I am often reminded how a small fire underneath a vast sky can bind people together like nothing else. For all that we are social creatures, we are too often shoved into solitary confinement by circumstance. The color of our skin isn’t like everyone else’s, or our language is different, or our religion isn’t the one that gets us invited to dinner by the neighbors. That last one has kept me alone for a long, long time. There are no more Druids walking the earth, unless you count the various neo-pagan versions, who are all operating on nineteenth-century reconstructions.

And despite the fact that I have an apprentice, I suspect she won’t be the same sort of Druid that I am—I mean believing in the old Irish gods as I do, paying them respect and offering them prayers, observing the holidays and the rites as the Irish used to do in the days before the invasion of the Christians. Gaia doesn’t require belief in any deity to be bound to her: She merely requires a highly trained mind and unswerving devotion to her protection. With Granuaile I think there is a willingness to see the divine, to acknowledge and appreciate both its wonder and terror, but a stubborn resistance to worshipping it.

But she liked staring into campfires well enough. Fires were warm cups of non-thinking serenity after the daily rigors of training. I had been exhausting her mentally with languages and headspace exercises and then physically with the martial arts. By the time the sun sank behind the baked sandstone cliffs of the Navajo Nation each day, she was ready to lose herself in the yellow and orange flickers of flame. And quiz me about my past.

“Ugh,” she said, flopping on the ground by our fire pit and popping open a bottle of beer with a hiss and clink as the top fell to the ground. “What a day. Wish I could just upload kung fu like Neo instead of learning it the slow way.” She leaned back against a rock padded with a bedroll and took a swig, winced at some ache or soreness in her muscles, then said, “Tell me about the old days, Atticus, when you were wee and had to walk both ways uphill in feces because no one had toilets.”

“You seriously want to hear about that?”

“Well, I’d like to hear about some old shit, but it doesn’t need to include actual shit, if that helps. I’m tired, damn it. Just tell me a story.”

<Hey, I know what you should tell us,> Oberon said through our mental link. He was stretched out by the fire, lying across my feet, belly up for easy rubbing. Granuaile couldn’t hear him, but she could follow along because I spoke my part of the conversation aloud.

“What’s that, Oberon?”

<Remember that time we were chased through Cairo by all of the cats ever? Because there was that cat goddess who was mad at you?>

“Oh, you mean Bast. Yes, I remember. Hard to forget something like that.”

<Tell us why she was mad at you.>

“You already know why she was mad. She wanted me to return the book of her cult’s mysteries that I had stolen long ago.”

<Right, but you never told me the details. Where’d you steal it from? Why’d you want to steal a book full of cat people having sex anyway? Was it guarded by mummies? And did they smell bad or ask you to change their bandages?>

“Oh, I see. Heh! Yes, I suppose that would be a good story for the night. Wow, this is going way back to the third century. I was still haunting Europe at the time.”

“Wait, Atticus, hold on,” Granuaile said. “Is this going to take a while?”

“I’m not sure. Is there some hurry?”

“I don’t want to interrupt you in the middle of it. I should answer the call of nature first.”

<That’s my favorite call! I can always pee.>

“Good call, then. We’ll reconvene after a few words from nature.”

Some hiding places are better than others. The ones with friendly company are the best, and by friendly I mean people who don’t particularly care about your background or what your tattoos mean. They just want a name to call you by, a sense that you’ll pull your own weight and contribute to the group’s survival, and maybe the occasional joke or roll in the hay. I miss the days of easy anonymity, when I could just make up a name when I got to a village and stay there as long as I could keep from using any magic that would give my position away to the Fae. I met new friends, made myself useful, and disappeared for years at a time.

That didn’t mean I was impossible to find. The Morrigan could find me pretty much anytime she wanted. On this particular occasion, she found me hanging out with the Visigoths in what is now the southern tip of modern-day Moldova, since I was doing my best to avoid the Roman Empire. She lighted in a tree as I was collecting deadwood for the night’s fire, and her eyes glowed red to demonstrate that she wasn’t the average crow. I looked around. It was just me out there.

“Hi, Morrigan. Looks like the coast is clear. You need to tell me something?”

She flew down to the ground and shifted to her human form, the red coals in her eyes dying out. “Hello, Siodhachan. Yes, I am here to deliver a message. Ogma needs to see you rather urgently. You must go now to meet him in Byzantium.”

“Byzantium? But that’s a mess right now.”

The Visigoths I was staying with were a part of that mess, in fact. Byzantium—indeed, most of the Roman Empire—was suffering what historians now call the “Crisis of the Third Century,” dealing with various invasions from its borders while internally their currency was taking a gigantic shit on the tiled mosaics of their bathhouse floors, and they had a string of military leaders taking turns at being emperor. The Morrigan came to see me in 269, right before Aurelian came to power and started to piece the empire back together.

“It’s going to get worse, especially down in Egypt. I have seen it.”

“Seen what, exactly?”

The tiniest of smirks lifted one corner of the Morrigan’s mouth. “I have seen you in danger there. So clearly you must go.”

“Somehow your words fail to motivate me.”

“I’m not supposed to motivate you to go down there. Ogma will do that. I just need you to go see him in Byzantium.”

“You need me to? Why? What’s in this for you?”

“Favors. The finest currency of them all.”

That was less than subtle. I owed the Morrigan several favors, if not my life, and saying no to her was not an option. “Where in Byzantium?”

“There is a public house called Caesar’s Cup. Ogma will be waiting there.”

“It’s going to take me a while.”

“He is aware. But you had best get started.”

“Right. Farewell, Morrigan.”

“Until next time, Siodhachan.” She shifted back to her crow form and flew off into the dusk. I hauled my wood back to the village, got the evening’s communal fire started, then packed my few belongings and slipped into the darkness while everyone was eating their dinner.

Weeks later I strode into Caesar’s Cup, all my tattoos hidden to disguise my Druidry, pretending to be just another Roman citizen out for a drink. Ogma was indeed there, seated at the end of a bench table, his head shaven and his tattoos concealed as well, nursing a goblet of what passed for expensive wine at the time and a board of bread and cheese.

He bobbed his head at me and gestured that I should sit down across from him.

“No names in here,” he said. “Speak Latin with me. Have a cup?”

“Sure.” He called for one and poured me a deep red vintage before continuing.

“Well met. Did she tell you why I needed to see you?”

“Something involving Aegyptus, but no more than that.”

“Yes. The Palmyrans will revolt soon and Rome will answer in force. The great library in Alexandria will be in danger.”

I snorted. “It’s always in danger. Julius Caesar nearly burned it down a couple centuries ago.”

“We think this time it will be worse.”

“We?”

Ogma’s eyes shifted down the table to a couple of men who had drinks but weren’t talking to each other. They were most likely listening to us.

“Myself, my sister, and the crow.” He meant Brighid and the Morrigan. “Much knowledge will be lost forever. And some of that knowledge should be preserved. I’m interested in a few specific scrolls.”

Shrugging, I said, “That’s great. Why tell me?”

“I want you to fetch them for me.”

I stared at him in silence for perhaps three seconds, then looked down at my drink. “I don’t understand. You have all of my skills and more. Surely it must be simple for you to do it yourself?”

Ogma chuckled and I looked up. He was grinning widely. “It’s far from simple. It’s rather deadly, in fact. These scrolls are well protected.”

“It must be fantastic information.”

“It is. And right now you are probably wondering why you would ever agree to do this.”

“I admit that had crossed my mind.”

“You will do it because there is truly wondrous information there. Anything you take beyond what I require, you are free to keep.”

I cocked my head to one side. “Can you give me an example of what I might be able to take that’s worth risking my life?”

Ogma checked on the men, and they were still making no attempt to converse. He gestured to the rear of the house. “There is a poor excuse for a garden in back. Shall we take in some sun and continue there?”

“Sure.”

We rose, cups in hand, and strolled past tables and curious eyes. Being covered from the neck down stood out in the summer, especially in a culture where bare legs below the knee were common. Ogma changed his speech to Old Irish and spoke in low tones as we moved.

“Those men are inept but persistent. They have been following me since shortly after I arrived here. We’ll see if they abandon all pretense and come after us or not.”

The garden had only a couple of people in it, since it was hot outside and there was limited shade to be had; it was laid out in hedges and flower beds more than trees, and all were starving for water. The scant shelter afforded by the fronds of a lone thirsty palm was already occupied. We strolled to the far side opposite, in full sun but also far away from inquisitive ears. Ogma switched back to Latin and pitched his voice so that only I could hear, even though no one was nearby.

“To answer your question: In the library you will find the mysteries of gods far different from the Tuatha Dé Danann or others you may know. Rituals and spells and secrets long kept locked in the darkness, the kind of thing that might help you one day should Aenghus ever catch up to you. Wards that clumsy wizards can attempt only with great care and sacrifice but that you can adapt and re-craft into elegant bindings.”

“That doesn’t sound all that great to me.”

“Yes, it does. And besides, you are bored. You are, what, more than three hundred years old now? Living with the Visigoths for the last five?”

“They’re charming people and impressive open-air cooks. They know how to roast a rabbit on a spit, let me tell you. And they share amusing stories about their sex accidents.”

“Pfahh. You yearn for more than this, Siodhachan. You stole Fragarach from Conn of the Hundred Battles. You absorbed the most powerful herblore of Airmid and keep it close to your heart. You cannot tell me you are satisfied to live life as a drear pastoral, that you are content with all you know and will never seek to know more.”

“That may all be true. But that does not mean I am anxious to seek my death in Alexandria for your benefit, Ogma, begging your pardon.”

“It is for your benefit too, as I said. And if you do this for me, Siodhachan, I will owe you a favor. That is currency of far more value than any Roman coin.”

He spoke Truth with a capital T there. When a god says he’ll owe you a solid, unspecified, bona fide favor, you need to take time to consider whether you might not be passing up the opportunity of a lifetime. Or indeed something that might preserve your life later on: Some favors, called in at the right time, might equal a Get Out of Death Free card. Though it was clear that Ogma would not be around to get me out of any problems in Alexandria. Whatever he considered to be so deadly there would be doubly so for me.

“I’m not agreeing yet,” I told him, “but you have my attention at least. Tell me more. What am I after, where do I find it, and what’s in my way?”

Ogma smiled as victors do, drank deeply, and refilled both our cups before answering.

“There is a sealed room of treasures beneath the library, similar to the burial chambers of pharaohs in their pyramids. Inside there are some scrolls and even a few bound books. There may be some scepters and the like, remarkable for their power more than their beauty. I want a bundle of four scrolls sealed in a lacquered box marked with the eye of Horus. You are familiar with that symbol?”

“Yes. But it’s fairly common, isn’t it? There might be many such boxes.”

“There are not.”

“If the room is sealed, how do you know that?”

“The Tuatha Dé Danann have their own all-seeing eyes.”

“Ah. The Morrigan?”

“Indeed.”

“What’s so special about these scrolls?”

The god of languages shrugged. “I can’t be sure until I read them.” A transparent evasion that meant he’d rather not tell me.

“Who built the room and sealed it, then?”

“Whoever built it is no doubt dead. But at least part of it is supposed to be the private hoard of the Egyptian goddess Seshat.”

“I’m not familiar with her.”

“Goddess of writing and preserving knowledge.”

“Ah. Preserving knowledge. I imagine in this case she’s preserving it from would-be thieves.”

“Yes. You may reasonably expect some curses.”

“Such as?”

“I have no idea.”

I threw up my hands. “This chamber is underground and sealed in dead, quarried stone, right? I’ll be cut off from Gaia and essentially powerless. I don’t see how it can be done.”

Ogma nodded at me, offering a small smirk. He’d anticipated the objection. “I have something that will help with that, at least.”

He reached into the folds of his tunic and withdrew a golden torc etched in knotwork. “I worked with Brighid on this.”

“Brighid is involved?”

“Yes. She wants to see those scrolls as well.” He handed the torc to me. “That has some energy stored inside that you can draw upon.”

I traced my finger along some of the knotwork. “Are these wards?”

“They are. Broad-spectrum protection against a few classes of Egyptian curses that we’ve seen before.”

“When?”

“In antiquity. Shortly after the Tuatha Dé Danann were bound to Gaia in response to the death of the Saharan elemental.”

“Oh. That makes sense.”

“We came to restore what order we could and bind the dispersed free magic back to the Nile, if nothing else. The Egyptian pantheon was … less than welcoming. These wards allowed us to escape alive. They won’t deflect the curses entirely, but they should reduce their severity.”

“What are you not telling me? Did someone die back then?”

“Of course. We could not have devised wards if we had not seen their curses in effect first.”

“So even though you have this, you won’t go fetch the scrolls yourself. Why?”

Ogma pointed to the torc. “Those wards worked thousands of years ago. But they might have new curses now.”

I exhaled audibly and shook my head. “This is going to be a pretty huge favor you’re going to owe me. What bewilders me is that it’s even something to be risked. Why bother writing down something they don’t want anyone else to know? Why not simply keep the secrets in an oral tradition, like we do?”

“Shared knowledge can weigh heavy in the scales of power,” he replied, and I have seen the truth of it since. “Controlling what you want shared is always the issue, and writing down nothing is the most extreme method of control. But while this preserves our secrets, it also limits our ability to spread our wisdom, does it not? Think of this new religion being spread from Jerusalem called Christianity. They have written down some stories about this Jesus fellow and are spreading it around much faster than we can spread the tenets of Druidry. Few people can read, but his priests hold up some pages and say, ‘Christ will return! It is written,’ and people accept it as truth. I fear what will happen when these priests appear in Ireland. There are mysteries in the written word as well as the spoken one. Think on it, Siodhachan.”

The two men who’d been listening to us inside emerged from the back door at that point and spotted us huddled together, talking over a ring of solid gold that would command a rich price in the market. That, apparently, was cause enough for them to cease their incompetent spying and switch to open belligerence.

“Begging your pardon,” one said, thick-necked and swinging arms like pork haunches, “but are you both Roman citizens?”

Citizens were afforded certain rights and could go where they pleased. Those who were not could be harassed or jailed for little or no cause by the Roman authorities. We weren’t citizens and they probably already knew that, so it was obvious that they meant to establish it, then find a thin excuse to confiscate the torc.

“Camouflage,” Ogma whispered, and he promptly winked out of sight, binding his pigments to his surroundings. I didn’t have my charms back then or his powers, so I had to take off a sandal to draw upon the earth before speaking the binding aloud. While I did that, the two men shouted at Ogma’s disappearance and told me not to move. I didn’t move, but I did fade from their sight a few seconds later.

They cursed and then looked around, as if I might have just moved really quickly when they blinked. It’s a natural reaction people tend to have when they see someone disappear, and I always took advantage. While they had their eyes pointed elsewhere, I took the opportunity to move a bit, as quietly as I could, and no doubt Ogma was doing the same thing. That was necessary because the next natural reaction to sudden disappearance is to poke the air where we had been standing. Sure enough, they stepped forward, hands outstretched in disbelief but needing to confirm that we were really gone. They grabbed nothing but air, even though I had stopped very close by. I could have reached out and slapped the thick-necked fellow on his shoulder. His companion, a lean younger man with whipcord musculature, offered a quiet theory.

“I’ve heard of this kind of thing happening before. They might be Druids.”

“Druids? Here? I thought they were in Gaul.”

The lean one nodded. “That’s where I’ve heard of such disappearances. But then the legions still get them, because they don’t really leave. They are still here; we just can’t see them. But maybe we can bleed them.” He reached for his gladius and had it halfway out when the left side of his face mashed in with a sound like wet meat slapped on a butcher’s block, and teeth flew out of his mouth in a spray of blood. Ogma had sucker-punched him, and he collapsed. Taking my cue, I laid into Thick Neck from the opposite direction and broke a knuckle on his jaw. Still, he went down, and neither of them would be in shape to pursue us soon.

“Let’s continue elsewhere,” Ogma said in Old Irish to me. “We’ll need to leave the city. Word will spread to look for two Druids.”

“Right.”

We left the two spies moaning in the dirt, slipped out of the public house, and dropped camouflage on the street. Some people were startled by our appearance but didn’t think anything of it except that they had missed us somehow. We walked briskly to the nearest gate and exited before word could reach the guards to be on the lookout for suspicious types like us.

“Well? What say you, Siodhachan?” Ogma asked. “Will you fetch those scrolls, take whatever else you like, and earn a favor? Or will you leave this treasure to be destroyed by the Romans?”

I didn’t like his either-or framing of the issue but didn’t think it wise to comment. “When must it be done?” I asked instead.

“You do have some time to get there, but the sooner, the better. You don’t want to be caught in the city when rebellion arrives and the Romans respond. That’s what Brighid has seen.”

“There are no groves for me to use to shift down there?”

“Unfortunately not.”

“Weeks on horseback, then. But every step will be farther from Aenghus Óg. All right, Ogma. I’ll do it.”

“Excellent.”

I shook my hand once out of town and cast a healing spell to bind the broken knuckle back together, sure that it was only the beginning of what waited ahead.

Outside the great library of Alexandria, my nose inhaled salt and fish and baked stone, sweat and blood and rotting garbage. Inside it was different: dust and musty lambskin, inks and glues settling into papyrus, and the occasional whiff of perfumed unguents desperately trying to distract from the scent of an unwashed pair of armpits.

I stabled my horse prior to entering, double-checked my clothing to be sure my tattoos were hidden, and also stuffed what gamers today might call a mighty bag of holding into my robes, concealing Fragarach there as well. Then it was smiling and nodding and a few quick exchanges in Coptic. Most of the scrolls were not free to be browsed. Rather, one had to request information from a librarian and the relevant material would be fetched. There were, however, some shelves one could browse on the main floor, and I pretended to do that while searching for a set of stairs leading downward. Once I found a doorway into which librarians came and went, I put the golden torc Ogma had given me about my neck and felt the power waiting there. I drew on some of it to cast camouflage and entered the stairwell, arriving in a basement thick with dust and disuse. Shelves rose up the walls and also in rows between support pillars. After a quick circuit informed me that few librarians came down here and they were heard before they were seen, I dispelled camouflage to preserve energy. The pillars, I noticed, were covered in hieroglyphs—somewhat unusual, since hieroglyphs had passed out of usage hundreds of years ago. There were also some passages of Demotic, perhaps intended to function much the way the Rosetta stone did, helping modern readers to decipher the glyphs, but that language was already dying out in favor of Coptic.

Ogma had been unclear about the exact location of the sealed chamber or how I was to find it. Seshat had not only sealed the entrance, she had hidden it. Despite not being able to read the hieroglyphs, I examined the pillars closely, one by one, until I identified the eye of Horus present on three of them but not the others. I returned to each of these and examined them more closely, searching for a pattern or any kind of clue that would point the way to Seshat’s chamber. I pressed the eyes. I searched the shelves on either sides of the pillars for any irregularities. I looked for cracks in the pillars that might indicate there was a hidden door and a stairwell inside a hollow column. Nothing. Twice I had to hide from approaching footsteps and wait for the librarian to move on.

It required rethinking. The three pillars marked with the eye of Horus necessarily formed the points of a triangle, but it dawned upon me as I checked their relative positions that the triangle in question was a perfect isosceles, like the pyramids. A bit of experimentation and visualization led me to an aisle with no pillars in it, which represented the approximate center of the triangle. Keeping my eyes on the floor, I soon came across the faint tracing of the eye of Horus etched into the stone. Kneeling down, I saw that there was a fine tracery of lines around the etching that indicated the eye might sink into the ground as a contiguous sigil. It wasn’t large enough to be accidentally stepped on and activated, though. A firm press of the thumb might work, but I didn’t want to try it without a large dollop of caution. Accessing the power waiting in the torc, I lifted the veil of my mundane vision and took a look at the etching through magical sight.

It was a simple button, pushing a lever that appeared to activate a series of stone gears hidden below my feet, though it wouldn’t work without a magic release first; it would behave as if stuck. Unsticking it, I surmised, would require doing something underneath the massive shelf to my left, stacked high with scrolls protected in wooden boxes. The red magical bindings circling the button streaked that way until they disappeared.

I doubted I could move the entire shelf by myself or that I should even try. The binding might actually continue beyond into other aisles, and I checked first to make sure. No: The binding terminated underneath the shelf. I returned to the aisle with the eye in the floor and examined the bottom shelf. There was one boxed scroll with the eye of Horus painted on the end in faded blue. That had to be a clue. It didn’t appear to be trapped or have any juju surrounding it, so I carefully extracted the box from underneath the others, opened it, and unrolled the scroll inside, returning my vision to the mundane in the process.

It was a map of the chamber below, in which the cartouche repeated a warning in hieroglyphs, Demotic, and Coptic that only high priests may enter without consequence. I was about to ask, “High priests of what?” but there were hieroglyphic representations of several deities below that presumably answered that question. I recognized Horus, Anubis, Osiris, Isis, Bast, Taweret, and one other I expected thanks to Ogma: Seshat.

Once I entered, there would be a button to close the opening behind me and then a series of seven rooms off a single hallway: three on each side and a large one at the end. That was six more chambers than Ogma had told me to expect, and none of them was labeled helpfully with THIS ONE HAS THAT THING OGMA WANTS. In fact, they weren’t labeled at all, and neither were there any instructions on how to open the chamber in the first place. As Ogma said to me in Byzantium, there are ways to control what gets shared. The arrow and instructions in Demotic and Coptic on how to close the chamber once inside were the only available clues to what I might find down there. But there were seven deities pictured and seven chambers; perhaps they were proprietary and I would simply need to find the one with a graven image of Horus on it—or Seshat, since I’d been told she was in charge of protecting this knowledge.

There still remained the problem of how to get down there. Perhaps the shelving warranted more attention.

I cleared away all the scrolls, boxed and unboxed, that covered the space over which the red streak of bindings had disappeared— that included the boxed scroll with the eye of Horus on it. What confronted me was a black expanse of shadow, which lacked promise, except perhaps for the promise of spiders.

Casting night vision allowed me to see that there was a hole drilled in the bottom of the shelving, about the circumference of a thumb and forefinger held up in an “okay” sign. It did not allow me to see what was in the hole. Should I stick a finger in there or not? I decided I could live without a pinkie if I had to, so I went with that first. I snaked it in there, felt around, felt the stone floor beneath it. Nothing bit me.

Feeling more confident, I placed my left thumb inside and pressed down. The stone floor sank beneath it and a dull click echoed in the silence, but nothing else happened. Dissolving night vision and switching to magical sight, I saw that the red binding with the bookshelf had vanished. The button in the middle of the floor should now function like one. I pushed down on it with my right thumb and then scrambled away as the floor rumbled and cracked beneath me. The stone irised open like a manhole, and a ladder made of stone rungs dared me to descend. I took the dare, night vision on, and found the button advertised by the map that would close the door. It also turned on the lights: not electric ones, but green flames in sconces placed halfway up the walls of the hallway, fueled by nothing visible that I could see. The word for it didn’t exist back then, but they were fucking eldritch, and it was awesome.

As an experiment I pressed the button again, and the lights went out as the portal opened once more. Escape route established, I closed it again and turned on the eldritch flames.

Before proceeding, I pulled Fragarach and my booty bag from my robes. I slung the bag and the sword over opposite shoulders and drew Fragarach from its sheath. I wanted to be ready for anything.

First door on the left bore the imprimatur of Taweret, the hippo goddess, which was often used as a sigil of protection. I knew better than to mess with her chamber. If there was ever a trap laid for thieves, this was it. On the right was Isis, and I didn’t feel especially safe messing with her either. But next on the left was Bast, and I’m not really a cat person.

There was no Demotic or Coptic on the doors to help me figure out what waited inside, only hieroglyphs, but there was a fairly obvious circle of stone to push to the left of the door. It slid open under my hand with a grating noise, lights bloomed inside, and I was treated to a wonder far beyond what Howard Carter found in the tomb of King Tutankhamun. Gold and obsidian figures of Bast, lapis lazuli and alabaster and more: scrolls and books of bound vellum, many of them written in Demotic and Coptic. That’s where I found the book of Bast’s sex mysteries bound in catskin leather, but I also found the sort of thing that Ogma suggested I might find useful: a scroll detailing protective wards—none of which, I noted, were in force on the chamber itself. The finely carved art, however, viewed in the magical spectrum, was surrounded with wards, which I studied but did not disturb.

Across the hall was the chamber of Osiris, and nothing in there had any protection as far as I could tell. Perhaps his high priests figured that after returning from the dead, his worldly possessions didn’t matter all that much. I snaffled a few promising scrolls and books and moved on.

The next two doors belonged to Anubis and Seshat. I didn’t want any part of Anubis, and Seshat’s door, which was supposedly my target, was warded with layers of protections, truly dizzying stuff that could not have been laid down by some priest. The quantity and quality of the mojo I was seeing had to be the work of the goddess herself, and I am not ashamed to say it caused a nervous gulp. Up to that point I could pretend I was merely tiptoeing through the treasures of men, and men I could usually handle. It’s very sobering to realize you are only a step or two away from incurring the wrath of a goddess with no softness in her heart for Irish lads. It was time to finish the job and get out of there, and I hoped I could finish it without trying to go through that door.

The chamber of Horus was the large one in the back, and like the rooms of Bast and Osiris, it was simple to enter. I decided to pursue it, since my target might logically be inside and it was at least accessible, where Seshat’s chamber practically vibrated with bad omens. Unlike the chambers of Bast and Osiris, though, it was not a simple security situation inside.

For one thing, there was the body on the floor just inside the entrance. It wasn’t fresh, and it wasn’t a mummy either. Scarabs and worms were at him, and maybe you could fix the smell with a wagonload of rose petals, but I doubted it. I covered my nose and breathed through my mouth as I inspected him from the hallway, never crossing the threshold.

He’d been in his thirties or late twenties, judging by his wrinkle-free skin, or what was left of it. No obvious signs of violence like a caved-in skull or a spear lodged in his rib cage. His fingernails, however, were torn and sometimes missing, which provided my main clue to what had happened. He’d entered, the door had shut behind him, and that was it. He was trapped without food or water or a handy way of calling for help, because of course this entire area was a secret chamber underneath a basement where only librarians occasionally trod. He had no doubt screamed to no avail. So he had gone mad with fear over his inevitable death and tried to claw his way out—which told me there wasn’t a way to open the door from the inside.

That made me check out the door a bit more closely, because it was different from the others, which were standard rectangular jobs that moved via a system of pulleys and counterweights inside the walls. Horus’s door was circular, and its mechanical design allowed it to open and close much faster. Pressing the button on the left side caused part of the floor to sink down, creating a slope that let it roll away and slam to a stop inside. Presumably the floor inside the wall would rise when it was time to close the door, and the slab would roll back into position. I wasn’t sure yet how the trap had been sprung on this fellow, but I sure wasn’t going to let it happen to me.

Drawing on some more of the torc’s energy, I thoroughly bound the stone door to its stone enclosure—especially the floor— making sure it would remain open and never roll back into place, even if I tripped the same trap as the unfortunate thief.

Once satisfied, I stepped over the threshold and the body and inspected the goods. Osiris had protected nothing, and Bast protected only the glorious statuettes of her feline magnificence. Horus, or his priests, had laid down protections on the majority of the items I saw spread out before me, but there was no discernible pattern to it—other than some personally assigned value system, I supposed. I also spied what looked like a magical alarm tripwire running along the floor just in front of where all the goodies rested, a good distance away from the door. That was it: Approach the valuables, trip the magical switch, and the door closed. I stepped on the trip and wiggled around on it. The door remained open.

That, however, was the easy part. Finding Ogma’s happy lacquer box o’ scrolls was going to be far more difficult, especially if they weren’t there at all but in Seshat’s chamber. The shelves in the room had once been orderly, but before his demise the dead man had indulged in a tantrum and swept things onto the floor or thrown them about the room.

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.

While I was casting that, Horus looked down briefly at his wound and screeched. His voice modulated into some kind of low-frequency chirps after that, either cooking up a heal or a buff or something to snuff me. I didn’t want to let him finish.

The neuromuscular boost snapped through my body like a tuning fork and I lunged forward, fully expecting to be parried by the scepter this time, and I was: Horus could definitely sense it somehow, despite my camouflage. But I followed up with a straight kick to the gut and that got through easily, forcing the breath from his lungs and cutting his chant short. He reeled back, stunned, and I pressed my advantage, kicking him right in the beak since his head was lowered. Horus squawked, reared, and nearly fell over backward, and I grinned as I realized what it meant: He could somehow sense my sword but not the rest of me. As long as I kept the sword away from my body, he couldn’t see my attacks coming. His first well-aimed strike at my head had been an excellent guess based on how I’d held Fragarach in my right hand.

I took too long to process that, however. Horus recovered and cried out, swinging his scepter in a twirling pattern very similar to the sort of thing that I now teach. I was still about seven centuries away from my martial-arts training in China, however, and I hadn’t seen that before. I backed up, thinking of how best to disrupt his flailing offensive and regain the advantage. If I could successfully interrupt him, he’d be vulnerable for a precious half second or more. Maybe. I didn’t know what counters he might have, honestly, and I felt outclassed.

But since he was focused on the location of my sword, I feinted right with it and then, as he swerved that way to knock it aside, I kicked from the left side. My foot caught his forearm and did interrupt the twirling, but the scepter slid through his hand to lengthen out at the top, and he whipped it in a vicious backhand swing that I couldn’t avoid. It caught me just below the collarbone, and I grunted and staggered back until stone stopped me.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t a mere wall: I’d been driven back into the ultra-warded door of Seshat’s chamber. I don’t know if it was Horus’s intention to do that, but it made him look damn clever.

My muscles spasmed and pain lanced through all my nerves as I collapsed to the ground, Seshat’s defensive wards lighting me up in spite of the supposed protective bindings woven into my torc. Ogma had said they might be only partially effective, and I screamed the Irish equivalent of “Fuck partiaaaal!” as I rolled away in a sort of fetal position to open up some distance between myself and Horus. I was practically back at his chamber door when I felt I could function again, and I realized that had it not been for the torc’s half-assed protection, Seshat’s wards might well have killed me instantly.

Horus certainly seemed to have expected it, for when I came to my feet, he was still where I’d last seen him, blinking in confusion. He clearly had driven me into those wards on purpose, and perhaps now he was feeling a measure of the uncertainty I was feeling: How in nine hells was I ever going to win this?

My personal calculus determined that it couldn’t be won but only escaped. He was a superior martial artist and not dependent on a limited supply of strength. I reminded myself that I only had to get past him, not destroy him.

He had no defensive martial screen in place now, so I charged, right arm held far out so that Fragarach would draw his attention and he’d therefore misjudge my center. He raised his scepter and brought it down in a two-handed swing just to the right of my body as I launched myself at his face, left foot extended for his throat. I withdrew my right arm as he committed, and his blow whiffed past my right side while my heel connected with his throat. He made a short choking noise and fell back, my foot planting on his chest as he fell, and I kept running for the exit.

Not that I got away without injury. He stabbed out blindly over his head with the scepter, and the sharpened steel crescent punched into my lower back just above my left ass cheek. I muttered a binding to keep all my blood inside and leave nothing for Horus to use later: It drew all the blood from his blade back into my body.

If adrenaline can add any speed to limbs already quickened by bindings, then it surely did at that point. I was down the hall and up the ladder before you could hum the triumphant opening bars to Star Wars.

But there was a figure waiting for me at the top, between the stacks, every bit as surprised to see me as I was to see her: Seshat, keeper of knowledge, whose wards had nearly snuffed me.

I knew who she was because she matched her hieroglyphic representation: a sheath of cheetah skin draped over her body and a headdress featuring seven points. Like Horus, she had a clue that I was in front of her, despite my camouflage. She hissed, muttered something in ancient Egyptian that I didn’t catch, and thrust a hand at me.

I felt as if I’d been thirsty for years—all the moisture of my throat sucked away and my breath choked off besides—but I spun around clockwise and ran past her to the stairwell that would lead to the ground floor and freedom. I sheathed Fragarach on my back, hoping that the leather might somehow have a cloaking effect on the Egyptian gods’ ability to target me. Nothing else hit as I ran, and I was able to reach the ground floor and even make it outside before I realized that I had been severely handicapped.

I breathed, “Thank the Morrigan, Brighid, and all the gods below,” once I thought myself safe, except that I heard not a syllable of it.

“What?” I said, except that once again there was no sound.

“Am I deaf? Am I mute?” Nothing.

It couldn’t be the former. I heard other noises—people walking, sandals grinding against stone. The torc ran out of energy, which caused my camouflage and increased speed to fizzle away, and then men passing by stared at me, a strange pale fire-haired man in the streets of Alexandria, and bid me peace in Coptic or Greek or Latin. Locusts buzzed in the date palms. Horse hooves clopped on the streets. My hearing functioned just fine.

“I’m mute,” I said, but heard neither word, and since I couldn’t be heard, I added, “Seshat has cursed me.” That was the buffet of throat shenanigans I’d felt, which Ogma’s torc had not prevented at all.

It was a perfect curse for someone wishing to protect secrets: Ensure that whoever stole them could never speak of them. And it was also the perfect curse for a Druid, since I couldn’t bind or unbind a damn thing without the ability to speak.

My exertions must have torn something, for my stab wound from Horus began to bleed freely and now I had nothing to stop it but manual pressure, since I’d been robbed of my power to bind it closed. But of Horus himself or Seshat, I saw no sign. Perhaps they had decided to track me later and were instead assessing what had been stolen.

I did think of asking an elemental to help with Seshat’s curse, but this was the one place in the world that didn’t have one, thanks to the wizard who’d consumed the Saharan elemental for his own purposes in the time of the pharaohs. The remnants of that magic formed the Nile elemental, but I would have to travel some distance out of Alexandria to reach its sphere of influence. I retrieved the horse I’d left at a stable and joined the light traffic of people heading to Cairo. As soon as I reached the delta area—it wasn’t all that far—I dismounted and reached out to the Nile through my tattoos, which didn’t require verbalization.

//Help Druid// I said. //Heal wound / Remove curse//

The healing began immediately, but the curse was a different matter. Nile finally had to ask me for clarification.

//Query: Curse?//

//Unable to speak// I explained. //Binding now impossible / Curse on throat needs removing//

There was a wait and then a disheartening reply: //Cannot remove//

Elementals don’t kid around. If the Nile said it couldn’t be done, then it couldn’t. What I didn’t understand was why, so I had to ask.

//Unfamiliar magic / Unbinding must be human craft// Nile said.

I sighed in defeat. I’d have to make it all the way back to Jerusalem and hope Ogma could unbind it.

//Or iron could eat it// Nile said, and my confusion must have been broadcast plainly, because the elemental continued. //Iron elemental can consume magic / Remove curse / Leave tattoos / I will control//

All I managed in reply was an //Okay// because I was a bit lost. My archdruid had never mentioned that anything of the kind was possible. We’d heard that there were lesser elementals running around associated with this or that, but it had never been suggested that we could communicate with them, much less ask them to be useful.

//Remain here / Iron elemental on way//

That was a worrisome time, because it was most of the day before one finally arrived. I spent it being eyed suspiciously by travelers worried that I was some kind of brigand lying in wait for them. And I worried that someone would try to take advantage of me, of course, but worried more that Horus or Seshat or even Bast would find me.

Perhaps they would come for me in the night, when they could pass among humans unnoticed. Or perhaps the reason they hadn’t found me was because they truly didn’t know where to look.

I considered my mighty bag of holding, which held many treasures now. Only those of Horus were cursed with an alarm or whatever he had on them: What if that curse provided not only an alarm but a location? If that were the case, the bag was the safest place possible for them. As soon as I touched them again, Horus would know where to find me. He was simply waiting for me to finger them.

Or they could probably find me and their lost treasures through divination; I wasn’t sure how proficient the Egyptian pantheon was at the art, but I felt sure they’d find me if I remained in one place too long.

The iron elemental arrived as the sun sank burning into the sands.

//Be seated and remain still// Nile said. //Touch left hand to sand//

I did so and black iron filings crawled up my arm like ants, crested my shoulder, and encircled my neck. For a brief time they formed a solid band and constricted, but before I could communicate my panic to Nile it loosened, the filings slid back down my arm, and I could talk again.

“Gah, thank the gods below!” I said. “Except maybe Ogma. Yeah. Let’s not thank him right now.”

//Gratitude// I told Nile, and then, after a sudden thought, added a request: //Query: Can iron elemental eat magic surrounding items inside bag?//

//Query: Which items? / Cannot see//

The road was clear at that moment, and no one was nearby. I upended the bag of holding over the sand, allowing the lacquered box and everything else to spill out without touching my hands. //These items / Please remove magic outside them but not inside//

I appended that last because the items inside the box might be fantastically powerful, but I didn’t particularly want to be carrying around cursed items that would summon Horus as soon as they were touched.

It was done in less than a minute. In the magical spectrum the box looked completely normal, and I placed it back inside the bag with a grin.

//Gratitude / Harmony// I said to Nile, and I rode out of there, powers restored, to meet Ogma in Jerusalem. Gaia and her elementals are ever our friends and salvation, even as Druids are theirs.

I made it to the Sinai Peninsula before I realized what a terrible error I had made and compounded it with another. Resting at an oasis during the heat of the day and assured of some privacy, I opened the books only, one by one, to evaluate what I’d managed to take for myself.

I began with the books I’d taken from Horus and that the iron elemental had attacked to eat away the curses I’d seen in the magical spectrum. Upon opening them, however, I discovered that they were entirely blank. I had no way of knowing if they had always been blank or if their contents had been erased by the wards on them once they left the room, or even accidentally destroyed by the iron elemental. Regardless, they were worthless, and Horus had lost nothing. I hoped that the scrolls inside the box were still valuable and worried that my entire infiltration had been for naught. I scrambled to check the rest of my haul.

The books of Osiris were still in fine shape, having no scrap of magic about them to begin with, and the knowledge inside regarding wards was priceless and worth the trip by themselves. I sighed in relief and thanked the gods below.

I went through Bast’s books last. One of them was the Grimoire of the Lamb, the true purpose of which I did not discover until centuries afterward, when someone came looking for it at Third Eye Books & Herbs. Another was full of descriptions of protective wards and, like the books of Osiris, proved quite valuable. The last was the book of Bast’s mysteries, which had a horrifying effect once opened and perused—though it quite literally crept up on me.

The text was in Coptic and I was reading through it, mouth half open in horror and unable to look away, like watching someone embarrass himself or rubbernecking at a traffic accident on the side of the road. And then my peaceful reading time was rent at once by yowling, screeching, and hissing from all directions. I scrambled to my feet and drew Fragarach, thinking I was under attack, but once I had time to assess the threat, I realized that I was surrounded by fucking cats! And by that I mean the cats were all actually, if grudgingly, fucking. They didn’t seem to enjoy it much, and maybe that’s why they were making such heinous noises. For the record, I didn’t enjoy it either, and honestly we should all be grateful that cats usually do this in the dead of night, well out of our sight, and usually as a couple rather than as a massive, writhing chorus of carnality. I dove back to the ground, closed the book, and soon afterward the cats stopped what they were doing and even ceased to be cats: They melted into the sands or the wind and disappeared entirely. And then I laughed, for I realized that Bast had woven an unseen curse into the book: Unless you were one of her high priests or otherwise approved, you couldn’t read it without being afflicted by a deafening, shivering, teeth-grinding feline orgy.

I met up with Ogma in Jerusalem some days later and handed over the lacquered box of scrolls. He opened it, briefly unrolled and inspected the scrolls within, and then beamed at me.

“You owe me big for that,” I reminded him, wagging a finger at the scroll. “I got stabbed. Lost my voice. Had to listen to the worst cat sex ever. Someday I will send you on an impossible quest.”

“Understood,” he said, and held out a hand, palm up. “The torc, if you please?”

“That’s not a keeper, eh?”

“No.”

“Ah, well.” I delivered it to him, and he radiated smug contentment as he put it away out of my sight and followed it with the lacquered box. We stood soon afterward, hugged, and made our farewells, he to return to Tír na nÓg, I to some new quiet village out of the Roman Empire.

Unfortunately, all Druids heard shortly thereafter through local elementals that they were no longer welcome in Egypt. But I can tell you that the treasures I saw in those rooms in Alexandria have never been found by modern archaeologists, and I suspect they’re still hidden away somewhere, guarded now entirely by Seshat’s wards.

“Wait,” Granuaile said. “No, that can’t be the end! What was in the box Ogma wanted?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know, beyond the fact that it was full of scrolls, and I never will. I gave it to him without question. You can think of it as the briefcase Jules and Vincent were after in Pulp Fiction: very shiny but forever a mystery.”

“You seriously never looked?”

“Wasn’t my business. I wanted a future favor more than I wanted whatever was in that box. And besides, I had plenty of other material to keep me company.”

<You’re not talking about your further adventures with the cat-sex book, I hope.>

“No, Oberon, I’m not talking about Bast’s mysteries. I mean all the other things I stole. I learned so much from what I stole. I still use that information today; Third Eye Books & Herbs was partially protected using Egyptian techniques. And I carefully neglected to tell Ogma about the potential usefulness of iron elementals.”

“Oh? Does that mean the Tuatha Dé Danann never summon them?” Granuaile asked.

“That’s right. I mean, I’ve told the Morrigan about them now, but I doubt she’ll be making friends with one quickly.”

My apprentice’s eyes grew wide and she shook her head a couple of times but said nothing.

“It was running that errand for Ogma, and then another one a few centuries later, that put me on the path to becoming the Iron Druid and creating my charms as a method of nonverbal binding. Seshat’s curse certainly taught me the need for that.”

Granuaile snorted. “Yeah.”

“Ogma still owes me—twice!—but I’m not sure I’ll ever call those favors in. I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for those errands. Becoming the Iron Druid has kept me alive as much as Immortali-Tea has.”

“Are we going to hear about that other errand?” Granuaile asked, stifling a yawn.

“Sure. But let’s save it for another night around the fire.”

<I hope there will be another belly rub around that fire. And more meat. And maybe a poodle with a poufy tail.>

I’ll see what I can do, Oberon.

<So next time I see Ogma, I should blame him for being chased by cats?>

No, you can blame me. I’m the one who angered Bast.

<Aww. I can’t blame you for stuff, Atticus! You give me snacks, and that’s like diplomatic immunity. Not fair!>

It is true, my friend, that life is not fair. But sometimes there is gravy.

<You are so right, Atticus. Gravy is our comfort and our joy.>