The Third Gate Read Online Free Page B

the call taken up by another mosque, then another, the chant moving Doppler-like into greater and greater distances, until it seemed to echo across the entire city.
    He felt a tug at his elbow. It was Rush. Logan turned and stepped inside.
    The ancient structure was crowded even at this early hour, but the sweaty throngs had not yet warmed the stone galleries. After the fierce sunlight, the interior of the museum seemed exceedingly dark. They made their way through the ground floor, past innumerable statuary and stone tablets. Despite signs bearing warnings against camera usage and forbidding the touching of artifacts, Logan noticed that—even now—many of the exhibits were still open to the air rather than hermetically sealed, and showed signs of extensive handling. Passing the last of the galleries, they mounted a broad flight of stairs to the first floor. Here were row upon row of sarcophagi, laid out on stone plinths like sentinels of the shadow world. Along the walls were glass-fronted cabinets containing funerary objects of gold and faience, the cases locked with simple seals of lead and wire.
    “Mind if I take a moment to inspect the grave goods of Ramses III?” Logan asked, pointing toward a doorway. “I believe it’s down that passage. I recently read in the Journal of Antiquarian Studies of a certain alabaster canopic vase one could use to summon—”
    But Rush smiled apologetically, pointed at his watch, and merely urged Logan on.
    They made their way to another staircase—this one narrower, missing its banister—and climbed to the next floor. It was much quieter here, the galleries devoted to more scholarly collections: inscribed stelae; fragments of papyri, faded and decaying. The lighting was dim, the stone walls grimy. Once Rush stopped to consult a tiny floor plan he pulled from his pocket, hand-sketched on a scrap of paper.
    Logan peered curiously around half-open doors. He saw stacks of papyrus scrolls, shelved floor to ceiling in niches like so many wine bottles in a sommelier’s vault. Another room held a collection of masks of ancient Egyptian gods: Set, Osiris, Thoth. The sheer volume of artifacts and priceless treasures, the weight of so much antiquity on all sides, was almost oppressive.
    They turned a corner and Rush stopped before a closed wooden door. Inscribed in gold letters so faded as to be almost indecipherable were the words Archives III: Tanis–Sehel–Fayum . Rush glanced back briefly at Logan, then over his shoulder and down the empty hall. And then he opened the door and ushered Logan inside.
    The room beyond was even darker than the hallway. A series of windows arrayed just below the high ceiling grudgingly admitted shafts of sunlight, heavily filtered through countless years of grime. There was no other illumination. Bookcases covered all four walls, stuffed to bursting with ancient journals, bound manuscripts, moldy leather-covered notebooks, and thick bundles of papyri, fastened together with desiccated leather stitching and in apparent disarray.
    As Rush closed the door behind them, Logan took a step into the room. It smelled strongly of wax and decaying paper. This was precisely the kind of place he could find himself very much at home in: a clearinghouse for the distant past, a repository of secrets and riddles and strange chronicles, all waiting patiently to be rediscovered and brought into the light. He had spent more than his fair share of time in such rooms. And yet his experience was primarily in medieval abbeys and cathedral crypts and the restricted collections of university libraries. The artifacts here—the histories and the narratives,and the dead language most of them were written in—were very, very much older.
    In the center of the room was a single research table, long and narrow, surrounded by a half-dozen chairs. The room had been so dark and still that Logan had believed them to be alone. But now, as his eyes adjusted, he noticed a man in Arab garb