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Limestone was fairly soft as rocks went, and the prisoners were vamps. The only scenario I could come up with for why they hadn’t been able to literally move a mountain was that they had already largely atrophied by the time they were entombed here, and were so weak that their best efforts only made scratches. To be so desperate, and yet be unable to get out, knowing the fate that awaited them . . .
I did shudder then.
Ray, I thought suddenly, Ray would have been cussing up a storm right about now and dragging me out of here. Ray was a smart man. I guessed I was less so, because after a brief pause, I followed Hassani into the burial chamber.
It turned out to be a huge room with a gorgeous sarcophagus carved out of the same yellow limestone as everything else, but long as a yacht and taller than my head. It would have fit a giant—or the actual statue of Ra outside, had they folded it up a little. But I didn’t think that was what was in there.
No, I didn’t think that at all.
I guessed Lantern Boy didn’t, either, because he was shaking enough that golden light shimmered around the room like water. It splashed the walls and made the hideous thing festooned above the sarcophagus and draped around the room to also seem to move—and thus making him shake even more. It got bad enough that Hassani took the lantern away and held it up himself, which . . . yeah.
Could have done without that.
“He ruled over the vampires of this land for time out of mind,” Hassani said, his voice hushed. “Before the pyramids were built, he ruled. Before there was an Egypt, he ruled. Before civilization itself, he was here, and he ruled.”
I didn’t say anything. Diplomacy required an answer, but fuck diplomacy. I stared upward and hoped like hell that the cracked and dusty thing up there didn’t fall on me. Or I was gonna do a Ray, I swore to God.
Hassani glanced at me, and a small smile flirted with his lips. “It is a bit much, all at once.”
Yeah, but at least I finally knew what that smell was. It permeated the air, thick and old and musty and horrible. I’d been in some bad places, and smelled some pretty terrible things. But nothing that s
tuck in my throat, feeling like it was clogging and burning it at the same time, quite like that.
I really envied the vamps their ability to just not breathe.
But worse than the smell was what it was coming from. Papery thin pieces of scale covered skin draped the room like evil bunting. In some cases, there was coil after coil of it, what looked like a hundred layers all rolled up together. In others, those layers had burst apart, like the most God-awful Christmas cracker ever, leaving fluttery ends waving about in the air in abstract shapes yards long, and a foot-deep confetti of smaller pieces on the floor that crunched and crackled horribly underfoot.
I shuddered visibly, and didn’t give a shit.
“After his death, he was brought here, to the seat of his power, to possibly regenerate,” Hassani said. “He had been able to do it before, and his supporters thought that, despite the damage, their god might yet return. But not this time.”
There was a certain vicious satisfaction in the consul’s voice that I didn’t understand, and he didn’t give me a chance to ask.
“The bones put out flesh and skin, more than once,” he continued. “But the final push back to health, to life, eluded him. In the end, even his most fervent supporters had to admit that he was gone.”
“He was a snake?” I croaked, finally managing to get my head around the image of a shed snakeskin at least twenty times bigger than I was.
“It was his master power, the ability to transform,” Hassani said. “Or one of them, I should say, as he had several. As Apollo’s son, he grew more powerful in the sun, for instance, instead of being consumed by it—”
“What? Wait.”
Hassani did smile then. “I know how it sounds. But he was the first of us, the very first vampire ever made, and thus a . . . prototype, if you will. He was enormously strong, able to redirect the sun’s rays to consume his enemies, among other things. It was the reason we entombed him down here. To deny him his greatest weapon, should he ever return.”
I wasn’t listening. I’d made the mistake of looking closer, and—shit. It wasn’t just a snakeskin. Cracks in the shed epidermis showed that there were bones in there, including a spine as long as a train and three-foot fangs. I wondered what the hell they’d buried, and then remembered what Hassani had said: this thing regenerated. I shuddered again, and stepped back, really glad not to have met this bastard in person.
Really, really glad.
“The ancient Greeks named this city Heliopolis, after Helios, their original sun god,” Hassani continued. “But they were wrong to do so. They saw the suns portrayed everywhere, and naturally thought of Helios, who was the personification of the sun disk itself. But Apollo was the god who used the sun’s power, and thus aligned more accurately with Ra, while our friend here—”
“Was the cobra,” I whispered, remembering the tiny snake on the statue outside.
“Exactly so. The statue shows the god, the source of his power, and his defender. The ancients understood, even if modern man has forgotten.”
“What happened to him?” I asked, after a pause, because clearly something had.
Hassani glanced at me. “You father never told you the tale?”
“My father?” I frowned. “What would he know about this? Didn’t that thing die . . . well, a long damned time ago?” This whole place reeked of age and long, dusty centuries forgotten by time. The man—the vampire—must have died thousands of years ago.
