We'd managed to recover the pharaoh, and were facing the long walk back to Pi Rameses--three weeks, no matter which way we went, perhaps shorter with the help of some Fly spells.
But remember how I'd mentioned that we were neck-deep in gods? It was about to get somewhat worse…
20 HetHert, Inundation, Year 4 of the Reign of Rameses II (October 6th, 1275 BCE)
somewhere on the Sinai Peninsula
We slept the night--well, most of us did. Usi, Isu and I went on a hunt for a while, though we didn't manage to catch anything. The hyenas and I were the first people out of the doorknob in the morning, which is why I was the one who first saw Grrrbek, holding a sword I hadn't seen before, backing away from what appeared to be a sinkhole in the sand.
I grabbed the doorknob, and we ran.
Fortunately, the hole in the sand stopped expanding while it was relatively small. Unfortunately, what came pouring out of that hole was a bunch of spiders. Yellow and black spiders as big as a man, in fact.
We hollered for the others to get their butts out here, and then battle was well and truly joined.
Grrrbek cast something...big. When I asked him about it later (professional curiosity, you know), he said it was something called Storm of Vengeance. Which creates a literal storm, a big one, complete with lightning and hail, etc.
Fortunately, he cast it far enough away that none of it hurt us. However, the lightning *did* evidently hit something big and nasty that lurked in the hole.
We were a bit too busy with the spiders to go investigate, however. Sixty or so spiders, seven--no six, Amunet hadn't come out of the doorknob--of us. We eventually polished them off, but it was close there for a while.
Evidently, Grrrbek had triggered the spiders by pulling out an innocuous-seeming sword from the sand. It was a scimitar, made of iron, and miraculously both sharp and unrusted.
When the storm faded, we went to the hole in the sand, wading through ankle-deep mud to get there. The hole seemed to be a skylight over a four-way intersection carved into the rock that was beneath the dirt and sand of the ground. The rain had washed away some of the dust on the walls, and we could see hieroglyphics on the walls.
Pepy lowered himself down to have a look. He reported that it looked clear for the moment, and we all piled in after him. I left Usi and Isu up top to keep watch.
The tunnels evidently used to be a temple to not one god but four. The east corridor was dedicated to Ra, the west corridor to Bes, the south corridor to Horus, and the north corridor to (who else?) Imhotep. Whatever was down here had dripped ichor up the north corridor, and we decided to follow it so we wouldn't get any nasty surprises sneaking up on us.
About that time, I noticed that my vision had begun to go blurry. When I asked, the greyling told me that the corridor was filled with god magic. I pulled it out of my eye and stuck it into my ear, occasioning noises of disgust from Mayet.
Looking down the corridor, we could see indentations in the walls that would hold lanterns. To everyone but Pepy and I, these indentations were perfectly blank. To those of us with Detect Magic up, we could see that there was something behind that illusion. There were in fact lanterns behind the seeming of blank wall. I fussed with the closest one and managed to first turn on bright lights all down the corridor, then plunge the whole place into absolute darkness. The third turn of the knob I'd found turned the lights back on--but, more than that, it illuminated what seemed to be a magical trap.
The trap was spraying a fine mist into the corridor, a magical one. Now that we could see it, it was easy enough to avoid. We proceeded ahead.
The source of the bleeding turned out to be a giant spider that nearly took up the whole of the corridor. We made short work of it, though it nailed Pepy with its fangs twice in the process. In return, Pepy made somewhat of a pulp out of it--and in the process, his axe banged up against something hard.
He fished it out of the mess which was the body, and discovered that it was a flat piece of metal, about two feet on a side, and it was one of the more magical things I've seen in the last few weeks. I asked Imhotep what it was, and he replied, a bit shortly, "A mistake."
When I persisted, he told me that it was part of an artifact. With five other pieces, it assembles to create a box with a hole in the top. When the artifact is assembled, if the hand of a person is put into the hole, then all members of that person's race die out.
All right, now I'm sort of wondering about Imhotep. Creating artifacts that can fall into the wrong hands and be used for evil, sure, happens all the time. Creating artifacts that have no purpose but genocide? Um, why?
He recommended that we not let Menes get his hands on it. We agreed, and stowed it away and kept exploring.
Where we had fought the spider was one half of a T intersection, so we went to look at the other half. There was magic down there, a dimension door that led who knew where. We elected to leave it for the moment, and explore the rest of the temple.
Down the Ra corridor, there was a hole in the floor covered by an illusion. Under it was a room filled with snake-like creatures, and something glowing magically at the end of the room. Again, we left it and kept going. The corridor ended at a room with an altar to Ra on it. On the altar was what appeared to be a small red dragon, enclosed in a force cage. I determined that the dragon was probably alive. The walls were filled with murals depicting a dragon much like this one riding on Ra's shoulder through all sorts of adventures.
Cautious about the idea of taking something off of an altar, we backed off. Down the Bes corridor, we found that the corridor began to slope at what was more and more extreme of an angle. We attached a rope to one of the sconces on the walls and proceeded down with all caution.
At the bottom was a rough room with a dirt floor, and a stone well in which there was a liquid that was glowing with a reddish light. Grrrbek was delighted. Bes, being a god of the earth, and he were evidently aligned somewhat. He dug down into the soil and uncovered...the top of an altar?
At this point, I was invesigating the pool, ignoring the strange activities of our small god. Cautiously, I reached out and touched the fluid within it with my staff. I yelped as the fluid raced up my staff, coating it from end to end, and then receded.
In its wake, I saw that my staff had been turned to crystal, and had taken on magic of some kind.
(Would it be ungrateful to note here that I bought the staff in Pi Rameses in large part because I thought the wood was pretty? Ah, well. The crystal is pretty, as well.)
In the meantime, Grrrbek had uncovered the altar. He pointed out something on the top--and, yes, it was indeed a symbol of Grrrbek. The god's very odd, but his conviction that the world centers upon him seems to have at least a small basis in truth. He touched the symbol, and then something very odd happened.
The altar rose up out of the ground, and underneath the lip of the altar appeared stones of different shapes, sizes, and colors. Grrrbek touched an opal, and the walls changed color to match the stone, the pool changing color as well.
At this point, Pepy dipped his own axe into the pool, which turned to a red metal that matched the color of his armor. The hilt turned gold--and when he grasped it, the gold reached out to wrap around his hand. He can't be disarmed while using it unless his arm is cut off, now.
At this point, we started noticing that the pool was starting to get smaller with every item we dipped into it. I finally gave into my curiosity, and stuck my hand into the water.
It asked me what I wanted, and I said I wanted to know what it was meant for. "To create artifacts," it said, and when I questioned it further it said that it would replenish itself, but it would take centuries to do so. When I asked it if it knew which gemstones would bestow which gifts, it told me that it had been deemed best for it not to know.
Random it was, then. We played with the gems and each of us dipped one of our possessions into it--Grrrbek's non-enchanted scimitar became something like a spiritual weapon, Terik's sword turned into what looked like a blade made of shadow, Raam's sword became Exceedingly Shiny and even more excessively sharp than it had been (I swear, if it gets any sharper, he'll be able to use it on time and space itself!), and Mayet's plain wooden staff transformed into some sort of purple-hued wood.
After that, the magic was spent, and the altar sank into the ground. Oddly enough, the corridor leading away was now flat instead of very sloped. Grrrbek and Mayet did some of their weird priestess and god consecration stuff, and we left.
There was one last hallway to investigate--the Horus corridor. Once down it, we discovered that our way was obscured by a mist in the corridor. After much puzzling, Pepy and Terik decided that since Amunet had elected to sleep rather than explore today, they'd do the tried and true method of finding traps--walking into them.
We settled down to wait. No explosions happened, surprisingly enough. Pepy and Terik came out of the fog, and I noticed that Terik now had some grey in his hair.
Evidently, according to hieroglyphics on the wall, the mist caused you to get better at what you were already good at, while aging you to compensate. Everyone in the group decided to go in except me. I'm old enough already. Who knows what might have happened to me in there?
Waiting around was boring. I entertained myself by listening to the reports of hyena packs; that time of the day, they were mostly sacked out in the shade, waiting for night and the hunt to come again.
Eventually, the others wandered out of the mist. Of all of them, Mayet had changed the most. Instead of the slightly awkward teenager with potential for beauty someday that she had been, she was a little taller, fully developed (she inherited my mother's hips, thankfully, and not mine), and, well, her potential for beauty was realized.
Let's just say that had I looked like Mayet at twenty-five, too old or no, I probably would have had to turn down some offers of marriage even after I was widowed. Which would have made things awkward, so it's probably a good thing.
A few alterations to her clothes later, we were off again. Down the Imhotep corridor, Terik decided to go through the dimension door and see if he could get back. The answer was evidently "no." Pepy decided to go through as well, and the rest of us looked at each other and decided that we wanted to finish up here before taking what might be a one-way trip to Somewhere Else.
Back to the altar of Ra we went. Raam had the excellent idea of trying to get the rays of the sun to fall on the crystal that seemed to be powering the force cage around the little dragon, and Mayet happened to be carrying the spell Sunray that day.
She cast it and directed it at the crystal, and the force cage shattered. The dragon inside woke, and after looking around for a moment, it fluttered to Raam's shoulder. Raam, in return, looked extremely confused. He asked it, "What are you?"
It said that it was a guide. It was not certain what it was a guide to, but a guide it definitely was. It also mentioned that Ra had told it to join the member of the royal family that was present when it was freed.
All right, then. Back to our friends we went.
We stepped through the door, and inside of it was the most interestingly complex piece of machinery I had ever seen. It was an orrey, as I've seen them described in books, but it was so strange--it had too many things going around the sun, for example. I walked around it, watching the motion of the gears, while Pepy and Terik explained that pulling the levers made the planets stop, and seemed to change where the door out led.
After some discussion, I asked for one half of our teleporting dagger set, and tried a door.
Where it led me to was a very strange place indeed. It was raining, and it was cold--not as cold as the desert at night, but colder than any day here gets. I was immediately soaked to the skin and shivering. There was what looked to be a variety of grape vines all around me, obviously tended by human hands, the grapes ripe and nearly ready to pick.
Mud squelched into my sandals as I turned around. There were no habitations nearby, but there were a pair of bearded men, who pointed my way and talked in a language I couldn't understand.
I activated my dagger, appearing inside the doorknob next to Amunet, who was snoring blissfully. I went out and told everyone where I'd been.
The other levels made the door go to other places--one to somewhere that looked a lot like Nubia, somewhere that looked like more of a sand desert than we get anywhere near Egypt, several more places where it was raining and cold, and one place that had some very odd plant life. Different combinations of the levers sent us to still more places that we couldn't name.
Well, at least I can say I've seen the world now, even though I have no idea what parts of the world I've seen. I'd like to go back to the place with the grapes some day, when it's sunny. It looked like it would be picturesque in the light.
Finally, we shut all of the levers down, and the sun at the center of the orrey began to glow. It was Pepy's turn to try the gate, so he went through. A few minutes later, he returned and told us that this configuration was a "go anywhere you want" door.
Perfect. I called in the hyenas, we all except Raam trooped into the doorknob, and we appeared in Pi Rameses--in the Imperial Palace, no less--saving us a three-week walk across the desert.
(I'm almost sad about that. I was planning to use the time to create my wand and spend some time getting to know Sekath. Oh, and learning how to hunt as a hyena. Ah, well. Perhaps we'll be still for a few days now, though what I'm going to do with my familiars inside the Imperial Palace, I have no idea. Human-souled they might be, but they're still hyenas, and they still have a number of habits that make them unacceptable in polite company.)
The First Prime was happy to see that Rameses was safe and most disconcerted when Raam told him that if the Prime ever let Rameses order him and his men away from him again, he'd kill them all. He then told Rameses that if he ever ordered away the Pharaoh Guard again, their deaths would be directly on his head.
The pharaoh looked very cranky at this. The First Prime and Raam fell to arguing, and so I didn't quite notice when Rameses stepped away from us. However, I did notice when Rameses came back, cleared his throat, and said, "Mayet has agreed to marry me."
What?
Mayet, with that grin that told me that she was indeed doing this of her own free will, asked me, "Is that good enough for you?"
I think I managed to stammer out an affirmative before Mayet waved to us and said casually, "I'll be back tomorrow," and walked out on Rameses' arm. Evidently, Mayet in her newly adult state had caught Rameses' eye, and he decided that he wanted her for his sixth wife.
Well. I'd meant for her to marry well, and marry well she has. Married quite a bit better than I ever dreamed, as a matter of fact. I have to write her mother about this, and soon. In a practical sense, it's the best thing she could have done--her children will be some of the most obsessively well-protected people in the Black Land, after all. (Evidently, Rameses has a thing for Hathor priestesses. Perhaps he's discovered that the rumors of the interesting fertility rites they use are in fact true?)
May she have more joy in her marriage than I did mine, and may she be able to look back on this time in her life with far fewer regrets than I have.
That's one thing that's been in the back of my mind, finished. I wonder what's next?
Quotes:
"We're going to call him Spider Slayer."
--Laura
"What a way to wake up in the morning."
--Mayet, referring to the spiders
"You got yourself captured. You are so grounded, mister!"
--Sitefnut
"Ew. She just took something out of her eye and put it in her ear. Next thing you know, she'll be spitting on a hanky and using it to wash our faces. Grandmas are gross."
--Mayet
"It's a black box!"
"The FAA has determined that bands of adventurers are hazardous to your health."
--Graham, Laura
"I don't want to put my holy object into another god's thing. It's like god-dultery."
"Grrrbek puts his holy object anywhere he wants."
"Yes, I do."
--Mayet, Raam, Grrrbek
"I don't want to go to Pluto."
--Derek
"Ignore the hamster."
--Raam
"That's Mrs. Mayet to you."
--Mayet
"I've told the first Prime that if you order him away from you again, I'll kill him and all of his men. So if you do, you're responsible for their deaths."
"You're using my power against me?"
"Yes."
--Raam, Rameses
