Tanith’s voice made Jenmar’s skin crawl. How had he failed to see such duplicity back on Vorash? Perhaps what he had mistaken for friendship had blinded him. In hindsight, all the indications of Tanith’s true nature were evident, if only he had been willing to see.
There was little comfort in realizing he had allowed his presumption of a shared purpose to lead him astray yet again.
“I come from Aset a’Teneb.” There was no point in drawing this out. The sooner it was over with, the better. He had no desire to exchange pleasantries with Tanith. “She sends a gift for your master. It is a promise of things to come.” Jenmar handed over the box Aset had given him.
Opening it, Tanith carefully removed the contents. It was a spiked sphere, small enough to fit into the palm of one’s hand. Tanith’s eyes widened as he held it up for examination, his smile broadening.
“A most welcomed gift indeed.” He returned it to the box, snapping closed the lid before passing it to an attending Jaffa. “I trust Aset has also provided a list of her terms.”
Jenmar produced the crystal and offered it wordlessly. Where his rage had been before, he now felt only emptiness. It was nearly incomprehensible that he should find himself here, of all places, when a few short hours ago he had aspired to so much more.
Tanith was reading the contents of the crystal at a nearby console. Jenmar stood far enough back to not appear to be looking over his shoulder. Nevertheless, he could still make out some of the writing. The words ‘Ancient’, ‘storehouse’ and ‘Tau’ri’ figured prominently in the text.
“Excellent.” Tanith removed the crystal and the screen went blank. “I will, of course, need to present this to my master, but I am confident an agreement can be reached.”
The door to the room slid open and two armed Jaffa stepped through, positioning themselves on either side of the opening. At first Jenmar thought they had come to escort Tanith, but when he swept out of the room, and they remained, their purpose became clear.
Tanith paused in the passageway beyond and called back to Jenmar. “Perhaps, when our deal is concluded, we might toast our renewed alliance.” His eyes glittered with amusement. “What is the phrase — ‘For old time’s sake?’” Jenmar was certain he heard Tanith’s low laugh as the door slid shut.
In his pocket, Jenmar’s fingers curled tightly around Aset’s remaining crystal. He could guess what information it contained. In the other pocket, his palm cradled the orb NebtHet had given him. The irony that he now stood on the very ha’tak she had sent him to find was not lost on him.
Wearily, he took the only seat available in the room — a long, low bench that offered little in the way of comfort. There was nothing to do now except wait. With the guards at the door, he was going nowhere.
Then again, there really was nowhere for him to go.
Chapter Twelve
“THERE is an oasis up ahead. We will stop there and rest,” Sha’re informed Daniel after another hour or so had passed. He didn’t feel so much tired as dry. Even in the cool of night, something about the constant dredging through sand seemed to suck the moisture out of him. He’d tried to ration his canteen, but now he was running precariously low. An oasis would have fresh water and it would feel good to sit for a while.
Daniel found it more than a little curious that Sha’re seemed to know what lay ahead. In all the texts of the Egyptian underworld he had studied, he’d never found any which described the exact route through it. They provided no maps to help the deceased navigate their way to the Hall of the Two Truths. It was, as he understood it, not a place defined by geography as much as by experience, with no two journeys ever being exactly alike. Daniel could understand how, if this really was the afterlife, his journey and Sha’re’s might be joined, but that didn’t account for her knowing so much — and he so little. The only way that made sense was if he was correct in his supposition that this was something else entirely.
It took almost another hour of walking to reach their destination. Faint hints of dawn etched the horizon at their backs as the silhouettes of palm-like trees emerged in the distance. By the time they reached them, day had fully come.
They found an outcropping of stone that hung out over the lake — a large, flat rock upon which it seemed many others before them had paused to rest. Both he and Sha’re drank their fill from the clear water below before taking out their canteens and refilling them. That task done, Sha’re leaned back, arms propped behind her, and lifted her face toward the sun. She looked perfectly at peace.
Daniel couldn’t help but watch her. In every way, she was his Sha’re, exactly as he remembered her. Each tendril of hair, each perfect earlobe, each curve of her body which his own still yearned for on long, lonely nights. How hard would it be to let go of his doubts and just accept her as she was? How easy would it be to extend his hand and simply caress her cheek, her hair, her lips —
His musing came to an abrupt halt. Something had moved along the edge of the lake. He hadn’t noticed it before. In the shadows, it had been indistinguishable from the landscape. As he watched, whatever it was sidled off toward the darker cover of the nearby copse of palms.
Daniel scrambled to his feet, keeping his eye on the shape so as to not lose it in the shadows. It must have realized it had been seen, because it suddenly sped up, running for the trees. Daniel sprinted after it.
It did not get far. After a few strides, it stumbled in one of the errant sandpits that pockmarked the oasis and fell. Even then the woman — as he closed in, Daniel could see that she was, in fact, female — began to scurry fervently across the ground, as if she might somehow be able to escape before he reached her. With a few more strides he was in front of her, blocking her way.
And trying to figure out what she was.
In form, he supposed, she was human, although, judging by her appearance, she was long past the prime of her life. Her face might have been beautiful in its day. There were vestiges of once-fine features: a proud aquiline nose, brown-speckled eyes, a chin that could be described as haughty. But time had caught up with her. Her cheeks were hollow and her eyes sunken. Matted gray hair hung over her face. Angular bones showed clearly beneath her coppery skin which, despite having the texture of leather, nonetheless seemed fragile, as if at a mere touch it would lose its tenuous hold and slip off her meager frame.
She looked like a living corpse. Or a mummy.
In spite of her appearance, she was still agile. Staggering to her feet, she turned to flee again, only to come face to face with Sha’re, who had followed Daniel from the lake. Seeing her only hope of escape thwarted, the old woman sank to the ground again and began to wail.
“Stop, please —” Daniel implored, looking down at her in dismay. He hadn’t meant to frighten her, but she was the only person, aside from Sha’re, he’d seen since he got here. Questions were going off in his head like flashbulbs.
She did not look at him but only continued her keening, occasionally beating her breast with her fist. Daniel looked helplessly at Sha’re, but she only shrugged, as uncertain what to do as he was.
“Look,” he tried again, “we don’t want to hurt you. I promise. It’s just you’re the first person we’ve come upon and we wanted to talk to you. That’s all.”
“Help me, help me, help me…” she wept, over and over again.
Daniel knelt beside her, trying not to let her appearance bother him. Unfortunately, she smelled as horrible as she looked. “How can we help you? Tell us what to do.”
The woman’s sobs lessened and she peered closely at Daniel through her tangled, filthy hair. Her eyes widened as if in recognition and she recoiled slightly. Her gaze flitted over to Sha’re, and he saw recognition there too, but of a completely different kind.
“I know you!” she cried, flinging herself on the hem of Sha’re’s robe and gathering it in her fists. “Oh my Queen! Amaunet! Save me!” She reached up a desiccated arm in supplication to Sha’re, who tried to back away from her, but could not, a
s the woman held on with surprising strength. Daniel saw an uncharacteristic flash of anger in Sha’re’s eyes.
“I am not your queen, old woman,” she replied, sharply. “That was the demon who lived within me. The demon who is now long dead. As you too shall soon be, I think.”
“Sha’re?” He was taken aback by the look of disgust on her face. Daniel wasn’t sure he’d ever heard her speak like that. At least, not as Sha’re. “Do you know her?”
Sha’re at last managed to free herself from the old woman’s grasp, leaving her whimpering in the dirt.
“Know her? Yes. Only too well.” Sha’re nearly spat out her answer. “Her face is forever seared into my mind, even if the demon did possess it at the time.” She looked finally at Daniel and her face softened into a kind of grief. “She is the one to whom Amaunet gave my child. She is the one who took him from me and hid him away.”
Daniel looked at the woman on the ground and felt an uncontrollable loathing of his own. Yet he had seen the woman who had brought Shifu to Kheb. They had found her, murdered by Apophis’ Jaffa, as she fled with the child into the forest. But she had been a Jaffa priestess. This woman —
“I served my Queen!” she hissed at them, suddenly vigorous in her apparent hatred. Out of their two sunken hollows, her eyes abruptly glowed.
— was a Goa’uld.
“I did as she commanded.” The old woman’s voice was strong with pride. She looked first at one and then the other, her speech taking on the tenor of the symbiote within. “She knew I would be followed. So she instructed me to find a priestess to take the child far away. To a place that no one even knew existed.”
“Be gone, old woman,” Sha’re interrupted her. “Do not bother us further. Crawl off into some dark shadow and die.”
As much as Daniel despised the creature on the ground before him, he found Sha’re’s words harsh. And perplexing.
“Isn’t it a little difficult to die here? I mean, if we’re already dead —?”
“I speak of the Second Death, Dan’yel. The death from which there is no return.” Sha’re pointed at the creature on the ground. “See, she has the look about her of one who will perish before her journey to the great Hall is complete.”
“I have been cursed!” the woman cried out, managing to look pitiful again. She turned to Daniel this time, the glowing in her eyes now gone and her voice normal. “Please — I implore you. Help me.”
Bits and pieces of information were coalescing in Daniel’s mind. The Second Death. The fetid smell. The diminished body.
“It is a curse, isn’t it?” He knew now. It too was straight out of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. How many times had he pored over the texts as a graduate student, searching them for clues in support of his theories? “You’ve been forgotten, haven’t you? Someone has erased your name from history. Obliterated your memory. No one will ever know who you were, or what you did in life. There is no afterlife waiting for you. Not anymore.”
He couldn’t help the note of satisfaction that had crept into his own voice as he’d realized the woman’s fate. Here was justice at last, or at least a sliver of it. Someone was finally being punished for their part in the crime that had been committed against Sha’re.
“Yes,” the woman nodded, tears streaming down her face. “It is as you say. And now I will perish. Become nothing. Nothing.” She curled into a ball and wept again.
Daniel looked at Sha’re whose hard gaze was fixed on the former handmaiden. “It is nothing less than you deserve.” Her voice was like ice. “May your bones become as dust.” She turned away and strode back toward the rocks.
The Goa’uld looked up at Daniel. Her red-rimmed eyes only made her that much more hideous to look at and he wanted nothing more than to follow in Sha’re’s wake. But he could not. The old woman held his gaze and he felt as if he were truly seeing the host, not the symbiote within. It was the only thing which kept him from turning his back on her and walking away as well.
“Please.” Her voice was barely a whisper. Gone were the hysterics and breast-beating. It was the singular voice of a being in pain. In need. “Please,” she entreated him again. “Help me.”
Chapter Thirteen
“SAMANTHA, please. Reconsider.”
Sam ignored Martouf’s plea and continued the steep climb up the hill, sweating with the effort. The coat was long gone, abandoned a good klick back. Now the landscape was comprised of dead grasses and, on occasion, leafless trees, stunted and twisted in their growth. It was little wonder, considering she’d noticed an intensifying sulfuric odor hanging in the warming air.
It was even worse here. Every breath she took made her want to gag on the smell of rotten eggs — and something else. It was an odor she recognized, but could not place. Not that she really wanted to; her stomach was roiling enough as it was.
Sam could hear Martouf breathing hard behind her as he scrambled up the incline in her wake. The hill itself was more or less barren, save for the mat of ground-hugging grasses that had once grown over it. The path was strewn with rocks, and she’d slipped more than once in her boots. She’d considered ditching those as well — her sandals were tucked in the knapsack on her back — but even though they were overly warm, she figured they offered the better protection.
It took her longer than she would have liked to reach the summit. As she took the last few steps, she came to an abrupt halt, assaulted by a blast of furnace-hot air and a gut-wrenching stench. Both emanated from a vast chasm that was spread below her, the floor of which was covered in a churning, undulating liquid.
Then she heard the sound. It was both human and inhuman at the same time, a painful, wretched noise that made her want to cover her ears to block it out. The pit, she realized, was roiling not only with liquid but with bodies. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people, were crowded together, barely able to move, their cries rising up on the heated air of the sulfuric mud-pit in which they were trapped.
Sam stood there, stunned. She’d seen similar images in depictions of the damned as imagined by artists over the centuries. But to stand on the edge of such a scene, to hear the lamentations of those who were abandoned to so cruel and desolate a place —
Then the true horror struck her. Her team was down there. This was the punishment Martouf had warned her about. These were the ‘Enemies of the Gods.’
Sam wheeled on Martouf, who was now standing beside her, looking as horrified as she felt.
“Where are they? How do I get them out?”
He looked mournful. “I have tried to tell you, Samantha. You cannot help them. Their fate has been decided. Their sentence carried out. No one has ever escaped from the Pit of Mutu. If you were to attempt to rescue them, their fate would become yours as well.”
“I won’t accept that. There has to be a way!”
Frantic, Sam turned back toward the pit, her eyes scanning for a familiar face. There were so many, and they kept in constant motion, climbing over each other or attempting in vain to scale the sheer rock face that surrounded the pit on all sides. Geysers of steam would sporadically shoot high into the air and there would be a cry of anguish from those standing in its vicinity as it rained boiling sulfur down on them. She realized with revulsion that the stench she smelled was that of burning flesh.
She tried looking for Teal’c. With his golden tattoo, he might stand out amongst the others, but there were many Jaffa in the pit — those who, like Teal’c, must have defied the Goa’uld. The rest, though, were humans of all cultures and races. The three faces Sam was so desperate to find were impossibly lost in the midst of so many.
Then she saw the colonel’s hat. In that sea of writhing bodies his brimmed baseball cap suddenly stood out. There was no sign of the others, but at least the colonel was alive, even if he was in this hell hole. Now she had something she could do.
Off to her right, Sam noticed that the path led to a narrow footbridge spanning the vast crater. A sadistic catwalk over the theater of the damned, it offer
ed a better view of the interior of the pit and could take her closer to where the colonel was stranded.
“Samantha, no!” Martouf called as she set off at a jog toward it. “You cannot save him!”
Raw fury pumping adrenaline through her veins, she shouted back at him. “I can try! So either help me or shut the hell up!”
The bridge was simply made of corded rope and wooden planks, but it was sturdy. Grasping the rope handholds on each side, Sam strode across it until she was as close to the baseball cap as she could get.
“Colonel!” Sam waved her arms in the air, wondering if it was even possible for him to hear. “Colonel O’Neill! She called his name again and finally he turned.
Her joy at finding him faded as she saw his face. Angry red lesions marred his cheeks and forehead where the heat and sulfur had scalded him. His clothes were burned away in places, revealing bare and blistered skin. When the colonel raised his arm, the flesh was eaten away down to the very bone.
Sam’s heart lurched. Even if she could save him, she wasn’t sure how long he would survive, not with such terrible wounds. But she wasn’t about to leave him there to die in some Goa’uld’s demented version of Hell.
Looking around, her hope sank. It was as she feared: all sides of the pit were sheer drops. Even a professional climber would have found it impossible to find any sort of foothold going down or coming up. If she was going to do this, she was going to need a rope.
Except she didn’t have one. Neither did Martouf, who’d followed her out onto the bridge. He had nothing with him except his canteen of water — and a knife.
An idea took hold of her. It was crazy. Impossible. Movie-stunt stuff. But it was the only chance she had of rescuing the colonel. Besides, considering what bad shape he was in, she needed to act now. Time was as much a consideration as anything else.
All of which meant it was worth the risk.
Sam eyed the bridge, making the calculations. It was long enough, but she’d have to cut it at just the right point to avoid being submerged in the pit herself. Although, considering how hard she was going to slam into the wall on the opposite side of the canyon, maybe the pit was the better choice.
STARGATE SG-1 29 Hall of the Two Truths Page 11