The Burning Man

7

In the confusion, Hunter, Shavi and Fayed carried Laura out into the corridor. Church, Ruth and Veitch fought for their lives as the Devourer of the Damned drove them back. Numerous blows had been struck, but its true form was too slippery for their perception to tell how badly it had been wounded.

Through the curling smoke, Church could see the gods becoming more animal than human with each step. Anubis loped on all fours, preparing to attack. Sobek slithered in his crocodile form, jaws gaping wide.

‘Get over there and hold them back,’ Veitch snarled. Etain instantly led the Brothers and Sisters of Spiders to protect Veitch’s right flank.

‘They’re going to be slaughtered,’ Church shouted.

‘Serves her right.’

‘She brought me here to take Ruth away. God knows how or why, but I think she cares for you.’

‘Can’t believe someone likes me?’ Veitch lashed out furiously. There was a roar of pain from Ammut as the black lightning struck.

‘She’s dead, Ryan.’

Veitch didn’t respond.

Wielding her spear expertly, Ruth came between the two of them. ‘Stop it. In about three minutes we’re all going to be dead.’

Anubis’s snapping jaws tore a chunk out of Owein’s arm. He continued to hack at the god regardless.

‘For God’s sake, can’t one of you useless males do something?’ Ruth snapped. She fell back with a yell as the Devourer raised blood on her cheek.

Veitch cursed loudly. ‘Can you hold it off for a few seconds?’

‘What are you going to do? Run?’

‘What I’d like to do is ram this sword up your arse. Instead, I’m going to give up my “Get Out of Jail Free” card.’

Ruth retaliated with a ferocious spear strike. ‘Don’t be an idiot. You can’t control it.’

‘They’re scared of it — that’s a good enough reason to use it. Are you seriously telling me it’s going to be worse than this?’

‘Would one of you tell me what the hell’s going on?’ Church yelled.

‘The Anubis Box,’ Ruth replied breathlessly. ‘Ryan was going to trade it for free passage through the Great Dominions.’

‘It’s too dangerous!’

‘Sometimes you’ve got to take a leap in the dark.’ Veitch stepped back and removed the Anubis Box from inside his shirt. In one swift movement, he tore off the lid.

Church and Ruth yelled as one, but their voices, and all sound in the chamber, were sucked into the darkness in the box. For one moment everything hung, silent, motionless.

A barely audible susurration. Then tendrils as black and shiny as oil erupted from the box, lashing out with intelligence, accompanied by a deafening roaring. Veitch could barely hold on to the box, so great was the force of the evacuation. The gods ran in terror, but the tendrils sought them out, latching on to their faces, their limbs, pouring into their mouths, noses and ears.

When Church had last witnessed the contents of the box in action, it had been controlled by the crystal skull, but here it was untrammelled. The gods began to disintegrate at its touch.

Other tendrils splattered against the walls and ceiling, seeking out the minute cracks between the cyclopean blocks of stone. Soon after there came an ear-piercing squealing that drowned out even the deafening roar emerging from the box.

‘It’s attacking the spiders!’ Church yelled.

When they had all reached the door, Veitch hurled the box into the chamber, his arms shaking from the strain of holding on to it. The sound that followed would haunt them for ever: the shrieks of dying gods.

With the fabric of the building shaking as the contents of the box sought out every hidden part of the structure, they ran through clouds of dust and falling masonry until they reached the place where they had entered the pyramid-space, where the others waited. As each crossed the mark of a scarab inscribed in the flags, they were flung upwards, blacking out briefly before finding themselves in the sarcophagus in the King’s Chamber.

The pyramid continued to shake, though not as devastatingly as its counterpart in the Otherworld, and there was no sign of the spiders, but still they ran, and didn’t stop until they were in the chill night air beside the Sphinx.

His face drawn, Hunter carried Laura’s unmoving form to one side. Miller ran to help, but though he hung over her for long minutes he could do nothing to revive her. ‘I can’t find the spark,’ he said tearfully.

Veitch was oblivious to the distress that drew Shavi, Fayed and Ruth to Laura. He turned to Church, eyes blazing. ‘Let’s do it.’

The anger that had been eating away at Church had been fired by Ruth’s troubling responses in the pyramid. It left questions that he wasn’t sure he wanted answered. ‘I’ve had enough of you screwing things up,’ he said, drawing his sword.

‘I’ve barely started.’ Veitch drew his own blade.

A shadow crossed the moon. In a thunderous cloud of feathers, the Morvren swept in from the direction of the city, emitting their cry of dismay and suffering. Within seconds of their descent over the pyramids and Sphinx, flakes of snow began to fall. A bitter wind whisked them into a blizzard that soon coated sand and rock. Church and Veitch backed away from each other, shivering. With the unnatural localised storm came an abiding sense of presence.

Out of the swirling snow, a figure appeared. The cries of the Morvren took on a desperate, frightened edge. It was a god, ten feet tall and wearing the traditional Egyptian clothes of the ruling class. Despite its aristocratic manner, its features were brutish, part pig, part ass. It carried a staff mounted with a single golden eye.

Fayed pressed himself against the stone of the Sphinx. ‘Seth,’ he said in a voice almost lost to the icy gale. ‘God of evil and the desert.’

Seth loomed over them. ‘Sheathe your swords, Fragile Creatures. There is nothing to be gained by confronting you at this time.’ His voice sounded like a boulder being dragged over gravel. ‘The destruction you have wrought here will reverberate across all Existence. You have slain gods, the source of wonder that your own ancestors worshipped.’

‘You shouldn’t have sided with the Enemy,’ Church said.

‘Are these, then, your morals? The near-eradication of an entire race to achieve your aims?’

Church was bowed by his words. ‘It was them or us,’ he responded feebly.

‘My people took the decision to walk with the Devourer of All Things a long time ago. But I was the first. When the spiders came to me in the long dark of the desert night, I recognised our place in the vast sweep of everything. To rule-’

‘To serve!’

‘To be part of something greater.’ Seth’s piggy eyes lay heavily on Church. ‘And for a long time we were. Now only I remain.’

‘So why all the bleedin’ chat?’ The black flames of Veitch’s sword cast odd shadows across his snow-flecked face. ‘If you want to get your revenge, give it your best shot.’

‘I have observed you from the moment you crossed into this Great Dominion, and I have learned a great deal,’ Seth continued. ‘Existence has found powerful champions, but the seeds of your own destruction lie within you. That information is valuable and will be returned to the source.’

Near the foot of the Sphinx, Hunter and Shavi were hunched over Laura, oblivious to Seth. Church couldn’t tell if she was alive or dead.

‘Run back to your safe-zone with all your ugly bastard pals, then,’ Veitch said. ‘You’re done here.’

A glimmer of contemptuous humour crossed Seth’s face. ‘And you run on your way, Fragile Creatures, like the frightened vermin you are at heart. You may have slain the most wondrous of wonders today, but you are not gods. You will never be gods. You think if the Mundane Spell fails, if you find the two Keys, that you will have a chance to build your shining city. You will not. This is a world without hope, yet you appear blind to that fact. How wilfully stupid, how very typical of Fragile Creatures. So go now. Run. I see there is nothing in you to truly fear. Go to the Forbidden City and ask the location of the Second Key. It will do you no good.’

Church tried to pretend that nothing vitally important had been said, but he could see Veitch had registered it, too.

Seth stepped back into the gusting snow. ‘Ask the King of Foxes. He has learned many things to which even the greatest power is blind.’ The words were delivered flatly, but there was an inherent note of threat: Seth clearly did not believe they would survive any meeting with the King of Foxes. More snow swirled, and when it cleared Seth was gone.

Church and Veitch studied each other’s faces for a moment. Then they turned and ran, Church for the truck, Veitch for a battered taxi cab abandoned near the edge of the necropolis.

Tom was asleep in the passenger seat of the truck and jerked awake when Church fired the ignition and sent the vehicle lurching towards the Sphinx.

‘Is the Devil after us?’ Tom spluttered, still half in a dream.

‘No, we’re racing him for the prize.’

Veitch in his taxi reached the Sphinx a few seconds ahead of Church. He leaped out and threw Miller into the back seat.

Church was out and running as Veitch grabbed Ruth’s arm. ‘Fight him till I get there!’ Church yelled.

In Ruth’s face, Church saw the same inexplicable uncertainty he had witnessed in the pyramid. Her eyes met his for a fleeting instant, which only confirmed his doubts, and then she was being bundled into the cab with no resistance.

He watched the cab roar away in a cloud of dust towards the lights of Cairo until Fayed gripped his elbow. ‘The others need you. Your friend has little time left.’

Throwing off his troubled thoughts, Church ran to where Shavi and Hunter crouched over Laura. The desperation in Hunter’s eyes made him look more acutely human than Church had thought possible.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said to Church.

‘No pulse,’ Shavi said.

‘I don’t know if she ever had a pulse after Cernunnos changed her,’ Church replied.

‘Still, the life is leaking out of her. Nearly gone now.’ Shavi rubbed the skin around his alien eye, seeing something invisible to the rest of them.

‘What are you saying?’ Hunter asked bitterly. ‘We give up? I thought we were supposed to be some kind of heroes.’

‘We can’t do anything for her here,’ Church said. ‘But in the Other-world, anything is possible.’

Hunter’s face came alive. ‘Some spell … magic … the Blue Fire. Or one of those golden-skinned gods.’

‘But you have never visited Tir n’a n’Og,’ Shavi said. ‘How will you cope?’

‘I’ll go anywhere,’ Hunter said. ‘To hell’s door and beyond.’ He looked down at Laura’s face. ‘Nothing’s going to stop me.’

‘Then we need to find a place to cross over,’ Shavi said.

His words gave Hunter pause. ‘I can’t hold you back. You need to catch up with Veitch.’ He paused, shook his head. ‘What am I saying? You need me here. I can’t go running off …’ He tore his gaze away from Laura. ‘… just for personal reasons. None of us matter. Only the mission’s important.’

Church looked from Hunter to Laura, and saw Ruth instead. ‘Take her. This isn’t just about saving the whole universe. Some things are more important than that.’

Hunter’s haunted eyes thanked Church silently, and as he carried Laura to the truck, Shavi said to Fayed, ‘Are you coming with us? This is your chance to see wonders of which you have only ever dreamed.’

‘I am returning to my home, and I will never speak of these events again,’ Fayed replied.

‘But you wished to see the gods.’

‘I have a wife and a child and another on the way. I have a job that is slow and laborious and dusty. I am human, only human. These things I have seen — these wonders and horrors — will haunt my thoughts for the rest of my days. I can never go back to being the man I was. You were meant to experience these things. I was not.’

‘We’re only human, too,’ Church said.

‘Perhaps you were once. But your experiences have changed you. You stand against the gods with impunity. You wield weapons that were not meant for men. You are as far beyond me now as the gods are beyond you.’

He turned without another word and trudged towards Cairo. Church watched him go, desperately afraid that what he had said was true, for if it was, the lives they knew, and to which they hoped to return, were over.