Besieged: Stories from the Iron Druid Chronicles(6)

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.