"Where's Sopdet?" Petronius asked now. "Is she close behind?"
"She's swimming," Vali said, and Petronius thought he could hear a smile in the barbarian's voice. "It looks like she's finding it harder than she expected. Like me, she's spent too long among men. But she won't be far behind. We need to hurry."
Petronius did his best, stumbling over the rocky ground beneath him. All around him he heard voices, the sound of a thousand people, but he wondered if he would have been able to see them, even with his eyes. Their whispers seemed incorporeal, the murmured complaints of spirits who'd been worn away until they were nothing but air.
He didn't know how long the journey took. Away from the river that embodied it, time seemed to have no meaning here. But after a countless succession of moments, they drew to a halt.
There was another noise now, a deep and sibilant hissing that seemed animal, not human. Petronius felt Vali's hand claw into his bicep and shrank back, terrified by anything fearsome enough to frighten even the barbarian.
"Big snake," Nero said.
Vali choked a laugh. "A very big snake - and it has two heads."
"Well," Petronius said, "and this is only a suggestion, but perhaps we should run away from it."
"We can't," Vali told him. "We need to get past. This is the guardian of the halls of death."
"Then what do you suggest we do?" Petronius asked, and this time he couldn't stop his voice from shaking. He didn't want to face his end and not even see it. And what would it mean, anyway, for a person to die in the realms of death? Was there some deeper level, some worse hell he might be banished to?
"We hope that Boda really does trust me," Vali said, and then the hissing heads descended.
The giantess had barely finished dying when the wolf came. It looked tiny beside her vast corpse, but Boda backed away all the same, not trusting her senses in this world where nothing was quite as it seemed.
When the beast pounced, she knew that she'd been right to fear. Its back rose higher than her head and its head was the size of her whole body, each needle-sharp tooth as long as her arm. The saliva that dripped from them hissed and fizzled in the dirt.
But its size saved her. The soft hair of its belly brushed hers as she dodged underneath it, and the claw it sent raking towards her dug up a furrow of earth but missed her chest by an inch.
The beast realised she'd eluded it. Its back legs flicked up and round, trying to dance away from her, but she danced with it, keeping herself in the safe spot beneath its chest where none of its feet could reach.
A second later, the dancing ceased, and she had a sudden, upside-down view of its head as it tucked its muzzle beneath its own chest. She stumbled as she flung herself away from the wicked snap of its teeth and it saw her on the ground and knew this was its moment.
The wolf reared back on its hind legs, the great sweep of its tail raising a cloud of pollen behind it as it brushed over the heads of the grass. And then its front paws came down, claws unsheathed and slashing for a killing blow.
They caught her this time, low on the ribs, and she had a moment to wonder how a ghost could be injured, and then she found out. Her skin tore, not like flesh but something finer, the lightest silk. And when it did something leaked out of her, but it wasn't blood. She couldn't see it in the diffuse brightness of this world, but she sensed it. She was losing some essential essence, the thing that made her Boda, even when all her memories and all her life were gone.
She clamped a hand over the wound and flung herself forward to roll beneath the creature's legs. It roared its fury at her escape and slashed again, but she kept on rolling, flattening the grass beneath her and releasing a smell that was quite wrong, like sugar burning.
And then her back hit something else, something cold and hard - metal. She didn't make a conscious decision to reach for it, just incorporated it into her roll as she tumbled even further from the wolf, curling her hand around its smooth end and pulling up.
It was surprisingly heavy, wrenching at a shoulder that was somehow still tender, even in death. The wolf growled and lowered its head, hackles bristling on its back, and Boda only had one second to see what it was she'd taken. It was long and thin - sharp only at the point. It was a weapon, though like none she'd ever seen. But in this desperate fight she'd use whatever she could.
She hid it behind her as the wolf stalked forward. The creature's eyes were too wise to risk it understanding what she intended. Its tongue snaked out to wet its purple lips and she wondered what it might taste like, to eat a human soul.
Then, with no warning, the wolf leapt. Its paws descended towards her, each larger than her head, the pads like soft brown storm clouds. And, when the nearest was above her, she pulled the strange silver spear from behind and stabbed upward, into the animal's most sensitive flesh.
It yowled in agony and leapt away. The spear pulled in her hand but she clung on grimly and it came away with her and not the beast, leaving red blood to spurt from its injured paw, sticky and hot on her face and hair.
The wolf was crazed with pain and fury now, more lethal than ever. But it wasn't thinking clearly any more. It wanted to kill her, crush her - destroy this thing that had hurt it so badly. Its head snapped down towards her, snarling and spitting, and suddenly something even more vital was in her spear's reach.
And in the moment before she thrust it forward, Boda suddenly recognised the shape of her weapon - a hairpin, magnified a thousand-fold. It must have fallen from the giantess's head when she died. The realisation almost stayed Boda's arm but her will to survive was too strong.
The pin flew forward, past the wolf's snout, its snarling teeth - and straight into the great brown orb of its eye. Her arm went after, plunging into the glutinous fluid that spilled out, passing through it to pierce the orbit of the eye itself. And in the moment the spear punctured the wolf's brain, everything changed.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The first thing Boda saw was Petronius, Nero clinging to his left hip. The young man seemed oblivious to her presence, but the little boy stared at her over the corpse of something she was no longer sure was a wolf. The fur around its muzzle suddenly looked green, scale-like, and why had she thought it only had one head, when it so clearly had two?
No, not two, three - and of course those weren't scales, the fur was bristly brown. A dog's fur. The silver spear she'd used to kill it had pierced the central eye of its central head. And beyond the third head, staring at her in bafflement, was a face she'd never expected to see again.
"Narcissus!" she said, and he smiled uncertainly.
And then, as she watched, there was neither a wolf nor a serpent nor a three-headed dog lying between them all, but only a pile of freshly stripped bones, and soon even those faded from sight and the floor was just marble, black and white chequers receding down a corridor into an endless distance.
"Boda?" Petronius said, doubt and painful hope in his voice. His head swung from side to side, as if he was trying to seek her out by scent or sound alone. His eyes were as big and brown as ever, but they'd lost all expression. She realised with a shock of horror that he was blind.
"You found me— " she said, her words cutting off as he stumbled forward to fling his arms around her. She didn't know what else she would have said, anyway. How could she be pleased to see him, here?
"Are you're -" he said.
"Dead. Still dead." When she saw the sorrow on his face, she didn't say the rest. "And you? Did Vali kill you too?"
"No. Sopdet opened the gates of death. She's very close behind." His head twisted, as if he might be able to see her.
"I'm sorry, but who are you?" Narcissus asked. His blank face was as blind in its own way as Petronius's eyes, and Boda suddenly remembered the wind which had tried to rip her apart when she first crossed over into this realm. She feared that Narcissus had felt it too, and failed to resist.
"We're your friends," she told him, and he smiled and nodded, happy to accept her word.
&
nbsp; "Is that Narcissus?" Petronius asked.
"Am I Narcissus?" he asked and Boda answered 'yes' to both of them.
She turned to Petronius. "What happened to Vali?"
He shot a startled, blind look around him. "He was just here, a moment ago. Listen, Boda, he really is Sopdet's brother, and I don't think he's a man. I think he's—"
"A god," she said. "The god of mischief, whom the Egyptians call Set and my own people call Loki. I know. He's used us all, but he's still right. Sopdet must be stopped."
There was a sound behind them, footsteps echoing down the long corridor.
Petronius flinched, and Boda took his arm.
"She's coming," he said. "How do we stop her, if she's a goddess too?"
"We go on," Narcissus said. He spread his hands when they turned to face him. "The dead god must stay dead. It's the only thing I know."
The footsteps grew louder behind them, and Boda didn't argue, just pulled Petronius on, along the black-and-white tiled corridor, which led only into darkness.
When she saw the figures up ahead, she thought at first that they were more of the half-real shades who drifted through this place. But her footsteps stuttered to a halt when she saw their faces, glaring at her out from the most shameful corners of her own past.
"Josephus," she said. Death hadn't made him whole again. The cavities in his chest and stomach gaped raw and red, and there was a trickle of white brain matter from his nose.
"You killed me, barbarian," he said. "You condemned me to this place."
It was only the truth and she couldn't deny it. "I didn't know," she told him. "I'd change what I did if I could."
"But you can't. You can't!" said another voice and this time it was Petronius who flinched.
She was a young girl, not much older than him, ivory-skinned and flat-faced like the people of the far east. "I died of the child you got in me," she said, "and you weren't even there to watch me bleed my life away. Your father sold me to labour in the mines, and you never raised your voice in protest."
Boda could feel the shiver in Petronius' arm through the hand she rested against it. He took a step back, and she realised she had too.
Nero huddled against his legs, whimpering, and when Boda saw the little girl with the crushed head she understood. That spirit haunted her too.
Then another figure stepped forward, an older woman, grey-haired and sad-faced. "My son," she said to Narcissus, and Boda saw the resemblance between them, the two-thin, not quite pretty faces.
His remained blank. "Are you my mother?"
A single tear tracked down her cheek. "It broke my heart when they sold you away from me. I didn't last another year, and by then you'd already forgotten me. You loved the master who parted us more than your own flesh and blood!"
Boda winced at the pain in the woman's face, but Narcissus only frowned. "I'm sorry, I don't remember you. And I've forgotten how to feel guilt."
There were more spirits behind Narcissus, crowding back into the darkness. Boda saw faces she barely recognised but knew all the same; every Roman soldier she'd sent to his death stood beside the blue-eyed Celts she'd cut down when they tried to invade her land. Beside her, she felt Petronius begin to sob as more voices called out his name. And then she saw the smallest figure as it pushed itself to the front, the stumbling, awkward shape of a baby too young to be born. It mumbled a word that might have been 'mummy'.
Boda turned to flee, only to fall to her knees when a hand grabbed her. She didn't dare look back to see whose it was. It could be any of a hundred people. She hadn't realised she'd killed so many. So many lives unlived because of her.
But it was only Narcissus. "Close your eyes," he said. "And I'll lead you."
She didn't want to follow him. She couldn't bear the thought of passing those spirits, their dead flesh touching hers. But then she heard Petronius stumble to his feet beside her. He was already blind. If he could find the courage to face it, so could she.
Narcissus's hand was hot and dry in hers and she was reminded suddenly of their escape from the catacombs beneath Rome. Narcissus had rescued her, though it had been Petronius who led them.
There too she'd been afraid of what hid in the dark. Here she'd seen their faces, but did that really make it worse? Wasn't the unknown always more frightening than the known? Still, when the ghostly hands reached out and touched her, she couldn't stop herself flinching away, and only Narcissus's firm grip on her hand kept her from fleeing. She heard Petronius whispering words which might have been a prayer, but the spirits he faced were less malevolent than her own. He'd killed only tangentially - by neglect or ignorance. She'd set out to take life, and only now, as she felt them plucking at her clothes and whispering in her ear did she know the value of what she'd stolen, from so very many people.
She'd looked down on Petronius, because he'd never trained as a warrior and didn't know what it was to kill a living man. Now she understood that it made him the better person.
The journey seemed to take for ever. She wondered if perhaps it would, if they'd failed and this was their punishment. Could the prison that awaited her when this mission was done be any worse?
But it did end. The whispers faded into nothing and after a while she felt no more hands reaching for her. She sensed a greater emptiness around her, as if the corridor had opened into something far more vast.
"Can I look now?" she asked.
It took a moment before Narcissus replied, and when he did his voice sounded choked, as if there were tears in it. "Yes," he said. "They've gone. Everything's gone."
She opened her eyes to utter darkness. Narcissus's hand was still in hers. She could hear Petronius's breathing beyond, and Nero's quiet sobbing beside him, but aside from that nothing. She took a step forward and round, fumbling until she could catch Petronius's other hand in her own. His was softer and warmer than Narcissus's, and he gave her a grateful squeeze. His face alone was visible in the darkness, just the barest shadowed outline of his rounded cheek.
"What is it?" he said.
"All our ghosts left," Narcissus told him, "and they took the light with them."
There was something different in his voice, and after a moment Boda realised what it was. The blank innocence was gone. "You remember," she said.
She felt his nod travel down his shoulder to her hand. "When my mother left, the memories came."
"So what do we do now?" Petronius asked.
"We go on," she said grimly, releasing his hand, and they did, into the endless darkness. They went on and on and nothing changed, no hint of light ahead of them and no murmur of voices to either side. They might have been walking in place, and maybe they were.
"Are we there yet?" Petronius asked, after an uncounted time.
"We're nowhere," Boda said and saw his mouth twist down.
She saw it, when she could see nothing else. Why was he alone visible in this world? Her footsteps slowed as she pulled the others to a halt beside her and turned to face Petronius.
He was the source of the light. She could see its faint shine from beneath his eyelids. She reached out to touch them, soft skin with the hardness of his eyeballs beneath. He flinched away in surprise before leaning longingly into the contact. And suddenly she remembered what Vali had told her, in the moment before she died - that he'd make sure she had with her everything she needed.
"Petronius," she said. "How did you lose your sight?"
"I saw the sun, burning on the barge that carries it through the night."
"And do you see it still?"
His throat bobbed as he swallowed. "It's all I'll ever see again."
"Then let it out," she told him.
He shook his head, baffled.
"Open your eyes."
He hesitated, then flicked his eyelids open. "I'm still blind," he said after a moment. The disappointment in his voice was painful to hear, but she could see something, a golden light in the dark heart of his pupils.
"That's because you're hol
ding the light inside you," she said. "You have to let it out. Let it go."
"How?"
"Just do it. Let the sun out. Give me the light, Petronius - please."
He looked almost wistful at that. But in his eyes the light burned brighter, and she thought she could see it now, the red-gold sphere of the sun trapped inside.
"Oh," he said. "Oh, I—"
And then the light roared out of him, blazing from his eyes and flattening his round face into blankness. Boda shielded her eyes but for an instant she was blinded too. And then she blinked them open and Petronius was in front of her, blinking back at her.
"I can see," he said. "I can see you."
And they could see everything else, too.
For a moment, Boda thought they'd somehow returned to the Temple of Isis. This marbled space shared its dimensions, its high vaulted spaces and its darkness. Behind the great, seated figure of the goddess, she could see the gateway to death, green light flickering at its rim.
But when she took a step nearer and saw the pale-faced spirits flooding through the gate, she understood. This hall was what lay on its far side. Then the figure on its throne stirred, and she realised with a shiver of fear that it was no statue. His form was lost in shadows, but she felt the power roll off him like a cold mist, the dead god who ruled this realm.
Boda fell to her knees, and beside her she felt Petronius and Narcissus doing the same. Only Nero remained standing, his head on a level with theirs and his eyes happy and unafraid as he looked up into the hidden face of death.
"So," Osiris said, "you have come to me, mortals, as my brother foretold."
There was a shifting in the darkness at his feet and Boda realised that there was another figure there, huddled and chained.
"Hello, Vali," she said.
He bowed his head, but she saw the shadow of a smile beneath his sharp nose and knew that his plotting wasn't over yet.
"We come to seek a boon, my lord," she said to the dead god.
Anno Mortis Page 28
