I answered the Russians' questions as we trekked across the dunes towards Ammit's proposed solution to our setback in reaching Buyan. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised when Ammit revealed knowledge of a hidden transport beneath the Egyptian desert. The land had been the dominion of Ra for centuries. It didn't take much effort to convince the group that heading for her concealed cache beneath the sands was our best course of action.
The Russian Colonel was a remarkably receptive audience, I've had to give the "magic 101" conversation before and it's generally a painful experience even for people who weren't totally ignorant of the mystical world. I'd been operating under the assumption that the Russian soldiers were substantially more knowledgeable of the world they'd been thrown into. While there certainly were elements that they understood such as the existence of vampires, aliens, and White Council, their knowledge was only marginally more than anyone who'd watched the X-Files. We went through the basics, how to kill vampires, why magic was dangerous, the importance of thresholds, the Nevernever, Faeries and why to avoid them like the plague, and – of course – wizards. Boy did they ever want to know about wizards.
Their job in protecting Petrovich's fortress had been mostly of the "do anything this man tells you to do" variety. They'd been told both that magic was real, and that the people living within the fortress were Russia's Wizarding allies, but precious little other than that. Even learning that not all Wizards were combat specialists like the Brute Squad had been new knowledge to them. When I told them that there was an utter legal prohibition on using magic to inflict lethal damage on human beings, you would have thought I told them bullets no longer worked on them.
Colonel Zukhov seemed to fundamentally struggle with the idea that the purpose of the White Council of Wizards was not, in fact, a method of secretly controlling the governments of the world. That one would have the ability to warp all reality to their will, and would not elect to do so, seemed preposterous to him.
"If not to save humanity, then what purpose is there in having laws and structure for Wizards?" Zukhov asked in annoyance, having no re-worded the same question about six different ways.
"I'm not the best resource to answer that question Colonel." I shrugged. "It's not like they're consulting me on how to structure a government. I'm more than a little bit surprised that they were as involved with the Russian government as they clearly were in Archangel."
"Stalin's agreement with the Wizard Pietrovich continued after the collapse of the USSR. After he was kind enough to assist us in removing the choke hold the White Court and their Oligarchs placed upon us the president was predisposed to accommodate protecting him from their potential reprisals." The Colonel shook his head. "He will not be so agreeable in future without substantial compensation to make it worth the time of the Russian people, I think. Too many lives were wasted."
What little I knew of the Russian President didn't incline me to believe that he'd be swayed one way or the other by the loss of life, but it seemed imprudent to say that to the Colonel. The man seemed quite enamored with the leader of his country. "Like I said, I'm not the guy to ask."
"Why have the Goa'uld not come back to Earth? It has bothered me greatly – it seems like with minimal effort the Goa'uld could bomb us from orbit. The Americans seem convinced that they've been too busy to attack us, but I've never met a military too busy to invade a nation that makes a habit of assassinating their leaders." Queried Major Vallarin, his eyes twinkling with the eagerness of a boy who'd found out that every fairy tale he'd ever dreamed up might well be real. "Why would you not come back?"
I snorted, translating the question for the benefit of my Goa'uld speaking compatriots. They found it hilariously funny. I let Enlil wipe the tears from his eyes before I answered the boy's question. I didn't intent to mock the young man, but I needed it to be obvious that my answer wasn't a Goa'uld prevarication. I chose to address my answer to the Mercenary Kincaid rather than to the boy directly, "Kincaid. How many vampires are there in the Red Court?"
"Nobody's sure. Thousands, maybe millions – they breed too quickly to get an accurate count and go to war internally with enough regularity to make their population fluctuate wildly." He chewed his lip. "Enough to be in charge of South America."
"Thomas, how many vampires are in the White Court?" I continued, addressing the question to my brother.
"Enough." Thomas replied succinctly. I knew that they weren't as numerous as the Red Court, given that they were forced to reproduce the old-fashioned way, but there would still be many thousands of the psychophages.
"The thing you saw, the creature we had to nuke, that was only one Vampire. One who'd grown very old and very powerful but given enough time and enough preparation they can all potentially grow that powerful. There are millions of them and they've had thousands of years to consolidate power." I replied as though it were the most obvious answer in the world, though admittedly the horrifying scale of it hadn't quite occurred to me till I actually said it out loud. "And they're some of the less scary things that live on this planet."
"There are scarier?" Vallarin queried in confusion.
"Koschei comes to mind." I muttered darkly, "Old Gods left behind after the Goa'uld left, demons, Fallen Angels of the Lord –"
"Angels are real?" Interrupted Kirensky. I wasn't sure if I'd ever actually heard the lantern jawed Russian speak aloud before, his voice grumbled in a way that gave the distinct impression that he wasn't commonly in the practice of using it. The immediacy and urgency of the question took me aback.
"Yep. Heaven, Hell, Jesus, the whole megillah – it's all real. Not just it, mind you, there are a bunch of different afterlives and pantheons, but that one most definitely is real." I shrugged, "I've met a couple Angels. They seemed nice enough. A couple Fallen Angels as well. They were… less agreeable."
"I would not expect you to bring up rival religions to your own following." Kincaid interjected in a voice of mildly pleased surprise.
"Only an idiot would consider himself an actual rival of the White God." I shivered, looking up and willing my intentions skyward. "I've met two Angels. Either one of them could have annihilated my entire kingdom with their pinky. As cosmic entities go, I'm small potatoes."
"Good to know Mom left me in such capable hands." Thomas joked, his face looking more and more gaunt as we continued our trek. The hand device had fixed the physical issues with his body, allowing him to ignore his hunger but not actually abating it. The issue of feeding my brother had been delayed, not removed entirely. It annoyed me that I couldn't fault Ammit's hypervigilance over him or find a particularly pressing flaw in her assertion that Thomas' method of consuming people was less messy but no less deadly for the people it was inflicted upon.
"Trust me, you wouldn't want to deal with anything higher up the food chain than I am." I joked back, repeating to myself that I'd somehow find a way to satisfy Thomas without breaking my moral code. "The more powerful something gets, the less human morality applies to it."
It felt oddly cathartic to answer their questions as we crossed the desert landscape. I'd had a couple of students over the years, few of whom could be properly called an apprentice. The one major foray I'd tried into the area of tutoring had ended extremely poorly for my student. I still felt guilty for not having been able to help Kim Delaney. It had probably been the right thing not to give her the information she'd been asking for about the summoning circle – there weren't many safe or reasonable causes to have that information – but having made the "right" choice hadn't made her any less dead.
I wish I could say that I'd come to some grand epiphany for what information was safe to give out after the Loup-garou incident. Hell, I'd be happy for just feeling confident that the right choice had actually been the right choice. But I'm a Wizard, not a… huh… well…. Uh, I technically was a god but that didn't seem to have done much to improve my decision making. Omniscience didn't come in my godhood starter package.
Fortunately, stamina did, given that we'd been walking for at least thirty minutes through the dunes. At least I think it had been about that long. The Goa'uld computer strapped to my gauntlet was set to Nekheb's method of measuring time, which was in a base 12 system for measuring the passage of day into night for an entirely different planet. I wasn't great at calculating the conversion on the fly.
Hell's Bells, I wasn't really great at reading it not on the fly. I wasn't exactly bound by a strict schedule any more. The very idea that I would be considered either early to or late for anything on Nekheb was almost preposterous. If I felt the need to do something at the crack of dawn or the dead of the night, everyone around me would just hop to it without much of a fuss. It was probably not the best thing for me in terms of living a grounded lifestyle.
"Stop," Ammit growled in irritation as we crested the dune, her eyes surveying the landscape before us in irritation. "Warden – we have a problem."
She didn't need to verbalize the problem in question for me to understand her dilemma. Having never actually been to Cairo, I didn't quite realize how suburban the area surrounding the pyramids actually was. Once we'd passed the crest of the dune, I couldn't see any single angle to the north of us that wasn't just utterly covered with electric lights. It was the middle of the night and tourists still covered the landscape like locusts. I suppose it should have seemed obvious to me, it was one of the most famous places on Earth, but I'd sort of forgotten that Pyramids were something to be considered strange or interesting.
"Crap. Is there anywhere to get to this thing without going through that?" I groaned, speaking to her in Goa'uld.
"No." Ammit muttered in irritation. "I hid a transport ship near the Great Pyramid before Koschei took me captive, but it's in the middle of… that."
"Perfect." Kincaid grinned, handing his weapons over to one of the Russians. "I'll be right back. Vampire, if you wouldn't mind?"
"Uh, what?" Thomas blinked.
"We're going to secure transport." Kincaid pointed out into the distant blackness, towards one of the barely visible groups of tourists. "The bus on the left. Do you see it's driver."
"Yeah I can see her." Thomas replied before making a noise of recognition, "I can see her. I get it."
"We just need the bus, not a corpse or a thrall. You think you can manage that." The mercenary asserted.
"Frustrated not fornicated, aye." My brother joked, though I worried as to his sincerity. Given alternative seemed to be for them to steal a bus without the driver's permission, it seemed worth the risk. I didn't need to be involving Egyptian law enforcement in addition to everything else we'd dealt with today.
The two men scurried into the darkness beyond my line of sight as we crouched down to make ourselves less visible. I felt a tug on my sleeve and looked over to the eager face of my High Priestess. She whispered to me plaintively, "Lord Warden, if I may be so bold, what is your goal in educating these heathens? I cannot understand what you speak to them except when you consult the other gods, but it is clear that you are showing them the wisdom of the Warden's Path. You often offer the path to those who do not believe but offer sparing information to those who follow your word. Why do you do this?"
"Muminah, when I speak to you, the first thing you do is try to find the secret meaning in my story. The clergy seems to believe that every word I say holds a secret meaning to it. If I were to tell you that I didn't like the color red, I might wake to a Kingdom that has banned all things red because they are sinful. If I tell them that I don't like the color Red, they'll tell me 'Too bad, we already picked the color of our Flag before you got here." I looked back into her reverent expression, mildly annoyed that I could virtually see the parable being written in her mind even as I explained why not to do that. "I don't worry about them having me make up their minds on their behalf. I can speak to them freely because I know they're going to make their own choices with what I tell them."
"Should I not listen to your wisdom, Lord Warden?" Muminah queried in polite confusion.
"You have a perfectly functioning brain between your ears, Muminah. I expect you to listen, learn, and make your own choices." I sighed. "I don't know all the answers, Muminah. I'm flawed. I make bad choices. I say things that aren't true because I don't know better. I even lie sometimes."
"Really going for the hard-sell on keeping a functioning chain of command with the clergy there, Warden." Ammit snorted, rolling her eyes. "The doctrine of 'don't listen to me' is going to end up biting you in the ass when one of them decides they're smarter than you are."
"We would never defy the Warden's will." Muminah replied, scandalized.
"Child, never is a very long time." Ammit replied softly. "And you are too young to know even a fraction of its breadth."
"They're coming." The Russian Colonel cut across Ammit as a set of headlights broke away from one of the clusters of Tourists. A bus was driving off-road, plodding through the rough, rocky sand in a beeline for our hiding place.
The gas guzzling behemoth trundled towards us, garumphing and clanking as it went. It was an ugly machine that looked like it was a relic of the flower child era kept in service with a mix of duct tape and prayer. There had doubtlessly been better options, but Kincaid knew that he had magic to contend with in addition to everything else.
The machine grunted to a hissing halt, its airbrakes screeching in a way that had me seriously doubting their functionality as the door swung open. Kincaid was sitting in the first row, immediately behind my brother's position in the driver's seat. The mercenary would never allow a predator behind him if he could avoid it, and his hand hovered near a bulge in his shirt that I suspected was a concealed weapon.
Thomas took a perverse degree of glee in addressing us the unmistakable nasally, irritating tone adopted by every tour guide I'd ever dealt with. "All aboard for the intergalactic Russian tourist bureau, next stop Giza Plateau."
We embarked within the bus, sitting amidst the bags, backpacks, and purses left behind by tourists who would likely be incensed to discover their belongings had been stolen. I opened the nearest handbag, flipping though its contents till I found a map. It was of the touristy variety, designed for visual appeal rather than geographic accuracy. Based upon the ruinously cheery cartoon images and chaotic symbols, I guessed that it had been a Japanese tourist group whose bus we'd stolen.
I spread out the map as the bus started moving, turning to Ammit and asking, "Ok, where is he driving us exactly?" in English to be sure that Thomas understood what was being said.
Ammit considered the map before tapping a talon on the map twice. "There."
I burst out laughing. "You're kidding right?"
"No, I am quite certain that the cache is beneath that location. I used the Sphynx as a point of reference." Ammit asserted, speaking in broken English.
"Do I even want to know?" Thomas inquired, doing his best to navigate into the late night traffic of southern Cairo.
"We need to go to the Mariott." I replied, trying and failing to keep a straight face at the sheer absurdity of it. "There's a space ship under their golf course."
"Of course, there is." Thomas replied calmly. I had a brief, irrational moment of annoyance as I realized that this meant that Thomas absolutely knew about both space ships and aliens before I met him, followed by even greater annoyance that I wouldn't be able to call him out for not having told me. This was the sort of thing that an older brother was supposed to confide in his sibling.
"How many of these caches are there on Earth?" Inquired the Colonel eagerly.
I translated his question to Ammit who considered the matter before replying, using me once again as an interlocutor to say. "I only left five of them, and I'm not about to give away the locations of my ways off this horrible hellhole of a world. I'm sure that other gods left their own caches of stuff, but I don't know where you'd begin to look for one of them that wasn't crawling with vampires or in Yu's old stomping grounds."
"She means China," I added, continuing from her translation. "Lord Yu used to be the Emperor of China."
"Would the Americans have found one of these Caches yet?" Inquired the Colonel nervously, once again using me as interlocutor.
Ammit just shrugged but Enlil actually voiced an answer. I translated, though I suspected that I did a poor job of keeping the surprise from my voice as I said. "I don't know how they would have. It's not like we were ever able to conquer the northern part of that damn continent. Hathor tried several times, but they were always too protected."
I couldn't say if the Colonel's expression was more pleased or bothered. He had a perpetual expression somewhere between a smirk and a grimace. His expression abruptly turned to one of shock as the Bus slowed to a halt and there was a sound of breaking glass, followed soon after by a snarl of pain from Ammit as glowing green blood splattered across her seat. She ripped something out of her side, revealing a stone headed arrow attached to an ebony shaft. It was an elegantly crafted weapon, perfect in balance and artistry. Too perfect, in fact, to be of mortal make.
"Fairies!" I shouted, shoving Muminah's unarmored body to the floor as arrows started pelting the bus. It would seem that even the Erlking couldn't keep up with Summer's hitters any more. I blasted an axe-wielding goat man off the side of the bus as Thomas floored it, driving the bus through a red-light heedless of the screeching horns from the other drivers.
The ancient bus' engine screeched in protest as Thomas forced it forwards, bashing through several parked cars in his way as he grinned like a maniac. Not nearly fast enough for my liking as creatures of Titania's realm charged us, pursuing us with a frenzied hatred only equal that that I'd seem Summer Fae display to the forces of Winter.
"Fire at will!" The Colonel screamed, flinging a shrapnel grenade into a cluster of the goat-men before shooting a multicolored Eagle in the head. I blasted a volvo sized moth with a gout of fire, setting its wings alight and sending it screaming into a pike-wielding satyr. Kincaid scrupulously did not join the battle, continuing to sit in his chair.
"You want to give us a hand here?" I growled, clubbing a goat-man in the face as it tried to force itself through a shattered window.
"No." Kincaid replied simply. "They're here for you, not me. They're fairies. They can't kill unless except in self defense unless it has been explicitly permitted by their queen, and even then there are rules to it."
"If they crash this bus, I don't think it will matter one iota." I snarled, flinching as Ammit tore the head of what seemed to have been a Sidhe noble from his shoulders. The green skinned man's surprised expression dulled as the leaves growing from his head in the place of hair wilted. "They're not exactly taking a roll call here."
"I will not leave myself defenseless." Kincaid replied, not even flinching as an arrow zipped past his face, pinging off the pauldron of my armor. "But I am not trespassing on fairy. This is the mortal realm. There are rules."
"They feel a bit more like guidelines under the circumstances!" I snarled, blasting a tiny winged thing with a nasty looking sabre out the back window of the bus as it tried to stab Enlil in the back. The jabbering thing howled angrily as it hit the pavement, going under the wheels of a passing car as its driver blared the horn furiously. Apparently even invading fairies weren't enough to convince Egyptian commuters to slow down.
It was at this point that Thomas swore and spun the wheel furiously, only by the grace of his preternatural reflexes managing to keep the bus from tipping over as he course corrected ninety degrees to avoid the truly massive shape that had formerly been in front of us as it slammed an obsidian axe down in the middle of the street. A massive fairy standing in the middle of the road, something that might have resembled a man riding a horse if one didn't have the glowing light of both the man and the horse's eyes to illuminate the skinless horror that the fairy truly was.
It was as though someone had taken the flensed torso of a man and knitted it to the sinews of a skinned horse, then lit them both on fire. I recognized the creature, though I admit I'd rather hoped it was one of the legends that had been exaggerated. It wasn't a fairy in its own right, by my understanding. It was more of a curse on wicked men, a trick that Summer Fae might play upon a particularly greedy and evil man in times of old.
The Nuckelavee were particularly malevolent things, vain and cruel men who'd once sought power from the Sidhe and cursed to be as ugly on the outside as they'd been within. They were the sort of creature that would only grow meaner and stronger over time and judging by how it towered over the buildings around us it was both old enough and mean enough to put up a proper fight. I was reasonably confident that I'd be able to take it in a fight. Not easily, but it was doable.
Which, of course, is why Titania had sent four of them.