Many Words

“For meself,” Iseabail said, “I dinnae like the implications of t’ gods of th’ dead bein’ pu’ above the rest.”

“You and me both.” Cannon looked up into Osiris’ eyes, then shook his head and pointed his flashlight at the wall. “Where’s that draft coming from? This room isn’t big enough to be the whole temple.”

di Giacomo pulled a matchbox from his pocket, fumbled with it, struck a match, and held it very still. It flared to life, the flame bending subtly before the draft. Cannon let out a breath, and di Giacomo shook out the match as the others moved again. A few flashlights probed in the direction the match had indicated, revealing a patch of wall covered in hieroglyphs, indistinguishable from the wall around it.

Iseabail went over for a closer look, and Cannon waved for the others to follow here. “There’s a door here. Ha’ a look at yon outline.” She indicated a portion of the wall, where a fine line split a column of hieroglyphs in two. Splaying out her hands, she gave the wall an experimental push with her fingertips. Frowning, she moved two feet to her right and tried again. “Tha’s the ticket. Gi’ it a good shove righ’ here, cap’n.”

Cannon planted his feet, pressed his shoulder against the wall, and pushed. di Giacomo joined him, and as they heaved together, Cannon felt the wall give, then bind. They leaned into it again, but couldn’t get it to budge further, and in any case Iseabail, a mad glint in her eye and a grin lighting up her face, was saying, “Look!”

Cannon stepped back. The outline of the door was obvious now—six feet tall, three wide. The gap on its right side had grown enough to fit a fingertip into.

di Giacomo gave it a push. “It feels stuck to me, capitano.”

“That’s my take, too.” Cannon looked up and down the hinged side. “I thought I felt it catch on something.”

“Perhaps I could try?” Masaracchia said.

“Have at it.”

The monk swung his arms back and forth, hunched over, and wedged himself between the floor and the door. He straightened, then walked forward step by labored step, forcing the door open to the noise of grinding stone and, Cannon thought, a curious clicking—ten sharp noises like the creak of stressed metal spread out over the motion of the door.

“Set,” Cannon said, as the others looked on. “He killed Osiris, his brother.” He turned his flashlight on the next statue in line, a crocodile-headed man who also knelt facing the far end of the gallery. “Sobek. God of the Nile and of power in warfare. That’s Khepri across from him—he’s god of the morning.” He led them on toward the end of the gallery, Iseabail keeping pace with him and watching the floor for anything untoward while he had a look at each statue in turn. Some he didn’t recognize, but all of those he did he knew to be gods and goddesses, minor and major alike.

The next few statues his light revealed stopped him cold. Masaracchia bumped into him. “This is wrong,” Cannon pronounced.

“What d’ye mean?” said Iseabail.

Cannon indicated the statues with his flashlight. Both were falcon-headed men; one wore a tall headdress, and the other an upright disc surmounting his head. “These two are Horus, the patron god of the pharaohs, and of a unified Egypt. If anyone, Set ought to be bowing to him. The other one is Ra, the sun god. He’s not a supreme god like Zeus, but look at the symbolism here. Horus, Ra, and Sobek—the most important parts of Egyptian life, the pharaoh, the sun, and the Nile, all beneath…”

His flashlight’s beam revealed a statue standing at the end of the room, an eight-foot man wearing a tall crown comprising a central piece flanked by two long feathers. He held a shepherd’s crook and a flail out before him, and his legs were pressed together and indistinct. Another figure, standing off to the side, caught Cannon’s eye, and he turned the light on it: a jackal-headed man, facing the first statue.

“Osiris and Anubis,” said Cannon. “This isn’t right either.”

Masaracchia raised his eyebrows.

Cannon obliged him. “First: Anubis and Osiris aren’t exactly contemporaries. Their roles overlap. Second: Osiris is god of the underworld and of death, but he’s not such a big shot that the whole pantheon would be bowing to him, and his personality was all wrong for that anyway. He was all about gently guiding the souls of the departed to the afterlife.” He canted his head. “I don’t know if the ancient Egyptians had heresy, but this is one if they did.”

Burr looked up at the statue of Osiris. “So what does it mean, skipper?”

“If it’s some cult or some branch of the Egyptian religion,” said Cannon, “Egyptology has nothing to say about it. We’re in uncharted skies.”

di Giacomo approached, carrying something and pointing toward one of the ruined outbuildings. “Capitano, I found this over there.” He presented the object to Cannon. It was still recognizable as a scimitar.

“That’s not Egyptian, is it?” said Cannon.

Masaracchia looked it over. “Mohammedan, I would say, of the seventh or eighth century.” Cannon stared, his unspoken question hanging in the air, and Masaracchia exasperatedly added, “Monasteries have always been centers of learning, captain.”

“That’s one explanation, sure,” Cannon said. He turned to size up the temple. “Alright, ladies and gentlemen. We have evidence that this place isn’t as dead as it looks, so caution’s the word of the day. Crannach, you’re up front with me. If anything looks even remotely suspicious, call a halt.”

“Aye.”

“Burr, di Giacomo, you’re on rear guard. If someone tries to get the drop on us, shoot him.”

Masaracchia raised a hand. “And me?”

“You’re in the middle, brother monk,” said Cannon. “Keep your eyes peeled.”

They lined up and headed for the temple’s entrance, two stone doors, wide open. As they passed the threshold, the temperature immediately dropped. A cool breeze wafted past from further in, setting a layer of fine dust to snakelike motion. Cannon slipped his flashlight from its loop on his pack and switched it on.

The beam, soon joined by four others, stabbed into the shadows to reveal, bit by bit, a long gallery. Lengthy sequences of hieroglyphics were chiseled into the walls, surrounding the statues flanking the path down the center of the gallery.

Cannon trained his light on the nearest statue. It had been carved from black granite, and rather than facing the path, it faced the far end of the room. Playing the light on the ground before him, Cannon walked carefully over to it. It depicted a man with the head of a beast, a peculiar long-snouted creature with tall horns, kneeling, his palms on the pedestal.

Behind him, Masaracchia said, “Do you read hieroglyphics?”

“By heart, only a few,” said Cannon, kicking himself. His library aboard Inconstant held a copy of Alan Gardiner’s Egyptian Grammar, but without it he was working from memory alone. He ran a finger along the rows of glyphs. “Here,” he said, pointing at a pair of symbols: an owl in profile, looking out of the stone, and a man, viewed from above, laying on his side. “This pair means death.”

“An’ Osiris is god of the dead, aye?” Iseabail said.

“Yes,” Cannon said, glancing over his shoulder in surprise a moment later. Iseabail’s face glowed with curiosity. “I see you did your reading. Let’s see. This next one…” Two arms spread palms apart. “It’s common, I know that. Gives or takes, maybe?” The next symbol he recognized at once: a half-circle trailing lines beneath it. “Amen-ta,” he said. “The Land of the Dead. It’s the sunset, you see, with reflections on the river.” He looked up from the stele. “The Egyptians put sunset and death together, and they buried their dead on the west side of the river. This is a temple to Osiris—it could be a burial ground, too.” He looked over the inscription again and read, “The dead are taken to Amen-ta.” A few glyphs further down the face of the stone caught his eye. One depicted arms bearing a shield and a weapon. “This one means to fight.” A few others whose meaning Cannon could not discern followed, and the line ended in a man bowing. On the next line down, a man, laid out horizontally, fell onto a pair of spikes. “Trap,” Cannon said. “Good thing we brought you along, Isea.”

“Aye.”

“Alright. That’s all the ones I—”

“Over here, skipper,” Burr called. “You’re gonna want to see this.”

Cannon straightened and went over, Iseabail and Masaracchia behind him. Burr pointed at an object in the sand—a revolver. Cannon looked up to the top of the hill and back at the revolver; it was the object he had spotted earlier. He picked it up and turned it over.

“L. Nagant, Liège, 1913,” he read off the frame. Opening the loading gate, he turned the cylinder around. “”Three chambers empty.”

Burr looked from side to side, scanning the horizon. “What do you think he was shooting at? And where did he go?”

“Beats me,” said Cannon. He unbuttoned the flap of his holster. “If it shows up again, let’s make a better show of it.”

“Absolutely,” Burr agreed.

Masaracchia drove a stake deep into the sand and tied the camels to it. Cannon eyed the descent. The face of the hill against which the temple stood bore tool marks. It had been chipped nearly smooth, uncommonly shoddy work for the Egyptians, but more than enough to make the sixty-degree slope a tricky proposition for all but the most skilled climbers. Burr could have done it, were she not carrying the firepower, but Cannon doubted he could and knew that none of the rest were up to it.

They would have to go around. It was about a half-mile’s walk over broken, rocky badland, a gentle curve and a moderate descent to follow the limb of the hill down to its base. Another half-mile over sand and rock took them back to the outer wall of the temple complex. The main building rose high above the ruined walls in all its ancient glory, the white of its pillars glowing in the shadow of the hill and the black of its granite structure swallowing the gaze as readily as it did the light. It had been painted, once, but none of the few patches of color which remained changed what the temple was: a cold, unchanging monument to a long-dead civilization.

“Nae a picture of welcome, is it?” Iseabail said.

Cannon shook his head. “Did your people find out anything else about this place?” he asked of Masaracchia.

“No, Captain Cannon.” Masaracchia tore his gaze away from the building. “It puts me off my ease.”

“It gives me the willies, too,” Cannon replied. “Keep your eyes open. You especially, Burr.”

“You got it.” Burr let the tommy gun hang on its sling and threw a jaunty salute.

They filed through a gap in the rubble of the outer wall and fanned out over the courtyard. Cannon leaned over a fragment of one of the obelisk, running a hand over it to brush away the dust. Inscribed hieroglyphs ran the whole of its length. Two more pieces of the same obelisk laid nearby. Someone, long in the past, had gone at all three pieces with a chisel, and in many places, the inscriptions were unreadable. With a grunt, Cannon turned one of the pieces over.

That was more promising. He pursed his lips and blew on the stone, and the sand skittered away to reveal a few sections were the glyphs ran uninterrupted.

She laughed. “Only tha’ it was safer than the gallows, but we’re aye explorin’ new sorts of danger, aren’t we?”

Cannon couldn’t disagree. A few miles’ ride went by in relative silence, broken by the occasional snippet of conversation between them and, every now and then, a bellow from one of the camels. They came to the rocks. What had looked from several miles off to be merely a few boulders turned out to be a rocky hill, half-covered by the shifting dunes. Cannon dismounted, and the others joined him. He passed his reins to Masaracchia and took a few steps, hopping from rock to rock, up to the top of the hill, the temple complex laid out before him.

Time had wrought its ruin upon the scene. The walls which had once surrounded the temple were only memories, piles of rubble defining their rough outline. There had been several outbuildings along the periphery, now reduced to foundations. A newer wall, more complete but still sand-blasted and short enough to step over, circled the central temple. This, its roof abutting the clifflike face of the hill only a few yards below Cannon’s feet, was the most impressive element of the site. Standing almost directly above the temple, Cannon could nevertheless see some patches of paint left around the edges of the roof, breaking up the black and white of the granite and limestone blocks, themselves a sharp contrast to the brown bricks of the rest of the site and the dusting of sand on the temple’s roof.

Iseabail and Burr clambered up the rocks behind Cannon while he picked out a few more details. Four obelisks, all laying horizontally and broken in several pieces, had once stood by the gates in the walls, or at least the gaps where the gates had been, two at the outer wall and two at the inner. A glint of metal, half-buried, caught his eye.

“What is it?” said Burr.

“We’ll see when we get down there,” said Cannon. Returning to the camels, he took a long drink from his canteen and untied his pack from his camel’s saddle. He would need a few things before going in: an electric flashlight and batteries, which went into loops on his belt; two wooden torches and a box of matches, which he secured to the side of his pack. He slung a coil of rope over his shoulder and pocketed two spare magazines for his Mauser pistol, then hefted his pack up onto his shoulders. The others equipped themselves similarly, Iseabail taking a roll of tools besides, and Masaracchia tossing an empty sack over his shoulder.

“Ready?” said Cannon. Burr yanked the charging handle on her Thompson gun and nodded along with the others. “Alright. Let’s go.