24 Bones

by Stewart, Michael F.

  In the distance, Katle stopped and looked back. He yelled sharply, and a camel rose to its feet from between two outcroppings of rock and lumbered toward him. In Katle’s hand, a golden block blazed.

  “The spine,” Askari shouted and then knelt. His hands dug into his robes. When Askari stood, he held two sundiscs, or aten, weapons of the Shemsu Hor.

  “Hold this.” Askari handed a disc blindly to Faris, eyes never losing their target.

  The disc was thrice the diameter of Faris’s palm and hollow at its center. His fingers slipped into the central hole, and he caressed the familiar rounded edge. The outside lip of the disc sparked keen as a razor.

  Katle ran beside his mount, and he heaved upward as he clambered to its back. Askari let the first aten fly. Its spinning reflected the sun as it sawed toward its prey. But at the last moment, Katle pulled hard on the reins. And the disc spun into the desert. Askari swore.

  Faris considered throwing the last disc. He could do it; he knew he could. He had taken down vultures in flight at a greater distance. But if he missed … Askari held out his hand. Using the Void was forbidden, a breach of trust and a condition of him maintaining his position as a watcher.

  “The disc,” Askari screamed. Katle’s camel galloped. Faris handed it over.

  “Re,” Askari yelled, and the second disc flew. Faris followed its flight, using his mental will to speed it on and true to the target. Instinct told him it would miss. Closing his eyes, he lent it his strength, augmenting its power and pace with a sliver of Void. The sundisc caught Katle in the back. His camel slowed as its driver slumped and fell behind a dune. Faris’s fist shot into the air.

  Askari looked to Faris with his mouth open. “You used the …” Shadows marred his features. “… Void.”

  Faris nodded and swallowed.

  “We will tell no one of your indiscretion.”

  Faris’s lower lip quivered. “I am not a companion.” He looked Askari in the eye. “I can leave the deir.”

  Waxing Crescent Moon

  Chapter Six

  Beneath the City of the Dead, Cairo

  Sam shivered on the chamber’s stone floor.

  A jar of phosphorescent fluid glowed from a high recess. No brighter lights than the vials were allowed in the caverns by order of Pharaoh, who stressed the importance of night vision and acknowledged the sensitivity of the dwarfs who, having lived their lives underworld, shunned even low-level light. The jarlight was enough, however, for Sam to see. The glow illuminated a rectangular chamber, every part of its angled walls inscribed with hieroglyphs or religious sunk-relief.

  A triptych of carved panels told the story of Pharaoh’s birth. The first panel showed the introduction of Pharaoh’s mother by Thoth, patron deity of scribes, to Amun, the creator god. In the next, Khnum, the ram-headed potter, fashioned Pharaoh from clay upon his wheel. The sequence ended with the birth and acceptance of the child by Amun, Pharaoh’s baptism by water, and the noble offering of gold and perfumes from adorers. This room was the Pharaoh’s Birthing Chamber and, in many ways, Sam’s as well.

  Four dwarfs, Pharaoh, and a veiled woman had attended Sam’s initiation. The woman had been forced to wait at the threshold, but Sam had felt the woman’s eyes upon her and had sensed the woman’s rising thrill as power crackled within the chamber.

  When the dwarfs held Sam’s legs and arms, she had not struggled. Pharaoh stood above, old even so long ago, and sent Void rippling through her blood and marrow, opening her to the chaos, allowing her to learn from his connection how to access it. She had writhed, arching her back in pain, but did not cry out. By then she had learned never to show weakness.

  The pain was its own test. If she could not control the rage and pain of the Void, she was not Shemsu Seth. Her veins swelled in a network of lightning that stretched her flesh. To this day, her veins shone luminescent whenever she gripped Void.

  When Pharaoh left Sam to lie on the floor, feeling every nerve and synapse of her body and mind, he spoke with the woman.

  “Will she be trained to train us?” the woman had asked.

  Sam could not see Pharaoh’s nod, but the woman had continued, asking when they would have her. Demanding that Sam not be touched, that she remain pure. Pharaoh had answered that only when he held the Spine of Osiris would Sam be given to the sisters.

  At this, the woman shrieked—the vertebrae of the Shemsu Hor would be his to claim, but the control of Void was the sisters’ by right. Horus’s cord would never innervate the spine for so long as Sam lay in the underworld, the woman claimed.

  Sam heard the words, but did not understand. But she understood Pharaoh’s satisfied smile as he returned to the chamber. His one hand tucked a sheaf of paper into his robes, and the other gripped a slim rectangle that glinted gold. Another piece of the neck vertebra.

  “I do not trust them. What is the real reason they wish you to be trained, Samiya?” he whispered. “What other reason than to one day supplant me?”

  After that, Sam often lay in the Birthing Chamber, but not in memory of her initiation. It was the thick calm, the space of meditation. The room was hazy with the humid air of Cairo’s underbelly, but the ceiling’s depiction of the goddess of the night sky, Nut, infused the chamber’s narrow dimensions with a spacious quality, and she forgot the mountainous press of rock.

  She slipped on her robe and sandals and rubbed her temples. The chamber was near silent, yet Sam picked up the sound of her breathing. As she held her breath, she listened in the hope of hearing her mother’s calls from where she lay imprisoned in Krokodilopolis below.

  Some believed Krokodilopolis was Daedalus’s inspiration for the Labyrinth of Minos, built to jail the king’s wife’s son, the Minotaur. In the twist of Krokodilopolis’s halls and chambers, crocodiles were mummified and entombed. But even if her mother cried out, the calls couldn’t penetrate the stone. The next sound was Sam’s exhalation as she gave the starry stone sky one last look.

  Sam glided into the gloomy temple halls, which contained none of the photosensitive fluid. Clucking her tongue, she listened. The passageways bloomed, echolocation acting like rays of light. Trand, her dwarf mentor, had taught her the technique.

  Eighty feet right, forty feet left. She knew the dimensions anyway; she knew these halls well. Creeping down the right-hand tunnel, she passed the sacred chamber of Seth where Pharaoh had presented her the crossbow. This inner sanctum lay under the hollow of a squat obelisk; no part of its two-hundred-foot peak pierced the sun-dweller world. The sanctuary’s weight pressed at her back even as the passage ended in the airy Hall of Offerings. In this outer court, the echoes of her footfalls illuminated the position of ribbed papyri columns.

  As she passed through the stony swamp, the rumbles of large trucks invaded the layers of rock, a reminder of a different life moving above, the sun-dwellers’ world of light and noise. She exited through a thick walled portico and jogged across a causeway that linked the temple gates to the temple proper. The rush and crash of flowing water approached. She paused and tensed.

  A hound panted, its handler whistling softly. The dog reminded Sam of Abu, her Doberman puppy. She had left Abu in Trand’s care when she had ventured topside to capture her mother and could picture Abu’s entire body wagging at the sight of her. Pure, distilled joy. She smiled. Her cheeks hurt with anticipation.

  In ancient Egypt, the genetic anomaly that caused dwarfism was revered, and dwarfs had shared a special place beside each pharaoh’s throne. Trand liked to joke that it was because they couldn’t run very fast; they were thus a good choice to guard the royal treasury. After the fall of the Egyptian empire, they found themselves outcasts to modern times and religions and so had retreated to Cairo’s underworld and found solace in Seth’s halls.

  The dwarf community lived in the warren of tunnels beyond the Temple of Seth. The
y had maintained a low population, never over a hundred strong. The numbers were kept naturally small because the heritability of the genetic trait was only fifty percent and the death rate of children was high.

  The long causeway ended in a second pylon, where a branch of the Nile coursed, thundering through the cavern and passing under the arc of a bridge. Where Sam stepped from the bridge the masonry ended; here the walls were no longer shaped by blocks of stone, but rather the rough hacks of pick and shovel. Tunnels wormed into the walls.

  From one entry, the scent of roast mutton made her stomach growl, but she desired a different form of nourishment. Sam hunched and entered one of the dozens of tunnels that coiled away into the darkness. Claustrophobic in the constrictive passages, she moved faster, pulling at the irregular walls with her hands. Her sense of space disappeared with her peace of mind, taking paths by memory rather than spatial analysis. Darkness crowded behind.

  As Sam collapsed onto a web of woven rags, rich laughter greeted her. The coils of braided cloth were Trand’s bed, chair, pillow, and blanket.

  “As silent as a sewer rat.” Trand chuckled. The muffled words burrowed through a bushy beard pierced by the bulbous tip of a nose and two eyes. The dwarf’s colorless irises gave the impression that his eyes had rolled back into his head but for the spare dots of his pupils. A jarlight cast a diffuse glow from a table. Its presence meant Trand had known she was coming; the dwarf needed no light.

  “At least I don’t smell like a sewer,” Sam retorted. Dwarfs had poor senses of smell, relying on their ears as their primary sensory organ. But Trand didn’t just listen with his ears, but also with his fingers, bare feet, and body hair. Of smell, however, there was no question. The braided rags retained organic matter from the garbage bins where the rag people had scrounged the cloth.

  The rag people, or Zabbalin, lived in the tombs of the City of the Dead and the slums of Garbage City and believed the dwarfs to be walis—those close to God. In their symbiotic relationship, the rag people supplied food and materials, and the dwarfs provided spiritual protection and training for the most competent male youths. Except in the case of Sam, the Shemsu Seth were drawn from their ranks. The connection ensured continued secrecy of the underworld. The dwarfs commanded the children and controlled whether they lived or died.

  “At least I can see, Samiya.” Trand, like all dwarfs, had a different conception of sight. Seeing was something done in the dark. Trand was one of the few who still used Sam’s full Arabic name, which meant “elevated.” The translation suited, given Sam’s preferential status within the Shemsu Seth. She was being groomed as a commander of men, and she the only woman not of Pharaoh’s harem or dwarf. Sam suspected Pharaoh held a grudging respect for the Sisters of Isis and liked to keep his chattel in saleable condition should the need arise.

  “I’m working on my night vision, Trand.” Sam tossed a nearby cloth over the jarlight. Darkness prevailed.

  The dwarf guffawed.

  Sam let her senses expand. She felt for her hair follicles and for the layers above and below hearing that cascade around untrained humans. She slunk into the corner of the room. The beat of Trand’s thumping heart grew clear. Sam slowed her pulse, concentrating, making it weaker even though her instinct wanted it to hammer. Trand left the chamber.

  Sam smiled. She hugged the walls until she reached the tunnel through which she had originally entered. A looping passage connected the tunnel to Trand’s alternate way out. Something throbbed at the dwarf’s exit.

  Sam skirted the opposite side of the room with her senses extended. She struggled to separate sounds, the rattle of a donkey cart, the squeal of brakes and clop of hooves, the cars and vans sliding along the thoroughfare. The throbbing at the door distracted. She stopped at the entry and bent toward the pulsing object. The throbs stopped.

  Sam sent out the softest of clicks, opening all her senses. The object exploded. A siren blared. Trand caught her, barreling into the room. The air whooshed from her chest. She tumbled onto the rags.

  Trand lay astride Sam and pressed a metallic point into her palette.

  “Good,” Trand said. Sam could hear the grin. “A year ago you wouldn’t have even heard the beetle. When startled, it has a cry like a sonic blast designed to scare away the bat, its predator.”

  Sam tried to speak, but the tip of the blade jabbed into the roof of her mouth. She tasted blood.

  “Sorry.” Trand removed the weapon and uncovered the jarlight. He held a long, thin knife with a cross bar—a black ankh. She shivered. If Trand had been the assigned handler when she had killed Tariq, Tariq’s soul would now be prowling the conscienceless Void.

  “A beetle?” Sam repeated. Trand sheathed the dagger in leg hair at his thigh.

  “I keep a few of them. They are great alarms if a sun-dweller makes the mistake of entering the temple. Sun-dwellers can’t hear the sound, but we can.” To Trand the term sun-dweller applied to both animal and human.

  Sam clasped the dwarf’s thick, fat hand, and he helped her to her feet.

  The dwarf continued. “It reminds you that sometimes relying too heavily on one skill can be a great liability.”

  Sam nodded agreement.

  “What brings you to my warren?”

  “Stories, I suppose, and myths.” Sam liked Trand’s tendency to offer explanations through the retelling of ancient parables.

  “Which is it, stories or myths? Stories you can hear from your mother.” Sam shot him a look. “But myth is a method of imparting knowledge. A way of maintaining the truth,” the dwarf finished.

  “I made my first kill, Trand.”

  “And you wonder if you did the right thing?” Trand nodded.

  “Was it wrong?”

  “It was evil, Samiya. The taking of life is evil. But was it wrong?” The dwarf’s broad shoulders heaved. “Your mother killed a hound of Seth, Rylac, a fine dog.”

  Sam refrained from telling how Rylac hid under the bed and how her mother stabbed him through the wire mesh.

  “A sun-dweller for a hound seems reasonable. And it was in sacrifice to Seth?”

  Sam nodded.

  “Well then, you merely replaced one sun-dweller with another, didn’t you?” He smiled and patted her hip. “You do me much honor, Samiya. I am proud of you.”

  Sam looked down at her hands now cleaned of Tariq’s blood. It was true; with Tariq’s sacrifice, Pharaoh would forego the murder of another sun-dweller, at least until the full moon. “I do not understand the purpose of evil,” Sam stated. The question she wanted to ask, but couldn’t, was what role she played in it.

  Trand did not see beneath Sam’s words, for under his beard, Trand laughed mightily. “That is a big question.” He motioned for Sam to sit, and she slumped onto a heap of rags with her hands on her knees.

  “It is best explained by the Pythagorean Brotherhood,” Trand continued.

  “Number symbolism?” Sam asked, dubiously.

  “Yes. One represents unity, God. Two represents duality, good and evil. Three represents creation. One and two cannot exist together alone. Three must also exist.” Sam stared at him and the dwarf grunted. “Two chemicals must combine to react. A sculptor and a rock do not make a statue. It requires a third thing: inspiration. A man and a woman do not have a relationship without meeting and feeling love. In a world of two nothing happens,” he explained.

  Sam scratched a vein on her neck. “So what does this have to do with evil?”

  “The Void is part of the formula; it is the reciprocal of the Fullness. If you destroy the Void, the Fullness dies.”

  “The world can’t exist with only one and three?” she asked.

  “Can the sculptor sculpt without the rock?”

  Sam shook her head.

  “It is the reason for the importance of the number
three in many religions,” Trand said. “Note how the third thing cannot be measured—the sculptor’s inspiration, the man’s love, the Holy Ghost.”

  Sam smiled.

  Trand nodded at her reaction. “To acknowledge three is to grasp the mystery of creation,” he said. “Two is the opposition, the blocks of stone, the sheet of paper; without three, the sculptor, the writer, he is defeated.”

  “So good and evil are God’s tools in creation?”

  He winked. “By honoring Seth, you honor the balance.”

  “Thank you, Trand.” Sam wondered if the balance between good and evil really was a zero-sum game. Can there be no joy without understanding pain, any life without death? She did know one thing; her mother need not die. It served no practical purpose. A shudder rattled down her spine; she felt the passage of the moon in her bones. Fourteen days remained. Luckily, her mother’s computer had provided a lead and that lead was on its way from Canada, straight into their arms.

  “I have something that might cheer you, Samiya.” Trand opened his mouth.

  Sam could sense but not hear the yell. They waited and soon the pads of feet on dust approached. The hound’s paws made no other sound, the nails removed at birth to eliminate clicking.

  She grinned. Abu lunged through the door. Sam toppled over again, but this time sandpaper licks met her. Laughter cascaded through the caves.

  Chapter Seven

  “Mafeesh baksheesh,” David said to the man who waited for a tip in the airport washroom. The caretaker stood in overalls and wrung a rag that drooled gray water onto the linoleum floor. David patted his pockets and then shrugged.