“Don’t I?” He finished his cigarette and tossed it to the carpet. “You yourself have been possessed by Aset on more than one occasion.”
And she had. Only here, in this moment of extremity, did she fully remember the time in Maye House, and again in the Museum, when she had seen in Leo not merely a soldier named Maahes but also a god. When she had become the goddess herself.
“How would you know such a thing?” she demanded.
He sighed like a schoolmaster burdened with a particularly dull pupil. “I saw Aset stand before me in your drawing room, casting Erskine from her presence.”
“That was not—”
“I recognized it because it happened to me, my dear. Only I have left my mortal self behind forever.”
“You are Sinuhé, a priest of Aset!”
“Long ago. Long before this incarnation. Before he found me wandering in the desert and preserved my body for his use.”
The numbness had spread throughout Tameri’s entire body. “Who are you?”
He smiled, and there were too many teeth, too wide a mouth, too much red in the eyes. “Don’t you know, Princess? I am your enemy.”
Sutekh.
There was no use in further struggle, but Tameri fought until Boyd—the god of chaos—brought forth a cup and forced the stinking contents into her mouth. Her final thoughts were of Leo, and what an utter fool she had been to send him away.
IT WAS THE NOISE THAT woke Leo, the scuffle of boots and bodies around him. He tried to sit, but the dizziness and nausea forced him down again. His uncertain vision picked out perhaps a half-dozen men, four of whom seemed vaguely familiar to his aching eyes. The other two were thickset and armed with knives and cudgels, which they were attempting to use on their opponents.
For a moment Leo was lost in confusion. He remembered speaking to the fortune-teller, and hearing her confession about the kidnapping. “The ancient war,” she had said.
That was the last thing he recalled with any clarity. The rest had been like a dream, as if he had not been in control of his own body. Something had been said of a train to Marseilles, with Egypt the ultimate destination. He had threatened the woman. And then…
Leo reached within himself, clutching at the core of determination and strength upon which he had relied in many a sticky situation. He got more than he bargained for. A rush of pure, hot energy surged through his body, pulling him to his feet. He charged the nearest knife-wielder, knocking away the man’s weapon with a slice of his hand. The man grunted in startlement as he fell. Someone shouted; the other ruffian flew past Leo, followed by three of the half-familiar men.
The fellow at Leo’s feet tried to rise, and Leo stamped down on his wrist, almost taking pleasure in the man’s howl of pain. The unnameable power coursed through his veins, alight with the joy of triumph over his enemies.
“Mr. Erskine?”
He turned to the owner of the hesitant voice, whom he knew at once to be one of the worshippers in the warehouse temple. The gray-haired gentleman had thrown a cloak over his Egyptian costume, but it was evident that he and his companions had come directly from the warehouse.
“They were trying to kill you,” the man said, still panting from his exertions. “We arrived just in time.”
Leo’s head began to clear again. “You followed me?”
The man glanced at his companions, who had gathered around him. “We knew you were following the princess. It was necessary that we learn your purpose in pursuing her.”
Both anger and triumph deserted Leo in an instant. “She did something to me,” he said. “The woman in the shop.”
Another exchange of glances. “I am Dr. Thomas Newton,” the gray-haired gentleman said. “Who was this woman you speak of?”
Leo shook his head, doing his best to disregard the savage pain inside his skull. “There’s no time to explain. Tameri has been kidnapped.”
“Kidnapped?” Newton echoed. “What do you mean?”
“By Boyd,” Leo said. “He’s taking her to Egypt.”
All four of the men exclaimed at once. “But surely…” Newton stammered. “Sinuhé would have no reason—”
“‘The ancient battle,’” Leo quoted. “‘The war that never ends.’”
“Eye of Re,” Newton said in a choked voice. “Is it possible?”
“I don’t know what’s possible,” Leo said, “but I’m going after her.” He heard the ruffian stir and nudged the man with his boot. “Secure these men, and see that they do not follow me.”
Newton stared into Leo’s eyes. “Sinuhé is not what he claimed to be,” he said slowly. “But neither are you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t you?”
“I’ve no time!” Leo snapped. “It’s nearly dawn. I must find the fortune-teller.”
He stepped over the groaning thug’s body and broke into a run, searching for some familiar landmark. But if the fortune-teller’s shop was anywhere in the vicinity, the woman had surely removed any sign or marker that would identify it. He stopped in a street that looked like any other in the rookeries, breathing hard.
A train bound for Marseilles. That was all he knew. It would have to be enough.
Two of Aset’s followers caught him up, breathing as raggedly as he. “The ruffians have been secured,” Newton said, bracing his hands on his knees. “What do you want us to do?”
“Nothing.” Leo hesitated. “If you’ve any money, give it to me. I’ll need it for fare.”
“We’ve none with us,” Newton said. “If you’ll return with me to my home—”
“I’ve a little cash. Go at once to St. John, the Earl of Donnington, and request on my behalf that he immediately wire five hundred pounds to my account at the Banque de France in Paris.”
“Surely, if Boyd is what you claim, you should not go alone.”
“I must.” Leo gauged the direction of the rising sun and turned west, readying himself for another hard run.
“Great Asar!” Newton called after him.
The word was like a silken noose around Leo’s neck, jerking him to a halt. “I have nothing to do with your gods,” he said. “Pray that they have more ability to protect their own than they’ve shown thus far.”
Newton made no further attempt to stop him, and he ran until he was well out of the rookeries and could hail a hackney cab to take him to Victoria Station.
No one there could remember a beautiful, dark-haired lady accompanied by a handsome man with a tanned complexion, and Leo found no further help in Dover. He crossed the Channel, collected his money in Paris and bought tickets for the next train leaving the city for Marseilles. Just before his departure, he found a clerk at the station who responded to his description of the people he was seeking.
At least he was not too far behind them. But once Boyd and Tameri reached Marseilles, the trail could rapidly grow cold.
The journey all but drove Leo mad. He could not sit for more than a few minutes at a time, and haunted the corridor outside his private car both day and night. Once in Marseilles, Leo looked up an old acquaintance, one Bébert, who had on occasion provided Leo with certain unusual items a British agent, archaeologist and adventurer might require in his work. Bébert sent his own agents scurrying throughout the city, inquiring at hotels, ticket offices and wharves, but it was as if Boyd had never been there at all. Only when Leo was about to board a steamer bound across the Mediterranean did Bébert himself come to meet him with word that several Turkish vilains attempting to steal a beautiful green-eyed woman from the monsieur with the dark red hair had met with an ugly end in the Vieux Port.
No one else had caught a glimpse of either Boyd or Tameri. Leo knew that he couldn’t afford to linger in Marseilles. He would have to assume that Boyd had boarded a ship for Egypt.
The voyage to Egypt was without incident, and Leo disembarked in Alexandria, breathing in the thick, fertile scents of the delta. After questioning the dock workers at the q
uay, he caught a train to Cairo and went directly to Shepheard’s Hotel, where he inquired of the clerks on the off-chance that Boyd had taken Tameri there. No such person had checked in. The other hotels popular with European tourists were equally barren of clues.
But Leo was not without resources. He had made many reliable contacts in Cairo over the years, and he called upon them now. Men who knew every back street and alley in the city were eager to take his money. Shopkeepers and merchants were recruited to watch for the couple, and Leo continued to search himself.
Two days after his arrival, his efforts finally bore fruit. A man of dubious reputation, who had on more than one occasion directed Leo to smugglers attempting to sell Egyptian antiquities on the black market, had heard that the two Europeans had been seen boarding a boat bound up the Nile.
“I was told that the dark Inglizi and the beautiful sayyida were bound for Luxor,” Abbas said, casting a nervous glance over his shoulder. “But the man with whom I spoke would say no more. He was very much afraid.”
“Why afraid?” Leo asked.
“He would not say.”
Nor would Abbas elaborate. Leo sensed that he, too, was afraid.
But of what? Boyd was only one man, and though he, like Leo, had experience in Egypt, he had no real power to threaten anyone.
And yet…
“He will kill me,” the fortune-teller had said, just before Leo had fallen into the waking dream. “One does not refuse him.”
Who in hell was he?
Leo pressed a wad of bills into Abbas’s hand. “Arrange passage for me on the next train and report back to me at the hotel. You shall have twice as much as I’ve already given you.”
Abbas wavered, but in the end he agreed. Leo made his own arrangements, outfitting himself for every eventuality he could imagine. He bought a good pistol and a selection of knives which he could carry hidden in his clothing and boots.
Abbas returned by nightfall, informing Leo that the train—bound for Asyut, 234 miles south of Cairo—would leave early the next morning. Once in Asyut, Leo would hire a boat to take him the rest of the way to Luxor. It was a trip with which Leo was very familiar. And when he got to Luxor…
One way or another, Boyd was not likely to survive their next meeting.
CHAPTER EIGHT
CONSCIOUSNESS CAME AND WENT, flickering like a candle in flashes of light and darkness. Tameri had fleeting visions of trains and busy streets, ships and tossing waves, a teeming throng of humanity crowding about her in a strange city. She felt burning heat on her face, and the coolness of deep shadow.
And always she was moving, carried or forced along by merciless hands. Sometimes other voices spoke, often in foreign tongues, words tinged with fear. Tameri had no chance to cry out for help; as soon as the thought came into her head, it faded again.
At last there came a time when the constant motion stopped. Tameri drifted for a while on the edge of waking, aware that something had changed, something her bewildered mind was unable to grasp.
Wake up.
She opened her eyes to utter blackness. A scream built in her throat, as instinctive as the wail of an abandoned child.
No one came for her. She lay rigid on an ungiving surface and tried to hear past the roar of her heartbeat. Voices, droning in a continuous swell of sound. Chanting. Words that were half-familiar.
Because she had heard them before.
Slowly her eyes adjusted, and she realized that the blackness had been within her own mind. The chamber was lit by a pair of lamps that caused the shadows to leap and dance. She pulled at her bonds…soft and silken, as if the one who had imprisoned her wished to preserve her delicate flesh. Her dress was little more than a wisp of the finest, sheerest linen, her collar a tracery of gold wire and beads.
A tomb. She was in a tomb. But there was no feast here, no furniture inlaid with ebony and ivory and gold.
And no Maahes to hold her hand, to give her courage in the face of oblivion.
Oh, my love…
She forced herself to examine the chamber more closely. She lay on a couch that was little more than a wooden bench. The walls were painted just as she remembered…but there was something wrong. Some of the frescoes had been damaged. No, deliberately defaced. And over them had been laid pictures of a god—a god with a drooping snout and long, squared ears.
This is not possible. It could not be happening again. Aset would have shown her the truth long before this.
But it was not Aset who had told her. It was Boyd, whose eyes glowed crimson and whose teeth gleamed like an animal’s.
“Have you accepted at last, Tameri?” Boyd said, strolling into the chamber as if it were his private domain. “Do you know who I am?”
She looked at him with new eyes…at his dark hair streaked bloodred—Sutekh’s color—and his bronzed skin that had never grown paler in spite of England’s often dreary weather. In defiance of every natural feeling, Tameri’s courage returned. This was her enemy. The enemy she had known she must eventually face.
Now the time had come.
“When did it happen?” she asked calmly. “When did Sutekh take you?”
“He saved me,” Boyd said, leaning casually against the wall beside the heavy stone door. “I was lost in the desert, and he gave me a choice. To die slowly and terribly, or to live as a god.”
“A god of Evil.”
“Am I?” He sighed and shook his head. “Mortals so often confuse chaos with evil.”
“You desire more than chaos, Sutekh. You desire to rule the world and cast it in your image.”
He cocked his head. “Ah. The goddess speaks.”
Tameri felt a shifting, as if her body had moved without really moving at all. Aset. She remembered so many things, now that it was too late.
“So you remember at last?” Sutekh purred. “How you gave yourself to the priests so that Aset could be born into this world anew?”
Oh, yes. It had all been true, every last part of that last and most terrible vision.
“The common soldier, Maahes, stood beside you, though he could never be your equal,” Sutekh continued. “He, to become Asar. Your mate. Perhaps it was his very unworthiness that ended your pitiful attempt to stop me.”
“We did stop you,” Tameri said, meeting his burning gaze. “You have been powerless these thousands of years.”
“Powerless?” Sutekh bared his teeth. “Think again, Great of Magic. Who was it that killed Maahes with a scorpion’s venom? Who sealed you into the tomb to be buried alive?”
Tameri plunged into the past. She was with Maahes again, and he was about to enter her, to claim her for himself and for his god. But a shadow had come into the tomb. Maahes had cried out and fallen from the couch. Tameri had knelt beside him and watched him die.
“Did you guess then that you would die even more slowly?” Sutekh asked. “That the door would close, never to open again, and that Aset would abandon you to suffocation?”
Tameri felt herself beginning to gasp for breath, as if the walls were collapsing around her. “Aset…she did not—”
“She left you because she had no power to save you. As she has none now.” His teeth glinted. “I knew that she had chosen you again, Tameri. I knew the time was coming when she would summon you to sacrifice yourself as you did before.”
“Because Sutekh had reentered the world.”
“And this time I shall work my will with none to stop me.” He raised his arms. “When I killed your mortal avatars, my ancient enemy, I destroyed your hope of reunion. Now I shall do so again!”
Tameri’s laugh was little more than a wheeze, but it wiped the triumphant expression from Sutekh’s face. “You have forgotten one thing,” she said. “There is another you must have to complete your design. He who would be Asar. Where is he?”
“You know, do you not?” Sutekh hissed. “You know who he is. As I have suspected since first he came to your house.”
Like a vast khamseen blowing scorching
sand across the desert, despair swept through Tameri’s soul.
“The soldier named after the Lion god has been reborn in another lion,” Sutekh said, his voice thick with satisfaction.
“But he did not remember, did he? Instinct alone guided him in your defense. A pity he will never fulfill the great part he was to play.”
At first Tameri scarcely heard him. She was thinking of Leo…of that strange attraction she had felt on the day of their meeting at the Museum after the lecture. Of how much deeper those feelings had grown. And of the dream they had shared in the museum vault.
She and Leo had come together there, just as their former selves had done in this very tomb. They had nearly completed the bond that would have brought Aset and Asar back into the world to fight the god of chaos.
If only Leo had acknowledged the truth. If only she had been less afraid. If only she had seen.
A pity he will never fulfill the great part he was to play….
Tameri sat upright on the couch, straining against her bonds with such force that the cords groaned. “Where is he?”
“Alas,” Sutekh said, regarding her as one might a dung beetle busy with its labors. “He met with an unfortunate accident when he attempted to follow us after the ceremony.”
Tameri muffled a cry of anguish. “You lie!” she shouted, struggling to rise from the couch.
“I lie when it suits my purpose,” Sutekh said. “But I have nothing to gain by doing so now. He is dead, and you shall serve me by dying the ultimate death and closing the gate to Aset forever.”
THE DAY WAS BRUTALLY HOT, and the wind cast grit and sand into Leo’s eyes with every step he took.
The Nile was far behind them now, him and his unwilling companion. The sun had not yet reached its peak, and yet it seemed as if there had never been any water within a thousand miles of this remote valley with its many excavations, abandoned to the relentless summer sun.
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