Neil Gaiman & Caitlin R. Kiernan & Laird Barron (57 page)

Sara hesitated. Power raising was common to many traditions—but it wasn’t Egyptian.

“It’s going to be outside, under the stars. The shooting stars.” Diane smiled faintly. “Sesh’tet says they’ll be a strong focus for intention and healing.
‘And the stars are as bread for Her body; even the imperishable stars in the height of the sky are as thousands of bread. For Her restoration she shall swallow up their fires in the night.’”

Tiny hairs rose on the back of Sara’s neck. “Where did you get that?”

“One of the
Gate
readings. Powerful, isn’t it?” Her smile faded. “Just tell me you’ll come, Sara. Please. For me.”

Next day at work was a slow-motion nightmare, haunted by the images of Lost Aegypt. Even the Rameses II photo she’d once been tempted to buy made her shudder. Its chunks of eroded stone in the Nubian desert now resembled a tomb robber’s leftovers, some dismembered royal victim whose once-imperishable body now fed jackals.

And beyond those robbers rose something even older and more malevolent. Something which granted worshippers the gift of moonless, starless darkness. The cult of Ammutseba: a name she’d translated as
Devourer of Stars
.

Martin Stanley was right. Some lost gods needed to stay lost.

Sara called the metaphysical bookstore during her lunch hour, only to be told Diane was out sick. She knew she ought to check on her on the way home, but she wasn’t nearly ready to face that situation again. Not until she’d read whatever Martin had promised to send her.

The padded envelope with its Next Day stickers was jammed into her apartment’s mailbox. She pried it out with difficulty, then took the stairs up two at a time.

Her answering machine was flashing for attention as she walked in.

“Sara? Sara, if you’re there, please pick up… OK, here’s the deal. I’m still at my sister’s and I’d still like to see you. Could you please call me?”

She was tempted. Dinner with her ex (though he hadn’t offered dinner this time, she noticed) just might be a good idea. A break from this sick morbid mess Diane had gotten her into. All she had to do was call Martin first, let him know his stuff arrived, and then she could take a little time for
her
life.

With guilty relief, she laid the envelope on her desk and dialed San Francisco.

Somewhere in the static, Martin’s phone rang… and kept ringing. She was about to hang up when a younger male voice answered.

“Could I speak with Dr. Martin Stanley, please?”

For several seconds, the unfamiliar voice—Middle Eastern, and very musical—said nothing.

It was too busy stifling grief.

“I’m sorry,” she finally broke in, feeling awful. “I’ll try back later. I’m a former student of Dr. Stanley’s…”

“Are you Sara? Is this about the package you sent him?”

“Actually, about the one he sent me. But I did send him one, too. Did it arrive?”

Only faint, sick laughter replied.

“I’m sorry?”

“Yes, your little box arrived. This morning it arrived. Martin took it to his study to examine it. When I called him for lunch about one o’clock, he didn’t come out.”

“What’s happened?” She knew, suddenly, that something terrible had.

“Martin’s dead.” The voice took on a cautious tone. “He’d been ill for a long time, but we both thought he was coping well. Then, this afternoon, it… exploded. All over his body, his face… “

“
What’s happened
?”

Another, longer hesitation. “Did he ever tell you why he stopped teaching and moved back here?”

“Not really.” Though Martin had mentioned something, just before he left, about health problems. There weren’t many health problems people wouldn’t discuss in Boulder—but she could think of one that might fit these circumstances.

“Ever heard of Kaposi’s Sarcoma?” asked the voice. “Connective tissue cancer—very ugly. Dark lesions under the skin, and Martin had them
everywhere
when I found him. Purplish-brown blotches like medieval plague, like his whole body was rotting.”

He took a long, shuddering breath. “They aren’t sure yet how he died, but his doctor says his lungs were involved—and that he’s never seen lesions erupt so rapidly. I mean, Martin had been living with AIDS since… “

Sara felt herself start shaking.

“Please—can you tell me what happened to the box? Did Martin even open it?”

The only response was an agonized flood of Arabic, or maybe Farsi. She got the vague impression that he was cursing someone. Her? Fate?

Ammutseba
?

Murmuring condolences, Sara hung up. With one trembling finger, she erased her ex’s message—then sat motionless for several minutes at her desk, paralyzed by shock too deep for grief. She knew, as surely as the voice in San Francisco did, that her amulet had killed Martin Stanley. And that Diane’s amulet was trying very hard to kill her.

Cilia writhed behind her eyes as she reached for Martin’s padded envelope.

The contents hardly seemed worth dying for. Only a worn canvas-bound field journal and one sheaf of photocopies—though several slips of paper and yellowed newspaper clippings protruded from the journal. Blinking back tears she had no time for, Sara opened it carefully.

Journal of: Evelyn Bishop, Valley of the Kings, 1924–25 Season
.

Evelyn was a copyist, the daughter of an American excavator working some tomb site in the vicinity of KV 62. That meant they’d caught the aftermath of Howard Carter’s discovery… though she couldn’t recall anybody else in that area then.

Curious, she flipped through the first few pages. It seemed to be both diary and sketch book, including some watercolors. Evelyn didn’t draw maps of the area, however—and she never mentioned the tomb by number.

Instead, she used the same nickname Martin had: Seven Sisters. It didn’t take long to see why. Their entire season had been taken up with removing over a dozen mummies from niches cut into the tunnel-like tomb’s rock walls. All the mummies so far had been female.

Sara frowned. Aside from a few stockpiles of already-desecrated royals, hidden in the vain hope of protecting them from robbers, multiple entombments weren’t common. These women hadn’t been re-entombed—or even apparently royal.

Priestesses
, Evelyn noted, below a sketch showing one entire wall of niche tombs.
But not Hathor’s, or anyone recognizable
. She added a hieroglyphic scrawl after this last: three spiky blobs under some kind of table. In red ink.

Next to the scrawl, a slip of paper bore one word in Martin’s handwriting.
Ammut-seba
?

That same glyph turned up all over this sprawling tomb, always in red. Like a good copyist, Evelyn recorded each occurrence, though none of the excavators had any theories. They were also beginning to grumble that this site wasn’t even a proper KV tomb.

Too early. And the walls look wrong
.

Evelyn added a sketch to illustrate. Where a normal rock-cut tomb had chips and flaws marking door-sill edges, Seven Sisters had what looked like
drippings
—as though something had burned through it, melting rock like wax.

Another slip of paper fluttered to the floor.
Stygian: Shuddam-El
, Martin had written.
Devourer of the Earth (Khemite), or ??? S-E in service to A? Alliance? No wonder tomb robbers 1st Intermed. so hideously effective!

Sara stared. Martin had called Stygia a “very early” pre-Egyptian culture—which made it just about older than any she could imagine.

Maybe even pre-human?

Of course, this tomb couldn’t be pre-human. Evelyn’s fragmentary grave-goods list on the following page suggested early Dynastic, with an abrupt cut-off near the end of the First Intermediate period. After that, the tomb had been sealed up (how?
from which side
?) and hidden so well even catalogers never found it.

The only evidence that anyone other than the occupants ever had known its location appeared in a sketch a couple of pages later. Red clay potsherds, as found near the misshapen crack of the tomb’s only entrance.

Breaking the Red Pots
, Martin’s note added helpfully.
Early ritual exorcism—funerary rite?—to destroy malign spirits or?

The tomb’s occupants hadn’t been popular in life, either. Several had died by fire, or violence so obvious even mummification couldn’t hide it. Evelyn’s father expected to find more of the same when he unwrapped his chosen specimen. She would be sketching it, of course, but she confessed to feeling queasy about the assignment.

Queasy didn’t begin to describe Sara’s own feelings as she read. For a while it was mostly sketches: not mummies, yet, but wall ornamentation. Walls and ceiling. The tomb’s main chamber ceiling boasted a strange variant on the Nut-mother of later tombs, her dark form twisted and bloated by cankers which—on closer examination—seemed to be clusters of stars. Another steady stream of stars poured (or was being sucked?) into her gaping mouth.

Gate
p. 12, Martin noted.
As highlighted
.

Sure enough, the sheaf of papers was entitled
The Gate of All Lost Stars:
A Fragmentary Translation
. She couldn’t find a translator’s name, and the manuscript looked as though it had been photocopied at least a dozen times. The handwriting was clear enough otherwise, though: tiny neat academic script below meticulously drawn lines of hieroglyphs.

Page twelve had its own heading: Of How She May Come Forth By Night.
Behold, Ammutseba has devoured the light of the stars, she has eaten their words of power, she has eaten their spirits…

Sara stared at the highlighted passage. Here it was, from
And the stars are as bread for Her body
to
For Her restoration she shall swallow up their fires in the night
. The whole week’s reading as Diane had supplied it to her—but how had Martin known? She hadn’t quoted it to him on the phone, or in her e-mails.

Turning back to Evelyn’s drawing of the Nut-like figure, she found three words written beneath it in faded pencil.
Devourer of Stars
.

And, again, the table-and-three-spiky-blobs glyph. This time, though, the blobs were three upside-down stars. This thing… this diseased, woman-shaped black hole…
was
Ammutseba. And swallowing stars (weren’t stars the souls of Kemet’s blessed dead?), nourished her.

Allowed her to her come forth by night.

Desperately, Sara dove back into the journal.
Gate
had something to do with the Seven Sisters tomb, and she guessed it might have been found there. But where? She’d seen no mention of papyri found with the mummies, or any tomb texts on the walls.

It took her a month’s entries to find out. In the meantime, she came across another of Martin’s notes—with the epithet
Daughter of Isfet
(Chaos / Azathoth?)—accompanying a tomb wall sketch with similar hieroglyphs. Copying this bit of art had given Evelyn nightmares.

It’s as though we aren’t alone here any more. All the mummies
…
the awful ways some of them died… really starting to wear on me. Father says they found the ideal specimen today, though. A High Priestess, from her regalia, maybe the last one entombed here. Strangled and stabbed and burned…

So the worship of Ammutseba wasn’t healthy then, either. Sara flipped forward. Sure enough, Evelyn’s father picked this last mummy to unwrap—defying the wishes of his colleagues.

But it’s all right
, Evelyn noted the next day,
because there’s actually writing on some of the bandages. Hieroglyphs. Whole words and phrases and prayers
.

Sure enough, she’d found
Gate
. Skimming ahead, Sara learned that several other mummies were also being unwrapped, in search of more texts. Meanwhile, Evelyn’s father continued with his High Priestess.

I’m supposed to start sketching her tomorrow. I don’t want to. Her face is… awful, what’s left of it. What they did to her…

Besides, I’m nursing Dr. Parker now. He’s got a terrible fever and none of the
fellaheen
will go near him
.

She was skimming ahead, noting uneasily that the native workers disappeared from the site soon after, when she came across another sketch. This one was full page and tinted with watercolor, but less detailed than Evelyn’s usual.

And something about it was faintly, hideously, familiar.

Readjusting her desk lamp, Sara studied it. She’d seen unwrapped mummies before, in half a dozen books. The look of ancient death had never bothered her. So why did this particular one send cold spiders down her spine?

To start with, it didn’t look quite human. The frail woman’s face was freakishly narrow, and her leathery eye sockets took up far too much of it. They’d been both rounder and larger than any normal person’s. More like a nocturnal animal…

She whispered the name an instant before she read it, penciled below the sketch.
Sesh-tet
.

She’s the genuine article, though I can’t think how it happened
.

The journal slipped from her shaking hands, scattering newspaper clippings like dead leaves. The
Cairo Daily News
, 1925: three brief mentions of a young woman rescued in the Valley of the Kings. Delirious with fever and sunstroke, she’d had nothing with her but a knapsack stuffed with what appeared to be mummy wrappings. Under these, they’d found her field journal—which was fortunate, since her tongue had been too swollen for speech.

She died alone in a charity hospital two days later.

Diane called Sara at work next morning, but only to remind her about the power raising. If she’d heard back from her tests, she wasn’t telling—and Sara wasn’t asking. She just wanted a few particulars about the ritual site, a recreational area a few miles outside town.

“Good and private, this time of year,” Diane assured her. “Unless we get too much cloud cover, it’ll be fantastic. Just be sure to set your alarm!”