"She on the level?" Carmichael went back into the kitchen and brought me a wad of flatbread, covered with cooked goat and hummus, takeaway from the ceremony, I guess a" never let anybody tell you even the pilots from the B.P.R.D. aren't psychic. "Yeah, it sounds like poor Yusef got his from a demon, but that doesn't mean it wasn't her that sicced one on him."

I shook my head, the dreams coming back to me. "No, ibn-Ghaalib's a demon-hunter, all right. I saw Azuzar, shut up in an amber bottle a" "

I winced, a stab of pain going through my head again. Azuzar. The other bottles and jars. Some were old a" some were damn old. Demon hunters pass these traps along to each other, or steal them from each other and from unsuspecting museums. They have their own whispered network where they're bought and sold. Most of the traps are pretty poozley a" they'll hold a poltergeist or a little water-pook, and most of the zar I'd seen at the dance weren't much stronger than that a" but there'd been two or three in the collection that could have disabled low-level gods.

One of them a" the strongest a" I remembered had been empty, set aside in a separate compartment, packed in iron filings and salt.

"He's after something big." I opened my eyes again, looked from Carmichael to Harik. "He came here to fuel up. To trap the little stuff so he can use them when he goes after King Kong."

"He has not been seen since the ceremony," said Harik, as I proceeded to make short work of the flatbread. "When bint-Tahayet found us, it still took time to bring you here a" "

"He see you at the dance?" Carmichael handed me a beer. It was warm, but I wasn't bitching.

I nodded, and winced. I'd hit that floor pretty hard. "Who would he be after, Professor?" I looked over at Harik. "What demons a" what ... entities a" would a man like that go after, if he had the power of about a dozen captive demons to back him up?"

Harik thought about that. He didn't look happy. I wasn't thrilled myself. There's scary crap out there that Necromancers over the millennia have called across into this world and used a" or tried to use a" to get things their way.

Before he could answer feet clunked on the wooden steps outside the door, and a second later Raisha came into the kitchen, then through into the room where the three of us were. "Allah be praised, the all-merciful, the all-compassionate." She pulled off her veil a" I guess she'd established that Harik was a Catholic and didn't care whether she was veiled or not a" and sat beside Carmichael on the edge of the bed, making it pretty crowded. "I feared ibn-Ghaalib had taken you, al-Jahannum, as he took Azuzar a" "

"I think we are all of us fortunate he did not," said Harik softly. "Egypt is a land full of spirits, even in times of quiet. Had your self, your soul, been drawn out of your body a" " He turned to look earnestly at me, " a" I think there would be real danger that another demon a" an earth-spirit, not a hell-spirit a" might have possessed it."

Oh, swell. "You mean I'd have been possessed?"

"More like ..." He paused, thinking. "More like sublet. The problem is that none of us understands a" I have discussed this with Trevor and I think he has spoken of it to you also a" none of us understands the precise relationship of the demon spirit to its flesh. We know it is different from that of mortals; we do not know how different. Or what elements a" what secrets, what dangers a" may be hidden within you."

In the silence that followed the tinny blare of a Cairo radio station from the apartment next door sounded very loud. I knew there'd been a school of thought, while I was being raised in secret in New Mexico, that I should simply have been destroyed while humankind had the chance to do it. I'd heard also that some in the Bureau thought I should have been kept permanently under wraps and studied, instead of being brought up like a more or less normal person. It was only now that I began to realize what a risk the Professor had taken, insisting that I was a human being and should be treated like one. Which party, I found myself wondering, would Professor Harik have been in?

At the moment, there seemed to be only one thing I could say about the whole subject.

"Got another cigarette?" I turned to Raisha. "What'd you find out?"

She pressed one hand swiftly to her mouth, shut her eyes, trying to steady herself. "He was gone from the ceremony by the time I returned there," she whispered. Under decades of sunburn her face looked ashen, sick with anxiety and grief. "No one could say where. I checked at the airport and they knew nothing. But later one of the men there who loads planes for the smugglers a" not the official flights, you understand a" said that they'd left this morning, that ibn-Ghaalib had his box with him a" "

A shiver went through her, and the gaze she turned on me was haunted. "What will they do with him? What do they want with him?"

"What happens to him," I said slowly, "depends on where ibn-Ghaalib was going."

She shook her head, fighting to keep calm against the unthinkable fear that she'd never find him again. Had she been that shook up, when her husband died? You do not understand, she'd said ...

Silently Carmichael got her a Coke from the kitchen, and lit a cigarette for her.

"There is a man named Fuad," she said after a minute, "who flies cargoes in and out of Cairo. Sometimes cigarettes, sometimes kif, or women for the workmen's brothels. Or he will take pilgrims to Mecca a" anywhere that anyone will pay for the fuel." She swallowed hard, fingers trembling on her cigarette. "These are not official cargo companies, you understand. They pay the men in the tower, and no papers are filed."

Carmichael said, "Shit."

I said, "What kind of plane?"

Raisha looked blank, the way most people do when you ask that question.

"This Fuad ain't the only cargo runner working the airstrip," I said. With Russian money funding an army of manual laborers, I knew Aswan had to be chin deep in smuggled goods. "I saw a lot of old C-40s and gooney birds left over from the War out there when we came in; bigger craft as well. If we know what kind of plane our boy rented, we might get some idea how far he thinks he'll need to go."

We'd come down from London to Aswan in an old C-46 that a grateful government had bestowed on the B.P.R.D., stopping off to refuel in Rome. From Professor Harik's rental Chevy at the edge of the unofficial end of the airstrip, Raisha and I watched while Harik and Carmichael went in and put the fear of God into the boys in the tower.

"Ibn-Ghaalib beat feet out of here the minute the zar ceremony was done," I told her. "So he knows we're on his tail. If he knew to kill Yusef, he may even know who we are. He's been around long enough. So he'll stay away from commercial flights." I gestured at the small planes scattered on the flat pale sand that stretched beyond the regular commercial runway under the brutal glare of the noon sun. "Now, if our pal Fuad flies a C-40, like half the smugglers in Africa, that could be bad news, because he could just be headed for Cairo, to pick up a flight anyplace in the world. A C-40 would also put him in Syria, in Mecca, along the trade routes through the north of Arabia, in Greece, or at the site of ancient Carthage. Any of those places had enough sophisticated occult knowledge in the past to be hiding some truly nasty bogeymen."

Carmichael and Harik emerged from the door at the base of the tower and walked toward us, Carmichael keeping an eye behind him on the airstrip staff. They looked like they'd sell a load of Mecca pilgrims to be chopped up for dog food if the price was right.

"A gooney bird a" a DC-3 a" would expand ibn-Ghaalib's range to sixteen hundred miles before they have to refuel," I went on. "That's the Empty Quarter of Arabia, Baghdad, the mountains of Azerbaijan where there's supposed to be some really weird stuff walled up under old monasteries, and the sources of the Nile. Anything bigger is going to cost more, and means one of their hops is longer than sixteen hundred. And that," I said, as Carmichael opened the driver's side door, "means only one place, from here."

"Fuad flies a C-46," Carmichael said.

"All right." I glanced at Harik; he nodded agreement. He knew. "That means he's headed for Timbuktu."

We refueled in Cairo, and again in Tripoli with the sun sinking red over the mountains to the west. The ground crew said another old C-46 had refueled around noon. The descriptions fit ibn-Ghaalib, Fuad, and Fuad's two-man crew. To be on the safe side we kept west and fueled again in Casablanca, because there was no airport then in Timbuktu and we'd have to go from there to Lagos a" if we survived.

Harik and I both knew what was supposed to be in Timbuktu.

We took off and headed southeast across the desert, a thousand miles of nothing in the dark.

For four hundred years, Timbuktu was one of the greatest trading cities in the world, the last port on a deadly ocean of sand. Even after the Portuguese cut into the trade in slaves and gold in the sixteenth century, the universities there were famous throughout Islam, both for their studies of the Holy Qur'an and for their production a" and preservation a" of manuscripts. "We know that a line of adepts of occult knowledge lived and taught there," Professor Harik said softly to Raisha, as those black miles unspooled down below us and Carmichael's flight crew a" a young Brit named Thomas and a jarhead Carmichael had borrowed from an air base in Germany a" passed around thermos coffee in paper cups. And if you think there was any way we could have left Raisha on the ground in Aswan, think again.

"I will not leave him," she'd said. The look in her eyes was scary. And to me, "You owe me your life,"

Well, she was right. I had the uncomfortable feeling that if it hadn't been for her knowing what ibn-Ghaalib could do with demons, I'd have been in that other plane, not this one, cursing and screaming in one of those damn alabaster jars. And God only knew what would be occupying my flesh. Harik knew he a" and the Bureau a" owed her, too.

Now she sat on one of the carpet-cove red wall benches that were the only furnishings in the dark cabin, listening to Harik while I tried to pull together in my mind everything I'd picked up from the Professor, over the years, about what it was ibn-Ghaalib had to be seeking in that pink mud city on the banks of the Niger.

"Manuscripts were preserved among the ancient families of the city," Harik went on, "vast libraries dating back to the days long before the Prophet. Manuscripts collected from Arabia, Persia, Moorish Spain, and India, and brought to the city on the caravans that brought in slaves and ivory and salt. During colonial days wealthy Europeans plundered some of these libraries, carrying them off wholesale to Paris or Berlin. Seeing this, the scholars of Timbuktu hid many of those that remained a" thousands of volumes a" in caves along the dry rock watercourses In the desert, or buried them in the sand."

Raisha asked, "And that is what he seeks, this ibn-Ghaalib?" Her brows pulled together under the dark edge of the hijab that covered her hair. She knew there had to be more. "Why does he need to capture spirits, only in order to discover a book?"

Harik glanced at her, then at me, asking how much of this an outsider would understand.

An outsider who's been possessed by a demon for thirty years? Beats me.

"We think so," he said. "There was ... a great Arab scholar, a master of occult lore." Which I guess is one way of describing Abdul Alhazred, author of the Necronomicon. "We know that he studied in Timbuktu. It was there that he wrote portions of... of a work of frightening scholarship, a work that can be used to summon forth terrible beings from the abysses beyond Space and Time as we understand them. And a tradition exists, that he not only taught students of his own in Timbuktu, but that he left his notes, his early drafts of that dreadful manuscript, with these students: notes on sources that are lost now to the outside world."

"Legends say," I took up the story, "that Abdul Alhazred a" that was his name a" had a slave. He probably did; Timbuktu was the big center for the slave trade. This slave had come from the tribal south with his wife, but the woman had been mistreated on the way and died. Legend says the slave kept the spirit of his wife in a bottle, and every time a new caravan of slaves came in, he'd go down to the markets with the bottle, and the spirit inside would eat the spirits of women slaves when they died in the slave compounds."

Raisha said softly, "A zar. Many of the zar had life as humans, or take on the humanity of those they possessed before."

"Sounds like it," I agreed. I remembered the woman at the dance, swaying with empty eyes as she shouted the Hail Mary in Latin. "The story goes that after Abdul left town, our pal the slave went on living in Abduls palace outside Timbuktu, and became a scholar in his own right. Years later he got religion, bricked up the palace, the bottle, and it sounds like his boss's old notes, and became a hermit in the desert."

"And this spirit," Raisha whispered, "this wife a" this woman who died in hatred and in hatred lives on in the form of a zar a" it is she who guards this evil book. I see." She closed her eyes. She looked dead tired; God knows how much sleep she'd gotten in the past two days, if any. "As the zar give women strength a" as Azuzar gave me the strength to survive a" now this ibn-Ghaalib thinks to use their strength to defeat her. Dog," she breathed. "Pig and dog."

Her eyes opened, burning up into mine. "She will devour him," she said. "This woman who died in anger, this Guardian Zar. She will destroy him, and eat the spirits he brings with him, as she ate the others long ago."

I didn't think it was wise at that point to say that was what we were all hoping would happen. If ibn-Ghaalib had power over demons a" the power I'd felt at the zar ceremony a" I sure didn't want to lay money on us being able to get near him before he laid hands on whatever notes Alhazred had left. He had six hours' lead on us, and personally, I was coming to realize that getting killed outright would probably be the least of my worries.

It wasn't a pleasant thought.

We sighted Timbuktu at first light. Sand swept and crumbling, it stood on a slight rise above the river surrounded by the baked-out remains of what used to be marshes, the Sahara moving in on all sides. In 1962, there wasn't a modern building in the place, just pink mud-brick, weird triangular mosque towers with log ends sticking out of them, elaborate old gates and dome-shaped ovens like beehives in every street. Farther out in the desert, fumaroles smoked where the peat of vanished marshlands burned under the ground, and little lumps of rubble marked where old villages or forts had stood, protecting the caravan route.

"It could be any of those, couldn't it?" asked Professor Harik, kneeling on the bench beside me a" carefully, because Raisha had fallen asleep there a" and looking down out the window. "The slave's old palace, where he hid Alhazred's notes?"

I shook my head. "Bureau's checked 'em out already." And don't think that had been easy, while the Algerian War was going on. I'd seen photographs, and the map, in the Professor's office, a couple months back. Like I said, the whole subject of Africa had been talked about a lot at the Bureau, between the breakup of the French dependencies and the start of surveying on the dam.

"Can we simply guard their plane, then?" For a fussy little stick who thought alcohol would kill germs in a glass of Scotch, Professor Harik had a nice, logical mind. I like that. It makes things lots easier.

"Too late," I said. "If ibn-Ghaalib gets hold of those manuscripts, he'll probably be able to command the Guardian Zar as well. Then we're all screwed."

"Ah."

Beside us, Raisha breathed, "Azuzar" and opened her eyes.

There was something about them a" blank, smoky, still tangled in dreams a" that made me lean down and whisper to her, "Did he speak to you?" and she murmured, Yes.

Her eyes slipped closed again and as gently as I could, I laid my hand on her forehead. "Can you speak to him now? Ask him where he is?"

If she hadn't been that tired I'm not sure it would have worked, or if she hadn't been used to putting herself in trances for the zar dance. "Overhead." The word passed her lips like a dying breath. "We crossed overhead, and he saw us. A chamber a" rocks a" stairs going down. Water was there once and now there is only dust."

"Tell Carmichael to swing this thing around and take us straight back over our tracks," I said softly. "Not you," I added, as Harik would have gone, and flicked with my stone hand to Thomas, who ducked fast through the cockpit door. "You watch for landmarks a" "

"There is nothing." A thin, steady wind was blowing across the desert below, driving little crescents of dust before it. Enough to take out whatever tracks there might have been. "I have been watching."

"Don't look for a building; it's too old," I said. "Look for ground that'd take a building; bedrock where you could dig an underground cistern."

On the other side of the plane, the jarhead called out softly, "Something down there." I hadn't thought he'd been listening. A minute later it came into view with the turning of the plane: a big thicket of dried-out camelthorn that didn't move right in the wind. Raisha whispered again, "Azuzar," and at the same time the sun came up, marking every irregularity of the ground with huge violet shadows, showing up what looked like a long island above an arm of the far-off river, that had sunk away centuries ago into the sand. Timbuktu lay about ten miles to the south, an easy ride if you were rich and had horses a" or could rent a jeep in the town. On the sunny side of that slight rise of ground there were what looked like rock formations, and a couple more withered trees. There'd been water there longer than the rest of the area.

I said, "Tell Carmichael to put this thing down."

I went in first because I'm big, I'm scary, and I was betting ibn-Ghaalib hadn't told Fuad the cigarette smuggler that the people after him included a seven-foot-tall red guy. The mud flat where Carmichael put the plane down was on the sun side of the island and the two guards ibn-Ghaalib had left on the entrance to the old palace's cistern started shooting while we were still taxiing, long before we were in range. Amateurs. Back at the start of this expedition we hadn't expected trouble, so we didn't have professional muscle, but the jarhead was a fair sharpshooter and we did have rifles, as well as a box of grenades.

I took off my trench coat so they could get a good look at me, hooves, tail, and all, then ran toward them, dodging and weaving enough a" I hoped a" not to take a bullet that probably wouldn't kill me but that could be a real pain in the ass.

It worked. Even from the plane I heard one of them scream, "Yallah!" and saw him break cover from the rock formation and throw aside his rifle, and head over the rise to where I was pretty sure they had a jeep hidden under the camelthorn. The other guy had an AK-47 and fired two bursts at me, which showed him up to the jarhead, who fired back with aim a lot better than his or mine. Then he ran, too. I'd gone flat at the first semi-auto burst and stayed flat until Carmichael zigzagged up to me, though there wasn't any shooting after that. Then we went up to check out the area to be sure.

"Why're they still here?" whispered Carmichael. "They had six hours' lead on us a""

"a" and probably a wall to dig through," I said. "We may still be in time." Whatever was down there guarding those notes, I'd much rather deal with ibn-Ghaalib before he got it riled up than after.

We'd barely reached the rocks when a scream came from the other side of the rise, a scream of purest, hellish agony, and a man's voice shouted frantically, "Hassan! Hassan!" And the next second, the stink of burning flesh.

I went to look, though I'd guessed ibn-Ghaalib had booby-trapped the jeep with a geas of some kind, and I was right. Hassan lay in the sand near the jeep, dead a" most of the flesh was melted off his arms and his right leg. The other man, kneeling beside him, emptied a handgun in my general direction and then threw it at me and took off running straight across the desert.

Midsummer in the Sahara, you can die in less than ten miles, and he wasn't even headed in the right direction for town. My guess was, he wouldn't be back.

As I crossed back to the rocks where Carmichael waited, I felt, deep beneath the ground, a shudder, not like the jar and roll of an earthquake but a kind of sustained quivering, like a horse twitching its skin. I didn't know what that meant, but none of my guesses sounded good. I broke into a run.

Professor Harik and Raisha had joined the group by the rocks. Carmichael said, "What the hell is that?" and Harik, "There's no way in."

"There has to be, they were guarding here a" " Carmichael began, and behind him I could see, behind fragments of half-buried masonry, the dark mouth of an ancient shaft.

Demons can see certain things that people can't. And so can I. I'd seen the runes ibn-Ghaalib had put on the jeep, and I could sure as hell see the marks he'd drawn on the old threshold, the broken wall, that slipped the human consciousness past them. Its an old trick and it doesn't work if your attention is drawn to whatever they're trying to hide, as I drew it by stepping into the shaft entrance; they all looked startled as hell. "How about this?" I said, and took the gun from my holster. Around us, the stone of the low hill shivered again, sending down a shower of pebbles and vibrating a cloud of dust from the walls. Harik coughed, backed out a step, then returned, taking a flashlight from his pocket; Carmichael muttered, "Damn straight." Raisha only stood, listening to something only she could hear.

"He's down there," she whispered. "He's calling a" calling for help. Can you hear them?"

I couldn't, but what the hell. Down we went.

One member of ibn-Ghaalib's hired flight crew was still unaccounted for, and from the runes on the jeep I knew ibn-Ghaalib himself had a pretty high degree of supernatural power, so I wasn't really surprised at what happened next. Didn't make it easier to cope with, but I wasn't surprised. Because of the shaking of the hill the air was thick with dust, cutting the flashlight's beam to a few feet, and the soft, subsonic rumble of the earth hid every sound but one. Below us somewhere in the darkness I could hear a man's voice a" ibn-Ghaalib's a" chanting or singing, not in Arabic but in something else, some language unheard on the earth for millennia, words that existed only in those forbidden texts the Bureau tried to trace and keep under lock and key. And under that, woven around it like silver wire around a core of burning iron, a kind of wailing vibration that twisted the heart inside my body and made me want to turn and run.

Damn, I thought, knowing it for what it was. Damn a"

A gunshot cracked, somewhere below us. Carmichael gasped and I heard his Walther-PK clatter on the broken stone steps underfoot, smelled his blood as I shot back. Whoever was down there was shooting up into the narrow shaft, like firing at fish in a barrel. I felt a bullet tear my shoulder as I barreled down the stairs, blazing away a" Hell, he had to be in a direct line with us a"

And I walked smack into it. A line a" a field a" of spells that necromancers form, to trap and hold the demons they summon. Energy went through my head, through my body, paralyzing me and turning me cold. Bluish light showed me the dry cistern chamber at the bottom of the stairs, the ring of bottles and jars set up in their own protective ring at one side of the long stone room, blurred by the haze of dust. The jars themselves glowed and above each one burned a heatless, terrible little flame. In front of me ibn-Ghaalib swung around from the hole he'd opened in the rear wall, a hole cut through ancient masonry, opening into blackness. His pick, and Fuad's, lay on the floor beside him, and before him the jar I'd seen in his trunk, the ancient one he'd packed by itself, a skull with its eyes sealed with silver.

He faced me with a face like nothing human, eyes glowing with demon light. Damn.

I tried to bring up my gun to shoot and my fingers loosened, my knees turned to water.

The bastard smiled. He opened his mouth and light came out of it, and he spoke words in the tongue of the Great Old Ones, and the trembling of the hill seemed to pass into my own flesh, loosening it around the bones.

For not quite twenty years, I'd lived on the earth. Now I felt my spirit a" my soul a" tearing loose, being drawn out of me the way ibn-Ghaalib had drawn the zar out of that girl Naseeba at the dance, the way he'd drawn the spirit Azuzar out of Raisha's body. From an ammo pouch on his belt a" he was still wearing the white galibeya he'd had on at the zar ceremony a" he brought another one of those jars he'd had in his trunk, a little one made of alabaster, and I hated it, hated it like the mouth of Hell because that's exactly what it was. He stretched out his hand toward me, palms marked with the ancient Lemurian signs of mastery, and there was no way I could stop him ...

Because of what I am.

Cold pale skeleton light flared in the black hole in the wall behind him. He swung around to face it, dropping the alabaster jar as he flung up his hands. The jar shattered and it was like an iron noose around my throat being let out one quarter of an inch: I couldn't move, but breath trickled through my lips. Not that that would do me any good, with the thing that was squeezing, soft and horrible, through the hole in the wall, soundless mouths working, eyes the eyes of a woman who's been raped to death a" and has dwelled in that last moment ever since.

Get me out of here. Whatever was going to happen next, it was not going to be good news for me.

Ibn-Ghaalib swayed, turned, moving as he'd moved in the zar dance. In the flame glow of the circle of jars I could see the thing that faced him; sometimes a woman a" or two women or three women a" sometimes like a great, glowing snake.

I don't know what Fuad saw a" Fuad crouched with a gun in his hand at the other side of the dry cistern chamber a" but he was paralyzed by it, either too hypnotized to notice me moving or maybe too scared to break his boss's concentration by so much as drawing breath.

Made sense to me.

I managed to shift one elbow, move one hoof a" it was like trying to crawl out from under a mountain. I pushed myself toward the steps again, toward the line of chill-burning signs that delineated the demon field.

I couldn't cross it.

Hands reached out of the dark, grabbed my wrist. Dragged me. It was like having the meat combed off my bones. I think I blacked out. Next thing I knew I was lying curled in the small stone space at the bottom of the stairs, Harik and Raisha crouched above me, the stone of floor and walls quivering like a Chihuahua on cold linoleum and the sound of ibn-Ghaalib's trapped demons wailing going through my brain like splinters of glass. Light and shadow flickered from the cistern, flashes of fire, the crack of lightning and the ozone stink of demonic power.

Raisha took my hand. Bony little claws, and warm. Despite the hammering African heat, my flesh was cold as the dead.

She whispered, "Possess me."

"What?"