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Maddock unhooded his light and shone it down the steps, catching just a glimpse of Rose as she stumbled along behind Aliyah. Then he was moving, too, pounding down the steps in pursuit. He felt more than heard the crunch of beetle bodies underfoot and some part of him recalled Bones’ warning about the scarabs getting under his skin. That was a silly notion, he knew, a nightmare fantasy straight out of a B-movie. The Egyptian scarab was actually a dung-beetle, not a flesh eater at all. But telling himself that and believing it were two very different things, especially here, on the cusp of an ancient Egyptian catacomb. He could feel tiny insect legs crawling on his skin, mandibles clicking... Burrowing.
Crunch. Crunch.
The steps fed into a narrow tunnel and again he spied something moving in the darkness ahead. He did not stop, but in that moment of transition, he realized that the others were with him. Kismet was right beside him, and Jade and Bones weren’t far behind.
Maddock skidded to a stop as his light fell upon a familiar form, lying sprawled on the passage floor, one hand raised to provide shade from the glare of the light. It was Rose. She looked a little disoriented but did not appear to be injured. There was no sign of Aliyah, though Maddock thought he heard the crunching sound of footsteps from further down the passage.
“She took my pack,” Rose gasped. “She has the orb. And the mirror.”
“We’ll get them back,” Maddock promised, helping her to her feet. He tried to inject a little confidence into his tone, though deep down, he wasn’t feeling it. Aliyah now possessed two of the four elemental relics, and if she was right and the last remaining one lay somewhere in the catacombs beneath the Serapeum, then odds were good that she would soon have three.
Then Bones gave them all something else to worry about. “Holy crap. Scorpion.”
Maddock followed Bones’ pointing finger and saw something crawling up the outside of Rose’s thigh. It was three inches in length, with a greenish-yellow segmented body, yellow legs, and a curled bobbing tail.
“A deathstalker,” Kismet warned, unsheathing his kukri. “Don’t move, Rose.”
He extended the tip toward Rose’s leg, placing the flat of the blade in the scorpion’s path. It stopped moving, its forelegs resting a fraction of an inch from the edge, as if somehow sensing the potential lethality of the metal.
“Get it off me,” Rose wailed.
“Don’t move,” Kismet repeated, and then with a snap of his wrist, flicked the creature away. “Dane, check her for more.”
Rose was already moving, retreating back toward the stairs, her limbs twitching with the involuntary reflex known colloquially as the heebie-jeebies.
“Hold still, Rose.” Maddock played his light up and down her body, and when he was satisfied that there were no other scorpions or any other creepy crawlies on her, turned and shone the light on the walls and ceiling of the passage. He saw more of the scarabs, roving aimlessly across the floor, but there were also several lighter-colored shapes.
“Deathstalker,” Jade said. “Cute name.” There was a faint quaver in her voice that might have been merely the result of the sprint down the stairs, but probably wasn’t. She was also backing slowly toward the stairs.
Maddock had heard of the deathstalker scorpion. Despite the ominous name, its venom wasn’t automatically fatal, particularly to a healthy adult and in the amount that might be delivered by a single creature, but a sting would be immediately painful, much like a bee sting, and as with bee stings, there was always the risk of a potentially fatal allergic reaction.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t just one of the creatures, but dozens. Perhaps even hundreds of them, just in the area revealed by the light.
“Did I mention that I hate the desert?” Kismet said, more resigned than fearful. He continued to hold his kukri in his right hand.
“Right?” Bones said. “First scarabs, and now scorpions. It’s like someone took all the worst parts of the Mummy movies and dumped them down here. I don’t even want to think about what other horrible things might be waiting for us down there.”
“Like Brendan Fraser,” Jade said.
“Hey, I like Brendan Fraser,” Bones shot back. “Though, I like young Rachel Weisz even more.”
“Tom Cruise then?”
“We do not speak of that,” Bones said, flatly.
“We need to keep moving,” Maddock said, taking a step forward. He kept moving the light back and forth, up and down, making sure to avoid walking directly under any of the scorpions, or letting any of them get close enough to crawl onto his boots. After a few steps he glanced back and was relieved to see that the others were following.
Aliyah had left a clear trail for them to follow—crushed beetle carapaces and smeared bug guts stamped on the floor of the passage in distinctive footprint shapes. Not that there were a lot of places she could have gone. The tunnel continued forward for a ways before making a right turn and then another, but there were no branching passages. A hundred strides brought them to another descending staircase.
Maddock paused at the top, cocking an ear toward the unplumbed depths below and listened. The soft thud of footsteps echoed up from below. Aliyah was still on the move. Maddock started down after her.
After just a few steps, the wall to his right fell away to reveal an open space beyond, a yawning emptiness into which the scant illumination of his flashlight vanished entirely. Thankfully, there were no more creepy-crawly denizens in evidence. Maddock shied away from the edge, hugging the left wall, which he absently noted slanted as it rose toward the ever-diminishing ceiling. The wall appeared to be constructed of stacked stone blocks or bricks, all of them adorned in some way, either with relief carvings of Egyptian hieroglyphs or some kind of alphabetic writing that Maddock guessed was probably Greek. He didn’t take the time to stop and look.
“Dane!” Kismet called out to him in a stage whisper. “We’re in a pyramid.”
The significance of this was not immediately apparent to Maddock, or it seemed, to Bones, who shot back, “So?”
“So, there aren’t any pyramids in Alexandria.”
“He’s right,” Rose said. “At least none that have been discovered.”
Maddock faltered a step as he processed this, then started moving again. “So, this is some kind of secret chamber?”
“One that Aliyah opened,” Kismet replied. “Using the relics. I don’t know if she did it consciously, or if the entrance simply reacted to their presence.”
“Then she was right. The Emerald Tablet is here.” Maddock quickened his pace.
“If it is, then it’s not behaving like the other relics. I’m not getting any kind of reaction from the Apex.”
The stairwell flattened onto a corner landing where the slanted wall met another just like it, apparently confirming Kismet’s assessment. The stairs continued downward to the right, the number of steps half-again as many as the first flight and then turned right again, describing a square clockwise spiral down the interior walls of the hollow pyramid.
And then, the steps ended, depositing them on a broad stone pavement. The space was empty, devoid of even dust, but Maddock could just make out a trail of faint footprints leading out toward what he guessed to be the center. Holding his light high, he sprinted out across the flat, featureless floor in pursuit of Aliyah. Fifty yards or so later, he spotted her.
Whether by accident or design Maddock could not say, but Aliyah had somehow managed to find the only object contained within the pyramid—a block of stone, shaped like a rectangular prism, about four feet high and six feet long, and positioned, if Maddock was not mistaken, directly in the center of the chamber. A funerary bier, Maddock guessed, where a coffin—perhaps the golden coffin of Alexander the Great himself—had once lain. But the only thing on the bier now was Aliyah Cerulean. She had fallen across it, and now lay face down with her arms outflung, hugging the stone. She looked like a grieving widow who had thrown herself upon the coffin of her deceased beloved, only there was no coffin. Rose’s backpack lay on the floor beside her, unopened. Forgotten.
“Not here,” she said, her voice hollow, desolate. “It’s not here.”
Maddock hastened forward to remove the backpack from her vicinity, though it was apparent that Aliyah either had no intention of using the relics or lacked the ability. Only then did he acknowledge what she had said.
“It’s not here?”
Kismet and Bones were already there with him, and Rose and Jade arrived seconds later, spreading out in a loose circle around the stone block. Bones asked the obvious question. “What happened to it?”
“Someone else got here first,” Kismet said, a hint of bitterness in his tone. “It was foolish of us to think that it would still be here.”
“Who?”
“Who do you think?” The voice, a sardonic almost-shout, echoed and rebounded from the inwardly slanting walls. It had not come from anyone in their group, but despite the weird acoustical distortion, Maddock recognized it instantly. A chill of dread shot through him.
The voice belonged to the man he had dubbed TBH, owing to the latter’s annoying habit of utilizing text-shorthand in everyday speech. Maddock had tangled with the man on at least two previous occasions—first, in the Antarctic Outpost where they had discovered the orb, and then again in Plymouth Harbor, shortly after capturing the Magna of Illusion from Aliyah’s brotherhood of magicians—and both encounters had ended the same way. Both times, Maddock had killed TBH.
It was only after the second encounter that Maddock had learned the truth about TBH—also known as Ulrich Hauser. The man was the leader of a radical splinter faction inside the secretive group known as Prometheus.
He was also Nick Kismet’s brother, and like Kismet, Ulrich Hauser was, for all intents and purposes, immortal.