Eater of souls

by Lynda S. Robinson

  Dedication

  To take a chance on publishing a novel set in ancient Egypt, an editor has to have courage and the ability to withstand criticism from those who dislike subjects that seem too esoteric. Michael Seidman had that courage and took that chance. Then he had the patience to allow me to grow as a writer and the wisdom not to take me seriously when I let my fears overwhelm me. Thank you, Michael. I will always be grateful for your guidance, your experience, and most of all for your willingness to take a chance on ancient Egypt, Lord Meren, and me.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank Dr. Charles van Siclen for serving as an invaluable resource and Polly Price, my dear friend, for her help in manuscript review. Any errors remaining are mine.

  In addition to the research and writing, producing the Lord Meren books involves the hard work of Marlene Tungseth, director of editorial production and design, Krystyna Skalski, art director, and Miranda Ottewell, copy editor. I would also like to express my appreciation to JoAnn Sabatino, Matthew Papa, Liza Miller, and Theresa D’Orsogna, all of whom have played important roles in the Lord Meren series.

  So many books are published each year that it takes special enthusiasm and expertise to make any one distinguishable from the crowd. George Gibson, publisher of Walker and Company, has given my books intensive backing that has been crucial to their success. From the beginning his expertise in the publishing business has been invaluable. He also knows and understands writers, their fears and idiosyncrasies, and the toll their own standards can exact from them. His insight and empathy have been a great solace to me.

  Finally, I would like to thank my husband, Wess, who is a marvelous first reader and unfailing source of encouragement.

  Prologue

  Ammut, the Devouress

  She is the Devouress, Eater of the Dead, Devourer of Souls, creature of the netherworld—crocodile head, lion’s foreparts, hippo’s hindquarter—she is feared even by the one called Blood Drinker. Ammut the Devouress crouches by the scales while Anubis weighs the heart of the dead one against the Feather of Maat. Toth, Osiris, and the pantheon observe but do not interfere. The scales tilt; the Feather rises. A scream tears itself from the throat of the dead one who stands at the scales. The Devouress salivates, squats on her haunches, and springs. Long, yellow-toothed jaws snap, once at the heart, once at the dead one. Bones crack; flesh is severed; and Ammut the Devouress carries out the punishment dealt to all evil ones—annihilation. The gods turn and face the portal through which the next one will come, the evildoer forgotten. But Ammut lifts her crocodile head and listens to souls in torment in the living world above. Their pain calls to her. Another dead one appears at the portal. Ammut, Eater of Souls, Devourer of Shades, swings her head toward the smell of fresh meat. She is hungry again.

  Chapter 1

  Memphis, Year Five of the Reign of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun

  She could smell the darkness. Night in the land of the living was a feeble imitation of the obsidian nothingness that possessed her own lair, yet she could smell the darkness. Lifting her hard, jutting snout, she sucked in the textured scents—waters of the Nile, mud and refuse from the docks nearby, the faint smell of dung mixed with fish and smoke from a thousand dying oven fires.

  The snout whipped around at the sound of a flute, a shriek of drunken laughter from the beer house. A claw, long, curved, with a honed blade-edge as sharp as a physician’s knife, scraped over the cracked mud brick of a wall. It snaked back into the shelter of the alley at the sudden appearance of light. Several of the living approached. Eyes with daggered pupils observed the strangers. Rapid, guttural chattering made her wince. Foreigners—in rank, unclean wool robes smelling of beer and sex. Bearing the torch that had assaulted her eyes, they stumbled past and swerved to disappear down the street.

  Snorting to rid herself of the stench, she returned her attention to the beer house across the street. One of its wooden shutters was loose and warped, allowing light from within to escape and casting rippled shadows on the packed earth of the road. A larger group burst from the interior, arguing, giggling, swaying to the beat of a sailing song. Men from the docks. Of no interest, no relevance.

  She grunted with impatience, something she never experienced below. But the evil one had been in the beer house since dusk. Leaning against the chipped plaster of the wall, she rubbed her haunches against the surface, scraping off more chips of plaster with her rough hide. All grew quiet again, and the light from the beer house began to dim as someone quenched lamps. Far away, in the palace district, a hound howled. At an even greater distance, out in the western desert, land of the dead, hyenas yipped and squealed.

  The brittle wooden door of the beer tavern swung open again. She turned a yellow eye and saw, at last, the evil one. He was a small man, as befit his place among the living. A humble farmer with cracked, sunbaked skin, splayed, dirty feet, and three cracked teeth. This was the one who had offended, had transgressed in so callous a manner that she had heard the cry of injustice from below.

  She sniffed the air again and caught the scent of a decayed ka, the soul of the evil one. The farmer came toward her. He would use the alley to cross this district of taverns and beer houses on his way to the skiff he’d left at the dock. As he marched unsteadily toward her, she felt the sudden burning rush of power spiced with anticipation. It boiled through her like rolling thunderclouds.

  Slinking back into the deepest blackness, she crouched on her hind legs. Heavy, irregular footsteps announced the farmer’s approach. And over the sound of his tread she heard that for which she’d been listening all night. The steady, dull th-thud, th-thud, th-thud. The voice of the heart. It grew louder and louder, provoking her, taunting her, invading her skull and battering its low vault. Just as the noise threatened to shatter the bones of her head, she sprang out of the blackness and landed behind the farmer.

  He turned and tottered, his mouth agape, his eyelids climbing to his brows. He had time for a rattling little screech before she bashed him in the head. The man flew backward and smacked into the hard earth. The moment he lay flat, she lunged, her forearm drawn back, claws spread wide. They cut through the air, impaled flesh, and sliced, severing the farmer’s throat. Drawing back, she shook her claw deftly to rid it of blood and stringy tissue while the farmer gurgled and stared up into a long, rigid maw studded with yellow fangs. She listened for that last escaping breath. Once it issued from the body, she stooped over the farmer once more—to do what had been decreed, what she existed to do, what was righteous, what this evil deserved.

  Kysen strode out of his bedchamber toward the hall of Golden House, the ancestral home of his family in Memphis. Dawn approached, and exhaustion nested in his body like a sated vulture. At the same time he had to endure the pounding mallet of dread that beat in time with his heart. He’d slept only a few hours after last night’s conversation with his father. Meren was one of the Eyes and Ears of Pharaoh, confidential inquiry agent to the living god, the pharaoh Tutankhamun, but even one so favored as Meren couldn’t investigate the death of a queen without risking his life.

  Kysen’s thoughts careened to a halt as he imagined the magnitude of the risk to his father. Nearly stumbling into the half-open doors to the hall, he placed his hand on the polished cedar and electrum and entered. The scene of splendor before him never failed to call up memories of his own childhood before Meren had adopted him, memories of bare walls, meager furnishings, poverty of spirit, and the devastation of joy.

  Before him slender columns painted in green, blue, and gold rose above his head, while lamplight glinted off furniture trimmed in sheet gold or wrought in darkest ebony. He passed the master’s dais, on which stood his father’s chair with its elegant ebony legs ending in lion’s pa
ws. Each carved paw had claws painted in gold. The solid sides and armrests were fitted with sheet gold engraved with hunting scenes.

  The contrast between his memories and the hall faded as he approached his sisters, to be replaced by worry. He had searched for Meren without success earlier this morning. If his father wasn’t with Bener and Isis… His imagination crowded with thoughts of court intrigue, the enemies Meren had made in protecting and nurturing the boy pharaoh.

  Cease. You’re weary and not thinking clearly. There’s nothing to fear at the moment. He hasn’t begun to study the death of Queen Nefertiti.

  Raised voices interrupted his worried thoughts. Bener and Isis were arguing as they breakfasted on hot bread, figs, and barley porridge. Holding a rush pen, Bener munched a piece of bread while composing a list of items on a scrap of used papyrus. She glanced up to smile at her brother before responding to Isis.

  “You’re too young. Barely fourteen.”

  “I’m not too young. You’re just jealous. Lord Reshep is the most pleasing of any at court, and he hasn’t even looked at you.”

  Bener wrote another word in her fine cursive script and contemplated it as she replied calmly. “It would be hard for him to do that, since we’ve never met.”

  “I don’t care—”

  “Have you seen Father?” Kysen interrupted before Isis succeeded in provoking her sister.

  “Not this morning,” Bener said as she added another item to her list. “Did you know that the steward has been obtaining watermelons from a street vendor?”

  Kysen, already on his way out of the hall, answered with impatience. “No.”

  “The kitchen garden produces abundant melons.”

  “Then I suppose we use more than we grow,” Kysen snapped without turning.

  Bener’s voice rose. “We don’t. Damnation, Ky, who has been looking after the accounts while we were in the country?”

  “I don’t know,” he shouted back.

  “Find out!”

  He didn’t answer. If he’d argued with Bener, saying such small matters weren’t important, she would have contradicted him and pointed out why watermelons were important. Then she’d have proved her assertion with so well-reasoned a series of statements that he’d feel like a fool for questioning her judgment. Bener had grown into womanhood in the few months they’d been separated, and he’d learned not to challenge her. She’d been right about too many things, even about the culprit in a murder a few weeks ago. He would have to control his temper, or Bener would notice and try to make him tell her what was wrong. She didn’t give up once her curiosity was aroused, and he hated lying to her.

  Where was Meren? Kysen looked in the master’s office, the scribes’ rooms, the library, even a few storerooms. All he found were servants, slaves, and old Hapu, the household steward. Finally he realized he was wasting time and climbed an inner stair that rose the height of the house. Coming out on the roof, he left the shelter of an embroidered awning and strode toward the wall, which came up to his waist. He noticed his pace. It had quickened as he searched, and he’d almost run up the stairs.

  He made himself slow down. It would do no good to confront his father in this agitated and inflamed state. Meren would observe it, lift one brow in that understated and unmistakably noble and elegant manner of his, and refuse to talk until Kysen had calmed.

  He reached the eastern roof wall and forced himself to pause, turn his thoughts elsewhere, so that he could absorb even the smallest sand grain of peace. Looking over the landscape, he beheld a sight that always provoked his awe. Across the dark ribbon of the Nile was baked black land, fertile, life-giving. Beyond that came the east bank villages, and then the red and cream of the desert.

  Ra, in his solar boat, approached the horizon of the living world, showering Egypt with his amber-and-gold light. And all around him lay Memphis, greatest of the cities of Egypt, city of Ptah, the creator god in his vast stone-and-gold temple, city of palaces unrivaled even by those of rich and powerful Babylon; Memphis, city of princely mansions and vast foreign trade.

  Kysen turned to gaze out beyond the protective walls of Golden House to that other, even greater city, the Memphis of the dead. In the west, up and down the river as far as he could see, stretched tomb after abandoned tomb, deserted mortuary temples, aged and decaying monuments erected by the ancient ones. These had been intended to carry on the mortuary rituals of kings, queens, and nobles whose very names now had vanished from memory. The new cemeteries invaded those of the ancients. Even the uncompleted tombs of great ones like General Horemheb seemed like brash little children clinging to the legs of stronger, wiser old ones.

  Kysen watched, holding his breath, as Ra sailed higher. The sun’s rays hit the sheer, polished faces of the giants of Memphis—the pyramids. He released his breath, annoyed with himself for feeling so insignificant at the sight. Though distant, the stone triangles loomed, thrusting out of the desert floor. They ascended so high and their bases covered so much ground that even after all the centuries that had passed, nothing had been built to equal them.

  His jaw had gone stiff. Kysen had to force himself to stop grinding his teeth. It had been ten years since his father had adopted him at the age of eight, taking him away from the blood father who had beaten him. But he wasn’t used to Memphis, White Walls, the royal city, named for the vast protective ramparts of plastered mud brick that protected palace and temple alike. He’d never become accustomed to such grandeur. How could he when he’d been born of a common artisan, a carpenter among the tomb makers in Thebes?

  Kysen breathed in the last cool air of morning. Before long, the power of Ra would sear it to the temperature of a furnace. He glanced once more at the pyramids, the walled cities and temples that accompanied them, the first smattering of houses of the living. Then he transferred his gaze to the Golden House compound.

  He leaned forward and looked over a white enclosure wall set some distance from the main house. Meren’s private garden. He should have guessed. Still as the water of a delta marsh, a tall, lean figure in a pristine kilt and sheer overrobe cinched by a jeweled belt stood beneath a palm.

  Placing his cupped hands close to his mouth, Kysen emitted a short, rough panther’s cry. Meren turned quickly, looking up at him. Kysen saluted, and Meren nodded, then began to walk slowly to the garden gate. Kysen would await him on the roof, for lately Meren hadn’t welcomed anyone into his garden.

  As he watched his father’s progress across the far-flung grounds, Kysen remembered the first time he’d come here. He’d thought it the most magnificent house ever built, and the largest. And even after having spent years attending court at the various royal palaces of pharaoh, he still felt a jolt of astonishment at its size.

  How could Meren have adopted him, made him firstborn son in a house that almost rivaled that of pharaoh? The place was vast, from its columned verandas that surrounded the central house to the five reflection pools, the protective verge of palms, sycamores, and acacias, and the jewellike furnishings. When he’d first set foot inside the high front gate, he had mistaken the private family chapel for the main house.

  Small as it was compared to Golden House itself, the chapel was many times the size of the narrow abode in which he’d been raised. To him, Golden House had been a small city complete with granaries, stables, servants’ quarters, barracks for charioteers, and a well with winding stone steps leading down to water level. It had taken him years to grow accustomed to his new life, years to forget the beatings, years to believe the love Meren offered so freely.

  Now he believed. Now he returned that love, and now he was afraid. Meren had discovered that pharaoh’s sister-in-law, the great and powerful Nefertiti, hadn’t died of a plague as assumed but had been poisoned. The crime had happened years ago—before the heretic king Akhenaten, Nefertiti’s husband, had died—in Akhenaten’s new planned city, Horizon of Aten. But those responsible had survived the furor of their heretic king’s death. One had been killed only a short tim
e ago, after secretly confessing to Meren that he’d poisoned the queen.

  Young as he was, Kysen knew that more people must have been involved in such a crime. The murderer hadn’t been powerful enough to order the slaying of the Great Royal Wife; whoever had been responsible for such a decision might still be alive. He and Meren had been aware of this possibility for weeks. But what alarmed Kysen was that since learning the evil secret of Nefertiti’s death, his father had grown more and more tense, silent, wary. He’d even stopped juggling, a pleasure he had to enjoy privately since a great noble could not be seen tossing brightly colored leather balls like a common entertainer.

  Kysen’s brow furrowed as he gripped the edge of the wall and heard the voice of his heart pound in his ears. He’d seen what happened to those foolish enough to stumble upon hidden wickedness or trade in it. He squeezed his eyes shut at the vision of a man at the Nile’s edge, stumbling. A long, dark snout shot out of the water, rigid jaws flying open, snapping as the creature lunged. Long ivory teeth punctured flesh; that powerful body hurtled backward into the water, dragging the man, who howled in unremitting pain and terror. Then the victim’s cries changed to short repetitive screams. Even when he was dragged beneath the waves, he screamed into the blue-black waters.

  “Ky?”

  He jumped and whirled, breathing hard, ready to fight. His vision focused on a man bathed in newborn sunlight— the sharp jaw angle, the smooth obsidian hair, the muscled body wrapped in transparent linen.

  “Father,” Kysen said, forcing his lips to curve upward.

  Meren ignored his smile. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. I was deep in a memory—that man who was killed by the crocodile at the country house.”

  Joining Kysen by the wall, Meren leaned on it and gazed into the distance. A few moments of silence passed as they watched the pyramids of the ancient ones burst into white stone flame. Kysen glanced once at his father, who seemed far more calm than any mortal ought to be given their predicament.