Besieged: Stories from the Iron Druid Chronicles(10)
//Gratitude Harmony/ I said to Nile, and I rode out of there, powers restored, to meet Ogma in Jerusalem. Gaia and her elementals are ever our friends and salvation, even as Druids are theirs.
I made it to the Sinai Peninsula before I realized what a terrible error I had made and compounded it with another. Resting at an oasis during the heat of the day and assured of some privacy, I opened the books only, one by one, to evaluate what I’d managed to take for myself.
I began with the books I’d taken from Horus and that the iron elemental had attacked to eat away the curses I’d seen in the magical spectrum. Upon opening them, however, I discovered that they were entirely blank. I had no way of knowing if they had always been blank or if their contents had been erased by the wards on them once they left the room, or even accidentally destroyed by the iron elemental. Regardless, they were worthless, and Horus had lost nothing. I hoped that the scrolls inside the box were still valuable and worried that my entire infiltration had been for naught. I scrambled to check the rest of my haul.
The books of Osiris were still in fine shape, having no scrap of magic about them to begin with, and the knowledge inside regarding wards was priceless and worth the trip by themselves. I sighed in relief and thanked the gods below.
I went through Bast’s books last. One of them was the Grimoire of the Lamb, the true purpose of which I did not discover until centuries afterward, when someone came looking for it at Third Eye Books & Herbs. Another was full of descriptions of protective wards and, like the books of Osiris, proved quite valuable. The last was the book of Bast’s mysteries, which had a horrifying effect once opened and perused—though it quite literally crept up on me.
The text was in Coptic and I was reading through it, mouth half open in horror and unable to look away, like watching someone embarrass himself or rubbernecking at a traffic accident on the side of the road. And then my peaceful reading time was rent at once by yowling, screeching, and hissing from all directions. I scrambled to my feet and drew Fragarach, thinking I was under attack, but once I had time to assess the threat, I realized that I was surrounded by fucking cats! And by that I mean the cats were all actually, if grudgingly, fucking. They didn’t seem to enjoy it much, and maybe that’s why they were making such heinous noises. For the record, I didn’t enjoy it either, and honestly we should all be grateful that cats usually do this in the dead of night, well out of our sight, and usually as a couple rather than as a massive, writhing chorus of carnality. I dove back to the ground, closed the book, and soon afterward the cats stopped what they were doing and even ceased to be cats: They melted into the sands or the wind and disappeared entirely. And then I laughed, for I realized that Bast had woven an unseen curse into the book: Unless you were one of her high priests or otherwise approved, you couldn’t read it without being afflicted by a deafening, shivering, teeth-grinding feline orgy.
I met up with Ogma in Jerusalem some days later and handed over the lacquered box of scrolls. He opened it, briefly unrolled and inspected the scrolls within, and then beamed at me.
“You owe me big for that,” I reminded him, wagging a finger at the scroll. “I got stabbed. Lost my voice. Had to listen to the worst cat sex ever. Someday I will send you on an impossible quest.”
“Understood,” he said, and held out a hand, palm up. “The torc, if you please?”
“That’s not a keeper, eh?”
“No.”
“Ah, well.” I delivered it to him, and he radiated smug contentment as he put it away out of my sight and followed it with the lacquered box. We stood soon afterward, hugged, and made our farewells, he to return to Tír na nóg, I to some new quiet village out of the Roman Empire.
Unfortunately, all Druids heard shortly thereafter through local elementals that they were no longer welcome in Egypt. But I can tell you that the treasures I saw in those rooms in Alexandria have never been found by modern archaeologists, and I suspect they’re still hidden away somewhere, guarded now entirely by Seshat’s wards.
“Wait,” Granuaile said. “No, that can’t be the end! What was in the box Ogma wanted?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know, beyond the fact that it was full of scrolls, and I never will. I gave it to him without question. You can think of it as the briefcase Jules and Vincent were after in Pulp Fiction: very shiny but forever a mystery.”
“You seriously never looked?”
“Wasn’t my business. I wanted a future favor more than I wanted whatever was in that box. And besides, I had plenty of other material to keep me company.”
<You’re not talking about your further adventures with the cat-sex book, I hope.>
“No, Oberon, I’m not talking about Bast’s mysteries. I mean all the other things I stole. I learned so much from what I stole. I still use that information today; Third Eye Books & Herbs was partially protected using Egyptian techniques. And I carefully neglected to tell Ogma about the potential usefulness of iron elementals.”
“Oh? Does that mean the Tuatha Dé Danann never summon them?” Granuaile asked.
“That’s right. I mean, I’ve told the Morrigan about them now, but I doubt she’ll be making friends with one quickly.”
My apprentice’s eyes grew wide and she shook her head a couple of times but said nothing.
“It was running that errand for Ogma, and then another one a few centuries later, that put me on the path to becoming the Iron Druid and creating my charms as a method of nonverbal binding. Seshat’s curse certainly taught me the need for that.”