I backed away from the staircase, because I had a feeling the demon was faster than me, even if I juiced myself up. I went ahead and did that, of course. If I made him come all the way up and locate me before he could charge, I’d have enough time to take my own shot. He might, in his hubris, even let me take a free swing at him.
Elkhashab finally died, and the demon seemed to lose interest. No fear and pain there anymore. The lamb, I realized, hadn’t bleated in a while. I didn’t know if it was dead or if it was hoping the demon wouldn’t notice it. I hadn’t seen it when I played peekaboo, but neither had I looked for it.
The demon was free to do as he wished. The one who had summoned him was dead; all bindings were off. The lamb, if it was still around, wasn’t much of a soul. The demon came after me instead.
He made no noise on the steps with anything that could be called feet; there was simply a sort of deep drumroll and he was there—glowing orange like banked embers around the edges, a mouth and a distended stomach and two pairs of huge arms to shove food down the maw. He didn’t have any legs at all; his black body was rounded like a balloon. He moved on his knuckles, and his mouth sneered at me.
“Khaja gorl mahka …” the demon began. The voice sounded like a grumpy Tom Waits mixed with an acetylene torch. I didn’t let him finish. I didn’t understand him anyway. I lunged much faster than he expected and lopped off his front left arm at the elbow.
The creature was shocked but utterly savage in reply; he roared and swung at me with his right, able to stay balanced on the back two arms, and my attempt to block cost me a broken left wrist. Both of us staggered back, wounded and wary now. I decided that attacking was my best strategy; the demon was probably unused to playing defense, and I had to make the most of my few advantages, especially since I was operating on a limited supply of magic.
I brought the sword around high on his left, precisely where it would be most difficult for the demon to block. He rotated to his side to avoid the blow and countered with a swing from his back right arm. I’d anticipated this and pivoted away, much as he had. Those back arms didn’t have huge claws, I noticed. Those were used primarily for movement.
He was faster than me but crippled and unused to fighting against swords. All the demon had seen so far was two slashes. He might have concluded that this was all I could do. I feinted another hack at his left side and then twisted my wrist, sweeping the sword down and across my body to meet the right cross I knew would be coming. As Fragarach arced up, it caught the demon’s wrist from underneath and severed the clawed hand. This move left my right side exposed, however.
The demon lost his shit. Down to just the two back arms and seeing an opening, he launched off his back right, and his left fist hammered my ribs. They cracked and I went down, wondering what happened to all the air in the world.
I didn’t know how I was ever going to get up. My left wrist wouldn’t support me. My ribs wouldn’t let me roll to my right. I couldn’t breathe. I supposed it was okay, though. This seemed the type of demon to bring the fight to you—especially if you were vulnerable.
He had not landed gracefully, but the creature was shifting for a charge. I lifted Fragarach’s blade to make sure it couldn’t be trapped against the floor, then folded up my legs to reduce the target. That was about all I could manage without any air. I gasped for some and kept an eye on the demon.
He let loose with a thunderous roar scented with all the joys of ass and pestilence. The faint whiff I got made me grateful that I couldn’t inhale a lungful of it. The beast’s teeth were mismatched ebony punji sticks, showcases of rot and an example to all who refuse to floss.
One massively knuckled hand swung forward, planted itself, and then seemed to buckle at the elbow. It stopped and swayed. The loss of blood—ichor, rather—from two severed limbs was taking its toll.
The creature spat, “Barg rah!” That was a “Fuck it!” if I ever heard one. His back arms churned and his damn black teeth were sunk into the side of my calf before I could move. I grunted and swung Fragarach at the top of his head, shearing off a slice like a cantaloupe. The blow rocked him back, and the teeth popped out of my leg before he fell over and dissolved into a sulfurous puddle of goo. The corporeal form of demons never lasts long once they’re unbound.
I expelled a sigh of relief and relaxed for a moment—or at least as much as I could, considering my injuries. But the stench of the room and my pressing need to get in touch with the earth drove me to action. Despite being fully charged when I came back down, I had burned a lot of juice to boost my speed, and I didn’t have enough left to do any serious healing. I compromised by shutting off the pain so I’d be able to move and concentrate. My calf, while probably infected with something nasty from the demon’s teeth, was still capable of functioning. Getting up was a bit of a chore, with cracked ribs and a broken wrist, but the legs weren’t in terrible shape, and I could go back downstairs and retrieve the grimoire—or, better yet, destroy it along with the writings of Nebwenenef.
Figuring I was all alone, I kind of clomped down the metal stairs when I should have kept quiet. It prevented me from hearing the noise in the next room until I reached the stone floor. I froze at the bottom of the stairwell and heard the chalky grind and thud of stone scraping against stone. The jaundiced light of yellow bulbs revealed a disturbing shadow moving on the floor. It grew as it approached the door to the chamber I thought of as the crocodile lounge. Being careful to make no sound this time, I minced behind the altar. Elkhashab’s torn and partially eaten remains littered the front, I noticed, along with his plastic grocery bags. The grimoire lay open between the candles he had lit before his death. A tiny noise of fear drew my eyes to the wall on my left, back near the door. The lamb was still alive and cowering near the boxes of untold treasures. The shadow took on a solid presence at the doorway, and I crouched down out of sight as it entered with heavy, grinding footsteps.
Whatever it was scared the bejesus out of the lamb, for it screamed and quite probably shat where it stood. I risked a peek around the corner of the altar, figuring that whatever had entered the room would be focused on the lamb.
It was one of the Sobek sarcophagi—or, rather, the front of it—the lid now ambulatory, a lurching stone-and-metal horror with its backside missing and much of the paint worn away, but possessing a full complement of limestone teeth in a maw of basalt that it was now able to open. The legs functioned like articulated action figures, with stiff movements allowed by cracks in the stone around the knees and hips. The gilded bronze scepter of power that looked so fascinating when it was art turned abruptly sickening when it was wielded on living flesh. That’s what the unholy thing did—it crushed the lamb’s spine with the scepter in its right hand, then tossed away the ankh in its left, and picked up the body.
I had a lot to process and little time to do it.
First, how had this thing come to life? Was it, in fact, living, or was it undead? That was an important distinction for me, since Druidry forbade me to harm living things through binding or unbinding. On the one hand, its stone body and the fact that it had torn itself free of a sarcophagus suggested something undead or animated along the lines of a golem, but on the other—what if it was a manifestation of Sobek?
That was possible but unlikely to my mind. Back in Cairo, Bast had manifested first as a cat and then took a semi-human form, so it would have made more sense for Sobek to take over the living crocodile in the next room than to animate the sculptured lid of a sarcophagus.
Said sculpture didn’t pause to provide me with an explanation. It placed the head of the lamb between its black jaws and tore it off with limestone teeth, then spat it out hurriedly and lifted the carcass above its head, letting the blood drain from the body into its mouth.
It didn’t swallow because it didn’t possess a throat, just a closed-off surface like a hand puppet—but the blood didn’t spill out the sides either. Instead, it was absorbed into the stone. I silently triggered my magical sight, which drained my magic down to dangerous lows, but it revealed to me that this thing wasn’t Sobek—it didn’t have the blinding white aura of a god. Instead of being suffused all over with the white power of magic, the sculpture had its power centered at the back of the mouth, where the blood was pooling and disappearing. In other words, it was ordinary rock and metal animated by an extraordinary spirit. I would ponder later whose spirit it might be and why and how it had animated that sarcophagus at that particular time. A better question to ponder right then was how I was going to prevent it from tearing off my head too and gulping my blood like an energy drink.
Running away sounded attractive. The sheer size of the thing—seven feet tall and the width of a bookcase—would make navigating the spiral staircase difficult. But I didn’t want to leave behind the grimoire—nor did I wish this thing to grow any more powerful than it already was. How to defeat it?
Fragarach wouldn’t do me any good. It was great against armor but not so good against rock. Few martial arts were great against rock, now that I thought of it. Probably because one so rarely sees possessed sarcophagi.
Perhaps I could unbind its feet—which were only half feet anyway—and it would fall down and go boom. It was worth a shot, especially since I’d have nothing left afterward but some dregs to keep my injuries from distracting me.
I banished my magical sight mentally by using my charm, but there was no way to perform the unbinding silently. I whispered the words, of course, but even that sound echoed in the stone chamber and alerted the thing that it wasn’t alone. It stopped drinking blood, cocked its head, then turned my way. It spotted me peeking from behind the altar as I finished the unbinding and energized it.
The lamb dropped from its grasp, forgotten, and its mouth opened wide. I think it would have bellowed or hissed if it had any vocal cords, and I kind of wished it did, since its silence was creepy. It whipped its left hand down to point at the floor near its ankles. Nothing happened—visually, at least. I could imagine very well what had happened in the magical spectrum, for that gesture was familiar to me, thanks to Elkhashab. My earth magic had just been canceled out by Sobek’s water magic, a small flood drowning my bindings, and now I had nothing of significance left.
Hiding was pointless. Pushing up off my right hand, my left still useless, I rose from behind the altar and drew Fragarach. It would do me little good against the stone but would provide some defense against its weapon, which had a flared crest at one end and two forked tines at the other. I circled around the altar to my right, which would force the thing to pivot on its uncertain feet to face me.
It knew what it was doing with that scepter. Displaying a dexterity wholly alien to most rocks and much more fluid than the movement of the legs, it twirled the was in front of it and then lashed out as I approached. I deflected the first blow, then another, and its skill was such that I found myself fencing with it for a brief time. Its mouth remained open, silently promising to end me. But its weapon was inherently slower, and I was able to slap away a blow and use the opening to deliver a straight kick to its abdomen. Lacking heels on which to stagger backward, it toppled over. As it fell, however, it whipped the scepter around and hooked my plant leg—my left—with the crested end and sent me tumbling on my ass. When I collided with the ground, something crumpled further inside; now my ribs were not just cracked but broken and, in all likelihood, scraping my spleen. The fresh bloom of pain prevented me from rolling out of the way or moving much at all. It gave the Sobek creature the chance to sit up and swing at me again with the scepter, the crested end aimed at my face. Having no other choice, I threw up my left forearm to block, and it did so but scored another break in the process. It wasn’t useless after all. Just painful. Wincing as I moved, I rolled out of range before another blow could rain down, using my right arm for support.
We were both slow to get up but for different reasons. I had broken bones, and it was a ridiculously top-heavy monstrosity trying to stand without any heels. It managed to get halfway up, lost its balance, and crashed to the ground again.
As I regained my footing and my magic ran out completely, letting me feel all the agony of my broken arm and ribs, I realized that keeping this thing on the floor might be all I could reasonably hope for. I didn’t have a jackhammer handy. Magically we were at an impasse as well: Even if I had any magic left, the sculpture had already demonstrated that it could dissolve my bindings, and anything it threw at me would be deflected by my cold iron aura. It didn’t know that yet, though. It gestured at me with its left hand—and snapped its jaws shut when nothing happened. My amulet kind of wiggled on my chest, but that was it.
“Ha! Suck it, Sobek. Or whoever you are. Kind of stupid to take an earth form if you’re a water sorcerer, don’t you think?”
I doubted it understood English, but I knew it could hear me, because it had reacted to my whisper before. It was also clearly able to see. So despite the lack of anything akin to normal eyes or ears, the spirit possessing that form had some basic senses. A bit slow on the uptake, though. It kept flicking its hand at me and expecting something to happen.
“Why now?” I asked it, thinking aloud. “You had centuries of time and presumably several years in the recent past during which you could have stumbled through these chambers. What changed?”
It gave up on trying to hex me and attempted to stand again, a noisy, scraping business that made the hairs on the back of my neck try to flee. A well-placed kick kept it seated, and I danced out of the way of a scepter strike. The strain of dodging aggravated my calf, however, where the demon had bitten me. My pain kept developing layers and flavors; this one burned with a dull fire.