A low female voice rose from the docks. I didn"t see any cat move its mouth, but it came from one of them."Hrrr. Show me the book."
My leather satchel was under the surface of the river, and I pulled it out now, putting the daggers inside.
"The book has been in the water?" the voice cried. "It"s useless!"
"No, no!" I said. "It"s protected. It"s in a waterproof wrapper. I will show you." Pulling out the oilskin parcel with Nice Kitty! inside, I unbound the oilskin and stuffed it back into my satchel. I held Bast"s book of mysteries carefully by my fingertips, trying to demonstrate my great respect for it. I still didn"t know which cat was Bast-or if she was simply speaking through one of them-so I spoke to the cats on the dock in general.
"Unlike so many other old treasures, this book has resisted the ravages of time," I said. "I have kept it sealed away from the air. Every word is still readable. Think of it, Bast! Given to the right people, this book could revive interest in you like nothing else! You would receive prayers again, grow powerful. Your influence could spread beyond Egypt, and you could enjoy the worship of millions!" This was unlikely and wishful thinking, but I knew it was thinking she would very much want to believe. As if to emphasize my point, the muezzin began to buzz throughout Cairo, calling all Muslims to prayer. Bast knew what that meant: Another G.o.d was getting the worship that used to be hers. I kept selling.
"These other G.o.ds have their holy books translated into every tongue, and now humans bow to them around the world. You could do the same with this. How many of the other Egyptian G.o.ds could manage this? None. In truth, Bast, I have done you a great service by preserving it so well."
"Hrrr. Give it to me."
"I beg your pardon?"
From the back rank of the cats, a slight shift of shadowy movement attracted my eye. It grew taller; it was a shorthaired black cat with yellow eyes and a small gold hoop earring high up on its left ear. It continued to grow and change until I was looking at a woman with a cat"s head. The woman had clothes on where the cat didn"t, and I thought that sort of trick could revolutionize fashion. She had one of those giant golden necklaces draped over her shoulders, like one sees in the art of the pyramids, but she didn"t have a headdress. From underneath the gold necklace fell a white linen dress, belted below her b.r.e.a.s.t.s with a rich blue sash. Her arms, while bare of clothing, were covered in soft black fur and the occasional golden circlet; she had human fingers but very feline claws instead of fingernails on the ends of them. The muezzin finally stopped blaring and we could speak without shouting.
"Hrrr. You will give it to me now, human."
"Call me Atticus. I"d like something in return."
Bast"s eyes widened at my presumption. "Ridiculous! You stole it! Return it now and take your punishment!"
"No, that"s not how we"re doing this. Remember, I"m doing you a favor by returning it. You thought I was dead and your book lost forever until I showed up today."
The yellow eyes now narrowed to mere slits. "You are not a normal human."
I dipped my head in thanks. "It"s kind of you to say so."
"Why are you in Egypt?"
"In one of life"s great ironies, someone has stolen a book from me. I have come to steal it back." And prevent him from harming the earth, I didn"t say.
Bast"s cat face lost its suspicion and seemed amused. "Hrr! Hrr! Hrr! Was it an Egyptian book stolen by an Egyptian?"
"Yes."
"Then there is no crime. It is justice! Do you know who stole it?"
"A man named Nkosi Elkhashab."
Bast blinked. "You mean the crocodile priest?"
Crocodile priest? That would make him a follower of Sobek, the G.o.d of the Nile. Suddenly the nature of his magic was clear. Water softened and carved away the earth on a regular basis. No wonder my bindings had dissolved. No wonder his aura was muddy brown.
"Yes, that"s the guy. Do you know where he is?"
"Is this information what you wish in return for my book?" Bast said.
"No." I shook my head. "I want your permission to travel Egypt freely and your word not to reveal my presence here in any way to any other being."
"Hrrr." This time when Bast smiled, it looked predatory. "That is acceptable to me. I walk away with my book, and you walk away to be destroyed by Sobek"s chosen." She held out a gray hand, palm up, to receive the book.
"Let me hear you swear it first, please," I said.
Bast hissed a little with impatience. "In return for the book in your hand, you may freely wander Egypt and not be bothered by any of my people. I will not reveal your presence here to anyone-"
I raised an eyebrow and c.o.c.ked my head to signal she"d messed up. She knew it.
"-Very well, or to any G.o.d or animal. Now, give."
Happily, I waded forward and gave her Nice Kitty! Bast would hand it to some human scholar with woeful personal security and I would steal it back and destroy all records they made. The world really didn"t need a reborn cat s.e.x cult.
Bast flipped briefly through the book to make sure it didn"t contain cartoons or something. She purred in pleasure for a moment and then remembered I was watching.
She hissed in earnest this time, then said, "May Sobek devour you."
"Oh, that"s nice. Well, may harmony find you, Bast, and I am sorry for any pain I"ve caused your people."
She ignored me and walked away in the manner for which cats are renowned. She and the book faded into the gray light of dawn, and the horde of cats began to disperse in her wake.
Oberon said as Bast faded from view. What about the Druid? When you"re finished, let"s go find a place that will let us drip dry on their floor.My shirt was shredded and my cuts hadn"t fully closed up yet. I refilled my bear charm with all the magic it could hold and then activated my healing. The ugliness would fade over time. My priority now had to be getting some local cash, a set of dry clothes, a temporary cell phone, and then some food and an Internet connection.
People began to appear on the streets after morning prayers, and I asked them for directions to the nearest bazaar. A few blocks" walk to the north, the flash of a credit card, and some spirited haggling provided me with almost everything I needed. I got directions from there to an Internet cafe-such places were more ubiquitous then, in the years before the iPhone.
Once I got Oberon settled with some sausage and carefully camouflaged under my table, I logged in to my email and found a nice dossier on Nkosi Elkhashab waiting for me from Hal"s private investigators.
Hal had highlighted something for me: Elkhashab had been dirt poor until he"d joined the Ministry of Antiquities after college. He showed no signs of abnormal behavior until about a year into the job, when he suddenly began to buy real estate far above his income bracket and then lots of expensive goodies with which to line the walls. There was no indication he had another job, so the question on everyone"s mind-Egypt"s as well, for he"d been investigated-was, where did he get the money?
Elkhashab"s story was that he had been selling his "art" to wealthy collectors abroad. His art consisted of some uninspired splatter paintings-the efforts of a person who looked at Jackson Pollock"s work and said to himself, "I could do that." But the Ministry of Antiquities suspected, and I had no doubt they were correct, that the purchase price included rare Egyptian treasures, and Elkhashab was smuggling those abroad via different channels to his wealthy "art collectors." He was t.i.tling his pictures along the lines of "Small Bust of Sobek, Twelfth Dynasty," so that the ministry would know precisely what he was slipping past their guard. They never caught him, but they did fire him on general principles.
Twenty years later-he was now in his mid-forties-he still made a living via his art. Some of it was probably legitimate; he was commanding such high prices for his work that rich people thought there must be some value to it. But the ministry felt that the smuggling continued. They theorized that he had found a tomb somewhere in the region of Al Fayyum, near what the Greeks called Crocodilopolis, and he was selling off its treasures piece by piece. He was under electronic surveillance around the clock.
Most disturbing to me was the fact that Elkhashab had two residences, not one. There was one in Cairo and another in Al Fayyum, about eighty miles southwest. I could hardly lay in wait at both places, so I"d have to call that number at the bottom of Hal"s email and take an educated guess that the dirty deeds would most likely be done in Al Fayyum.
"Greetings from an old wolf in America," I said in response to a gruff greeting.
"Who"s this?"
"A friend of Hal Hauk"s in Arizona."
The tone of Cairo"s alpha changed abruptly. "Oh, sure, I know Hal," Yusuf said.
"He told me you and your boys may be able to help me out."
"Help with what?"
"Watch an address in Cairo for me for twenty-four hours and report all comings and goings."
"You don"t need my boys for that kind of work."
"The resident is a sorcerer and may try to slip by unseen."
"I stand corrected. You need us."
The incredible usefulness of werewolves-and also the reason why you don"t want to get on their bad side-is that they"re immune to almost all magic. Think you"re invisible? Nope, not to a werewolf"s eyes. Think you have an impenetrable magic ward protecting all your goodies? You don"t if a werewolf walks across it. Like the honey badger, the werewolf takes what it wants. Sure, you can pick a fight with a werewolf if you have some silver, but you"d better have enough for the whole pack. And if other packs get word that you go around killing werewolves ... well. Let"s just say that n.o.body tries to mess with werewolves anymore.
I made arrangements with Yusuf and gave him my number in case Elkhashab showed up. He"d send the bill to Hal and everyone would be happy.
In America-before the widespread use of GPS devices-if you wished to go somewhere you"d never been before, you hired a taxi. If you were brave, you asked your father-in-law. In Egypt, you waved some money around in the bazaar, and plenty of people would happily volunteer to take you where you wished to go. We got picked up by a family of three, who were delighted to spend some time driving us around, especially since I paid for all their gas and then some.
I am not ashamed to say that, spread out in the back of an old pickup, Oberon and I napped on the way down.
Al Fayyum-spelled many different ways and sporting many different names through the centuries-is most likely the oldest city in Egypt. Herodotus described a labyrinth of surpa.s.sing magnificence there, better even than all the other wonders of Egypt, and evidence of his tale remains, but it"s a b.l.o.o.d.y wreck because some ancient Roman choad ordered the place quarried. Still, despite this defilement and many others, Al Fayyum has yielded its fair share of archaeological finds. The Ministry of Antiquities had good reason to suspect Elkhashab of finding something in the area: Chances were if you dug deep enough, you"d find something no matter what.
There"s an inland salt lake there called Lake Moeris, or Birket Qarun, and it was on the eastern edge of this lake that the old cult of Sobek flourished. In Crocodilopolis, they used to keep a real crocodile swathed in bling and fed on a diet of soft pink fleshy things. It was the lap of reptilian luxury back in the day. The new lap was on Elkhashab"s property, if Bast"s word could be believed. More of an estate than a house, ringed by a wall made of river mud and gated, it was east of the old site of Crocodilopolis and north of the ancient labyrinths.
Al Fayyum was not nearly so paved as Cairo, so I had little trouble accessing my magic there. Oberon and I took a leisurely stroll around Elkhashab"s estate, making no effort to conceal ourselves. I was looking at the walls in the magical spectrum to see what kind of wards Elkhashab had put around it. Bizarrely, he didn"t have any, except on his gate. That told me he had to have something frightful waiting on the other side of the walls that couldn"t be seen from the gate.
I did a pogo leap up to take a peek at the top of the wall. No wards there either. So I leapt up again, slapped my hands on the top, and pulled myself up for a good look, not caring who saw me do it.
He had something frightful waiting behind the walls, all right. It was a d.a.m.n moat. A deep and wide one. And it was filled with hungry crocodiles. I had to admit that was pretty bada.s.s.
A few of the creatures spotted me and shifted, hoping to get a nice bite if I cooperated and leapt down to provide them breakfast. I toyed with the idea of calming their tiny reptilian brains and swimming right by, but it was too great a risk. There could be a big monster hiding under the black water that I wouldn"t catch, and then he"d certainly catch me.
Elkhashab had laid out his estate like a lion or tiger exhibit at a zoo. Inside the walls, the earth rose sort of like the mound of a volcano, so that the inside of the wall was much taller than the outside and impossible to jump over. By filling that with water and reptiles, he"d also made it impossible to jump over to safety from the outside. His house therefore rested on an island accessible only by the narrow strip of land leading from his gate.
I knew that couldn"t be the only entrance, though. A sneaky b.a.s.t.a.r.d like Elkhashab had to have some other escape route, especially since he was smuggling artifacts out of the country. He probably had a s...o...b..-Doo bookcase inside that revealed spiral stairs, and if you followed them down, you"d be in some creepy catacombs and eventually find a ladder that led to a trapdoor hidden in a warehouse or someplace else innocuous.
The chances of finding his secret pa.s.sage inside were much greater than finding his exit point, but I had to get in there without tripping his wards. He had to come home to happy, undisturbed wards on his gate if I was going to ambush him properly.
I took one last look around and then allowed myself to slip down off the wall, disappointing the residents of the moat.
"All right. I"ve seen enough. To the casbah!"
Oberon trotted beside me, tail wagging. "Um. Right. And we need to find a place for you to hang out for the day. It"s going to be impossible for you to come inside."
"Can you swing paw over paw on a rope without falling into a moat full of crocodiles?" "Yes, there is. We"ll hide you well. I don"t want anyone to think you"re up for grabs."I bought some food and water for Oberon and a few bones for him to gnaw on, and then we found a nice roof-there were plenty of the flat kind in Al Fayyum-where he could lounge unseen and undisturbed. After wishing him an excellent nap, I returned to the bazaar to purchase a good length of rope, a small anchor, and a single length of steel rebar. These would allow me to negotiate the moat.
Back on top of Elkhashab"s wall-this time with camouflage cast on myself-I set the steel rebar about halfway into the hardened mud, with a little magical encouragement. After tying one end of the rope to the rebar and the other to the anchor, I created a binding between the steel of the anchor and the wall of Elkhashab"s back patio; his house was constructed of the same adobe material. Once I energized the binding, the anchor flew to the house and stuck there without me having to throw it.
I had rather a lot of slack to take up-I"d overestimated the distance-and had to retie the rope on my end to make it taut.
All this activity had drawn the attention of Elkhashab"s crocodiles. Even though I was in camouflage, once I began to swing over their heads they threw off their customary torpor and became quite excited, scrambling over one another and trying to position themselves underneath me. They smelled what they couldn"t see. Hissing, snapping fights broke out. I have never felt so potentially tasty.
Once I had pa.s.sed over the moat and it became clear that I wouldn"t fall into their waiting mouths, most of them gave up, but a few pursued me onto land, cleverly deducing that I"d have to drop down at some point. I slowed and found the small, hungry threads of their conscious minds and told them I wasn"t breakfast. Really. Go away. Back to the moat, there"s a good croc. They obeyed sluggishly, but they obeyed, one at a time, and I was able to make a soft landing next to the crocodile priest"s patio and dissolve my camouflage.
A quick glance at said patio in the magical spectrum revealed that-besides being expensively furnished-it was warded. So were all the windows. I didn"t intend to use any of them, anyway. I snuck around counterclockwise, to the side of the house where there was a thin strip of gla.s.s block high up in place of a full window. My guess was that this was a bathroom. Chances of plumbing being right on the wall beneath the blocks were slim. The chances that Elkhashab had warded his bathroom were even slimmer.
This adobe made of river mud was precisely the sort of thing I appreciated in construction materials. Though it took longer than I may have wished, it was not difficult to unbind it and watch a me-shaped hole appear in the wall. I still had to cut through some insulation with a dagger and then kick through some thin drywall inside, but it was easier than trying to dismantle an accomplished magician"s wards.
The first of many shocks in Elkhashab"s house came in a whiff of cinnamon apples. He had one of those plug-in air fresheners glowing softly next to the sink. Neat patterned towels, fluffy and folded, waited to complete hand-washing rituals. Not what I expected from a crocodile priest. Apart from that, the room looked unused-far too clean for an evil warlock"s daily use. I concluded with satisfaction that this was a guest bathroom and Elkhashab wouldn"t check it when he came home.
I stepped back outside for a moment to top off my bear charm. Fully charged, I crept back in with my faerie specs on, looking for more wards, and worrying a bit about mundane security as well.