Chapter 23 #2
The footprints led into an antechamber. Ezra didn’t need to study the strand in Vincent’s hand to understand that he’d been here before…
The room stood out. Sand yielded to a polished obsidian floor.
Walls soared upward, past the reach of even Ezra’s light.
It should have been shining brighter… against piles of treasure.
The riches had looked mountainous when he’d stood here with his mother.
This is your inheritance, Ezra, she’d said, with tears in her kohl-struck eyes.
Her hand had squeezed his even harder. He couldn’t understand why she was crying—wasn’t it a good thing to find gold?
He still did not understand.
The chamber had been looted. Stripped of every shining thing from his childhood memory. There was no way Hugo could have taken it all already. And his mut… Well, she hadn’t even touched a single jewel. She’d just stood there. Weeping.
Ezra started to walk to the center of the room.
In a shadowed corner, something moved.
Biz let out a cry and brandished her parasol. Vincent clutched the memory in his fist like a dagger. Ezra stepped in front of the pair and began to shine even brighter.
Two pointed ears. A keen snout.
The stone jackal’s head sat atop a bare human torso. In his hands he held a pair of scales.
“Anubis,” Vincent said tightly.
“There’s another one.” Biz pointed her umbrella at the opposite corner. This statue was as life-sized as the first, only it had been broken into dozens of pieces. In the fragment of one fist sat a sickle sword.
There was blood on the khopesh’s blade.
Not yet dried.
“Anubis weighs hearts in the Duat, to see if a person’s soul is worthy of passing into the afterlife.
” Ezra’s eyes flitted from the red-edged weapon to the statue holding the scales.
The papier-maché headdress Hugo had worn to the costume party looked childish by comparison.
“I’m guessing our rivals failed the test.”
“Is that any surprise?” Biz’s gown swished around her scarred heels. She gripped her parasol with agonized knuckles. “If I were a god they’d dance straight into a lake of fire.”
“But what about the toothpicks?” Vincent said lightly.
“It doesn’t look like the statues stopped them,” Ezra pointed out.
Biz shifted from foot to foot, chewing her lip. “What if they’ve already reached the wand?”
“Then we’ll have to fight them for it.” Vincent patted at the pockets of his safari jacket. Panic took root in Ezra’s throat as he spied the outline of the Webley. The gun. Why had Vincent brought the gun? “Right, Bright?”
He glanced back at his sister. The way she wielded her umbrella reminded him of the stick-swords they’d used to play with as children.
Battles had been so simple then. The Boers were bad.
The British were heroes. It wasn’t until Ezra had gone off to war himself that he’d learned the truth—the Boers had been sitting on top of lucrative gold mines.
The British slaughtered them for it. Just as the Boers had slaughtered those who came before.
It never ended, this awfulness. It just kept going around and around and around—
He could feel that old, monstrous anger starting to stir.
But was it?
Monstrous?
“Keep the pistol in your pocket,” he warned Vincent. “Hold on to the memory instead. And stay a good distance behind me.”
This time, Biz seemed more inclined to listen.
She hung back with Vincent as Ezra turned toward the next door.
It was just as obsidian as the floor, the overhead mantel engraved with the winged sun disk of Ra.
Feathers gleamed with real electrum and lapis lazuli.
There were more symbols inlaid on the door itself, but Ezra couldn’t read them.
They’d been blasted away, as if with sticks of dynamite.
It sat open.
The chamber on the other side was made of the same smooth obsidian—long and supported by massive pillars.
But this wasn’t what stole Ezra’s breath away.
There, in the center of the space, sat a gauntlet of sphinxes.
The two rows faced one another, but when Ezra approached, their gazes swung toward him.
Just like the statues in the British Museum.
Exactly like them.
More jagged dynamite markings gouged out the floor in front of the foremost sphinxes. They hadn’t always been the first. Someone had come along and hauled off the original pair.
Again, he doubted it was Hugo.
Ezra’s neck hairs bristled—as if with an electric current—while he crouched to study the sphinxes’ base stone.
Sure enough, their hieroglyphics matched the ones that sat in front of the Order’s vault.
With one or two notable changes: We are the eternal guardians of the afterlife.
Only through the blood of the… Magician?
Again, Ezra wasn’t sure… may the gate be opened.
The nearest sphinx’s looming head began to turn.
One by one, statues down the line mirrored the motion. There were nine on each side… Deep channels had been carved into the floor between them, all leading to a freestanding wall of blank, black stone…
Ezra looked down at his wounded hand. The dark crust of blood there matched the grins of the waiting statues.
A scream sliced through the chamber, followed by the sound of a parasol thwacking meaty muscle.
There was another, deeper, scream. Too deep to belong to Vincent.
When Ezra whirled around he saw Everett, clutching his shoulder.
Blood stained his shirt, but it wasn’t bright enough to be Biz’s fault.
Most likely the wound had been caused by the Anubis statue’s sickle sword.
His sister was clever enough to keep aiming for it, in her bid to beat the magician back.
At the moment, she seemed to be winning.
“This. Is. For. Making. Me. Dance. You. Lecherous. Cretin!!!” Each one of Biz’s words was punctuated by a ferocious strike of her umbrella.
Vincent, meanwhile, was too busy trying to cut at the strings Hugo was pulling from his shadow. His opposite hand fumbled for his pocket. For the pistol.
Not again.
Magic reared up inside Ezra’s chest—flaring like a cobra’s hood.
More golden light crackled at his fingertips.
He would grab Hugo’s and Everett’s shadows this time, just theirs.
He’d hang them like Cornish game hens and pluck every single magical memory out of their skulls, every time they’d ever made a young woman waltz her feet bloody, every stolen artifact they’d touched.
They wouldn’t even rue the day they’d met Ezra, because they would not remember that night, or anything else about the Seek and Find.
He reached out to seize the magicians’ shadows.
There was a burst of light. Three bursts. Ezra’s own vicious magic blazed back at him, lashing around his arms and neck like golden whips. He followed the long, glowing cords to the floor, where a trio of small mirrors had been placed in a half-circle around the entrance to the sphinx gauntlet.
A trap.
The Order magicians had set a trap. And he’d walked straight into it.
“The mirrors! Smash the mirrors!” he yelled at Vincent and Biz, but there was little the pair could do. Everett had used a spell to turn the parasol into a snake. Hugo had wrestled the memory out of Vincent’s hand. The gun replaced it.
And the barrel was, once again, aimed at Elizabeth Ellington’s head.
His sister stiffened. The serpent that was once her umbrella coiled around her ankles. Ezra felt the same tight coils in his chest. Trapped. By his own powers.
Hugo’s voice rang out. Triumphant. “The harder you fight, the tighter the bonds. Clever, isn’t it?
Italians are masters at glasswork. The mirror magic they managed in Murano over the centuries…
Well, I digress. Really, we should be talking about your magic, Mr. Bright. What a curious thing you are.”
Biz spit at this. “He’s a person, you utter cad!”
Ezra knew it didn’t make a difference. People like Hugo Pratt had never really seen him that way—even before he was shining.
“I knew there was something strange about you, that night at the Seek and Find. The way you started to glow as you took that necklace from Rose. And then all those Germans—screaming about how you were damned. I started asking around about you, you know. They say you killed a whole unit with your bare hands. The Miracle of Amiens. Of course, those dead Krauts called you something else…”
“Tell me, do you go out of your way to be nasty or does it just come naturally?” Vincent seemed to be fighting Hugo’s wrapped shadows—enough to speak, at least. He was still aiming the Webley pistol at Biz’s head. His finger one twitch away from a kill.
Hugo barely spared the other young man a glance.
“Nolan was there too. At Amiens. He didn’t come home with any medals, though.
All that arrived at our doorstep was a flimsy telegram—my father, he was especially torn.
He thought that, with the power of our family’s relics, my brother would be untouchable.
He was, after all, the golden son. The one with all the promise. ”
Vincent wheeled around at this, his trigger finger squeezing tight. A shot exploded across the chamber—hot bullet pinging off Ezra’s lashed chest and falling to the ground.
Hugo stared at this spent ammunition, nudging the lead with his toe. “So tell me, what makes you so special, Mr. Bright?”
Ezra could feel rivulets of sweat crawling, crawling down the backs of his legs, like flies on a corpse. George, Nolan, the Germans… The rage was building, building, just as it had in the trench, only now Ezra was hurting himself. With every seething breath, the cords around him tightened.
There was a cold click as Vincent cocked the pistol and swung it back toward Biz.
Ezra’s heart squeezed and squeezed.
“I don’t know,” he rasped.
“Stop lying,” Everett called out. He’d stepped away from Biz—out of the Webley’s range.