a/n: Special thank yous to Redgrave, LyaCatWoman, Katerinaki and Himeno Kazehito for your reviews! And thanks, as always, for the continuing follows/faves. :)


Arabic:
Shokran - Thank you

Hungarian:
Igen - Yes
Szent szar - Holy shit


CHAPTER 23

"The Reptile Room"

"Can I get you anything to eat, E'temad?"

Dr. Chalthoum shook his head.

You would think, after being held at the mercy of an evil cult for months and just yesterday nearly having had his throat slit, the curator of the Egyptian Museum of Antiquities would have been feeling shaken, worn down and vulnerable.

Quite on the contrary, Perry found him to be in high spirits.

"Shokran, my dear, but I am quite alright."

He was propped up in bed, cleaning his glasses with the corner of his shirt. His white beard was still speckled with dry blood and his skin was cracked with dehydration, but he was smiling.

Perry smiled back at him, confusedly.
"You know, you look very happy."

She was bringing him a pitcher of water and a change of bandages for his neck. His skin had been sliced just a few millimeters deep, it seemed, short enough to avoid anything vital.

He chuckled.
"Well, I am. I have been saved," he said, holding his glasses against the bedside lamp to check for spots on the lens. "I am alive, and my daughter is free as I am. It is a wonderful day."

Perry seated herself on the edge of his bed and busied herself with unwrapping the gauze around his throat.

"Well, I have much admiration for your strength, Doctor," she said. "But really. Help yourself to any food. It's not my house. I'm not paying."

He chuckled again and reached around her to slide his glasses onto his nose.
"I hear that your friend got away with his life today, too. Did he not?"

"Yes."

"Then why do you not seem as happy as I am?"

Pyrrah pulled the last of the bandage free. With her, she had a cloth soaked in ethanol to treat his cut with.

"This might sting," she warned, and indeed Chalthoum scrunched up his face and hissed when it touched him.

When he relaxed again, he said, "You still have not answered my question."

She lifted her new roll of gauze to his collarbone and sighed.
"My problems are far from over, I suppose."

There was a moment's quiet, and then the curator whispered,

"A simple sorry goes a long way, you know."

Perry stopped wrapping his bandage and looked at him.
"You were listening?"

He waggled his forefinger around lazily.
"Thin walls."

Perry sighed again and went back to the task at hand.

"Truly," he went on. "A good person cannot dismiss a heartfelt apology. I think he will forgive you quickly."

She raised her eyebrows and let out a slight scoff.
"Well, you don't know him like I do."

Chalthoum smiled again, weakly this time, and allowed her to finish her work. She ripped the bandage and tucked in the edge on one side, and then patted him on the hand.

"There. All done. Now, just shout me if you need anything." she told him.

"Give it a try," he urged again, quietly, and her smile turned wry.

Then, the phone rang.

"Excuse me, Dr. Chalthoum," she said, glad of the reason to leave, and hurried off to answer the phone in the lounge.

Shafek had passed out hours ago, so Beni had helped her securely chain him up in the basement before he left. Perhaps too mercifully, she had left him food and water down there, but doubted he'd have even awoken to see it.

So, the lounge was empty. Just Perry and a mess of broken glass and porcelain remained, and she had even busied herself with sweeping that up.

She picked up the telephone receiver. "Allo?"

"Pyrrah, it's me," Beni's near-whimpering voice whispered into her ear.

"Beni, are you in? What's happening?"

There was a pause.
"Meela is here. I have spoken to her. You did not tell me she was ten times as beautiful as you."

"Out of pure jealousy, I assure you," Perry droned. "What did you say to her?"

There was another hesitation on Beni's end. She wondered if he was keeping something from her. Knowing him it would probably be something utterly ridiculous, like the fact that he was fetching Meela herself a drink.

"Not much, yet," he answered, voice high and uncertain of itself. "But I was talking to some of her acquaintances and it sounds like those scrolls of yours are here in this very house."

Perry's throat suddenly felt dry.

"...The Scrolls of Thebes?"

"Igen."

She didn't know what to tell him to do.

Fighting the compulsion to fidget with anything in her immediate surroundings, she stared at the ceiling until she could think up a reply.

Until now she had largely held off the restlessness that accompanied being trapped in a stranger's house, completely out of control of a situation you were very passionate about seeing through.

But it was getting very frustrating, so she let out a loud huff and told Beni,
"Okay, well, find them."

She thought she heard him choke a little.

"Find the scrolls?"

"Yes. That is what I would do, if I were at that party."

"But you are not here," Beni whispered. "I am."

She chuckled deliberately.

"And you are far better and more experienced a thief than myself. All the more reason for you to get them, baratom."

He whined.
She hung up.


Beni slammed the receiver down and rested his forehead on the wall. Rather, he banged it against the wall, and then winced a little.
Why was he always agreeing to these things? How on earth had he dug himself into this hole?

"Something wrong?"

He jolted, spinning around to face the open doorway.

The room in which he had found the telephone was an empty lounge or library of some sort, lit only by the passing headlights of cars through the front window and a thin wash of moonlight.
The corridor beyond was dim, too, but a womanly figure was well enough distinguished in the darkness.

She had a cocktail glass in her hand.

Beni rubbed the back of his neck in self-comfort.
"Oh, it is you," he laughed, forcefully. "No, no, I just needed to call my cousin. She is always in trouble, you see."

There was no response from Meela Nais.

Beni swallowed, and flattened his clammy palms on his suit jacket to try and dry them.
"Is there a reason you came to find me, Madam?"

A grandfather clock behind him was ticking away, and between its second hand and the faint clinking of ice cubes in her cocktail glass, he heard Meela draw a breath.

"You're an odd little man," she said. "And I'm a suspicious woman. Forgive me."

He chuckled again, uneasily. He was glad of the darkness, because he was sure his forehead was beaded with sweat.

"Come. You're missing the party, Mr. Kiss," she told him, and melted back into the corridor.

The gathering was in full swing.

Women were dancing, men were passing cigar boxes about, people laughed uproariously every few minutes or so at something hilarious in a far off corner.
Beni consumed gin rickey after gin rickey, allowing the fizzy concoction to put his nerves at ease and distort everything in this strange, wonderful house. Meela introduced him to absolutely everyone, and only once or twice did he stop to wonder why she had taken a sudden interest in him.
It must have been the accent.
Almost eight million Hungarians out there, and still he was the prize pig in situations like this.

He scoffed to himself as somebody suggested they go to some sort of attraction upstairs.

Embrace your accent, he decided, vaguely aware that people were pulling him off of his barstool. Embrace your stereotypes. Wear your fez, Beni. Wear it proud.

The staircase he was being dragged up was long and steep and hard to climb. He felt like the house was floating down the Nile and he hadn't found his sea legs.

And then that giggling person who had hauled him all the way up to the second— third?— floor opened a door and somebody snapped at her. She began sulking as Beni was pulled inside a room that she was not allowed entry into.

"Laszlo, good man."

Sherif was here. He was holding a tumbler of bourbon and guiding him to a leather armchair. The room was all green wallpaper and parquet floors. It was quiet and oddly humid. There was no smoke. Meela was in here, as were Nolan Bunbury, the pug-faced man with the tasseled hat and a few other people, including that scary man he had heard Meela call Lock-Nah.

The sight of the hostess' massive brute of a bodyguard was the first thing that made Beni sober up a little.

The second thing was pure terror.

"Mr. Kiss, this is my reptile room," Meela Nais told him.

At second glance, Beni realized that what had seemed like a regular lounge was walled with glass tanks of various sizes, all containing horrific reptilian creatures plucked straight from the trenches of his nightmares.

"What do you think?"

Meela had a black mamba draped over her shoulders.

He nearly fainted.

"Snakes?" he repeated, feebly, further blinking away intoxication.

"And such, yes," she said, and strolled past the armchair Dr. Bunbury sat in. She lightly brushed her fingers across the top of one of the larger tanks beside him. "This is a Komodo dragon, for example."

Beni slapped his hands against his cheeks and rubbed them feverishly. He had really done it this time. He had gotten too cocky and walked right into his own horrific death.
They were going to throw him in with the dragon.

"Her name is Kali," Meela informed everybody, breezily, and then drifted over to some other tanks.

The meaty dragon flicked its tongue out at Beni, possibly getting a whiff of dinner, which would smell mostly of booze and sweat.
The thing was ten foot long. One bite and it would unlatch its jaw and swallow his skinny, paralyzed body whole.

"It is a truly beautiful collection you have," Sherif told her. "What would you say all these marvels are worth?"

Marvels was not a fitting term for them, Beni thought. All around there were nature's most vile and freakish creations: a snake with elephant skin, a chameleon with three horns and the hands of a crab, a lizard covered in spikes; in a watery tank dwelled two tiny crocodiles, conjoined at the tails, and there was a gigantic worm— bigger than most of the snakes— with the tiny clawed legs of a mole.

"They are priceless," she answered, coolly. "Look here, gentlemen. This is called an Inland Taipan snake. Ever heard of one?"

The men in the room shook their heads in unison. Beni couldn't imagine that any of them— even that colossal bodyguard— had a steady pulse going right now. There was something in Meela's dark eyes, a psychotic twinkle, that kept her looking about as trustworthy as the black mamba around her neck.

"My darling baby is fifty times more venomous than the common cobra. Its single bite can kill a hundred men."

Beni loosened his tie.

"Well," Sherif laughed. "I'm glad my wife isn't as fond of these slimy things as you are!"

Bunbury and Meela harmonised in a little laugh.

"You'd still have nothing to worry about," the latter said. "They are not very aggressive, unfortunately. Which is why the black mamba remains my favourite pet."

She lifted the head of the snake on her arm, bringing it right up to her nose like one would to kiss a small dog. A miniature poodle, maybe, or a cute terrier.

This woman is insane, Beni thought, and frantically started thinking of ways to get the hell out of there without raising suspicions.

He needed to look for those scrolls, and that would surely be easier with Meela and her acquaintances all out of the way in one room.

"Wh... Err— What is that one?" he stammered, and pointed to a tank level with her waist.

Everybody looked at the glass box, seemingly nothing more than wet mulch and climbing plants lining its insides.

"Oh," Meela said, and tapped the glass fondly, trying to summon out whatever lived inside it. "A two-headed Death Adder. I had it shipped over from Australia... Quickest strike in the world."

"I'm interested in the big boys," Nolan Bunbury announced, and rose from his seat. Drink in hand, he motioned towards the largest tank of all, such a size that a human could probably settle in there comfortably.

It took up much of the room's back wall, lonesome in its personal darkness, and a large portrait hung above it to fill empty wall space. Beni copied everybody else and got to his feet to look at the tank.
The portrait was what was catching his eye, however, and it was unsettling him as much as the snakes and lizards all around.

It was a large, oval photograph of Meela, aged probably nine or ten, and another girl, slightly younger. Beni guessed straight away that they were sisters.
In the picture they were stern-faced and wore black pouter pigeon dresses, sitting side by side, hands folded on their knees. The frame was dusty and shadowed but he could make out some sort of disfiguration on one side of the younger girl's face, a mottling of the skin, as if perhaps she had been burned.

"Is that you, Ms. Nais?" he asked, loudly, and pointed at the portrait. Meela, who had been putting her prized mamba back in its home, turned her head quickly.

"Yes," she said. Her eyes grew distant as she wandered over to the big tank. "Twenty years ago. And my sister."

"I was not aware you had a sister," Sherif input, surprised. "What is her name?"

"Ursolia," she said, and just like that, her attention was flung back to the big snake tank. "I named this python after her."

"Python?" Beni repeated.

"That's right," she purred, like the words were simply delicious. "She's an albino Burmese python, twenty feet long, two hundred pounds. Would you like to touch her?"

There were two sharp clicking noises, and Meela snapped up the latches that kept the roof of the tank in place. Everybody in the crowd seemed to surge forward at once, and that was when Beni took a step back.

His opportunity had arisen. As people began to ooh and aah at Ursolia the great pale python, he slunk out of the room without so much as a single head turning in his direction.


Meela Nais' Aswan mansion contained a billiards' room, a conservatory, two studies, several lounges, a library, multiple bedrooms, an indoor swimming pool, a dining room and the biggest kitchen Beni had ever seen. If the world began to end, he would barricade himself in here and live out his days on the most gourmet survival food in the land of Egypt.

The chandelier-topped hallways all began to look the same as he quietly navigated the empty parts of the house, sneaking from floor to floor, east wing to west, peeking his head into rooms only to disappoint himself repeatedly. This task was the worst kind, stressful and without reward.

He felt like one of those rats that they put in mazes.

Rats found their cheese, though, and he was no closer to those scrolls than before.

Every room seemed to have its own voice, its own character, and so he considered which would be the best at keeping secrets. If, of course, Meela was hiding the scrolls. Insane and extravagant as she was, she might have chosen to flaunt them somewhere, keep them in a glass case on display.
Maybe they weren't in the house after all; it was entirely possible that word had gotten muddled on its way around. They were in a cult-owned bank somewhere.
The worst case, he decided, would be if Meela stored them in a safe within her anaconda tank.

I would let the world end before getting near one of those snakes, he thought to himself, slipping inside a north-facing room on the third floor.

"Oy, why can't they just be somewhere simple?" he whispered to himself, whining a little as he found a lightswitch. "Like her dressing room?"

The lights came on and he saw before him a bedroom fit for a Pharaoh. An obvious homage to the design of Egyptian royals' rooms several thousand years ago, Beni guessed right away that this was Meela's favourite bedroom.

The northernmost side of it extended out onto a balcony that overlooked the great Nile, twinkling mightily on its course. The veranda doors were open and he could hear the rush of the waters.

Egyptian artwork tastefully decorated every wall, and the furniture was striped in different shades of gold lame. A large golden bust of a cat sat at the foot of the four-poster bed, glaring at Beni as he slunk carefully across the space.

And there was a room opposite the bed, closed off by a single golden curtain. Beni stopped and eyed it.

In the distance, somebody laughed uproariously, and there was a dulled clattering of dishware.
The wind whistled suddenly though the balcony doors and violently whipped around the sheer drapes that had covered them.

He raised his sleeve to wipe the sweat off his brow. This was it.

Stepping forward, he grabbed the edge of the curtain and yanked it to one side.

About twenty candles dimly illuminated this closet-sized room ahead of him, set out on little shelves like the whole thing was a shrine. In a way, he supposed it was. The fabled Scrolls of Thebes lay on an altar in the centre of the room.

"Szent szar..." he whispered to himself.

He stepped forward again, shocked that he had actually found the damn things. Three little papyrus scrolls, frayed at the edges, thinned and worn over time. He couldn't believe that these were the things people were dying over.

Now, if they were made of gold, he could understand the fighting. But three little rolls of—

"What do you plan to do with those?"

Beni felt his entire body go cold. It took him only a split-second to guess who that deep, deep voice belonged to.

He turned his head very slowly. Yes, he was correct.
Lock-Nah was in the doorway, and he was holding a scimitar.


"Please, please! I beg you, have mercy!"

Tears were streaming out of Beni's pale eyes. Lock-Nah's fist had twisted the front of his shirt into a tight knot, and he was being held up against the wall by the huge bodyguard.

Meela's arms were folded. She watched the little Hungarian writhe and struggle with an air of disappointment.

"Did you really think I was not suspicious of you?" she asked him. "Strange little man in my house, sneaking around. Sweating too much."

Beni swallowed and gasped to catch his breath. It felt like Lock-Nah was crushing the bones in his chest.

"Please— I can explain—"

"Did you think you would steal my scrolls away and use them for your own agenda?" Meela inquired, her voice strangely calm, deliberately condescending.

"No, no, not me—"

"I think I will start with a scarab."

Beni fell silent.

Meela gracefully reached into her dress pocket and pulled out a small black case, the kind that one might keep blush or powder in. She brought it up towards his face and opened it.

Staring, horrified, as it opened, he immediately heard the squeal of a scarab beetle. It's little legs popped out of the opening and brushed against his nose, searching for flesh.

He screamed.

Lock-Nah backhanded him, smacking a massive set of knuckles up his cheekbone.

Meela snapped the case shut.

"You want to talk?"

"I will tell you everything, I swear, I did not come here on my own accord, I was sent by others—"

"Why should we believe you?" Lock-Nah barked into his face.

Beni shut his eyes in fear.
"Pyrrah Ananka sent me! She is alive, Pyrrah Ananka sent me!"

The wind whipped the drapes around again.

Lock-Nah let go of Beni's collar, and he collapsed into a sobbing lump on the carpet.

"Pyrrah Ananka is dead." Meela said, curtly.

He looked up at them and shook his head.
"No, she is alive! She is working with the Medjai to get the scrolls back. She knows all about you and your cult!"

Meela was frozen for a second. Then, she turned and went to sit on her bed. Lock-Nah watched her.

"The Medjai," he repeated, grimly.

"Yes, yes," Beni wheezed from his spot. "She has one of your men, Shafek, hostage. He told her you would be here tonight."

Meela was shaking her head at the floor.
"There is nothing she can do."

"Not if the Medjai have been made aware of what we are doing," Lock-Nah said, a maddened sort of glint now lingering in his eyes. "They will swiftly put an end to us. Their numbers are great."

Meela snapped her head around to look at he and Beni.

"And?" she snapped. "Is that going to happen?"

Beni pushed himself up into a sitting position.
"It is possible. I called her. They know the scrolls are here."

There was a silence, in which Meela and Lock-Nah weighed their options, individually thinking of the dire consequences they might face if caught by the nation's army of dark secret-keepers.

"I have not worked this hard to be ruined by a little tramp from Embabeh," Meela spat, and stood up aggressively.

"We have to run. Prepare for an onslaught," Lock-Nah said. "My tribe is stationed at Kom Ombo. You can hide—"

"It is no use, I am quite certain they know of your tribe's involvement," Beni interrupted. "If you run they will just follow. You are out of options, baratom—"

Lock-Nah angrily kicked Beni in the ribs, toppling the skinny man over as he sobbed in pain.

Meela put her hands on her hips.
"Is that so?"

Beni just whimpered.
Lock-Nah looked over at her.
Meela's eyes were darker than normal. In that beautiful skull of hers, an idea was flowering.

"What is your real name?" she asked Beni.

"Gabor," he answered, obediently. "Beni Gabor."

In all elegance, she knelt to the floor and placed a hand on Beni's shoulder. He flinched, fearing that she was going to release her scarab on him.

"Sweet Beni, I am going to need you to do me a favour in exchange for my mercy," she whispered.

He nodded and gulped.
"Anything!"

"Alright," she said. "I need you to call Pyrrah Ananka. Tell her that the Medjai should be sent to this mansion to retrieve myself and the Scrolls of Thebes for return to their tribe."

Beni frowned, but nodded, nonetheless.

Meela smiled.
"Good."

Silky hair swinging like a black pendulum, she sharply turned her head to look at Lock-Nah.

"How quickly can you get to Kom Ombo?"