Good question, but the answer wasn’t. “Thoth. When I killed him, I set a bunch of Isis’s godly games into motion.”
Shu shifted her stones. In the low light, I could just make out her ever-cynical eyes and the gleam of sweat on her face. Her quiet preluded more questions, and stuck as we were, I couldn’t escape them.
“The prophecy about a son killing a god?” she asked.
The son will sunder a king… I heard Isis saying those exact words, remembered it, but I couldn’t recall from where or when. “Right. That prophecy.” Shu had been there when I’d stabbed Alysdair through Thoth’s chest. She’d heard the God of Law mention the prophecy. “Isis used Thoth to put into motion an alleged prophecy that will kill her husband. She can’t do it herself because then she wouldn’t be the Goddess of Light who loves her husband dearly, so she’s using those around her, but mostly me. I know it, I just can’t prove it.”
“Prophecies.” Shu snorted. “She believes in a godstruck priest’s fantasy?”
I was sure Isis didn’t believe in anything but herself. “Isis doesn’t have to believe it as long as those around her do, including Thoth. She’s making it happen, and she’s got me buried up to my neck in it. All fingers point to me.” I rocked back on my heels and counted down on my fingers. “I’ve got motive—I’d happily kill Osiris and the entire pantheon knows it—and I’ve got a rap sheet.” More fingers fell. “Ammit, Thoth, it doesn’t matter that I didn’t technically kill them. It’s all Isis’s doing. She had Ammit killed, and she knew I’d lose it when I discovered the body and consume all the souls in that room. She convinced Thoth to kill himself by proxy. Plus, I’m not the most innocent soul. If Osiris dies, Isis gets to be the grieving wife and wear the crown, while I get to play pin the body part on the soul eater with Anubis for all eternity.”
Even in the dark, Shu’s glower was obvious. “Anubis weighed your heart against Ammit’s murder. I doubted it, but the feather was clear. You’re innocent.”
“Innocent?” I chuckled dryly. That word didn’t belong in the same sentence as my name. “So the feather’s judgment was right for that crime. But I did kill Thoth, and I am despised everywhere I go in the underworld, with good reason. Isis set me up as the villain in her tragic love story. Nobody will challenge her. It’d be like trying to convince everyone that Jafar was the real hero of Aladdin.”
Shukra dug around more stones and shifted them out of the doorway. The only sound was the grinding of stones and our ragged breaths in the dark. We had plenty of air, for now, but I felt it thinning as I trawled it over my tongue.
“So Isis isn’t trying to stop the prophecy; she’s encouraging it?”
“Oh, she’ll go to any lengths to be seen as the dutiful wife who’s protecting her husband. Their love is eternal, and anyone who doubts that faces Osiris’s wrath. But I know what she’s doing, and she knows I know. Hence the come-ons, getting inside my head, dragging my ass out here, and probably why we’re buried in a tomb.”
“All this dancing around just to kill Osiris?” Shu heaved a large rock out of the way and dumped it behind her.
“He’s the God of Rebirth. His brother, Seth, killed him once already. He doesn’t die and stay dead without a lot of effort.”
Debris in the blocked doorway crumbled. Shu backed up, and I kicked the rest of the rocks in, stirring up more dust. As it settled, a chamber opened beyond. A trickle of power hummed in the background, enough to confirm there was something worth finding here, and it was probably inside the stone sarcophagus sitting dead center in the room.
“You feel it? A curse?” I asked, referring to the power’s background tickle.
“Could be.”
As far sarcophagi went, this was one plain. More of a stone box than a vessel to travel the underworld. What few hieroglyphs remained mentioned a great builder, but no pharaoh.
I ran my hand over the markings. None flared to life. Whatever magic was left, it wasn’t in the writing. Crouching close, I read the inscriptions. The hieroglyphs depicted someone risen from poverty to a position of power.
“This tomb belongs to a man,” I said, noticing the subtle accents on various scenes.
Shu took a closer look over my shoulder. “A man buried in the Valley of the Queens?”
“Some sarcophagi were moved over the thousands of years to keep them hidden from angry pharaohs and opportunistic robbers.” I straightened to get a better look at the hieroglyphs on the walls, but the work lights ended in the hallway, filling the burial chamber with shadows. Alysdair’s glow would have come in handy, but I’d left the sword back in the hotel room. “Can you spell a little light?”
Shu uttered a few words and cupped her hand in the air. Something long and thin wriggled in her palm. A sruvurk—glow worm—the kind that, in Shu’s hands, could crawl up your nose and set your brain matter on fire. She tossed it into the air, where it flung out sticky silk and dangled from the tomb ceiling. Comfortable, it started glowing.
Light spilled over the hieroglyphs, revealing scenes of people bowing at his feet. “Looks like he was someone special… See here… He’s depicted standing behind a woman… a pharaoh.” Only a handful of female pharaohs had come to power, which narrowed it down considerably.
I ran my hands over several cartouches that had been chiseled away. Where the cuts ran deep, old magic throbbed like a festering wound. Some clues remained. Crooks and flails, and the upper and lower Egyptian crowns. “This man was Queen Hatshepsut’s advisor. Ammit weighed his soul before my time in the Halls. She told me he’d been one of the lightest souls she’d ever weighed. The sarcophagus belongs to Senenmut.”
Shu’s eyes glowed brighter, the yellow in them bleeding through. She recognized the name. “If I find his canopic jars, can I keep them?”
“No. We came for the skull.” The brightness in her gaze sharpened. “Don’t touch anything else.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
I gripped the edge of the sarcophagus lid and worked my fingers into a comfortable position. The stone felt warm under my touch. The latent magic, tentative and old, continued its soft pawing at my mind. “Serious as Tut’s curse.”
“Isis put me in a locket, dragged my ass out to a country as hot and filthy as Seth’s armpit, and buried me in a tomb with you, and I don’t get to keep any souvenirs?”
“Are you really arguing about this now?” I shoved the lid. The seal cracked, but the lid had barely moved.
“I’m taking a jar.” She huffed, sounding more like a disgruntled teen than a demon sorceress of unknown origin.
“Shu, help me with this lid.”
She locked her hands on the edge of the lid and pushed.
I braced my boots against the floor and heaved with her, shoving what felt like five tons of stone a millimeter. Then another.
“You’re not taking a jar,” I hissed. Canopic jars held a body’s most valuable organs. In Shu’s hands, a canopic jar holding just a fraction of someone as important as Senenmut was a biblical plague waiting to happen.
“I’m taking a jar,” she hissed back.
“I’ll tell Isis to put you back”—the lid jolted—“in the locket.”
“I’ll tell Osiris you’ve had Isis all the human ways and some ways that are definitely not human.”
I laughed, knowing she wouldn’t. Any punishment Osiris rained down on me was her punishment too. He’d kill anyone who delivered that message out of principle.
The sarcophagus lid jolted again and gasped millennia-old air. With it came a boiling mass of glistening black bodies, each the size of my hand. Scorpions. They were on me, pouring over my fingers and up my arms. Needle-like claws dug in. Pincers clicked. Stingers cocked.
Shu screamed. Her glowing worm died—probably eaten—plunging us into darkness.
“Hurzd!” The spellword shot from my lips, around a pincer, and slammed into the oncoming flood, freezing the scorpions and locking every single one down. But in the absolute blackness, I couldn�
�t see them. I didn’t want to see. The weight of their bodies clung to my clothes. There had to be hundreds—thousands—enough to make the strain of holding them shudder and twitch through my control.
I spat the scorpion off my lip. “Shu?”
“Here,” she answered, voice tight.
“Light?”
After a few seconds, another glowing worm hovered in the air, illuminating the walls, a sarcophagus, and the ceiling, all covered in shiny-black scorpions. None moved. Beady eyes watched me, tails hooked over and pincers raised, waiting for my spellword to fail.
“I can burn them…” she whispered.
“And us.” And use up the rest of our oxygen. I plucked several off my arm and tossed them into the ankle-deep layer covering the floor. Shu did the same, avoiding their hooked stingers. These weren’t normal scorpions. Bigger and more aggressive, they’d come straight from the same place as the delightful sand-tunneling vurk that had recently terrorized a Long Island beach: my backyard, mu moka.
“I’m holding them,” I told her and winced against the strain.
“For now.” She yanked one from her hair and tossed it at a wall.
She was right to worry. I’d controlled a wave of snakes in Duat, but this ancient tomb wasn’t Duat, and I didn’t have the same power here as I did back home.
Inching forward, I leaned over the sarcophagus to get my first look inside. The mummy had shrunk in size, revealing the shocking decayed carcass of a once proud and substantial man. Skin had contracted and turned prune dark. The years had not been kind to Senenmut.
“Well, he’s mostly intact.” Four canopic jars were nestled against the corpse. I kept that knowledge to myself.
“No skull?”
“Give the sorceress a prize.”
Senenmut’s neck had been severed after the embalming process. There was a slim chance the archaeologists had gotten through the door, shifted the sarcophagus’s lid, and taken the head, but considering the scorpion welcoming party, I doubted it. The skull had probably been taken before Senenmut was entombed—sometime a few thousand years ago, give or take a decade. Great.
My hold on the scorpions wavered, and they shifted, jerking forward, bodies creaking.
“Hurzd…” I strengthened the hold, but it wouldn’t last. A magical backlash was already stalking me.
“Plan B.” I headed for the doorway, grateful for solid shoes when the carapaces cracked like candy under my soles. Shu couldn’t say the same about her sandals.
“Which is?”
“It’s always the same. Run.”
We didn’t get far. Corridors switched back on themselves while others dug deeper into the earth. Shu kept her glow worm alive in her hand, illuminating walls that all looked the same. Round and around we went, with no exit in sight.
“We’ve been here before,” I murmured.
In the sarcophagus chamber, now somewhere above us, the scorpions pushed forward as one huge wave. I stumbled and reached for the wall just as they snapped free of my will. Razor-edged pain lashed through the inside of my skull.
Shukra spat a curse, rolled her shoulders, and deliberately shuffled off human, setting her eyes aflame with yellow light. “All right, then, barbeque bugs for dinner!”
“There has to be,” I panted, dragging hot air through my teeth, “another way out.”
Shu turned her palms up and faced the tide of oncoming thousands. “Amun Ra, bae orr uk aeuir kesrs.” Her voice dropped, adopting tones and hitches that didn’t belong to human vocal cords. “Sroms ka sra resrs, sra raos, sra amarsae, kerr ka vesr aeuir akkamka. Braosr kera emsu ka.”
I didn’t know the spell, but she was invoking Ra’s name, something few sorceresses were powerful enough to handle.
Fire opened inside her hands, peeling apart like the petals of a vast orange desert lily.
“Go,” she growled. “Find another way. I’ll hold them back.”
In two steps, I’d shrugged off the mortal man and dissolved into darkness. Human pains and exhaustion evaporated. The weight of my human body fell away, freeing the truth of me. As Shu’s fire filled the tomb’s hallways, I funneled power into every chamber and annex and around each column, filling out all the unknown places, stretching far and wide and deep, searching for a way out. And there, a shaft tunneled through the earth, narrow and steep, climbing up through rock to an opening high above the valley. I withdrew each branch I’d cast outward and was almost back beside Shu when a sharp jab of alien power hooked in and yanked me short. I hadn’t been expecting it—few things can touch me when I’m made of shadow and hunger—so when the grip snagged, I froze, stunned. For one terrible pause, between a single second and the next, power crawled over me and through me, turning me inside out, over and over. I recoiled and tried to pull free and hide myself in a human body, but the grip didn’t budge. Worse, it didn’t even appear to notice my struggle. The hold was… monumental.
Too much power! The presence filled the tomb and valley and stretched halfway to Luxor. Its power smothered me, crushed in close and pulled me apart all at once. And then, it was gone. Not withdrawn, simply vanished.
I collapsed into my human body, feeling unbalanced and exposed, as though someone had turned my soul inside out, leaving me open, but Shu was alight with flame, and the scorpions sizzled and popped as they came closer and closer. There was no time to chase down the power or consider what it meant.
“Follow me!” I called to Shu, stumbling over my heavy human feet before I could properly get a grip on my body. We ran down corridors and steps and hurried around columned chambers until the small depression in the ceiling revealed itself as a shaft.
“Go!” I shoved Shu ahead.
She dove into the small opening and scurried out of sight.
But I wasn’t alone.
The crunching, gnawing, grinding sound of scorpion bodies endlessly tumbling filled the room. Turning, I flung out a hand, “Hurzd!” The spellword gripped the scorpions washing up the walls, but their slippery souls wriggled and squirmed, eager to be free. “Cukkomd!” I had them, but not for long. It had to be long enough; I didn’t have much more power to give.
I scrambled into the shaft after Shu, pushing through pinched rocks and crumbling choke points, until Shu’s hand appeared ahead. I flung my hand into hers. She pulled me out into the cool Egyptian night, clapped her hands together, and uttered, “Dea aeuir kumk uk bescrak!” Loosely translated to “Die, you sons of bitches.”
The ground rumbled, and a blast of rock and dust spewed from the shaft, collapsing our escape route and sealing the scorpions inside.
I fell to my knees, lucky to be upright, and stared at Luxor’s city lights twinkling on the sleepy surface of the Nile a few miles away. That had been close, even for me.
We didn’t get the skull, but we did escape the tomb mostly alive.
“You get stung?” I asked.
“No.”
The power… the hold… Something had gripped me as easily as I flung spellwords around. Weakened and disjointed, I didn’t want to stick around and think too hard on it.
“You okay?” Shu asked. I must have looked bad for her to pretend to care. “What happened?” She stood over me, covered in dirt, hair tangled about her face, and clothes torn. Suspicion burned in those purple eyes. I shouldn’t have been this weak, shouldn’t have been on my knees, grasping at the tattered remnants of my magic.
That kind of power… If Shu got hold of it, or it got hold of her… She already wanted the jars. The temptation would be too great.
“Nothing happened.” I wobbled to my feet and spied our Jeep down in the valley. “Let’s get back to the hotel.”
And away from whatever’s back there, I silently added. Isis had a lot to answer for.
Chapter 6
It wasn’t difficult to find Isis’s room. The godstruck hotel staff guarding the door stood out like a neon sign.
“You cannot pass,” the guard blocking the door declared, the words at odds with
his modern hotel uniform.
I eyed the little guy. He probably weighed half as much as me and looked like one solid punch would drop him for the count. Still, godstruck people didn’t reason like everyone else. He’d probably fight me to the death—his death, if Isis ordered it.
I sighed. I didn’t want to hurt this guy, but he was in the way of my getting answers. “Just tell her I’m here.”
“You cannot pass.”
I worked my mouth around the things I wanted to say but knew were useless. “Do I look like I want to be here?” I had half the desert stuck on my torn clothes, the rest I’d swallowed, and I was sure the grinding, gritty parts down my pants were bits of scorpion. “Turn around, open the door, and go tell her Ace is here. Don’t make this into a fight, because I’ll win.”
Two more glassy-eyed hotel staff rounded the corner and squared up to me.
“Isis!” I bellowed. She didn’t care if I had to mow down her people to get to her, but I did. “Don’t make me call Osiris!”
The guard’s left eye twitched as the goddess crawled around inside his head. “You may enter.” He stepped aside and opened the double doors.
If my room was luxurious, then her suite was the Taj Mahal. I’d been in smaller museums. Glass, gold, and stone glittered and shone. Different levels broke up the vast open living area while a wall of windows opened onto a balcony that afforded a stunning view of the illuminated Karnak temple less than a mile away. Unfortunately, Her Highness wasn’t in sight, meaning I had to wait.
I loitered in the living area for all of five minutes until I decided I was done waiting around for Isis to deem me worthy of her time. She’d buried me and Shu in a tomb after sending us looking for some cursed skull, and I’d almost had my soul violated by something I did not want to think about. The bitch goddess would answer my questions NOW.
I found her in the bathroom. Though “bathroom” was too small a word for the bathing temple I’d stumbled into. Thankfully, my feet stopped at the open door, and the rest of me froze there. I’d forgotten I wasn’t immune to her, and the sight that greeted me reminded me why I shouldn’t be alone with the Goddess of Light. The baths were ridiculously wide and deep. They had to be to accommodate the two women and one guy in the water with her. Isis had her back to me, but she knew I’d arrived. One of the women devotedly braided a small portion of Isis’s long black hair, and the other lathered soap over the goddess’s bronze shoulders. I couldn’t see much of the man from where I stood—just his head as he kissed the goddess’s neck and his hands kneading her shoulders. His eyes flicked up to me, glassy and unfocused. He was halfway to being godstruck.
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