24 Bones

by Stewart, Michael F.

  “I send a note to the deir,” Shen stammered.

  “The deirs are abandoned, Shen. You know this.”

  “But what of the men sent to claim the Osiris?”

  “We know it is whole.” Askari placed his hand overtop the old man’s. Shen lowered his eyes and allowed the message to slip free of the falcon’s claw.

  Askari unfurled the tiny parchment.

  “Qar kher neter—Qar, at the necropolis?” Askari looked confused. “This is where we found Faris. It is where Sam plans to surprise …”

  His eyes flew wide.

  “Why, Shen?”

  Shen’s face screwed into an ugly snarl. “I could never be a true companion. You made me ashamed of what I was.”

  Askari’s jaw clenched. He had known Shen for over three decades. “We did include you, Shen. As keeper of the falcons—”

  “Pharaoh showed me that I had worth. He showed me my true powers.”

  “He used you for your falcons.”

  Tears ran down the sides of Shen’s cheeks. Askari ignored the tears; he had seen too many crocodiles last night.

  Shen struck out with a black ankh sheathed in Void. Askari dodged. The blade pierced the chicken-wire cage. Age slowed Shen. Askari’s counter carried gentleness. His fist struck the base of Shen’s neck, snapping it as easily as he might one of the pigeons that hooted excitedly in their hutch.

  Shen’s head twisted awry in the courtyard dust.

  “You test me, Re. Your companions number five.”

  Chapter Forty

  A few hours later, night had fallen. But it wasn’t the night that pressed down on the shoulders of the Shemsu Hor and Sisters of Isis—it was the tar-black weight of blindness as they groped forward, deep in the tunnels of the Shemsu Seth underworld. As the Fullness drained, their control snapped. What had begun as a hum, a slow cadence of Wedjat, broke into alarmed shouts.

  The cavern shuddered. Gravel fell across backs and heads and slid from the walls, pushing sisters into the emptied crocodile pits. A lantern dropped and fire streamed down the slope.

  “Hold one another,” Sam called, and they linked arms.

  With the help of Askari, Sam pulled the fallen sisters from the pit, glad for the reptiles’ absence, although knowing it meant terror elsewhere. A stalactite fell and splintered upon the path before them. Sam shielded Zarab, who trembled like a newly born calf.

  Through the hundreds of feet of rock above, shouts trickled down. Sam had been reaching, and she clutched her head as Void enveloped the area. The final filaments of Fullness were unraveling.

  “We haven’t much time, Askari. The Fullness has hours, maybe less. Lead the companions and sisters. I must go on ahead.”

  “Re be with you,” Askari said.

  Sam found the niche to the shaft tomb, since cleared by the dwarfs, and climbed up the rock chimney and then the rungs of the ladder. She hauled Zarab behind.

  They broke into the tomb of Qar, but dared not wait for Askari to regroup. Only a fragment of the Fullness remained. And all of the sisters drew from that same shallow well.

  Pharaoh stood upon a platform used by tourists to photograph themselves with the Sphinx and pyramids in the background. An array of microphones bristled before him. Speakers blared and announced the start of the nightly laser show. Tourists wearing T-shirts, shorts, and skirts filled rows of plastic chairs. Not even the rifle-bearing police questioned the ranks of black robed men who arrived with crossbows, flails, and maces. The costumed Seth and ornately garbed Pharaoh, wearing the Atef, or headdress of Osiris, met only a bombardment of flashes as tourists snapped pictures. The strange hairless dogs gave pause, but when they saw the hounds’ red eyes, the guards looked away.

  “Six millennia past, demigods reigned on Earth.”

  The audience hushed at Pharaoh’s words.

  “Six millennia past, Osiris died to allow his people entry to the underworld through the Halls of Ma’at.” The resonant voice carried. “His gift was not eternal.”

  The Shemsu Seth gathered at Pharaoh’s back; they lined the path to the mortuary temple beneath the Great Pyramid of Khufu and stood on the shoulders and paws of the Great Sphinx. From their posts, the Shemsu Seth controled much of the Giza plateau. Several of the police swaggered toward the causeway linking the Sphinx to Khafre’s pyramid. The causeway had once led to the Nile bank, instead of the dusty suburb of Giza. Media crews arrived and turned their cameras toward the dais.

  Pharaoh faced the press. “Today you will witness the epic myth of Osiris and the battle between Seth and Horus. Tonight the battle will be replayed. Witness Osiris’s resurgence, a myth reborn!”

  The audience clapped and rubbed hands together, chatting to their neighbors.

  Seth stepped from the darkness behind Pharaoh. His eyes glowed and the crowd murmured surprise. Pharaoh descended from the platform, allowing him room.

  “As the shadow moon crests and Re’s eyes are averted, we enter the Age of Matter. Chaos shall reign,” Seth stated. His monotone voice reached the microphones and thundered over the audience. Lasers suddenly illuminated the background and flickered over the Sphinx and pyramids.

  The crowd exclaimed and clapped.

  “Today you will witness the purpose of the Great Pyramid. This night you will see that it is the Temple of the Phoenix and the microphone of a god!” He pointed at his chest.

  One cameraman rushed to better capture Seth against the backdrop of lit pyramids. Something behind the platform distracted his focus, however, and his lens lengthened as he zoomed closer. He peered into the strobing lights and stumbled backward at the horror.

  “Oh, Allah. Crocodiles!” he cried.

  Shouts erupted from the audience. The guards shrugged off their weapons.

  “I need background on the Osiris and Seth myths,” a female reporter screamed at her press truck. “The tip was real!” Dark shadows roamed along the sloping causeway to Khufu and neared through the desert.

  Police gunfire rattled as they shot approaching crocodiles.

  Screaming tourists toppled over chairs and shoved each other in their exodus to Giza’s well-lit streets.

  Seth didn’t flinch. After a pause filled with gunfire, he lifted hands engulfed in blue flame. The sight spurred the crowd’s fear. At his back, a light, like a throbbing early dawn, obscured the flashes of gun muzzles.

  With his audience panicked, and alone on the stage, Seth turned. Pharaoh strode, already halfway to the Great Pyramid, the heart of Osiris a false sun in his grip.

  Chapter Forty-one

  Sam and Zarab crouched in the stairwell of the tomb of Qar. The swarm of crocodiles and hounds had yet to discover their scent. Pharaoh, the pulsing Spine of Osiris in his grip, advanced up the causeway toward the Queens’ Pyramids below the Great Pyramid. Lasers zigzagged across their slopes. David’s voice, muffled by distance and distortion, rumbled from Giza below. The acrid reek of ozone obliterated all other smells.

  Within the shroud of twined Void and Fullness, the moon hung black with a tarnished silver edge. In its Void-light, a lion leapt and caught skulls in its cavernous maw and hooked crocodiles with its claws. Sam swallowed a lump of guilt. The lion’s injured hind leg dragged. Askari had told Sam of his confrontation with Shen and now Sam understood that she had saved the life of a traitor.

  Sekhmet, goddess of war, now hunted. Faris was no more.

  “We must retrieve the spine,” Sam said to herself and the deaf Zarab. They clambered from their hideout and wove unhindered through the large tombs of the eastern necropolis, using the graves as bunkers, sprinting between them to stop in a tomb’s stairwell. An open stretch of desert remained unsheltered by crypts.

  Above the Great Pyramid of Khufu a spectral light swirled, but this was clearly not part of the lightshow. It lo
wered slowly while its spin increased. Apparitions coalesced in its winding current. The heavens descended in an inverse funnel. The head of a man in silent scream sped past, his neck the amorphous tail of a comet. Men, women, and children whirled, expressions screwed in anguish and confusion. The pyramid tethered a vortex of trapped souls. Sam’s stomach churned with them, seeing the gathered thousands of the prophecy, minds drawn here and then shackled. Each soul exuded pain. Their suffering lanced through her as they hurtled past.

  Pharaoh moved quickly now, the crocodiles parting for him. Gunfire erupted near the Sphinx.

  “You stay here, Zarab,” Sam signaled.

  Zarab gestured his understanding.

  Sam’s knuckles were white as she gripped the blade of Saint George. She stepped out into the hoard.

  The Void–Fullness washed over her, and she bathed in it. She lifted the ancient weapon. It blazed, one blade golden, the other electric blue. As she reached the open, Pharaoh stopped.

  He scanned the area, searching for the army Sam had surely brought. Not seeing any greater threat, he smiled.

  “You’re brave,” he stated. The Spine of Osiris lowered and a bolt of power shot from its diamond tip.

  Sam dove behind an embankment, and the wedge of rock where she had last stood exploded. She crawled further and that stone shattered too. She sprang over the side of the ledge.

  Calling on both the skills of the Fullness and the rage of the Void, she landed.

  Pharaoh’s next bolt caught one of the wings of the spear, and it spun like a helicopter rotor in her hands. The missile’s power defused as the weapon whirled, forming a globe of light.

  “The Wedjat is supposed to help her father,” Pharaoh said and lifted the spine again. “I promised a battle between Seth and Horus.” He bared his teeth.

  Sam concentrated and threw back three scrambling crocodiles. Screams echoed from Giza’s streets. Shemsu Seth surrounded the Pharaoh and Sam, hounds heeled to their sides. Crocodiles roamed freely. She hoped Zarab had retreated inside the tomb. Sam waved her fiery staff at the reptiles and they shied back.

  “You’re not Osiris and never will be,” she said.

  The missile caught her in the hip as she flipped another crocodile aside. It cooked a strip of flesh from her front to her back. The scent of roasted meat filled the air. She staggered, and a crocodile snapped at her ankle. She pinned its snout to the rock and searched for the bolt’s origin. It wasn’t from Pharaoh.

  Laughter rang out from beyond the borders of the makeshift arena. The Shemsu Seth parted to allow David entry, resplendent in red robes. His face had thinned; a strong jaw replaced plump cheeks. The blistered skin had healed, and his eyes betrayed the power in which he steeped.

  “Seth,” Pharaoh called. “This woman stands between you and godhood.”

  David carried no weapon, but held a fist out toward her. The fingers of his opposite hand traced from his fist to his shoulder, as if he drew a bow. When his hand reached the full draw, the fingers straightened.

  The ice-blue arrow formed and then released. Sam’s blade rose and halved the projectile; one portion slammed into the roof of a tomb, cracking it, and the other struck the chest of a Shemsu Seth and lifted him from the ground to land in a heap of popping bones. Pharaoh left the circle and continued toward the Great Pyramid, leaving Sam to David. Horus to Seth.

  A cry of Wedjat rose in the distance and announced Askari’s arrival from the Shemsu Seth’s tunnels. Sam straightened to her full height and twirled her staff. Joy had laced their rallying call. She took deep breaths and tried to maintain the ever-thinning grip of the Fullness.

  “Re Riseth!” the last companions called.

  “David, you bear the mark of the companions.” Surrounded by Shemsu Seth, Sam needed to buy time if she were to break through. “Why do you do this?”

  She prodded her Void-blade toward David and launched her own dart, a globe of white fire. He caught it in his hand. Sam grunted and ignored the knot that twisted her stomach.

  “David is dead, Wedjat. I am Seth.” Seth seemed to grow. Repeating his bow drawing action, he snapped off a dozen arrows.

  Sam ran, but the causeway upward was clogged with armed men and passage to the Great Pyramid similarly blocked. The Shemsu Seth loosed the leads of their hounds, and they charged after her.

  The arrows blasted craters about her feet. She dodged crocodiles and sprinted back through the eastern cemetery, retreating into the shadows of the Valley Temple’s thick pillars. She hugged a hundred-ton block and panted. The Fullness, although it allowed her to maintain her head, also conflicted with the Void and hindered its complete use. That David could wield it so easily could only mean that he truly was the beast of prophecy. Her own doubts of her place in the prophecy slithered back into her heart, and she constricted the flow of the twining to a slim wire.

  Trailed by several Shemsu Seth soldiers, David scanned the shadows of the temple. He stood at its side and looked down on ranks of stone columns.

  The giant pillars hid Sam, and she watched motionless.

  David raised his hands and began to blast the sixteen columns, one by one.

  The walled Valley Temple became a kiln of overheated stone. Pillars exploded like grenades, and shards of granite lacerated her face, arms and back. The spear couldn’t protect her. A twenty-ton block toppled. She leaped aside as it crashed to the ground.

  She jumped on top of the slab and then up onto the tip of the broken pillar from where it had fallen. Her pedestal disintegrated with another of David’s arrows, and she flipped to land upon one of four whole pillars still standing.

  David’s quiver still seemed full, but his thick forearm shook with the effort of his next draw. He aimed at her chest.

  Pharaoh climbed the closely fit dressing stones of the Great Pyramid attributed to Khufu and up the seven courses of stairs to the entry. The pain of his arthritis was gone. The spine filled him with the energy of immortal youth.

  “You become young again and are the same as you were yesterday,” he said, repeating ancient Egyptian scripture.

  Upon the pyramid’s north face, Caliph al-Ma’moun had created a gaping wound in the ninth century. The Osiris had awakened fully and cast its angry glow on the low passage. As he walked, Pharaoh began to recite the Book of the Dead.

  “He comes indeed, this pharaoh, weary of the nine, an imperishable spirit. The eastern ones, those who are upon earth, belong to this pharaoh.”

  “Re riseth!”

  An aten struck the Spine of Osiris, and it spun from Pharaoh’s grip to clatter down the rock courses.

  Pharaoh whirled.

  Askari stood three courses of stone above. “We’ll see who is imperishable,” Askari said and drew another sundisc. It was his last. The inner edge dug into his palm.

  Pharaoh squatted, eyes ablaze, then he leapt.

  Pharaoh jumped for the spine and sailed twenty feet through the air to land at the pyramid’s broad base. Askari hurled the disc. It flew with all his prayers for the dead companions and the rebirth of the true Osiris.

  At that moment, the Fullness died.

  Askari dropped to his knees as his strength fled. The disc, sent with love and hope, faltered. It chinked against stone at Pharaoh’s foot and rolled like a coin in circles to settle flat and dull.

  Pharaoh straightened from his crouch. In a slow measured movement, the tip of the spine rose to point at Askari. The Heart flared, and the spine’s power snaked forth.

  David’s arrow caught Sam full in the breast. It passed through her and shattered a granite block behind. For a moment, she teetered on her perch.

  “I have shot forth arrows. I have wounded the prey. I have slain the prey. So Seth states in the Book of the Dead. I am Lord.”

  Time slowed for Sam.

&nbs
p; Sisters slashed at the Shemsu Seth and their pets. They fought fiercely, but were swarmed. Dozens had gathered, not thousands.

  Askari, midway up the Great Pyramid, fell to his knees.

  The Fullness unspooled.

  The souls that surrounded the Great Pyramid cried out. The sisters stumbled and collapsed, clutching their skulls as Void consumed them. Askari ignited in flame.

  Sam fell, the wind wrenched from her lungs as she cracked her head on the granite. Her vision faltered, turned black. A great weight smashed atop of her and blocked Seth’s hideous glee.

  Chapter Forty-two

  Lee Chin’s eyes rolled into the back of his head as the surge of energy left him. Stunned by the union of so much power, never had he been able to sense the meaning of yarrow so casually tossed. Pharaoh had not wanted the diviners to divine, only to focus their minds, but Lee couldn’t help himself. Energy had crackled at his fingertips, and if he ran his nails across the boardroom table, blue sparks lanced against its surface.

  Yarrow stems lay within the octagonal bagua before him, eight trigrams. After recovering from the release of power, he studied their design once more.

  The bagua was a traditional framework used to conduct an I Ching reading, and this bagua carried great movement, its eight trigrams: Returning, Centre Confirming, Obstruction, Shake, Skinning, Corrupting, and Gorge—the Abysmal Water—the double water trigram. When he had started the reading, warmth saturated him and he felt a unity that he often sensed conducting a reading, but never to such a degree. Then the warmth shattered.

  He shook his head, no longer able to see truth in the yarrow, but viewing the bagua nonetheless. He shivered at its inauspicious trend. Ten million dollars was not enough.