James Lovegrove - [The Pantheon Trilogy 01] - The Age Of Ra (pdf).pdf

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SOLARIS
A Rebellion Publishing Ltd Publication
Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.
www.solarisbooks.com
abaddonsolaris@rebellion.co.uk
First published in 2009 by Solaris, an imprint Rebellion Publishing Ltd.
Text Copyright © 2009 James Lovegrove
The right of the individual authors to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
ISBN (.epub format): 978-1-84997-156-0
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ISBN (.mobi format): 978-1-84997-157-7
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or
by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission
of the publishers.
For
Theodore Finch Xavier Lovegrove
DoB: 27 July 2006
AUTHOR'S NOTE
I'm aware that in modern Egyptological circles there are preferred spellings of certain gods' names, e.g.
Re for Ra, Seth for Set. I've gone for the traditional spellings, since they're more familiar to most people,
including me.
1. Petra
The sun went down like a tin duck at a shooting gallery. Night stretched itself over the eastern Arabian
desert, the light from a clear full moon creating a finely filigreed landscape of silver and black.
At an altitude of 1,000 feet a twin-engine Griffon-3 transporter plane released a stick of paratroopers in
alternating door technique, ten on either side. Canopies flared immediately. The twenty men turned into
the wind and dropped to the desert floor as silently as thistle seeds, each making a perfect five-point
landing. Within minutes their chutes were buried and they were jogging towards Mount Hor and the dead
city that nestled in its shadow, Petra.
They filed through the Siq, Petra's eastern gateway, a sheer-sided gorge hacked out by a long-ago
earthquake and smoothed by water erosion. In places it was so narrow they could barely walk two
abreast. Above, the sky was a distant strip of starshine, a glittering river meandering between black
banks. The paratroopers moved carefully, wide-eyed in the near-total darkness of the gorge. The path
sloped steeply, uneven underfoot. Each man held his ibis-headedba lance at the ready, reassured by the
warmth he could feel through the handgrips, the charge of divine essence that glowed within the weapon.
The Siq opened out onto a valley. Directly ahead lay the rendezvous point, a Romanesque temple hewn
out of the face of a sandstone cliff and known as Al Khazneh, ''the Treasury''. Its colonnaded and
porticoed entrance towered before the soldiers. Essentially a decorated cave mouth, it exuded a dusty
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silence, the breath of the ancient darkness within.
On the steps of the Treasury, Lieutenant David Westwynter lowered his lance and checked his watch.
Precisely 8pm.
''Bang on time,'' he muttered. ''At least,we are.''
He gave the order to his men to fan out in a defensive formation. Sergeant Mal McAllister, his number
two, relayed the order. The paratroopers broke off into small units and found what cover they could in
this smooth-bottomed natural amphitheatre. They aimed their weapons in the direction an attack was
most likely to come from, should one come: above.
''This can't be a trap,'' David said to Sergeant McAllister.
''Aye, but if it is,'' McAllister said, finishing his sentence, ''they have us in the ideal spot for an ambush.''
''That's just what I'm trying not to think.''
They waited. And waited. The cold desert wind sidled through the crags and canyons of the abandoned
city, never louder than a sigh. In centuries past, Petra had been home to thousands. It had been a trading
post, selling its principal resource, fresh water, which came from frequent flash floods and was
husbanded in a network of dams and cisterns. The cave-dwelling citizens had worshipped deities who
had been vanquished long ago, their names now forgotten, their effigies defaced. Christianity had briefly
gained a toehold here, as had Islam. But in time those religions, too, had evaporated, leaving nothing but
ruined monuments behind.
Petra, like so many other places, was a museum to the world's fallen gods. A museum and a mausoleum.
Here lay their legacy, such as it was - a few broken idols and abandoned buildings, sacred to no one.
Here were the sparse, scratched traces they had left behind, the only tangible proof that somewhere on
earth they had once held sway. Now mankind belonged to the One True Pantheon, and the wind blowing
through Petra sounded, to David Westwynter's ears, like a faint, mournful sob, the despair of defeated
rivals. He was comforted by that.
''Sir.''
A whispered warning from McAllister.
David turned.
Men were approaching from the far end of the valley. He counted at least a dozen. They were spread
out in a line, and the moonlight showed them to be clothed in ragged camouflage fatigues, with turbans
around their heads and scarves across their faces, so that just their eyes were visible. Only the
falcon-head nozzles on theirba lances and the maces that hung by their sides marked them out as
Horusites.
David drew himself up to his full height, which at 5' 10" was a shade shorter than he might have liked.
The leader of the Horusite commandos halted in front of him and unveiled his face, revealing himself to
be a broad-nosed black man with finely pitted skin. He stood an inch or so taller than David.
''Colonel Henry D. Wilkins, Eighth Infantry Division out of Cairo, Illinois,'' he said, snapping off a salute.
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