On a low chair sat a dour man with a hawk's nose, striped headcloth, and a headband in the shape of an upright cobra. Flanking him were four women of various ages, regal and serene, obviously queens. Ranged nearby, all facing out, were two dozen relatives from ancient crones to children. All were still, silent, layered with age and dust, mute. Silence, threatening and smothering as darkness, pressed upon the living trio as they circled the ring of soldiers to glimpse all the royal family.
"Amber," squeaked Hakiim, "this one looks like you!"
Slowly, as if she'd expected this discovery all along, Amber squeezed between two guards and stepped up onto the dais. A young woman stood arrow straight, haughty nose and chin high, full lips pouting. A princess, Amber realized, with the same square shoulders, modest upthrust bosom, and (Amber noted with disgust) milk cow hips. The statue's hair was braided into cornrows and beads, while Amber's blew like a lion's mane, but both were black topped. Amber might have been gazing into an antique mirror.
"What does it mean?" Hakiim asked. "Is she-you?"
"Amber in an earlier life," marveled Reiver.
Amber didn't hear. On the princess's head rested an enscrolled tiara set with a square stone. Yet something looked odd. Amber saw gaps between the tiara's band and the woman's cornrows. No one could have carved a statue that intricate, she knew.
With icy calm, Amber's calloused thumb stroked the tiara's moonstone. Dust brushed away to reveal a dull glow. With a tiny trickle of dust, Amber plucked the tiara from her stone counterpart's brow. A nervous laugh burst from her.
"Look," she said, "it's real! Real silver, and a true moonstone."
"Better put it back," Hakiim said, and his torch jiggled. "When you touched the moon globe, it triggered a sandstorm."
Reiver echoed the warning, then both of them shouted, "Amber, no!"
Before she could be stopped, or stop herself, Amber flicked back her headscarf and tugged the tiara onto her brow.
Scowling, worried, Hakiim and Reiver squeezed between statues and bracketed Amber, terrified of what might happen. Amber's dark eyes burned queerly under the silver band and lustrous moonstone.
Waiting, waiting… until Amber said, "Nothing."
"Good!" Hakiim gushed. "You shouldn't-"
In the suffocating silence came a scuffle and a scrape. Amber, Reiver, and Hakiim stopped breathing.
There was a shuffle and the jangle of jewelry, and into the pool of their torchlight shambled a dingy yellow figure. Shuffling, lurching, a figure wrapped in rotted rags approached the ring of statues. Powdery bandages covered the creature's limbs, torso, and head. Crackling at every step, the wrappings shed resin dust and crumbs of herbs. Only the monster's hands were bare, the bandages having shorn off like milkweed. Petrified skin was the color of tea. A double chain of silver, tarnished black, encircled its neck. Suspended on its breast, a red jewel shone like a dragon's eye, like a funeral pyre, like fresh blood.
Gargling at first, when Reiver finally found his voice he shrieked, "Run!"
Like swans taking flight, the three companions bolted. They rammed at the line of soldier statues, ducking and scrambling to get away.
The mummy only needed to crook stiff fingers to stop them. The intruders plowed to a halt as the "statues" abruptly moved. A dozen soldiers slanted spears to block their path and stamped stone legs as awkward as tree roots to form a wall stemming their escape.
Minds racing with terror, the trio whirled to skirt the statues. Diving and slithering between stone legs, they squirmed free of the trap.
The mummy slowly curled both brown hands and waggled its fingers twice, as if giving the tiniest push.
Hakiim and Reiver screamed so loudly and so harshly that Amber thought their brains had burst. Jerking and twisting as if struck by lightning, the two young men fell on their backs like crippled turtles. They beat their heads, thrashed their arms, tore their clothing and hair, and screamed as if to split their throats. Catching sight of the mummy, they clawed at the marble to get away, crabbing across the polished floor like madmen. They were mad, Amber realized, paralyzed with insanity, reduced by terror to gibbering idiots. Spittle flew from their lips as they beat the floor and themselves, crawling in no direction except away from the mummy. Too scared to stand and run, they fetched up against the wooden legs of the blockading statues and squealed like rabbits. Their dropped torches burned on the polished floor, the light half extinguished but doubled by reflection to cast an evil red glow over the shrouded room.
Amber could scarcely breathe for fright, but her literate mind wondered why she was spared the mummy's terror-inducing spell. She saw the mummy advance-toward her.
Panting, wanting to shriek and hide her face, Amber stumbled back against the solid phalanx of soldiers. The mummy crooked a withered hand, and the soldiers closed tighter, spears forming an iron-headed fence. Crowded on three sides, almost crushed, Amber was in danger of burning herself with the torch, so she chucked it away to clatter on the floor, sputter, and extinguish. Fresh terror surged through her. Would she be trapped in pitchy blackness with two madmen and an undead fiend?
The mummy shuffled closer. Amber smelled its dry, snaky musk, but also an ancient perfume of cedar resin, beeswax, sage, wormwood, and other herbs used to preserve flesh.
Amber finally screamed as the mummy's hand reached for her. Driven against the dais and the trapping wall of stone, cringing, helpless to escape, Amber whimpered in fright. The withered claw clamped her head, mashing the silver tiara down over her eyebrows. In her haste and fright, Amber had forgotten she wore it. The dead hand, cold and hard as a statue's, squeezed Amber's skull until she feared it would burst.
Memories rushed in.
Amber felt dust gurgle in her desiccated lungs. A smothering darkness dragged on and on, never ending. Time drummed in her brain like the clanging of an enormous bell. Hours stretched into days, into years, decades, centuries, millennia. She was alone, left behind, while everyone and everything she'd ever known grew old, withered, died, and crumbled to dust, until even the dust blew away on the wind. No one alive remembered her or her country. Even the land forgot she'd ever existed and only hot desert wind blew over hummocks of barren sand. Amber felt constricted by bandages, felt herself suffocating, felt her mind rebelling at the stifling silence, felt her thoughts run rampant, until her only refuge from horror was to plumb the depths of insanity.
Worst of all was the unending loneliness, eons with an empty, aching heart. The mummy needed help, aid in accomplishing some murky desire that yet burned in its shriveled heart and had burned for ages. It needed help but languished alone, for the mummy had lost its friends in awful punishment.
Like a star exploding in the heavens, Amber was blinded by the most twisting emotion of all. This mummy, an ancient, enchanted, undead creature, was somehow familiar. All this tumbling turmoil Amber suffered in a second while the mummy's hard hand trapped her skull, then the hand released and Amber was free to go.
Weak with horror and emotion, she scurried away on her knees, then scrambled up to run. She snatched a sputtering torch. Hakiim and Reiver cowered in a pile like frightened puppies.
Kicking them to get their attention, Amber shrieked, "Get up! Come on!"
Blearily, as if awaking, the young men shook their heads. Amber caught their arms and yanked, then pushed so hard they almost sprawled. She flicked a backward glance to see if the mummy pursued, but the fearsome monster stood still with both bandaged arms folded across its breast, as if lying in a coffin.
Wondering, wishing she didn't care, still in the throes of nightmare memories, Amber hustled her two friends from the replica palace. Panting, huffing, the weary companions trotted ever upward toward the surface, the world of life and sunshine. In the highest tunnels, Amber shoved her friends through the wide phoenix-marked doors, then boosted them with hysterical strength through the gap in the ceiling.