Besieged: Stories from the Iron Druid Chronicles(7)
There were finely carved figurines, as in Bast’s chamber. Some books, some boxes, some shattered pieces of things that might have been ceramic vessels at one time, a crook and flail of solid gold, an obsidian ankh, and more.
I examined the scattered boxes first, but none had the eye of Horus emblazoned on them. Their littered contents held no special allure either.
Abandoning them, I stepped over the security line to examine the shelves. I found a lacquered box with the eye of Horus on it, undisturbed, in the very back. Yawning spaces framed either side of it, but the dead man had not seen fit in his mortal terror to throw this box. Perhaps that was because it clearly had protections.
Having located it, I surveyed the rest of the shelves and noted many books and scrolls that looked promising. I put the unprotected ones in my bag first. The protected ones, limned in red and yellow in the magical spectrum, I saved for later. I mapped out a course, a sequence beginning with Ogma’s box and then proceeding with the others I wished to take, all leading me ever closer to the door. I opened the bag and kept the flap open with my right hand and ran the gauntlet, expecting some kind of juju to thump me good every time I touched something.
But nothing happened. I snagged and shoved all my prizes into the bag, one by one, and felt nary a magical kick to the kidneys. That was odd. Could Ogma’s torc be protecting me that well? Or were the nature of those curses more of the long-term variety?
I closed up the bag, drew Fragarach, stepped across the threshold, and waited for something heinous to happen, but nothing did. Grinning at my success, I secured the bag around my shoulder and back, crosswise from Fragarach’s sheath. I kept the sword itself in hand as a precaution, but I was feeling jaunty and edging toward ebullience as I approached that button at the end of the hallway that would open up the portal and let me climb the ladder to the library proper.
The door started to open well before I pressed that button. Someone was coming down. I scrambled back, flattening against Bast’s door, and cast camouflage on myself.
The bare-chested figure who came down the ladder rippled with muscles, and I knew right away he wasn’t merely a buff librarian, and I knew he wasn’t a high priest either. I knew this because the figure lacked a human head. Rather, he had the sleek, twitching head of a falcon, and not some elaborately painted spacey-techno mask from Stargate either: It really was a falcon’s head, albeit an abnormally large one, with a razor beak that opened and closed and scary black eyes that blinked as he stared down the hallway at the open door to his chamber.
It was Horus in the flesh.
And apparently both eyes worked just fine. He’d lost one in a fight with Set, and after it was magically reconstructed he offered it up to help resurrect Osiris, but I guess he had bonus XXL-falcon eyes hanging out in a jar somewhere, waiting to be plugged in whenever he had a free socket. He was doing that bird thing where the head shifts from side to side to aid with depth perception, and that wouldn’t be necessary if both eyes weren’t functioning. Which meant, unfortunately, he didn’t have a blind side.
What had summoned him here? Surely not opening the door. I doubted it was the triggering of his little trap either, because he’d never come to clear out the body of the last fellow who ran across it or to clean up the mess he made. It must have been laying hands on his magical doodads—maybe even the very one Ogma had sent me to steal. Most likely it was precisely that, because the lacquered box had been untouched by the previous thief. It occurred to me that the juju I’d seen wasn’t a curse, per se, but rather an alarm calling Horus to provide his own security. And he responded with alacrity.
He was so focused on the breach and finding out why the door to his chamber remained open that he forgot to close the portal, leaving me an escape route. My exceedingly clever plan was to remain still in camouflage, wait for him to pass me by as he went to check on things, and then scramble up the ladder before he realized he’d been had.
My plans rarely work out the way I want them to.
Horus strode right by the first pair of doors but then stopped directly opposite me, that dead left eye looking at me in profile just like a hieroglyph—though I hoped he wasn’t looking at me at all. I should have been functionally invisible, but who knew what extrasensory abilities—or even finely attuned regular senses—he had. He might be able to smell my elbow or hear my toenails growing or something.
His right hand moved at his hip, taking out something like a metal baton. It telescoped in both directions and morphed into two distinct shapes on either end: the sloped head of a bennu bird at the top, a sharp-bladed crescent at the bottom. He had himself a fancy was scepter, a symbol of power but also clearly a weapon in this case. His chest rose with a deep breath, and that was my only warning: On the exhale, he tried to take off my head with a wickedly fast strike.
I ducked underneath it, but just barely. It shattered the stone, and a shard of it opened up a furrow on my scalp even as I lashed out with Fragarach during his follow-through and drew a line of red across his belly with the tip. That was both encouraging and very bad news, because it meant that he could bleed, but he’d leapt back to avoid the worst of the blow, which meant that he knew I had a weapon and saw it coming. Or, if he didn’t see through my camouflage, he sensed it somehow.
Horus danced backward, blocking my path to escape. I spun to my left, into the center of the hallway, backing up a little bit to give myself time to activate the binding that would increase my natural speed and reflexes. The torc was running low on juice and wouldn’t be able to cast much else.