At the sound of Kate’s chanting voice, Charlotte let out a whoop of girlish delight before she was flung to the side. Hogarth caught the child in his massive arms, slamming against the pile of rock. He set her on her feet and slipped his tattered shirt off to cover the now-naked girl. Charlotte smiled broadly at him despite holding her side, which dripped with red blood.
The mummy shuddered as Kate’s voice rang like singing crystal carefully pronouncing each word. The air around St. Mary changed from damp London to rolling waves of desert heat. The linen flew toward Kate, smashing Simon aside. It wrapped around her. Simon struggled to his feet and dug his fingers into the linen as she continued reading, desperate to complete the spell. He fought to drag the cloth away from Kate’s body but it was immovable. Yards of cloth swirled around her legs and torso and pinned her hands to the box. Then strips covered her mouth, cutting off her oration, as well as her breath. She struggled against it, but she was trapped. Her green eyes darted wildly to Simon. He tried to tear the charred fabric from her mouth and nose, but the cloth refused to yield. Suddenly Hogarth was beside him, fighting the linen as well, frenzied to save his mistress. Even his incredible strength was not enough to tear the skin of a god.
Simon then attempted to pull the box from Kate’s hands, anything to make the linen release her, make it attack him instead. Again, he spoke aloud a runic phrase out of instinct, but without result. There was no way to extract the ebony case from her bound hands. Her eyes bulged from lack of breath in her lungs. Then she stopped struggling and fell limp.
Terror filled Simon and he yelled. There was only one chance to get the linen off Kate. He would give Ra what it wanted: limitless power. He ran across the church. Hogarth looked at him in astonishment, unable to comprehend why Simon would leave Kate to her death.
Simon leapt onto the shattered remnants of the altar. He raised a glittering object and repeated the word his mother had taught him, praying the device still worked. The gold key flared. The air above him swirled a vast hole in the fabric of space and the map of the world with its portals appeared. Somehow it had remained untouched by the linen, perhaps because it wasn’t active.
The mummy froze. All the madness of its tendrils stopped. The linen released the limp Kate into Hogarth’s arms. The Skin of Ra sped toward Simon like a slithering nest of serpents.
“Kate!” Simon shouted.
Hogarth tried to rouse Kate, slapping at her face. Simon was now at the center of the coiling linen. Tentacles held Simon fast while other tendrils of cloth stabbed deep into the portal. Several of the markers on the shimmering map suddenly winked out. Unearthly lightning crackled around them. Violent energy cascaded over Simon’s flesh, searing him with its fiery touch. Limitless aether flowed around him, but he couldn’t gather any of it. Instead, it passed over him to surge into the linen. The Skin of Ra grew, rising high above the jagged walls of the church. Simon’s eyes began to roll up in his head as the tendril about his throat tightened.
A dark shape passed Hogarth and Kate in a blur. Malcolm vaulted wreckage and dove into the aether storm surrounding Simon. The Scotsman was immediately blown off his feet. He shook his head and fought back onto his knees. Tendrils of linen wavered near him but seemed to take relatively little interest given the feast of power it was enjoying.
The quivering map was losing its vigor and becoming translucent. More portal dots disappeared. Calcutta. New Orleans. Batavia.
Malcolm dragged himself, inch by inch, onto the altar, where Simon was suspended in a linen web. He climbed, staring into the slack face of Simon, then he turned away.
The map continued to vanish. City markers blinked away. Cairo. Paris. London. Warden Abbey. The map flickered as the linen drove several more tendrils into the faint swirl in space. It was a mere whisper of energy now. The last spot on the ghostly map was Hartley Hall. That dot started to vanish.
Malcolm reached out and clasped the hand in which Simon held the key. He felt cold metal. “Marthsyl!” he shouted.
The map spun and shrank to a spot in the air. Then it vanished.
The strips of linen that had been inserted into the portal were cut. The Skin of Ra shuddered as if in surprise. Then it shook itself with an explosion of pain that threw Malcolm and Simon against the walls with enough force to break bones. The mass of linen roiled in a cataclysm, slamming itself in throes of agony. Huge stones and deadly shafts of timber flew like cannonballs.
Kate finally stirred, eyelids flickering as she heard Simon scream in pain. She staggered to her feet with the aid of Hogarth.