Tales of the Red Panda: Pyramid of Peril (9 page)

Fenwick squinted in the semi-darkness as he strained to examine the metal bands on Falconi’s wrists. They were the color of dull copper, slightly tarnished, though Fenwick doubted they were made of anything quite as pedestrian as that, and covered most of the Stranger’s forearms.

“Don’t trouble yourself too much, my boy,” Falconi said
, “they can’t be removed except by reversing the spell that bound them to me.”

“And you can’t cast it yourself?” Kit asked.

“Not with the bands on,” Max smiled wanly. “The bands are intended to nullify the powers of anyone who uses magic. Fiendish things. Never seen anything like them.”

“Neither have I,” Fenwick said in frustration, “but possibly only because I can hardly see anything in here. Kit, you didn’t think to bring a flashlight, did you?”

“Sorry, Boss,” she said, “it’s like the surface of the sun outside, I didn’t figure on needing one.”

“Aris Pavli created these wretched things,” Falconi sighed
, “and I expect he is the only one that can remove them.”

The Red Panda appeared not to have heard this. “Look, I can’t do a thing like this,” he said
. “I’m going to pop out onto the street and see if I can’t buy a candle or a small lamp or something.”

The Stranger sighed. It was still no use telling him anything. “Mind you aren’t followed,” he said
.

The Red Panda raised an eyebrow at this. “Who are you talking to?”
he asked.

“The large, rich-looking white man who sticks out like a sore thumb in this neighbourhood,” Falconi smiled. Kit covered her face to keep from laughing. The Boss didn’t get a lot of sass-back, except from her, and she reckoned it was good for him.
He smiled ruefully and a moment later he was gone.

“So,” Kit said with a smile
, “what else is new?”

“Me?”
he asked. “I’ve been hiding in the darkness waiting for the cavalry to arrive. Without my powers I’m not much more than a stubborn old man, but at least I’m pig-headed enough to stick with the job until it’s done.”

“If it takes magic to get those thinguses off,” she said
, “maybe you called in the wrong cavalry.”

Max shook his head. “Not too many I trust with something this important. And fewer still clever enough to have made it this far off a penny postcard.”

She grinned. “I wouldn’t describe anything we’ve done so far as exactly
clever
,” she said.

“Clever is all about results,” Falconi said in a fair impression of the Red Panda.

“I’ve heard that somewhere,” she deadpanned. “Like every eight minutes when he was training me.”

Falconi shrugged apologetically. “Sorry about that,” he said
. “It was me who told him that one during his awkward apprenticeship with me. It may be the only piece of information that actually stuck with him. People who can’t quite bring themselves to believe in magic shouldn’t study with sorcerers.”

“That’s from Emily Post, isn’t it?” Kit grinned.

He smiled, and for a moment he looked less exhausted. He glanced at the doorway, which remained resolutely closed, and brightened as he leaned in toward her slightly.

“I’m quite pleased to see you travelling together,” he said. “Does this mean that he’s finally come to his senses?”

“Max!” she scolded. “What if he was outside that door listening right now?”

“I don’t know,” Falconi grinned
, “perhaps he’d say something like
Great Godfrey, what a fool I have been,
that kind of thing.”

“I think it is less than likely,” Kit said, her face pulled into a disapproving sideways pout.

“I never had a junior partner in crimefighting,” Falconi said, “but as a stage magician, I have had quite a number of lovely young assistants, and I assure you, I was never one to miss the slightest encouraging sign from any of them. It’s why I have such a pleasant backlog of memories to look back on.”

“I’m sure,” she said wryly.

“There is, currently, an opening for the position of lovely young assistant in my act,” he said gallantly, “if you were at all tired of waiting for tall, dark and oblivious.”

“You’re a million laughs,” she said with a shake of her head.

“That’s all right,” he offered. “I was joking. Sometimes I think your instincts are as terrible as his. How on earth do you two get any detecting done?”

“We found you, isn’t that clever enough?”

“Clever is about results,” he said with his damnably frustrating smile, and said nothing more.

A moment later the door opened and the Red Panda slipped back in with a small piece of candle in his hand. “Not a lot of stores around here,” he said.

“Red Panda,” she scolded, “did you steal someone’s candle?”

“No,” he said, striking a match. “Well, yes. A bit of one. I think we’re trying to save the world here or something
. Max, are we trying to save the world?”

“We are trying,” Max agreed. “So far I would not say that we were doing exactly well.” The Red Panda planted the candle in some dripped wax on the floor and held it steady for a moment. When it was standing by itself, he motioned for Max to hold out his arm to be examined in the light.
Max complied with a resigned air. “Are you capable of listening while you do this? I think we may be pushing our luck rather with too much activity here.”

“Go ahead,” he nodded
. “I’m listening.”

“You might as well know that since you two first coaxed the Stranger from his retirement, others have had the same idea,” he said ruefully. “There seems to be something of a renewed interest
in magic these days from some quarters that are… surprising. There have always been practitioners, guardians of the lost arts, but the trade in magic artifacts has never been a robust one. There are simply too few people who understand such things, or have a hope of unlocking their power if indeed they have any power left in them, which is not always the case. But in the last few years, that has stood on its head. Items of true power, mystically gifted items which lost their charge centuries ago, even broken fragments of no use to anyone except perhaps to study… all of them have been selling for tremendous prices. Most of it is done through proxies, sometimes through treasure-hunters… no one really seems to know who is in back of it all, but the business has become a cutthroat one, and I do mean that quite literally.”

“You aren’t fortune-hunting, are you
, Max?” Kit asked, surprised. He seemed amused at the question.

“No, dear child,” he smiled
. “Not in that way, at any rate. There is a… a sort of a loose organization of devotees of the ancient arts. A regulatory body, if you will. Always been a rather high-minded group, and more than a little high-handed as well – they call themselves the Council of Mages. They saw all this commerce going on and some genuinely dangerous items changing hands, or worse, dropping off the map altogether, and of course they found the whole business less than desirable. They have taken to collecting these items themselves, or at least dragooning formerly retired magic-using superheroes into the task for them.”

“Why not tell them to go whistle?” Kit asked.

Falconi smiled. “I toyed with the idea,” he said. “But their point is hard to argue with. Someone, or possibly a small series of someones, is amassing great otherworldly power. Until we know who, or why, it would be foolish to do nothing and hope for the best.”

“And your playmates, Pavli and
Thatcher,” the Red Panda asked, “they are working for this mysterious buyer?”

“Ah,” Falconi smiled
, “you
have
been busy. Pavli is most certainly motivated by money. He is a former council operative, who has allowed himself to fall to the temptation of wealth. He may have a buyer lined up, he may be planning an auction, he may just have a general idea of the sort of price that an item like the Eye of Anubis might fetch. But there will be money at the back of it, that much is certain. Thatcher is quite another matter. I promise you, his search for the Eye is a quest for dark power, and I cannot imagine that he means to part with it.”

“Kind of an odd couple,” Kit suggested.

Falconi shrugged. “They may be planning on betraying one another eventually,” he agreed. “It didn’t stop them from working fairly effectively against me. The Eye of Anubis has managed to stay lost for many centuries. That is partly by design, most experts on the subject feel that the Eye is too dangerous for anyone to possess and is better left wherever it is. But a contributing factor has been, no doubt, that the magic of the ancient Egyptians resonated on quite a different mystic frequency. Most locator spells would never even register it if they were right on top of it. There aren’t more than a handful of spell-casters who would have the necessary skills to trace the energies of the Eye.”

“And is
Thatcher one of them, or Pavli?” asked the Red Panda.

“Neither,” the Stranger frowned. “Not that they didn’t try. In the end, their final plan seemed to be
to scare the Council into thinking they were on the verge of discovering the Eye, and then shanghai the poor sap that was sent to try and beat them to it.”

“Subtle,” Kit grinned.

“And I ought to have seen through it,” Falconi agreed. “Before I knew it, they had me in these bands and were setting about the task of… persuading me to give them the knowledge that they needed to trace the Eye’s energies. In the end, all that saved me was a flaw in the bands themselves.”

The Red Panda looked up from the bands he was still examining with an expectant energy.

“A very low-level spell, the sort of thing a child might use, could just creep past the limiting field. It took a great deal of doing, but it could be done. But they aren’t terribly useful spells, so I used them to hide and stayed hidden. If it had occurred to them at all to trace such low-powered magics, I would never have made it.”

Kit looked around at the dark, shabby room. “How did you… what
have you been doing for food… for water?”

Falconi smiled and his hands glowed with a blue light that resolved itself into a mist. The mist rose from his hands and formed the shape of a Chinese dragon, which seemed to fly away before dispersing into vapor. “A few extremely limited illusions, together with some good
old fashioned prestidigitation, have earned me quite a following of local urchins,” he beamed. “Like the boy who brought you here, and the one that mailed the postcard I wrote to you. They look after me. Keep me a bit like a pet wizard, actually. It’s why Pavli and his men haven’t been able to flush me out. But I admit I am getting sick and tired of hiding.”

“Good,” the Red Panda said. “I think I can get these off.”

“You can’t,” the Stranger said sadly.

“Yes, all right,” the Red Panda said, a smile playing about his lips
, “we’ll call it a bet. But I need some equipment. Can you hang on here until tonight?”

“Where else have I to go?” Falconi asked.

The Red Panda smiled. “How quickly will you be able to trace the Eye once we have those bands off?”

Falconi shook his head. “I will need to be very close. If it were a simple matter, the Eye would have been traced centuries ago.”

Fenwick smiled at Kit. “I was going to take you across the river this afternoon,” he said, “but the Valley of the Kings is so beautiful at night.”

“Good times,” she grinned.

“The roof is clear,” the Flying Squirrel called, “you ‘bout ready to go?”

“They didn’t have a man up there?” he asked, surprised, as he fussed with his suitcase.

“They had two men up there,” she said
, “but they’re gonna take a little nap now.”

“Did they see you coming?”
he asked, removing a long, flat pouch from his gear.

“Do they ever?”
she asked. “Besides, they were watching the stairs, not the hatch. I gassed ‘em and trussed them up like Christmas turkeys. What’s the hold up?”

“
Those bands Max is sporting are well-made, but once you find the seams, the locking mechanism seems simple enough,” he said, opening the pouch and rolling it out. It held variations of some of their regular equipment – throwing stars, throwing knives and combat boomerangs lined with a metal edge.

“The lock is magic,” Kit said, confused.

“No,” he said, “the lock is a lock. It’s just protected by magic.”

“You say potato,” she replied with a very slight roll of her eyes.

“That’s where this comes in,” he said, holding aloft a lockpick set that looked identical to the one that she knew was in the inside left pocket of his coat.

“Lockpicks?”
she asked. “Did you forget the
protected by magic
part?”

“I did not,” he smiled. “Do you remember how our old friend Doctor Chronopolis tries to hide the energy signature of the mystic items in his museum collection?”

She nodded. “Sure. He developed a special alloy that… I don’t know. Blocks magic.”

“It is highly resistant to the energy wavelengths associated with mystic powers,” he said.

“Right,” she replied, her brows furrowed. “That’s kind of what I…” She trailed off. “Are you telling me that those lockpicks are made of anti-magic metal?”

“Well,” he shrugged
, “magic-resistant alloy, anyway.”

She frowned. “You keep saying the same thing as me but using different words.”

He thought about it for a moment. “I suppose that’s true,” he said in what Kit supposed was supposed to be an apology. “It occurred to me that the metal might have uses in practical crime-fighting, should we ever face another occult threat.”

“Hey!”
she said excitedly, looking at the rest of the gear in the pouch he had just rolled open. “Aren’t you taking these?”

“I wasn’t planning on it,” he said.

She was flabbergasted. “Are all these goodies made with anti-magic whatsit?”

“I love it when you talk technical jargon,” he said in his best Kit Baxter voice, which was disturbingly good.

“Okay,” she deadpanned, “I deserved that. Answer the question.”

He shrugged, but nodded. “Yes,” he said
, “but we haven’t had a chance to test them.”

She started emptying her
utility belt of similar items. “Tonight sounds like a real good chance to me,” she said with a grin.

He frowned. “Don’t rely on them too much,” he said
. “They may not do anything.”

She was filling her belt pouches as quickly as she could. “They’ll still do whatever a regular boomerang’ll do, right?”

“Yes,” he admitted, “but this doesn’t mean we can go toe-to-toe with a spell-caster.”

“Well,
you
can’t,” she grinned.

“Kit, I mean it,” he said gravely. “Until we know otherwise, the best policy is to avoid magic as much as possible, and when you can’t, duck. We have no evidence that this alloy will have any practical effect.”

“Yes, Boss,” she agreed. “Let’s go get some.”

They raced over the low rooftops
of Luxor through the cool desert night, Static Shoes firing, propelling them over vast gaps in the buildings. They were more familiar with the territory now, and took a winding route that kept them mostly above street level through the city center and back into the slums where they had left Max. They moved fast through the district, knowing that every step on the rooftops of the small dwellings would be heard by someone within, no matter how quietly they travelled. At last they dropped into the space below, concealed in the dark of an alley just steps from Max’s door.

“See anything?”
she hissed.

“We’re clear,” he said
, “unless they can conceal themselves in the infra-red spectrum.”

“Let’s not start second-guessing ourselves,” she said
, “it ain’t healthy. Besides, why would they conceal themselves in the infra-red spectrum if they don’t know that we have infra-red lenses?”

“It’s an interesting point,” he said. “Sorry. I’ve never been entirely comfortable with magic.”

“Right,” she said, “so let’s go kick its fanny.”

They moved into the small back room silently, giving even Falconi a start, though he was watching for them.

“We should move quickly,” Falconi said. “Thatcher and Pavli won’t be happy about losing you today.”

“They should be getting used to it by now,” Kit grinned.

“Quite the opposite,” Max replied. “If they become personally involved in trying to keep track of you, or if they suspect that you may already know where I am, they may use a tracking spell.”

“If they were starting from the
hotel,” the Red Panda said, “we still have some time.”

“Nothing beats traffic like a run over the rooftops
,” Kit said sweetly.

“First things first,” the Red Panda said
. “Let’s see those arms.”

Falconi sighed and raised his left arm, extending it palm up to the younger man. “I keep telling you, old boy, you won’t be able to-”

“Now the other one,” the Red Panda said wryly as he pulled the first band off. “Squirrel, take this one. Don’t let it close.”

“But that’s impossible,” Falconi sputtered
. “How on Earth did you do that?”

“Now, now, Max,” the Red Panda replied
, “a magician never reveals his secrets. How are you doing, Squirrel?”

“Pretty good, Boss,” she replied
. “These things kick like a mule trying to get back together, but I jimmied one of the special throwing knives between the two halves of the lock, and that seemed to calm it down.”

“Good girl,” he nodded, handing her the second one
. “Do the same with this, then tuck them in your belt. Those could come in handy.” He looked at the Stranger, who was still standing dumbfounded. “How do you feel?”

The older man nodded. “
Weak,” he admitted. “It may take some time before I can summon a proper field. But better now, thank you.”

“Excellent,” came the reply.

“You really do still have the power to surprise me, dear boy,” the Stranger said, straightening his back and appearing years younger than he had just moments ago. “I knew that I could count on you.”

“Okay,”
Kit interrupted, securing her new burdens in the back of her utility belt, “what’s the plan? I mean, technically, we’re kind of done, aren’t we? We came for Max, we’ve got Max, and they all lived happily ever after? Yes?”

“No,” the Stranger shook his head sadly
, “if our enemies reach the Eye of Anubis before we do, there will be very little
ever after-ing
and almost none of it will be happy.”

“Right, Boss,” she said without skipping a beat, “what’s the plan?”

“We need a boat,” the Red Panda said simply.

“A boat?”
she asked. “Where are we supposed to get a boat?”

He shrugged. “I thought we’d try
down by the river.”

Her eyes narrowed and her lips pursed tightly to the side in a mock-pout. “You’re making this up as you go along, aren’t you?”

“Indescribably so,” he said, beaming at her.

Suddenly, the still of the night was broken by a short cry, high, but mournful. And then another.

“What the heck is that?” Kit asked, her voice suggesting that perhaps she did not really want to know.

“Just a jackal,” Falconi said. “Nothing to worry about.”

There were several more calls in rapid succession. Between a howl and a bark, in multiple voices. It was clear that there was more than one animal nearby.

Kit eyed the exits, in as nonchalant a manner as she could. “Guess you’ve been hearing them every night, huh Max?”
she offered.

“Well now, that is interesting,” Falconi said quietly. “I would have to say this was the first time.”

The high wails rang out as if coming from everywhere.

“Geeze,” Kit admitted
, “those guys are giving me the creeps in a pretty serious fashion. Think we can make tracks before the whole pack drops by?”

“I have one problem with that,” the Red Panda said grimly.

“Only one?” she asked, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“The Egyptian Jackal is not a pack animal,” he said. “It is a solitary hunter. Pairs at best.”

“Don’t tell me,” the Flying Squirrel said, “tell them.”

The Red Panda looked at the rickety door that led back out to the alley. “I suppose one
of us really should,” he sighed.

The door creaked on its hinges. The narrow laneway was flooded with a darkness that seemed too deep to be entirely natural. From that expanse of black, a dozen pairs of eyes flashed their cruel intent. The chorus of wails grew in intensity, and with every moment that passed, another pair of eyes flashed from the cover of the night.

“How are we doing, old boy?” Falconi called from within his room.

“Oh, about what you might expect,” he replied, touching the side of his mask and switching to nightvision, if for no other reason than it made his own eyes flash back at the predators surrounding them. The new setting of his mask lenses turned the world a grainy black-and-white and made the shapes of twenty more jackals clear to him, drawing ever closer under the cover of creeping darkness.

“We’re in a certain amount of trouble, aren’t we?” the Flying Squirrel asked, trying to sound calm.

The Red Panda
stood tall in the doorway, and carried himself like a tiger, a prince among hunters, beset by lesser creatures far out of their depth.

“Well
, someone certainly is,” he said with a cold smile.