Theodosia & the Eyes of Horus (9 page)

He came fully into the basement; his gaze slowly took in the mad jumble of long-forgotten artifacts before finally settling on the row of mummies on the far wall. He crossed over to them and began studying them with interest. "I see you're keeping Tetley down here."

"Not by choice. Chudleigh wants nothing to do with him now that he knows that it's a fake. He clearly doesn't belong in the museum, but there's not much else to be done. Unless you have a suggestion," I said sweetly. Actually, what I longed to do was give the poor man a proper burial; I just hadn't figured out how to go about it yet.

Fagenbush sauntered over to the Canopic shrine on which the statue of Anubis rested. "Ah, yes. Your jackal."

Oh, do be quiet,
I thought.
You're going to spill all my secrets.
I glanced at Henry, who was watching Fagenbush with narrowed eyes. "Amazingly lifelike, isn't it?" I said.

Fagenbush looked over his shoulder at me, then down at Henry. "Amazing," he drawled.

"What are you doing down here?" I demanded again, my nerves stretched thin by his examination.

"Now, Theo, you can't blame me if I wanted to check out where you've been keeping yourself for the last few weeks. You can't hog all the choicest artifacts, you know. I'll have to be sure and come down here more often. In fact, you might say I'll be dogging you." He glanced at the Anubis

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statue, then laughed at his own joke. But I knew a threat when I heard it. He was going to follow me around if need be--whatever was required for him to make those wretched reports to Wigmere.

He continued his perusal of the room, sauntering ever nearer to the shelves. As Fagenbush worked his way closer and closer to the tablet, I realized I had to divert him--but how? I glanced around, and my eyes fell on a Canopic jar that held a length of rope ensorcelled with a particularly nasty curse. Hmm. I could use that, except it was a rather vile piece of magic, and while I wanted Fagenbush out of the way, I didn't wish him any permanent damage. Well, not often, anyway.

When Fagenbush reached out and picked up a funerary mask from the shelf just above the hidden tablet, my gaze settled on a stool from the New Kingdom that was nestled up against the base of the shelves. Carefully, as if I didn't want him to see me, I lifted my foot and gently pushed the stool behind the Canopic shrine.

Fagenbush's head snapped up, his nose quivering like that of a hound on point. "What was that?"

"What was what?" I asked innocently.

He dropped the now forgotten mask back on the shelf and strode toward me. "What are you trying to hide from me?"

"I'm not trying to hide anything from you."

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"You little liar." He pushed past me and reached behind the Canopic shrine, then smiled in triumph as he pulled out the stool. "See! I knew you were trying to conceal something." He examined it. The leather seat had rotted away centuries ago, but the legs were inlaid with small pieces of ivory and ebony, so it didn't take long for Fagenbush to figure out it had belonged to an important individual. His gaze turned speculative. "Now, why didn't you want me to see this? I wonder."

Actually, I
had
wanted him to see it. That was the whole point and the basis of the new strategy I had just devised on the fly: redirect Fagenbush's nosiness to harmless artifacts. Well, relatively harmless. The stool had a mild curse on it, one that roughly translated to "May the sands of the desert settle in your knickers until the next new moon."

I scowled, as if I were upset he'd found the stool. "I'm sorry, did you say what you were doing down here?"

He gripped the stool and closed the gap between us. "I have actually been sent down here by your father and Weems to see if you've finished their precious inventory yet. If not, I am to assist you until it is done. I have, in essence, been sent to clean up after you."

"Hardly," I said, thrusting the ledger at him. "The inventory was completed last night. Here. It's all yours." Of course, it wasn't complete. There were a number of

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questionable artifacts I hadn't included, such as the tablet and the Orb of Ra, but I wasn't about to confide that to Fagenbush.

He snatched the ledger from me, then thumbed through the pages, reading what I'd written. "Well, it looks complete, anyway."

"It is complete. I am very thorough."
And you would do well to remember that,
I thought. "Now, since you have what you need, perhaps you should get back to work."

He leaned forward and I was enveloped in a small cloud of pickled-onion-and-boiled-cabbage fumes. "Watch yourself, Theo" was all he said. Then he snapped the ledger closed and began climbing the stairs. I breathed a sigh of relief and looked at Henry.

"What a beast!" Henry said. I winced, sure that Fagenbush hadn't made it to the top of the stairs yet.

My suspicions were confirmed when the entire basement suddenly went black. I froze as Fagenbush's soft laughter floated down the stairway, followed by the click of the door closing. I waited to see if he would lock it, but no. He seemed satisfied to simply turn off the gaslights and leave us to fumble about in the dark.

"I say, why is Fagenbush so mean?" Henry asked.

I sighed. "I don't know, Henry. Perhaps he doesn't think

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he should have to work with a young girl? Whatever the reason, it is most tiresome. I honestly don't trust him a bit."

"Can't say that I blame you. You know, it's not as dark in here as I thought it would be," he added.

"You're right." A faint sickly green light kept the room from being pitch-black. We quickly found the source of the light. It came from the shelf. From the Emerald Tablet under the wooden shield, to be precise.

"Is it supposed to glow like that?" Henry sounded a bit awed.

"Maybe. If it's as powerful as Stilton was telling us."

"Does it mean something, do you think?"

"That's what I intend to find out."

"How?"

I turned to look at him. "Research," I announced. "Piles and piles of it."

Henry groaned, then moped his way up the stairs. I started to follow, pausing when I thought I saw a small patch of shadow dribble down from the ceiling behind the mummies. I blinked to clear my eyes, and when I looked again, it was gone. Clearly, the strange light was playing tricks with my vision.

Thinking of green light reminded me that I'd yet to conduct a Second Level Test on the Emerald Tablet. I quickly

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slipped a few wax bits from my pocket onto the shelf next to it. It wouldn't hurt to find out if it was cursed before we handled it much more. Then, because I realized I'd been distracted from my mass Second Level Test the day before, I took another moment and scattered more than a dozen wax blobs throughout the catacombs. It really was time to get a handle on the curses down here.

"Are you coming or what?" Henry shouted down the stairs at me.

"I'm right behind you," I called back.

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CHAPTER NINE ALL ROADS LEAD TO ... CHALDEA

***

"ARE YOU DONE YET ?" Henry asked for the third time even though we'd been in the reading room less than ten minutes.

"No, Henry. I'm not done. I'm just getting started." The truth was, I hadn't even cracked open a book yet, just managed to pull them from the shelves. Honestly. Did he think I could absorb the words through my hands? "This will take a while, so you might as well get comfortable."

He sighed, then trudged over to an open space on the floor, sat down, and pulled some marbles from his pocket. Satisfied that he would entertain himself for at least five minutes, I returned to my books.

Since Stilton had said the tablet was revered by those who

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studied alchemy and the occult, the best place to begin my research was with the grimoires, the ancient books alchemists and magicians of old had used to record their experiments and working knowledge of magic. One in particular, written by Silvus Moribundus, seemed like a good place to start. Much of his information came from Nectanebo II's head priest and magician. The problem was, the book was written in Latin in an old-fashioned script and there were a number of handwritten notes scribbled in the margins, all of which made it painfully slow to translate. Research is not for the easily discouraged.

I thumbed through the old, worn pages looking for the words
Tabula Smaragdina
and felt victorious when I actually found them.

Moribundus wrote that the tablet had been handed down from Hermes Trismegistus, who was thought to be a combination of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth. Many considered the two gods to be one and the same, and hence the book was credited with being the source of all Western occult knowledge and lore.

Perhaps Stilton was correct and the tablet was simply a record of the failed recipes for turning lead into gold.

"Now are you done?" Henry's voice at my shoulder made me jump.

"No," I said, rather more crossly than I intended.

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"All right, already, you don't have to bite my head off."

I took a deep breath and tried to hold on to my patience. "I'm sorry, Henry, but being startled makes me a bit grumpy." He looked so bored and miserable that I took pity on him. "I have an idea. Why don't you go spy on Fagenbush? See what he's up to this morning, find out if he tries to go down into the catacombs again, that sort of thing."

Henry's face brightened. "Truly? You'd let me do that?" Then his face fell. "This isn't like the pinching thing, is it, where you're setting me up to take the punishment?"

I felt my cheeks pinken slightly at this reminder of my unfair behavior. "No, Henry. It's nothing like that. I truly think it's a good idea to know what one's adversaries are up to. I don't know how angry people will be if you get caught, so just be good enough at it that you don't get caught."

"Prime!" he said, then headed for the door. "When should I report back?"

I checked my watch. "After luncheon, perhaps? That way if Fagenbush meets anyone for lunch, you'll be there to see it." Henry looked positively thrilled at this possibility and hurried out. I settled back into my grimoire, determined to make some headway.

Moribundus called the tabula the bible of all alchemical knowledge. It had formed the basis for generations of alchemical experiments and magical theories, which confirmed

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that Stilton did indeed know what he was talking about. Moribundus also claimed that the tablet had been inscribed by the god Thoth himself. If that were the case, then the tablet could be much more valuable--and dangerous--than Stilton, or Moribundus, knew. It would have been much easier to believe this claim if the symbols on the tablet had been Egyptian hieroglyphs, but they weren't. They were distinctly different.

Frustrated by that puzzle, I continued reading. Moribundus went on to say that the tablet, along with the Book of Thoth, a thirty-six-volume work that contained the entire Egyptian philosophy and magical doctrines, had been stored in the Alexandria Library and destroyed in the great fire. I sighed in disappointment. It's hard to describe just how much ancient knowledge was lost in that wretched fire.

But wait a moment! If the Emerald Tablet had been lost in the fire, then it couldn't be hidden in our basement! Hoping for more clues, I turned the page. There was yet another handwritten note in the margin, this one in a different hand.
It is rumored that some of these books survived the Ere and were secreted away in the nearby desert, where they are carefully hidden and only initiates of the
wedjadeen
can know their location.

Most interesting. Unfortunately, I was a bit unsure as to