The Cult of Osiris

Another echoing slam of impact. He raised his foot—

They whipped between the columns, hitting a flat floor. Something huge plunged at Eddie’s head—

The crusher smashed down an inch behind him as the water flung him into the chamber beyond. The room was much wider than the passage, the wavefront quickly spreading out and losing its power. The three unwilling watersliders were deposited on the floor, coughing and flapping like beached fish.

The crusher kept pounding, slowing down. Nina retrieved her flashlight and shone it at the source of the noise. It was a stone block, painted with the figure of a woman raising her feet as if stamping on ants. The gutters had channelled the flood into a pair of water wheels; not large enough to power the crusher itself, but capable of tripping some mechanism. ‘I guess that’s our Lady of Might,’ she said, wiping wet hair off her face. ‘She really does try to “trample on those who should not be here”.’

‘Women with big feet, not my thing,’ said Eddie tiredly. The heavy tools in his pack had bashed against his back, bruising him. ‘Is everyone okay?’

Macy stood as the crusher juddered to a standstill. ‘Not feeling so good,’ she admitted. She held up her hands, unable to stop them shaking. ‘Oh, God, I think I’m gonna puke.’

Eddie stood in front of her, resting his hands on her upper arms. ‘Hey, you’re okay. And you’re not going to puke. Know why?’

She looked into his eyes, uncertain. ‘No?’

‘ ’Cause you’d puke on me! And then we’d have to have words, and that’d be bad all round. So you’re going to be fine.’ He smiled. It took a few moments before Macy managed to respond in kind, and then only faintly, but it was at least genuine.

Nina smiled as well. ‘It’s okay, Macy. We beat this trap - two traps, actually.’

‘Yeah, but there’re another three to come,’ she glumly reminded them.

‘Four-nil to us, so far,’ said Eddie, searching for the next exit. Another passage, this one stepped, led downwards. ‘And I bet we can make it seven-nil. This Osiris bloke can shove his traps right up his mummified arse!’ A grin broke through on to Macy’s face.

‘Okay, so the next arit was the Goddess of the Loud Voice, right?’ Nina asked. Macy nodded. ‘Let’s see if we can shout her down.’

At the entrance to the inverted pyramid, nothing moved except for sand drifting in the breeze. The Land Rover waited silently for its passengers to return, no sound disturbing the emptiness of the desert.

Then . . . a noise came from the northeast.

Growing louder.

A cloud appeared on the horizon, dust swirling through the shimmering heat haze. But it was not a sandstorm. It was too small - and moving with purpose. Heading directly for the ruins.

Something became visible through the rippling air, a slab-like grey and black shape. The noise increased, a roaring thrum of powerful engines and the rasp of whirling propeller blades.

But this was no aircraft.

Sebak Shaban gazed through the bridge windows of the massive hovercraft, a Zubr class assault vehicle designed to carry tanks and other armoured vehicles over almost any terrain. After observing the abilities of the four Zubrs bought by the Greek navy, the Egyptians had recently decided to follow the example of their friend/rival across the Mediterranean and purchase two of the enormous craft from Russia.

Officially, this Zubr was currently undergoing trials before entering full service. That it was almost one hundred kilometres from the isolated desert range where said trials were supposed to be taking place was down to one of the other men on the bridge. ‘I like this a lot,’ said Shaban to General Tarik Khaleel. ‘When the plan is successful, perhaps you could loan one to the Temple. Though I’m not sure where we would park it.’

‘Anywhere you want, my friend!’ laughed Khaleel. ‘And if anyone complains, it has rocket launchers and Gatling guns.’ He nodded at the turrets on the foredeck below. ‘It’s amazing how quickly people shut up when you point a six-barrelled cannon at them.’

‘The threat of death is always persuasive, isn’t it?’ Both men shared sly, knowing smiles. ‘How much further?’

‘Just under two kilometres,’ said the pilot.

‘Good.’ Shaban entered the weapons room behind the bridge. ‘We are approaching the co-ordinates,’ he announced. As well as a member of the Zubr’s crew, the room contained Osir, Diamondback, Dr Hamdi . . . and the group’s newest addition.

‘Dr Berkeley,’ Osir asked the IHA archaeologist, ‘are you absolutely sure they’re correct?’

‘As sure as I can be,’ said Logan Berkeley, annoyed at being doubted. ‘The inverted pyramid on the zodiac, the marking representing the Nile, the symbol in the Osireion, the position of Mercury relative to the end of the canyon - it all fits together.’ He indicated his laptop, which in one window displayed a satellite image of the desert overlaid with lines marking distances and directions, a photo of the Eye of Osiris inside the Osireion pulled from the IHA’s massive Egyptian database in another. ‘Either the Pyramid of Osiris is here, or it’s somewhere that’ll never be found.’

‘I hope it’s the former,’ said Shaban, with a menacing undercurrent.

Berkeley’s annoyance increased. ‘I’ll do what I’m being paid for,’ he snapped, ‘so there’s no need to threaten me.’ He looked at Osir. ‘It’s funny. If you’d tried to buy me off a week ago, I would never have accepted. Now? I just want to get something out of the whole fiasco at the Sphinx.’ His face clenched with anger. ‘I should have been on the front page of every newspaper in the world, but that bitch Nina Wilde turned me into a joke. At least the money will make up for some of that.’

The weapons officer called Khaleel into the room to point out something on a monitor. Osir raised an eyebrow. ‘Funny that you should mention Dr Wilde.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I think she’s beaten you again.’ The screen displayed an image from one of the hovercraft’s targeting systems; the Land Rover would have been unmissable against the blank plain even without the cursor the weaponry computer had locked on to it.

‘What? God damn it!’ Berkeley glared at the monitor. Diamondback sniggered.

‘Who is this Dr Wilde?’ Khaleel asked.

‘A competitor,’ Osir told him. He looked more closely at the ruins. ‘But she may have done us a favour. There’s nobody there, so she must have found a way in. We won’t need to use all those bulldozers and diggers we brought after all!’

He went into the bridge, Khaleel, Shaban and Diamondback joining him. Ahead, the faded yellow void of the desert was broken by the spot of colour that was the Defender. The pilot eased back the throttle to slow the 500- ton hovercraft, the three huge propellers above its stern losing speed. ‘Your men,’ Osir quietly asked Khaleel. ‘Are they totally reliable? If one word of this gets back to the government . . .’

‘I will vouch for Tarik,’ said Shaban firmly. ‘I owe him my life.’

‘And I will vouch for my men,’ added Khaleel. ‘We only have a skeleton crew, but I hand-picked them. They will keep your secret . . . for the price you’re paying, certainly.’

‘Good.’ Osir looked back at the ruins as the Zubr wallowed to a stop, settling on its huge rubber air cushion in a cloud of billowing sand. ‘Let’s find Osiris . . . and Nina Wilde.’

24

‘Wow,’ said Nina, aiming her flashlight upwards and finding no end to the black void above. ‘That’s tall.’

‘You know where we are?’ Eddie said, indicating the two pipes running down the far wall. ‘Right under that bridge. If the trap’d been working and we’d been chucked off, this is where we would have ended up. It’s at least a two-hundred-foot drop. Splat.’

Nina tried to picture the whole pyramid in her mind’s eye. ‘Jeez. This place must be as big as the Great Pyramid. Maybe even be bigger.’

‘That’d explain why nobody tried to out-do Khufu’s pyramid,’ said Macy thoughtfully. ‘If the Great Pyramid was almost, but not quite, as big as Osiris’s, no other pharaoh could make their monument bigger than Khufu’s without insulting Osiris. And nobody would dare do that.’