Read Wraiths of Time for Free Online Page B

gestures. But none of the others followed her. Instead the priestess laid the ankh carefully on the threshold and raised her masked head, making a firm sign that Tallahassee was to remain where she was. Then she stepped back into the main portion of the temple.
    The girl made a circuit of the chamber. She discovered that the tall jars in the corner were covered, and when she slipped the lid off the nearest she could see water in it. Instantly, as if the sight of the liquid had triggered her response, she was so thirsty that she longed to raise the whole jar and let its contents take the taste of sand grit from her. There was a cup resting on a pile of plates nearby and she seized that.
    The drinking of that water more than anything else roused her out of the bewilderment that had held her since she had awakened among the ruins. She did not remember ever drinking or eating (for now she had reached for a date lying with others in a sticky little pool on a plate, above which was a transparent cover easy enough to lift) in any dream before.
    The date was very sticky, for it must have been steeped in honey. Too sweet, she had to wash the taste of it from her mouth with another gulp of lukewarm water. Food, water, the mats to sleep on—and that thing in the corner which certainly was not of Meroë, nor of Egypt either.
    The steady hum it had emitted vanished in a flash of brighter light that rose, not in random lines now, but in a well-marked spiral on the front panel. At the same time, there came a crackle of sound that grew louder and more insistent with every second.
    Tallahassee approached the thing carefully. It was eerie, mainly because it was alien to all the rest in this room, all that she had seen outside, enough so to make one wary. However, as quickly as it had appeared, the brilliant spiral of light vanished, leaving again only the vibrant hum.
    There was only one door to the room, but high on the walls some stones had fallen out, so that the sun made bright, light patches here and there. Tallahassee, oddly reluctant to turn her back on the pillar thing, crept softly to the door. She had no idea of the plan of this temple. And now, from what must be the outer shrine, she heard once more the tinkle of the sistrum, a murmur of voices chanting in a tone hardly above a whisper.
    Could she slip out? Tallahassee studied the ankh lying in the doorway. It was enough in the shadows to show once again a small shimmer of radiance about it. When she tried to edge past, it was like meeting a solid surface—not hard and stationary, like a wall, but a barrier that gave a little and then repelled.
    Retreating to one of the cushions on the floor, the girl sat cross-legged and tried to assess her position. Now she deliberately did what she had kept herself from doing earlier, attempted to trace this unbelievable situation back to the very beginning.
    She had indeed been forced along after the ankh to the room of the Brooke Collection. There had been a seeming confrontation there between two invisible wills—perhaps personalities. Then had followed her own compulsion to capture the rod, her full awakening in the sand and ruins.
    This was all too vividly real and had lasted far too long to be just a dream. She was not and had never been into drugs. But perhaps this was the sort of thing a user might imagine when high.
    The evidences of the past, she knew, could be drawn from her own memory. Only, to refute that, there was that thing in the corner which was plainly not of any Meroë she knew through her studies. If she was not drugged, nor dreaming—what had happened to her? And why did the dead girl have Tallahassee’s own features, features which could not be disguised even by the exotic eye makeup, the difference in skin shade?
    Where was she?
    There was no logical, nor acceptable answer for what had happened: none that she could muster anyway.
    It was hot, so hot, in spite of the thick walls of masonry. A flicker