Session Overview
Cairo, 1942. The second great battle of El Alamein rumbles on the horizon like a distant god clearing its throat, and somewhere out in the merciless Egyptian desert, Himmler's pet mystic and his merry band of Nazis are digging for something that almost certainly shouldn't be found. H-Cell had a name — the library of dust and salt — and the nerve to go looking for it. What followed was a masterclass in negotiation, a deeply undignified camel ride, one catastrophically shiny pair of binoculars, and a brief but extremely emphatic lesson in why you don't point a gun at an ex-special operations sniper.
A Humble Dromedary Shepherd with Nothing to Hide
The session picked up at Omar's café, where the party had recently established that yes, there were Germans in the desert, and yes, they appeared to be up to nothing good. The next question was rather practical: how does one pursue Nazis across the Sahara without actually knowing where they've gone?
Pendleton, to his considerable credit, offered precisely nothing useful on this front. "I don't have one on me, old boy," he said of the map that would have been enormously helpful. "You wanted that? You should have asked before we left." A fair point, delivered with the breezy confidence of a man who was not the one about to ride a camel into the wilderness. Fortunately, Omar had pointed them toward something more promising: the dromedary pens on the far side of the market, where his cousin Ahmed could be found.
The journey through the Cairo market was a riot of colour and noise — vendors calling out, the smell of spice and animal and humanity all layered together, the distant percussion of a city bracing for war. Then: the pens, and a smell of an entirely different variety.
Ahmed turned at the mention of his name with the expression of a man who has seen every kind of tourist and knows exactly what they're worth. He looked the group up and down with frank suspicion — and then Hex mentioned Omar, and praised the camels, and Ahmed broke into a grin of a man who has just spotted an easy mark. He was not wrong to be optimistic.
What followed was a wonderfully theatrical negotiation. Ahmed established early that he was, of course, but a humble dromedary shepherd — "What could I possibly know that would be of use to you? Many people hire camels. Many, many people." The description of three unusual Europeans — one of them enormous, almost as tall as a camel — didn't ring any bells whatsoever. His children, however, were very hungry.
Money changed hands. The memory returned immediately. Yes, the trio had been there — very distinctive, very strange, he had not liked them at all. They'd taken supplies for several days, claimed to be archaeologists investigating old ruins, and had not come back. Ahmed confirmed he always sends a guide with foreigners because, as he put it with entirely reasonable pragmatism, he does not want a reputation as a tourist killer.
Then came the complication. Hex asked about following the same route.
"You do not want to go where they are going," Ahmed said, and his voice had changed. "It is not a good place."
He described the destination with the careful gravity of someone who has heard too many stories to dismiss them: a place of "darkness and very evils, best left undisturbed." A library of dust and salt — that was what the locals called it. A relic of times best forgotten. People claimed to find it. They came back mad, or didn't come back at all.
Hex acknowledged the warning and asked how much it would cost to go anyway.
What followed was a negotiation that would have impressed a Cairo bazaar veteran. Ahmed produced a shopping list of desert necessities so lavishly padded that it bordered on performance art — camels, a guide, food, equipment, a pack camel, sleeping equipment, water, and almost certainly a few line items that existed purely for the joy of being haggled away. Hex, who was "new to your country but not necessarily a tourist tourist," told him to cut the fat and get to the brass tacks — and to make sure there was something in it for his hungry children. Seven of them, as it turned out. His wife, Ahmed noted with audible pride, "is quite the woman."
Two rounds of negotiation later, the deal was struck. Camels, guide, pack animal — the works — for a price that was slightly more than ideal but considerably less than the opening gambit. Ahmed, apparently satisfied, called for drinks: a carafe of what appeared to be potent local liquor, served in thimble-sized cups. Hanover declined. Haze declined. Hertz — "if it's being offered" — experienced it. We salute his commitment to cultural exchange.
Then Ahmed added, almost as an afterthought, that the Germans hadn't been travelling as just three people. Armed men had come with them. Seven or eight in total. He had one final request for the group: "Please — if any unpleasantness should break out — try not to damage the merchandise."
The camels were not to be harmed. Noted.
Into the Featureless, Sweltering Nowhere
The party spent their remaining Cairo evening wisely. Haze spent part of it scanning their surroundings for surveillance — he clocked some attention drifting their way, but nothing that smelled like hostile eyes. Just general curiosity toward a group of Americans who were slightly overdressed for the climate and clearly up to something. Hex took the opportunity to sleep properly for the first time in what felt like a while, and looked marginally less like a man haunted by the abyss for it.
The following morning found the party assembled at the edge of Cairo, where their camels and a young guide named Khalid were waiting. Hanover quietly assessed Ahmed and Khalid both as the group prepared to depart — looking for any sign they'd been sold out. She found nothing more suspicious than the ordinary calculations of men in the business of surviving wartime Cairo. Whatever Ahmed's misgivings about the destination, he hadn't shopped them to anyone. Small mercies.
The riding went about as well as you'd expect for a group containing a theoretical physicist and two people whose military training had not included significant time on the back of a dromedary. Haze, Hanover, and Hertz all had a difficult time of it. Hex, in a small but satisfying reversal of fortunes, took to it naturally. (There is always one.)
They rode out into the desert, and the desert swallowed them whole.
It is difficult to convey how completely featureless the Egyptian desert becomes once Cairo is behind you. No landmarks, no roads, no signposts. Just heat, sand, and sky in every direction, indistinguishable from every other direction. Khalid moved through it with quiet certainty, reading subtle variations in the dunes and stone that were entirely invisible to his charges. During the worst of the afternoon heat, he had them shelter in the shadow of the camels and drink hot, tepid water from animal-hide bottles — and this was, apparently, the correct thing to do.
None of them had any idea which direction they were travelling. They were, in every navigational sense, at Khalid's mercy.
During this ride, Hanover turned her memory to what she knew of their destination. The library of dust and salt surfaced from the edges of folklore — a quasi-mythical site, said to hold secrets over life and death, woven into regional stories for longer than anyone could reliably trace. There were no dependable accounts of exploration. No guidebook, no map notation, no academic paper. The comparisons that came to mind were not encouraging: El Dorado, Shangri-La — places people claimed to have found, from which they returned either raving or not at all. She also noted, with the precision of a woman who has done her reading, that salt has always meant power — that the Romans paid their soldiers with it, that it has been currency and sacred substance across a dozen cultures. Whatever the library was, it hadn't been named carelessly.
That night, they made camp in the open desert. Khalid found enough scrub to sustain a small fire. Above them, the stars were extraordinary — the kind of sky you only see when there is no city for a hundred miles in any direction. Far off, the faint thump and rumble of artillery carried across the sand. El Alamein, grinding away at the edge of history. It was, the party noted, a fair distance away and not currently their problem. They had enough of their own.
Someone — no one was quite sure who, and no one was quite certain afterwards that they had actually seen it — caught something at the edge of their vision at the campsite. A shape, a presence, something, out there in the dark beyond the firelight. By the time they turned to look directly at it, there was nothing there. Only sand and shadow and the distant sound of war.
No one slept especially well.
The Library of Dust and Salt
Morning came, and Khalid announced they would probably arrive around noon.
He was right. As the sun climbed toward its apex, the guide pointed toward a line of dunes ahead — a natural ridgeline that overlooked a rocky promontory below. The library, he indicated, was carved into that stone. The dunes would allow them to look down on the site without being seen from it. Several hundred yards of open ground lay between that ridgeline and the cave entrance.
Haze volunteered to go up first.
His approach to the dune crest was, to be charitable, not his finest hour. He made it to the top, brought up his binoculars, and focused on the scene below: a rock outcrop, a cave entrance, a group of camels. A guide — presumably the one who'd accompanied the Germans — tied up and being stood over by three Wehrmacht soldiers in desert uniform.
One of those soldiers looked up at precisely the wrong moment, caught the glint of reflected sunlight off Haze's binoculars, and pointed.
To his considerable credit, Haze was already moving — rolling backwards and down the dune before anything could be done about it. No shots came. What did come was a great deal of animated German shouting from the direction of the promontory.
At the base of the dune, Hex heard it. "I can't understand the jerk," he said, eyes moving across the group, "but can you?" He didn't wait for an answer. He told them Haze looked like he'd been spotted, and that they should get ready to move or defend.
Then two of the soldiers crested the dune with weapons raised, shouting in German, and came down toward them.
The Persuasion Attempt (We Don't Talk About the Persuasion Attempt)
Hanover stepped forward — hands raised, presenting herself as the group's least threatening member, which was both tactically sound and required a certain amount of personal courage. A rapid assessment of the situation produced a small stroke of luck: one of the soldiers spoke broken French. Communication, of a kind, was possible.
The soldier demanded to know who they were and why they were here.
What followed was a valiant effort at a cover story, delivered with a twenty-point handicap from the linguistic barrier. Hertz gave it his best. His best was not quite enough. The soldier was not buying it. He gestured, quite clearly, that the party should come with him.
Hex, assessing that events were about to go badly regardless, began quietly angling toward one of the camels where a rifle was stored. It was a reasonable plan. It was executed very visibly. The second soldier swung his weapon around immediately, shouting.
Both soldiers were now armed, alert, and suspicious. They were also, the party noted, within arm's reach of one another.
Haze, who had by this point retreated behind the dune and repositioned, chose this moment to act.
Two Germans, Several Firearms, and a Knife
What happened next was swift, brutal, and — by the end — almost comically messy.
Haze moved with the controlled violence of someone who spent years learning exactly where the human body fails under sudden force. He seized one soldier and drove him into his companion — both men stumbled, tangled together, scrambling for balance. In the half-second that opened up, he pressed his pistol to the nearest soldier's body and fired. The shot was enormous at that range. The soldier went down hard, badly wounded but still moving.
The gunshot rang out across the dunes like a starter's pistol.
What followed was a melee of varying degrees of success. Hex levelled his pistol at the downed soldier and fired — and missed cleanly, the round whipping past Hertz at an angle that made Hertz reconsider his life choices. Hanover produced her garroting wire and lunged for the standing soldier with intent and purpose. She stumbled past him entirely, ending up off-balance on the wrong side of her target. (The wire, it should be said, is an excellent weapon in the right circumstances. These were not those circumstances.)
Hertz, who does not spend his evenings nursing a drink and thinking about ultraviolent tactical scenarios, nevertheless drew his combat knife and drove it into the standing soldier's side. The soldier grunted. It was not a killing blow, but it was real, and it counted.
The wounded soldier on the ground, despite his condition, managed to raise his weapon toward Haze and fire. Distance and pain conspired against him — the shot went wild, passing close enough to Hertz's ear to leave a memory. The standing soldier, refusing to fall over despite having a knife in him, brought the butt of his rifle across Hertz's chin in a blow that rattled his teeth and briefly reorganised his relationship with consciousness.
Then Haze finished it. Two shots, two problems solved. The first soldier took a bullet between the eyes; what followed is not suitable for a family newsletter. Hex, tracking the second soldier, put a round into him that resolved the situation with absolute and devastating finality, and in doing so covered Hanover — standing directly behind the man — in something that required a certain amount of composure to process. She processed it. (She rolled that sanity check and she held together. Respect.)
Hanover made one more attempt with the wire, pure determination overriding all sensible instincts. The blood-soaked, dying soldier somehow evaded her. (At this point he had to be running on pure spite.)
Hertz finished it. His blade found the soldier's neck — a vein, an artery, the specific geometry of violence — and the man collapsed into the sand.
Both soldiers. Dead. The fight was over.
Behind them, Khalid had dived behind a camel at the first sound of a gunshot and had the good sense to stay there. When the silence settled, he peered out from behind it at a scene of considerable carnage. Hertz and Hanover were, to put it diplomatically, in need of a change of clothes.
A third soldier, the party noted, had not come over the dune.
He was still down there. At the library.
To be continued...
The current situation, summarised for those keeping score:
- Two Wehrmacht soldiers: comprehensively deceased
- One Wehrmacht soldier: unaccounted for, presumably still at the library, presumably now very alert
- One guide (not theirs): tied up at the cave entrance, hopefully still alive
- The library of dust and salt: directly ahead, mysterious, and described by everyone who knows anything about it as "do not go there"
- Hertz and Hanover: requiring immediate access to a bucket
- Khalid's camels: mercifully unharmed, per the contractual arrangement
- Next session: breaching the library of dust and salt. What could go wrong.
Quote of the session, Ahmed, on why he always sends a guide with foreigners: "They do not know how to move in it." Correct. Deeply, irreversibly correct.