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be gold foil. It was a hawk's head, and it completely covered Clarke's face.

"Who opposes?" Balsam said.

A young oriental woman, rather plain, but with an undefinable sexual quality, stepped forward. "I oppose." Balsam gave her a mask with long, pointed ears and a sharp face. When she put it on, it gave her a cold, disdainful look. Fortunato felt Eileen's pulse begin to pick up.

"Who claims her?"

"I claim her." Another man came forward and took a mask with the jackal face of Anubis.

The air behind Balsam rippled and started to glow. The candles flickered out. Slowly a golden man took shape, lighting the room. He was as tall as the ceiling, with canine features and hot yellow eyes. He stood with folded arms and looked down at Eileen. Her pulse leapt and stuttered and she dug her fingernails into her palms. No one else seemed to notice that he was there.

The woman wearing the pointed mask stood in front of Eileen. "Osiris," the woman said. "I am Set, of the company of Annu, son of Seb and Nut."

He felt Eileen open her mouth to speak, but before she could say anything the woman's right hand exploded against her face. She fell over backward and slid three feet across the tiles. "Behold," the woman said. She touched her fingers to Eileen's eyes and they came away wet. "The fertilizing rain."

"Osiris," said the jackal-headed man, stepping up to take the woman's place. "I am Anubis, son of Ra, Opener of the Ways. Mine is the Funeral Mountain." He moved behind Eileen and held her against the floor.

Now Clarke was kneeling next to her, the golden man looming behind him. "Osiris," he said. Light glittered from the tiny eyes of the hawk mask. "I am Horus, thy son and the son of Isis." He pressed two fingers against Eileen's lips, forcing her mouth open. "I have come to embrace thee, I am thy son Horus, I have pressed thy mouth; I am thy son, I love thee. Thy mouth was closed, but I have set in order for thee thy mouth and thy teeth. I open for thee thy two eyes. I have opened for thee thy mouth with the instrument of Anubis. Horus hath opened the mouth of the dead, as he in times of old opened thy mouth, with the iron which came forth from Set. The deceased shall walk and shall speak, and her body shall be with the great company of the gods in the Great House of the Aged One in Annu, and she shall receive there the ureret crown from Horus, the lord of mankind."

Clarke took something that looked like a wooden snake from Balsam. Eileen tried to pull away, but the jackal-headed man had too tight a grip on her. Clarke swung the snake back and then gently touched Eileen's mouth and eyes with it four times. "O Osiris, I have established for thee the two jawbones in thy face, and they are now separated."

He stood aside. Balsam bent over her until his face was only inches away and said, "Now I give to thee the hekau, the word of power. Horus hath given thee the use of thy mouth and thou canst say it. The word is TIAMAT "

"TIAMAT," Eileen whispered.

Fortunato, numb with fear, pushed himself into Balsam's mind.

The trick was to keep moving, not to get overwhelmed by the strangeness of it. If he kept triggering associations he would end up in the part of Balsam's memory that he wanted.

At the moment Balsam was near ecstasy. Fortunato followed the images and totems of Egyptian magic until he found the earliest ones, and from there made his way to Balsam's father, and back through seven generations to Black John himself.

Everything Balsam had ever heard or read or imagined about his ancestor was here. His first swindle, when he took the goldsmith Marano for sixty ounces of fine gold. His escape from Palermo. Meeting the Greek, Altotas, and learning alchemy. Egypt, Turkey, Malta, and finally Rome at age twenty-six, handsome, clever, carrying letters of introduction to the cream of society.

Where he met Lorenza. Fortunato saw her as Cagliostro had, naked before him for the first time, only fourteen years old but dizzyingly beautiful: slim, elegant, olive-skinned, With jet-black wavy hair spread out around her, tiny perfect breasts, smelling of wild coastal flowers, her throaty voice screaming his name as she wrapped her legs around him.

Traveling through Europe in coaches lined in deep green velvet, Lorenza's beauty