by Jim Johnson
Pashet took another breath but coughed up blood. He squeezed his arm tighter against his chest. "We...we was just followin’ orders. Cleanin’ up after the culling."
Tjety flicked his eyes around the closest areas of the village, the injustices done to these people rekindling the anger in his heart. He kept his pistol aimed at Pashet's face. "What culling? Who ordered you?"
Pashet blinked several times. He turned his head and spat a thick wad of blood-laced phlegm into the dirt. "Culling come for you too, Ranger-man. Ain't no one safe from us."
Tjety's fury pushed hard to cut loose. He forced it down again, but it felt like a losing battle, like trying to hold back the Iteru’s inundation with a dam made of papyrus. He yelled out, "Who are you to threaten the balance of divine Mayat?"
Pashet winced at another harsh coughing bout. The puddle of bloody mud around him continued to expand. Tjety doubted if the Pharaoh’s own scarce healers could have helped the man had they been fighting in the capital city itself.
Pashet seemed to dig deep for some defiance. He pushed himself up to a sitting position and leaned against the nearest wall. He stared into Tjety's eyes and pulled his scraggly hair away from his grimy face, displaying the spot where his left ear should have been.
Only it had been sliced clean off, flush against the man's skull, leaving a neat scar and small hole behind.
Pashet spat bright blood toward him. "We're the servants of Apep, you son of a bitch, and we take what we want."
Tjety's frown deepened. "Khepri's dung balls. Apep's cult was wiped out years ago. The Rangers had a hand in that." His mind raced to remember the details, but the anger roiling around in his head and heart were too distracting.
Pashet shook his head as a trickle of dark blood oozed out of his mouth. "Think that all ya want, Ranger-man, but we're here and you can't stop us. We gonna kill you all…"
Somehow the man found the breath to chuckle hollowly. Tjety leveled his pistol at the man's face; laid pressure on the trigger. It would be so satisfying to end him here and now…
But no. With a supreme force of willpower, Tjety pushed aside his anger enough to slide his finger off the trigger and lowered his pistol. “No, damn you. No.” Indiscriminate rage wasn’t the answer. He was a servant of Mayat, not of that darkling maggot Isfet. A flutter through his hekau confirmed his choice to be the wise one. Perhaps the gods were keeping watch after all. The thought raised the hackles on his neck.
Pashet locked eyes with him, breathed one last shuddering breath, and then sagged against the wall. A lingering blood-flecked smile touched his lips before the light in his eyes went out forever.
Through his weary hekau, Tjety just barely sensed the man's soul, his ba, slip out of his body, assume bird form, and soar away toward the Duat, where he would face final judgment in the court of Osiris, lord of the underworld and the dead.
Tjety closed his eyes and took a deep breath, willing the anger to flow through his body and down through his feet and into the firm ground. After a couple of deep cleansing breaths that weren’t as effective as he’d hoped, he holstered his pistol with a shaky hand. He made a mental note to clean the thing before he got back on the trail in pursuit of Meret and whatever caravan they had been talking about.
He stared at Pashet’s body for a long moment or two, then reached down and slung the body up onto his shoulders. As much as he wanted to go ride after Meret, he needed to look for any survivors and then bring some sort of balance to this broken village. It was the decent thing to do, as well as part of his mandate as a Ranger of Mayat and a servant of Kekhmet.
Other than the storehouse, the largest building in the village was the communal hall, where the villagers would have gathered to eat meals, share stories, drink beer, and play senet when they weren't busy planting or fishing or fucking. He unceremoniously deposited the bodies of Pashet and Uni outside the hall, then spent a solid hour combing the village in the hopes that someone had survived. By the time he finished his sweep, the moon, blessed Khonsu, was at full rise and the bodies of seven villagers—five women and two men, all adults—occupied the communal hall. He found no survivors.
With a heavy heart, Tjety realized the hall was now a sacred space for the justified dead. The simple decorations and furnishings in the hall were well-worn and showed signs of regular use and repair, and had a homely feel about them that brought sudden, unbidden tears to his eyes. If he were to squint through the moonlight just so, he might have thought that he was back home in his own childhood village, with the elders and children all around him, a family, a clan, a home. The doors in this village were painted a similar shade of red, and the colorful headcloth weave of green and gold was not all that different from the one he had worn before earning the Ranger blue.
He closed his eyes and indulged in a moment of self-pity, then shoved the feelings aside. The memories of his childhood were years in the past and many miles to the south. They wouldn’t serve him now. He stared at the bodies arrayed in the now-sacred hall, and set his mind back onto the depredations done here.
He’d found sandal tracks and broken ground all around the village, though he wasn't a skilled enough tracker to make sense of what precisely must have transpired in the attack. Some of the other Rangers, long experienced in scouting and tracking, might have been able to figure out the chain of events, but the best of them were currently far to the south, enjoying the good life in the field with Pharaoh’s well-provisioned army as they squashed the upstart Kesh and secured Kekhmet’s southern border. He should have been cavorting with them and his damned brother rather than choking sand on the northern fucking frontier, but…
No. Tjety shook his head again, made a silent prayer to Mayat for patience and peace, and focused on the here and now. That there had been an attack on this village was not in question. The information he'd gathered so far, along with the bodies and the wagon tracks leading out of town, more than confirmed that.
After laying the villagers to rest in the hall in two close rows, he stripped and searched both of the brigands. Uni was, like Pashet, missing his left ear. On closer examination, both men also had crude tattoos scratched into their breasts with dark ink—scaled coils wrapped around some sort of snake head. The mark of cultists of Apep, maybe.
Or the trappings of them, anyway. Tjety scoured his memory, even tapped into his weary hekau to try and poke at the deeper recesses of his mind to dredge up something useful, but he couldn't recall anything significant about the Apep cult. The few stories he knew were of the Rangers and the soldiers of Pharaoh Inteferre and the priests of Amun-Re working together to wipe out the last of the cult, but that had been so long ago that they were little more than night fire tales.
Tjety left the hall and called for Heker, then retrieved his warding amulets from the pack strapped to his horse’s back. He tapped into his hekau to charge up the latent power contained within the four small granite amulets and fashioned a simple protective square around the dead villagers. His warding talents were modest at best. The shielding wouldn't hold for more than a couple days, and wasn't powerful enough to preserve the bodies.
It was better than nothing, though, and it would keep all but the most determined scavengers from getting at the bodies until he could return with help to give them all proper burials.
The two bandits, though, well, fuck them. He tossed their naked bodies into the Iteru without ceremony. Their bas were already on the way to the Duat. In a fresh surge of anger at the injustices they had wrought, he clenched a fist over his heart. “Dread Mayat, may those two have their names struck from all memory and may they spend plenty of time lost in the underworld before they find their way to final judgment before Lord Osiris. And may they be found wanting and suffer a horrible second death as a meal for Ammut, the monstrous Eater of Hearts.”
He watched the two bodies bob along in the river, rolling in the waves. He then knelt down in the water and offered a brief prayer to Hapi, god of the river. “May the offerings I deli
vered to you this night prove acceptable to you and may they make a fine meal for your water creatures.” He stood up, cold water drizzling off his linen kilt and leather greaves. He turned back to the village without another thought for the bandits.
Tjety gathered up what food and supplies he and Heker could easily carry, and made sure Heker got his fill of grain and water. After hitching Heker to a post outside the communal hall, he made himself a quick meal of dried, salted fish and a couple triangular loaves of bread that had been baked that morning by some unfortunate villager. He washed the simple meal down with some slightly foul date beer he'd scavenged from one of the homes and then turned his attention to cleaning his pistol, musing over what he had learned.
He had counted just over thirty homes during his sweep, suggesting that the village’s population had been somewhere around fifty or sixty. He had found wooden toys and knotted grass dolls in several of the homes and scattered around the village, so there had to be at least a few children unaccounted for, along with the rest of the adults.
He glanced at the seven villagers laying at rest under his warding shield, which glowed with a gentle silvery pulse. His heart surged with a strange sense of pride for them. They each had a variety of defensive wounds in addition to the bullet holes that had ended their lives, suggesting that they had all put up a fight before meeting their end.
Tjety stared at the solemn array, satisfied that the remains would remain unmolested for a little while longer. He clenched a fist over his heart again. “I vow that I will do all I can to rescue your fellow villagers. And I promise to deliver hard justice to whoever was responsible for your pain and suffering.”
He closed his eyes and then whispered, “And you, Mayat, dread Lady of the Judgment Hall. You may choose to ignore my prayers and not grant my wishes, but I will continue to serve you as I have before and if that’s not good enough, then fuck you and fuck every other god who allows something like this to happen. Where you won’t balance the scales, I will.”
After another quiet stare at the row of bodies and their green headcloths similar to his own village’s pattern, he added, “I will find the one responsible for sending those men to attack these people. In your name, for order and for justice.”
With a hardening heart and a firm line to his mouth, he mounted Heker and left the shattered village behind. In the bright moonlight, even his modest tracking skills picked up the wagon tracks leading away from the village and deeper into the rugged frontier.
Tjety focused on those tracks, heeled Heker into a canter, and rode toward retribution.
CHAPTER 4
AT THE DISTANT, FUZZY EDGES OF his consciousness, Master Deshi Zezago felt a cool breeze ripple through his canvas tent, brushing across the nape of his neck and bald head almost like a caress. He surfaced out of a meditative hekau trance and carefully sat up on his well-worn camp stool.
He raised his arms over his head and then leaned away from his cherished portable cedar desk. His spine crackled as he stretched muscles tight from many hours hunched over ancient papyrus scrolls. Judging from the campfires flickering outside, beyond the open flap of his tent, he’d worked through most of the day again.
He returned to a straight sitting position, rubbed the bridge of his hooked nose with ink-stained thumb and forefinger, and stifled a cough. He trickled his hekau into a wordless recuperative charm and felt the results almost immediately. Much of the soreness in his muscles melted away, and the weariness weighing on his mind dissipated like vapor on the wind. The charm was little more than a temporary fix, though. He’d soon need something substantial to eat along with several hours of uninterrupted rest.
Zezago glanced at the time-worn scrolls and at the single sheet of clean vellum he’d used to inscribe his translations and notes, and then indulged in a brief smile. The long-forgotten scriptures and incantations scratched upon the scrolls were difficult to decipher; even harder to translate. But, what he had so far managed to puzzle out of the faded passages limned in inks of blue and red and black was encouraging; encouraging indeed.
He turned his attention to the silent construct waiting with unnatural, unliving patience inside the entrance to the tent. “Perhaps encouraging enough to justify my mission out here on this gods-forsaken frontier, what do you say?”
The construct, in its moldering funereal wrappings, merely stared ahead with its dessicated visage and glowing green eyes, apparently focused on nothing in particular. It had no tongue and no mind of its own. A simple, dedicated servant beholden to no one but him.
Zezago stood and backed away from the desk, head rasping against the nubbly wool blankets stretched out on the tent’s sturdy roof frame. He rubbed a hand over his head and felt the stubble of a long day’s growth. He chuckled and glanced at the silent construct again. “Certainly not up to House standards, eh? Though, I suppose there is no one nearby to disapprove. The brothers and sisters of my House are very far away, indeed.”
Zezago stifled another cough and then pushed aside thoughts of his Housekin. He called out for his overseer, raising his voice so that it would carry through the canvas walls. He hitched his sun-faded black knee-length kilt to a more comfortable position, then hooked his thumbs into his wide, worn leather belt. He heard the muffled clinks and rasps of his constructs hard at work in the quarry beyond the camp, punctuated by the occasional cry from a penned horse or the evening activities of his soldiers and slaves.
Sandaled footsteps crunched on the ground outside. Then, his overseer, Qebsenuf, ducked down and glanced into the tent. The fresh scar bisecting his visage from left temple to filthy chin seemed to glow lividly in the mix of campfire light outside and lantern glow inside the tent. Qebsenuf’s matted long hair and soiled homespun headcloth framed his ugly face.
Qebsenuf focused on a spot on the ground. “You called for me, Master Deshi?” His polished Hesso and measured tone created odd counterpoints to his rough appearance.
Zezago used Qebsenuf’s imperfect native Hesso language, recalling that the man struggled with the nuances of modern Kekhmetic. “Has the raiding party returned?”
Qebsenuf shook his head. “If they met minimal resistance, as expected, we should hear of their success soon.” He glanced outside. “Perhaps by full moon rise?”
“Hmm. That fishing village is little more than a two days’ ride, perhaps more if they are loaded down with fresh slaves. They should have returned by now, or at least have sent a rider ahead.” Zezago sighed. “Meret has failed again.”
Qebsenuf flicked his gaze toward Zezago’s face but quickly returned to staring at the ground.
Zezago frowned. “Something you wish to say?”
Qebsenuf licked his lips. “Meret’s a good hand, Master Deshi, and…”
“And nothing.” Zezago crossed his arms over his chest, clad in a simple sleeveless tunic. “I have given him several opportunities to advance himself and he has botched every single one of them. I know you desperately want to give him the benefit of the doubt, but I do not believe he has the strength of will to escape his own vices.”
Qebsenuf continued to stare at the ground, wordless. Zezago gave him a long contemplative look, then nodded. “Take two men. Ride out to find Meret and the caravan and then get them all back here as soon as you can. My operation has slowed to a crawl. We need those new slaves.” After a moment, he added, “Do you have any questions?”
Qebsenuf shook his head. “No, Master Deshi.” When Zezago didn’t immediately dismiss him, he added, “How else may I serve you?”
“Have someone prepare some hot water before you leave. I am in need of a shave and a scrub. Also, have Knefa bring me food and drink. Something simple but filling; I don’t care what.”
Qebsenuf nodded deferentially. “Is there anything else, Master Deshi?”
Zezago pursed his lips then assumed a solicitous tone. “The scar. Is it healing well?”
Qebsenuf shot another glance toward him. “It is, and you are gracious for asking. It is hot and
it stings, but Knefa prepared a healing salve that makes the pain more manageable.” He gnawed at his lower lip, then added, “I…I am sorry my actions required you to take the time to discipline me.”
Zezago took two long steps and rested his hands on his overseer’s shoulders. “Your apology is noted, Qebsenuf, and accepted. You are an able lieutenant. I value your service and your dedication. It is…regrettable that discipline is sometimes necessary, but I am pleased to hear that you understand its need.”
Qebsenuf’s face flushed, making the scar stand out more. “I have given an ear in your service, master.” He glanced at the ear in question, which was attached to a thin gold chain along with dozens of similar grisly trophies, all hanging around the neck of the silent construct.
Qebsenuf whispered, “I would give my life as well.”
Zezago patted Qebsenuf’s shoulders once, then stepped away from the man, who clearly had not interacted with water or soap for some time. “Well, then. You should be on your way.”
Qebsenuf nodded again and then backed out of the tent and out of his sight. Zezago heard him bark out various orders, but paid them no mind. In spite of his many flaws, Qebsenuf was, in fact, a very good overseer and the smartest man among those currently serving him. It would be a significant inconvenience to have to find and train a replacement, especially given Meret’s failure to complete simple tasks.
Zezago glanced at the string of his servants’ ears, and then at his sheathed sword, hanging from one of the tent poles. He ran a thumb over the intricately-wrapped leather hilt, tracing the curves and folds of the serpent the wrappings were meant to represent. “Perhaps soon I will be able to use you for purposes other than disciplining my servants.” He sighed, and glanced at his construct again. “I long for a fight, even just a sparring session with an equal, but…I suppose I must wait.”
He glanced at the scroll on his desk and smiled. “If our efforts proceed as planned, I suppose there will be battles aplenty soon enough. And then what shall we do?” He gave the construct an inquiring glance, and nodded his head at an imagined response.
