24 Bones

by Stewart, Michael F.

  “Thy messengers hasten. Thy runners run. They ascend to heaven. They announce to Re,” Haidar chanted alone.

  “Re Riseth,” the men cried.

  The tour group stared. Some smiled and others raised cameras and phones.

  “Seth. Spit of the wall, vomit of the brick, what comes out of your mouth will be thrown back against yourself,” Haidar yelled.

  “Re Riseth,” his men called again.

  Syf landed on Haidar’s shoulder, and the tourists gasped delight. His deft fingers plucked the message tied to her talons, and the falcon nipped at Haidar’s knuckles. When the small sheaf was unfurled in his palm, Haidar grinned. A weight fell from his shoulders as he recognized the note’s penmanship.

  “Askari wishes that we run with Re and will be ready to channel the Fullness when we have need.”

  Haidar turned to the bird on his shoulder and said: “Today is a good day to die.”

  “Re Riseth!” the cry rose again.

  “Deliver the tablet and the Spine of Osiris or she dies,” the note stated.

  Askari kneaded a ball of dough. His fist pounded it into the kitchen’s stone table. Behind, a fire burned in the hearth.

  “We will send another falcon, David, but do not leave. I cannot spare a man to protect you, and you will not make it alone.”

  David’s sunburnt skin from his flight from Cairo cracked with each movement, his blisters oozed, and his flesh burned in the ambient heat of the oven. Between his fingertips, the letter shook. Earlier that morning a one-eyed man named Rabah had delivered the envelope.

  Inside was a note accompanied by a picture of Zahara. In the photo, her face twisted in anguish and her hand clutched tight to her breast—her naked breast. But that was not all. David had whipped away the waxen stub that had been Zahara’s thumb and then vomited.

  “They kidnapped her because of me. I have to rescue her.” His eyes met Askari’s and held.

  “You cannot take the spine, and you do not know where you are going.”

  “Oh, they’ll find me, I am sure of that.”

  “And then? You will hand over the tablet as a pair of hounds lunge from their handlers? As an ankh blade slips between your ribs?” Askari scoffed.

  David paled beneath his burned face. In the photo, another of the weird dwarfs held a long blade over Zahara’s heart. He remembered the hounds well.

  “But I must do something.”

  “Haidar may well return with your friend, hope remains. In the meantime, join us, you cannot help uninitiated, but it may be that you can be useful unconnected, carrying water or bringing food.”

  “I don’t understand. You’re going to pray for them or something?”

  “You are not a companion. Untested, you cannot reach the Fullness.”

  “What do you mean? I have the brand.” David moved to yank up his sleeve and reveal the folds of leathery skin, but Askari shook his head.

  “In this, the way of Horus is unlike Christianity. Baptism doesn’t get you in.” Askari chuckled. “Even so, do you remember much more than your baptism?” David shook his head. “Your father baptized you at the age of eight, not twelve, against the wishes of the deir and against tradition.”

  “You knew my father?” David whispered.

  “Of course, he wasn’t of my deir, but I knew him from Akhet ceremonies.”

  David pondered this revelation.

  “Why did he baptize me so young if it was against tradition?”

  “No one understood, we suspect his mother was one of the Sisters of Isis and he fell prey to their plans. I’m sure you know that no one can ask him now.” Askari watched David.

  “He committed suicide to atone for me.”

  Askari started in surprise. “I’m sorry, but that is not true.”

  “My grandmama told me so.” Confusion fogged David’s thoughts.

  “No, David, your father didn’t commit suicide,” Askari spoke quietly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your father was murdered.” David leaned forward, fingers white against the butcher block. “Your father died in a bed filled with scorpions. Scorpions are poisonous, but it takes a great number of stings to kill. He was murdered.”

  “By whom?”

  “The Sisters of Isis are known to keep scorpions.”

  David squinted.

  “I’m sorry, but your baptism was false. You were not old enough, nor were you ready.”

  David nodded slightly and jerked back to face Askari.

  “What is this Fullness, is it like reaching nirvana?” David asked.

  “Life is a cycle, and energy has movement. The Shemsu Hor were once considered demigods because they could connect with this energy and control it.”

  David lifted a dubious eyebrow. The Heru Shesu, or Shemsu Hor, were a predynastic legend. Most scholars could count the references to them on one hand, the clearest from the walls of the pyramid of Unas and from the Turin Papyrus as part of a funerary ritual. But there was no sign of them in any text that wasn’t a reference to something five thousand years earlier. He couldn’t believe that so much time had passed with such power undocumented.

  “Individually we have some strength,” Askari continued. “Together, and with the focus of others, we can wield greater power. This is the power of the Osiris. The Osiris can draw from uninitiated others, primal or human, simply bleeding them of their psychic energy and amplifying that strength, weaving, and binding it.”

  David held up both his hands and laughed.

  “Follow me.” Askari wheeled and abandoned the dough, leaving it in a dusting of flour as he strode from the kitchen. David slapped his palms on his pants and followed.

  “Do you prefer any particular weapon?” Askari asked when David had caught up.

  “A bow, I guess.” David shrugged.

  “Your father’s choice.” Askari veered toward the temple. When David hesitated at the door, Askari waved him inside. A feeling of peace blanketed David as he crossed the threshold. He couldn’t attribute the balm merely to cool shade. Askari turned to his left and entered a small chamber, its sunk-relief work depicting the familiar battle scenes of Horus and Seth. When Askari grabbed one of the squares of relief, he pulled it from its socket and lowered the slab to the ground. He removed three additional stone panels and revealed a much depleted weapons rack.

  From beside the few dozen sundiscs that remained, Askari snatched a simple straight bow. Despite its substantial length, it wouldn’t have much more than a forty-pound draw, far less than the squat compound bows David used in the archery club.

  Askari wrapped the bow shaft between his legs and grunted as he strung it with twisted gut. Leaving the stone slabs on the floor, he handed David a quiver of arrows. These were wood, tipped with barbed iron heads. These he didn’t have at the archery range.

  Askari brushed past. They burst back into the sunlight. David’s neck itched in the heat. When the first sweat trickled down his red cheeks, he nearly cried out. They plodded into the desert, sand sloughing from their steps.

  “There.” Askari pointed to a wooden pail approximately fifty yards away. “Can you hit that?”

  David squinted at the primitive bow and rough-hewn arrows and bobbed his head. He wasn’t really sure given what he had to work with. Askari gave him the bow and waited with his arms crossed.

  David drew an arrow from the quiver and nocked it on the bowstring. When the bowstring grazed his earlobe, he rested his finger against the arrow and steadied it against the bow shaft. The desert air was still. He let fly, giving the arrow a greater arc to counter the weight of the arrowhead. The arrow thudded into the pail.

  A great shot.

  David whooped and handed Askari the bow. Askari didn’t look him in the eye as he to
ok it. David chuckled.

  Askari nocked an arrow, jerked the bow toward the target, half drew it, released, and then sighed. The arrow wobbled in the air.

  “Hah!” David scoffed.

  “Re riseth!”

  Tendons strained along Askari’s neck and his outstretched hand. David jumped back. The arrow immediately shifted direction, accelerated, and cracked into the pail. Splinters burst like a duck’s feathers caught by a shotgun blast. David’s jaw dropped. Askari slapped the bow shaft against David’s shoulder.

  “How—” David began.

  “That is what I can show you,” Askari replied, leaving David to fry in the desert heat.

  Haidar scanned the alley of mausoleums left and right. Silence weighed on his shoulders. Their group’s only advantage was surprise, so they had split into four troops of twenty and approached the City of the Dead from the four corners of the compass. They would each burrow to the central temple and then start to clear the tunnels systematically outward. He dared not reach out to the companions’ minds, fearful of meeting the mind of someone aware, someone touching the Void.

  Haidar cracked his knuckles, crouching at the corner of two outer walls that climbed at his back. They would enter at sunrise. Although the temple was located underground, Haidar preferred to attack in daylight. Little was known of the temple or how many the Shemsu Seth numbered. They knew to expect dogs, crocodiles, and their fierce dwarf handlers.

  What they did not expect were the beetles that Trand had set as sentries. And as the Shemsu Hor crept forward, tiny legs sounded the alarm.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The deir had become pandemonium.

  Two rows of white-robed men lay on the granite floor of the inner sanctum, packed close enough that David needed to watch where he stepped. He cocked his head at the writhing companions. They sweated as though they ran a marathon.

  Askari had fought with Jamal to allow David to watch and help. Only the dire situation and lack of support from Rushdy and Michael defeated Jamal, who had argued that they already had one uninitiated person in the temple’s inner sanctum, pointedly noting Faris’s presence before finally bowing to necessity.

  Faris and David fed water to the muttering mouths of the perspiring men. Faris glared at David as another companion choked from too much fluid.

  “If they would sit up—” David complained.

  Faris’s hand made a chopping motion. David frowned; he had already been shushed to silence twice. The pail’s explosion replayed in David’s mind, and he acquiesced to Faris’s demands. The unsubstantiated theory of an Egyptian evolution into Christianity was worth, at worst, a contested tenure-track position at the university. But Askari had shown him something more, something infinitely bigger than job and status.

  The men convulsed and knocked their skulls and their bare heels against the floor. Nothing showed how they reached the Fullness. When the clay spout spilled a stream into a companion’s mouth, he sputtered water across David’s cheeks. David tightened his grip on the pitcher and grumbled. Eyes rolled back in another’s head; the body seethed as fluid poured from the sides of his mouth. David wiped his face with his ragcloth shirt and gagged on its reek.

  Faris traded David’s pitcher with a damp towel and pointed to Jamal’s sweat beaded forehead. The man shook in seizure and foamed from his lips. As David watched, the leader’s wrist struck the floor and broke. Perhaps, David considered, accessing the Fullness wasn’t all he imagined it to be.

  The lowest portion of the Osiris, five smooth platinum cylinders, revolved in Pharaoh’s palm. His fingers ached from arthritis, and he dipped into the Void to ease the pain. The ache grew daily. He would soon be lost if he continued to use the Void as an analgesic. But soon was a matter of months, not days. And only days mattered.

  The cylinders hummed as they rubbed. He had often meditated with the pieces granted to Seth. That Seth had been bestowed the lowest portion was something of an ancient joke. In a legendary battle, Horus had torn off Seth’s testicles. Other vertebrae lay in Pharaoh’s lap. But not all.

  The Mother of the Sisters of Isis had met him yesterday evening at the gates to the City of the Dead. Even wearing the complete abaya and niqab, the force of her anger pierced the eye-slit. But having handed him the locations of each piece of the Osiris save the spinal cord, a location he wondered if they even knew, the sisters were no longer of value. Her ire had slipped over him. Her demand to know the Void, and for Samiya’s return to teach them, had met his diseased stare. By the time she turned away empty handed, only fear had crept through her veil.

  Pharaoh regarded the fractured pieces, and his lip curled. The Shemsu Hor were the final threat to his plans. Without all of the vertebrae, the spine could not be assembled, and without Horus’s relic, the spine could not be innervated.

  His hand shook, the cylinders jangling.

  The neck vertebrae were six rough electrum ingots topped by a diamond prism. The diamond was a surprise. The fabled Benben stone worshiped for millennia by the priestesses of Heliopolis, the Sun Temple. When they handed over Samiya, they also handed over its location, and for months, the dwarfs had burrowed into the temple, under the modern Cairo suburb, to claim this prize. In the blue-tinged light of the phosphorescent vials, it brewed a murky rainbow. Pharaoh’s sigh rattled in his lungs. He was close to his goal.

  Long ago as a rag boy, clawing through garbage, he had heard the prophecy as every boy in Garbage City had. Even then he had known he had no part in it, even though his red hair had marked him as different. He was no beast, no prophet, no Wedjat. Only one option had remained, to become a Shemsu Seth, to lead as Pharaoh, and finally, to strive to be even more …

  Trand struggled up the overlarge steps. As Pharaoh stood, the pieces fell from his lap to clack discordantly on the floor.

  “Pharaoh, they have entered the catacombs, and the guards to the entries have left the doors open for the Shemsu Hor to pass.” Trand smiled, but his eyes clenched suddenly. Pharaoh had been hard on Trand after the Void-wielding watcher’s escape. But the dwarf had a hard head and the blow from the djed staff had not killed him.

  It was an important day for Trand. Sam was on a mission in the Sudan, and Trand coordinated the Pharaoh’s orders against the Shemsu Hor assault. The achievements of the mentor’s pupil would reflect on him as surely as the battle’s outcome.

  “Let them pass and continue to guide them into Seth’s Hall.” Pharaoh wanted to watch. “Once here, kill all but …” He looked pensive. “Two.” He regretted letting any escape, but without visible proof of their annihilation, the last companions would have hope. “And, Trand.” The dwarf’s bowed legs slipped over another course of stone, and then he stopped. “Chain Zahara above the pit. They should see her, too.”

  Trand bounded down the last steps.

  “You need to keep giving them water,” Faris told David, grimly returning the handle of the pitcher. “Only a dribble, wet their lips with the cloth if you have to. Each time they choke, they can’t help the companions in Cairo.” The rows of men either convulsed or were motionless. Their cries had settled to murmurs and moans. The room smelled of urine.

  “What are you planning to do?” David asked.

  “I’m going to connect.”

  “You?” Faris had explained to David why he was not one of the men who lay on the ground.

  “I can’t reach the Fullness, but I can touch the Void.” Faris did not explain further and ignored David’s pursed lips. Faris lay beside Askari, who forcibly shook.

  Sweat continued to pour from the men, but they thrashed less. A few curled fetally. David grew worried that no one would be left to show him how to reach the Fullness.

  As Faris’s irises rolled into the back of his skull, David dripped water into a companion’s mouth. He sputtered weakly.

  David shook
his head, exchanged the pitcher for a cloth and then wrung drops of water onto another man’s chapped lips, his tongue swiping them greedily.

  Pharaoh dodged behind his throne as a sundisc broke a limb from the granite chair. The Shemsu Hor attacked in coordinated groups and swarmed across the temple floor. In the mob of invaders, Zahara hung beside the pit. She flinched as swords clanged and gunfire popped.

  Pharaoh had imagined the Shemsu Hor ushered into Seth’s hall with their heads hung in the shame of capture. He had pictured himself rising to give a brief but derogatory speech, then watching as they were torn to shreds.

  No speech, no shame. A sundisc struck the throne’s back and flame cascaded down the steps.

  Several dozen Shemsu Seth lay strewn near the altar; amongst the corpses were dwarfs and a score of hounds. As discs showered sparks and bit into the hides of dogs and Shemsu Seth alike, Pharaoh drew deep breaths. A lever protruded beside the throne and he twisted to pull it. Beside the pit, a steel portcullis rose.

  The rattle of chains attracted Pharaoh’s attention. The noise also drew the interest of the first crocodile that entered through the raised gate. Zahara kicked at the threat. Pharaoh had forgotten about her. Dead bait was less likely to snare a croc. And they still needed the tablet.

  “Trand,” he shouted. “Save the girl.” A hundred crocodiles moved ponderously through the yawning darkness. Their corded hides were a dirty yellow color. The crocs, although trained, were unpredictable. A crocodile ran fast and snapped up a dwarf by his leg. Pharaoh winced. The croc dragged the yowling man back into its lair.

  Pharaoh wobbled as he stood, but then straightened, eyes flaring with Void. The djed staff lifted to the pyramidal roof. Void-rage flushed through him and into the weapons of his men. Lightning arced from the corners of the ceiling and struck the staff’s tip. Below, the dwarfs roared and swung their mattocks like willow branches. Blades whipsawed through the companions’ flesh and bone.