There is a weird Zen-like feeling you can tap into when it's too late to panic and too early to whine. A treed possum must feel like that. We'd all settled into our assigned places. Even the hyena had stopped filing its nails on marble horsehide and sat quietly below, rather like Quicksilver, waiting.
I supposed I'd ultimately fall asleep and fall off in a couple days, but doubted I'd get that relaxed about my situation. I'd tried my cell phone to contact Ric the minute I was ensconced on the horses, but this stone mausoleum was an "out of service area." No surprise there.
I distracted myself from a panic attack by studying the hyena, which was an odd combination of the canine and the feline. The Egyptians worshipped cats, I knew, and probably liked dogs since their jackal-headed god of the dead, Anubis, was canine. It was hands-down the most fascinating ancient empire on earth and the first great civilization to fall in love with life, death and the afterworld, and the trappings of all. The Egyptians devoted great resources to continue their existence just as it had been before death.
Then I recalled Hector Nightwine's amazing statement about the Egyptians, or about zombies, rather. He said the mystery of how the Egyptians built the pyramids was solved not by huge numbers of slaves or stunning engineering, but by zombie labor.
I eyed my tightly-wrapped honor guard. Really, weren't these mummies just zombies by another name? They were both the walking dead, no matter the culture or time that spawned them. Was one of those embalmed forms down the hall that much different from one of Cicereau's desert-dried hit victims from the forties, give or take a few thousand years?
They were all human remnants who, revived and linked by magic, could pull a barge-sized block of stone as well as anyone alive. I doubted the Egyptians used their embalmed and dressed-for-the-afterlife mummies as grunt labor, though. It would be the bodies of slain enemy armies and never embalmed at all. Zombies weren't good for much else than cannon fodder and stoop labor and mindless rampaging, were they?
All those old forties movies, though, featured an embalmed and disappointed-in-love mummy who awakened to find his lost princess mummy-love and avenge himself on those who'd done him wrong millennia before. He hadn't struck me as the smartest roll of gauze in the sarcophagus. Okay, it was linen.
My mummy guard of honor, though, got the bitumen and bandage treatment; they were a step up from mindless stone-pushers, but not by much.
These specimens were the sad-sack sort, the Scarecrow in multiple just waiting for some Dorothy to come along and liberate them. So who turned them off and on, and released the hyenas? I was being allowed to ride bareback on the chariot horses with limbs intact for a reason.
Something made the hyena perk up its ears, stand up, and then back away. I wasn't sure I wanted to see anything that backed off this mad dog a couple of millennia removed.
From around my steeds' noble chests shuffled a nondescript, pale little man in a baggy white suit, perhaps five feet tall. His hair receded as much as his chin, and with his protruding eyes, it all added up to the look of a deadly snake.
The hyena began a low cackling that made the hairs on my neck, head, and not-recently-enough shaved legs stand up. That'll teach a girl to neglect personal beauty routines, Irma whispered, just as the snaky little guy spoke.
Why was I not surprised that he used a soft lisp that slithered over the marble walls in a sibilant echo?
"You're trespassing on private hotel areas, miss. You are also mocking and defacing a sacred tomb fixture."
"I'm saving my ankles for leaving as soon as I can." I said, nodded at the cackling hyena.
"Tut," the little man said.
"I'm serious. That thing was ready to chop me off at the kneecaps."
"Tut," he repeated, regarding the spotted hyena. "Stand down."
The creature burst out in eerie, ugly laughter and then stepped back against the wall, on guard with the mummies.
The man regarded me with large, sorrowful eyes drowning in upper and lower bags. His gaze was as intense as Perry Mason's, but chillingly regretful. "I'm afraid I'll have to take you to the reception hall, even though you are not an invited guest."
Now I knew him! The reflected amber glow of the golden chariot had bathed his pale complexion and clothes in its glory. He was a CinSim, but one of such a monochromatic ashen gray that his borrowed 24 karat tan had made him look warm-complexioned and human. My vintage fan mania makes me nothing but a quick study when it comes to CinSims.
"Mr. Ugarte, I presume," I said, naming his character from the film, Casablanca, in which he'd worn the same white, sweat-stained tropical suit he wore now. I didn't forget that Peter Lorre's other iconic film role-another Bogart classic-had been as the greedy thief, Joel Cairo, in The Maltese Falcon. And that title bird was a black figurine that, despite its fictional sixteenth century origins, looked very much like a depiction of the Egyptian god Horus, the falcon.
Of course Peter Lorre would be here at the Karnak in CinSim form! He was a natural. And he veered from playing truly creepy villains to effete, slimy losers. Luckily, Ugarte had been the latter.
"Let me help you down, miss." He extended a small, soft hand.
I hesitated. The Lorre/Ugarte hand was eons better than a blackened claw, but I was still freaked from taking Dracula's cold, cold hand not long ago.
"I won't bite," he lisped like a back alley seducer.
"No, but Tut will."
"Not now. Come down."
The trouble with wanting to go where you're not supposed to go is not being able to leave when you're found out. I braced my hands on my horse's broad hindquarters and slid down its swelling side to the floor, grabbing onto the real leather harness to ease the impact.
"This chariot is the biggest funerary item I've ever seen, even on PBS."
"You should see the hundred-and-fifty-foot-long funeral barges. The Karnak contains much that is fabulous and rare and beyond price," Ugarte spoke with the limpid lust of a small-time thief, "but most of that is not open to the public."
"I saw a big sign for an artifact exhibition off the, er, lobby."
"That is open to the public at twenty dollars a head"- he surveyed mine as if referring to literally detached heads-"but you will have a private audience. A pity. The management is quite severe with tomb robbers."
"I wasn't going to take anything!"
"Even memories can be stolen, alas."
"I forget a lot. I've already forgotten most of my childhood and school years."
"Is that true?" Those glassy eyes stared at me without blinking. "I'll mention that to the twined godheads, but you are hardly able to swear that your adult experiences are as forgettable as your youthful ones."
"No," I agreed, thinking of all the dangerous, dead- and therefore memorable-individuals and circumstances I'd encountered here in post-Millennium Revelation Las Vegas in just a few weeks. "I can't."