by Brad Geagley
Shepak, unimpressed, gestured indifferently to Semerket that he should take the seat in front of him. Another tired gesture dismissed the sergeant.
“Felicitations on your recent promotion,” Semerket said, by way of initiating their conversation.
Shepak stared at him, red-eyed. “I’m facing the Insect Chamber, while you make jokes.”
Semerket opened his mouth to protest, but stopped. It was the second or third time he had heard reference to an “insect chamber.” It had to be more than just a Babylonian idiom with which he was unfamiliar.
“I’m sorry—?” he asked. “What’s this chamber you refer to? Someone mentioned it to me before.”
“Merely the post I’ll be assigned to next week this time,” answered Shepak. He waved his hand, dismissing the subject. “How may I help my distinguished visitor from Egypt?”
Semerket came to the point. “I’m seeking information about the raid at the prince and princess’s plantation—the one that happened about twelve weeks ago, to the northwest of here.”
The colonel shot a penetrating glance at him. “Why, I ask myself, should an Egyptian be interested in what is only an internal affair of Elam?”
Semerket told him how the Egyptian ambassador had sent Naia and Rami to the plantation. He also mentioned that the pharaoh of Egypt was personally interested in their recovery, letting the tantalizing promise of a fat bribe remain discreetly unspoken.
But Shepak only shook his head. “You’ve come for nothing,” Shepak said. “No one survived. The slaughter was painstaking, even by Isin standards.” This from a man, Semerket noticed, who decorated his helmet with severed fingers and phalluses snipped from various Dark Head enemies.
“They left one person alive, however,” Semerket said.
“Do you mean the princess?”
“Someone else.”
“You’re mistaken.”
“I have proof.”
Semerket reached into his leather pouch and fetched Rami’s letter into the light. He laid the palm bark on the table before the colonel.
“This letter came to Pharaoh from the boy I told you about—Rami—wanting to be rescued.” He pointed to the glyphs. “He was ‘attacked by Isins,’ it says there. We learned that he’d suffered a head wound, at a plantation to the northwest of Babylon—the same place, it turns out, where your prince and princess were also attacked. It may be that the lad’s dead now—but he wasn’t when he wrote it.”
“By the Babylonians’ sixty thousand gods,” Shepak said, awestruck. “We’d very much like to meet this Rami of yours! If he could tell us what happened to the princess—”
“I was hoping you Elamites had found him.”
Shepak rose, disgusted, to pace the tent. “You try to find anything in this demented country. Just when you think you’ve discovered something, you reach out only to find it wasn’t there in the first place.”
“So I’ve noticed.”
“What more can you tell me?”
“Only this: I’ve talked to the Isins myself—”
Shepak interrupted him with a foul oath. “You’ve actually met with them?”
“When I came down the river, I went into Is and had a look. A couple of their men talked to me.” Some instinct told him that it would be unwise to mention that Marduk had arranged the meeting. “They said they didn’t do it.”
“Egyptian,” said Shepak, “you amaze me. I’ve offered rewards for anyone who can capture an Isin and bring him to me alive. They go unclaimed, even though the Isins are becoming quite plentiful here in Babylon—”
“What do you mean?”
“We’ve had reports that the Heir of Isin managed to slip into the city a few days ago—along with a great number of his men.”
That explained the extra Elamite brigades on the ramparts.
“We expect an attack at any time,” Shepak continued. “They’ll want to stop Kutir from taking the hand of Bel-Marduk at the festival next week, for if he does, it means that heaven favors his claim to the throne. These Dark Heads are very backward, you know—very superstitious about such things.” Shepak sat down across from him, leaning forward to stare into Semerket’s face. “Did you believe the Isins, when they told you they had nothing to do with the raid?”
Semerket was cynical. “I’m not in a profession where I can afford to believe anyone.”
“But if you were to wager…?”
Semerket shrugged philosophically. “I don’t know. If they’d done the deed, why wouldn’t they boast of it? And if they have the princess, I think you’d have heard their demands by now.”
Shepak looked through the tent flap to the garrison compound baking in the white sun, and bit his lip. “Why did you really come to see me, Egyptian? What is it you want?”
“I want to go to this plantation. I want to see for myself what happened.”
Shepak shook his head doubtfully. “You won’t find anything. We’ve scoured it clean.”
“I haven’t scoured it.”
Shepak looked at him for a moment. Then he abruptly stood, seizing his grisly, trophy-bedecked helmet from its wooden perch. “All right. I’ll take you there myself. Maybe you’ll find something my own men have overlooked.”
Semerket was surprised when Shepak also donned his bright crimson commander’s mantle. “But surely…” Semerket began, and then stopped.
“What?” asked Shepak.
“If you expect an attack, won’t you make a tempting target, wearing such a red cloak?”
“I certainly hope so,” the colonel muttered dolefully.
SHEPAK LED SEMERKET to the stables and ordered two horses to be saddled. Semerket appreciated the aesthetics of a horse, certainly, its grace and power—but preferably from as far away from its mouth and hooves as possible. Overall, he said to Shepak, he preferred to ride a good little donkey whenever possible. In fact, there were those who said his rapport with donkeys was amazing…
Shepak gave him a disgusted look. “A donkey? It’s almost twenty leagues to where we’re going. We’ve no time to waste with a donkey.”
Semerket suggested nervously that, if that were the case, perhaps it would be best if they rode together on a single horse. The Elamite colonel also dismissed this idea. “Too dangerous,” Shepak said with finality. “If anyone comes after me, they’d be sure to kill you, too.”
Semerket reluctantly allowed a groom to help him atop a dusty black nag, which the Elamite grooms assured him was as gentle as a pet rabbit. And though the beast plodded through the Babylonian streets in a complacent manner, Semerket grew uneasy at the way she kept rolling her eyes backward to see what kind of fool guided her. But the mare was a seasoned veteran of many wars and many riders, and did her best to keep Semerket from tumbling to the ground. Though he never quite lost his wariness of her, Semerket was soon able to unbend his spine a little and breathe regularly.
All the way to the Ishtar Gate, Shepak rode some fifty paces or so in front of Semerket, so that any lurking Isin assassin would not think they were together. It was not until they reached the lonely road leading to the northwest, far outside the city, that Shepak reined his horse and allowed Semerket to catch up to him.
“Let’s pick up the pace a bit, shall we?” said Shepak.
With a click of his tongue, Shepak increased their speed to a slow gallop. Sometime after noon, they reached an area where rich fields had been plowed into long furrows. At the junction of a second road, they came upon a village of tenant farmers. Their curious round houses and barns, with pitched roofs made of dried reeds caulked with bitumen, made Semerket think of toadstools.
The children grew quiet as he and Shepak passed, running to their mothers to stare at the strangers from behind their skirts. He turned his head in time to see an old woman make the sign of evil at Shepak. Semerket made a mental note that if he came back to question these farmers later, he would do it without an Elamite colonel at his side.
As they neared the plantation, Semerket b
egan to feel uneasy, his mouth growing dry. Everything seemed so weirdly familiar to him—the level brown land; the glimpse of the shimmering Euphrates in the distance; the upright, unbroken walls of the approaching estate. Then, with a start of horror, he realized that the place exactly conformed to the eerie landscape of his nightmares—the ones in which he had seen Naia repeatedly slain before the eyes of his wandering ka.
Then they turned down a path that Semerket knew, absolutely knew, he had seen before. In the afternoon’s humid stillness, Semerket turned his head and finally saw the ruins.
The plantation’s buildings were parodies of their original shapes, with an obscene smell to their ashes that Semerket doubted he would ever forget. Several structures had once stood in the compound—stables, worksheds, grain silos, servants’ quarters. Now all of them were gone.
Semerket trod into what was left of the main house. Large and sumptuous at one time, it had been three stories or more when intact. Most of its floors had collapsed in on themselves, leaving its gaping husk open to the sky. Going from room to room, he glimpsed odd bits of pottery on the floors, fragments of furniture crushed beneath the charred rubble.
There was no logic to why something had survived the flames; a broom of palm leaves remained barely singed, while the stone statue beside it lay shattered in fragments. As he roamed, he vaguely wondered what Naia’s duties had been within this house. Had she swept these rooms with the palm broom? Or carried the water jug to the pantry where it now lay in pieces? Perhaps she had polished the little statue of the Elamite household god, still standing in its niche, headless.
He went out the rear door. The thing hung on leather hinges, its paint charred and blistered. A few steps more and he was at the kitchen. Ironically, the structure had been built away from the main house so that its hearth would not set the larger building afire. Nearby was a well, and out of long habit Semerket stared down into its depths. The water’s scent was fresh, smelling vaguely of citrus. The smell reminded Semerket of Naia, who habitually wore a perfume distilled from lemon blossoms.
He turned again and made another walk through the kitchen. Semerket found only copper pots, clay dishes, and broken cups. A sudden glint of gold caught his eye amid the rubble. He bent down to retrieve a flat serving tray, shaking off the ash and dust that covered it, and saw the design chased into its surface.
“The royal crest of Elam,” whispered Shepak, who had silently followed him through the grounds. “The prince and princess must have brought it from Susa.”
“It tells us one thing,” Semerket grunted.
“What?”
“The raiders didn’t come here for plunder.” He threw the tray onto the ashes.
Semerket strode to a nearby grove of date palms. Wandering through the cool shadows, he examined the high brick walls that surrounded the estate. He saw the telltale marks at their top. “That’s where they came over,” he said to Shepak, pointing. “See how every few feet there are marks from grappling hooks? They would have been seen during daylight—but this far away, at night…”
Shepak looked up. “How many of them were there, do you suppose?”
Semerket shrugged. “I wouldn’t imagine there were very many. Surprise and the dark were on their side. The raiders needed only a few of their men to scale the walls, to open the gates for the rest. If they were experienced, ten men could have handled the job from start to finish—”
Semerket stopped speaking when a cloud of flies darted past them. Alert to where they flew, he saw them disappear behind the wall and into the far courtyard. He followed for a few paces, and the flies’ buzzing became louder and more frenetic as he approached.
When he came around the corner of the wall, he saw what attracted the flies—a massive stain of black blood stretching across the limestone tiles in a side courtyard.
“This is where they slaughtered them,” he said to Shepak.
“You’re right,” Shepak confirmed curtly. “We found the bodies here, their hands bound together. There were thirty-three of them. All the water from the well couldn’t wash the blood away.”
“Then they had been at least two days dead before you found them.”
Shepak looked at him oddly. “How did you know?”
“I know blood. You can wash it away if it hasn’t been sitting for more than a day and half. After that, no matter how hard you scrub, some of it will remain.”
Shepak swallowed uneasily. Despite being a hardened warrior, he possessed the same squeamishness about death and its detritus that all the peoples of Mesopotamia shared. “You Egyptians certainly possess a ghoulish streak, knowing such things,” he said.
Semerket did not reply as he walked around the perimeter of the stain. Though the blood had long since dried, the flies were dense on the tiles, and the stain seemed to roil and heave iridescently in the sunlight.
“Where are they buried?” Semerket asked.
“Who?”
“The ones slaughtered here.”
“Kutir brought their bodies back to the palace in Babylon, to bury them with the prince. He placed then into funeral jars, and embalmed them in honey.”
“Everyone?”
Shepak nodded.
Semerket turned away, so the Elamite could not see the pleased look on his face. Honey would preserve the victim’s features. “These jars—where are they?”
“In the royal crypts below the palace.”
Semerket looked at Shepak with an enigmatic expression. He was remembering the vision he had had upon the river, searching the jars of honey. He knew he had to see those bodies for himself, to discover finally if Naia was among them. He did not intend to leave her behind in Babylon, alive or dead. Somehow, he must find a way to convince Shepak to get him inside the royal crypt.
“I must see their faces, before they’ve decomposed any further.”
Shepak looked at him with revulsion. “They won’t decompose. But it’s against all our laws to interfere with the dead.”
“How am I to learn the truth, then?”
“You’ll have to figure it out another way, that’s all.”
“If you don’t help me view those bodies,” Semerket said shortly, “and find out what happened to your princess, how will I ever be able to save you from the Insect Chamber?”
The Elamite colonel raised his head abruptly, and stared at him.
They sat in the shade of the outer wall, near the broken gates. Shepak had brought a loaf of round bread and some cheese in his pack, but neither of them was hungry.
“I’ve only a week left to find Pinikir,” Shepak said, drinking wine from a leather flask. “When the Day of the False King dawns, if I haven’t produced the princess, I’ll suffer the same fate as Kidin. Kutir’s promised to go through the officers’ ranks until either Princess Pinikir is recovered, or we’re all dead.”
“And execution will be in this Insect Chamber I’ve heard about?”
Shepak was quiet. Then he nodded. “Yes.”
“But what is it? I mean, what is the method of…?”
Shepak took a ragged breath before he spoke. “We found it in the palace dungeon and thought at first that it was just another prison cell—until we put one of our own men in there. He’d gotten drunk on duty, and needed a scare, we thought. We hadn’t even closed the doors before the screaming began. Some mechanism is triggered when the door closes, we discovered, allowing other trapdoors inside the chamber to open.”
He had to rinse his mouth with wine again.
“First come the shredders, those with their claws and pincers and beaks, the beetles and mantids, the scorpions and centipedes. Those that fly get there first. They flay the outer flesh open, crawling between the lips, competing for the tongue, burrowing into the ears and nose and eyes. When they’ve eaten their fill, then the next trapdoor opens. This time, it’s the gray flesh eaters—the worms and grubs that go to work on the softer tissues, the organs and vessels. You can hear their jaws clacking together, thousands of them.
Worms cluster in the victim’s belly, feast in his skull. When they’re finished, the third and final door opens—and the small parasites stream out, the most voracious of all, ants and mites and maggots. They clean the bones to a glistening white in a matter of minutes. It’s said that the Kassites invented the chamber to secretly rid themselves of their most hated enemies, so that nothing would be left that could identify them.”
Shepak fell silent. Semerket realized that he was staring at the Elamite with his mouth open. “I can’t believe it,” Semerket said.
“Believe it. Kutir forced the officers to watch Kidin when he was put in there.” Shepak looked at him with the same haunted expression. “But I’ve not yet told you the most terrible part.”