No one wanted to consider what, or who, might be underneath it. The bleached skeleton that lay partly beneath it was warning enough.
Ky lifted Raissa down the other side, so much as Khai had once done―his hands closing around her waist―that it caught at her.
Warm brilliant light beckoned at the end of the long narrow shaft, the cold stone looming above them.
They stepped out of the long tunnel and into paradise.
In the millennia that had passed, the palms had seeded themselves and the wind or birds had carried in the seeds of other plants, so that now the garden bloomed lushly.
Tall palms swayed in the light breeze from above, vines twined up the stone walls, while thick tall grasses grew in great tufts with towering silken heads. Flowers bloomed riotously, their scent filled the little glen, the aroma fresh and light.
It was like a little cup of Eden, lush and brilliantly green, brightly flowered and hidden in the depths of the desert.
All but Raissa were looking up and around in wonder.
It was beautiful, serene, almost magical in its serenity. The air seemed to hum with contentment.
A path, marked with great stones, wound into the heart of it. Like Dorothy on the yellow brick road they followed it to a great central meadow.
Four great statues of lions, each done in warm golden alabaster, each on a tall marble pedestal, glowed golden and tawny in the light of the setting sun. They were spaced down a broad avenue, two on each side and nearly buried in the greenery, vines and flowers twined around them. They were unique, individual, each one of them in a different pose.
Sunlight sparkled on a thin thread of water falling through another narrow crack from the heights above. A rainbow arced around it. Light coruscated high on the walls.
The last brilliant light of sunset glowed against the far wall gilding everything with its warm radiance.
They looked up to see the crack in what had once been the ceiling of some ancient cavern, some catastrophic event in the far distant past opening it to the sky to let earth and sand, seeds and nuts blow inside to give birth to what lay within.
It was extraordinarily beautiful, bathed in that soft, gilded light, the tops of the trees swaying in time with an unfelt breeze high above them. Within the massive walls it was still, the silence broken only by birdsong.
The creatures that lived here had found a sanctuary in this place.
Against one nearby wall, a skeleton sprawled, a harsh reminder of what lay within.
Raissa watched them all with quiet, careful eyes and took a slow, steady breath, fighting against the pull of the stele.
“There are others,” she warned, with a nod toward the remains.
It was another reminder, this time of who she was, who she’d been.
Gently, Ky tightened his fingers around hers, feeling hers grow colder.
Her shadowed blue eyes met his. Her fingers released his…
“There is one more thing for you to see,” she said, looking first at him, warningly, and then at the others.
Both Ryan and Komi met her glance evenly.
Tareq’s wise eyes just looked at her. He knew where she was taking them.
She walked through the tall grass and they were all startled to see butterflies flutter up around her as birds swooped through the air above them. This was indeed her place.
If none of them had believed in magic before, they might have believed in it at that moment as they watched the slender woman with her long sunny hair walk through the grass while butterflies rose around her and birds swept by, unafraid of the humans in their midst. That warm hazy light filled the avenue of stone, turned it mystical, magical, warming her skin and bathing her white dress in pale gold.
Vines had twined around the stele, too, so it seemed the face of it peered out from behind a veil of flowers, leaves and vines pensively.
The face was the face of the woman who stood next to it…
Raissa’s face…
She fought the tug of this place, the call of her resting place…
Or rather, Irisi’s face, as she had been, the blue eyes kohl-rimmed, the color shadowing the lids the same color as those eyes, the features fine, the nose a little crooked as Raissa’s was.
It was more than a little disconcerting to look at, as Khai’s sarcophagus had been.
The age of it was obvious, the stone weathered, the plants, thick and lush, shielding it from the ravages of the centuries.
An intricate series of hieroglyphics covered what would have been her dress, the delicate figures looking like an intricate pattern at first. It was beautiful, the characters tiny and incredibly detailed
“Look at this, Ky,” Tareq said, in awe.
With a soft exhalation, he traced some of the characters etched into the stele, his fingers just above the stone.
“These are from the Book of the Dead. Here’s the Spell for Going out into the Day and living after Death, another, and the spell for Creating another Form. Every spell she would need for recreating herself is here. All the spells she might need to do what she’s done.”
It took a second for Ky to understand, to truly comprehend the magnitude of it.
She was in there. Raissa. Irisi. The body she’d been born with resided within the narrow confines of the stele.
The idea staggered him. It was unimaginable. The stone was barely wider and taller than Raissa herself, within it the confines would be close against her linen-wrapped body.
Suddenly Ky understood her horror, her loathing, as the same sense of claustrophobia enveloped him.
He slid his arm around her waist, pressed a kiss to her temple. He couldn’t imagine the courage it had taken to willingly allow herself to be interred within it. Alive.
Raissa looked into his dark eyes and saw the glimmer of gold deep within them. He pressed another kiss to her forehead. The simple comfort of that gesture meant more than she could say.
She rested her hand on the cold stone in which her body was interred.
Carefully, she looked at all of them.
“Whether you believe or not,” she said. “If anything goes wrong, deeply, drastically wrong, destroy this and the Guardian will be released. Some part of me remains here. Once it’s destroyed, run, drop your weapons and run… The part of me that is Irisi may not know you. She’ll do you no harm as long as you mean none, as long as you’re not armed. But it would be even better if you are not here.”
She looked at Ky, at Tareq, Ryan and Komi.
“Are you ready?”
Behind the stele was the entrance to the Tomb itself, an arched opening in the rock, draped with vines. A stone sealed it. Ky and Tareq pushed it away.
Once again, Raissa led the way.
With a simple gesture, she called up a touch of magic and set the torches in the walls alight. Flame leaped from one to the other like a frog, fire preceding them down the narrow mouth of the entry tunnel.
Suddenly the walls fell away, opening around them. The short tunnel was gone and they stepped out into an enormous echoing chamber filled with light, firelight and lamplight.
The flame split to encircle the walls, raced toward the rear of the chamber to ignite the last two torches so the space was ringed, filled, with light.
Tareq sighed and shook his head.
It was brilliant. Light gleamed, sparkled, glowed and glittered from everywhere, dazzling the eye as the torchlight reflected from the quartz and mica in the stone of the walls, in the stalactites and stalagmite, the gold and silver veined marble, and from the gold and gems that spilled everywhere. Towering figures stared down benignly at them.
It was beautiful.
They just stared in wonder as the light filled the chamber brilliantly, warmly.
Around the circumference of the echoing cavern were the individual figures representing the Gods, each on a pedestal, each carved of a different stone or precious wood, marble, alabaster, even granite, gilded in gold, silver and bronze, each in their traditional clothing and poses. Golden-skinned, serene and lovely Isis with an asp curled around her feet, lion-headed Sekhmet stood at their back with Ra, Osiris, hawk-headed Horus and the others in a circle around them. Each was bejeweled in some way.
In the center of the chamber was a long white marble pedestal, a plinth, the stone veined with gold, clearly the original intended location of Irisi’s sarcophagus, the center of it hollowed and smoothed to the shape of her graceful curves.
Gold was all around them, everywhere. Gold plates, gold bowls and gold combs, gem studded jewelry spilled out of coffers and there were figures of lions everywhere―which puzzled Ky a little, as lions were creatures of Sekhmet not Isis and Irisi had been a priestess of Isis.
Where there wasn’t gold there were jewels, little coffers filled with gemstones of all kinds, a rainbow of glittering stones.
Tall amphorae were filled with priceless oils, smaller ones with frankincense, myrhh, and millennia-old wine. Still smaller ones contained spices that scented the air when their stoppers were removed.
In moments the air smelled sweet and fresh, softly perfumed by more than the flowers outside.
The walls had been smoothed as much as possible, plastered over and painted intricately in red and black hieroglyphs with passages from the Book of Death and the Book of Life, as guides to her passage through to the underworld…except her journey to the underworld had never been completed.
It was beautiful, a divine and sacred space.
“Look at this,” Ryan said, reverently, picking up a gold bowl.
It was pristine, untouched. There wasn’t a scratch or dent in it. Time had not touched it nor had the hands of another since it had been set here.
Komi picked up a sapphire the size of a hen’s egg and shook his head.
Pearls dripped from bowls in strands draped across fine linen cloth, perfectly preserved by the bone-dry air within the cavern.
They could only look around them in astonishment.
It was simply breathtaking.
To his amusement, Ky found himself mentally cataloguing where everything was and what it was, to compare it against their guesses, against the later tombs of Pharaohs, Viziers and other priests and priestesses.
Even as he knew Tareq was doing.
He looked at his friend. They both grinned, knowing what the other was thinking.
Tareq reached out to touch the hand of the Goddess Hathor, her carved face serene, kind, perfect and untouched. He shook his head in amazement.
It was one of the most beautiful things he’d ever seen.
“Lovely,” he said, softly.
Time hadn’t touched her or the room around them.
It was a place of light, not darkness.
Puzzled, he looked around.
“This was all yours?” Ky asked.
Raissa nodded, touching one of the necklaces in the coffers. They had done her too much honor. It had been intended to be the home of her spirit, a place for her to go out from to be among those she loved, and in a way, it had been.
“And the Tomb of the Djinn?” Tareq asked, almost eagerly, for this was clearly not it.
Involuntarily, she shivered.
She looked from him to Ky.
To them, to all of them, what lay below was only a myth, a legend out of time. It wasn’t real and she understood that.
Neither Ky nor Tareq truly believed and she understood that, too. None of them did.
They’d never known otherwise, had never experienced this.
Perhaps because of what those long ago others, and she, had done.
All of that was about to change.
Each step of this journey, though, had been to bring them to this place, this time, to prepare them for it and she understood that now as well.
There wasn’t much time.
She turned.
Concealed by the shadow created by the light of the torches was another fissure in the rock, a dark, jagged, uninviting crack in the rock, another dark tunnel. A cold, damp breeze greeted them at the mouth of it as they followed her to it, so strong it lifted Raissa’s hair and blew it back to flutter, chilling all of them to the bone as it struck them.
It was the breath of the tomb and it was damp, thick and foul. Something fetid hung in it, so strongly you could almost taste it.
Suddenly Tareq found he wished he hadn’t asked.
Before them was a long throat of darkness that lead down into the depths of the earth, it was utterly and pitch black.
No light shimmered here. In fact, oddly and eerily it seemed to swallow up the light that came from behind them.
The weight of the limestone and granite above them seemed to press on them as they began to descend.
Raissa led the way, another spell setting the torches leading their way down alight before them.
Unlike the chamber behind them, either there were fewer torches here or the damp dark stone of the walls drank up that light, too, rather than reflecting it, muted and smothered the brightness as it seemed to smother sound as well. Their footsteps didn’t echo.
Ky found himself looking down to reassure himself they were walking on stone.
Here there was no quartz to reflect the light and the walls were rough-hewn, the marks of the chisels used to widen it etched in the stone. It seemed hurried, hasty, as if those who chiseled these walls wider had rushed to get it done.
It was a long, dark, dank and dripping tunnel spinning down into the deep recesses of the earth. They wound down into the depths, the sound of their footsteps becoming more muffled with each step they took.
The atmosphere grew more and more oppressive. It seemed hard to breathe.
The walls were dark, slick and shiny, yet oddly dull, slimy like the skin of a worm. No one wanted to touch them. Shadows stretched weirdly, moved oddly in the wavering torchlight. It sometimes seemed as if something moved beneath or through the walls, or slid behind them or over them, something only seen from the corner of your eye. All around them it seemed as if there were whispers, hushed, barely heard voices speaking in a language no one understood and the sound of that fetid breeze blowing, whistling discordantly in the dark.
Instinctively they all walked softly here.