Tales of the Red Panda: Pyramid of Peril (15 page)

The Red Panda struggled to clear the cobwebs from his head, but he had hit the ground hard. Only the last-second hit of his Grapple Gun on the statue’s upraised arms had prevented him from being killed by the impact against the stone dais at Anubis’s feet. While it had slowed his fall, it had not kept him from getting his bell rung once or twice as he rolled. If he had been unconscious at all, it had not lasted more than a few moments, but he was still seeing spots when the laughter forced him to lift his head.

The laughter was
Thatcher’s, ringing off the hard stone and throughout the vast space as he stepped forward to a hidden panel at the base of the statue. A panel that none of them had seen before, but which had obviously opened when the beam of light had been broken as Pavli had suspected. The Stranger made a slight movement as if to intervene, but he found himself suddenly the object of the attention of a dozen firearms. Falconi’s eyes narrowed. He could deal with these underlings, but what would Pavli do while he did? They were running out of options and almost entirely out of time. His eyes flashed to where the masked man lay, having been left as if dead where he fell.

The Red Panda tried to force himself to stand, or at least sit, but his head still swam. He could only watch as
Thatcher stepped forward and reached into the chamber, his hand emerging wrapped around an enormous jewel, so black that light seemed to simply fall into it. A hush fell over the assembly as he held it aloft, the jewel glowing with a deep black energy that almost drank the lustre of the gold in which it was set. An instant later the power of the jewel began to spread over Thatcher’s body, oozing like a thick paste of black light.

“Yes!”
Thatcher cried in triumph. “Mine at last! Power over the living, dominion over the dead! And now I will add the Eye’s power to my own and overcome these filthy bands.”

Thatcher
closed his eyes in concentration that bordered on exultation as the power of the Eye flowed through him. An instant later there was a hollow, metallic ring as the copper-colored bands fell to the stone floor, rattling like enormous coins. Thatcher’s laughter rang throughout the hall once again, growing in its fevered pitch until it seemed to be the only sound in the world.

The Red Panda pushed himself up from the floor again, his head still ringing
, but unwilling to meet his fate lying down. If only he could stand-

Suddenly, there was a bright, blinding flash and
Thatcher’s laughter ceased abruptly. Another burst of energy flew forth and the Eye of Anubis fell to the ground. Thatcher, still weakened by the bands, had been no match for the powerful spell that had been unleashed upon him, but how had Max managed that? Even now he stood stock-still, and the men guarding him had not responded to the attack at all. Lightning seemed to flash a third time, and it was only then that the Red Panda realized it had not been the Stranger who had attacked Thatcher at all.

The third hit put
Thatcher down on his knees, cursing. Smoke reeked from his shoulders, and his damaged face was a mask of rage.

“Pavli,” he hissed
, “you treacherous worm! I will kill you for this!”

Pavli smiled. “That was on the agenda anyway, was it not, my dear
Thatcher? Certainly you would never have abided by our agreement to sell the Eye. And these men have not faced danger and seen their fellows die just to make you a god. Power is all very well and good, but it is money that makes the world go around, old man.”

Thatcher
spat blood onto the stones and tried to push himself to his feet, but the gesture was futile. Pavli smiled and drew his revolver.

“
If only you had left those bands on, Thatcher,” he said, “I might have been able to trust you. At least long enough to have put the Eye of Anubis in our client’s hands. I would have freed you then, if only you hadn’t made your move.”

“Pavli, wait,”
Thatcher said as his partner pushed the gun against his temple.

“I think not,” Pavli said. “This is ever so much easier than sharing.”

The roar of the gunshot rang throughout the room, swiftly fading echoes that seemed to transform themselves into laughter from the shadows. It was the Flying Squirrel, mocking Pavli in his moment of triumph.

“Enjoy it while you can, peaches,” her voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. “You’ll never get that pretty necklace out of this room.”

The gunmen’s focus was divided now, some covering the Stranger, others scouring the shadows for any sign of the girl. All of them had at least half an eye on their master as he stooped to pick up the prize near his dead partner’s outstretched hand.

“Will I not, little
one?” Pavli sang happily as his fist closed around the stone, lifting it high above his head. “The Eye of Anubis is mine to command!”

At this, there was a blaze of
power and light that flooded the room, making the torchlight seem like a pale shadow and filling the entire hall with a luminescent black glow. There were shouts from the guards, and they raised their rifles as they spotted the Flying Squirrel darting for cover against the far wall of the chamber, which was covered in enormous hieroglyphs and ringed with golden sarcophagi standing upright on their feet, blazing in the light of the Eye like a hundred suns. The Stranger turned quickly, realizing that every wall in the enormous room was covered with identical ornamentation, and felt his blood run cold.

“Pavli, wait!”
he called in vain.

The first of the rifle shots barked loudly
as the men took aim at the Squirrel. She was racing for the cover of one of the enormous statues that served as pillars around the room, but she would never make it once the gunmen had dialed in their range. Or so it seemed until the fourth man to raise his rifle to his shoulder was hit by something that felt like an out-of-control truck, but was in fact a very angry Red Panda. The masked man blocked an overhead blow with a rifle butt and threw the attacker over his shoulder as if he had been a paper doll. The man to the Red Panda’s right took a high-kick to the chest that caved in his ribcage on the left side and he fell, gasping.

The R
ed Panda turned the opposing force of his kick into a cross-punch to his left that put another gunman down as if he had been shot himself, but the masked man was still groggy and could not keep this up forever. A man at the fringe of the group who had the benefit of more distance raised his weapon and promptly fell down shrieking, his left arm reaching desperately back over his own shoulder to try and grasp something unseen. The Red Panda did not have to see the throwing knife his partner had dispatched to know what it was, so another piece had been taken off the board. But what good was any of it going to be if Pavli used the power of the Eye against them? He turned in his tracks leaving the henchmen for the Flying Squirrel to pick off, and pulled a pair of throwing stars with each hand from under the folds of his jacket. He wished now that he had taken some of the anti-magic gear that Kit had loaded up on earlier, but if he was fast enough, perhaps something would get through. This would have to be perfect.

“STOP!”

The order was possibly the loudest thing the Red Panda had ever heard, and it had the desired effect. The Red Panda recognized Falconi’s voice, and could feel the effect of the enchantment in the order, but could not resist it. Only Pavli seemed blithely unaffected.

“What have you done, Max?”
the Red Panda thought ruefully.
“You’ve given him all the time he needed.”

Pavli seemed to think so to
o, but he regarded the Stranger with amusement, almost condescension.

“Far too little, Falconi,” he said
, “and far too late.”

“Pavli
, you fool,” the Stranger cried, “you’ve murdered us all! The walls! Look at the walls!”

There was just enough power left in the enchantment that had frozen the combatants in their tracks
to compel them to turn and face the far walls and corners of the room. The sound of metal scraping against stone could be heard from everywhere.

“The guardians of this place are rising, Pavli,” Falconi said
. “The dead will have their day.”

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

It
isn’t always a perfect concept, and at the very least it is a great deal more complicated than it seems, most of the time. If there was an obvious exception, it seemed to be when a rising horde of the undead was involved.

From behind the statue
under which she had taken cover, the Flying Squirrel had a front row seat. Bone-thin arms tightly wrapped in ancient linens creaked as they fought their way out of the golden sarcophagi that had been their prisons for thousands of years. They were relentless, and the stones rang with the ringing of precious metals striking the floor as they were cast aside and short-bladed swords of bronze were raised. These were warriors, given a king’s burial in exchange for their eternal vigilance over the Eye of Anubis. And if they served the Pharaoh who had entombed them, rather than the god or the Eye itself, their mission would be to destroy any who tried to return the Eye of Anubis to the surface world.

Kit Baxter was brave by nature, and by training had developed those instincts into something like fearlessness. But she was anything but stupid, and when the first mummy to stand free of his golden casket looked directly at her and emitted a hissing sort of a groan, she broke cover and made tracks. No shots rang out as she sprinted across the floor. The small assembly of well-dressed men in fezzes who had been their chief enemies
until moments ago were backing up the steps of the dais, desperately scanning the walls for some break in the ranks, some means of escape, and finding nothing.

The Red Panda began running toward her, which she took to mean that there was something immediately behind her which she could not handle alone, and she dug a little deeper and moved a little faster. They practically collided moments
later, and she turned at once to see that the solid line of undead warriors was still some distance away, marching evenly like an army.

“Hi,” she said.

“Yes,” he replied.

“I thought something was chasing me,” she said, a little winded.

“Yes, well, there are these mummies,” he offered. “If they broke into a run behind you I didn’t want to be all the way over there.”

This made sense to the Flying Squirrel
. Were their roles reversed, she would have done the same thing without a thought. This she found good, and the sparkle in her eyes said so, though she did not speak. They turned and ran back together toward the only thing that felt at all like cover, the statue of Anubis, where Falconi and Pavli were arguing.

“Don’t you see, Stranger?” Pavli’s voice rang out in something like exaltation. “The dead arrive, ready to serve me! Their new master! Isn’t it astonishing?”

“You’re a fool, Aris,” Falconi warned. “This is the final trap of the pyramid, set thousands of years ago when these warriors yet lived. A reaction to the use of the power of the Eye. You can’t control these monsters.”

“Look at them, Falconi,” Pavli said, his voice barely a whisper. “No wonder they will pay a king’s ransom for this.”

“What the heck are they waiting for?” the Flying Squirrel said breathlessly from the steps. The mummified warriors ringed the inner chamber now, three men deep, weapons at the ready, and made no motion.

“The Eye of Anubis is an amplifier,” Falconi cried desperately
, “it takes what it is given. If it has the will of a mighty king behind it, it can command the dead, build astounding structures, bury them under mountains, do anything. This army awoke when the Eye sprang back to life, but it is the imprinted will of a long-dead Pharaoh you see, not the inherent power of the relic. They will not let you take the Eye from this place.”

“The Eye of Anubis is mine!” Pavli shouted, holding the great jewel aloft to command the fealty of the mighty army of the dead. In
stead, the warriors crouched low, as if preparing to charge and began to emit the same low, hissing groan that had sent Kit Baxter running moments ago. Except that it was now hundreds of times louder, and there was nowhere left to run.

“The Eye takes what it is given,” Falconi said sadly
, “and your energy still reeks of betrayal and murder. The Eye has betrayed you, Pavli, and you have murdered us all.”

And at that, the mummified warriors broke into a run. Pavli’s guards began to shriek in terror and peppered the advancing
line with gunfire, which did not seem to have much effect. The bullets collided with mummified flesh and produced small clouds of dust, but they did little to slow the undead soldiers, and none of them seemed to be stopping.

“I wish I had my sword,” the Red Panda said as casually as he could manage.

“Take one of theirs,” the Flying Squirrel offered, holding up a throwing star made of anti-magic alloy. “Think these’ll do anything?” she asked.

“No,” he said
glumly.

She shrugged and threw it into the advancing line, now less than twenty feet away. It passed through one of the horde and buried itself deep into the one behind him. Both of them fell and did not get up.

“I mean, yes,” the Red Panda corrected, diving down the stairs and racing forward with the intention of grabbing the swords of the fallen. There was very little holding these monsters up. If he could take them out at the legs, it might not destroy them, but it would certainly help to slow them down. The pungent smell of tomb dust and long-dead flesh grew as he closed in. He heard a whistling sound whizz past each of his ears, and the front lines began to crumble before him as the Flying Squirrel peppered them with missiles.

The Red Panda rolled at the bottom of the s
tairs and came up with a khopesh, an ancient Egyptian sword with a curved blade. He had trained with one of these long ago. It cut like a sabre but handled like a lightweight axe, and the young August Fenwick had not been fond of it. Now that he was older, wiser and surrounded by the resurrected dead, he thought it was just dandy, and picked up a second blade for his left hand as he parried the first of many blows with his right. He bound over his attacker’s blade with his sword, holding it against the ground as he brought the weapon in his left hand up through the legs of his undead foe. The creature fell to the ground and hissed, but did not have the sense to die again. The Red Panda pinned the sword the beast still gripped down hard with his right hand and brought the blade in his left down on the mummy’s head, cleaving it in two with a cloud of dust. This was even less effective, as the beast seemed entirely unaffected by the loss and continued to struggle to free his blade.

“Legs it is, then,” the Red Panda said to no one in particular, as he turned his motion into a rapid rotation of his footing, and the blades he held on either side. Like a whirling dervish, he cut through the thick crowd of attackers, leaving behind a battlefield littered with legless things that still f
lailed with their weapons. They were slower than living fighters, but they fought without fear, and no sooner had he cleared away one creature than two more leapt from the shadows to take its place.

For a time he held his own as the sounds of gunfire began to fade, replaced by bone-chilling screams as Pavli’s men were set upon by horrors from beyond the grave.
The rending and tearing sounds that followed the screams did not seem to abate when the screaming finally stopped, and though he could not pause to look, it suggested to the man in the mask that these mummies did not know enough to stop killing them when they were already dead. That did not bode well, but at least it seemed to be keeping some of them busy.

The Red Panda heard several blasts for which no origin seemed clear to him, and knew that the Stranger must also be in the fray. The air hung thick with the smell of ancient corpses burning until there was not enough left
of them to continue the fight. It explained why they had not yet been overwhelmed by foes enveloping the altar of Anubis from the other side of the room, but it was clearly too good to last. The Red Panda gasped in a lungful of the fetid, smoke-filled air. Was Max strong enough to keep this up for long? For that matter, was he? He swung his blade again and hoped so.

More than once he would have been cut off from potential retreat were it not
for a steady stream of attacks from the Flying Squirrel. These seemed to be growing less and less frequent, though, and if there were any sign that the howling mob of monsters from beyond the grave was running out of conscripts, he certainly couldn’t see it. Indeed, they seemed to be getting stronger and faster as they fought. This had to end soon, or it was not to end well.

An undead soldier howled as he sprang forward at the masked man, his blade raised high above his head. The Red Panda was off-balance and did not know if he could respond in time, not without throwing himself backwards blindly, and leaving himself wide open to the ne
xt attack. The mummy was so close already that the Red Panda felt certain he could see the rage and murderous intent in the dead man’s empty eye sockets. And just as suddenly as the threat had appeared, a crimson combat boomerang crashed into the mummy’s head, shattering the skull and dropping the creature to the ground, lifeless once again.

“Boss!” the Squirrel’s voice rang out over the din. “That’s my last boomerang and I’ve thrown it three times already! The law of large numbers says sooner or later it ain’t comin’ back!”

“I understand,” he called grimly.

“No
, you don’t,” she protested. “Get your fanny over here!”

He threw himself backwards twice head over heels to gain some space, brought his fist across through the skull of the only mummy between himself and the stairs and took the steps at a sprint. For the first time since the battle had begun, he saw what she was seeing. The
main force of the horde of undead creatures were at the front of the dais, pressing in toward Pavli desperately, held back only by the force of Maxwell Falconi’s attacks. A few would scatter with each blast the wizard threw, one or two would fail to rise, but the end seemed inevitable, and soon.

“Obey me!” Pavli shrieked desperately, waving the Eye of Anubis as if it weren’t the thing that was bringing the monsters down on his head.
“Obey me!”

“Boss,” Kit’s voice rang out
, “up here!”

She was halfway up the statue, crouched against the enormous torso of Anubis
, and she clutched her last boomerang as though it were made of gold. He activated his Static Shoes and ran up the surface toward her.

“What’s the plan?”
he called as he climbed.

“Plan?”
she cried in disbelief. “When would I have thought of a plan? How about ‘
don’t die’
, that’s my plan!”

“Max,” the Red Panda yelled to be heard over the hysterical Pavli
, “what have you got left?”

“Almost nothing, old boy,” the sorcerer called. “One good blast. Maybe two.”

“The Eye is an amplifier!” the Red Panda cried. “It takes what it is given.”

The horde of hissing monsters was reassembling itself for another charge. There was nothing else left. “I think you had better both get down here,”
the Stranger ordered, “as near to me as you can!”

The heroes dropped and drew in close beside Falconi as
the enchanter muttered softly under his breath, his hands moving in a rapid, complex sequence.

“Obey me!” Pavli implored one last time.

“I’m sorry, Aris,” the Stranger said softly as he unleashed a blinding stream of pure energy into the very heart of the jewel which his rival held aloft. The mummies froze but seemed to howl in unison, a terrifying song of cold death that rose high in the chamber and seemed to make the walls quake.

“The timing of this will be a bit tricky,” the Stranger said as the world seemed to explode all around them into a blaze of black fire. The Flying Squirrel squeaked in spite of herself before she realized that there was something holding the savage fury of the blast away from them. A glowing, golden dome that surrounded the three heroes, held together by the pure force of the Stranger’s will.

An instant later it was over. Aris Pavli and the undead horde that desperately wished to fulfil their dying pledge by destroying him were reduced to atoms by the force of the blast. Walls had shattered, enormous god-shaped pillars were crumbing into dust, and suddenly a mighty quake seemed to seize the ancient chamber and hurl the treasures it contained about the room.

“Okay,” Kit cried
, “this is actually a little bit worse.”

“I don’t know if we can make that door!” Falconi cried.

The Red Panda threw his gaze up to the darkened ceiling of the great hall. He knew what he was desperate to see and, to his elation, it was there, far larger and clearer than before. The beam of light that shone down into Anubis’ hand. The single ray of sunlight in this terrible place.

“Look up,” he shouted as more great stones fell from above,
making the beam of light wider and more brilliant still. “That’s our doorway!”

“I got it!” she called, firing her Grapple Gun blind
ly into the darkness, hoping it took hold.

“Hold on tight, Max,” the Red Panda ordered as he seized his mentor with his left arm and fired his own
Grapple with his right. “We won’t get a second shot at this.”