24 Bones (20 page)

Memories entwined. A new one formed. She watched it, a drop of resin that hardened to amber. It was something Sam had never fully known and now shared.

Colors exploded beneath Sam’s lids. She yelled in surprise. Her mother sobbed and punched Sam, coiling for another blow. Sam caught the next strike in her palm.

“No!”

“Sam,” her mother cried and hugged her.

“No, Mother, I need to go back.”

“You can’t. Your heart stopped, you weren’t breathing. You can’t.” Tara shook Sam’s shoulders. Sam looked into her mother’s stricken face and saw love.

Sam checked Faris’s neck for a pulse. The beat was steady, his breathing barely perceptible.

“I have to make sure he’s okay,” Sam said.

“Sam, you’ve done enough.”

“I need him.” She frowned and nodded in the darkness. “I do.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I, but I have to be sure.” Sam shut her eyes and reached to Faris.

The yellow glow hinted at life. Faris, covered in a gluey mass, lay upon the ground. He struggled at its silken ties. Sam ran to him and pulled webbing from his face. It was no longer the visage of a warrior cat, but a handsome, noble face, edged in blue-black hair. Strings of white gum stuck to her fingers as she caressed his temple.

“Faris,” Sam said, but having drunk his deepest memories and sipped at his fears, little remained to say.

“You’re not evil, Samiya,” he said. “You did what you had to.” His eyes were large and moist, trim-bearded cheeks accentuated a strong chin that balanced a slightly bent nose. She ran her finger across his fuzzy jaw line, bent, and kissed his lips, enjoying the tickle of his beard. He smiled, and it was strong and confident. Tears welled in Sam’s eyes.

“And you are luckier and more loved than you know, Faris.”

He pulled the cocoon open. Black curls sprang from his wiry chest. Slippery from the oily web, she slid over his skin. Sam breathed the subtle scents of salt and incense. The skein draped back over them both. Warm, full, and whole.

Chapter Twenty-seven

I
n his dreams, David practiced control of the Void. When the sun could stand at noon one minute and in the palm of his hand the next, time became an abstract concept. His body had shut down to recuperate from the stabbing, but his mind had never blazed with such wakefulness. If he had been fully conscious, he might have been frightened. Conscious, his mind might have shattered. The clay of the astral world molded easily in his hands, formed by thought, animated by Void.

Upon realizing he existed on this ethereal plane, David recreated Askari’s arrow-and-pail test. He thought of a desert landscape; heat beat at his brow. A hundred feet beyond, he placed the wooden pail. He moved the pail further and shrunk his target. Satisfied when he could barely find the pail upon the horizon, he dreamed a simple bow into his hand, no more than a strung yew staff and a slim arrow, its tip whittled sharp. He faced away from the pail, drew the bowstring, and fired. The black fletching twirled. The arrow sailed in an arc opposite the pail. It began to plummet toward sand.

“Seth,” David roared and flung his hand forward and then tossed it back over his shoulder. Some giant nimbly plucked the arrow from its path and heaved it. The pail exploded into fragments. David grinned
.

“I am god,” he said aloud.

Suddenly, Pharaoh laughed beside him.

David’s ire rose, and soon he looked down upon Pharaoh, who stood like a sapling in the shadow of David’s tree trunk legs. His skin grew rough as bark, and arms transformed into corded limbs.

Pharaoh expanded to meet him. Pharaoh’s flesh turned green-brown, and it oozed steaming fluid from between crocodilian scales. He met David’s eyes, smiled, and then grew so that David stood at his knee and stared up at the lording pharaoh. Pharaoh reached down, snatched a boulder from the earth, a pebble between talons, and hurled it into the distance. A cloud mushroomed into the atmosphere.

“This,” Pharaoh’s thunderous voice swept the desert, “is not real. No limit to your power lies here.” David shrank back to his initial height and size. “Be aware, however, your last effort shook the temple.”

The prophecy foretold, David thought.
A beast shall rise. Power will be given unto him over all kindreds. He will open his mouth in blasphemy and cause the earth to tremble.
He rubbed his chest. It all fit. His life’s work. He was no
false
beast. He
was
the beast incarnate.

“Remember our secret, you and I, why you survived the blow.” Pharaoh’s finger tapped where David rubbed.

David hoped his surprise hadn’t registered. David concentrated and tried to read Pharaoh’s mind, but he faced a black orb that sloughed his attempts. If Pharaoh noted his clumsy efforts, he did not show it.

“I can teach you control. This is most important. If you can control power, it can be useful. Out of control,” he shrugged, “in time it will destroy you.”

David nodded.

“First, tell me of the tablet,” Pharaoh demanded.

David’s thoughts translated into actions, and he looked down at his belt as he wondered what to say. Pharaoh grinned and David knew that his mind was open to the Pharaoh. Pharaoh reached and pulled off the cinched cloth at David’s waist, opening his robes.

“I wrap this around the Osiris?” Pharaoh asked, but he did not need David’s answer. Pharaoh studied the characters inked inside the cotton strip. “Clever—simple, but clever. Similar to my lesson for you, David. It’s important that the beast prepare.”

David wrung his hands.

“If you truly wish power, you must first open your soul.” Pharaoh hovered over him and fear slid through David’s flesh as he recalled the scratch of nails against his brain. Pharaoh’s eyes shone.

David had little more to lose. He cleared his mind and bared his chest. Jagged tendrils of Void blazed from Pharaoh’s eyes into David’s, igniting their shared desert with a blacklight that scorched. The earthy smell of fired clay pervaded the air. Pain slid molten through his veins. David flailed, unable to control the direction of his limbs. Only his head stayed immobile. His body whipped around it and wrenched his neck’s cords and tendons. Then, it stopped.

A hum of energy hung in the air. They had returned to David’s desert.

The Void tingled, as though it had insinuated itself into David’s cells, into their nuclei, his DNA. He embraced it.

“You will be my son, David.”

David nodded.

“And, in time, my brother. In your room, where you lie unconscious, is a vial of blue fluid.”

David held his breath with anticipation.

“Lift it to the ceiling and lower it to the floor. Do so as many times as you can without breaking it.”

David deflated with the simplicity of the task.

“I can’t have you lift the temple yet,” Pharaoh answered in response to David’s dismay.

David laughed, and it was loud and unpracticed. “I suppose not, Pharaoh.”

“Sometimes, David, it is easier to do big things than small. This is the lesson.”

Pharaoh blinked out of David’s sight. David spun and searched for him. Sand grit blew in his face.

David shut his eyes and tried to exit into the world of consciousness. Nothing coalesced. He struggled to wake, to see the jar in reality, but his body and mind would not follow. Chest pain flooded him when he released the Void. The control he had in his unconscious did not yet carry over to the conscious world.

He dreamed the vial. It immediately appeared several paces away. The landscape turned into a sandstone-walled chamber. He imagined a ceiling, and then levitated the vial to its top and set it back down. Up it went, then down, up, down, up, down.

“Stop. Stop. Stop, David!” A voice infiltrated.

He drew the vial toward him and held it in his hands. His head ached, and he reached deeper into the Void.

“David,” the sound soothed.

He laughed, in dream and in reality. His thoughts turned the vial and shaped it into the lithe form of his memory of Zahara. She stood naked and flushed in the gray light. He touched her mind and sensed her confusion before she barred him. He probed further, caressing, but her thoughts remained as hidden as Pharaoh’s had. However his growing interest was not in her mind. His lips pressed against hers, and his robes fell completely away.

David drifted on the heels of their sex into deep slumber and discarded Zahara to the conscious world. Later, he returned to his dreams to practice with the Void, and once more, he took Zahara to bed. Distant shouts interrupted her moans. He chased the tease of reality greedily, hungry to be free. When he woke, he knocked Zahara backward. She toppled onto the ground with a cry.

David sat forward. His hands probed his face and scraped the crust from his cemented lashes. His eyes opened to stale blue light emitted from a vial on a pedestal. David strained to hear the voices. He reached out with his mind, and the voice became clear.

“At the new moon, as Akhet begins, the Shemsu Seth shall rise,” Pharaoh shouted in a chamber deep in the temple.

David pictured Pharaoh lifting the golden staff high, the Osiris wrapped in its cloth shroud. He suddenly saw the genius of it. Osiris, god of the dead, his secrets unveiled only when he wore his funerary vestments, mummified.

“David,” a voice whispered, and he recognized it as the one who had hissed prophecy.

He turned his neck awkwardly; Zahara was ragged and bruised. She pressed torn clothes to her chest and groin. Her cheeks were gaunt and her eyes hollow.

“David,” she repeated. He noted the deadness in her gaze, but it failed to stir any life in his heart.

“How long?” he croaked.

“Three days,” she replied, shaking. He struggled to sit, scabs cracked under the bandage strapped around his chest. Unconsciously, he drew the Void about him to block pain, but it slipped from him and his jaw clenched. Lethargy hindered his movements, but he forced himself to swing his legs over the stone slab where he had lain.

Hieroglyphic text inscribed on the walls rose vertically from ground to ceiling; charred gouges criss-crossed the relief. He turned to the vial, found the object in the Void, and tried to lift it to the ceiling. It wobbled, and then smashed on the floor. Fluid splattered like luminescent egg white. Angry, David grasped madly for the Void to no avail.

He noted a shadow near the door, even though it was behind him. It flitted away. David knew the message the dwarf carried: The beast wakes.

Chapter Twenty-eight

“S
am?” Faris called. “I can’t see.”

Sam’s body ached in sharp contrast to the ephemeral bliss of the lovemaking she and Faris had shared in the Fullness. Tara, an ineffectual chaperone, shivered between them on the shore.

“It’s all right, Faris. We’re still in the labyrinth,” Sam replied, her voice throaty. She blushed when her mother looked toward her.

“Sam, I was afraid,” her mother said.

Sam placed an arm on Tara’s shoulder. “We need to find a way out.”

“My leg, it hurts so much.” Faris groaned.

Sam pressed her hand against his forehead. She cupped him in the Fullness, but she was drained. She couldn’t maintain a proper link. In her brief connection, she touched the sickness of his leg. He moaned when she relinquished the flow.

“Faris, don’t touch the Void. You’re too weak, and you’ll be lost. Mother, stay with Faris, I’m going to search for an exit.” Tara nodded in the darkness, and Sam clambered to her feet and ascended the bank. The chamber was huge. She skirted the river.

Although she had not heard of any Nile tributaries that led into the desert, at one time the river would have carved a long channel through the rock. Distance from the Temple of Seth was almost as good as an exit.

She picked her way across the river’s rock-strewn shore. In the rubble, old tires lay piled amongst pop bottles and bits of wooden boards. She collected the wood. The river ended in a rock face and passed into a tunnel with several feet of air between the ceiling and water. As she explored the lips of the cave, water eddied about her thighs. With a grunt of satisfaction, she hugged the bank and forged upriver to Faris and Tara. In her arms she carried a stack of short boards.

“I’m going to make Faris a raft,” she explained.

Tara’s face crumpled.

“The river is slower here, Mother. We can’t carry Faris, but we can float him.”

Faris had already fallen into unconsciousness. Sam set to work threading the planks with tangles of fishing line and strips of cloth from her robe. When she finished, she sat naked but for a crude loincloth fashioned from the remainder. Her fingers bled from manipulating the fishing line.

She dragged the misshapen craft, heavy with sodden wood, into the water, where it sank. Sam knelt in the river. But then she recalled the plastic pop bottles and other vessels amongst the refuse. She collected them and strapped the containers to the raft’s bottom. Finally, the junk floated.

Tara held the raft while Sam carried Faris to his litter, his arms clasped about her neck. He shuddered as he eased under the cool surface. Each with an arm on the raft for balance and Faris between them, Sam and Tara exited the chamber through the river mouth.

The black water hid rocks that scraped shins and bruised knees. Tara finally flopped into the water and floated beside the raft. After Sam cracked her knee against a few more boulders, she did the same. Together they drifted. Threading clefts, passing under low shelves and majestic vaults, they wound with ears submerged, silent. Sam wallowed in the drugged sensation of movement.

The river grew shallower and its flow weaker, until their feet ground against the pebbled bottom. When she raised her head from the water, she jerked to attention. The sharp yips of hounds echoed in the dark atria of the labyrinth’s heart.

“Sam?” her mother asked from opposite the raft.

“Shh,” Sam cautioned. Her fingers enveloped a large stone. She lifted it and prepared to strike. Ahead, the stream split into two, the water volume diminishing to a trickle. The barks came from the right-hand side. Sam’s hackles rose. She glanced at Faris, who blinked in the dark. She splashed over to her mother and leaned close to her ear.

“Mother, whatever happens, you must not say anything or cry out. You can hear the dogs, which means there must be an exit, but if we are caught …” Sam didn’t finish. The dwarfs were powerful Void-users. Sam didn’t see how she could defeat them.

“What about Faris?”

“I’ll carry him. No more words.” She crouched and maneuvered Faris to her shoulder. Her thighs burned as she stood from a squat. Faris might be slight, but he had wiry muscle that weighed like lead. He moaned as she gripped his injured leg.

The barking continued, but at a distance, a blend of excited yelps and low-pitched woofs. They passed the fork in the tunnel and the barking clamored. Pale jarlight emanated from the passage’s farthest reach. Sam looked at her mother, who nodded back.

“Go on, go on,” Tara signed
.

Sam shifted Faris to her other shoulder, her movements slow and gentle. They halted at the edge of the light. Sam strained to see around the bend. A low brick wall cut the tunnel in half, beyond which a series of cages stretched on either side. Sam straightened. The kennels were the domain of the handlers. Sam had never seen the pens, but there had to be an exit from them. Her pace quickened.

She signed her thoughts as they crept to the low wall. The stench and snarl of dog filled the otherwise empty hall. A score of hounds jammed each cell. The dogs caught their scent and the barks switched to growls. Sam swung over the barrier and helped her mother.

Snouts lunged beyond the bars, and Sam shifted her cargo out of the reach of snapping jaws. In one cage, hounds chewed at each other’s throats until one broke away yipping. Cell after cell passed by, a gauntlet of teeth. Where the snarling halted, wagging tails and soft-eyed puppies greeted. Sam stopped and gasped with joy.

“Abu,” she called and searched the pens. The puppies’ naked skins were pink and downed like a piglet’s, their ears and tails long, not yet cropped. One puppy scrambled over top the others.

“Abu.” Sam sighed, and struggled with the latch, which rasped as she worked it. The door groaned open and a flood of puppies crowded their feet. Her mother rolled her eyes. Sam plucked Abu into her arms. The dog squirmed and nibbled at her wrist. With Faris over her shoulder, holding Abu was awkward, and she handed the dog to Tara. Abu struggled, overlarge in her arms until he wormed out on to the floor. The puppies scattered around their legs. Sam grimaced and let Abu tail them. Puppies yowled and chased ahead.

The kennels ended, and the hall split. From here, the walls were square, shaped by hand, rather than millennia of erosion. The only aspect still craggy was the narrow, lowering ceiling. After a hundred yards, it forced Sam to her knees; Faris’s weight strained her lower back and ground her knees into the mortar of rock. A passing puppy licked salt from her face.

Sam took all passages that led to the right, with the exception of those that sloped upward. She hoped the method would serve to skirt any of the central areas where the dwarfs might congregate and keep her from becoming lost. After a time, however, she grew disorientated. A series of doors lined another hall and Sam could stand again. Behind each door, more dogs barked. The passage continued on the ledge of a large cavern. Where the tunnel ended, the puppies also stopped.

“Go on, Abu,” Sam ordered as she moved into the greater chamber. The dog whimpered and peed.

“What is it, Sam?” Tara asked.

“Abu won’t come,” Sam whispered. Her back knotted under Faris’s weight.

On Sam’s right, the cavern wall rose beyond her sight, but to her left it sloped into a shadowy pit. Within, crocodiles of all sizes slid over each other—the nurseries.

Sam waved one last time at Abu, then shook her head and tugged her mother along.

The dwarfs raised crocodiles, feeding them meat and honey cakes. Sam hadn’t known how many reptiles they kept. Evidently, Seth needed a pestilence to herald his coming. Only Pharaoh would be able to halt this swarm. Crocodiles scraped over backs and tails and snapped grumpily.

Abu barked at Sam’s side.

“Hey!” The shout followed the bark. It came from beyond even Sam’s sight, on the far side of the pit. “Identify yourselves.”

“Run,” Sam said, feeling the dwarf draw deeply from the Void.

They ran along the narrow ledge. The jarring elicited murmurs from Faris. The wall began to curve toward the nearing dwarfs. Gunfire struck the rock around them. Tara cried out when shards of stone struck her face.

Abu disappeared, and Sam glanced around to find the cleft of rock into which the dog had scrambled. The heavy footfalls of the dwarfs pounded toward them. An axe flared, bright with Void. The light cast a deadly tint on the hides of crocodiles that levitated up from the pit to challenge the intruders.

Sam dashed into the fissure, pulling her mother with her from the ledge. The rock chimney led steeply upward. Sam pushed her mother’s thighs and scrabbled over rubble behind her. Sam tossed and kicked back loose rock. Exclamations of pain and frustration resounded. She urged her mother on, expecting a spray of bullets from behind. Abu struggled at Sam’s side. A hole breached the tight chamber, and they climbed inside. Tara stood paralyzed by darkness, but Sam could make out the cylindrical room: a shaft tomb.

The shaft tomb came into favor in late ancient Egyptian dynasties for fear of gravediggers who had plundered early dynastic crypts; the deeper the tomb, the greater the secrecy. A sarcophagus leaned against the wall beside a ladder.

Sam knelt and let Faris sag to the floor. The sound of the dwarfs’ huffing breath rose from the hole. Abu barked down at them.

“Help me, Mother,” Sam said and placed Tara’s hands on the coffin. It was wooden and rotten. She shifted it, and together they set it teetering on the edge of the hole. When the first dwarf popped his head up, Sam kicked him in the temple. The dwarf thudded below. The sarcophagus followed, clattering and wedging into the fissure. Its bulk muffled the yells.

Sam heaved Faris across her shoulders. Tara struggled with Abu. Sam began to climb the nearly vertical ladder. After about a hundred feet, her head bumped against boards and she pushed. They shifted aside, and she listened for movement. Nothing. She cleared the exit and climbed out. Faris fell from her shoulders and struck his head.

“Damn,” Sam swore under her breath and dropped beside him. Their fight with Sobek, the river journey, the trek through the nurseries, she shut her eyes and drew breath.

Tara’s head popped out of the hole. “They’re on the ladder,” she said.

Sam levered herself upright. The square chamber appeared to be a mastaba or bench tomb designed to misdirect robbers from the real shaft tomb. Six statues stared, as if angry she had discovered their secret. Beyond a hieroglyph-inscribed arch and pillar was a steel door. Sam stumbled to it, grabbed the latch and pulled. Her vision swam in white light, and she paused for her eyes to adjust. Outside was a stairwell, which she climbed.

The tomb was nearly flush with the desert, and she could see in all directions. Drenched in sunlight, Sam faced the massive eastern necropolis of the Giza plateau. As she blinked, the pyramids materialized. In front of her, Khufu cast a shadow over its three Queens’ Pyramids in the early dawn. Khafre’s pyramid stood to Khufu’s left, the limestone-dressed top like a snowcapped mountain. In the distance rose Menkaure’s smaller prism. Shouldered by the Valley Temple of Khafre and Temple of the Sphinx, the Great Sphinx seemed small. The modern concrete and asphalt city of Giza beyond provided a strange, but welcome, contrast.

They had exited at the site of the overseer Qar’s tomb, set in the eastern cemetery.

Heat draped across her skin. A falcon called out high on the thermals. At the corner of the mastaba, a black-robed man slept on the roof. Sam bent to the ground and retrieved a sharp stone. She stood over the man and whipped him with the rock, striking his skull. He rolled from the roof, his face kissing the sand. Sam stumped back into the tomb, hauled Faris over her shoulder, and ushered her brood into the light of day where the dwarfs dared not follow.

Half naked and battered, Sam and Tara picked their way through the necropolis. Sam staggered under Faris’s weight. They threaded through a dozen tombs. Tara checked over her shoulder.

“They won’t follow us into daylight, Mother, at least not into public areas,” Sam explained. “Soon the tombs will swim with tourists and—” The rhythmic beat of hooves on sand caught her tongue. She held up a hand for Tara to stop.

Three horses with brown-robed riders rounded a nearby mastaba. Sam turned to run around the tomb’s opposite wall, but tripped and fell to her knees. Faris slipped. Her arms knotted under the strain of his weight. Three more riders turned the corner. Dust clouded around them. Faris dropped to the sand. Sam reached for the Fullness and rose with a rock in her fist. But an invisible force held her fast.

The first rider, his robe fringed in silver, leaped from his horse and rushed forward. Sam hauled at her bonds but was paralyzed. The rider knelt and grabbed Faris’s head.

“No,” Sam yelled, veins prominent on her face.

“Faris,” the man cried. The voice was familiar. He cradled Faris’s head. Sam ceased to struggle and hung limp.

“Who are you?” Tara asked.

“We are the last companions,” the man stated.