CHAPTER
EIGHT
Gunther held only a lit torch. He knew he could probably stun a couple of attackers with his . . . powers, but he’d quickly exhaust that ability, so he wanted to save it until he really needed it.
He swung his torch wildly, chasing back a couple of the Grays, and tried to shelter between his two more martial companions.
This way . . .
“What way?” he asked out loud, but he knew.
There was an opening in the corner. Two openings, but one was lower than the other, and full of water. But the other opening was dry, and broad, and empty.
This way . . .
The voice was talking to him again. Or was there a voice? Wasn’t it possible that he was just losing it? Wasn’t it possible that all the strange things that had happened to him in recent months—traveling back in time, battling aliens, developing weird psychic powers—had somehow broken him?
Or, more likely still, he realized with chagrin, wasn’t it possible that none of those things had happened after all? Wasn’t it possible that he was lying in the dig site near Aswan, having the most intense fever dream imaginable?
Maybe the voice was the sign that he was cracking up.
Or maybe he had already cracked up, and the voice was someone trying to summon him back from his madness. Maybe the voice belonged to some doctor or nurse from Médecins Sans Frontières whom François had summoned to the dig to see to Gunther.
But the voice didn’t sound like the voice of a Nigerian doctor or French nurse.
It sounded like the voice of an angel.
And now it wanted him to go down the unguarded hallway.
“What’s there?” he demanded, and the voice didn’t answer.
“Gunther!” Marty snapped.
Gunther focused on his surroundings again and saw one of the Grays rushing him, claws extended.
“Stop!” Gunther bellowed, raising a hand. The hairs on his arms stood on end as energy surged from within him.
The Gray stopped and tumbled to the floor.
Marty had dropped the unlit torches and his own torch had burned out, leaving Gunther holding the only light in the room. Surjan and Marty fought side by side, Surjan slicing through the Grays with equanimity while Marty spun like a top, throwing out kicks and punches with equal facility. The foes they dropped seldom rose, melting quickly into fuming puddles that smelled of copper and turpentine.
Gunther scooped up two of the unlit torches. They were straight sticks with strips of cloth bound around one end, the cloth impregnated in something resinous and cloying to the smell. Gunther lit them both just as his torch sputtered to a dying halt, filling the room with light again.
This. Way.
Gunther didn’t look. If he was cracking up, he wasn’t going to follow the voice of his madness, no matter what it told him to do. And if some doctor was trying to revive him from a fever by calling out to him, they were just going to have to try harder. Or at least be a little more explicit.
Another Gray rushed at Gunther and he countercharged, waving the two torches and howling. The Gray turned and ran.
“Hold them here!” Surjan shouted.
Without waiting for an answer, he darted through an opening in the wall of Grays and plunged into one of the tunnels. The Grays folded in to chase him and Marty attacked them from behind, punching them where humans would have vulnerable kidneys and then cracking them on the backs of their skulls. Gunther covered Marty covering Surjan, waving torches, shouting, and, when he had to, thrusting fire into the faces of his enemies.
Gunther heard a bloodcurdling scream and the Grays scattered. Marty stood tall in a slime of evaporated foes, and the German backed away several steps toward the crack in the wall through which they’d come.
Kareem emerged from the tunnel. He tossed aside the severed head of a Gray, which sizzled with light and then burst into goo as it hit the ground. His hair looked disheveled and his eyes were narrowed in anger, but he looked unharmed.
Surjan emerged after him. “There are more coming! Back the way we came!”
Kareem fairly sprang up the brick wall and into the crack that led to the chimney. Gunther eyed the wall skeptically, wondering whether he could perform a similar feat. Without asking permission, Surjan grabbed Gunther and hurled him straight up into the gap, torches flailing. Gunther scrabbled at the cracked brick and Kareem grabbed him by the tunic, pulling him into safety. Surjan handed him his torches.
“Come,” Kareem whispered. “We watch the other end.”
Gunther shoved the butt end of his torch into a crack in the wall. Surjan was already climbing up into the chasm, and Marty held the Grays at bay. He was fast as a hummingbird, but there were so many of them.
“Marty!” Gunther cried.
“Go!” Surjan shoved him, and Gunther stumbled around and up the corkscrew, back into the kitchen. Kareem crouched in the fireplace there, visually scanning all the exits.
“There are too many shadows,” Gunther said.
“You forget that I can see in the dark,” Kareem said. “As you forget that Marty can run up and down walls.”
“Marty can run up and down walls?” Gunther asked.
“You need to pay more attention,” Kareem said. “Here they are. Run now!”
This! Way!
The voice called him still. It shivered with static, but it had a musical quality to it, like notes generated by touching the rims of crystal wineglasses. It made him think of the music of the spheres, or the voices of angels.
He lurched across the kitchen in Kareem’s wake.
“Can you take us back to where we came from?” Surjan called to Kareem.
“I can see your footprints that brought you here,” the young man said, “slowly fading but not gone yet. I can follow them.”
Kareem led the party to the room with the mezzanine level and the colonnades, then across the center. Running out ahead of Gunther’s torchlight, he nevertheless ran neatly around the lip of the pit in the center. Gunther lingered to make sure that Surjan and Marty had light enough to avoid catastrophe, though he wasn’t sure he needed to. Surjan could track by sense of smell—could he also smell the open pit? And Marty seemed to have some kind of sixth, psychic sense that detected life forces.
Was Gunther the only member of the party who was helpless in the dark?
Surely, François was also useless when blind.
Kareem led them to the bottom of a staircase. It looked like the stairs by which they had descended before, but Kareem hesitated, and Gunther also wasn’t sure. Water flowed over the steps now, an inch deep across the entire staircase, and then spilling out in a wide stream that flowed toward the pit.
“I can’t see the tracks anymore,” Kareem said. “I came down stairs, though. I think these were the stairs.”
Hooting and howling filled the room as Grays burst from the hallway from which they’d recently emerged.
“Go!” Surjan shouted. “Gunther, Kareem, up the stairs!”
“We’ll hold the stairs!” Marty told them.
“I’ll hold the stairs!” Surjan bellowed. “Marty, you go!”
Marty hesitated a moment but then ran up the steps first. Gunther followed, side by side with Kareem. He marveled at his own stamina. As a younger man, he’d never had the fitness to run this much, up and down stairs, in water, climbing up and jumping down walls. Not even when he’d been in the military. Now he felt tired, but not excessively so.
Turn back.
He stopped, halfway up the steps.
Marty and Kareem splashed forward several steps, then turned to stare at him.
“Are you hurt?” Marty asked.
Gunther shook his head, not sure how to explain what he was experiencing.
“Then run, you idiot!” Kareem yelled.
What if he was wrong about the voice, though? What if Gunther wasn’t cracking up? What if, instead, some true part of himself was speaking to him? What if his unconscious mind, his right brain, was trying to get him to recognize something important?
What if some external party was trying to speak to him, and this was how he was hearing it?
Turn back.
But that just meant he was crazy anyway, didn’t it? What kind of external party would be telling him to go deeper into a maze filled with flesh-eating ghouls?
Was it possible he was hearing from the Grays? That they had some mind control power, and were trying to use it on him? Or they had some mighty Gray sorcerer who was trying to capture Gunther?
But why go for Gunther, if they had their choice? Why not try to capture, say, Marty?
Was Gunther the most vulnerable one?
“Idiot!”
Kareem grabbed Gunther by his tunic and pulled him up the stairs. Gunther staggered off-balance for several steps, sloshing water over his knees, and then finally ran on his own. Kareem followed, poking him in the back over and over.
As Gunther reached the top of the stairs, he heard Surjan roaring below. Many Gray voices shrieked in unison, and then Surjan came splashing up the steps. Gunther turned and saw the Grays begin to rush up after the Sikh. He was waiting, looking for an opportunity.
He felt a crackling sense of something surging through him as he picked his target with precision.
“Stop!” Gunther yelled. He directed his command at a Gray running ahead of two other Grays, who in turn were just a couple of steps ahead of a knot of five more.
The lead Gray tumbled back, stricken. He crashed through his fellows on his heels like a bowling ball through pins, sending sickly green limbs flying in all directions.
As Surjan reached him, Gunther turned and ran.
The rope at the bottom of the well dangled ahead of him. Marty and Kareem stood prepared to defend the lower end of the rope.
“Gunther, you first,” Marty suggested. He looked up at the well and yelled, “François, Lowanna, whoever’s up there, get ready to pull on the rope!”
“Tie a bowline around Gunther’s chest,” Surjan countered. “François will haul Gunther up, and the rest of us climb. Now!”
“I can do it.” Gunther knew his knots from the military. Handing his torches momentarily to Kareem, he knotted a bowline around his chest. “Ready!” he shouted. Then he took back the torches. The rope under Gunther’s arms went tight and yanked him a foot off the ground.
His companions began climbing up the shaft, Marty fastest of all—Kareem was right, he practically ran up the brick shaft of the well. Kareem also moved quickly, wedged into the corner of the room with one hand and one foot on each wall, ninety degrees apart, shimmying up like a spider. Surjan moved more slowly, but with deliberate confidence, grabbing each handhold or foothold, testing it, and then moving his weight onto it as he searched for the next grip.
Grays burst into the far end of the room.
Marty and Kareem disappeared overhead and Surjan rose to the height of Gunther’s chest. Gunther gripped his two torches, gritting his teeth and facing the howling mob of man-eaters as they scurried forward. Some of them ran on their legs like men, he now saw, while others ran on all fours like dogs or cats. In the gleam of the torches, he imagined seeing a mist of spittle in the air around their misshapen, leathery heads.
“Faster, please!” Gunther called upward.
Door. Door.
“What?”
Gunther tried reaching for the brick-lined shaft to help speed things along but couldn’t quite manage it as he dangled helplessly in the middle of the shaft. He felt himself get yanked upward a couple feet.
Turn back. Door.
“Shut up!” he snapped.
“What?” Surjan asked from above him.
“Pull!” Gunther yelled. “Pull!”
The Grays rushed forward. Gunther kicked one in the face and pushed another away with a lit torch, but then a third wrapped itself around his ankle.
“Hey!” He shook his leg, trying to toss the Gray aside, but couldn’t budge it. He rose another foot into the air, but then a Gray leaped and wrapped itself around his other leg.
Gunther jammed a lit torch into the back of one Gray’s neck. It shrieked, howled, and then bit his leg, just above the knee.
More Grays swarmed toward him. He rose a foot into the air again, but he wasn’t getting away fast enough. He beat the Grays with his remaining torch, waved it at the oncoming mob, and thought maybe he should have listened to that static-ridden angelic voice, after all. More Grays leaped for him.
Suddenly he shot four feet straight up. He narrowly missed jamming the torch into the face of Surjan, who had wedged himself into position with his legs only and hoisted Gunther by main strength. With his ankh, Surjan neatly ran both Grays through the head, one at a time. In turn, each burst into gray slime, and then the rope went taut again and Gunther rose toward the light.
Gunther rose, and then rocks began falling past him. In the torchlight, he saw Surjan press against the wall of the shaft as a cascade of stones struck the climbing Grays repeatedly. A harsh keening sound erupted from below as one of the creatures was struck, fading away into the depths of the underground palace.
As he emerged from the mouth of the well, Gunther was struck by spray. Rain crashed against the outside of the palace and water ran in rivulets across the tiled floor.
He looked down and saw Surjan slowly advancing up the shaft when Lowanna pulled him away from the edge and helped him yank the rope from his chest.
“The other exit,” Gunther tried to tell her.
“What other exit?” she asked.
“The Sacred Grove,” he said. “At least. Maybe others we don’t know about.”
“He’s right.” Marty looked over into the well and called, “You okay?”
“I might be a bit slower on the climb, but I’m coming,” Surjan said with an air of annoyance.
Marty hitched his thumb toward the well and said, “Surjan thinks there’s another exit from the underground ruins. The Grays might come out there.”
“I don’t care if this thing escapes tonight,” Lowanna said. “I want a place by the fire to wait out the storm.”
“There’s not one thing down there,” Marty told her. “There are hundreds. We should make sure we’re not being blindsided.” To François and Kareem, he said, “You stay here and help Surjan get out.”
Then Marty headed out of the palace, Lowanna in tow and Gunther tagging along behind.
Should he mention the voice?
Was it possible that the voice’s reference to a door was to this same second exit that Surjan thought he’d identified?
They exited the outer edge of the palace grounds, past two startled spearmen, huddling beneath the entry arch to shelter from the rain, and then skirted left. Trudging back to where they’d started this whole misadventure, at times sliding in the mud where they had to and clinging to old stone pavers where they could, they finally crossed over into the Sacred Grove.
There was a path into the wood that none of them had noticed before, yet somehow Marty had managed to sniff it out as if he’d been there previously. It was only about fifty feet into the woods when they entered a clearing.
“He was right!” Lowanna howled into the wind and rain.
Gunther followed her pointing finger to see a mound of rocks like a tumulus or an altar. Not far from that was a well, built like the one in the palace courtyard but fully intact.
Grays began climbing from the shaft and over the crenellated casing.
Marty ran forward and Gunther ran with him, pulling his ankh from his belt.
Behind them, Lowanna shouted. The night grew bright as lightning cracked high above.
With a blinding flash, lightning struck the top of the rock mound, surging through the leathery bodies of the Grays.
Marty rushed forward, and even though he was half-blinded by the lightning, Gunther wielded his ankh and followed, stabbing again and again at the alien creatures until he thought he could stab no more.
And just as suddenly as the fight started, the wave of Grays spilling from the well finally broke, leaving him gasping from the exertion on the wet rocks.