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"I'm fine," I said. "Fine. Let's get the lid off, get what we came for, and then get the hell out of here."
"Suits me, sweetie. The mummy's holding the wand in his left hand. All we have to do is slide the lid far enough to one side for us to reach in."
Even with both of us pushing and shoving, the sarcophagus lid didn't want to move. It ground grudgingly sideways, a few inches at a time. Loud scraping noises echoed on the still air, interspersed with muffled curses from Polly and me. We threw all our strength against the lid, and slowly, slowly, a space opened up, revealing the interior of the sarcophagus and its occupant. The mummified head and shoulders looked shrivelled and distorted, the eyes and mouth just shadows in a face like baked clay. The wrappings were brown and grey, decayed, sunken down into the dead flesh. The body looked brittle, as though rough handling would break it into pieces.
The elven wand was held tightly in one clawlike hand, laid across the sunken chest.
"Well, go on!" said Polly. "Take it!"
"You take it!"
"What?"
"Let's think about this for a moment," I said, leaning on the lid. "I have seen pretty much every mummy movie ever made, including that Abbott and Costello abomination, and it's always the idiot who takes the sacred object from the mummy's hand who ends up getting it in the neck. In fact, it's usually at this point in the film that the warning music starts getting really loud."
"God, you're a wimp!" said Polly. She grabbed the elven wand, wrestled it out of the mummy's hand, and stepped back, holding the wand up triumphantly.
The whole burial chamber shook violently, as though hit by an earthquake. Thick streams of dust fell from the ceiling. The floor rose and fell, as though a great rippling wave had swept through the solid stone. The walls seemed to writhe and twist, as though all the hieroglyphics were coming to life and screaming silently. And the wall we'd opened into the burial chamber shot up out of the ground, and slammed into place against the ceiling again. I glared at Polly.
"Next time, listen to the music! Is there any other way out of here?"
Polly waved the Looking Glass back and forth, dust dancing in the brilliant beam of light. "I can't see anything!"
"Terrific," I said.
Then the lid of the sarcophagus crashed to the floor. We both looked round, startled, just in time to see the mummy rise out of its resting place. It moved slowly, jerkily, animated and driven by u
"Maybe we should give him his wand back," I said.
"Unthinkable!" snapped Polly.
"Hell, I'm thinking it, and so is he," I said. "Can you use the wand against him? What does it do?"
"I don't know!" said Polly, backing quickly away from the mummy as it advanced upon her with slow, shuffling steps. The whole chamber was still shaking, making loud, groaning sounds as the heavy stone walls flexed, but the mummy's attention was still fixed solely on the wand in Polly's hand. I took out my gun and gave the mummy six rounds rapid. Three to the body, three to the head. Puffs of dust burst out of the bullet-holes, but the mummy didn't even stagger or interrupt its pursuit of Polly as she retreated before it. Her back slammed up against the wall behind her, and she had to stop. I thought about jumping the mummy from behind and wrestling it to the floor, then thought better of it. Some plans you know aren't going to float. I ran past the slow-moving figure, and grabbed the elven wand from Polly. The dead face immediately turned to me, and I smiled. Because the moment I had the wand in my hand, I knew what it could do and how to use it. The knowledge was suddenly there, in my head, as though I'd always known it but only just remembered. I said the activating Words silently, inside my head, and the wand's power leapt forth and took hold of the world.
Time stopped.
The mummy was still, and so was Polly, caught reaching out to snatch the wand back from me. The burial chamber was still, caught between one moment and the next. Falling dust hung suspended in mid air. I moved slowly forward, and Time did not move around me. I considered the mummy, the shrivelled face wrapped in yards of decaying gauze, like a mask baked from ancient Egyptian mud. Scary, yes, but take away the supernatural energies that drove him, and the mummy was a small, fragile thing. I considered the elven wand in my hand. Two feet long, carved from the spine of a species that no longer existed in the waking world, it shone with a brilliant light while it did its work. There were all kinds of tricks it could play, with Time. I jabbed the wand at the frozen mummy, and Time accelerated around it. The bandaged body decayed and fell apart and became dust, all in a moment.
I hefted the wand in my hand. Why had it spoken to me and not to Polly? Perhaps because it didn't trust her. I knew how it felt.
I started Time going again, and Polly yelped loudly as she saw only a pile of dust on the floor where the mummy had been a moment before. She looked at me, glared at the wand in my hand, and gestured for it imperiously.
"No," I said. "I think I'll hang on to it for a while. It wants me to."
"What happened to the mummy?" she said, studying my face intently.
"Time caught up with it," I said. "Can we get the hell out of here now, before the whole bloody place collapses?"
Polly was a practical soul. She wasted no time with arguments, just hurried over to the entrance wall and studied it through her Looking Glass. Only took her a few moments to work the mechanism again, then we vaulted over the lowering wall and ran back through the shaking stone passages, trying not to listen to the increasingly loud groaning sounds all around us. Dust fell in thick sheets, and we both coughed harshly as we ran, holding our hands over our mouths and noses to keep out the worst of it. I don't know how long we ran, following the light from the Looking Glass, but it seemed like the journey would never end. For years afterwards I had dreams where I was still there, still ru
But finally we came to the side-door again and made our way back out onto the Street of the Gods. We kept ru
"All that gold," I said.
"All your fault," said Polly.
"How do you work that out?" I said, honestly curious. "Everything was fine until you grabbed the wand from the mummy."
"It's your fault because you hurried me!"
You can't argue with logic like that. "Sorry," I said.
"Now, give me the wand. You don't know what to do with it."
"It wants me to have it," I said firmly.
Polly looked at me.
We took a taxi to our next destination. Most people don't trust taxis, but I find you can always rely on the driver as long as you keep a gun pressed to the back of his neck. Polly had promised the next item on our list would be much easier to acquire, and I relaxed a little as we headed into Uptown, with its many up-market clubs and bars. You meet a much better class of scum in Uptown. We were looking for a pair of chaos dice, simple probability changers, and according to Polly, the very best example of their kind were to be found in Wu Fang's Garden of Delights.