24 Bones

by Stewart, Michael F.

  Faris swallowed, nodding.

  “The Shemsu Seth and Shemsu Hor believe good and evil balance each other naturally. But as we have seen, this is not true.”

  Faris furrowed his brow. “If your role is to maintain the balance, then you failed, not the Shemsu Hor,” Faris said carefully, tying the points together.

  Tara’s face reddened, and her eyes narrowed. “Yes, Faris, we have all failed, but we might not have if … Let’s just say, with your help, it’ll never happen again. And among us, you will not be a watcher, but a dark king.”

  “I don’t care who they say they are.” Askari’s level tone carried through the yard. “They’re not wanted.”

  “How can it hurt?” Essam challenged.

  Askari shook his head. He sat on a step in a sunken corner of Tara’s courtyard that faced one of Coptic Cairo’s many churches. The church of Abu Serga had an outdoor baptistery and altar, which appealed to Askari’s ascetic character, allowing him to pray as the sun fell about his shoulders. Yet no amount of prayer resolved Faris’s amputation or the encroaching threat of the Shemsu Seth. He glanced at the Sisters of Isis. His skin crawled as if he had discovered a scorpion in his bedroll.

  “We number six, High Priest.”

  Askari squinted. “Don’t toy with me, Essam,” he warned.

  “You are high priest. They are young and strong.”

  The women standing silently near the sycamore tree were covered head to toe but for a thin aperture for their eyes. “How in Re’s name can you tell?”

  “They don’t move like they’re old.”

  Askari looked at the man. “No,” he said and tugged at his beard. “Send them away.”

  Essam pursed his lips and then shook his head. “Yes, High Priest.”

  A leader must consider his desires last in the consideration of the deir, Askari’s mentor had once said. But Rushdy was dead. Askari contemplated the cross above the altar.

  Essam returned.

  “They won’t depart on my order. You must talk to them, Askari.”

  Askari slapped his knees. The noise sent pigeons into the air. He climbed the steps and strode toward the black-garbed sisters.

  “Who sent you?” he asked and stopped in front of the faceless women. The raspy voice of the crone in the Hanging Church grated at the fringe of his thoughts.

  A figure stepped from the score; she had a hitch to her step that reminded him of someone.

  “The Mother Isis sent us,” she stated in a calm tone.

  “What is this mother’s name?” Askari searched his memory for the nagging familiarity.

  “She has no name. She descends from Isis,” the figure explained. “As you are Shemsu Osiris.”

  He cocked his ear at the sound of her voice. The line of figures murmured agreement until the woman raised her hand.

  “My name is Askari. What is your name?” he asked.

  She paused. “I am a Sister of Isis.”

  Then he knew. “You were a watcher at Deir Abd-al-Aziz.”

  Her head tilted downward.

  Askari reached up and jerked away her veil. The face behind the cloth had made him dinners and cleaned his home. “Rayla,” he accused. “Why are you here?”

  “Many of the watchers are sisters.”

  Askari threw his hands up to the sky. It was why the sisters had not arrived for Akhet. They were already there.

  “We need weapons,” she stated.

  “We only have a few ourselves and no time to train you,” Askari said and dropped his arms.

  “Teach us to connect,” Rayla said and parted her robe to reveal black cotton pants and a black tunic. Her figure was slim and athletic but for her withered right leg. A thin curved scimitar hung at her hip.

  Askari sighed. “Your mother’s motives grow clear. Trust the balance, indeed.” Askari chuckled, a slow ponderous sound. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, “even if we would teach you, the Fullness is dying, it has little to offer.”

  “We know, Shemsu Osiris. You will teach us to wield both Fullness and Void.”

  Askari staggered. “What? Void? You are on the side of evil?”

  “No,” she said. “Not evil, the Void is a tool, and we are keepers of the balance.”

  “I cannot teach you to grip chaos,” Askari said, his usual calm marred by a sneer. “Even if I could, to do so would risk losing you all to its abyss. The Void is at its height. It will destroy all but the most adept.”

  As he spoke, several of the women’s heads tilted to the sky. His gaze followed theirs to see falcons swooping, easily a dozen. To see so many was strange. Shen exclaimed joyously, his brood had returned.

  When Tara stepped through her apartment threshold and into the sunlight, Askari’s expression soured. Blood rushed to his face.

  “The sisters. The watchers,” Askari shouted, as he whirled between Tara and the gathered women. Falcon calls redoubled. “You destroyed the Shemsu Hor.” An aten slipped into his hand.

  “No, Askari, we never wished murder, only to reclaim dominion over the balance,” Tara said.

  “No companion will teach you, any of you,” Askari seethed.

  “And no companion shall,” Tara said quietly.

  She stepped aside to allow another figure to reach the door’s threshold.

  “I will teach them,” Faris’s voice shook, ragged with pain.

  The blood that throbbed in Askari’s skull blocked Faris’s words. His shadow wavered at the entry.

  “Faris, please stay in bed, you are ill.” The creases radiating from Askari’s eyes and across his brow deepened.

  “Faris has agreed to teach us,” Tara said.

  Askari’s chest ached with the betrayal. “Faris cannot reach the Fullness.” Askari’s breath came in short pants.

  A voice came from behind. “I wield both.”

  Askari staggered around to see Sam standing under the gate. Beside her was a wiry boy, and above, a row of falcons perched on the arch.

  “I will teach them both. Or we will all fail.”

  Chapter Thirty-five

  “I’m sorry, Seth,” Zahara cried. The tips of her hair curled and shriveled in the heat of David’s gaze.

  She fumbled in the darkness with her arms outstretched.

  David hadn’t removed a cloth from a jarlight since he had claimed his hold on the Void. He no longer needed light to see. His world, although hardly luminous, held its own sense of sight, a world of vibration and movement. Anything that brushed the air, he saw its friction in black or white, no matter the darkness present. Her flinches backward streaked white; her hot breath blew a shadow against the black of Void.

  Zahara’s slim body shook and gave her a ghostly appearance. David forced her toward him and slavered Void upon her neck. Her flesh shuddered gray.

  “I came back to warn you, David,” she said.

  Her shoulder blistered.

  “Seth, sorry, to warn you, Seth.”

  He used fear and pain to guide her, like training a dog to pee in the right spot.

  With most of the Shemsu Seth, he could read their minds plainly, but Zahara’s mind, despite her shivers and shudders, lay in shadow. His suspicions were roused. She had lain with Pharaoh; her thoughts were hidden, and the Void didn’t inspire trust, not in anyone.

  “Pharaoh says you will become little more than an animal if you remain enveloped in the Void. Eventually it will consume you.”

  “Why should he worry about me?”

  “That’s it, Seth, he doesn’t, he wants you to become like one of his crocodiles. Says you’ll be easier to train once the Void has chewed out your mind.”

  Her logic clawed, and his eyes blazed in the darkness. “Why are you telling me this? You’ve made you
r choice.” He caressed the round of her breast with the Void, or his hand, he was no longer able to tell. They were becoming the same.

  “Remember when you were ill, and everything else we’ve shared,” she said. “No matter what Pharaoh can do …” The gray tinge of her flesh lightened as she trembled. “I’m … yours.”

  He trickled Void down her breasts and it wormed into crevices.

  “I asked him how he could defeat you while you embraced Void.”

  David pulled back.

  “And?” he asked.

  “The only way you can wield Void continuously and not lose your mind is to hold the Osiris.”

  For a long while, his jaundiced glow ate at her.

  “You deserve a reward, Zahara,” he said. His teeth glinted under his Void-stare.

  Zahara quaked white.

  Faris was a small, shivering hump. Sam drew a blanket to his chin and knelt beside his bed in her mother’s apartment. In the neighboring room, Zarab slept. Shen guarded his door.

  The scent of antiseptic mingled with the metallic tang of blood. Even sleep failed to wipe the angry curl from Faris’s lips.

  Faris stirred at the wool’s scratching fibers and groaned as he curled away from Sam. She had spent the day training the Sisters of Isis, and Faris had helped for an hour before he had collapsed. Faris couldn’t touch the Void. Not without losing his mind.

  “Faris,” Sam whispered; the late hour demanded gentle speech. “I am sorry I left, but I know now.” He turned over and touched her face; hot fingertips traced veins, bone, and the bridge of her nose. “I am the Wedjat. I understand the role I am to play.” Sam waited for him to respond.

  “My leg.” His words carried no inflection.

  Sam hung her head. “They did what they could, but the tourniquet was on too long.”

  “Your tourniquet.”

  “I couldn’t lose you.”

  He smiled wryly.

  “My mother says you’re willing to join the sisters. When you’re better you can help to train them in the Void.”

  “But I’ve lost that too, Sam.”

  It was the first time he had used her name, and tears filled her remaining eye.

  “I can’t reach it. It’s too powerful. The sisters will never be able to harness it. We’re doomed.”

  “No, Faris. Those that can reach the Fullness can be trained to harness the Void.” He squinted at her. “I’ve been using it differently all my life, twining the Void and the Fullness. As long as I use some of the Fullness, I can maintain my … humanity.” She reached into the Fullness and extracted a thread over which she bound a cord of Void, like wrapping darkness around a shaft of sunlight.

  “I’m glad … Wedjat.” Faris turned from her.

  She touched his mind and tasted the ash of his depression, his fear of their relationship, and his insecurity of his worth. Sam reached deeper into his feelings for the intimacy they had once shared.

  Faris blocked. He twisted back, eyes blazing. “Don’t touch me.”

  Sam flexed her jaw. “I need you, Faris. You’re the only one, other than me, who can wield Void. You may not be able to touch it, but you can teach it. I need your help to train an army.”

  His eyes watered and lungs labored. He nodded.

  “You’ve changed,” Faris said. “Your eye glows.”

  “I know.”

  Pharaoh grunted at Zahara and returned to the scrubbing of his armpits. Sulfurous steam rose from the pool. The subterranean thermal spring reeked of rotten-egg, but Pharaoh breathed deeply and submerged to his neck. The heat eased the pain of his bones. In the weightless balm of the waters, the limitations on his mortal life ebbed.

  The thin woman twirled her hair. She wore linen pants belted at her waist by a cord and a tunic against which her nipples pressed. He had scowled at the Shemsu Seth guard that had let her through. She was a distraction. Seth’s residual claim on Zahara had finally broken as he lost his conscience in the Void. But the trip to Hong Kong had taken its toll, and Pharaoh was tiring. Others remained to be contacted by phone and that meant a return to the surface.

  “While you were gone, Osiris, Seth came to me.” She crouched at the rim of the pool. “He bragged that he grows more powerful than you, and once he has learned all he can, he will rule.”

  Pharaoh’s smoldering gaze trapped Zahara. “Why would he tell you this?”

  Her tongue traversed the line of her full upper lip before she answered: “He has no one else, and his ego grows with his power.”

  Pharaoh chuckled.

  When she leaned toward him, her tunic fell open. His meaty arm swept the surface of the spring in welcome. Zahara slipped out of her clothes and into the waters.

  A broad Shemsu Seth interrupted. “A message, Osiris, and by falcon.”

  It was the first falcon in a week. Pharaoh sighed and hauled himself out of the bath, unmindful of his erect nakedness. He considered the contents of the message: ‘The Wedjat. She is come and trains the Sisters of Isis. She brings the prophet.’

  Pharaoh gritted his teeth and crumpled the message in his fist. Zahara caressed his ankle with her fingertips. He growled and kicked her hand away.

  “It is time we finished this.”

  “Wedjat,” cried a Sister of Isis.

  Her sword slashed a block of masonry. The rock held, and then slowly slid apart at the joint of its wound. The cut shone like polished marble. She stepped back, and under her veil, she smiled.

  Sam flushed at the choice of battle cry.

  The apartment courtyard acted as a makeshift training area. The cobblestone surface held enough space to train a handful of sisters at one time. At best, it meant a hundred sisters had been trained over the past five days—the very last days before the Fullness died.

  They split into two groups of ten with Faris helping to explain the Void and to orient them to the skill of reaching. Sam took his graduates and trained them in the use of the Fullness, and then in the “twining”, as they had come to call her technique.

  In the sunken floor of the churchyard, Askari’s role was to test the sisters for their ability to reach the Fullness and to train those who could not in the more basic skill of swordsmanship. It was a compromise. He had refused to teach them the actual art of reaching. He had resisted even teaching them how to fight, but Sam had told him that the Wedjat needed his companions, as would the prophet. Askari growled, on his back with a sword tip pressed at his throat. Training was coming well.

  The next sister was smaller. In fact, as the days drew on, the size of the sisters changed from a uniform height and degree of athleticism to vastly ranging body types—fat, thin, tall, slight. Already they scratched the bottom of the nunnery’s ranks. Sam balanced a new block of stone on top of a stump.

  “Let me walk you through. Draw a single thread from the Fullness.” Sam waited, reaching to the sister and watching. The sister pulled at a tarnished filament and then drew away. “Try again.” The next wire she held was of fine gold, and Sam nodded. “Now the Void. Careful—”

  Void reared like an uncontrolled fire hose, and it lashed at the sister. Sam gripped a thick cord of Fullness and dove for the Void. Too late, it snaked around the woman and stripped the fibers of the Fullness. Her mind snapped. The woman collapsed and convulsed on the stone. Limbs cracked, and she bashed her skull against the stone block. Sam held her as she shook and then died. Silence pervaded the yard.

  “I fear she is only the first of many,” Sam said, looking down at the dead sister’s face. “May she not have died in vain.”

  Pharaoh and David faced each other in the Temple of Seth below the steps that led to the throne. Pharaoh wore the white of Osiris, and David, the red of Seth. The red echoed the glow of David’s eyes, which burned like molten iron, and brighter still when
they fell on the spine.

  “Trand, we have a job for you,” Pharaoh murmured to the shadows. Trand stepped into the circle of pale jarlight, a light David believed a sign of Pharaoh’s weakness.

  “The sisters are growing bold. Set siege and take Babylon tonight. Leave no one to witness,” Pharaoh continued. “I will be nearby, but have something else to take care of.”

  Trand nodded solemnly. “The traitor is mine.”

  “Tonight is Trand’s, Seth, but tomorrow night is ours. A million eyes will be on us. I’ve invited the press.” Pharaoh’s words hissed.

  David regarded him quizzically.

  “The world must see.” Pharaoh continued. “To create a modern myth takes media. Otherwise, we will simply be a bizarre happening somewhere in the Middle East. It took hundreds of years to build modern religion. I have a shorter time horizon.” Pharaoh laughed.

  David smiled. “And once you’re a god? What then?”

  “Nothing heralds a god’s coming like a flood.” Pharaoh’s fulsome smile illuminated the room. “Lake Nasser’s one hundred cubic miles of water will have to do.”

  From the corner of an entry a figure skulked away. To Pharaoh, it held the unmistakable psychic presence of Zahara. To David, it was a voluptuous gray specter.

  Pharaoh’s hand slashed across his neck, and David nodded distantly.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  “And what does God do for you?” Father John Harrelson of the Lord is Mighty Hour Special asked in a booming voice.

  Actor Ashley Starr was on cue and looked sharp, for which Father John was mighty glad, having been present at tapings where the man was helped onto the stage in a mist of alcohol. This was live.

  “Father, God helped me when I was down.” Ashley stared into the camera, eyes brimming.

  “Amen,” cried Father John.