“Through Lex and Heru,” Anapa continued, “Re spent the last few millennia doing what he could to revive the health and stability of ma’at, and the births of the new Netjers did help, but Syris and Susie are mere caretakers of this universe; they are apart from it, not a part of it. Ma’at must be fully restored if this universe is to continue on, and I believe it is through you that balance and harmony may rule here once more.”
“But I’m just a Nejeret,” I said, voice small. A relatively young one, at that. A broken one, soul tainted by anti-At. I just wanted to save a few humans. That was all. Not because I was more special or stronger than anyone else, but because I was the only one willing to do it.
“There is much more to you than meets the eye,” Anapa said. “You are capable of greatness.”
The hysteria I’d been battling couldn’t be contained any longer. I snorted a laugh, throwing my hands up in the air. “Great. Awesome. This is absolutely fucking fantastic.” I laughed up at the sky. “Thank you, universe, for all of your lovely gifts. I’m so fucking glad that I get to be the special fucking snowflake I never wanted to be.” I raised both hands, making fists and extending my middle fingers.
Anapa cleared his throat, and I let my hands fall back down to hang at my sides. “Please . . .” He gestured to the portal. “There is much to show you. Come.”
Numbly, I let him guide me to the whirlpool of colors. Why fight it? He could make me do whatever he wanted, anyway.
“I should warn you,” Anapa said when we reached the event horizon. “This may feel . . . strange.”
I opened my mouth, intending to ask for just a smidgen more detail, but I never got the chance. He gripped my arm and pulled me into the portal. Into Duat.
Into the land of the dead.
Chapter Twenty-Six
There was something like a “pop” and then all I was aware of was a horrific sound, so discordant and grating that it overwhelmed all of my other senses, leaving me nothing but ears. Painful, bleeding ears.
“Oh God!” I cried out, eyes squeezing shut and hands covering my poor, abused ears. I groaned, grinding my teeth. My whole body—or soul, I supposed—thrummed with the arrhythmic screeching and thumping and grinding. The sound was stealing my thoughts, rendering me little more than a frayed bag of raw nerves.
And then it lessened suddenly, the discordance growing less so, the volume going from ear-stabbing to ear-punching—still painful, but manageable.
Now that that awful sound wasn’t everything, I was able to peel my eyelids open. Blinking in awe, I stared all around me. I was floating in a river of . . . not water, but something that felt just as substantial. Electrically charged, almost. It flowed all around me, glimmering streaks and swirls of every conceivable color.
Years ago, before Susie and Syris left us to hone their powerful skills in the Netjer home universe, my people had access to another plane we called “the echoes.” It was a place outside of time and space that allowed us to view echoes of the past—thus the name—and it had looked a whole lot like this with all of the swirling colors. But it sure as hell hadn’t felt like this. It was as though, back then, we’d been unknowingly skimming the surface of Duat, but now I’d plunged headfirst into it.
I could feel the currents of energy flowing around me, trying to drag me along with them. But to where?
The current seemed to be flowing in a direction I could only call up. Not that there was any kind of a floor or ceiling to go off of. But there was a shimmering, translucent wall, through which I could see the interior of my shop. I watched another version of myself—a past version of myself—chatting with Kimi at the reception counter, and I envied her for her naiveté.
“Enjoy it,” I whispered. She—I—had no idea that her world was about to get flipped upside down.
Despite the draw of the familiar so close in front of me, I felt the pull of something stronger, deeper coming from behind me. I spun around in that eddying energy, and through the miasma, I could see a dull, hazy darkness. The vibrant energy seemed almost repelled by it, but the same couldn’t be said for me. I floated closer, something deep inside me dreading the touch of that relentless darkness.
“Careful,” Anapa said, once more taking hold of my arm. His grip kept me from drifting ever closer to the lightless abyss. “Your time to enter Aaru will come, someday, but today is not that day.”
I looked at him, stunned for about the millionth time. “Aaru? So that’s real, too?” To the ancients, Aaru was the paradise souls were allowed to enter only after they’d been found worthy in the weighing-of-the-heart ceremony.
“In a sense,” Anapa said. “When this universe was first being formed, Re and Apep created Aaru to contain isfet to make the universe more manageable.”
Thanks to my people’s all but mandatory proficiency with Middle Egyptian, the official ancient language of Nejerets, I recognized the term isfet. It meant chaos, violence, and the mindless drive for evil. If isfet—whatever it really was—was trapped within Aaru, no wonder the darkness felt so overtly ominous.
“It was the only way to preserve ma’at,” Anapa continued, “to ensure universal balance. However, neither Re nor Apep anticipated the rise of another species of energy beings in this universe, and by the time Re realized that his newest creation—Nejerets—were being drawn into Aaru after their bas were freed from their physical bodies, it was too late.”
I shivered.
“Now Aaru contains not only isfet, but also the ba of every Nejeret that has passed on from the physical realm. None who have entered Aaru have ever returned. Not even I know what existence is like beyond that barrier, for if I were to pass into Aaru, I would never reemerge.”
I stared at the darkness, wanting nothing more than to get far, far away from it. “So . . . Aaru is more like a prison than a paradise?”
Anapa shrugged. “In essence, yes, its original purpose was for containment. Be cautioned, Katarina Dubois: if you lose focus, Aaru will lure you in like any other disembodied energy being.”
“But I’m not disembodied. I have a body.”
“Not at the moment,” Anapa reminded me. “Take a look at yourself. See what I mean.”
I raised my hand, mouth agape as I examined it front and back. I followed the line of my arm upwards, then stared down at the rest of my body. I was still generally me-shaped, but that was where the resemblance ended. Instead of flesh, I was made out of a golden, glowing energy that sparked and crackled with each tiny movement. And within that golden mass, thick veins of shimmering moonlight and glittering onyx spider-webbed all over my body—or rather, my soul.
“A physical body cannot enter Duat,” Anapa said, “as it is a dimension of pure energy. I had to separate your ba from your body. It was the only way to bring you here.”
I felt my eyes bug out. “But what about my body? Doesn’t it need this?” I asked, pointing frantically at myself.
“Your physical body will be fine so long as I return your ba to it in the exact moment that I pulled you out of it,” he said patiently.
“OK, but what’s this?” I asked, holding out my hands to him so he could get a better look at the dark and light veins. “Why does it look like I’m—I don’t know—infected with At and anti-At? Is this normal?”
“No,” Anapa said. “It is far from normal, and it explains much.”
“What? What does it explain?”
The corner of his mouth tensed.
“And why don’t you look all glowy?” I gestured to his very normal-looking self. At least, normal for him. “You look exactly the same.” He was even still wearing a suit, while my soul seemed to prefer going au natural.
Eyes locked with mine, Anapa blinked. And then he melted into a blindingly brilliant, ethereal being. There was nothing normal about his form now, certainly nothing even vaguely humanoid. I’d seen him in this form once before, in the Ouroboros boardroom, only now his wattage was turned way up.
“Is this preferable?” he asked.
I shook my head, barely able to stand the brightness.
“I thought as much.” He reined in the glow and slowly retook his increasingly familiar form. “Now, take me to the moment when this happened,” he said, tracing a line of inky darkness down my golden forearm with his index finger.
“How am I supposed to know when—” My mouth opened into a little O because a switch flipped in my mind. I knew exactly when it happened. And I knew how.
There was an odd sense of motion, like the current of the energy surrounding us had sped up . . . or maybe simply that we were moving against it. And then I was staring out through the transparent wall at a scene I remembered all too well.
“Well, let’s get on with it, then,” Mari said. She was sitting on an upturned stump facing a campfire, the hood of her raincoat pulled up and her back to another version of me—a decades-younger version of me. Both women glowed with a gentle golden light despite the overcast sky. “Go ahead,” Mari said. “Do your mommy proud. Kill me.”
“You’re insane,” the other version of me said. She raised the sword and lunged at Mari.
But Mari was ready. She moved so much faster than I’d expected, spinning on the stump and springing to the left. An anti-At dagger materialized in her hand, and she thrust it at the other version of me, burying the soul-poisoning blade in her belly.
The other version of me froze, her momentum vanishing. She became boneless, her sword tilting downward until the tip pointed to the ground, and the hilt slipped free of her fingers entirely.
I could see the ribbons of anti-At spreading throughout the other me’s body, sending cracks of darkness through the golden glow surrounding her.
Suddenly, Mari was restrained by vines of At and Nik was kneeling at the other me’s side, sending ribbons of shimmering white into her body. I was watching those ribbons chase down their inky counterparts, binding to them. But not pulling the darkness back out of her—my—body. Both the At and the anti-At remained within me then, marbling my soul…and was apparently still there, now.
It was still there. Even now.
I raised my hand, looking at the evidence, right there, laced through my ba. I’d always believed that what happened that day had damaged my soul. I’d had no idea how right I was.
“That was the moment the connection was forged,” Anapa said quietly. “Your soul is fused with the two fundamental forces of this universe.”
I looked at him but looked away quickly, put off by his intense scrutiny of, well, my soul.
“Whether by choice or by happenstance, you are ma’at’s champion.”
“I don’t understand a single thing you’re saying.”
Anapa bowed his head. “In time, child. In time.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The current of the river of energy sped up, becoming a rushing torrent whooshing upward. I clung to Anapa’s arm in an effort to not get dragged away. We remained like that for what felt like days, for eons.
Until the rushing energy suddenly slowed, and we were once again floating along in that gentle, almost lazy current. The distracting discordance was gone, in its place an almost heartbreakingly harmonious sound—except it was more than that, almost like music but lacking any definable rhythm or structure. Even so, it was achingly perfect.
“What is that?” I asked, releasing Anapa’s arm and looking around for the source of the music.
Anapa’s eyes were closed, his head tilted back and his features serene. “The song of ma’at,” he said, his voice hushed, almost reverent. He opened his eyes and looked at me. “This universe’s heartbeat, as it was long before your time. It has been altered over the ages, warping in response to the imbalance to become the ‘monstrosity’ you first heard upon entering Duat.”
“So does that mean we’re in the past?” I shivered at the thought. I’d barely been able to hold on to Anapa as we swam backward in time. What might have happened if I had let go. Would I have been stranded in some time between this now and my own? Would I have been sucked into Aaru, only to become a prisoner alongside the rest of the deceased Nejerets?
Anapa nodded.
“Maybe a little warning next time . . .”
The Netjer tossed me a sideways glance. “Time is of the essence, and we had a long way back to go,” he explained. “Look . . .” He gestured to the world beyond the gossamer barrier.
The fateful scene featuring Nik, Mari, and me from a moment ago was gone. I was now looking out at an expansive desert with endless rolling dunes of golden sand. A string of people dressed in black robes looking so much like ants from this distance marched along steadily in the valley between two dunes, the sun beating down on them.
“Where is this?” I asked. “When is this?”
“It is the seventh millennia before your common era,” Anapa said, “and we are watching the seasonal migration of one of the Sahara’s desert people as they head to their summer oasis.”
I moved closer to the translucent barrier, squinting. “They’re glowing,” I whispered, brow furrowed.
Each of those little ant-sized people shimmered with a unique luminescence, some more red, some more blue, others golden or green or purple or orange. Even the animals in their caravan glowed with that otherworldly light. Just like Mari, Nik, and I had been glowing with a vibrant golden light just a moment before, only then I’d been distracted by the quick onset of violence to really process the reason behind that golden light.
I looked over my shoulder at Anapa. “Why is everyone suddenly glowing? How are they glowing?”
“You are seeing their soul-energy. It is always there, only now you are able to perceive it,” Anapa told me. He gestured to the barrier and the desert beyond. “Observe, Katarina Dubois. Understand.”
I returned my focus to the world outside of Duat. One of the ancient people near the rear of the caravan stumbled, then collapsed onto the sand.
“His heart is failing,” Anapa said. “Brought on by severe dehydration. He is seconds from death now.”
I watched in horrified fascination as other members of the tribe circled around the fallen figure. It was impossible not to feel the tug to do something to help, but this was thousands and thousands of years before my time. This dying man had already been dead for millennia. There was nothing I could do to help.
The dying man’s glowing aura was a greenish-yellow, and it seemed to expand as the seconds passed. And then something changed, and that ethereal light floated away from his body, a vibrant mote of green and yellow glittering in the relentless sunlight like a cloud of the finest emerald and topaz dust. It ebbed and flowed, twisting this way and that, slowly making its wayward way closer to us.
“Um . . . Anapa,” I said, tugging on his sleeve as the light picked up speed.
“Be calm, child,” Anapa said. “This soul poses no threat to you.”
Was he serious? That ancient man’s soul was heading straight for me. I barely had the chance to think about moving out of the way; actually doing it was out of the question.
The glowing soul punched through the translucent wall separating the physical world from Duat, streams of vibrant yellow and green splitting up to flow around us. I could feel the soul brushing past me, like a thousand sun-kissed feathers.
And then it was moving on. I spun around to watch it integrate into the greater flow of energy. I stared after it until I was no longer certain that this or that streak of green or yellow was a part of the man’s soul. Until I could no longer tell where he ended and everything else began.
“It’s souls,” I whispered, reaching out to let the streaming energy flow between my fingers. “All of it . . .” I thought I should’ve been horrified by the realization, but all I felt was awe. It was too beautiful to be disturbing. Too wonderfully right and balanced and harmonious to be anything but wondrous.
“It is the energy that makes up souls,” Anapa corrected. “It is the raw material that shares a collective purpose and a deep awareness of all that is, som
ething close to a consciousness without quite being sentient.”
“It’s beautiful,” I breathed, tears in my eyes. The wonder of it all was too much, overwhelming my sense of self. I wanted to join it, to become one with the collective, to feel that perfect balance and harmony flowing through me. My mom was a part of this, now, and I felt the desperate need to join her.
But I never would. I glared at the darker barrier. I was destined for Aaru, for imprisonment away from this glorious sense of unity.
“It is truly a marvel,” Anapa said.
I looked at him, not following. “Aaru?” It was far from a marvel to my eyes. More like eternal damnation.
“No, child. I speak of the purity of this untainted flow of soul-energy and the elegance it gives to the song of ma’at. I have heard the songs of thousands of universes, but few even come close to ma’at’s lost perfection.” He sighed. “But, alas, I did not bring you into Duat to listen. I brought you here to learn.”
“To learn what, exactly?”
“The true nature of the disease plaguing your world so you might better fight it.”
“Really?” I said, eyes widened in surprise. I moved closer to him. “You’re going to help me fight it?”
“I said no such thing,” Anapa said, tucking in his chin as his eyebrows climbed up his forehead. “Such a thing would be grossly forbidden.” He readjusted his posture, stretching his shoulders. Apparently, my question was making him uncomfortable. “I was sent here with a specific purpose: to observe, and to judge. That is what I do; that is my role in the greater schematic of existence. I study universes that may become problematic and determine whether or not they should be allowed to continue.”
I laughed and shook my head. So, the mythic Anubis wasn’t here to pass judgment on me—to weigh my heart, or anyone else’s—he was here to weigh the heart of the universe and decide whether it was worth salvaging or whether it was best to just toss the whole thing to Ammut to devour.
The Kat Dubois Chronicles: The Complete Series (Echo World Book 2) Page 50
