The Isis Knot

by Hanna Martine

  She couldn’t save this man because it would alter too much else. If she ran into the canyon shouting warnings right now, Before Sera and Malik would see her. Their actions would inevitably shift. There would be a high chance that Isis would not send Before Sera back to 1819 New South Wales, because Before Sera would not be thrown to the ground immediately after the death and stare dazedly up at Sirius, hearing Isis’s call. Current Sera would then disappear instantaneously—erasing meeting William and creating the son inside her—and Before Sera would remain in Malik’s control.

  Oh God, no. Sera had to stay here. She had to stay silent.

  The innocent man would die again. At her hands. She had to witness it all over. Guilt and anguish tore through her.

  “You’re finally mine,” Malik said in English. “My little weapon. My little cure.”

  Current Sera doubled over, remembering with awful clarity what would happen next. Seth would push an oily sliver of his ka into her mind, taking control of her body, and steering the evil magic himself. The driver would sense something horrible was happening and turn to run. He wouldn’t get far.

  In her memory, Seth’s manipulation of her was a bloody battle that waged for hours. In reality, it took only a second or two. Seth’s beast reached into Before Sera’s mind, threw out the death magic like a sizzling, invisible arrow, and it struck the retreating man.

  Before Sera was sobbing. Malik was smiling. The driver collapsed to the ground. He lay facedown in a tangled, lifeless heap.

  Neither Current Sera nor Before Sera could find any air. Current Sera’s fingers grabbed stone with a force that nearly made it crumble, and the taint of death lurked in her veins.

  Malik threw Before Sera to the ground. She tried to crawl away but didn’t succeed. He grabbed her by the ankle and flipped her over. Seth’s translucent beast loomed over her.

  Before Sera looked up at the sky helplessly and found the star. One lone, brilliant, pulsing star.

  Up in the sky, Sirius burst. The desert black momentarily turned to searing white. A rainbow halo shimmered around Isis’s star. Arms of crystal white light stretched out toward Earth. They snapped up Before Sera. The star pulsed once, twice, then pulled the light back into itself, taking Before Sera with it.

  Now there was only one Sera in the canyon. One Sera, a dead man, and an enraged god-beast whose hoarse scream shook the valley. Malik turned and smashed his fist against the rock, blood seeping from his knuckles.

  The sight of him, defeated and bewildered, spurred Sera on. This was the part of the night she hadn’t seen: what had happened after Isis had taken her away.

  This was the part that told her exactly what she had to do.

  A new sensation bloomed in her belly. Like butterflies, light and fluttery, centered low.

  The child. The tiny little boy William had given her. The hero Isis wanted.

  Its soul—its ka—started to gently pulse, pressing her forward. He radiated new power, and she felt it drawing up inside her, extending down her spine and tingling to the tips of her fingers. It brought steadiness to her legs and confidence to her stance.

  Her son—her Horus—wanted her to face Seth. William’s son was ready. And so was she.

  She pushed out from behind the rock and stepped into the narrow canyon.

  Malik and his beast shadow stalked in front of the cave entrance, his limbs jerking violently like a marionette.

  Sera started for him, honing in on him, concentrating on narrowing her vision to create the tunnel through which she could deliver death. William had been right. She was meant for this. If she could rid the world of this thing that wanted to destroy more people like he’d destroyed the poor driver, this would be good. This was what she was meant for.

  Her foot scuffed on stone, the sound echoing down the canyon. Malik stopped and wheeled around, finally seeing her. Good. Then he’d know what was coming for him.

  She watched him take in her shortened hair, the billowy, soiled skirt, and the frayed, high-neck blouse. She watched him try to figure out what’d just happened. Both he and Seth looked to the sky, to Sirius. When his eyes snapped back to her, his stare was black and full of challenge.

  She raised the arm that bore both the gold cuff and his hideous ring, and for the first time since either had been unwittingly clamped on her arm, she wore them with prideful vengeance. He saw them, opened his mouth, and screamed. So did she, except that his was a sound of frustration and disbelief, and hers was the roar of an attack.

  The chaos churned and churned inside her. She saw Malik and Seth, and only them. Combined. Layered. Together but still distinctly separate. They were a dark target at the end of her tunnel vision. The rest of the world disappeared.

  She whipped the bloodlust into a frenzy and cast it out, releasing death. As it had done the day in front of Hyde Park Barracks, it spiraled out from her, barreling down the tunnel. Only this time she controlled it. This time she wanted it to strike the target in front of her. She aimed for Malik—kill the man and the ka would finally be released, homeless, with no other host body standing nearby. The beast would finally dissipate into the air, like smoke.

  The chaos god would disappear, his time on Earth forever gone.

  The air shimmered between them as she charged.

  Malik’s human eyes widened. His mouth formed human protests.

  But Seth snarled as he continued to pound forward, his beast solidifying. The translucent hairy body turned more opaque around Malik’s body. Shielding him. The magic struck Seth with a dull thud…and sparked out into nothing.

  She waited for him to go down, to join the driver in the dirt. But Seth didn’t fall. Didn’t even falter. His dripping grin only widened as his speed increased, plowing toward her.

  She skidded to a stop. Her head swam, her body shook, and she didn’t know if it was the residual chaos spinning through her or the paralyzing realization that her attack hadn’t worked.

  Her only shot. Her only chance. Gone.

  She started to scramble backward, feeling like she existed in a world of mud. Everything was slow and useless.

  In the next instant Malik was before her. His hand shot out, grabbed her tight around the throat and threw her to the side with the strength of a god. Her body felt light as it sailed through the air, but then eviscerating pain sliced through her spine as she hit the wall next to the cave entrance and slammed to the ground.

  She’d failed.

  Her whole body screamed in pain. Her brain fed her nothing but fear. She pushed onto her hands and knees and tried to crawl away, knowing it was useless. Heavy footsteps were coming for her.

  Malik kicked her, throwing her onto her back, and he was there above her, his dual faces grinning and snarling. A paralyzing mirror image of what’d happened with her previous self only moments before.

  His hand shot out and made a vise around her throat. The beast’s claws were not an apparition.

  “You can’t use my power against my own ka, dear one,” he said, calm as ever. “Did Isis neglect to tell you that? She never was worthy of what she’d been given.”

  Sera dug her jagged nails into Malik’s hand and wrist, but his hold never faltered. Her legs kicked and flailed, pointlessly. Only the barest trickle of air made it into her lungs. Enough to keep her alive. And petrified.

  Immune. Seth was immune to his own chaos. It made sense. It made horrible sense.

  Even with the added strength of her and William’s child—Seth’s own enemy—feeding the attack, she’d failed.

  Dear God, she’d been wrong. She’d squandered her only chance and now it was gone.

  Even more heartbreaking, William had been wrong to send her back. He’d thought she was the weapon, but he’d been wrong. She should have stayed with him, death or no. She should have remained in New South Wales and raised their baby until the boy was old enough to find Seth on his own. Now it was too late.

  Her eyes blurred, this time with tears, not bloodlust.

  “You
don’t have to die, you know,” Malik said. “I don’t want you to die, as a matter of fact.” He leaned even closer, his breath like fire on her face. “You know what your ka can do. Now stand at my side.”

  She kicked, thrashed, tried to spit on him. But he was stone himself.

  “We’ll stand together,” he cooed. “After chaos always comes peace and healing. Let us create both. Let’s break the world and then put it back together again. The people will bow to us and our effigies. There is nothing to match that feeling, in this world or the next. I promise you.”

  Malik’s face suddenly cleared. Seth’s flat-topped ears lay back like a cat’s.

  “Or,” he said, almost to himself, “I could just give my ka to you. The death prayers forbid Isis’s ka from entering a male body…but what if I gave Seth’s ka to you. Let Isis and Seth fight it out inside your pretty skin. I think I know who’d win control.”

  Sera stiffened.

  Malik didn’t know she was pregnant. And Seth didn’t know that Horus existed again.

  The flutters of her son bounced around and around inside her body. More in her head now than in her belly. She curled herself around the little one, begging him to go deeper inside. To hide.

  A malicious black presence began to test the edges of her soul. Seth was trying to penetrate, to take her over. To make her accepting of his ka.

  Her little god-hero didn’t like that at all. He started to pinch, to ricochet through her being. As though he were caged, trapped, and throwing himself against the bars. Trying to get out.

  Seth surrounded her now—his huge body consumed her vision and his ka pressed hard into her mind. Her thoughts were beginning to scramble and weaken, but she did suddenly know this: She wasn’t supposed to wield her son like a sword or a gun. He wasn’t supposed to give her the strength to take down Seth.

  Horus had to do it himself. Him and him alone. Not sixteen or twenty or thirty years in the future. Now.

  Seth’s ka clawed through the last, thinnest barriers of her mind. He swirled into Sera with his dark commanding presence, with the force of a charging army. And she—the toothpick bridge trying to hold up a fat lead weight—had to give in. Not even Isis was strong enough to help her defend against the onslaught.

  Sera could feel herself being shoved out of her own body. Not bled out like a stab wound or gunshot, but pushed and pressed and suffocated into the narrowest spaces of her body. She was weak…losing everything that made her Sera…

  But, she realized in those dim, waning moments, she was also a woman who’d never had a true, honest purpose in life and had now been granted a great one. Perhaps the greatest.

  She was a lover now. A mother. A healer.

  Every one of those untapped wells of will and fortitude.

  Desperately, she started to pick at the locks behind which she’d protectively stashed the essence of her son.

  I love you, she told him. I’ve never met you but I love you. Take what power you need from that. Take all that I am.

  She flung the cage door wide open, releasing what Isis and William had given her. Releasing Horus.

  On top of her, his hand still squeezing her neck, Malik’s body went taut. His eyes popped wide open as he stared into her face. Seth started to moan, an unearthly sound of impossible depth. Ancient words and curses clanged in her ears.

  The two of them finally saw what she carried inside. They finally knew the nature of their true enemy.

  Malik’s fingers clamped tighter around her neck, trying to crush the life from her body. Trying to destroy what she carried. And it was working…

  Above her, high in the night sky, the stars swam. They jumped from their fixed places and eddied in black pools. It was a death hallucination. It had to be.

  Then Horus surged forth, pushing Seth’s ka fully out of Sera’s body. She could breathe at last and she drew huge, gasping lungfuls of air.

  But she still wasn’t free. Malik was still pinning her body down. All she could do was stare upward and watch, transfixed, as the stars continued to move. Like magnets they drew toward one another with purpose. They danced and swirled and coalesced into a living, moving being: an enormous falcon, with the moon as its left eye.

  Materializing into three sparkling dimensions, the bird made of stars pulled away from the dark sky and soared down to earth.

  Horus. The falcon god.

  Sera smiled through misty tears. She could dream of her son for two thousand years and never imagine anything more beautiful or heroic or awe-inspiring.

  The falcon swooped down over the desert, trailing a carpet of billowing black. As it descended upon them, its celestial legs unfolded, releasing diamond-sharp talons. It opened its beak and released an ear-shattering shriek, then stabbed and sank one set of talons into Malik’s shoulder.

  The falcon was no death dream. The animal was as corporeal as Malik, whose blood splattered onto Sera’s chest. He gurgled in anguish and surprise, but didn’t die.

  Horus’s wings beat slow and steady, keeping the giant bird hovering above the bloody scene. The wind it created surged over Sera in an even tempo. She scrambled out from under Malik’s writhing body, wiping his blood from her face.

  Above, Seth’s translucent body twitched, howling in rage. The bird shifted, raised its other leg, then sank that set of razor talons into the beast shadow, piercing him straight through. With a great back-swoop of its wings, the falcon rocked backward and yanked Malik and Seth off the ground. Malik was a rag doll, a limp, battered body being thrown about, his attempts at defense weak.

  Seth, however, fought—and fought hard. His clawed arms struck Horus’s glittering beak again and again as the giant falcon swerved haphazardly about. They circled and swooped, their battling bodies bouncing off the towers of rock in the canyon.

  Sera ducked flying debris and coughed through dust showers, but she never took her eyes away from the battle, alarm making her body heavy. She huddled close to the cave entrance, one hand placed protectively on her belly. She wondered if she should go inside and pray to Isis, but decided that would do no good—the goddess was inside her and nowhere else…and Seth’s sister would be utterly helpless in this fight.

  Above, the combatants slammed into the arch above the cave entrance, crunching the apex and collapsing the small tunnel. Sera raced away from the avalanche, tripping over her skirt and falling forward onto her hands. The pain of a hundred scrapes on her palms was nothing compared to the tightness of her throat and the fear for the safety of her child.

  As she looked up, she saw that the cave entrance was now filled in, Amonteh’s tiny Isis knot hidden.

  The two gods plummeted to the ground, Seth pinned underneath, Malik’s useless arms barely swatting at the bird’s head. Seth writhed and wailed in Horus’s talons, but the falcon held on tightly, screeching wordless cries and beating at the air with his mighty wings.

  Then Seth’s bloody arm wriggled free. His massive claw swiped at Horus’s face. Sera screamed in warning, telling her son to get away, but the blow struck true. With a great bellow, Seth’s fingers curled around the falcon’s left eye. The claws dug in and gouged the eye out.

  The bird threw back its head and shrieked, and it seemed like the whole world shivered. A mother’s pain, the worst thing ever, ripped through her as she watched it happen. She lunged forward, heading back into the fray—to do what, she didn’t know, only that she had to do something.

  Seth turned his hand and opened his palm, the smooth round eye dissolving in his grip. It turned into a shower of light and shot back up into the sky, where the moon absorbed it.

  With a great pump of his wings, the falcon lurched up, taking himself airborne. Only he left Malik on the ground this time, and kept both sets of talons in Seth. With a great riiiiiiiip, Seth’s ka came free.

  Malik’s body went completely limp, his head rolling to one side, his lifeless eyes open and unable to watch as the great falcon wheeled hard to the left. But Sera saw. She watched through wet eyes,
her hands covering her mouth.

  Free of its host body, Seth was now a faint, flaccid creature hanging from Horus’s talons. Useless. Powerless. Until his time came again.

  Horus made huge, graceful circles as he soared higher and higher, back up into the black.

  Triumphant screeches filled the sky, fading as the bird gained altitude. Until his shape and that of Seth’s merged back with the millions of other stars, and the sky was as it had been.

  Her son was gone, but gone because of victory.

  Sera would see him in person in another nine months.

  CHAPTER 29

  Spectacular orange and fuchsia rays backlit Elephantine Island, bathing its ancient nilometer and the ruins of the Temple of Khnum in natural magic. The waters of the Nile rippled like fire. Sera lounged in a chair on the balcony of her hotel suite, slowly stroking the subtle swell of her belly.

  Three months, and she still couldn’t bring herself to leave Egypt.

  Three months, and the hole created by William’s absence still hadn’t healed.

  The night Horus had taken Seth back to the stars, she’d stayed by the buried cave, staring up at the sky until dawn. When the sun rose, she’d slid, numb, into the car that had once been driven by the man who’d died by her hand. Her prevailing thought had been to hop the first flight out of there. To head for home, curl up on her bed, and sleep until the baby came. She’d figure out the rest later.

  But where was home, exactly? Not Seattle, with her crappy beige apartment and secretarial job and school books that no longer held any interest. Definitely not Las Vegas.

  The thought of leaving Egypt, where everything had begun two thousand years ago, opened a chasm in her heart and made concrete shoes of her feet.

  She’d considered going to Australia, but the Sydney that stood now was not the Sydney she knew. It would only remind her of what she had lost. Of what no longer existed.

  So she decided to stay, at least for a little while. The money her father had left her was more than enough to stick around, and since no time had passed in the present day while she’d spent time in 1819, she hadn’t been considered missing or anything.