robert Charrette - Arthur 02 - A King Beneath the Mountain by Robert N. Charrette Read Free Book Online Page A

god had just been rediscovered.
    "The museums will be pleased with your find," she told him.
    "He is not for the museums."
    "Open your eyes, Nakaguchi. It's just a goddamn mummy!"
    Nakaguchi continued to stare at the mummy. "Open your own eyes, Martinez."
    Pamela looked more closely at the withered shell of the ancient Indian ruler. The mask was magnificent, a work of art. The cloak would have once been magnificent and might be again after the restorer removed the dust of the centuries. This ancient king must have been a powerful ruler to rate such an elaborate robe; it fell in heaping folds around his legs. Too bad the feathers there had become so dirty.
    The feathers there?
    She looked closer. What she had assumed were feathers were not feathers at all, but a pile of insect husks tumbled in a talus slope from the throne. Tiny dry corpses. Pale bones of small animals lay among the empty shells, tumbled in piles on the floor around the throne, and lay in windrows against the arms of the mummy, white against the body's dark skin.
    A breeze puffed into the chamber, stirring the dust. The feathers of the crown rustled. Did that masked head nod? Or was it a trick of the light and the wind?
    Nakaguchi turned to them.
    "Gentleman and madam, may I present you to the Lord of Wind. His will be a wind of change, and it will fill our sails as we set our prows to the future."
    The stirring air felt very, very cold to Pamela.
    He became aware of others, nearby.
    Time had passed.
    Much time.
    How much he did not know.
    He was weak.
    Very weak.
    Their auras burned like distant fires in the night. Beckoning him. He reached out, all too aware of his weakness. He was eager, hungry. He—
    Stopped.
    The aura of the nearest one was different. He was not sure at first why, then he understood.
    This one bore the sign.
    The need would remain unfulfilled. For the moment. The hunger was strong, but his will was stronger. He had waited so long.
    He could wait awhile longer.
    Officer Shirley Hamett swung open the door of her GM Urban Patroller™ and looked around before she got out. Things didn't look any better outside the tinted Perspex windows. Something had gone down since she passed by earlier on her patrol. Whatever had happened had left the area looking more trashed than normal for this stretch of urban blight. A fire burned in a pile of trash spilling out of the alley behind the old Mallon Brothers warehouse. The fire made a mystery of the alley; the glitched thermal circuits on her Tsurei Com-Eye helmet couldn't handle it. The starlight circuit wasn't much better; at least not from this angle.
    She got out of the car and listened.
    Quiet. The streets were quiet and empty. The lack of streetlife was the strongest sign that there had been something going on down here. The only activity she could see was the crackling trash fire. So where was the fight that had been reported?
    "This is one-Zulu-twelve," she said into her helmet mike. "I'm on scene at Harris and Lovatt. It's quiet here. Over."
    "Zzzchk Zulu crkkkk. Kckckzz Dispatch. We've got no picture. Bzzzz."
    What a surprise. Seemed like the damned Tsurei ComEye helmets didn't transmit more often than they did. So much for milspec quality. She knew that it didn't help that she was down by the old rail yards, which put a lot of buildings between her and the tower, but that didn't ease her anger. The damned corps thought that they could slough off any old junk on the cops just because they worked for the government, and the government didn't care what it bought so long as the corps paid their nice fat kickbacks. And the media said that cops were corrupt.
    Of course, it also didn't help that Fumble Freer was on the dispatch console. Freer was a techno disaster; he'd probably spilled coffee on the keyboard again or cross-linked his entertainment program to the report channels and fritzed out the system.
    "This is one-Zulu-twelve. Trying alternate channels. Let me know if you get