Outside the great library of Alexandria, my nose inhaled salt and fish and baked stone, sweat and blood and rotting garbage. Inside it was different: dust and musty lambskin, inks and glues settling into papyrus, and the occasional whiff of perfumed unguents desperately trying to distract from the scent of an unwashed pair of armpits.
I stabled my horse prior to entering, double-checked my clothing to be sure my tattoos were hidden, and also stuffed what gamers today might call a mighty bag of holding into my robes, concealing Fragarach there as well. Then it was smiling and nodding and a few quick exchanges in Coptic. Most of the scrolls were not free to be browsed. Rather, one had to request information from a librarian and the relevant material would be fetched. There were, however, some shelves one could browse on the main floor, and I pretended to do that while searching for a set of stairs leading downward. Once I found a doorway into which librarians came and went, I put the golden torc Ogma had given me about my neck and felt the power waiting there. I drew on some of it to cast camouflage and entered the stairwell, arriving in a basement thick with dust and disuse. Shelves rose up the walls and also in rows between support pillars. After a quick circuit informed me that few librarians came down here and they were heard before they were seen, I dispelled camouflage to preserve energy. The pillars, I noticed, were covered in hieroglyphs—somewhat unusual, since hieroglyphs had passed out of usage hundreds of years ago. There were also some passages of Demotic, perhaps intended to function much the way the Rosetta stone did, helping modern readers to decipher the glyphs, but that language was already dying out in favor of Coptic.
Ogma had been unclear about the exact location of the sealed chamber or how I was to find it. Seshat had not only sealed the entrance, she had hidden it. Despite not being able to read the hieroglyphs, I examined the pillars closely, one by one, until I identified the eye of Horus present on three of them but not the others. I returned to each of these and examined them more closely, searching for a pattern or any kind of clue that would point the way to Seshat’s chamber. I pressed the eyes. I searched the shelves on either sides of the pillars for any irregularities. I looked for cracks in the pillars that might indicate there was a hidden door and a stairwell inside a hollow column. Nothing. Twice I had to hide from approaching footsteps and wait for the librarian to move on.
It required rethinking. The three pillars marked with the eye of Horus necessarily formed the points of a triangle, but it dawned upon me as I checked their relative positions that the triangle in question was a perfect isosceles, like the pyramids. A bit of experimentation and visualization led me to an aisle with no pillars in it, which represented the approximate center of the triangle. Keeping my eyes on the floor, I soon came across the faint tracing of the eye of Horus etched into the stone. Kneeling down, I saw that there was a fine tracery of lines around the etching that indicated the eye might sink into the ground as a contiguous sigil. It wasn’t large enough to be accidentally stepped on and activated, though. A firm press of the thumb might work, but I didn’t want to try it without a large dollop of caution. Accessing the power waiting in the torc, I lifted the veil of my mundane vision and took a look at the etching through magical sight.
It was a simple button, pushing a lever that appeared to activate a series of stone gears hidden below my feet, though it wouldn’t work without a magic release first; it would behave as if stuck. Unsticking it, I surmised, would require doing something underneath the massive shelf to my left, stacked high with scrolls protected in wooden boxes. The red magical bindings circling the button streaked that way until they disappeared.
I doubted I could move the entire shelf by myself or that I should even try. The binding might actually continue beyond into other aisles, and I checked first to make sure. No: The binding terminated underneath the shelf. I returned to the aisle with the eye in the floor and examined the bottom shelf. There was one boxed scroll with the eye of Horus painted on the end in faded blue. That had to be a clue. It didn’t appear to be trapped or have any juju surrounding it, so I carefully extracted the box from underneath the others, opened it, and unrolled the scroll inside, returning my vision to the mundane in the process.
It was a map of the chamber below, in which the cartouche repeated a warning in hieroglyphs, Demotic, and Coptic that only high priests may enter without consequence. I was about to ask, “High priests of what?” but there were hieroglyphic representations of several deities below that presumably answered that question. I recognized Horus, Anubis, Osiris, Isis, Bast, Taweret, and one other I expected thanks to Ogma: Seshat.
Once I entered, there would be a button to close the opening behind me and then a series of seven rooms off a single hallway: three on each side and a large one at the end. That was six more chambers than Ogma had told me to expect, and none of them was labeled helpfully with THIS ONE HAS THAT THING OGMA WANTS. In fact, they weren’t labeled at all, and neither were there any instructions on how to open the chamber in the first place. As Ogma said to me in Byzantium, there are ways to control what gets shared. The arrow and instructions in Demotic and Coptic on how to close the chamber once inside were the only available clues to what I might find down there. But there were seven deities pictured and seven chambers; perhaps they were proprietary and I would simply need to find the one with a graven image of Horus on it—or Seshat, since I’d been told she was in charge of protecting this knowledge.
There still remained the problem of how to get down there. Perhaps the shelving warranted more attention.
I cleared away all the scrolls, boxed and unboxed, that covered the space over which the red streak of bindings had disappeared—that included the boxed scroll with the eye of Horus on it. What confronted me was a black expanse of shadow, which lacked promise, except perhaps for the promise of spiders.