24 Bones

by Stewart, Michael F.

  In the Fullness, Faris’s thigh loomed purple and corrupted. Larvae of darkness squirmed in its folds. She debrided the wound. Then she sewed, at first fumbling and then with greater skill. She closed three of the deepest gashes and quelled the bleeding. Sam released the Fullness. The needle vanished. Faris’s heart beated irregular and weak.

  “He’s so cold.” Doubt penetrated her mother’s tone as she clutched Faris’s hand and touched his wrist for a pulse. “How can you …?” she broke off.

  “By opening my mind to him,” she replied.

  “Be careful, Sam.”

  Askari knew she was Shemsu Seth. He might be as much trying to kill her as saving Faris.

  “Mother, come hold my neck. If I fall unconscious, or slump, hurt me. That should break the connection.”

  Tara winced as she shifted to crouch behind her daughter. Her arms wrapped around Sam’s neck. Tara shook, but the closeness comforted, and her shivers began to subside.

  “Good,” Sam said and smiled. She reached for the Fullness and opened the doors to her mind.

  The pain racked. Claws cleaved gashes into her chest. Teeth gnawed at her forehead. Sam cried out to her mother. But no punch came. Pain battered her senses, and she flailed against the paws that pulled at the web of her soul. Suddenly, the gorging stopped. Her chest heaved and ached. For the first time in many years, she was blind. Utter blackness, no matter if she turned left or right, conscious or not, she did not know. She stood, helpless, and circled with her arms widespread.

  A weight dropped from above and wrestled her to the ground. Paws pinned her on her back so that her shoulder blades winged behind. Something chewed at her spine and neck. Flesh tore, and it snarled as it feasted.

  She shouted for her mother to wake her. A powerful swat rolled her over. She could see. Sam expected to view her excavated chest, but instead her breasts and abdomen were whole and smooth. A cat-man straddled her. His pupils were black slits in green globes, and his nose perched on a protruding snout of needlelike teeth. Still his face was part human, full lipped and with cheeks brushed with soft downy hair. From a devil’s peak, a black mane cascaded to frame his face. He licked clawed fingers, human in shape and function.

  The ache of his bites faded. He picked at her skin, plumping it, and searched for a spot to curl up. He lay down upon her and when he did, he fell into her, and she knew him.

  Not only did he open to her, but she to him. His memories and fears were an avalanche, and she showered in the distillation of his life. Moments fell like raindrops: the fall into the sand, the comfort of a father’s waist, family at a table, stern reprimands. These memories were foreign to Sam’s loveless youth.

  A tumult of recollection: galloping across desert dunes, tears streaming from eyes, grim determination before a brown-garbed Askari, headless bodies under the aten of Re, black in the Temple of Seth, confusion, a conversation in darkness, sundiscs blazing, death, the Fullness strung and ulcerated as if a perforated bowel, shouts of “Sobek’s beast! Sobek’s beast!” The fear and weight of Sobek, acceptance of death. Rebirth.

  Memories entwined. A new one formed. She watched it, a drop of resin that hardened to amber. It was something Sam had never fully known and now shared.

  Colors exploded beneath Sam’s lids. She yelled in surprise. Her mother sobbed and punched Sam, coiling for another blow. Sam caught the next strike in her palm.

  “No!”

  “Sam,” her mother cried and hugged her.

  “No, Mother, I need to go back.”

  “You can’t. Your heart stopped, you weren’t breathing. You can’t.” Tara shook Sam’s shoulders. Sam looked into her mother’s stricken face and saw love.

  Sam checked Faris’s neck for a pulse. The beat was steady, his breathing barely perceptible.

  “I have to make sure he’s okay,” Sam said.

  “Sam, you’ve done enough.”

  “I need him.” She frowned and nodded in the darkness. “I do.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Neither do I, but I have to be sure.” Sam shut her eyes and reached to Faris.

  The yellow glow hinted at life. Faris, covered in a gluey mass, lay upon the ground. He struggled at its silken ties. Sam ran to him and pulled webbing from his face. It was no longer the visage of a warrior cat, but a handsome, noble face, edged in blue-black hair. Strings of white gum stuck to her fingers as she caressed his temple.

  “Faris,” Sam said, but having drunk his deepest memories and sipped at his fears, little remained to say.

  “You’re not evil, Samiya,” he said. “You did what you had to.” His eyes were large and moist, trim-bearded cheeks accentuated a strong chin that balanced a slightly bent nose. She ran her finger across his fuzzy jaw line, bent, and kissed his lips, enjoying the tickle of his beard. He smiled, and it was strong and confident. Tears welled in Sam’s eyes.

  “And you are luckier and more loved than you know, Faris.”

  He pulled the cocoon open. Black curls sprang from his wiry chest. Slippery from the oily web, she slid over his skin. Sam breathed the subtle scents of salt and incense. The skein draped back over them both. Warm, full, and whole.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  In his dreams, David practiced control of the Void. When the sun could stand at noon one minute and in the palm of his hand the next, time became an abstract concept. His body had shut down to recuperate from the stabbing, but his mind had never blazed with such wakefulness. If he had been fully conscious, he might have been frightened. Conscious, his mind might have shattered. The clay of the astral world molded easily in his hands, formed by thought, animated by Void.

  Upon realizing he existed on this ethereal plane, David recreated Askari’s arrow-and-pail test. He thought of a desert landscape; heat beat at his brow. A hundred feet beyond, he placed the wooden pail. He moved the pail further and shrunk his target. Satisfied when he could barely find the pail upon the horizon, he dreamed a simple bow into his hand, no more than a strung yew staff and a slim arrow, its tip whittled sharp. He faced away from the pail, drew the bowstring, and fired. The black fletching twirled. The arrow sailed in an arc opposite the pail. It began to plummet toward sand.

  “Seth,” David roared and flung his hand forward and then tossed it back over his shoulder. Some giant nimbly plucked the arrow from its path and heaved it. The pail exploded into fragments. David grinned.

  “I am god,” he said aloud.

  Suddenly, Pharaoh laughed beside him.

  David’s ire rose, and soon he looked down upon Pharaoh, who stood like a sapling in the shadow of David’s tree trunk legs. His skin grew rough as bark, and arms transformed into corded limbs.

  Pharaoh expanded to meet him. Pharaoh’s flesh turned green-brown, and it oozed steaming fluid from between crocodilian scales. He met David’s eyes, smiled, and then grew so that David stood at his knee and stared up at the lording pharaoh. Pharaoh reached down, snatched a boulder from the earth, a pebble between talons, and hurled it into the distance. A cloud mushroomed into the atmosphere.

  “This,” Pharaoh’s thunderous voice swept the desert, “is not real. No limit to your power lies here.” David shrank back to his initial height and size. “Be aware, however, your last effort shook the temple.”

  The prophecy foretold, David thought. A beast shall rise. Power will be given unto him over all kindreds. He will open his mouth in blasphemy and cause the earth to tremble. He rubbed his chest. It all fit. His life’s work. He was no false beast. He was the beast incarnate.

  “Remember our secret, you and I, why you survived the blow.” Pharaoh’s finger tapped where David rubbed.

  David hoped his surprise hadn’t registered. David concentrated and tried to read Pharaoh’s mind, but he faced a black orb that sloughed his attempts. If Pharaoh noted his clumsy
efforts, he did not show it.

  “I can teach you control. This is most important. If you can control power, it can be useful. Out of control,” he shrugged, “in time it will destroy you.”

  David nodded.

  “First, tell me of the tablet,” Pharaoh demanded.

  David’s thoughts translated into actions, and he looked down at his belt as he wondered what to say. Pharaoh grinned and David knew that his mind was open to the Pharaoh. Pharaoh reached and pulled off the cinched cloth at David’s waist, opening his robes.

  “I wrap this around the Osiris?” Pharaoh asked, but he did not need David’s answer. Pharaoh studied the characters inked inside the cotton strip. “Clever—simple, but clever. Similar to my lesson for you, David. It’s important that the beast prepare.”

  David wrung his hands.

  “If you truly wish power, you must first open your soul.” Pharaoh hovered over him and fear slid through David’s flesh as he recalled the scratch of nails against his brain. Pharaoh’s eyes shone.

  David had little more to lose. He cleared his mind and bared his chest. Jagged tendrils of Void blazed from Pharaoh’s eyes into David’s, igniting their shared desert with a blacklight that scorched. The earthy smell of fired clay pervaded the air. Pain slid molten through his veins. David flailed, unable to control the direction of his limbs. Only his head stayed immobile. His body whipped around it and wrenched his neck’s cords and tendons. Then, it stopped.

  A hum of energy hung in the air. They had returned to David’s desert.

  The Void tingled, as though it had insinuated itself into David’s cells, into their nuclei, his DNA. He embraced it.

  “You will be my son, David.”

  David nodded.

  “And, in time, my brother. In your room, where you lie unconscious, is a vial of blue fluid.”

  David held his breath with anticipation.

  “Lift it to the ceiling and lower it to the floor. Do so as many times as you can without breaking it.”

  David deflated with the simplicity of the task.

  “I can’t have you lift the temple yet,” Pharaoh answered in response to David’s dismay.

  David laughed, and it was loud and unpracticed. “I suppose not, Pharaoh.”

  “Sometimes, David, it is easier to do big things than small. This is the lesson.”

  Pharaoh blinked out of David’s sight. David spun and searched for him. Sand grit blew in his face.

  David shut his eyes and tried to exit into the world of consciousness. Nothing coalesced. He struggled to wake, to see the jar in reality, but his body and mind would not follow. Chest pain flooded him when he released the Void. The control he had in his unconscious did not yet carry over to the conscious world.

  He dreamed the vial. It immediately appeared several paces away. The landscape turned into a sandstone-walled chamber. He imagined a ceiling, and then levitated the vial to its top and set it back down. Up it went, then down, up, down, up, down.

  “Stop. Stop. Stop, David!” A voice infiltrated.

  He drew the vial toward him and held it in his hands. His head ached, and he reached deeper into the Void.

  “David,” the sound soothed.

  He laughed, in dream and in reality. His thoughts turned the vial and shaped it into the lithe form of his memory of Zahara. She stood naked and flushed in the gray light. He touched her mind and sensed her confusion before she barred him. He probed further, caressing, but her thoughts remained as hidden as Pharaoh’s had. However his growing interest was not in her mind. His lips pressed against hers, and his robes fell completely away.

  David drifted on the heels of their sex into deep slumber and discarded Zahara to the conscious world. Later, he returned to his dreams to practice with the Void, and once more, he took Zahara to bed. Distant shouts interrupted her moans. He chased the tease of reality greedily, hungry to be free. When he woke, he knocked Zahara backward. She toppled onto the ground with a cry.

  David sat forward. His hands probed his face and scraped the crust from his cemented lashes. His eyes opened to stale blue light emitted from a vial on a pedestal. David strained to hear the voices. He reached out with his mind, and the voice became clear.

  “At the new moon, as Akhet begins, the Shemsu Seth shall rise,” Pharaoh shouted in a chamber deep in the temple.

  David pictured Pharaoh lifting the golden staff high, the Osiris wrapped in its cloth shroud. He suddenly saw the genius of it. Osiris, god of the dead, his secrets unveiled only when he wore his funerary vestments, mummified.

  “David,” a voice whispered, and he recognized it as the one who had hissed prophecy.

  He turned his neck awkwardly; Zahara was ragged and bruised. She pressed torn clothes to her chest and groin. Her cheeks were gaunt and her eyes hollow.

  “David,” she repeated. He noted the deadness in her gaze, but it failed to stir any life in his heart.

  “How long?” he croaked.

  “Three days,” she replied, shaking. He struggled to sit, scabs cracked under the bandage strapped around his chest. Unconsciously, he drew the Void about him to block pain, but it slipped from him and his jaw clenched. Lethargy hindered his movements, but he forced himself to swing his legs over the stone slab where he had lain.

  Hieroglyphic text inscribed on the walls rose vertically from ground to ceiling; charred gouges criss-crossed the relief. He turned to the vial, found the object in the Void, and tried to lift it to the ceiling. It wobbled, and then smashed on the floor. Fluid splattered like luminescent egg white. Angry, David grasped madly for the Void to no avail.

  He noted a shadow near the door, even though it was behind him. It flitted away. David knew the message the dwarf carried: The beast wakes.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  “Sam?” Faris called. “I can’t see.”

  Sam’s body ached in sharp contrast to the ephemeral bliss of the lovemaking she and Faris had shared in the Fullness. Tara, an ineffectual chaperone, shivered between them on the shore.

  “It’s all right, Faris. We’re still in the labyrinth,” Sam replied, her voice throaty. She blushed when her mother looked toward her.

  “Sam, I was afraid,” her mother said.

  Sam placed an arm on Tara’s shoulder. “We need to find a way out.”

  “My leg, it hurts so much.” Faris groaned.

  Sam pressed her hand against his forehead. She cupped him in the Fullness, but she was drained. She couldn’t maintain a proper link. In her brief connection, she touched the sickness of his leg. He moaned when she relinquished the flow.

  “Faris, don’t touch the Void. You’re too weak, and you’ll be lost. Mother, stay with Faris, I’m going to search for an exit.” Tara nodded in the darkness, and Sam clambered to her feet and ascended the bank. The chamber was huge. She skirted the river.

  Although she had not heard of any Nile tributaries that led into the desert, at one time the river would have carved a long channel through the rock. Distance from the Temple of Seth was almost as good as an exit.

  She picked her way across the river’s rock-strewn shore. In the rubble, old tires lay piled amongst pop bottles and bits of wooden boards. She collected the wood. The river ended in a rock face and passed into a tunnel with several feet of air between the ceiling and water. As she explored the lips of the cave, water eddied about her thighs. With a grunt of satisfaction, she hugged the bank and forged upriver to Faris and Tara. In her arms she carried a stack of short boards.

  “I’m going to make Faris a raft,” she explained.

  Tara’s face crumpled.

  “The river is slower here, Mother. We can’t carry Faris, but we can float him.”

  Faris had already fallen into unconsciousness. Sam set to work threading the planks with tangles of fishi
ng line and strips of cloth from her robe. When she finished, she sat naked but for a crude loincloth fashioned from the remainder. Her fingers bled from manipulating the fishing line.

  She dragged the misshapen craft, heavy with sodden wood, into the water, where it sank. Sam knelt in the river. But then she recalled the plastic pop bottles and other vessels amongst the refuse. She collected them and strapped the containers to the raft’s bottom. Finally, the junk floated.

  Tara held the raft while Sam carried Faris to his litter, his arms clasped about her neck. He shuddered as he eased under the cool surface. Each with an arm on the raft for balance and Faris between them, Sam and Tara exited the chamber through the river mouth.

  The black water hid rocks that scraped shins and bruised knees. Tara finally flopped into the water and floated beside the raft. After Sam cracked her knee against a few more boulders, she did the same. Together they drifted. Threading clefts, passing under low shelves and majestic vaults, they wound with ears submerged, silent. Sam wallowed in the drugged sensation of movement.

  The river grew shallower and its flow weaker, until their feet ground against the pebbled bottom. When she raised her head from the water, she jerked to attention. The sharp yips of hounds echoed in the dark atria of the labyrinth’s heart.

  “Sam?” her mother asked from opposite the raft.

  “Shh,” Sam cautioned. Her fingers enveloped a large stone. She lifted it and prepared to strike. Ahead, the stream split into two, the water volume diminishing to a trickle. The barks came from the right-hand side. Sam’s hackles rose. She glanced at Faris, who blinked in the dark. She splashed over to her mother and leaned close to her ear.