“Hurry, David.”
At his back Shagar stood and stared.
David swung his pack around; the tablet fit neatly inside. Biting his lip as he slung the heavy bag to his back, he nodded at the pope and then edging past, he climbed the stairs up and then went down a half-rotten ladder leading through the now open trapdoor. He still gripped the lantern, which rattled with each hack of the axe falling rhythmically against the church doors above.
Faris waited at the bottom. Together they started into the dark, the lantern dispelling only a small part of David’s misgivings.
All David could think about was the stele. Most stela were lists baked into clay. What could be so precious that it was engraved in gold?
Chapter Twelve
As she returned to the City of the Dead, Sam’s thoughts were on the Void-touching companion. Once again, she had failed to acquire the tablet, a failure compounded by the fact that she had let the instrument of her failure roam the Temple of Seth. But when she’d encountered him in darkness, she’d immediately seen the solution to all of her problems.
Emails from her mother to David Nidaal had promised to show him the tablet. By letting the companion free Tara, her mother would not be suspicious and so lead Sam to the tablet. In the pursuit, Sam would have a second chance to release her mother in the sun dweller’s world rather than face the sure death of the underworld. She couldn’t have suspected her mother would choose to remain imprisoned.
More hounds were dead and a very unhappy dwarf marched by Sam’s side. That Pharaoh had allowed Shemsu Seth to publicly attack showed how desperate they had grown. All was not lost however. David Nidaal may have the tablet, but Sam had acquired something of value to him; his woman was already chained below.
The dwarf, however, was not the only one disappointed.
Soon after entering the temple, more Shemsu Seth soldiers fell in and wordlessly guided Sam to stand before Pharaoh. His expression was as implacable as granite. A dirty, blood-soaked rag bandaged Trand’s shoulder, and small cuts scored his face. Five dogs were dead, two by a sundisc, one by Nidaal’s arrow, and two by Trand’s hand; their injuries had rendered them croc-feed.
Pharaoh rose from his throne and walked down toward Sam, stopping beside the pit over which her mother had been manacled. From Sam’s position she could not see into the pit’s depth, but she knew that the walls of the pit sloped downward in an inverted pyramid for thirty feet, ending in a black square hole.
Pharaoh tapped the side of the pit with his djed staff. The raps rose to the pyramid roof.
“You didn’t notice this man as you left to meet Nidaal?” Pharaoh’s eyes glowed. “A man made it past the sentries of the city, into the maze, and then out again, fleeing to the Copts where he disappeared.”
Sam shrugged. Pharaoh would easily see through her reasons for letting the companion go free, better to point the finger elsewhere. “The sentries are not yet in place, Pharaoh. They have only just returned from the deirs, and we could not have known they would use the passages beneath the church.”
Pharaoh’s eyes brightened. Sam sensed him probe her thoughts and she forced his mind away. He glared.
“The companion was more powerful than you think, Pharaoh,” Trand said. “A companion, but with skill in the Void.”
The Pharaoh’s pressure against her mind ceased. Sam staggered forward. Pharaoh looked at the dwarf. “Silence. You failed. Go tend your crocs and pups.” Trand bowed away. Pharaoh’s eyes settled on Sam.
Sam felt him probing still. “The full moon will require a substantial sacrifice. The moon is not near the quarter and already Seth is unhappy. His hounds are dying.” Below, in the pit, something moved; talons clicked on stone, followed by a long, slow scrape. “Even Sobek is restless.”
“We have his woman,” she said. “We will make a trade.”
Pharaoh took three strides, rising above her. “Nidaal is a companion and must be killed.”
“He’s no companion. I sensed no threat from him.”
“He is untrained, but a descendant. He will die,” Pharaoh commanded. “As for you, there are openings in the harem …” His glowing gaze caressed her head to foot. She suppressed a shudder.
Beyond the pit’s dark hole, Sobek’s jaws snapped.
“… I will have the tablet by the full moon,” Sam said, her voice cracking as her confidence faltered.
Pharaoh waved away Sam’s assertion and suddenly grinned with benevolence worse than his full fury. He walked her forward, closer to the altar and the pit. “Yes, of course you will—however, I have another job for you, Sam.” An image of her lying spread eagled on a bed bloomed in her mind. “It should not take you away from your hunt for more than a few days.” His tone was apologetic, and Sam cringed. Pharaoh never apologized. “The battalion sent to the Sudan did not quite finish its task.”
Sam was confused. A score of Shemsu Seth had been sent to the Sudan. A battalion sent to destroy targeted villages. Sam had avoided the assignment. Pharaoh’s priority had been the tablet. Nothing could be more important.
“Their failure …” His staff pointed toward the pit. “… is your opportunity.”
The bodies of those Shemsu Seth sent to the Sudan were piled in the pit. Sam knew many of the men. Despair and black anger swelled, and she swallowed it. As Sobek cleared the hole from below, a gummy coat of blood painted the pit’s sides.
Sam’s bowels loosened as she thought of the waste. Pharaoh’s eyes glowed with feverish sheen.
“Tell me what I need to do,” Sam said.
David had never ridden a camel and immediately disliked the gangly beast.
It groaned, hacked, and stared back at him with rolling eyes that accused him of being overweight. He didn’t need the reminder, his belt reminded him, and the triangles between his shirt buttons reminded him.
He shivered. Without the concrete and asphalt of the city to retain the heat of day, the desert night air chilled the sweat on his back and chest. He eyed Faris’s billowing robes.
After reclaiming the stele from its hiding place, they had escaped through the tunnels of the Hanging Church, and then taxied to Giza, site of the Great Pyramid. Below the face of the Great Sphinx, a herd of hobbled camels had slept.
Initially, David had protested, telling Faris that he needed to find his girlfriend. Faris had asked if he had the tablet and David admitted he did.
Faris had told him without blinking that if he remained in Cairo he would die.
David’s conscience still tugged, but the memory of the axe against the door had been all he required to trust Faris’s instincts. Perhaps Zahara slept on a king size hotel bed with a feather pillow. She was probably safer alone and the weight in his pack reminded him that he had a job to do.
Faris spoke with the herdsman, a sleep tousled man who wound a long band of cloth around his head into a turban as they talked. The two argued until the herdsman threw up his hands.
Faris ignored David’s pleas that they find a train or a taxi instead. No one could trace their steps if they took a camel. They would ride to the outskirts of Cairo and take the train from Helwan. Faris harnessed the animal with practiced hands.
Together they now lumbered, tracing the sweep of the Nile a mile distant, where the feluccas’ lateen sails ruffled white against black waters.
“Where are we going, Faris?” David asked. He struggled to remain centred on the camel’s back while it swayed left and right. It felt like he rode a boat in an unpredictable sea.
“Deir Abd-al-Aziz, a monastery.” David and Faris switched from David’s sparse Arabic to Faris’s rough English interchangeably. Between both languages, they could communicate.
“A Shemsu Hor deir?” David asked.
Faris’s head snapped around. He said something in a strange tongue, the words v
aguely familiar to David, but unintelligible. Faris watched for a reaction. “How do you know?” he asked, seeing David’s lack of comprehension.
David rolled up his shirtsleeve enough to flash the edge of his scar. Faris’s eyes widened and he spouted more words in the strange language.
David shook his head.
Faris looked confused. “How can you be companion, but not understand ancient Egyptian?”
David’s face darkened. David remembered the pain of the brand, the pressure for him to learn the language and his resistance. David recalled memorizing parts of the tongue to placate his father, and then promptly forgetting them all as he would later forget his grade-school Latin. Of course, he had had to relearn Latin to study comparative religion. Such is the gravity of fate.
“I’m not a companion,” he said and looked to the sun that breached the horizon.
Faris didn’t argue.
“The woman who helped you escape, the one who told you where to find me, was her name Tara Amat Yasu?” David asked as he stared out to the deep charcoal desert.
“Yes, they have captured her. I owed her for her help.”
David wondered for whom the hound had been set to wait. His eyes narrowed. “What were you doing with the Shemsu Seth?” He could guess why they had captured Tara, and he suspected it was she who was the source of all his problems.
Faris sucked in his cheeks. They trundled across a long rocky stretch before he responded. “I was scouting. The Shemsu Seth slaughtered many of the Shemsu Hor in the deirs, killing anyone under middle age and many of the high priests. I went to find out why.”
“Did you find what you were looking for?” David asked.
Faris shook his head and grew silent.
“What did Tara tell you?”
Faris pursed his lips and David knew he withheld information, information which could help David understand why they wanted him dead. Faris’s gaze drifted to David’s courier bag.
“She asked you to find me, surely that means she trusted me,” David added.
Faris tilted his head and looked at David with dark eyes. Then Faris glanced away uncomfortably.
“The Osiris, they search for the Osiris,” Faris said in a quiet voice.
“I still don’t understand,” David stated.
“Any prepared mummy is an Osiris,” Faris clarified. “In this case, Osiris is an object. It represents the Spine of Osiris, a relic used in the resurrection of the god. The twelve original companions, founders of our deirs, were each buried with a part of this spine.”
“What does it do?” David asked, and Faris lowered his eyes and was silent. “So the tablet is also a list, it tells the prophecy and the location of the burial sites?”
Faris’s shrug was non-committal. “Perhaps. We knew where our twelve pieces of the middle back lay. The Sisters of Isis are keepers of the neck and the Shemsu Seth have the lower back. No one knows where the spinal cord left to Horus resides. That is everyone’s mystery. Perhaps its secret lies with the tablet.”
The bag pulled at David’s shoulders. “The twenty four bones ... yes ... How many did the Shemsu Seth take?”
“We have four vertebrae, three are in doubt. We’ll get them all back, though. We will …” Faris drifted off.
The camel’s hooves clumped on the baked earth, and for a while, David lost himself in the rhythmic lumbering.
“Why do you think the Shemsu Seth targeted the young?” he finally asked.
Faris offered nothing.
David’s mouth twisted sourly. The camel walked steadily beside the dawn, skirting the road near the Nile. Something nagged him. “In the New Testament, King Herod killed all of the male children under the age of two. He was searching for the Prophet Jesus.”
Faris hauled on the camel’s reins and brought it to a groaning stop. He shot David a glance, then shut his eyes in pained understanding.
Chapter Thirteen
Near Wadi Halfa, Sudan
Sam knew it was a test.
After flying with a tourist group to Abu Simbel, the site of Ramesses II’s greatest work, she crossed on horseback into northern Sudan near Wadi Halfa at the southern tip of Lake Nasser, Egypt’s southernmost point. As the lake ended and the Nile meandered into the Sudan, the handiwork of the Shemsu Seth was evident. The Nile ran with a rusty tint.
Sam dumped the contents of her waterskins and took deep breaths to swallow bile and retain the precious fluids she had already consumed.
The remainder of the trip to the Nubian village devoured the better part of a day. In full sun, the wasteland was craggy and cracked. Heat rose in steady waves from baked rock and sand. She tottered with thirst. At the edge of a slim trail that wound through boulders and scrub, she hid behind an outcropping.
Sam watched her quarry, a thin boy of about twelve. The boy was evidently special, or might be special. It had been all she was told. But to Sam, the boy’s slack jaw and flaccid muscles hung wretchedly in the afternoon light. The boy would be taller than Sam if left to grow, not stunted by her crossbow bolt.
Her chest tightened. To kill the boy was different than killing Tariq. In her mother’s apartment, she had made the only possible decision—Tariq or her mother. This wasn’t sacrifice. Sam watched the boy draw in the dust with a stick. This was murder. In the depth of her being, from where she drew strength, she knew this murder would change everything.
Sam could justify murder for the right reasons. Justification was the difference between wrong and evil. Evil was noble. Pharaoh had said that the boy was to be killed for a special purpose and should already be dead. The Shemsu Seth had struck Nubian villages. In their efforts to maintain secrecy, their blows were sweeping and non-specific. Devised to look accidental, the strikes left no witnesses. In one case, they had poisoned the village’s water supply. In another, wholesale slaughter appeared to be due to a tribal feud. The river ran with the results.
This boy’s village had been poisoned, but his father, the local shaman, lived apart. His family had survived. In the Shemu Seth’s harvest, the scythe had missed a sheaf of wheat. It reminded Sam of her mother’s stories of Egyptian myth. When Seth had dismembered Osiris, Isis was already with child and her baby had had to be hidden until he could rise to power. Horus was hidden in the reeds of a papyri swamp. Sam ran her fingers across her veined cheek.
The sun would soon lower over the hills, and the cool quarter-moon would rise and draw the heat from the rock. Sam wished the moon were gone. Its light would trace her path down to the hut. Chickens and a few goats milled about the dusty property. Each night this week, Sam had climbed to the city’s surface from the underworld of Seth to watch as the moon slowly waxed.
A girl exited the hut. She skipped and mock-chased her brother, the chickens scattering.
Sam felt ill. The girl would also have to die. There could be no witnesses.
Then a boy wobbled out from the entry.
Sam slouched against the outcropping.
The toddler tripped over a lazy goat and tumbled, crying in the yard. The goat bleated and the eldest, Sam’s mark, bent to cuddle his brother, tickling him until tears of laughter replaced those of grief. His giggles reached Sam’s crag, but the actions of the girl caught Sam’s attention. She made strange motions to her older brother—sign language. It was crude and nothing that Sam understood. But it made clear that the boy was mute. She shook her head. The Shemsu Seth had nothing to fear from a mute boy.
Sam unslung the crossbow from her back. It balanced well on her forearm, a fine weapon. She had trained to fire it with one arm so as to leave her left arm free for her ankh knife. It would be easy to aim and lodge the bolt into the boy’s skull, heart, or throat. From this distance, she could make the shot. No survivors. No witnesses. This was Pharaoh’s rule. And it required wet work.
&nb
sp; Sam stretched her neck, relaxing and tensing, readying for the night that lay ahead: three children, their father and their mother. Seth’s stomach would be bloated before the moon reached its zenith.
Chapter Fourteen
Deir Abd-al-Aziz, Near Nag Hammadi
“All I know,” David said through clenched teeth, “is my girlfriend is missing and the Shemsu Seth are trying to kill me.” He felt as though Jehovah Witnesses had knocked on his door and barged inside his home. His skin was blistered from the sun. He had tried to enter their temple for shade, but they offered only the shadow of its crack-paneled wall. David tore a piece from a loaf of pita-style bread called aish baladi. His lips smacked as he chewed.
“Faris told me you thought the slaughter of the companions analogous to the story of Herod slaying the children,” Askari stated, tugging at the tip of his beard. A dozen men stood and stared down at David, their expressions fixed and fierce.
More like an alcoholic’s intervention than a religious recruitment, he decided. Askari reminded him of his father, the way the man’s jaw set when he registered disappointment.
“It was just an idea,” David replied.
Askari held up his hand. “A good idea, it is possible that the Shemsu Seth recreates ancient myth and is using myth as a basis to eliminate a perceived threat. It is possible they have not eliminated that threat.”
He stared at David. Other men nodded, as did Faris, who crouched at Askari’s side. Haidar stood with his arms crossed. David, meanwhile, stopped chewing.
“And you think that the threat is me?” David started laughing. “Me, the baby hidden in the reeds. That’s a good one. Maybe we should be painting lamb’s blood on our doors, too?”
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