I CRAWLED TO the edge of the pit and pushed forward to stare into the blinding, choking dust.
"Del!"
Ric had dived atop me, defending me but also holding me back. I made my fingers into claws and held even harder onto the crumbling stone edge.
"Quicksilver! He's down there, Ric!"
"I saw."
"Did the arrow-?"
"I don't know if it struck him," Ric shouted as chaos sounded around us. "He knocked you below the arrow's arc, but he had to overshoot the edge to do it. He vanished with the arrow. Shezmou's head-tossing is keeping the pit dust stirred up. You can't see a thing. It's like looking for a window into a muddy river. Get up, Del. They're still trying to kill us."
"I can't just-"
Ric pulled me half upright, turning me away from the pit. All I could see was the headless carcass of a fallen chariot bull behind us, the mummified bull Ric had animated long enough to charge the royal chariot. He dragged me to it.
Like Custer and his men facing the Sioux at Little Big Horn, we hunkered down behind the slain mount. Peering over that huge but now fragile barrier, we could see the still-linked gazelles racing away, reins and harnesses trailing, into the maze of pillars. The Twin Pharaohs' golden chariot stood marooned where it had rolled to a stop in front of the stone forest, facing the pit.
The Twin Pharaohs stood as still as the pillar figures in their gorgeous, golden toy, armed but isolated figures, leaders cut off from their troops and even retreat.
Quicksilver had accomplished that as well as saving me from their arrow.
Meanwhile, packs of fully physical hyenas poured through the pillars to surround and guard the royals, snapping formidable jaws that could sever bone. And the sandals of spear-bearing foot soldiers slapped stone as if stomping scorpions while rushing over the fallen bull-drawn chariots to engage Shezmou and Bez in the space between them and the pit.
I braced my arms and used the silver staff to pull upright. Apparently the familiar had known I'd shortly need literal support.
Then the forward charge faltered. Shezmou and Bez had been recognized. Gods might seem human, but true Egyptians had no heart to fight them.
Shez stretched an imperious arm and staff to the assembling warriors. Spears arced and fell useless at the feet of our new friends. The warriors' god-driven fear made them pile up on each other, halted like the waves of the Red Sea before Moses. Attackers stopped, quieted, and became audience.
Shez paced back and forth in front of his should-be worshippers and their feral pets, challenging them with fists and roaring voice, letting his opinions be known.
"Who has kept Shezmou, headsman to the mighty god Osiris, chained and mute all these centuries in this low, unembellished place, neither tomb nor temple?"
Shezmou raged on. "It is my duty to help my lord Osiris administer the Land of the Dead. I separate the damned from the saved. You unnatural rulers, paired in your perversions," he thundered at Kephron and Kepherati. "You dishonor the gods and land by dining on your kind.
"True, I am the subject of the Book of the Dead's 'Cannibal Hymn.' That is my privilege for making bloodwine of evil souls. Drinking their bad blood is my duty. Mine alone! I am the god! For millennia, you have not allowed your soiled souls to make the sacred transition through the Underground to the Afterlife.
"I, Shezmou, will crush your fanged heads like rotten grapes overripe on the vine. So come, feel my vengeful grasp, taste my wrath. Die the ultimate death you have averted for so long and deserved for so long. Before you touch yet another of these Children of the Caves, you will feel your own eyeballs spurting away like seeds and your heads rolling speechless into the pit."
An awesome address, but even hyenas that have been granted both physical and spirit form are still merely brute beasts at bottom and not responsive to oratory, or to those who look like mere men and would be gods.
The massing hyena packs broke into the eerie hooting calls of their breed, then dug in their low-slung rear quarters and leaped forward to drive the puny men, midgets, and women into the choking, festering pit behind them. If we could hardly breathe at the brink of it, how could Quicksilver survive at its unguessed bottom depths?
He was a supernaturally smart dog and devoted to me, I told myself, but that hadn't kept Achilles from contracting fatal blood poisoning from biting a vampire in my defense back in Kansas.
Neither hoping nor mourning was any longer an option.
As the wall of caterwauling hyenas leaped at us, I had to join Ric and Shez and Bez in repelling the repellent. No matter how much my heart called to Quicksilver in the fuming pit behind me, instinct and comradeship made me stand my ground and face whatever the immortal pharaohs could fling at us.
"Delilah!" I seemed to hear my name screeched. "Delilah-aha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!"
My braced silver staff shivered at the impact of one furry chest. I did as Shezmou and Bez did, used the animals' charging weight to fling them aside so they plunged into the pit. I felt like I was stabbing Quicksilver over and over.
Sounds of growling and snapping echoed off every stone surface. I glanced up at Shezmou's pillar, hoping his bigger-than-life image would step from the stone to turn the tide of battle. But what was etched in Vegas, stayed etched in Vegas. At least the god's man-figure had more than mortal strength.
Ric was holding his own in casting hyenas to their howling deaths below. I was startled to glimpse a silver aura around him as he caught a hyena neck in his bare hands. I'd glimpsed our conjoined multicolored auras in his bathroom mirror the first time we'd made love. This was war, not love, but I sensed a new link between us.
The hyenas' small dark eyes blinked shut against a metallic flash that pierced them. They seemed limp as he cast them away. I almost felt sorry for these cousins of Quicksilver.
No, wait. I'd looked them up. Hyenas were related to cats and mongooses, not dogs. I hurled with fresh zest.
The charging line of vampire warriors behind them was nothing to feel sorry for. How awful to see those calm, noble wall visages flaunting jaws that could drop inhumanly open, showcasing fangs as overdeveloped as a saber-tooth tiger's on a smaller, though no less lethal, scale.
Instinctively, we four had made a line, with Ric and Shez turning sideways to guard our flanks. We were slowly being forced forward away from the pit, making us harder to push in, but also in more danger of being surrounded and overrun.
My arms and legs ached almost beyond feeling from wielding the solid silver staff. Its weight was starting to hurt me as much as my enemies. And the familiar was showing an aggravating lack of innovation. Why didn't it morph into a rocket launcher, for instance, so I could take out the oncoming lines of warriors bursting through the stone pillars?
Ric and Shez had moved forward to shelter Bez and me. Our flanks would be history any minute now.
Us too.
Perhaps Shez and Bez couldn't die, but Ric and I certainly could.
Weariness must cause hallucinations. I watched a feathered arrow arch over our small force into the massed ranks, felling a warrior, whose prone body in turn felled two more.
More arrows in quick succession, graceful and swift, snapping into flesh and bone with a low, razor-like zing.
Only the royal pair had borne bow and arrows in their chariot. Had their men somehow taken the empty pole and worked the chariot around behind us?
An oversize Egyptian warrior fought his way to my right side. Not Shez, but almost as tall. He wore the same black, braided wig, the forerunner of modern dreadlocks. Had another pillar god escaped the stone to become an avatar? Which one now?
I dared a glance to muscular Egyptian-brown leg and hip under a kilt covered with rich turquoise and carnelian beads. Across his bare brown chest a sling held a full quiver to his back. Silver-tipped arrows from that quiver flew so fast over Shez and Ric's heads that fallen Egyptian vampire warriors piled up as high as the toppled bull carcasses.
What ancient Egyptian god-made-man was this? I scanned the pillars, but found no massive human-headed figure other than Shezmou's. The demigod's bow action kept him in the strict profile of the tomb paintings. He wore no uraeus or headdress as Shez did.
Still, his silver-tipped arrows stopped the vampire hordes like holy water in a seventies Hammer vampire movie.
If the new guy's silver-tipped arrows didn't actually slay the vamps, it didn't matter. It slowed them long enough for Shezmou to leap forward like a starving hyena, twist off their heads, and throw them in the pit. Neat. His ancient modus operandi echoed the later European method of killing the immortal pestilence.
Silver certainly empowered others besides me. Maybe Ric and my conjoined talents had called this silver-armed warrior. My silver medium, mirror-walking, CinSim Silver Screen-loving ways made me an unpredictable player on the Las Vegas Supernatural Follies stage, even to myself.
I could only hope the dog I'd named Quicksilver had picked up some of my quirky powers with the pale precious metal or harbored more supernatural ones of his own than I had ever dreamed...
