The Ring of Solomon Read Free

the hall.
    To my left a mummified corpse shuffled from its alcove. It wore a slave’s robe and had a rusted manacle and chain about its shrunken neck. With a creaky spring it leaped to snare me. I yanked the chain, the head came off; I caught this mid-palm as the body fell away, and bowled it unerringly into the midriff of one of its dusty comrades, snapping its backbone with neat precision.
    Jumping from the statue, I landed in the very centre of the temple hall. From every side now the dead converged, their robes as frail as cobwebs, hoops of bronze twirling on their wrists. Things that had once been men and women – slaves, freemen, courtiers and under-priests, members of every level of Eridu’s society – pressed tight about me, jaws gaping, jagged yellow fingernails raised to rend my essence.
    I’m a courteous fellow and greeted them all appropriately. A Detonation to the left. A Convulsion to the right. Bits of ancient person spattered merrily on the glazed reliefs of the old Sumerian kings.
    That gave me a brief respite. I took a look around.
    In the twenty-eight seconds since I’d tunnelled through the ceiling, I’d not had time to fully assess my surroundings, but from the décor and the general layout a couple of things were clear. First, it was a temple of the water god Enki (the statue told me that, plus he featured prominently in the wall reliefs, along with his attendant fish and snake-dragons) and had been abandoned for at least fifteen hundred years. 1 Second, in all the long centuries since the priests had sealed the doors and left the city to be swallowed by the desert sands, no one had entered before me. You could tell that from the layers of dust upon the floor, the unbroken entrance stone, the zeal of the guardian corpses and – last but not least – the statuette resting on the altar at the far end of the hall.
    It was a water serpent, a representation of Enki, fashioned with great artifice out of twisting gold. It glittered palely in the light of the Flares I’d sent forth to illuminate the room, and its ruby eyes shone evilly like dying embers. As a work of art alone, it was probably beyond price, but that was only half the story. It was magical too, with a strange pulsing aura visible on the higher planes. 2
    Good. That was that settled, then. I’d take the serpent and be on my way.
    ‘Excuse me, excuse me …’ This was me politely ushering the dead aside, or in most cases using Infernos to strike them burning across the hall. More were still emerging, trundling forth from slot-like alcoves in each wall. There seemed no end to them, but I wore a young man’s body, and my movements were swift and sure. With spell and kick and counter-punch I ploughed my way towards the altar—
    And saw the next trap waiting.
    A net of fourth-plane threads hung all around the golden serpent, glowing emerald green. The threads were very thin, and faint even to my djinni’s gaze. 3 Feeble as they looked, however, I had no wish to disturb them. As a general principle, Sumerian altar-traps are worth avoiding.
    I stopped below the altar, deep in thought. There were ways to disarm the threads, which I would have no trouble employing, provided I had a bit of time and space.
    At that moment a sharp pain disturbed me. Looking down, I discovered that a particularly disreputable-looking corpse (who in life had clearly suffered many skin ailments and doubtless looked upon mummification as a sharp improvement to his lot) had snuck up and sunk his teeth deep into the essence of my forearm.
    The temerity! He deserved special consideration. Shoving a friendly hand inside his rib-cage, I fired a small Detonation upwards. It was a manoeuvre I hadn’t tried in decades, and was just as amusing as ever. His head blew clean off like a cork from a bottle, cracked nicely against the ceiling, bounced twice off nearby walls and (this was where my amusement smartly vanished) plopped to earth right beside the altar, neatly