The Burning Man

6

‘If you can’t keep up I can get you a Zimmer frame.’ Laura pushed her way through the crowds on Mar Girgis Street. In the heat, Old Cairo breathed steadily under eight thousand years of history.

‘I’m actually choosing to walk several paces behind so people don’t think we’re together.’ Tom was red-faced and sweating, and yearning for the moderate climate of his Scottish home.

Laura’s white-blonde hair stood out amongst the veiled women who were in the majority on the streets of Masr al-Qadima as it stretched down to Coptic Cairo, but she had chosen to cover her shoulders and legs in deference to the local custom. ‘I’d have thought you’d finally want to boost your reputation now you’ve got a few hundred years under your belt.’ She glanced back at him. Her eyes were hidden by the expensive sunglasses she’d stolen from a tourist shop on the edge of the souk, but her smile gave an edge to her mockery. ‘Hot?’

‘Of course I’m bloody hot! It’s one hundred and four in the shade!’

‘One of the advantages of being not quite human. I don’t feel the heat.’

‘Yes, it’s easy to forget you’re a plant. In my experience, one of their finer attributes is that they’re always silent.’

Laura came to a halt before the ancient rounded towers of the western gate into Coptic Cairo. She checked the guidebook. ‘Looks like this is it. Built by Emperor Trajan in AD ninety-eight to enter the Roman fortress of Babylon. Like anyone cares.’ She shoved the guidebook into her pocket and marched through the gate into the cooler and less popular religious compound.

South-west of the gate was El Muallaqa, the Hanging Church, the oldest Christian church in Egypt built into the walls of the Water Gate of the old Roman fortress. Its twin white towers looked down on a peaceful avenue.

‘How will we recognise them? How are they going to know we’re who we say we are?’ Laura asked.

‘Did you hear that thing I said about silence?’

In the cool confines of the white-walled Hanging Church, Tom waited beside the central haikal screen, the dark ebony a stark contrast to the white marble pillars nearby. ‘Amongst his many attributes, Jack Churchill is a very clever man,’ Tom whispered. ‘Long ago he saw the benefit of establishing a vast network of spies and helpers linked to the places where the Blue Fire is strongest, in every religion, every path. Over the centuries, the Watchmen grew like a vine, spreading across the globe. In the earliest days, Church gave them their secrets and mythologies, descriptions of the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons who would exist at this time, ways to contact you, ways for you to contact them-’

Laura cut him short with a loud theatrical yawn. Tom fumed quietly and continued to watch.

After ten minutes they were hesitantly approached by a balding cleric with a clipped white beard. Tom subtly extended the first and fourth fingers of his left hand and touched the other two fingers to his palm to make a surreptitious ‘W’. The cleric repeated the gesture.

‘It is you. Here. Now. Of course,’ he whispered. He could barely restrain his excitement.

Behind her sunglasses, Laura rolled her eyes. ‘Don’t have a kitten. You’ll get used to our God-like brilliance.’

‘Ignore her,’ Tom snapped. ‘She likes to torment small animals. You expected us?’

‘Then you do not know? This is beyond coincidence. Proof, then, of God’s work. Come with me.’

As he hurried out into the heat, Laura whispered, ‘We just need him and his religious nutters to keep an eye out for Veitch, right? Don’t waste time letting him show you his action-figure collection.’

Tom ignored her and followed the cleric out.

‘It’s all right for you, you boring old git,’ Laura called after him. ‘This road trip keeps you out of the care home. Meanwhile, I’m missing out on sex, drugs and alcohol. You know, a life.’

In the forecourt before the Coptic Museum, the cleric consulted with an imam, who glanced towards Tom and Laura and then handed over a key.

The cleric returned to Tom, fishing a second key out of some hidden pocket. ‘I apologise for the secrecy, but we cannot talk of these things in the open. I fear what is happening.’ He steadied himself and marched towards the monastery and the Church of St George, its twentieth-century architecture incongruous amongst the ancient religious buildings. He took them through a side door and down several flights of steps. Moving quickly through the cool depths of the monastery, they arrived at an unassuming door that led through much older stonework into catacombs beneath. He paused in a derelict area beside a door with two locks.

‘I am so glad you have come,’ he said with relief. ‘We have debated what to do during the two days since he appeared. We felt the only option was to constrain him here because of the potential danger, but his power is growing daily. He was like a newborn when we found him, wandering in a daze on Mohandiseen, but soon he will choose to leave here and we will be unable to stop him.’

‘Who’ve you got in there?’ Laura asked.

‘We know who he says he is,’ the cleric replied. ‘And we hope and pray this is not true. For it cannot be true!’

‘Just give us the keys.’ Laura sighed. ‘One simple answer. How hard is that?’

As an added security measure, the locks had to be turned at the same time. The cleric backed away as the door swung open to release a blast of humid air heavy with the scent of vegetation.

Laura caught Tom’s shoulder. ‘Let me go alone.’

‘This is no time for your usual stupidity.’

‘No, I feel something.’ The Cernunnos brand on her hand was burning. Whispers came and went in her head.

What had once been a chamber cut into the natural bedrock on which Cairo rested was now filled with the lush vegetation that sprang up in the Nile Valley after the great river’s annual life-giving flood. Laura pushed her way through it until the door was lost to view and her only link to the modern world was the sound of Tom urging her to take care. On some level she knew this was one of her places, where her own peculiar abilities flourished, and that gave her confidence.

The room appeared to go on for ever. Laura knew she was in one of those places that lay on the border between her world and the other, where different rules applied. Yet the chamber itself had once been perfectly normal so she guessed the cause of the dissonance had to be the occupant.

She pushed her way past the final frond and found herself on the edge of a cool oasis beneath a starry night sky. The pool was ablaze with Blue Fire, though it was silent and without heat. Beneath the surface, Laura could make out a serpentine form swimming: a Fabulous Beast.

‘Great Apep, the serpent of chaos and destruction, who dwells in the Duat and accompanies the dead on their journey to the Underworld.’

Laura started at the voice. From out of the dense vegetation emerged a figure wrapped in the bandages of mummification. The features swam as he neared, eventually settling into a face that combined characteristics of human, animal and vegetation.

‘Okay, Tutankhamen. Back off.’ Laura forced herself in tune with the vegetation. It moved slowly at her will to bring a barrier between the two of them. The approaching figure waved one arm and the growth fell away; Laura felt a kindred power, but one much greater than her own.

She realised she had backed calf-deep into the burning pool, though there was no sensation from the flames beyond a subtle well-being. The bandaged figure stopped on the edge.

‘Who are you?’

The figure held its head as if it was having difficulty recalling. ‘I am the Good One,’ he said after a moment. ‘Onnophris.’

‘Doesn’t ring any bells, dude.’

‘I have another name …’ He struggled. ‘Osiris.’ An unsettling smile crept across his face.

‘You’re some kind of nature god. Like Cernunnos.’ She held up her hand to show the brand of interlocking leaves. ‘So that makes you my uncle, right? Same family, another branch?’

‘That is one aspect. Only one. You are in a different place now. Things are not the same here.’

‘All right, you’re feeling a bit out of it. You’ve been away for a long time so I’ll give you the catch-up: there’s a war going on. Spiders versus snakes. No sitting on the fence allowed. And because you’re the “Good One” you’re with us.’

‘Good is a matter of perspective. It is the quality of one who obeys the main directive of the ruling power.’ Osiris was changing; Laura watched with a queasy fascination as the vegetation and animal characteristics fell from his face to reveal yellowing bone.

‘You’re obviously going to be busy now you’re back in the world. Mummies to wrap and all that. I’ll leave you-’

‘This is my greater aspect.’ A pair of bloodshot eyes now watched Laura out of a cracked skull. ‘I am the King of the Dead.’

‘You’re missing a few clues. Here’s one: I’m not dead.’

‘You are dead. All you mortals. You simply do not realise it.’

His words touched something deep in Laura that she couldn’t and wouldn’t recognise, and it made her shudder.

‘Come with me.’

‘If you think I’m taking one step out of this lake, you’ve got your bandages wound too tight.’

‘Laura.’

It chilled her to hear her name coming from the skull. ‘All right, you know my name. Big whoop.’

‘A lost child. Unloved. Beaten and scarred by her mother. Unprotected by her father. A sense of worthlessness. Self-hatred. What value could you have, then?’

Laura felt sick to hear the deeply protected secrets of her life unfolding. ‘Stop it.’

Osiris appeared to be reading something just above her head. ‘Driven, as all mortals are, by circumstances beyond your control. Choosing a path of self-destruction and succeeding — until you were saved. By four others, Brothers and Sisters of Dragons. For the first time you were accepted, with all your flaws and your burden of troubles and your desperation. For the first time you had a home, and friends, and love.’

‘You know I’m going to keep standing here? Even when you get down to what shoes I wore on my first day at school?’

A moment of silent calculation and then Osiris said, ‘You have a choice, as all the dead do. Come with me or I will take another, and what will happen to them will be worse than anything you can imagine.’

‘I can imagine a lot.’

‘Every culture established by mortals in this world has shared one belief — that life continues in some way after death. It is known by peoples that have no contact with any beyond themselves, from the dawn of your ages, from the darkening west to the gleaming east. Because it is the One Truth embedded in the deepest recesses of your construct. The gift you were given when you were made.’

‘Yeah, I always knew I was going to live forever.’

‘The greatest threat to any being is that the endless cycle of death and rebirth could be ended. Complete termination. Never to exist again. More — never to have existed at all. Wiped from Existence.’

‘Except you’re making one big mistake. I’m a coward. In a world of cowards, I’m queen. Saving my own skin is my number-one priority in any situation. So whoever you choose, I’m going to be sick and sad, and hate myself, but I’m still not coming out of this fire.’

‘And still you lie to yourself.’

An image of Hunter flashed before her eyes. Laura felt a corresponding twist in her gut that shocked her. ‘You really picked the wrong one there.’

‘A lost child. Unloved. Ignored by his parents. Dragged into a friendless world of deceit and cold hearts. A man who loves, and loves love, but can never be allowed, and can never speak of it. Who must hide his loneliness and his sadness and his suffering. Who is honourable, and trustworthy, and who would give up his own life for others, but who is punished every second of his life by being forced to bring death, and to know all of the deaths he has brought. A man who loves you more than any man has loved you, and who cannot himself believe that he has found this depth of feeling.’

In the silence that followed his words, Osiris’s bloodshot eyes stared at Laura with uncompromising harshness. She hesitated, and then said, ‘You’re wasting your time. Run along now.’

‘I will take him.’ Osiris began to retreat into the dense vegetation.

‘Wait.’ Laura thought she was going to be sick. Every fibre of her demanded self-preservation, yet still she was torn. She had no control over the deep, oceanic swell of her response. ‘I won’t be wiped from Existence?’

‘No.’

‘But it’s not going to be nice, right?’

Osiris did not answer.

She barely knew Hunter. Of all the people Osiris could have chosen, he was the least likely to be important to her. Yes, they had made a connection, but it was nothing, not really. Everything for them lay in the future, unborn. She could resist.

She took a step towards the edge, hesitated. Osiris waited.