The Crocodile King
An adventure for Istanbul PCs, working for the Manzikert Hotel.
The mummy of a cat-sized crested pterosaur. Wrapped in ancient linen. Wings folded across its chest. Grégoire Loukianoff, Cairo antiquities trader, offers you more tea from his samovar and tells you it must be a fake.
His apartment by the Ezebekkiya gardens is crammed with hieratic ostraca, baboon-headed statues, canopic jars. Himyarite stelae from Yemen. Greek kouros statues. Byzantine icons from a Russian monastery in Jerusalem who had their funding cut off by the Bolsheviks. Faience beads. Shabtis. Hippopotami.
His wife in the next room is teaching the kids how to make baklava. You can hear her singing Russian songs.
He’s employed as liaison between small-scale dealers and museums - finding the best pieces, using the training he received as a boy in what was once St. Petersburg. Has a standing offer from Hans Lange, agent for the Copenhagen Glyptotek, to pay good money for anything particularly odd.
Wants you to confirm the pterosaur is real. Overpaid for it. The dealer, Dr. Verdakis, claims he can get another one - wants money in advance.
Verdakis has a small antiques shop on the Sharia el-Muski. In the Arab part of town. Near the Khan el-Khalili souk.
A maze of bad-smelling alleys, shady courtyards, warehouses packed high with Oriental goods. Requires you to duck through stalls, climb over roofs, dodge argumentative tour guides and souvenir peddlers. Snake charmers and crippled beggars seem to eye you as you pass.
Pay Verdakis a visit. You’ll get there just in time to catch the murderers over his bloody corpse. Sickles of meteoric iron in their lumpy hands. Don’t want to fight - will run away. Can be chased through the souk - beggars will surreptitiously try to block your path.
Dawada, queen of the beggars and the Zabbaleen garbage collectors, lives in the Cairo necropolis, under the mausoleum of the Mamluk sultan al-Ashraf Barbay.
A stunted legless woman on a little wooden cart. Has street urchin spies everywhere - sadistic twelve-year-olds covered with running sores. Those who offend her are judged by a panel of half-blind Sufi mystics, who endlessly debate the finer points of Islamic law. Guilty parties are fed to giant maggots - innocents compensated with gold.
The murderers work for her.
Her surgeon-general, Yusab Girgis, an excitable bald Coptic medical student, will reward them with another set of calculated deformities - hideous but largely painless scarring that makes them more appealing as objects of charity for Western tourists. You might spot them later lurking outside Shepheard’s Hotel, before the police chase them off.
Around 1907, Baron Édouard Empain, property developer and primary investor in the Cairo Electric Railways Company, discovered the heart scarab of the ancient Egyptian architect and sun priest Imhotep in the ruins of the sacred city of Heliopolis, which he was developing into a new luxury suburb.
He gave it to his son Jean to play with. Imhotep ate Jean’s ba - the part of his soul that contains his personality - and possessed his body.
When Jean’s sister complained that her brother was being creepy, and keeping her up at night by reciting Egyptian chants in a fully adult voice, he ate her ba as well. She sits on the floor, rocking back and forth, being spoon-fed and cleaned by maids, in a locked upstairs room of the Empains’ Hindu-temple-style mansion.
Jean, now an adult, still possessed by Imhotep, has married the American burlesque dancer Rozell Rowland.
She owns a nightclub in the Ezbekiyya district. Trains her girls to rob the houses of their clients. Expects them to perform with poisonous snakes. Keeps three hundred cobras in a pit below the stage. Finds the Black Sun cool and sexy. Believes she has Jean wrapped around her little finger. In over her head.
As high priest of Amun-Ra, four thousand years ago, Imhotep became a worshipper of Azathoth, the Black Sun - the living singularity at the heart of the galaxy that will one day devour all life.
Thought to be buried somewhere at Saqqara. Followers preserved his cult after his death - worshipped him as a demigod in the New Kingdom, a millennium later. Sometimes identified with Hermes Trismegistus. Dozens more heart scarabs - each capable of copying his ba into a human host - are hidden round the world.
As Jean, uses Baron Empain’s money to fund archaeological excavations across Egypt. Went in with George Carnavon on sponsoring the Tutankhamun dig - though his name was kept out of the papers. One of Dawada’s beggars, at his request, fired the poisoned needle that killed Carnarvon in 1923.
Nefertiti, a Zeta Reticulan heretic, an alien grey princess with a high forehead and bulging eyes, crash-landed in the Egyptian desert sometime in the 13th century BC.
Married the pharaoh Akhenaten. Had children with him. Converted Egypt to Atenism - a front for Black Sun worship. One daughter in particular was a favourite.
Ankhesenamun. A half-alien hybrid. Visibly inhuman. Beautiful. Psychic. Likes to torture cats. Recreational surgeon. Somehow even more evil than her mother.
Became Great Royal Wife to Tutankhamun, her half-brother. Slowly poisoned him with a tonic that induced epilepsy and lesioned his bones.
After his death, got married again to his grand vizier Ay. Ruled Egypt for four more years. Then the general Horemheb overthrew the Atenists, killed them both and did his best to extirpate her memory from Egyptian records.
Buried with half a dozen pterosaurs - her favourite court pets - in a secret location in the Valley of Kings. Guarded by traps, and mummified stillborn babies who crawl under the sand.
Howard Carter, archaeologist, found a scroll describing Atenist burial methods in Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus chamber. Imhotep bought it from him. Carter hates the Egyptian Antiquities Service and has always been happy to sell artefacts under the table.
They’re quietly excavating Ankhesenamun’s tomb. Using imported Cypriot workmen - but some artefacts from the dig site have still found their way onto the black market. The guy who sold the pterosaur to Verdakis has already been buried alive.
Imhotep has yet to break the magic seals on her coffin. Needs somebody pure of heart to lift the feather of Ma’at that weighs down the stone lid. Plans to extract the ba from her mummy and put it in Rozell’s body - bringing her back to life.
Zerzura - the Oasis of Strange Birds.
Deep in the Western Desert. Far past the Kharga Oasis and the Darb el-Arbein trade route. In the valleys of the Jabal Arkanu on the Gilf Kebir plateau.
The Kitab al-Kanuz, a 15th-century Arabic guide for treasure hunters, shows the way. Imhotep has a copy. Ankhesenamun knows the secret words that dispel the huge black djinn who guard the gates.
Imhotep’s organising an expedition.
László Almásy, Hungarian aristocrat, expedition chief, has devoted his life to finding Zerzura. Hired Bedouin guides. Bought Steyr cars and a De Havilland Gypsy Moth airplane. Ready to set off west from Luxor at a moment’s notice.
“Bunny” Anderson. Lion hunter. László’s second in command. Forced to flee Rhodesia after an incident where he cut a Ndelebe man’s foot off to turn him into bait.
Hunts the most dangerous game - including man, of course. Lion-claw necklace. African fetish talismans. Grinning sharp-toothed sidekick from the Congolese Zap Zappo clan. Likes the phrase “damned fearsome brute”.
Narrow mountain pass. Shunned by local nomads. Forbidding black cliffs that open out into a tropical paradise. Wide, steep-sided valley full of marsh and jungle. Lake runs down the centre. Fed by springs deep underground.
Inhabited by dinosaurs.
Wheeling pterosaurs. Towering aegyptosaurs grazing on tall palms. Lambeosaurs munching on water lilies. Stomatosuchid crocodiles capturing metre-long coelacanths in their neck pouches.
Fat-necked lagoon plesiosaurs. Giant leeches. Four-metre turtles. Primitive mammals hiding in the mud from azdarchids with stabbing beaks. Horned flat-faced abelisaurs hunting in small packs.
Ammonites. Foot-long black scorpions. Ape men descended from genetically engineered Serpent Man slaves, armed with rocks and malfunctioning laser guns looted from alien laboratories.
An ancient Egyptian city. Built around a towering Black Pyramid. Inhabited by priests, fellaheen peasants and medjay warriors, who worship the Black Sun and need your help fending off ape attacks.
Every creature in the valley lives in fear of Hedjet.
A huge grandfather spinosaur, tinted sickly white. Rubbery sail cuts the water around sunset. Ultra-deep reptile grunt. The Crocodile King.
Described in certain manuscripts from Tutankhamun’s tomb. Bunny’s read about him. Would give anything to hunt him. Greatest game on Earth.
Inside the Black Pyramid is the Chamber of the Sun.
Inside the Chamber of the Sun, a very old man sits at the edge of the deep pit, playing a flute made from blackened alien bone.
If he ever stops playing the flute, the Seed of Azathoth will emerge from the pit. A tiny singularity - a living black hole full of eyes and tentacles. The flute gives you the power to control it. More or less.
Imhotep wants to kill this man and take his flute. He believes humanity has reached its apex. Time for the Seed of Azathoth to eat the world.
T. E. Lawrence is monitoring the situation. Stationed in the Citadel of Cairo, which is right now a British army base. Reports back to Winston Churchill, head of the Black Pyramid Cult, for which the British Museum is a front. Under orders not to directly intervene.
If you beat Imhotep and save the world, Churchill will want to see you. He’ll make a special journey out to Cairo to pin medals on your chest.
“Jolly good show, old boys,” he said, clapping you on the back and handing you a cigar. “We wouldn’t want humanity to be destroyed. After all…” His eyes turn yellow, his tongue flickers. “You’re not yet ripe.”
