The others are dead, it said.
This confirmed what the taste of the laborer's ka had told him.
There are gods, but not the ones we knew. Its beak wasn't built for smiling, but it cocked its head to one side and he remembered that meant it was pleased. I was wise when I created you; through you I survived. The new gods have been strong in the past, but they are not now. Few souls are sworn. Build me a temple, gather me acolytes until I am strong enough to make others like you. We can do what we wish with this world.
Then he was alone again in the darkness.
Nothing held him now except millennia-old fabric already beginning to rot under the pressure of accumulated time, but he would remain for a little longer where he was. His ka had one more short journey to make and then he would gather his strength before he confronted his? savior.
Build a temple. Gather acolytes. We can do what we wish with this world. Indeed.
He had not really planned beyond gaining his freedom, but it seemed he would have much to do.
Rachel Shane stepped out of the elevator on the ground floor, the rubber soles of her shoes making very little sound against the tile floor. She was worried about Elias. He'd always been an intense man, determined to make the Egyptology Department at the ROM one of the best in the world despite budgets and bureaucrats, but in all the years she'd known him-and they were a good many years, she admitted silently to herself-she'd never seen him this obsessed.
She paused just inside the security door to pull her trench coat closed. Although the looming bulk of the planetarium limited the lines of sight from the staff entrance, water glistened on the pavement between the two buildings. If it wasn't raining at this moment, it had been in the recent past.
Recent past? She thought back to the workroom and the almost dreamlike way they'd unwrapped the linen strip from around the mummy. No documentation. No photographs. Not even a notation of the hieroglyphs. It was very stra?
The sudden pain snapped her head forward and exploded red lights behind her eyes. She sagged against the security door, the smooth glass pulling against the damp skin of her cheek as she fought to stay on her feet. Is it a stroke? And with that thought came a terrifying vision of complete and utter helplessness, so much worse than death. Oh, God, I'm too young. She couldn't catch her breath, couldn't remember how her lungs worked, couldn't remember anything but the pain.
As if from a great distance, she saw the guard run for the other side of the door and manage to open it without throwing her to the ground. He slipped an arm around her waist and half guided, half carried her over to a chair. "Dr. Shane? Dr. Shane, are you all right?" She grabbed desperately onto the sound of her name. The pain began to recede, leaving her feeling as though she'd been scoured from within by a wire brush. Nerve endings throbbed and for just an instant a great golden sun blotted out the security area, the guard, everything. "Dr. Shane?"
Then it was gone and the pain was gone as if it had never been. She rubbed at her temples, trying to remember how it had felt, and couldn't. "Should I call an ambulance, Dr. Shane?" An ambulance? That penetrated. "No, thank you, Andrew. I'm fine. Really. Just a little faint." He frowned. "You sure?"
'Positive." She took a deep breath and stood. The world remained as it always had been. The tension went out of her shoulders.
'Well, if you're sure?" He still looked a little dubious. "I guess you must've been working too hard, what with the cops keeping you away from your stuff until this afternoon." He went back behind his desk, still watching her with a wary eye. "So, they gonna take the mummy away?"
'Mummy?"
'Yeah. They say Reid Ellis bumped into a mummy up there in the dark and it scared him to death."
'Oh, that mummy?"It was amazing how rumors got started. She smiled and shook her head. With the police in and out of the workroom there was no real point in the department keeping quiet to save face. They'd just have to convince the scientific community that they'd meant to buy an empty sarcophagus. "There never was a mummy, Andrew. Just an empty coffin. Which I suppose is frightening enough in the middle of the night."
Andrew looked a little disappointed. "No mummy?"
'No."
He sighed. "Well, that certainly makes the story less interesting."
'Sorry." Dr. Shane paused with one hand on the outside door and fixed the security guard with a look she kept just on the edge of intimidating. "I'd appreciate you spreading the real story around."
He sighed again. "Sure thing, Dr. Shane. There never was a mummy?"
His fingers had torn through the bottom sheet and his heartbeat echoed off the walls of the bedroom. He'd woken again to the memory of a brilliant white-gold sun centered in an azure sky.
'I don't want to die!"
But then, why the sun?
One night he could force himself to ignore; wash it away in the hunt, in blood. Two nights made it real.
He fought himself free of the sheet and sat up on the edge of the bed, hands turned up on his thighs. His palms were moist. He stared at them for a moment, then frantically scrubbed them dry, trying to remember if in over four hundred and fifty years he'd ever sweated.
The stink of his fear filled the room. He had to get away from it.
Naked, he padded out into the condo and over to the plate glass window that looked down on Toronto. Pressing palms and forehead against the cool glass, he forced himself to take long, slow breaths until he calmed. He traced the flow of traffic down Jarvis Street; marked the blaze of glory a few streets over that was Yonge; flicked his gaze over the bands of gold in nearby office towers marking where conscientious employees worked late; knew that as dusk deepened to full dark, the other, still human, children of the night would emerge. This was his city.