hieroglyphs. “Here she says, ‘My rule stretches four by forty,’ whatever that means, ‘and my rivals fear my’—vigor, I think that word is—‘just as they fear my great armies.’ I’m not sure who she intended to impress by writing this here, but that’s what it says.”

“Perhaps she read it to her husbands as a bedtime story.”

“Perhaps,” Herrington agreed, a smile in his voice. “Tomorrow the conservators will begin removing these artifacts. We need to stabilize them from the change in atmosphere. Eventually, I’m hoping your government will agree to return them here. Then visitors will be able to admire them in situ, as we do tonight.”

“What a
wonderful
idea,” Beth said, her eyes pricking with how deeply she meant the words. “Everyone should have this experience, especially the Bhamjrishi. This is their heritage, after all.”

“Well, that’s a ways down the road. My government will have to agree to the plan as well. The process would be technically complex. But Hhamoun could end up being a huge tourist draw. I doubt your secretary of the treasury will mind that.”

He looked quietly satisfied by the prospect, and for the first time Beth saw him only as a person. Not demon, not diplomat, not even her in-law, but just a man with a dream that he was hoping to bring to pass.

It made her wish she had a dream herself, instead of simply wanting to escape the mundane life her family had planned for her.

“Thank you for bringing me here,” she said, feeling more humble than she could express. “This is a night I won’t soon forget.”

Lord Herrington offered her a gentle, unconcealed smile. “I enjoy sharing my discoveries with those who can appreciate them.” He tipped his head to the side, a definite glint of mischief entering his silver eyes. “Would you like to stay a while on your own? Maybe commune with the spirit of Hhamoun’s queen? I can wait for you outside.”

“Oh, my,” Beth breathed. “Yes, I would like that!”

Was it possible to communicate with the dead queen’s spirit? Beth suspected Herrington didn’t think so, but who knew?

While Herrington waited for her in the tunnel, she turned her torch’s cone of light around the chamber. The furniture was exquisite, much of it bearing the heads and feet of animals. One table with lifelike antelope legs supported a long black wig on a stand, its countless tiny braids still shining with golden beads. The ghost of some sweet perfume tickled her nose. Beth shivered involuntarily. She was probably the first woman to see these objects since the queen had fled. Yama weren’t as hidebound as Ohramese, but Herrington still only hired male diggers.

A soft noise, uncannily like a whisper, caused her to involuntarily yank her torch upward.
Falling sand,
Beth told herself, though she didn’t see any. The ceiling was the same black-veined gold marble as the door and floor. Unlike those surfaces, the ceiling was coffered, the deep, stepped squares positively covered in hieroglyphs.

What were you saying?
Beth wondered, the hairs behind her neck prickling.
Who were you warning to stay away?
She noticed a slender rod hanging from a nearly invisible eye hook not far from her. It seemed an odd object to leave dangling from the ceiling of this perfectly appointed space.

“Pull me,” someone said right next to her ear.

Beth spun around while her heart beat like a mad creature trapped in her throat. The shadows wavered wildly, but no one was there.

“I’m imagining things,” she whispered to herself.

Pull me,
the walls murmured.

Beth bit her lip and stepped closer to the hanging rod. Her hand seemed to lift of its own accord.

I really shouldn’t do this,
she thought—even as she went up on tiptoe to grasp the thing.

Her fingers found polished wood with more carvings. With a prayer that her actions weren’t going to bring the place crashing down, Beth gave the rod a gentle, experimental tug.

The testing pull was enough. A section of the ceiling came down as smoothly as if it were oiled, the marble block suspended by a silvery length of pipe. One small toggle switch was embedded within the metal—at least a switch was what Beth assumed it was. She glanced back over her shoulder toward the door. She ought to call to Herrington. He would want to know this was here.

I am for you,
said the same voice she had imagined she’d heard before.
Let any man who breaks the sanctity of this chamber feel my eternal wrath.

Before her conscience could stop her, Beth flipped the switch.

The wall across from her, where the queen’s warning was inscribed, rolled silently open.

Her head might have been floating, she felt so lifted out of her normal self. Herrington’s interests forgotten, she moved forward like a sleepwalker. There was another chamber behind the wall: small, perfectly square, with dull black walls that absorbed her Yamish torch’s light. As she stepped inside, a humming sensation swept over her skin. Some energy was radiating outward from the dark surfaces. Whatever it was felt delicious, like a cat twining around her limbs. The roof of this room was barely a foot above her head. She reached up to stroke the ceiling, and the moment her fingertips made contact, her insides melted with pleasure. It was as if she’d been tranquilized. She didn’t even jump when the wall shut behind her.

Her mind turned off as her escape route closed. She had no other words for the phenomenon. She seemed unable to think, though images did drift dreamily through her mind.

She saw Tou within this room, but she didn’t look like a queen. She was young, maybe fifteen, and she was crawling on her hands and knees, filthy and barely clothed, having scrabbled into this hole to escape the sun. Her palace didn’t exist yet, even as a wish in her mind. She was all thirst, all hunger, all desperate drive to survive. Outcast that she was, she knew the drive was futile. If the desert didn’t kill her now, it would soon.

Such was her state that she thought she was dreaming when the walls first spoke.

Goddess,
they said.
You have returned.

They belled inward to embrace her as if they were alive, turning to a tarlike liquid that was filled with stars.

And then it was Beth whom the walls embraced. A basso note rumbled through her bones, lower than the lowest horn ever blown. Colors and patterns flowered behind her eyes. She should have been frightened, but the capacity for that emotion had been drained from her. She felt more purely female than she ever had, desiring and desirable. As the walls pressed up against her, her body twitched and grew wet.

Goddess,
murmured the chamber.
This is for you.

Stars began to spin around her, celestial clockwork older than the sand. Stars couldn’t tell time, of course, and yet Beth sensed these stars had been waiting for her, mindlessly patient down the centuries, hoping only to fulfill the purpose for which they’d been designed. That purpose was to make her better, to make her capable of birthing children who would survive the dark age ahead.

Odd sensations twanged through her nerves. She would have fallen had the clinging walls not cradled her upright. She breathed in stars and blackness, scented of cinnamon. The dark curled in teasing fingers between her legs, almost physical, almost causing a release. She reached to let the tickling deeper, her body straining to feel more of the sweet, slippery caress…until her every cell seemed to explode and reform itself.

Beth was on her knees, breathing in great, quick gulps, her torch fallen to the matte black floor. Her muscles trembled as she tried to throw off whatever had caused the strange vision. The door was open, not closed as she’d imagined, and the surfaces of the room were perfectly solid. Shaking, she fumbled for the torch, got to her feet and tottered out. Her legs felt odd, like someone else’s legs rather than her own. The wall slid shut at her exit, the section of the ceiling that had descended now rising up with the faintest hiss.

She could not see a single crack to show where the stones had moved.

She was alone in the queen’s chamber, so weakened by shock that the torch was nearly too heavy for her to hold. However long she’d been in the other room, her stay had not alerted Lord Herrington.

That didn’t just happen,
she told herself.

She looked up and found the slender wooden rod still hanging from its hook.

Every one of her siblings would have sworn this situation was typical: Tell Beth not to do something, and she was sure to leap straight into trouble. In this case, no one even had to tell her. She’d known instinctively not to pull that thing.

I hallucinated what happened. I was dreaming about that demon and Charles, and being left alone in here must have been more than my nerves could take. I’m a simple, Ohramese girl who isn’t used to foreign goings-on.

Regardless of the cause of her experience, whether it was fear or ghosts or poisons lingering in the ancient air, her nerves compelled her to yank the whiplike rod from its holding place. Hardly able to bear touching it, she shoved it into a corner beneath a rug. One of Herrington’s workers would find it eventually. Until they did, Beth didn’t have to think about whatever she had or had not done.