Why did I say that?
“I would, some day. Thank you,” Wren said. “Who was your teacher?”
Asha pressed her lips together tightly for a moment. “Just some people in Ming. Have you been to Ming?”
“I’ve never even heard of Ming,” Wren said. “Is it a nice place?”
“It’s a place.” Asha tapped a few clinging motes of powder from her pestle and set it aside. She uncorked one of her copper tubes and poured out its contents into the mortar.
“Water?” Wren asked.
“Oil,” Asha said. “Eel oil. It’s good for carrying powders into the bloodstream.” She dipped her steel needle in the mixture and held it up. A thick bead of dark reddish amber gleamed on the needle. “See?”
“But you can’t get close to use it,” Wren said, nodding at Isis. “If I stop the aether, she’ll get up, but if I don’t stop, you can’t go over there. Sorry.”
“No, that’s all right,” Asha said, as she studied the sedative curing on her needle. “I don’t need to get close. In fact, I’ve had to do this before.”
“Do what?” Gideon asked.
Asha snapped her wrist and the needle flew across the room, striking Isis squarely in the chest. The immortal moaned softly, but her feet continued to kick feebly at the floor. Asha reached for a second needle and dipped it in her mortar.
“How did you do that?” Gideon stared at Isis. “I mean, that wind should have thrown the needle aside, unless you have some secret… dragon aiming… skill thing.”
“Aether can’t affect solid objects,” Asha and Wren said in unison, and they gave each other a sudden glance.
“Aether can only affect a soul,” Wren said slowly, a curious smile tickling her cheek. “So I can move living creatures, or even ghosts, but not regular objects. I can’t even move sun-steel, even though it drinks aether like a berserker drinks mead.”
“Oh.” Gideon gave her a curious look, and shrugged.
“Now then. Time to sleep.” Asha checked her second needle, and then flung it across the room where it struck Isis in the belly. The immortal woman kicked wearily one last time and slumped to the floor.
Wren lowered her arms and the aether tide vanished as a few last wisps of vapor faded back into the ground. She rubbed her shoulders and blew out a long, loud sigh. “Well, that wasn’t so bad, was it? What’s next?”
Asha began packing up her supplies and looked at Gideon. “We’ll need someplace safe to keep Isis. Then we’ll get some sleep, and in the morning, we’ll go looking for the others.”
Chapter 15
Anubis walked slowly down the dark and deserted streets of Alexandria, listening to the familiar sounds of the ancient city cleaning up after supper, laughing over coffee, and preparing for bed. Here and there he found men smoking in the street and chatting quietly, or he passed some lone fellow still trudging home after a very long day, but mostly, he was alone.
This quarter of the city is quiet. Either the immortals aren’t here, or they’re still hiding, and waiting. Perhaps they’re even sleeping. I wonder if they dream.
The youth walked on, his slender staff marking every other stride on the dusty pavement, the rings at the top of his staff clinking softly as the pole struck the ground. As the hour grew later, he met fewer faces in the street, and the lights in the houses grew dimmer and farther apart, until he was left in pale, naked moonlight under a small date palm in a small park surrounded by homes full of families. The park was one of his familiar haunts where he and Bastet would watch the children play, and occasionally pull them out of the path of a huge sivathera or a rushing steam carriage when the little ones wandered into the road.
Maybe they already found a way back into the undercity. Maybe they doubled back to the fountain. Maybe we should have left someone there to…
He turned sharply and listened. Something was shrieking. Someone was shouting. And the two sounds were coming from the same voice.
Horus.
The falcon-cries of the transformed immortal echoed across the sleeping city, and a moment later Anubis heard other sounds. The crackling of falling stone and masonry. The sharp booms of rifles firing. And the screams of people. Lots of people.
With a weary grimace, Anubis took the black jackal’s mask from his belt and placed it over his face, and then he cracked his staff on the street and burst into a living cloud of aether. He traveled the aetheric currents, stronger and faster than any wind, and when he heard the cries raging all around him, he snapped back into the real world, stepping lightly from nowhere into the middle of a living hell.
It was another neighborhood, just like the one he had left a moment ago, but here there were streetlamps lying in the road, their spilled oil burning in bright puddles of fire. The corners of houses had been smashed and crushed, and chunks of broken bricks lay on the ground, leaving the damaged homes to continue cracking and crumbling around their wounds.
And the people.
The people were pouring out of their houses, shouting and crying, and all running up the lane in the same direction, all looking over their shoulders in terror as they clutched their children or other bundles of precious things. A handful of soldiers were grabbing the people and rushing them away, pushing them and shouting at them. Anubis turned to see what they were all fleeing from.
Horus stood in the middle of the street, a massive and powerful figure, his muscular arms and legs painted gold by the roaring fires in the street. He held above his feathered head another of the broken streetlamps clutched in his scaled talon-hands, and he opened his beaked mouth to shriek at the stars.
Anubis flinched at the high, piercing cry. But then he straightened up and started walking slowly toward his cousin. With a slight nod of his head, Anubis shifted his throat to send his voice out through the aether as well as the air, a trick he had learned ages ago when he played the God of Death for the people of Aegyptus. And so it was with a booming and deified whisper that he called out from behind his mask, “HORUS!”
The single word shook the street and rattled the windows above them and made countless fleeing people stumble as they turned to see what giant could have possibly spoken with such power. The whisper was everywhere, vibrating the very bones of the earth like a titan’s dying breath.
The falcon-creature threw down the streetlamp and stared up with his white-in-white eyes at Anubis. A cruel croaking sound ululated in his throat.
“Horus.” Anubis held out his arms as if to embrace the monster before him, but he stopped walking well short. “You have to stop. I can’t let you hurt these people.”
Horus hissed.
“You aren’t yourself,” Anubis said. “And it isn’t your fault. And it isn’t fair. But that doesn’t matter. You have to stop. Or I will have to stop you.”
Horus dashed forward and slashed down at the grim youth with five gray talons as vicious as daggers, but Anubis loosened his body into the aether, just a bit, and let the talons swipe cleanly through him without leaving a mark, without even knocking him back.
“You can’t hurt me,” Anubis said quietly. “Can you even understand me?”
Horus stepped back, flexing and curling his long talons into hideous, beastly fists. And his huge feathered head nodded once.
Anubis narrowed his eyes. “I thought so. You can hear me, and understand me, but you can’t speak with that beak?”
Horus shook his head once.
“A pity. I went to see Father today. Our father. I asked him to help me, to help you.” Anubis paused. “You can see for yourself what his answer was.”
Horus charged again, slashing left and right with both talons, screeching and hissing, but Anubis simply shifted apart and let the beast stumble about in a small cloud of aether.
“Is Lilith’s hold over you so strong that you can’t even pause to listen to me for a moment?” Anubis asked from the side of the street.
Horus glared at him with white-eyed rage.
“Then come at me.” Anubis bac
ked up closer to the brick wall of the house behind him, a wall already cracked and compromised by the monster’s rampaging earlier. “Strike me down, if you can. Kill me. Come here and kill me!”
Horus arched his back and screamed his falcon cry at the uncaring stars, and he dashed away up the road in pursuit of the fleeing families through the burning pools of oil and the fallen walls of the houses.
“No! No!” Anubis started to run after him, and then slipped into the aether, whisking up the street, and planting himself in the middle of the road again between Horus and the people of Alexandria.
“Horus, stop!” He raised his staff, commanding the handful of souls trapped in the sun-steel rings to bring out their meager light, to set the staff head aglow, hoping to catch his cousin’s eye.
Horus charged up the street, running light and swift on his bare feet, and when he reached Anubis, he thrust out one clawing talon to grasp the youth by the head, but his talon swept through empty aether and the creature ran on into the night.
Anubis grimaced.
I need Gideon’s blade, or Asha’s dragon. But there isn’t time to find them.
He took a few running steps and slipped back into the aether with a light crack of his staff on the road, but this time instead of rushing ahead of Horus, he swept up into the cold night air above the city. He felt the world spread out around him and below him, opening up from the narrow confines of the city streets to the vast roofless expanse of the sky itself. On countless nights just like this one, he and Bastet had drifted high into the heavens to watch the stars, floating in eternity as aetheric clouds, wondering at the universe and all its hidden mysteries.
Tonight he did not look up. He looked down at the dark streets and saw the flood of bodies running east along the crooked roads, and he saw the feathery speck driving those bodies onward. Anubis released the aether, letting his flesh become whole once more, and he began to fall.
He fell with his feet together and legs held straight beneath him, plummeting like a spear hurled down from the moon itself. He raised his staff over his head and looked down once to be certain that his aim was true, and then he looked back up at the sky and closed his eyes.
The moment of impact was only a moment. A moment of pain and confusion. Anubis lay on the ground and knew that his legs were shattered, and his back was broken, and something was wrong with his chest and head, but he couldn’t move, or look, or speak. The pain and shock and dizzying sense of brokenness lasted for a brief eon as his mind refused to grasp anything, including the passage of time. But then the pain in his legs and back faded and he began breathing, and all the nauseating sensations swirling through his brain vanished.
He was lying in the street on his side, breathing easily and feeling a bit refreshed from his brief sojourn into death. Anubis blinked and sat up, and found himself in the bottom of a small depression in the center of the street, and at his feet lay Horus. But already, the falcon-beast was twitching and wheezing, with one talon clawing at the ground.
Anubis stood up.
How many moments was that worth? How many paces did those people manage to run in the seconds when we were here at death’s threshold?
He gazed down the road and saw the hundreds of men, women, and children still running into the distance. They were at the edge of the city already, having crossed the neighborhood and passed through the thin strip of old warehouses that stood between Alexandria and the eastern wilderness.
Horus hissed, and pushed himself up to his feet. Anubis stepped a bit farther back and picked up his staff.
“Remember, brother,” Anubis said. “I’m immortal too. I can’t fight you, but I can crush you into the earth as many times as needed to save those people. Let them go.”
Horus screamed, took a half-hearted swipe at the youth’s face, and then took off in pursuit of his prey.
Anubis sighed. “So be it.”
For an hour, Horus chased the people of Alexandria out into the grassy fields through groves of date palms, and for an hour Anubis glided up into the sky and fell upon his half-brother, crushing him into the earth and leaving them both broken and stunned. After the third time, Anubis felt his will wavering. The threat of having to fall again, to feel his bones shattering, to feel his organs sliding, to feel all his senses and thoughts set on fire and spinning through a vat of acid as his sun-steel pendant slowly dragged all the bits and pieces of his body back into place… it slowed his steps and stooped his shoulders. But still, he carried on.
After the fifth time, as Horus ran off into the darkness, Anubis sat in the grass rubbing his chest and massaging his eyes.
What if I don’t come back one of these times? What if the sun-steel chooses this night to fail me? What if I’m left only half alive, trapped in that broken hell, unable to think, barely able to feel?
Then Horus screamed, and Anubis rose to his feet, and set out again.
After the eighth time, Anubis simply lay in the crater, staring dully at the grains of earth and the green stalks of grass right in front of his eyes. A single tear ran down the side of his nose, and his breathing was thin and rapid.
Horus screamed in the night, and a dozen frightened people screamed back.
Anubis lay very still, and held his breath.
Four thousand years of life, and I have become a hail stone.
He blinked.
I fall from the sky, and I die, and then awaken to life, rising back into the sky again.
He closed his mouth and inhaled through his nose.
Only to fall again, and die. Again and again and again…
Anubis moved his head and looked up at the stars out of the corner of his eye.
Is this the paradise you’re waiting for, Father?
He sat up slowly, clutching his head. There was no pain in his bones now, but there was something else in his mind, in his soul. A gnawing fear. A nameless terror. A thing that looked like death, but wasn’t death, because he couldn’t die.
I am Anubis. I am Death.
He stood up and clutched his staff in both hands.
What is death?
Horus screamed in the distance.
Anubis exhaled and became one with the aether again, but he did not rise into the star-drenched heavens. He whisked through the grasses and the groves, and over the little hills and the tiny streams in the ditches until he found a group of several dozen people huddled in a copse of sycamores. As he stepped out of the aether, he heard them gasp at his masked face and he raised his hand to quiet them. And in his booming aether-whisper, he said, “Follow me.”
He led them quietly through a low ditch where their heads could not be seen above the level of the tall grasses, and they followed the winding path of a tiny stream northward until a small wooden bridge appeared before them, spanning the ditch.
“Take this road back to the city,” he told them. “You’ll be safe now. Go quickly. I will find the others and bring them to you.”
The people pressed in against him, their faces stained with dust and tears, but he slipped away into the aether, ignoring their words of thanks and praise. He found two more groups hiding in the hills, and he led them north to the road. Once he saw Horus striding in their direction, and Anubis flitted away to the far side of the field and led the monster south, away from the people.
It took another two hours to find the rest of the stragglers, people hiding in ones and twos in ditches and up trees, some too terrified to follow Anubis on foot, so he took them in his arms and carried them across the fields to the road. And each time Horus came too close, Anubis would slip across to the south and lead his half-brother farther out into the wilderness.
At last he stood on the little bridge over the ditch, and paused. The last refugee, a young woman with a miraculously sleeping infant in her arms, stood beside him.
“Thank you,” she was saying. Her arms shook and her wide eyes still stared out across the savanna for some sign of the beast. “You saved me. You saved us all, Lord Anubis.”
>
“No one should suffer for the sins of another,” he said softly, not in his terrifying God of Death voice, but in his own small human voice.
“Please come back with us,” the woman said. “Please, let us honor you for your labors and your mercy, Lord Anubis.”
At first he didn’t hear her. And then the words penetrated. He focused on her and said, “If you want to honor me, love your child. But do not worship me. Forget you ever saw me.” He stepped off the bridge and started walking through the tall grass.
The woman called to him, “Why won’t you come back with us? Where are you going?”
And he said to her, “There is still one person left to save.”
Anubis inhaled, struck his staff on the earth, and fell into the aether once more and let the currents carry him across the plains to the south until he found a familiar shape and heard a familiar cry, and he emerged back into the real world. Horus stood less than an arm’s length away, a monstrous falcon with nightmare eyes and vicious steel talons and a cruel bronze beak, all hovering over the slender black youth.
“It’s time, brother,” Anubis said. “It’s time you and I had a talk.”
Chapter 16
Omar lay on the table, trying to shift his back and shoulders and hips to get comfortable, but the straps and chains kept chafing and digging into his flesh. The room was well-lit with flaming torches set into braziers at regular intervals along the walls, and there was also a warm breeze blowing through the chamber from the stairwells and the hole in the ceiling, although an unpleasant fecal odor sometimes tickled his nostrils. Omar tried again to rest his arms and legs more naturally, but the thick iron shackles bent him at every angle.
“I’m not entirely comfortable,” he said.
“So you keep saying,” Lilith replied. She walked over to the table, looking exactly as he remembered her from nearly two thousand years ago. He recalled the night he first saw her as she danced for the prince of Damascus, her arms weaving through the air like serpents, her hips shivering beneath a belt of jangling gold coins, her lovely features half-hidden by a thin golden veil. And unlike Gideon and Nadira, she had remained precisely the same through all the long years. She still wore the elegant flowing silks and the shining trinkets around her neck, and the bright stones in her long black hair. The only thing missing was the veil, and a primitive corner of Omar’s mind considered it a wonderful improvement.
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