Besieged Read online

  The two men who’d been listening to us inside emerged from the back door at that point and spotted us huddled together, talking over a ring of solid gold that would command a rich price in the market. That, apparently, was cause enough for them to cease their incompetent spying and switch to open belligerence.

  “Begging your pardon,” one said, thick-necked and swinging arms like pork haunches, “but are you both Roman citizens?”

  Citizens were afforded certain rights and could go where they pleased. Those who were not could be harassed or jailed for little or no cause by the Roman authorities. We weren’t citizens and they probably already knew that, so it was obvious that they meant to establish it, then find a thin excuse to confiscate the torc.

  “Camouflage,” Ogma whispered, and he promptly winked out of sight, binding his pigments to his surroundings. I didn’t have my charms back then or his powers, so I had to take off a sandal to draw upon the earth before speaking the binding aloud. While I did that, the two men shouted at Ogma’s disappearance and told me not to move. I didn’t move, but I did fade from their sight a few seconds later.

  They cursed and then looked around, as if I might have just moved really quickly when they blinked. It’s a natural reaction people tend to have when they see someone disappear, and I always took advantage. While they had their eyes pointed elsewhere, I took the opportunity to move a bit, as quietly as I could, and no doubt Ogma was doing the same thing. That was necessary because the next natural reaction to sudden disappearance is to poke the air where we had been standing. Sure enough, they stepped forward, hands outstretched in disbelief but needing to confirm that we were really gone. They grabbed nothing but air, even though I had stopped very close by. I could have reached out and slapped the thick-necked fellow on his shoulder. His companion, a lean younger man with whipcord musculature, offered a quiet theory.

  “I’ve heard of this kind of thing happening before. They might be Druids.”

  “Druids? Here? I thought they were in Gaul.”

  The lean one nodded. “That’s where I’ve heard of such disappearances. But then the legions still get them, because they don’t really leave. They are still here; we just can’t see them. But maybe we can bleed them.” He reached for his gladius and had it halfway out when the left side of his face mashed in with a sound like wet meat slapped on a butcher’s block, and teeth flew out of his mouth in a spray of blood. Ogma had sucker-punched him, and he collapsed. Taking my cue, I laid into Thick Neck from the opposite direction and broke a knuckle on his jaw. Still, he went down, and neither of them would be in shape to pursue us soon.

  “Let’s continue elsewhere,” Ogma said in Old Irish to me. “We’ll need to leave the city. Word will spread to look for two Druids.”

  “Right.”

  We left the two spies moaning in the dirt, slipped out of the public house, and dropped camouflage on the street. Some people were startled by our appearance but didn’t think anything of it except that they had missed us somehow. We walked briskly to the nearest gate and exited before word could reach the guards to be on the lookout for suspicious types like us.

  “Well? What say you, Siodhachan?” Ogma asked. “Will you fetch those scrolls, take whatever else you like, and earn a favor? Or will you leave this treasure to be destroyed by the Romans?”

  I didn’t like his either-or framing of the issue but didn’t think it wise to comment. “When must it be done?” I asked instead.

  “You do have some time to get there, but the sooner, the better. You don’t want to be caught in the city when rebellion arrives and the Romans respond. That’s what Brighid has seen.”

  “There are no groves for me to use to shift down there?”

  “Unfortunately not.”

  “Weeks on horseback, then. But every step will be farther from Aenghus Óg. All right, Ogma. I’ll do it.”

  “Excellent.”

  I shook my hand once out of town and cast a healing spell to bind the broken knuckle back together, sure that it was only the beginning of what waited ahead.

  —

  Outside the great library of Alexandria, my nose inhaled salt and fish and baked stone, sweat and blood and rotting garbage. Inside it was different: dust and musty lambskin, inks and glues settling into papyrus, and the occasional whiff of perfumed unguents desperately trying to distract from the scent of an unwashed pair of armpits.

  I stabled my horse prior to entering, double-checked my clothing to be sure my tattoos were hidden, and also stuffed what gamers today might call a mighty bag of holding into my robes, concealing Fragarach there as well. Then it was smiling and nodding and a few quick exchanges in Coptic. Most of the scrolls were not free to be browsed. Rather, one had to request information from a librarian and the relevant material would be fetched. There were, however, some shelves one could browse on the main floor, and I pretended to do that while searching for a set of stairs leading downward. Once I found a doorway into which librarians came and went, I put the golden torc Ogma had given me about my neck and felt the power waiting there. I drew on some of it to cast camouflage and entered the stairwell, arriving in a basement thick with dust and disuse. Shelves rose up the walls and also in rows between support pillars. After a quick circuit informed me that few librarians came down here and they were heard before they were seen, I dispelled camouflage to preserve energy. The pillars, I noticed, were covered in hieroglyphs—somewhat unusual, since hieroglyphs had passed out of usage hundreds of years ago. There were also some passages of Demotic, perhaps intended to function much the way the Rosetta stone did, helping modern readers to decipher the glyphs, but that language was already dying out in favor of Coptic.

  Ogma had been unclear about the exact location of the sealed chamber or how I was to find it. Seshat had not only sealed the entrance, she had hidden it. Despite not being able to read the hieroglyphs, I examined the pillars closely, one by one, until I identified the eye of Horus present on three of them but not the others. I returned to each of these and examined them more closely, searching for a pattern or any kind of clue that would point the way to Seshat’s chamber. I pressed the eyes. I searched the shelves on either sides of the pillars for any irregularities. I looked for cracks in the pillars that might indicate there was a hidden door and a stairwell inside a hollow column. Nothing. Twice I had to hide from approaching footsteps and wait for the librarian to move on.

  It required rethinking. The three pillars marked with the eye of Horus necessarily formed the points of a triangle, but it dawned upon me as I checked their relative positions that the triangle in question was a perfect isosceles, like the pyramids. A bit of experimentation and visualization led me to an aisle with no pillars in it, which represented the approximate center of the triangle. Keeping my eyes on the floor, I soon came across the faint tracing of the eye of Horus etched into the stone. Kneeling down, I saw that there was a fine tracery of lines around the etching that indicated the eye might sink into the ground as a contiguous sigil. It wasn’t large enough to be accidentally stepped on and activated, though. A firm press of the thumb might work, but I didn’t want to try it without a large dollop of caution. Accessing the power waiting in the torc, I lifted the veil of my mundane vision and took a look at the etching through magical sight.

  It was a simple button, pushing a lever that appeared to activate a series of stone gears hidden below my feet, though it wouldn’t work without a magic release first; it would behave as if stuck. Unsticking it, I surmised, would require doing something underneath the massive shelf to my left, stacked high with scrolls protected in wooden boxes. The red magical bindings circling the button streaked that way until they disappeared.

  I doubted I could move the entire shelf by myself or that I should even try. The binding might actually continue beyond into other aisles, and I checked first to make sure. No: The binding terminated underneath the shelf. I returned to the aisle with the eye in the floor and examined the bottom shelf. There was one boxed scro
ll with the eye of Horus painted on the end in faded blue. That had to be a clue. It didn’t appear to be trapped or have any juju surrounding it, so I carefully extracted the box from underneath the others, opened it, and unrolled the scroll inside, returning my vision to the mundane in the process.

  It was a map of the chamber below, in which the cartouche repeated a warning in hieroglyphs, Demotic, and Coptic that only high priests may enter without consequence. I was about to ask, “High priests of what?” but there were hieroglyphic representations of several deities below that presumably answered that question. I recognized Horus, Anubis, Osiris, Isis, Bast, Taweret, and one other I expected thanks to Ogma: Seshat.

  Once I entered, there would be a button to close the opening behind me and then a series of seven rooms off a single hallway: three on each side and a large one at the end. That was six more chambers than Ogma had told me to expect, and none of them was labeled helpfully with THIS ONE HAS THAT THING OGMA WANTS. In fact, they weren’t labeled at all, and neither were there any instructions on how to open the chamber in the first place. As Ogma said to me in Byzantium, there are ways to control what gets shared. The arrow and instructions in Demotic and Coptic on how to close the chamber once inside were the only available clues to what I might find down there. But there were seven deities pictured and seven chambers; perhaps they were proprietary and I would simply need to find the one with a graven image of Horus on it—or Seshat, since I’d been told she was in charge of protecting this knowledge.

  There still remained the problem of how to get down there. Perhaps the shelving warranted more attention.

  I cleared away all the scrolls, boxed and unboxed, that covered the space over which the red streak of bindings had disappeared—that included the boxed scroll with the eye of Horus on it. What confronted me was a black expanse of shadow, which lacked promise, except perhaps for the promise of spiders.

  Casting night vision allowed me to see that there was a hole drilled in the bottom of the shelving, about the circumference of a thumb and forefinger held up in an “okay” sign. It did not allow me to see what was in the hole. Should I stick a finger in there or not? I decided I could live without a pinkie if I had to, so I went with that first. I snaked it in there, felt around, felt the stone floor beneath it. Nothing bit me.

  Feeling more confident, I placed my left thumb inside and pressed down. The stone floor sank beneath it and a dull click echoed in the silence, but nothing else happened. Dissolving night vision and switching to magical sight, I saw that the red binding with the bookshelf had vanished. The button in the middle of the floor should now function like one. I pushed down on it with my right thumb and then scrambled away as the floor rumbled and cracked beneath me. The stone irised open like a manhole, and a ladder made of stone rungs dared me to descend. I took the dare, night vision on, and found the button advertised by the map that would close the door. It also turned on the lights: not electric ones, but green flames in sconces placed halfway up the walls of the hallway, fueled by nothing visible that I could see. The word for it didn’t exist back then, but they were fucking eldritch, and it was awesome.

  As an experiment I pressed the button again, and the lights went out as the portal opened once more. Escape route established, I closed it again and turned on the eldritch flames.

  Before proceeding, I pulled Fragarach and my booty bag from my robes. I slung the bag and the sword over opposite shoulders and drew Fragarach from its sheath. I wanted to be ready for anything.

  First door on the left bore the imprimatur of Taweret, the hippo goddess, which was often used as a sigil of protection. I knew better than to mess with her chamber. If there was ever a trap laid for thieves, this was it. On the right was Isis, and I didn’t feel especially safe messing with her either. But next on the left was Bast, and I’m not really a cat person.

  There was no Demotic or Coptic on the doors to help me figure out what waited inside, only hieroglyphs, but there was a fairly obvious circle of stone to push to the left of the door. It slid open under my hand with a grating noise, lights bloomed inside, and I was treated to a wonder far beyond what Howard Carter found in the tomb of King Tutankhamun. Gold and obsidian figures of Bast, lapis lazuli and alabaster and more: scrolls and books of bound vellum, many of them written in Demotic and Coptic. That’s where I found the book of Bast’s sex mysteries bound in catskin leather, but I also found the sort of thing that Ogma suggested I might find useful: a scroll detailing protective wards—none of which, I noted, were in force on the chamber itself. The finely carved art, however, viewed in the magical spectrum, was surrounded with wards, which I studied but did not disturb.

  Across the hall was the chamber of Osiris, and nothing in there had any protection as far as I could tell. Perhaps his high priests figured that after returning from the dead, his worldly possessions didn’t matter all that much. I snaffled a few promising scrolls and books and moved on.

  The next two doors belonged to Anubis and Seshat. I didn’t want any part of Anubis, and Seshat’s door, which was supposedly my target, was warded with layers of protections, truly dizzying stuff that could not have been laid down by some priest. The quantity and quality of the mojo I was seeing had to be the work of the goddess herself, and I am not ashamed to say it caused a nervous gulp. Up to that point I could pretend I was merely tiptoeing through the treasures of men, and men I could usually handle. It’s very sobering to realize you are only a step or two away from incurring the wrath of a goddess with no softness in her heart for Irish lads. It was time to finish the job and get out of there, and I hoped I could finish it without trying to go through that door.

  The chamber of Horus was the large one in the back, and like the rooms of Bast and Osiris, it was simple to enter. I decided to pursue it, since my target might logically be inside and it was at least accessible, where Seshat’s chamber practically vibrated with bad omens. Unlike the chambers of Bast and Osiris, though, it was not a simple security situation inside.

  For one thing, there was the body on the floor just inside the entrance. It wasn’t fresh, and it wasn’t a mummy either. Scarabs and worms were at him, and maybe you could fix the smell with a wagonload of rose petals, but I doubted it. I covered my nose and breathed through my mouth as I inspected him from the hallway, never crossing the threshold.

  He’d been in his thirties or late twenties, judging by his wrinkle-free skin, or what was left of it. No obvious signs of violence like a caved-in skull or a spear lodged in his rib cage. His fingernails, however, were torn and sometimes missing, which provided my main clue to what had happened. He’d entered, the door had shut behind him, and that was it. He was trapped without food or water or a handy way of calling for help, because of course this entire area was a secret chamber underneath a basement where only librarians occasionally trod. He had no doubt screamed to no avail. So he had gone mad with fear over his inevitable death and tried to claw his way out—which told me there wasn’t a way to open the door from the inside.

  That made me check out the door a bit more closely, because it was different from the others, which were standard rectangular jobs that moved via a system of pulleys and counterweights inside the walls. Horus’s door was circular, and its mechanical design allowed it to open and close much faster. Pressing the button on the left side caused part of the floor to sink down, creating a slope that let it roll away and slam to a stop inside. Presumably the floor inside the wall would rise when it was time to close the door, and the slab would roll back into position. I wasn’t sure yet how the trap had been sprung on this fellow, but I sure wasn’t going to let it happen to me.

  Drawing on some more of the torc’s energy, I thoroughly bound the stone door to its stone enclosure—especially the floor—making sure it would remain open and never roll back into place, even if I tripped the same trap as the unfortunate thief.

  Once satisfied, I stepped over the threshold and the body and inspected the goods. Osiris had protected nothing, and Bast
protected only the glorious statuettes of her feline magnificence. Horus, or his priests, had laid down protections on the majority of the items I saw spread out before me, but there was no discernible pattern to it—other than some personally assigned value system, I supposed. I also spied what looked like a magical alarm tripwire running along the floor just in front of where all the goodies rested, a good distance away from the door. That was it: Approach the valuables, trip the magical switch, and the door closed. I stepped on the trip and wiggled around on it. The door remained open.

  That, however, was the easy part. Finding Ogma’s happy lacquer box o’ scrolls was going to be far more difficult, especially if they weren’t there at all but in Seshat’s chamber. The shelves in the room had once been orderly, but before his demise the dead man had indulged in a tantrum and swept things onto the floor or thrown them about the room.

  There were finely carved figurines, as in Bast’s chamber. Some books, some boxes, some shattered pieces of things that might have been ceramic vessels at one time, a crook and flail of solid gold, an obsidian ankh, and more.

  I examined the scattered boxes first, but none had the eye of Horus emblazoned on them. Their littered contents held no special allure either.

  Abandoning them, I stepped over the security line to examine the shelves. I found a lacquered box with the eye of Horus on it, undisturbed, in the very back. Yawning spaces framed either side of it, but the dead man had not seen fit in his mortal terror to throw this box. Perhaps that was because it clearly had protections.