The Book of the Dead (14 page)

The archaeologist sucked in on his pipe sharply at that revelation. Mr. Tarabotti waited with ill-disguised impatience while Mr. Caviglia coughed out puffs of vanilla-scented smoke.

Eyes watering, the man looked more closely at Alessandro’s face. “You’re one of them, aren’t you? I thought they were all dead. Too susceptible to the poisonous humours.”

Mr. Tarabotti, who
was
a bit of a poisonous humour, said sharply, “Interesting that you even know of my kind.”

“My cousin is a Templar,” Mr. Caviglia explained hastily.

Alessandro grimaced.
That
could make things difficult.

Mr. Caviglia recovered his equanimity. He handed back the letter of marque, openly evaluating his visitor’s appearance. Alessandro knew what he saw: a man of lean build and patrician nose, tall, wearing a cleverly cut coat and trousers a little too tight. In short – a dandy. He would not see that the coat was cut to hide musculature, rather than exaggerate it, and that the tightness of the trousers was to distract from the smooth movements of the legs that wore them.

“You’re not what I would have expected.”

Alessandro cocked his head. “Well, at least one of us is surprised. You’re exactly what I expected.”

And the archaeologist was – unshaven, undersized, wearing round spectacles and a jacket no decent human would wish upon his worst enemy. He could be handsome under the grime, in a peevish scholarly way, but there were certain unforgivable flaws. Atop his head rested a battered object that might have started life as some species of hat many years ago and at the bottom of the ocean.

Mr. Tarabotti shuddered. “Shall we go in now?”

Mr. Caviglia nodded, tapping out his pipe on the side of the entranceway. “A remarkable discovery, really quite remarkable.” He led the way inside the tomb.

Its ceiling was higher than Alessandro had anticipated. A smoking torch in the far corner cast a dim flicking light. It was as clean as could be expected from a place recently filled with rubble for thousands of years. There were few artefacts left – a broken column, several pottery bowls before an inset shrine, and a pile of digging tools nested at the base of the torch – but the walls were littered with carved and painted images. On one, a jackal-headed man sat at a vast banquet – bread, meat, and fruit laid out before him, a curly-tailed monkey crouched underneath his throne. On the other, the same man was shown undergoing various death rituals of a decidedly heathen nature.

“We found the tomb partly looted, of course. Most of them are. Oddly, the looters stopped half way through and not a single person has touched the tomb since. Until we came along.” The archaeologist crossed the room, grabbed up the torch, and led the way through a carved opening into a short passageway.

Mr. Tarabotti followed.

The passage turned to the left, and before them stood a huge basalt statue of a mummy, threatening and protective.

The archaeologist ignored this, turning again and leading the way down a steep set of stairs, talking all the while.

“Once we saw the mummy we realized why. The natives are terribly superstitious about these kinds of things. Well, you would be too, if you grew up in a land entirely devoid of supernatural. I mean, our government has been trying for elimination ever since the Inquisition, but the hives and packs will keep springing up. Not here, though.”

Mr. Tarabotti placed a hand against the tunnel wall to steady himself as he climbed down the dark stairs. “They’re too strong and too well connected.”

“Yet the Templars back home keep trying.”

“They’re believers.” Mr. Tarabotti grimaced as his hand came away from the wall filthy with dark brown dust and a fine yellow powder.

“And you?”

Alessandro shrugged. He believed in very little beyond his job and the wealth it generated.

“Well, regardless, this excavation has been fascinating. The sarcophagus has unique hieroglyphics on it. And the mummy – excellent preservation, stunning condition, from flesh to fibre. There.”

They emerged into a room slightly smaller than the first, and far less tidy. It was cluttered, with antiquities spread across the floor and nestled into niches in the painted walls. Everything was covered in a thick layer of dust and, while some artefacts had been knocked over and broken, most were intact. The preservation was amazing. Wooden furniture stood in the corners, draped in crumbling textiles with large stone statues of animal-headed gods resting on top. Pots in every shape and size lined the walls, nestled amongst crowds of tiny human statues, piles of copper weapons, and a myriad of other mundanities. In the middle of the jumble, next to the massive hole it had obviously been hauled out of, stood a large sarcophagus of red granite, its lid off and tilted against its side.

The archaeologist tugged Mr. Tarabotti over to it. Inside, a mummy lay partially unwrapped, the looters having started with its head, lusting after the precious amulets of gold and lapis tucked inside the linen bandages.

They’d stopped.

There was no doubt as to why.

“Remarkable,” said Mr. Tarabotti in English.

The creature inside was human, almost, but the bones of its face were not. Teeth, jaw, shape of forehead all leaned more towards canine than man. There was even a light patterning of hair in the shrunken wrinkles of the dried brown skin.

“A werewolf.”

“Undoubtedly.”

“Mummified in half
homo sapien
, half
homo lupis
form.” Alessandro pulled a small analogue aetheromechanical transducer from his jacket pocket and prodded delicately at the mummy, testing for remnant vital aetheromagnetism. Nothing. “They say alpha werewolves can maintain just such a state as this, half in, half out of human form. They use it in metamorphosis rituals. Can you imagine?” His fine upper lip curled. “Disgusting.”

He investigated further. “Well, I commend you, Mr. Caviglia. If this is a hoax, it is a very good one.”

The archaeologist puffed up in outrage. “I assure you, sir – !”

Mr. Tarabotti held up the transducer autocratically to stop any denunciation and continued examining the body. “Don’t you think that head shape is a little odd?”

“Aside from it being attached to a human body?”

“We call it Anubis form,” said a new voice in old-fashioned Italian flattened out by a British accent.

Out of the staircase entrance came the gleaming muzzle of a nasty double-barrelled pistol followed by a blond military-looking gentleman.

“Hello, Curse-breaker,” he said to Mr. Tarabotti in English, gun steady.

“You were at dinner earlier this evening.” Alessandro switched to the Queen’s tongue, out of courtesy for their visitor, at the same time releasing his gun out of its wrist holster. The movement was so subtle as to be imperceptible. The gun slid down toward his hand, almost peeking out of the bottom of one burgundy sleeve.

The man nodded. “I followed you from the hotel. As you inconvenienced me by not allowing my agents to steal the map from you.”

Mr. Caviglia raised both hands and straightened away from the sarcophagus. His eyes were fixed on the intruder’s weapon.

Mr. Tarabotti sniffed. “I knew someone was following me. How did I miss you?”

“You never looked up.” The man had a soldier’s bearing and a young face, but his eyes were dulled by past lives.

“I’m too old to remember humans have taken to the skies.” Alessandro shook his head at himself.

“You’re a werewolf,” accused the archaeologist, with more power of deduction than Alessandro would have given him credit for.

The man snorted. “Not here, I’m bloody well not.” He glared at Mr. Tarabotti as though this fact were somehow his fault. “I hope you know what a bother it has been, travelling through Egypt after you these weeks. I had to learn to shave again, and every little cut takes donkey’s years to heal. I don’t know how you mortals do it. I really don’t. I hope you appreciate the risk I’m taking.”

Alessandro licked his lips. This was going to be fun. “Oh, I appreciate it.”

The un-werewolf narrowed his eyes. “Don’t you move.” He glanced briefly at the archaeologist. “Is it true what you found? What he said? Is that there a mummy of a werewolf in Anubis form?”

“See for yourself,” suggested Mr. Tarabotti, hoping the un-werewolf would come within striking distance.

The un-werewolf didn’t take the bait, too old for that. “We used to rule this land. Did you know that?”

Mr. Caviglia gave a little snort of disbelief.

“You archaeologists haven’t figured that one out yet, have you? They worshipped us as gods. Turned sour on us in the end. Most things do. The god-breaker plague swept the Two Lands and, within a generation, every werewolf had died. We’ve not been back since because this,” he gestured to himself, “is what results.”

“Mortality.”

“And why would you risk everything to follow me here?”

The un-werewolf looked at Mr. Tarabotti. “Curse-breaker, this mummy is
our
ancestor. You daylighters,” and he included the archaeologist in his contemptuous statement, “have no right. Especially not some crusading religious fanatics. That mummy is the property of the British Government, we have the concession, not the Italians. Ours to study and understand.”

Mr. Tarabotti smiled his tight little smile. “Who said we wanted to study it?”

The archaeologist and the un-werewolf both looked to him in shock.

“But the Templars promised.”

Mr. Tarabotti shrugged. “The Templars lied. And we can’t very well have the English using it as some kind of pro-supernatural propaganda tool.”

No record and no witnesses.

He slid the derringer smoothly the rest of the way out of his sleeve and into his hand, turned slightly in the same movement, and shot Mr. Caviglia in the chest at point blank range. The archaeologist fell with a tiny cry of surprise and lay still against the corner of the sarcophagus, slumped and limp.

“We can’t allow you to go babbling about this to the antiquarian community either, I’m afraid.” He looked thoughtfully down at the scholar’s dead body. “Pity.”

The un-werewolf started, but his gun remained trained on Mr. Tarabotti.

Alessandro tucked the now-useless pistol into his pocket casually, feeling about for his second one, and narrowed his eyes at the man.

“What it must be like, seeing that,” he tilted his head at the fallen archaeologist, “and knowing you could so easily end up the same way.”

“Do you really think, after hundreds of years, we immortals fear death?”

“Do the crazy ones, who have lived too long, travel to Egypt to die voluntarily?”

The un-werewolf shrugged. “Some.”

“So, we find ourselves at an impasse.”

“Mmm, please take your hand out of your jacket, Curse-breaker.”

Mr. Tarabotti did so, tucking his second tiny gun up the end of his other sleeve in a manoeuvre he’d once learned from a street performer.

The un-werewolf gestured with his pistol for Mr. Tarabotti to move away from the mummy and towards the door. Cautiously, Alessandro did so. But, near to the entrance, as he passed close to his opponent, he pretended to stumble over a fallen urn, lurching violently to one side.

The un-werewolf growled at him and stepped threateningly forward.

Alessandro dove, shifting his weight and lashing up and out with his foot, striking the man’s wrist where it held the gun.

The double barrel discharged a bullet, missing Mr. Tarabotti by a foot, the slug ploughing hard into a support column, spitting limestone shards at both men. The un-werewolf swore and rotated the chamber to load his second shot.

Alessandro rolled, as much as he could, over the small statues and artefacts littering the floor, coming into a crouch covered in thousands of years of dust but with his second gun clutched in his hand.

He fired, hitting the un-werewolf in the shoulder. The shot wasn’t deadly, but it did cause the man to drop his own gun in surprise.

Mr. Tarabotti lunged for the fallen weapon at the same time as the un-werewolf, and the two of them scrabbled through the ancient offerings. Alessandro struck out viciously at his opponent, connecting where the shoulder wound seeped old blood, groping for the fallen gun with his other hand.

The un-werewolf backhanded Mr. Tarabotti, handicapped with only one working arm, and that odd British distaste for kicking in a fight.

Mr. Tarabotti had no such compunctions. Crawling as they both were after the fallen weapon, Alessandro kicked out with one foot and managed to shove the man over. Grabbing the gun, he came up triumphant, pointing the weapon at the un-werewolf, who now crouched amongst the wreckage looking as savage as he might have in his lupine state.

Mr. Tarabotti shot the last bullet. But the man was fast, even without supernatural speed, and managed to dodge. Frustrated, Alessandro threw the gun petulantly aside and pulled the flask of turpentine from his jacket.

He scattered it liberally about, making sure to coat the mummy in particular.

The un-werewolf lunged for him, seizing him by the waist and hurling him back to the floor. Mr. Tarabotti pushed against the man’s chin, trying to wrench his neck. His opponent howled, an animalistic sound coming from such a human face.

“That was you howling earlier this evening?” Mr. Tarabotti panted out the question, clawing at the creature’s eyes.

“Staying in practice, even if I can’t change,” came the hissed reply, as the un-werewolf struggled to hold Alessandro in a one-armed grip.

“That’s rather perverse, you know that?” Mr. Tarabotti uppercut sharply with the palm of one hand, achieving just enough leverage to break the un-werewolf’s nose.

Alessandro squirmed away. Coming panting to his feet, he brushed off his burgundy coat with fierce disgusted movements. “Is such dusty combat strictly necessary?”

The un-werewolf only bled at him.

Feeling deeply put upon, Mr. Tarabotti reached once more inside his jacket, pulling out the tin of phosphorus matches. He backed away until he was at the doorway. There, he struck a match and threw it at the turpentine-covered mummy.