“You’ve done this before?”
“Just those two times, like I mentioned. We didn’t run in, swords drawn. We went in carefully, just like this,” he said. “Fighting a monster is like fighting any other big animal. Like a bear.”
“I’ve fought bears,” Asha said. “And tigers. With needles.”
“Sun-steel needles?”
“No, just the regular sort.”
“Really? You’ll have to tell me about that sometime.” He paused. “But we’re not just fighting monsters now. Set and Nethys, and Horus and Isis. They’re immortal, like me. Wounds will close as soon as they’re made. And in their current state, they don’t feel much pain. And they don’t feel much fear.”
“And they’re family,” Asha finished. “For Bastet and Anubis, at least.”
“Right. This is more dangerous than anything I’ve done before.”
“Well, I don’t wish to die today,” Asha said. “So we will be very careful in the house of the monsters.”
Chapter 11
Within
“I see no windows,” Asha said. “Is there a way to see inside without going inside?”
“No.” Gideon stopped at the edge of the dark avenue behind a small pointed obelisk to check his gauntlet one last time. “We have to go inside to find Bashir. I mean, Omar. And there’s only one way in. Through the front door.”
Asha peered at the black pyramid, but could not see the door. “How many of the immortals do you think are inside? I can’t tell from the sounds of them. There is too much noise.”
“I would guess that they’re all in there,” Gideon said. “Lilith, the Aegyptian immortals, and some number of poor souls who were snatched off the street to work down here as servants and test subjects.”
Asha frowned at him. “All of them? All together? And you believe we can simply walk inside, just the two of us?”
“It’s the only way,” he said. “We need to know where he is, and how he is.”
“We do know where he is,” she hissed. “He’s in there!”
“Not good enough. That pyramid is huge, and none of us have been inside beyond the first chamber,” he said. “We’re completely blind. When we come back with the others, we’ll need a plan. We’ll need to know where we’re going.”
“But the moment we go inside, they’ll hear us and see us and smell us,” Asha said. “They’ll come running before we can take two steps over the threshold. These people have the senses and instincts of wild animals, predators. They won’t be distracted by idle conversation or music or a glass of wine. All of their senses will be focused on us, immediately.”
“I think you’re giving them too much credit,” Gideon said.
“If we’re going to go all the way inside to find Omar, why don’t we simply get him out right now?”
“That would be very reasonable,” he answered. “But I’ve been doing this sort of thing for a very long time, and there’s nothing reasonable about a fight with an animal, or a fanatic. It’s going to be messy, and it’s going to go wrong. I guarantee that. And what if Omar is already some sort of animal-monster? He isn’t going to sneak out with us, or help us fend off Lilith’s beasts. He’s going to try to kill us every step of the way. No, we stick to the plan. Find him. Just find him, for now.”
“Very well.” Asha started walking and didn’t wait for him to follow. “But if we find Omar, and he’s still himself, I’m taking him out of there.”
She tried to keep a straight path in the darkness by watching the small yellow flame at the top of the pyramid, but after stubbing her toe several times on the blocks at the edge of the thoroughfare, Asha made a fist and transformed her right arm from the elbow down, armoring her skin in golden scales and extending her bright ruby claws that burned like angry jewels in the darkness, casting their red light on the ground.
There’s no need for caution here. If there are no windows, then they can’t see my claws out here against the black.
She quickened her pace, jogging briskly across the front of Lilith’s citadel, and suddenly the long stone ledge of the bottom level of the pyramid cut off abruptly to reveal a gap, an opening of deeper darkness.
The door.
Asha slowed and crept off the road into the square tunnel with Gideon just behind her. By the light of her claws, she saw dark stains on the walls and ground, and deep gouges that could only have been made by claws. Very large claws.
She moved carefully but as quickly as she dared, and she let the dragon wrap her left hand in scales and claws as well.
Gideon was right about one thing. This will go badly, eventually. Something will go wrong. We will be attacked. Here, in the dark, in these narrow passages. There may be some warning. Growling and pawing. The flap of wings. Perhaps even a torch light in the distance. But it could just as easily come from nowhere and take us by surprise.
Asha strained her eyes, peering into the distant shadows for some hint of what lay ahead, but there was only darkness. She listened with her dragon’s ear, but still the soul-sounds around her were muddled and wild. Human and animal, whole and broken, and all twisted together. She couldn’t tell where anything was, precisely. Only that it felt like the creatures were in front of them, and above them, somewhere.
The walls opened up and they stepped out into a chamber where their footsteps echoed faintly. Asha raised her claws and saw the flat faces of the walls etched with more of the symbols from the obelisks outside, but nothing else.
“Horus and I killed some of them here,” Gideon whispered. “A few years ago.”
He pointed to the opening in the far wall, and they moved on.
Asha kept close to the wall, and not far down the next corridor she paused to listen. New sounds were mingling with the muddled soul-noises. Real sounds, echoing faintly through the walls. Grunting. Snorting. Stamping.
And voices?
Asha started moving again.
Please, Omar, give us something. Yell at her. Or yell in pain. Yell something. Tell us where you are.
At the next chamber they found much more than in the last. Here there were empty iron torches standing dark in the corners, and faded tapestries hanging on the walls, and a large block of stone in the center of the room like a table or an altar. Doorways on the right and left opened directly onto other small rooms, also filled with bits of broken furniture and cloth scattered over the floor.
Asha stopped. “This is wrong.”
“What?”
“This. Everything.” She gestured to the rooms. “Lilith is keeping a menagerie of monstrous slaves here, and conducting experiments. There should be some normal signs of life. Food, scat, tools, equipment, light. And if these monsters are roaming around, there shouldn’t be anything left intact here. But look. The tapestries aren’t shredded, the furniture is only knocked over, not shattered. This place is abandoned.”
“But I can hear them.” Gideon glanced up. “Can’t you hear them?”
“Oh yes.” She nodded. “They’re up there. But they aren’t down here. They don’t come down here. Which tells me they have a different door. Lilith may have even sealed off this area so no one can get in this way.”
“Or get out this way.” Gideon straightened up and relaxed his posture a bit. “You’re right. She must have changed it after Horus and I were here last. We’re not going to be able to get to Omar from down here, are we?”
Asha shook her head. “No. We go back.”
They moved quickly back the way they had come, jogging down the corridors and back out into the vast darkness of the undercity. And there they turned and looked up at the dancing yellow flame high above them.
“This is going to be even more difficult than I thought,” Gideon said. “I suppose we can scout around the building and try to find the other entrance.”
“No, the longer we’re here, the more likely it is that they’ll find us,” Asha said. “I’ll go alone. I’ll find a way inside. You wait here.”
“Go alone? No,
that’s not the plan.”
Asha wasn’t listening. She reached down into her memories of all the horrible things she had seen people do to each other, and she roused the dragon a bit more. As her skin hardened into unbreakable golden scales, she felt herself being cut off from the world outside her body. Everything outside was cold and distant and dark, but inside her skin she was warm and solid and bright. She watched the blackness shift in a warm hazy crimson, where living bodies shimmered in naked white.
Everything was simpler when she wore the dragon. There was nothing to fear, nothing that could hurt her, nothing that could hide from her. Her own soul called out, cautioning her not to lose control, not to give in to the dragon’s bestial seduction.
I must remember to fear it, even now. I could kill Gideon, or Omar, or everyone in Alexandria if I gave in. I could spend the rest of my life raging across continent after continent, crushing and tearing and burning through city after city, killing and destroying everything I find.
But if I did… If I gave in, I wouldn’t care anymore. I wouldn’t be Asha anymore. I would be the dragon, and the dragon would not care. It would only go on living and raging, a force of nature without conscience or guilt, without remorse or regret.
And that’s the real seduction. Not the power.
The freedom.
Asha looked up at the dancing white flame at the top of the citadel, and saw faint white shapes moving about below it.
Seek.
Save.
Asha gripped the stone wall before her and leapt up into the darkness. She was aware of the cool air rippling over her golden skin, but she could not feel it. She moved through it like a spirit, a creature of another world, untouchable. Her feet landed on one of the many step-like levels of the pyramid, and she leapt again, and again, each time flying higher and closer to the white flame. To her left and right, she could see more and more of the city spread out below her as her perspective shifted higher and higher. The obelisks were reduced to stone needles, and the towers become little more than trees. Only the pillars remained massive and otherworldly.
Her last leap carried her all the way to the very top of the pyramid, and she landed lightly beside the white fire dancing in an iron bowl.
A signal. A guide. It calls to them in the darkness, and brings them home.
Slowly Asha prowled around the signal fire, studying the walkways at her feet for some spoor, some trail that would lead her down inside. And she found it. On three sides of the pyramid, the light from the iron brazier revealed the stone walls below it, but on the fourth side there was only darkness.
A hole.
Asha crept to the edge of the hole, and dropped down inside the citadel. The air was warmer here, and the chamber echoed softly with sounds of life. Voices, human and not-so-human. And just ahead of her, there was light. Asha edged forward, placing her feet carefully so that her claws did not click or scratch at the stone floor. At the corner she peeked out and saw a round chamber with a single burning torch to one side, and in the center of the small room, another hole in the floor.
Voices. Louder. A woman. A man.
Asha knelt at the edge of the hole and looked down. The distance to the next chamber was a rather long drop, but the chamber itself was far larger than the round room in which she was kneeling. There were many more torches and the floor was bright with flickering light and moving shadows. And from watching those shadows and the thin white figures that her dragon eyes could see through the stone walls, Asha guessed that Lilith and Omar were to her right, and something else, something larger, was sleeping to her left.
“…don’t believe that for a moment,” Lilith was saying. She spoke Eranian with an accent that Asha recognized, but it took her a moment to realize it was the same Syrian clip that Gideon and Nadira used. But where those two had allowed their speech to evolve and muddle with the passage of time, Lilith had not. “If you took on an apprentice, it must be for a very special reason. This girl Wren has something, or knows something, and whatever it is, I want it. And I’ll warrant that you have a way to find your precious protege, as well. Some little aether trick, perhaps?”
“None comes to mind,” Omar said. “But at my age, my memory isn’t what it once was. You should probably consider me an unreliable source.”
The sound of a wooden truncheon smacking bare flesh, and a man’s groan.
“You’ve actually been very reliable,” Lilith said. “You’ve already confirmed so many things that Nethys told me. What the girl looks like, what she wore, how she spoke. A red-haired girl from Rus will be fairly easy to find in Alexandria, don’t you think?”
“She won’t be easy to find at all. I taught her well,” Omar said softly. “And if you do find her, she won’t be easy to capture.”
“Really? Does she have an immortal’s pendant? Does she have a seireiken? Because you had both, and my little ones didn’t have much trouble with you at all.” Lilith hummed as she moved around the edge of the room, out of Asha’s line of sight.
“Wren is different,” Omar said. “You’ll never lay a hand on her.”
“Oooh, how intriguing,” Lilith purred. “I can’t wait to meet her. What sort of souls should I pierce her with? An ostrich? Or a crocodile? There are so many to choose from.”
She wants Wren!
Asha gripped the edge of the stone floor in her ruby claws, and the lip crumbled in her grasp. A trickle of dust and tiny crumbs of rock fell down into the lower chamber and crackled on the naked floor below.
“Set!” Lilith barked. “Up! Smell! Hunt!”
Asha stood up and backed away from the hole.
The dog-man. Aardvark.
The danger is small. I can defeat one of them. And then I’ll save Omar.
“Nethys!” Lilith shouted. “Horus!”
Three of them? Damn my luck.
A huge shadow flashed across the room below, and a throat growled. A figure in a black robe dashed into view under the hole and the murderous white eyes of the beast-headed Set glared up at Asha.
She turned and ran back down the narrow corridor and heard barking and yipping echoing through the chambers behind her. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw a long black head rise up through the hole as the robed man hauled himself up into the round room. Asha ran lightly, her razor-sharp claws scoring the stone floor with every fleet-footed step. At the end of the passage, she leapt up and out of the corridor and stood on the exposed face of the pyramid high above the black streets, knowing that somewhere down in the distance, Gideon was waiting for her.
A vicious snarling and growling came roaring up to the entrance behind her, and Asha turned and smashed her armored fist into the black snout that emerged from the passage. Set howled and fell back down inside.
Asha strode to the front side of the pyramid and began descending the stepped walls, hopping down one level at a time.
Wren. She wants Wren. She wants to make Wren one of her monsters! It wasn’t enough to take Omar. It wasn’t enough to kill Priya…
SET!
She stopped and turned to look up. Her dragon eyes showed her a giant dark stair rising up into the subterranean chamber, all cast in faint hues of red, and there at the top stood Set. As a man he must have been quite tall and lean, a figure of great speed and grace, a runner and perhaps even a dancer. He moved with a liquid ease, flowing across and then down the side of the pyramid behind her, moving on both his hands and feet. He did not leap or crash about as he came down the tiers, instead he ran and slid on his side and rolled on his shoulder like a living flood of muscle and black cloth.
“You!” Asha raised her clawed hands and felt her back and head throbbing as the dragon yearned to grow its magnificent horns and flailing tail, but she held it back.
You will serve me, dragon. You are mine to command.
Set growled and leapt at her, and Asha struck, driving her burning ruby claws into his neck and arm. She grabbed him and held him, and slammed him down on the stone ledge. Pressing her
scaled knee into his throat, she whispered, “You killed Priya.”
The monster said nothing. His long thin snout snapped at her, his long thin teeth clicking and scraping together.
Asha stood, lifted the beast over her head, and hurled him down into the darkness, and then she leapt after him.
“Why Priya!?” she screamed. She crashed down onto the dark street in a pool of dim red light from her own claws and scales, and she felt the street stones crunch and crack beneath her. “Why!?”
She stood and turned just as Set crashed into her, shoving her back into an obelisk, crushing her windpipe. But his fingers had no strength to match her golden armor, and Asha stared down the length of his arm into his mad eyes, two white blanks in the darkness. She reached out slowly and took hold of his neck and squeezed her burning claws together around his soft flesh.
“What sort of man kills an innocent woman!?”
Set howled and flailed, trying to escape her grip, but she was stronger by far. He felt small and fragile under her hands, a soft and brittle thing that gave way before her, twisting inward, cracking.
“You’re not even a man anymore, are you?” She blinked. “You’re just an animal now. You don’t even know what I’m saying, do you?”
She loosened her grip on him, and then let him go. He fell back to the ground, one hand clutching his throat while the other hand struggled to drag him away from her feet.
“Asha!” Gideon called to her.
She looked up through the darkness and saw a dim shape coming toward her. Everything was so dim, so dark. And she felt cold, so much colder than before. She wrapped her arms around herself and rubbed her goose-pimpled skin.
My skin? When did…?
“Asha!” Gideon’s body burst into view as he released the locks on his gauntlet and the blazing white blade of his seireiken erupted from its sheathe. “Behind you!”
“What?” She turned slowly and saw Set scrambling to his feet, his whole body coiled and springing toward her, one side of him painted silver by the light and the other side utterly black.
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