Grimoire of the Lamb by Kevin Hearne Page B

or shiver as I ascended, and my inner ninja approved. My stomach, however, began to rebel as I got closer to the ceiling. Something smelled foul up there—but it was a different stench from the one in the chamber of the crocodile god.
    Once I got my head in the space between the ceiling and the floor, I paused. The smell was definitely coming from the room above, but I couldn’t see very much. Silently, I withdrew a dagger from my satchel and poked it up through the hole to see if it set off any kind of trap. I wiggled it around. I swirled it all around the edges. Nothing.
    I did a quick peekaboo, feeling silly, but whatever—I didn’t want to end more than twothousand years of existence as a victim to one of Elkhashab’s booby traps. No reaction, and I didn’t see much of anything. It was fair-to-middling Stygian darkness in there.
    Casting night vision, I took a longer peek and did a complete survey, three-sixty. There was a break in the railing of the staircase so that one could enter or exit on this floor. It appeared to be a single chamber, smaller than the ones downstairs. There was a lone sarcophagus here, but a more conventional type rather than one of Sobek. It was situated conventionally as well, resting prone instead of leaning upright against the wall. Three large cages filled the rest of the room, and it was from them that the stink emanated. Behind me, there was just the bare stone wall, and the staircase continued to wind above into farther unknown levels. I put my dagger away.
    I climbed and left the stairs to check out the cages. The first one held a small skeleton without a skull. The next held a rotting corpse, also headless, dressed in tatters of once-white linen that had been chewed on by rats. Or maybe by those flesh-eating scarab beetles from
The Mummy
, which still gave me nightmares. I couldn’t tell if the body was male or female, but it was young. I remembered the two skulls resting on the altar; I’d thought them there for gravitas or a sense of theatre, but the bastard had actually sacrificed kids. Sure, demons would let themselves be bound for one of those.
    Another still form lay in the third cage. The legs faced the door and the rise of shoulders concealed the head—if there was one. The reek was awful; there was a bucket filled to the brim with waste in one corner. Strangely, it gave me hope.
    “Hey, kid,” I whispered. Then I realized I didn’t need to whisper and I should probably speak in Arabic. “Wake up!” I called. No reaction. My throat tightened, but I shouted it again. The child didn’t move.
    Concentrating on the lock, I bound the metal tumblers to the unlocked position, swung open the door, and entered the cage. The boy—for it was a boy, about ten years old or so—still had a head. He was alive but unconscious, and the pulse I felt at his neck was weak. He was probably dehydrated and starved. Elkhashab had just left him in here while he went off to America to steal an ancient grimoire.
    I couldn’t let him stay here any longer. He needed medical attention now. As I had done before with Oberon, I created a binding so that this boy could use the magic stored in my bear charm for energy. Once the binding was complete, his eyes popped open and he scrambled away from me until he was at the back of the cage, his hands raised defensively as he begged in Arabicnot to be killed.
    “Salaam,”
I said in the same language. The poor kid had every reason to be terrified. “I’ve come to take you out of here. Let’s get away from that man.” I backed out of the cage and left the door open, speaking to him from freedom. “Come on.” Belatedly, I remembered that he probably couldn’t see anything. He might be thinking that
I
was Elkhashab. I cast night vision on him and spoke again. “Let’s go. Up the stairs. Let’s get you home. Your parents are worried.”
    I hoped he wouldn’t take too long to decide. The energy in my charm wouldn’t last forever and was already