by Kai Meyer
Standing on a roof opposite was Seth, highest of the high priests and the Pharaoh’s vizier. His head was slightly bent and his arms crossed over his upper body. Sweat stood in shining beads on his forehead, and his golden robe was soaked with it. At this moment he was the falcon, the absolute master of this illusion.
Seth held the illusion upright for a minute longer, then spread his arms apart with a quick movement and sharply expelled air through his mouth and nose.
The towering falcon dissolved in a fountain of glittering spangles that sank to the Piazza San Marco around the basilica as if the stars themselves were plunging from the sky.
Applause sounded from the rows of priests gathered in the piazza below him. Only the mummy soldiers, of whom several dozen were scattered all over the piazza, stood unmoved, staring straight ahead out of dead, sunken eyes, some even out of empty eye sockets.
But Seth required no rejoicing, no applause to know the extent of his talent. He was conscious of his power, of every tiny aspect of his godlike abilities. The golden falcon god was nothing more than a skillful illusion, a symbol of the victory of the Empire, like the others that time after time sent the Pharaoh into naive raptures. The toys of a child.
What a waste, Seth thought disapprovingly. Of power, respect, and credibility. He, the highest priest and second man of the Empire; he, the venerable Seth; was wasting his energy on Amenophis’s whimsies. And everyone in the priesthood, as well as his closest confidants, knew that he had no other choice. Not in times like these, when the sphinx commanders were winning more and more influence and power and pushing the priesthood out of the ruler’s favor. It was worth it to make the Pharaoh happy—at least until the power of the priests of Horus was no longer threatened by the accursed sphinxes.
Seth snorted. Here the Empire was, celebrating its greatest victory, the conquest of Venice after more than three decades of siege, and it was primarily Seth’s victory, his personal triumph over the Flowing Queen—and yet he could not rejoice in it. His satisfaction was only external, nothing more than a masquerade.
The sphinxes were to blame for that. And, of course, the Pharaoh himself.
Amenophis was a fool—a silly, narcissistic coxcomb on a throne of gold and human lives. The priests of Horus had chosen him and made him into the figurehead of the Empire because they believed him weak, pliant, and easy to influence. Only a child, they’d said, and they exulted when they succeeded in waking him to new life in the stepped pyramid of Amun-Ka-Re.
He was their handiwork, their puppet, they’d believed. And in certain ways that applied today.
But only in certain ways.
Silently, Seth allowed a long cloak to be placed around his shoulders and accepted a cloth that one of his inferior priests handed to him. He used it to pat the perspiration from his bald head, from the spaces in between the golden wires that had been countersunk into his scalp as ornament, but also as a means for concentrating his spiritual power. The other priests had the network tattooed into their skin in color, but his own was of pure gold, worked by the smiths of Punt, deep in southern Africa.
Seth walked into the stairwell with measured steps, followed by his priests. Numerous mummy soldiers had been stationed around for his protection. Remarkably numerous. Seth wondered who had given the order for it. Certainly not he.
As he entered the piazza below, a priest adept came up to him, bowed three times, kissed his hands and feet, and begged permission to deliver a message from the Pharaoh: Amenophis wished to see Seth, right now, in his new chambers in the Doge’s Palace.
Internally boiling with rage, Seth left the adept and his subordinates, crossed the piazza, and entered the palace. Amenophis summoned him like one of his body slaves. He, the highest among the priests of Horus, the spiritual head of the Empire. And that in front of the assembled priesthood. Through the mouth of a lowly adept!
Seth entered the palace through the richly decorated Porta della Carta, a masterpiece of gothic stonework. On the other side of the great interior courtyard, he mounted a splendid staircase in the shadow of two huge statues of gods. Mars and Neptune looked coldly down on him. Seth would have them pulled down as soon as possible and replaced with Horus and Re.
Through wide corridors and several anterooms he finally reached the door behind which some rooms had been arranged as the personal domicile of the Pharaoh. Appropriate to the status of a ruler, the rooms were on the top floor of the palace, just under the attic. Above them, in earlier times, prisoners had been locked into tiny cells under the lead roof. But today, so far as Seth knew, the dreaded rooms stood empty. He would inspect them later and decide whether it would be a suitable place to incarcerate the rebels among the city councillors.
Not all the city councillors had taken part in surrendering the Flowing Queen. Amenophis had ordered the three instigators executed the evening before, publicly, in the Piazza San Marco. He was grateful to them for their help but suffered around him no one whose word could not be trusted. The other councillors had been confined somewhere in the palace since then, separated from their bodyguards. Most of the soldiers had been imprisoned at the same time. Later an attempt would be made to enlist them on the side of the Empire; Amenophis was fascinated by the powerful bond between the soldiers and their stone lions. And kindling the Pharaoh’s interest above all were the winged stone lions, who were only at the disposal of the Body Guard of the City Council.
Seth, on the contrary, thought that it would be better to kill all lions, right away, however difficult such an undertaking might be—even if it were necessary to sacrifice a few dozen mummy soldiers for each lion. It was a mistake to let them live. Amenophis might see in the lions only animals that would be suitable to tame and use for his own purposes; but Seth was of another mind. The lions were not dumb creatures who let themselves be trained at will. He could feel the divinity in them, their intelligence, their ancient knowledge. And he wondered if, in truth, the sphinx commanders were not behind the Pharaoh’s decision as well. They were half lion themselves, and it was obvious that they knew more about the Venetian lions than they were admitting.
Was there any relationship between the sphinxes and the stone lions? And if yes, what significance did it have in the intrigues of the sphinx commanders?
Seth had no time to pursue the thoughts any longer. One of the Pharaoh’s lackeys had already reported his arrival. Now he asked Seth to enter.
The Pharaoh was resting on a divan of jaguar skins. He wore a white robe of human hair, shot through with gold threads. One hundred slave women had worked on it for almost a decade. Amenophis possessed several dozen of these robes, and often he would rip up a just-finished one if he didn’t like the curve of a line or a detail of the pattern.
The Pharaoh smiled as Seth approached him. Amenophis awaited him alone, and that was more than unusual. Ordinarily the Pharaoh was surrounded by his tall soldiers from the Nubian desert, whose sickle swords had already polished off so many would-be assassins.
Strange too was that the makeup on the Pharaoh’s face was even more garish than usual. But that could not conceal that his face was that of a child not yet thirteen years old, the age at which, more than three thousand years ago, the boy pharaoh had been poisoned. After the Horus priests reawakened him, he’d no longer aged. Amenophis had ruled for more than thirty years now, but he still always looked like a spoiled, snot-nosed child.
But that characterization didn’t even begin to include all his bad characteristics. Seth had often speculated as to whether the ancient poison had been mixed by his predecessors, by Horus priests who could no longer tolerate the moods of this cruel dwarf.
Secretly he felt that possibly Amenophis asked himself the same question—which might be one of the reasons why recently the Pharaoh had been freeing himself more and more aggressively from the influence of the priesthood and turning to the sphinxes.
“Seth,” said Amenophis, waving a casual greeting to him with his right hand.
The high
priest bowed deeply and waited until the Pharaoh indicated that he rise. This time Amenophis took an especially long time over it, but Seth allowed the affront to pass over him without reacting. Sometime the conditions would alter, and then it would be he, Seth, to whom the Pharaoh had to creep. A really uplifting thought, which wrested a pleased smile from him.
Amenophis bade him come closer.
“You wished to see me, Re?” The Pharaoh preferred to be addressed by the name of the sun god.
“More precisely, we wanted you to see something, Seth.”
The priest raised an eyebrow. “What could that be?”
Amenophis lolled on the jaguar divan and smiled. The golden color under his left eye had run, but he didn’t look as if he had reason to weep. What would Amenophis have been laughing himself to tears about?
Seth felt increasingly uneasy.
“Re?” he asked once more.
“Go to the window,” said the Pharaoh.
Seth went over to one of the high windows. From here he could look out on the now darkened Piazza San Marco. As always, it was illuminated by countless torches and fire-basins, but the scenery in the glow of the flames had changed.
Mummy soldiers were driving the priests together, several dozen men in long robes, not far from the place where, a few days before, the messenger from Hell had torn open the paving. A powerful sphinx was overseeing the arrest, which was taking place in uncanny silence. Among the prisoners Seth recognized his closest confidants, men with whom he had planned the resurrection of the Pharaoh and carried it out. Men who warned him and had trusted him when he brushed off their worries. What a fool he’d been!
For now his priests were going to pay for his stupidity, of that there was no doubt.
Very slowly and with as much dignity as he could muster, Seth turned around to the Pharaoh.
Amenophis was no longer alone. Utterly soundlessly, two sphinxes had come to his side on velvety lion feet. Their upper bodies were those of men, their underbodies belonged to mighty lions. Both had sickle swords that any ordinary man could hardly have lifted.
“Why, Re?” asked Seth softly and so under control that he surprised himself. “Why my priests?”
“The priesthood of Horus has discharged its duty,” said Amenophis lightly, without losing his smile. “We thank you and yours, Seth. You were a great help to us, and we will not forget that.”
The Pharaoh loved to speak of himself in the plural. But at the moment it almost seemed to Seth that Amenophis actually meant himself and his new advisers, the sphinx commanders.
“That is betrayal,” he squeezed out.
“Of whom?” Amenophis’s eyes widened in feigned astonishment. “Not of the Pharaoh. Also not of the gods.”
“We have made you what you are.” Seth now dispensed with the deferential address. “Without us you were only another body in the old graves, only a mummy in your sarcophagus, so hated by those who poisoned you that they didn’t even put any gold in the grave with you. Everyone knew that. Why otherwise, do you suppose, did the grave robbers never try to invade your crypt?” He laughed derisively. “They knew what they’d find there. Only the corpse of a cocky child, whose cries for play and amusement even his closest intimates could no longer stand. Only the body of a dumb boy who—”
One of the sphinxes took a gliding step toward Seth, but Amenophis held him back. “Seth,” he said, restrained, though his eyes showed the priest how very much his words had enraged him. “Silence. Please.”
“I say the truth. And your new … lapdogs will soon realize that as well.” He’d intended to irritate the sphinxes, but he knew they wouldn’t be drawn in. One grinned wearily, the other didn’t change expression. It had been foolish to attempt to disconcert them, Seth knew that, too.
“We do not intend to kill you,” said the Pharaoh. His lips drew into a malicious smile. “Not you.”
“What do you intend, then?” Seth looked out again at his corralled priests. The swords of their guards gleamed in the torchlight.
Amenophis smirked. “First—their deaths. And after that, your attention.”
Seth turned around, and again a sphinx took a threatening step forward. This time Amenophis did not restrain him.
“It is not necessary that they die,” said Seth. He looked for a spell, an illusion, with which he could surprise the Pharaoh, but he knew it was pointless. The sphinxes’ magic was equal to his, and they would turn any attack aside. If not these two, then one of the others, who were without question watching from behind the walls.
“Not necessary?” Amenophis repeated in his childish voice. He stroked his index finger over the golden coloring on his face and regarded the tip of his finger with interest. It shimmered like an exotic beetle. “We will make you an offer, Seth. You should not turn it down. We know very well that we have you and your priests alone to thank for this victory. It was you who found a way to drive the Flowing Queen out of the water—wherever she’s holed up now. So do not think that we feel no gratitude.”
“Yes,” Seth managed with difficulty to say. “I see that.”
Amenophis stretched his finger with the gold paint on it toward one of the sphinxes. The creature came forward and, his face expressionless, allowed the Pharaoh to smear two golden streaks over his cheeks. War paint.
“We are the ruler of the Empire, the only, the greatest, the most powerful,” said Amenophis. “Is that not so?”
“So is it, Re,” answered the sphinx devotedly.
The Pharaoh released him with a wave, and the creature again took up his post next to the divan.
“You spoke of an offer,” said Seth.
“Ah. We knew that it would interest you.” Amenophis stroked the palm of his hand over the jaguar skins. “We want more of these.”
Seth swallowed in bewilderment. “I should … hunt jaguars for you?”
The childish Pharaoh broke into shrill laughter. “Oh, Seth, you dumbbell! No, of course not. We think we will find another who can provide us with a pair of these exquisite little animals, won’t we?” He was still laughing, but now he gradually calmed himself. “It concerns the following, Seth. Our new advisers … our friends … in their infinite wisdom had a vision.”
Everyone knew that sphinxes did in fact have access to ancient wisdom. Seth would have given his right hand to find out what game they were playing. It made him half-crazy not to be able to see through them.
“A vision of our death,” Amenophis went on.
“The priests of Horus would not have allowed you ever to die.”
“Well answered. But we both know that you are lying. Sometime our person would have become wearisome to you. And who would then have taken our place on the throne? You yourself, Seth? Yes, we almost believe that would have been possible.”
Seth had to control himself not to spit at his feet. “So what do you want?”
“The sphinxes are of the opinion that the power that could be dangerous to us is not of this world. At least not on the surface.”
“Hell?”
“Indeed. The prophecy of the sphinxes predicts that something will come out of Hell and annihilate us. Is that not completely enchanting?” He laughed again, but this time it didn’t sound so arrogant. “And who rules over Hell?”
“Lord Light.”
“That outlaw! That filth! But yes—Lord Light. He has already tried to agitate the Venetians against us. Our honorable traitors were able to prevent that, by giving the order to kill the messenger from Hell. But Lord Light will give himself no rest, we know that, and the prophecy of the sphinxes confirms it.” His eyes narrowed. “On the other hand—we will not die, Seth. No matter what Lord Light is hatching against us—he will not conquer us. Because we will pull the evil out by the root.”
Now it was Seth’s turn to laugh. In fact, he laughed so loud and so ringingly that Amenophis looked at him as though he doubted his high priest’s understanding.
“You want to kill Lord Light?” Seth got out. His v
oice sounded too high, and he urgently needed air. “Is that your intention?”
“Yes—and no. Because you will kill him, Seth. Not we.”
“That’s suicide.”
“That depends on you.”
Seth shook his head. He had expected something, but not that.
His eyes traveled to the two sphinxes. They must know what madness this proposal was. If it was just about getting him out of the way, why were they making this farce out of it instead of ending him with their swords?
He found the answer himself, and it disturbed him deeply: because they believed what the Pharaoh was saying. Amenophis hadn’t lied. The vision wasn’t an invention. The sphinxes feared Lord Light.
He got hold of himself and asked, “What exactly did the sphinxes see?”
“Nothing,” said one of the two, speaking unbidden for the first time. Amenophis let it happen without reprimanding the sphinx.
“Nothing?”
“Our visions do not reach us in the form of pictures,” said the sphinx, with great seriousness. “They are feelings. Impressions. Too cryptic to give concrete advice.”
Seth burst out laughing again, a trace too shrilly. “One of you had a … bad feeling, and therefore you want to kill Lord Light? Risk a war with Hell?” He paced excitedly back and forth a few times, then stopped again. “That is completely mad!”
The sphinx ignored his last words. “Something will come out of Hell and destroy the Pharaoh. That is the prophecy. And you will keep it from coming true.”
The Pharaoh made a motion with his hand. Something rustled behind an opening in the paneling, and Seth felt someone rush past him. A little later a short trumpet signal sounded.
Seth whirled around to the window and saw the mummy soldiers approaching the corralled priests with sickle swords raised.
“Stop it!” Seth’s voice sounded toneless.
A second hand signal, a new trumpet signal. The soldiers froze in motion.
For a moment there was silence. Even in the piazza below, everything seemed to have quieted.
“I will do as you wish,” said Seth.
