His skin turns blue, his eyes bulging as I apply more pressure, drawing on what slips of ambient power still occur in the area. Jonathan’s hands snatch at my sleeves as he tries to grip my wrists, but each time he bucks, in a vain attempt to unseat me, his efforts grow weaker.
I’m doing it again. I’m taking a life, and each time it becomes easier and easier as I feed this core of hate that fuels my actions. The stone I carry in the backpack grows heavy and warm, as though it gains from this dismal activity, and snaking lines of life force drag from Jonathan to spiral through my arms and through my heart centre, and into the stele.
The fateful words inscribed upon the stone come to my lips unbidden—evil, forbidden words—and I stop in mid-incantation the moment I realise what it is I’m doing. I will not send someone’s souls howling into nothingness.
With a choked cry I stumble backward, my heel sending a gun skittering. Whether it is my own or the one the unfortunate guard used on himself, it doesn’t matter. I snatch it up.
Jonathan lies gasping, pale now, a hand raised to his throat. He sees my intention and raises an arm. “Nnn—”
I don’t give him a chance to finish. Bang!
The gun’s recoil jars my arm and I take a step back, a fresh ringing, this time more physical, marring my hearing. A dark blot spreads like an accusation from the centre of Jonathan’s chest. Fascinated, I watch how the souls coalesce just on the edge of my vision, a soft, shimmering, almost humanoid shape that dissipates quickly, so that when I blink the after-effect seems more something that I’d have imagined.
The lights in the house flicker then turn on, bathing this entire area in so much brightness that I have to squint for a moment to wait for my vision to adjust.
Feet planted wide I stand, arms loose at my side still clutching the gun in my right hand. Warm blood drips from my left hand, but this Kha is so battered, so numbed from shock, the pain hardly registers.
Ten dead. All by my hand.
I sway, catching myself against a pillar, a wash or exhaustion making it seem a good idea to sit somewhere to rest and gain my breath. I have killed a powerful Inkarna. There will be hell to pay when I return to Per Ankh. I can only hope Leonora made it that far, that she can somehow intercede for me when this almighty shit storm, as Ashton would call it, breaks.
“Ashton?” I murmur.
Nothing but the wind, that has renewed its raging, answers.
There is still Catherine, hiding somewhere in this house, no doubt guarding Marlise or poised to kill her. I know I would be with the hostage by now, holding some sort of power to threaten or cajole my enemy to slip up.
She’s just a girl. How can I kill a young girl?
She betrayed me. That bitterness sinks its venomous stinger in deep, a scorpion I don’t see until I step with a bare foot on the carapace. All those years that she must have been plotting this, machinating behind the scenes under the guise of sisterhood, so House Adamastor would send its weakest link—me—someone whose deepest secrets she’d pried out. All my fears. My hopes, my dreams. I’d told her so much, made myself naked to her.
And, on the outside, how ridiculous this situation, that a grown man in his early twenties should fear a confrontation with a young girl much weaker than him. The blurred identities are enough to raise a wave of disbelief.
None of this is real, is it? I’m just trapped in some sort of wild nightmare.
It occurs to me then: what if Jonathan called the police before he came out? Or buzzed some private security company? Even now the chapter houses farther upcountry must be trying to raise them on the phone. What if Jonathan wasn’t the only full Inkarna of House Montu in Cape Town?
This snaps me out of my miserable reverie, and then some.
I take a deep breath and look about me. “Ashton?”
Still the angry ghost doesn’t reply. Right, then I’m on my own for this one. Allowing myself three deep and calming breaths, I centre myself as well as I can, visualising a flaming serpent flaring its hood behind me.
“Wadjet protect me,” I utter, pulling hard on what tatters of energy are available in my immediate surroundings.
Where I’m going now, guns won’t help me and, to be honest, I’m not entirely sure exactly what I face. How would I feel in Catherine’s position? Scared? Most certainly. How powerful is she? Is Marlise all right?
“Ashton, where are you?” I mutter.
I’ve come to rely on the angry ghost far too much, to the point that now, without his presence, I feel half-blind, exposed.
The house is eerily quiet, the only sound the impassioned voice of a television presenter discussing Hitler’s preoccupation with the Aryan race, orchestral music in the background. My boots crunch on broken glass and I look up to see where a number of light bulbs have shattered from their connections. I walk gingerly, so as to make as little noise as possible, and continue to tug at the aethers and drag more tendrils of power to me.
The energy is not nearly enough but what little I gather thrums through my veins, pale in comparison to the might of earlier. This Kha is just shy of being a shambling corpse and I must push it beyond its limits.
Damn you, Ashton, where the hell are you?
I hear it then—sobbing—from upstairs. The stone tablet I carry grows heavy with each step. I tread quietly up to the first floor. Stern-eyed portraits glare down at me from beneath bushy brows. I assume these to be previous masters of House Montu. Not a woman in sight. For them to have accepted Catherine so readily…
But then a horrible thought occurs to me. If Catherine’s father already is so deeply entrenched in House Montu…and one cannot predict when the right Kha is available… Christopher van Vuuren must have drowned his own daughter to make way for the next Inkarna. A sacrifice freely given.
“Damn.” I say the word softly, more for my own comfort than anyone else’s.
The Oriental carpet with its tree of life design muffles my progress, a clock ticking quietly on the landing telling me it’s a quarter to eight. The television presenter’s voice drones on about the defences on the beaches of Normandy, of Allied and Axis powers. How apt.
A door at the end of the first floor passage is ajar, a flickering blue light hinting at action occurring on a screen. I don’t want to go any farther, fear of what I may find making my feet adhere to the carpet.
I have to face her.
Each metre feels like more than ten, my heart hammering in my chest and my throat tight. Paused by the door, I flex my fingers and swallow reflexively. Should I knock? A hysterical giggle wants to rip itself out of my belly but I tamp it down. Another breath.
“I know you’re there.” Catherine sounds tired, resigned.
To hell with this. I step over the threshold into a small study. A desk and chair with a flat-screen computer monitor stands by the window. The television is against the wall facing the door, where I stand. Catherine sits on a massive pile of cushions, her back to me.
It’s as if she says, I know you wouldn’t try to hurt me, but her shoulders are hunched and she has pulled a blanket around her—an old tartan blanket that looks as though it has seen better days. She doesn’t turn to face me.
How can I possibly hurt a child?
But this is Meritiset, whose deception has cost me so much, has cost House Adamastor almost everything. The Book of Ammit weighs even heavier.
I reach with my senses and try to ascertain whether the child has pulled any daimonic energies to her—nothing. About two metres behind her I stop, my reluctance holding me from laying hands on her. What am I to do?
“Are you going to look at me, Meritiset? So we can talk, face to face?”
“She’s in the spare bedroom. I suggest you take your woman and leave.”
The child sniffs and, for one wild, brief moment I want to reach out to place a comforting hand on her shoulder. The impulse dies in an instant when I recall Cynthia’s features twisted in hatred. Meritiset, Catherine… How the hell do I differentiate?
“Why you?” She starts laughing, rises to her feet and turns slowly to face me.
A cold sick jolt passes through my stomach, the duality of looking upon the face of a would-be murderer inhabiting the body of an innocent.
This could have been me.
Now I am the murderer.
Try as I might, I can’t meet her gaze, which remains steady and focused on my features.
“How do you think I felt, discovering Siptah courted you? He promised me forever, that we would find a way to punch through together. How do think I felt when you pitched up, alone, claiming Siptah trained you, married you? And that he never came back? Only you?”
Her words send barbs straight to the core of the matter, to memories that have lost some of their ferocity because, encased as I am in stolen flesh, a new life has come to me, my long-ago acceptance of Richard’s death so far in the past it’s reduced to an occasional dull ache.
“So you betrayed the House? I heard the stories, of Siptah finding you fully fledged. Don’t you think it’s just too convenient? Especially that you were supposedly the one who found this child’s body. What, is House Montu now sacrificing its younglings to keep it in the family, so to speak?”
She has the good grace to blanch before her expression hardens. “We are all pawns in this game, Nefretkheperi. You. Me. We do what we must.”
“Then why insist that I punch through? You could have persuaded the elders to send you instead, if Siptah’s rescue was foremost on your mind. If you could get them over their initial distrust of me then surely you could undo what issues of trust still remained between you and the council? Or was it always your intention that I am lost in limbo for ages, just out of spite. You’re as childish as that body you inhabit.” I shake my head.
She laughs. “Oh, you don’t know the half of what you’re up against. I must admit you’ve done pretty well for someone who knows so little. Yes. I admit it. It’s petty, but you really played into it. And yes, I took a childish delight in my machinations.”
“You underestimated me,” I say.
The child shakes her head, her eyes alight with mischief. “Oh, no. It’s you who underestimate me. You may be bigger, daimonically stronger, but you don’t have this.”
Before I can move, she reaches out and grabs my left hand. Her skin is cold to the touch, her grip crippling. The world blinks out and I lose all sensation of what’s up, down, warm or cold. Just the deepest darkness remains, great gouts of daimonic power ripping through me as though I’m caught in the midst of a thunderstorm.
Falling…falling…tumbling end over end. This motion speeds up and a roaring fills my ears. I snap into a completely different scene. My viewpoint is remote, as though I’m watching a scenario play out from multiple observers. There’s a garden. Lavender bushes line gravel pathways. Although the sky is heavy, overcast, the air is warm and lazy bees swarm drunkenly among the bruised purple heads of the fragrant shrubs, which have been sculpted into continuous hedges formed into the intricate pattern of a labyrinth.
High walls surround this hidden garden where a stately oak holds each quarter. A three-tiered fountain stands at the centre of this landscape, a stylised dolphin that looks more like a fish spouting a trickle of water into the successive bowls. The sound is music, singing of joy, the beauty of being alive.
Laughter then. I modify the focus to see a young man and woman rush into the garden, the man shoving shut a heavy door and leaning against it while his partner plants a dozen kisses on his lips, cheeks and forehead.
Judging by their dress I estimate them to belong to the Tudor era: all sombre-hued brocades and velvets, the woman’s bosom straining out of her stomacher. Milky-white skin, auburn curls loosened from pins to drape seductively over a shoulder.
He is bearded, but there’s no mistaking the lively glint in his eyes—Siptah, Richard in another life. It’s the way he turns his head, the tilt to his lips. Those gestures are immortal.
She…
Meritiset.
The world shifts with a sickening lurch.
A chamber, its walls draped with heavy tapestries depicting hunt scenes. A four-poster bed and upon it two people writhing in the throes of lust. The woman sits astride the man, her auburn hair loose and spilling down her hair. She raises herself and grinds down hard on her partner, whose fingers dig into the soft flesh of her buttocks as they strain together in their carnal dance.
The woman—Meritiset—throws her head back, her eyes closed in obvious passion and Siptah’s hand trails up from her back to cover her breast. The abandon of this scene digs its knife deep. He’s loved other women, possibly with more passion than he ever reserved for me, each thrust sending the blade further. Jealousy is an ugly thing, and though I want to rage at the pair, I’m held rooted to the spot, unable to move forward, my cries of anguish unheard.
The scene shifts again and I’m standing on the mossy bank of a stream, green willow fronds dipping into the crystalline water. Meritiset lies on her back, her thighs spread wide, her voluminous skirts hitched up to around her waist while Richard crouches between her legs, busy offering her oral pleasures. The way she bucks her hips to his probing tongue leaves nothing to the imagination, and I wish I could look away from how he massages his straining phallus, his thumb rubbing at the head of his shaft, his hands slick with his emissions.
With a long groan of pleasure he straddles the woman on the ground, thrusting into her once, twice, hard before he shudders in climax, Meritiset wrapping her legs around his back.
I don’t want to see this, don’t want to know about a past that happened long before I even figured as a sentient being.
“This is not necessary!” I rage. “Why are you doing this to me?”
Scene after scene unfolds and, to my horror, I feel the backlash of Meritiset’s desire burn through me. There seems something so perverse now in having a man enter my body with his phallus, of the peculiar aches and wants unique to a woman.
“Stop it!”
Laughter—Meritiset’s—fills my head, and the current scene of passion blurs into a smear of colour, revolving about me in a vortex, a thundering inferno of need. I don’t have to brush my hand against my denims to know I’m hard and for this I am furious, that Meritiset can manipulate me. If anyone were to walk in on this scene, of the child Catherine gripping Ashton’s arm…
Yet I’m not even sure where I am.
Dimly I’m aware that my Kha in the real world is forced to its knees, the girl’s paralysing hold on me having driven me to kneel before her.
“You’re pathetic, Nefretkheperi, you know that? You really have mired yourself in this fool’s past. Now look at you. Men were always weaker, didn’t you know that?”
I want to struggle against the barrage of memories, all foreign, but it’s almost as difficult as fighting the nothingness of limbo, the opposite really, like having one’s finger shoved into an electric socket and being unable to pull away.
“Don’t…” My voice sounds distant, as though it no longer belongs to me, while all my senses are hurled about in this maelstrom of Meritiset’s memories.
A small hands pat at my jacket, my jeans pockets and a sudden realisation hits me when she pulls the butterfly knife from the back pocket—the butterfly knife the House Montu initiates, in their arrogance, never found. Hell, even I’d forgotten I’d had it on me. She means to end this here.
I try to jerk from her hold, both physically and mentally, but the meld of our two memories is so hard, so fast, it’s as if we’ve become one person, with her Akh in dominance. Is this how it has felt for Ashton when he tried to take control? How is it that Meritiset can still maintain so much control over her body?
She’s going to stab or gut me, or slit my throat, and there’s nothing I can do about it. While she maintains her hold on my arm, keeping up this meld, I hear her flick the knife open.
But there is one thing that I can do, and the though
t frightens me beyond anything I’ve ever considered. The words of Ammit. It’s not so much the words, it’s the knowledge of what I can do with the intention, especially now with my body incapacitated and my ability to reach through paralysed.
One thing Meritiset hasn’t banked on is my ability to wield these words like the knife she now holds in her hand. My other option is to give up, allow The Book of Ammit to fall into the hands of the House of Montu. Or I could take one more life to spare many.
The way of Ma’at must be served no matter how badly I stain my eternal Akh.
I don’t need to speak the words with my lips and tongue, but I send them from me, shaping each one with care in my mind and directing them through the link with the girl. She pauses, and I’m assuming in mid-lunge, as the first import of what is transpiring hits her.
“What are you doing?” Her suspicion is a heavy cloud settling over me, an attempt to muffle my attack.
Then the realisation dawns upon her and she utters a small shriek.
“…and into the abyss your heart shall be flung, after Ammit has devoured your Blessed Akh…”
Each syllable is a blade twisting through my Ka and my Ba, my Akh, my Kha responding. Then my voice is loud and echoes in the room as I open my eyes to stare into those of the child. I’ve never noticed it before but her eyes have light flecks of brown embedded within the almost-crystalline green. The pupils become large as she registers that I’m actively returning her gaze, those fateful words dropping from my lips.
“No,” she mouths, but no sound comes out.
This is not a child, I have to keep reminding myself. This is not a child. Meritiset would cheerfully have relegated me to an eternity of drowning in the Sea of Nun for the perceived slight. How was Lizzie to know Siptah had had another lover before me? Why judge me after the fact?
I was just a victim, collateral, someone who got in her way. I mean nothing in the larger scale of things, yet Meritiset’s fit of pique has cost House Montu its victory at last gasp.
A single tear runs down the child’s cheek. She is frozen, her fingers trembling where she clutches to me, now more for support than anything else. A cold fire blooms through my veins, thrumming through the floor, pumping through my heart to seep from the point of contact into Meritiset’s frame. With each heartbeat she shivers, the frequency growing until, of a sudden, she stiffens and her eyes roll back to reveal the whites.
Inkarna Page 28