Page 54 of Dead Beat

The robed delegates took small ceramic jars from the altar and knelt beside each naked supplicant, drawing patterns along their skin.

“Let them be bound so that they may find their companions.”

“Papyrus,” Darlington whispered as the delegates took long reeds from the table.

“I remember,” Alex said. “Dawes bound my hands.”

Darlington sometimes forgot the places Alex had been, the things she had dared in his absence. But not because I’m good. She could have left. She could have run. She could have simply kept her head down and let Sandow get away with murdering Tara and sending him to hell. If she’d been a rule-follower, if she’d been a proper Lethe representative, if she’d been good, she might have done just that.

“This time it will act as a connector,” he said as the delegates looped the stalks of papyrus around the ankle of one supplicant, then let the end trail through the water so that their counterpart could tie it to the supplicant on the opposite bank.

Salome set three blue lotus flowers adrift on the surface of the channel. When they reached the first supplicants a gong sounded, echoing through the room, the sound merging with the rush of the waterfall.

This time she spoke in Middle Egyptian, her voice booming through the room. “Senemsen in bit er bahisen in beneru.”

“What does that mean?” Alex asked.

“Let them be fed on honey until they are overwhelmed with sweetness.”

The delegates took up funnels and placed them in the mouths of the three supplicants on the eastern bank. Darlington knew what was coming, but it was still unpleasant to watch. The robed delegates poured a gleaming, slow-moving stream of honey into the funnels. The supplicants began to writhe on the floor, choking.

“It’s never easy, is it?” said Alex. “It’s never Say the magic words, wave a wand, here’s your pumpkin coach.”

“Never.”

“Do not falter!” Salome cried as the supplicants drowned, eyes wet with tears, limbs thrashing, honey trickling from the sides of their mouths.

“I might have liked her better if I’d seen her like this,” muttered Alex.

“Cover your mouth,” said Darlington.

A wind gusted through the room, carrying the sweet green smell of water lilies and clouds of pollen that drifted on the air, shimmering in the torchlight. As soon as the pollen touched the bodies of the supplicants, they stilled. In the next breath, the supplicants on the western bank were gone. The looped reeds that had been tied around their ankles lay empty on the stone.

Salome rushed forward with a smaller version of the glass cloche that housed the hive. She clapped the cloche down, trapping the three bees that settled together in the base as no ordinary bees would. Then she rushed from the room as the six robed delegates began singing to the three remaining supplicants.

“They won’t be able to stop singing, not until this is done.”

Chanting, singing, the beating of drums, a way to create unity of intent, to bind each other together and call each other home. Darlington sometimes wondered how much the pull of ritual had brought him to Lethe and the arcane, a yearning for something he had once felt sitting beside his grandfather in a church pew.

“And you’re … okay?” Alex asked. “No demon urges?”

Plenty. But none he couldn’t control. “I’m fine,” he said. “Maybe because there’s a stable nexus here.”

“A portal.”

“A door at least. Access to all the demonic power the ritual requires. No need to tap a reserve supply.”

It was little more than a theory, but he was glad he could simply be himself tonight, without the demon roaring to the fore.

As the delegates hummed and chanted, Darlington gestured to Alex and they slipped behind the waterfall. It was darker here. The air still glimmered with pollen, but it was cooler, the sound of the waterfall a steady counterpart to the rise and fall of the chanting in the temple room.

Shelves full of canopic jars lined the stone walls. It felt a bit like being inside a cave and he thought of Dante again, the journey out of hell, the promise of the stream. But maybe it was Plato’s cave he should be thinking of and the shadows that might yet be made real.

Alex tapped the glass casket used to display the sarcophagus, which was itself made of white stone embellished with paint and gold ornament. Now Darlington understood why Dawes had noted the breastplate. It wasn’t even close to the right period. It didn’t match the sarcophagus and presumably the mummy inside.

The thermos full of tea Dawes had brewed up would handle any electronic alarm system, but magical warding was another story.

He reached into his bag and removed a pouch of powdered alabaster, clary sage, and ground beetles from the tomb of Willard Duncan Vandiver, the Missouri congressman who had delivered the “show me” speech that had given the state its nickname. It was absurd, but some of the easiest magic was based on wordplay.