Session Overview
Cairo is a city of a thousand secrets, and H-Cell spent this session adding a few more to the pile. From a dishevelled British officer reading things he absolutely should not be reading, to a ritual that screamed — literally screamed — at the people performing it, to the moment the desert itself seemed to hold its breath on the last watch of the night. They came, they brewed something horrible in a stone bowl, they met some soldiers who don't know what they've signed up for, and now they're driving toward something that's been drumming since before any of them were born. No pressure.
A Shadow of His Former Self
The session opened in Pendleton's office, and the first thing worth noting is that Pendleton was waving a radio strip in the air like a man who'd just solved the crossword — dishevelled, red-eyed, wearing yesterday's clothes and probably the day before's, but momentarily illuminated by purpose.
"Hedgehog," he announced, as if the word explained everything.
It didn't. But it was a start.
Hedgehog, it turned out, was a forward-deployed SOE team with hard-won experience fighting Germans in the desert. Pendleton had arranged a rendezvous with them in four days at a staging point south of the Kata Depression — and he'd been sensibly vague about the mission details, telling them only that they'd be supporting an operation against a German archaeological site and leaving the rest to the agents' discretion. The news was broadly welcome. Four soldiers, self-sufficient, living off the land and scavenged German supplies — they wouldn't refuse rations or tea, Pendleton noted, and something stronger wouldn't go amiss either. He'd also arranged a truck, a Jeep, eight days' worth of food and water, maps with minefield locations marked, a radio set already tuned to Hedgehog's frequency, and travel papers for the checkpoints. In terms of logistics, Pendleton was still, fractionally, doing his job.
The problem was the books.
Haze clocked them first — a pile at the back of the office that didn't belong there, the sort of volumes you'd find in a museum archive, not a military outpost. When he asked what Pendleton was reading, the officer's demeanour shifted. The thin film of lucidity cracked, and something more manic surfaced underneath.
"This?" Pendleton said, almost surprised to be asked. "This is fascinating. Fascinating stuff. It's just so compelling. It's almost like I can't take my eyes off of it."
He'd requisitioned the books from the Cairo Museum of Antiquities, he explained — material he'd initially dismissed as folk tales and nonsense, but which now made sense when cross-referenced with Brandt's journals. Creation myths. Prehistory. Accounts of what the Earth belonged to before humanity arrived. References to creatures from the water. He was working through the hieroglyphics, Coptic, and Greek with his classics education, and he was barely sleeping.
Hanover attempted to redirect him — gently, the way you'd try to lead someone back from a ledge by suggesting maybe they could do with a cup of tea. Haze appealed to the war effort. Hertz, bless him, suggested that perhaps the books should come with them on the mission, which was a reasonable plan that Pendleton flatly refused — they were checked out in his name and he couldn't let them out of his care. He could, however, copy out the relevant passages. He mentioned Abafar's treatise on water demons as being particularly pertinent to their situation.
Nobody pointed out that a British intelligence officer in wartime Egypt translating treatises on water demons at speed, in an office that smelled of three days without sleep, was perhaps not the trajectory they'd hoped for.
They took what Pendleton offered — the logistics, the copies-to-come — and made their way out.
Options, None of Them Good
In the corridor outside, the three of them took stock.
"What do we do about Pendleton?" Hertz asked quietly. The translations could be genuinely useful. The man producing them was visibly dissolving.
"If Pendleton becomes a casualty in this war," Hanover said, with the bleak practicality of someone who has learned not to spend sentiment they can't afford, "that's what he is."
Haze, ever the pragmatist, floated the possibility of rigging Pendleton's office if things got worse. He clarified, with some care, that this wouldn't be just for fun. They agreed to check on him again before leaving — give him the night to finish the translations, see where he was in the morning, and deal with whatever version of Pendleton they found. The worry, of course, was that the rate of his decline versus the rate of his translation progress was not a race anyone wanted to bet on.
They had other problems to solve in the meantime.
Requisition Purgatory
The ritual needed copper pipe. The ritual needed it tonight.
The direct approach — simply going to the facilities depot and asking — had a certain optimistic charm. The depot worker had an equally certain response: no paperwork, no pipe. Everything in wartime was scarce. Everything in wartime was spoken for. He was very sorry, it was more than his job's worth, but perhaps if they had the appropriate requisition paperwork signed by the relevant division with the correct part numbers and the appropriate justification in triplicate — ?
Hanover looked at the form. The form looked back. It asked for information that would require knowing which division they actually belonged to, which parts they were technically authorised to requisition, and approximately seven other things they had no way of knowing. The form won.
What Cairo needed, Cairo could provide. What an army base's facilities depot would provide to people without paperwork was precisely nothing. But as the Handler noted when they regrouped to consider their options — they did know someone who knew Cairo.
Omar Demands the Truth (More or Less)
Omar's café greeted them with coffee and sweets and Omar himself, effusive and warm and absolutely not fooled for a moment.
"You should be honest with me," he said, confronting them before they'd even finished their cups. He'd noticed things — the water of the dead, the virgin dust, the nuns, and now copper piping. He'd noticed, he'd said nothing, he'd helped, and he thought he deserved a little more than working for everyone's benefit.
Hertz made a valiant attempt to suggest that sometimes, in his line of business, not knowing things was itself a kind of protection. Omar informed him — pleasantly, but firmly — that he could be the judge of what he should and shouldn't know. He'd been in this business for many years. He knew a great many things. Hertz's argument had sailed smoothly over the target and kept going.
Hanover took a different approach. The spooky side of operations, she explained. Occult artefacts. The sort of things the Germans were known to pursue — the Spear of Longinus, the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail, perhaps descendants of Jesus if one was being thorough. Whether or not those things were real or carried power, if the Germans wanted them, the Allies needed to ensure they didn't get them.
Omar considered this. Then he gave Hanover a broad wink and tapped the side of his nose.
"I understand," he said. "These are exactly the kinds of things my cousin deals in. Which is why I sent you to him."
He directed them to a coppersmith at Khan El Khali, told them to use his name, and wished them safety as they walked in dark places. Hanover thanked him and meant it.
The Right Pipe
The coppersmith took one look at them, heard Omar's name, and produced something that Hanover — in the moment she took it in her hands — knew instinctively was correct. Not fresh copper, not pure copper. Old hammered pipe with verdigris worked into every join, copper that had been carrying water for generations, copper that had weight and history pressed into it. The note about virgin copper had turned out to be a red herring. The ritual wanted something older than that. Something that had already been through things.
It was, Hanover understood in some wordless way she would not have been able to explain to anyone without sounding very strange, exactly what they needed.
She bowed her head to the coppersmith. He told her it was on Omar's tab.
Something Wicked This Way Distils
Pendleton had arranged a supply building on the edge of the base — bare stone walls, no windows, a heavy door, a workbench, some crates, and a single lamp. Not much, but the ritual's requirements were specific: the mercury compound had to pass through the copper piping three times. First in daylight, with an incantation. Second in candlelight, in silence. Third under open sky at the appointed hour, under starlight.
They set up outside for the first pass. As all three of them worked, something shifted — angles that looked subtly wrong, a funny taste in the mouth, the prickling recognition of something unnatural at work. Hanover began speaking the Arabic words from the Kitab al Azif that Brandt's journal had specified.
That was when the mercury decided to be difficult.
Rather than flowing through the pipe, it clogged — stuck fast in the old copper as the pipe itself heated and softened to something almost pliable. Hanover had to work it through by hand, massaging and squeezing the mercury along like toothpaste through a softening tube, her blistered hands pressing it forward inch by inch. The burns came quickly. One point of damage, as the chemicals made their opinion of her fingers clearly known. She kept going.
And as she kept repeating the Arabic words — kept speaking them aloud, rhythmically, incantation after incantation — their meaning began to arrive. Not as translation. As knowledge. Driven into her mind whether she wanted it there or not. She lost something in that transaction, and gained something in its place that she was not certain she wanted.
They moved inside for the second pass. The door shut and the lamp was extinguished, and the darkness in that stone room was absolute — not dim, not dark, but the total absence of light, the black you find at the bottom of a pit where no light has ever reached. Haze struck a match. The candle caught.
"It's all mine to do now," Hanover said.
Her blistered hands poured the mercury into the pipe. The candle flame turned blue.
A wave of anxiety rose from nowhere — shapeless, sourceless, Hanover's chest tightening as the flame burned cold. An inexplicable chill washed through Haze, raising goose flesh despite the desert heat, as if something from a grimmer latitude had just brushed past his soul. For Hertz, the architecture of the building seemed to briefly become something else — larger, more brutal, wrong in its proportions — before snapping back to the ordinary stone walls of a supply building in Cairo.
And Hanover heard drumming. Faint, distant — but she recognised it. The others had described it to her, from before. From what they'd experienced in a place none of them liked to talk about at length. The drums at the edge of hearing, impossibly far away and impossibly clear.
She held on. Held the incantation. Held herself together with both hands, metaphorically speaking. And somehow — barely, by the skin of her teeth — she came back from the other side of it marginally more intact than she'd entered.
The mercury emerged into the vessel transformed: deep and lustrous black with iridescent green highlights that caught the candlelight like oil on dark water. The candle returned to ordinary yellow.
They mixed the methyl sulfate next — except the mercury, or whatever it had become, simply devoured it and expanded to fill the container. Then the virgin dust, stirred counterclockwise, the mixture thick and resistant, fighting the spoon. Then the grave water, drop by drop.
The mixture began to scream.
A thin, high-pitched whistle that created physical pressure against the inner ear — not metaphorically, not psychosomatically, but actually, like standing next to something that had decided sound was a weapon. It screamed for ten minutes. Then it writhed. Then it went perfectly, completely, mirror-surface still.
Hanover looked at it for a long moment.
"It may or may not work," she said.
They slept.
Supplies, Soldiers, and Scepticism
Morning brought a more manic Pendleton — he'd clearly not slept at all — plus a sheaf of translated notes and the news that the bazooka requisition remained stubbornly unresolved. He handed over the notes and turned back to his books. The agents left him to it, Haze making one last stop at Omar's café to collect coffee grounds and a small jar of honey for the road. "Any coffee," Omar said, handing it over, "is better than no coffee." He was not wrong.
The desert crossing was arduous but navigable, the featureless terrain defeated by Haze's navigation keeping them oriented through the first day's drive. That evening, as the sun went down and the radio crackled to life, Hertz heard something that wasn't static — atonal piping, flute-like, too many holes, too many notes, gone as quickly as it had come. He looked at Hanover. She'd heard nothing.
When Hanover ran a check on the radio configuration, what she found wasn't comforting: whatever that signal had been, it had come from roughly the direction they were travelling.
Later, round the camp on the first night, while Hanover was briefly absent, Hertz quietly told the others what he'd heard. He floated the possibility that it was his imagination, flashbacks, the monotony of driving through endless sand finally expressing itself in auditory hallucinations.
"Nothing is really coincidence," Haze said. A beat. "Keep an eye on Hanover."
He mentioned, as a point of comparison, that the last time something like this had been developing he'd had to knock someone out to prevent them walking into an explosion. He was hoping that wouldn't be necessary here. He also mentioned, because it remained on his mind, that Pendleton trying to do something dangerous by himself was a non-trivial risk. They'd deal with it when they got back.
The second day of travel brought increasingly hostile terrain — fine pale sand, wind-carved rocks worn unnaturally smooth, and a strange salty organic scent like the sea that had no business being there, hundreds of miles from any coast.
Then they rounded a bend in a narrow wadi, and there was Hedgehog.
Meet the Team
A young man with a rifle came out to wave them down. Hertz, with appropriate relief, noted that he hadn't opened fire first. This was an excellent start.
Captain Aldridge — lean, sunburned, radiating the quiet authority of someone who has been in the field long enough that violence had become simply another professional skill — introduced himself and gestured them into the shade. "Pull up alongside there," he said. "Get some cover. Come and meet the boys."
He introduced them: Taffy, small and wiry, demolitions, Welsh; Lance Corporal Singh, Sikh, turbaned and bearded, with the sharp-eyed manner of someone who asked good questions; Privates Harris and Webb, young riflemen who hadn't yet been in the field long enough to be visibly tired of it.
Hedgehog was down a sniper. Their last one had been killed two weeks ago, and Aldridge wasted no time sizing Haze up for the vacancy.
"Matthew was the best shot I've worked with," he said, looking Haze up and down. "Are you any good?"
"Give me a rifle and we'll see," Haze said. And then, after a moment: "I'll bring my own."
He passed whatever audition Aldridge had in mind.
The planning session, conducted over maps spread on a field table, had the texture of a military briefing and the underlying current of people who know they're not being told everything but are too professional to make a scene about it. Aldridge asked all the right questions: how many Germans, what defences, where's the entry point, what's the extraction plan? The answers Hanover and Haze could provide were... limited.
"We're going to have to fly by the seat of our — trousers," Hanover admitted.
"Normal, then," Aldridge said, without apparent surprise.
Singh was the one who probed further — archaeological sites didn't usually require a full assault team, he pointed out. He wanted to know about the high-value targets. Drexel, Brandt, and Das Ungerhauer, they told him. Two scientists and a man of considerable physical presence who worked directly for the Führer. Best to engage from a distance. Aldridge and Haze were in complete agreement on that point — the finest fight was one you didn't have to have.
Taffy perked up considerably at the mention of bazookas, complained at length about unreliable detonators in the heat, and found in Hanover a kindred spirit when she suggested simply setting twice as many explosives to compensate.
"I like the way you think," he told her approvingly.
By afternoon, they were planning in earnest, the genuine camaraderie of shared purpose threading through conversations that both sides knew were built on incomplete information. Hedgehog didn't know what they were truly walking into. H-Cell, if honest with themselves, weren't entirely sure either.
The Desert Listens
Two more days of travel. The terrain grew stranger — the pale sand too fine, the rocks too smooth, the organic salt-scent too insistent. The kind of landscape that made you feel observed by something that didn't have eyes.
On the last night, Haze took first watch.
He stood in the silence with his binoculars, sweeping the horizon. No wind. No insects. No distant artillery. The desert was perfectly, completely quiet in the way deserts almost never are — an intentional quiet, a held-breath quiet. Above him, the Milky Way draped itself across the sky from edge to edge.
He turned the binoculars toward the oasis.
And heard the drums.
Low and rhythmic, impossibly far away and impossibly clear — arriving at the very edge of hearing, where sound becomes something closer to sensation. They were coming from the direction they were travelling. They were coming from ahead.
They had always been there. Waiting.
To be continued...
Current Status Report:
- Ritual: Complete. Probably. Hanover is 74% sure. The mixture stopped screaming, which we're choosing to interpret as a good sign.
- Pendleton: Translating at speed. Sleeping: not at all. Prognosis: concerning.
- New allies acquired: One SOE team, four soldiers, one captured German anti-aircraft gun, and a Welsh demolitions enthusiast who is delighted about the explosives budget.
- Worrying sounds heard from destination: Two (drums, piping). Worrying smells from destination: One (inexplicable sea-salt, hundreds of miles from sea).
- Bazooka situation: Still unresolved. Taffy feels this deeply.
- Quote of the session: "Weird noises. Hanover talking to herself. This isn't the best first day of a car journey."
- The drums are still going. They did not stop when the session ended. Sleep well.