24 Bones (28 page)

Sam and Zarab climbed several courses of stone. She hoped to narrow their foes to bolts and arrows, but the hounds followed above, below, and beside. Sam’s twin blades sliced heads and hides. A crossbow bolt struck her thigh. The tip buried in tendon and bone. She limped around the pyramid’s corner, and a hound shot at Zarab’s head, jaws wide. Sam was too slow. But as paws slammed between Zarab’s shoulder blades, the ghostly apparition of Sekhmet caught the dog midair. He snatched it and flew thirty feet to break its back on the stone below.

Zarab’s arms windmilled. Sam lunged, but her injured leg gave way, and they toppled down two courses. Dogs pounced. But Sekhmet tossed them aside and straddled Sam and Zarab protectively.

Fear prodded Sam forward. Although the bishops’ forces now guarded the physical bodies of the companions and sisters from hounds and crocodiles, nothing sheltered their minds from the Void. Sam struggled to her feet and hauled up the stunned Zarab, a goose egg rising from where his forehead had struck rock.

Sekhmet trampled a hound, and his claws raked open the chest of a Shemsu Seth. Amidst his screams, gunfire stuttered.

A dwarf leaped down at Zarab from above. Sam’s spear caught him on its tip and continued his flight down to the base. The pyramid reverberated with power.

Above the pyramid’s entry, the charred remains of Askari sifted in the wind. Sam squeezed shut her eye and limped toward the opening. She released the Void as she ducked inside and pulled Zarab with her. Inside, she leaned heavily with her back against the wall.

Zarab’s breath rasped in his chest.

When she relinguished her grip on Void, Sekhmet winked from sight, but she knew this last vestige of Faris remained. His haunches guarded the entry like the sphinx defended the pyramid.

Void tugged at Sam. She could only risk a connection once more before she lost herself and became as Faris. Part of her wished to join him, but nothing of him remained but the fierce loyalty of an animal.

Sam clucked her tongue to test the distance of the walls and the path ahead, but the constant booming from inside rolled over her and blocked the talent. Sam strode into darkness.

And Zarab followed.

Chapter Forty-four

S
eth glowered from the roof of the gallery. With the Spine of Osiris buried in his chest, only his eyes casted light and illuminated a hellish passage. From his outstretched hands, black lightning snaked across the walls and down the stairs. Tendrils groped at Sam’s flesh and left blisters and burns.

Sam broke her spear into twin scimitars, the better for fighting in the narrow hall.

“Seth has defeated Osiris and gained the kingdom of the Gods!” Seth announced.

Sam pushed Zarab down the ladder that led to the subterranean cavity of the pyramid. Without the connection to the Void, her leg ached and her chest burned.

“You will die today, Wedjat.”

The red robed giant, power writhing in his grasp, was the embodiment of Seth. A vision of twisted cities and humans driven by only their most basic needs burst into Sam’s mind. A tentacle of Void caught her leg and pulled her from her feet. She cried out as she fell on her hip. Her scimitars clanged on the granite. He dragged her up the steps.

Sam lunged for a blade and caught the hilt. She swung it down and severed the limb of power that snared her ankle. Seth howled his frustration. She dove for the second blade, rolled, and came up in a crouch.

“Isis isn’t here to stop the Wedjat from killing you this time, Seth,” Sam said, but her voice cracked and echoed hollow in the gallery.

Seth laughed as Sam charged up the stairs.

Although the Fulllness was gone, Sam sensed splinters of it outside the gallery. Sam stretched out her thoughts and found the thousands of souls that swirled around the pyramid. The I-Ching diviners, minds set adrift when the Fullness disappeared, came to her. Together they gathered those souls who had given themselves to Pharaoh’s prayer and folded them into the Wedjat’s lance. The last vestiges of Fullness clung to them and grounded Sam. With this fragile link, she plunged into the Void.

She drove upward.

Seth countered like a ram of Void.

Sam could not match Seth’s strength. The gathered thousands must be enough. The psychic scents of others appeared, Askari, Tariq, and even Trand. They held her steady. From the rags of the Fullness Sam braided a needle, small and fine. Around it, she sheathed Void so that it was lost in the bulk of blackness. She climbed and spun the thinnest of wires; decades of practice made it fine and strong. Her skin blistered from Seth’s heat.

Seth saw the miserable weapon and swiped at it with arms made clumsy by their power.

The needle slipped past the broad blows and wove the Fullness in and out of his Void. He contorted like a man swarmed by bees. Void zigzagged in frenzy. The brushes of his Void tore hunks from Sam’s flesh. Even as he twisted away from the needle and its golden sutures, his momentum carried him downward.

Sam’s blades shattered on the wall of Void. Wafts of heat baked, and she pushed into the furnace, his Void-crucible. Her hair flared and was gone. The needle darted past. Tiny and true, the small arrow slid into Seth’s chest and sewed tight his false hearts. He reared.

“No!” he cried.

Sam hauled upon the needle’s thread and clamped the ventricles. She snuffed the heat of the Void. His shout shook the pyramid. Its fitted rocks shifted and ground. Sand sheeted from cracked walls.

Sam clambered closer to Seth. Every nerve still burned, although the fire was gone. Trapped by Sam’s threads, Seth’s eyes raged. A shard of Sam’s spear, lethal and ready, rested on a step. Sam reached for it. Seth’s gaze followed.

“I will finish the task Horus failed to complete so many millennia ago.” The words raked her seared throat. She reached—

A voice ordered from below: “Stop.”

Sam relinquished enough hold on Seth’s hearts, still throbbing bloodlessly, to turn and see her mother. Beside her stood the shrouded crone, Mother Isis.

“Leave.” Sam marshaled into the command what strength she retained.

“The balance, daughter,” Tara said.

From beneath the folds of the crone’s shroud, the Mother of the Sisters of Isis lifted a dagger, its hilt a scorpion, its tail a curved blade.

“We are the keepers of compassion. Mary, Isis, motherhood,” Tara continued and started up the steps.

Beside them, Zarab exited from the subterranean tunnel. For a moment, Sam feared they might kill the prophet.

Sam shut her eye. All that remained of the Fullness was the thread in her mind. The fragment of blade scraped against the step like a match across flint. She reeled herself toward Seth with the golden bond. In her grip, the shard cut into the palm of her hand. Seth’s eyes held chaos, but Sam’s hold remained firm. She caught the spine and yanked. Seth’s hands groped at the staff, slipping over its precious vertebrae as it slid out. The staff pulled free of his chest. He sagged against the steps.

“Give me the Spine of Osiris,” the crone hissed. She sailed up the stairs, infused with Void. “The Sisters will keep the balance. We put Osiris together once …”

Sam, holding the last trace of Fullness, saw their goal. An image of a black sister who wielded the Osiris filled her mind—the rise of the Isis cult.

David’s power faded. Blood leaked slowly from his chest, the staff having cauterized the wound. His eyes dimmed.

Sam released the souls and minds of the gathered thousands.

Confusion and then pain twisted in David’s darkening gaze.

Sam lifted the blade clutched in her palm.

Breath, hot and quick, fell on Sam’s neck. The crone’s dagger prodded the base of Sam’s back, naked, for her robes had burned away.

“Do not,” the Mother Isis ordered.

Sam’s knife dipped to Seth’s throat, and the crone stabbed. The blade bit deep.

Sam kicked backward and the crone flew, traveling farther from the ground as the steep steps descended. Her flailing arms sent the bloodied knife ricocheting from the wall.

Sam fell to all fours as pain surged up her back. But she dared not reach for the Void to quench the sting.

David, freed of the Fullness, edged up the steps.

The crone slammed onto the stairs, rolled twice, and lay still.

Tara ascended to crouch silently beside her mistress.

Sand streamed from the ceiling and stuck to Sam’s weeping flesh.

At the top of the stair, Seth’s laughter was an obscene throaty gurgle.

Zarab waved his arms, and Sam peered down to where he stood at the gallery’s landing. His gestures were awkward. He was trying to say something.

“You. Careful. Up. Up.” He signaled and repeated the last gesture.

At the height of the gallery, Seth’s eyes rolled like a threatened camel’s. Blood oozed from his chest, the wound’s puckered lips purple-black in the dull Void-light that still smoldered in his eyes. Beside him, a stone box teetered—the sarcophagus.

Sam clawed upward. The gold stem of the Osiris staff clanged against each step. She tried to draw strength from it, but it was lifeless in her grip.

Four tons of rock plummeted.

She dodged to the side, but below, her mother struggled with the body of the crone.

“Mother—” Sam wheezed. Sam dipped into the Void and shoved her mother out of the sarcophagus’ path. The crone rolled down the stairs in the way of the coffin.

Sam’s scream crescendoed into the gallery’s reaches. Its echo roared out to the world. The Void claimed her. She twisted and shook with rage and with power.

The great crypt cinched the crone into the cracks of the stairs; it snapped bones and sheared away flesh. The crone’s skull tore from her neck and shot from her veil to clomp down to the stair’s base. The sarcophagus crashed to lean against the exit, Zarab’s leg twisted beneath it at an awkward kilter. A steady shower of sand sifted from the ceiling blocks and spouted from cracks in the walls.

In her animal wrath, Sam turned to Seth and charged.

“The prophecy, Sam, remember,” the weak thread of her mother’s call came from below, her voice small in the noise of Void.

Something clawed at Sam’s mind, and in the clutches of Void, she shoved it away. She waggled her head.

David was before her, fear and madness in his eyes, but he looked at the bottom of the gallery, at the body and face of the crone.

“Grandmama,” he whispered.

In the base of Sam’s brain, fury connected with injustice. The staff shook as she raised the Osiris to strike. But her eyes fell on David’s inverted mark of the Shemsu Hor, and she remembered long ago watching at the gate of the convent as a boy was branded.

David wilted under the threat of the spine.

Sam saw a child, as she had been a child, manipulated and tortured by prophecy. She looked at the weapon, her humanity raging against the Void that claimed her. The heart had ceased to throb, but a hint of light remained, a red pupil in the faceted pink orb. She gazed into the backbone’s light—Benu’s egg?

“If the scarab’s shell is unbroken … the Benu will be lost,” she whispered. “The egg.”

“Re riseth,” Sam shouted and struck the heart of Osiris against the entry to the King’s Chamber. The Heart splintered and she paused, listening to a deafening silence.

The light of the heart sizzled like a directionless firework, spinning and rebounding back and forth, cutting Sam and David’s bonds with the Void. It hurtled past David, who slumped on the top step with his punctured lung sucking air through his side. The heart accelerated, entered the King’s Chamber, and fired up the shaft to the stars. It exploded into the heavens. A cheer swelled across the Giza plateau as the seed of the Fullness was freed.

Sam called: “The Benu found, the scarab’s shell broken, the Hall’s of Ma’at shall open. We are reborn. But the gates … the prophet.” She turned stiffly. Her flesh blazed with pain. The only light in the gallery was what escaped around the bulk of the sarcophagus. In its diffuse glow, the prophet’s broken leg was visible. Sam reached for the Fullness to staunch her agony, and although it lay warm and complete, she could not touch it.

“No,” she said.

Her mother stared upward, brow furled and mouth twisted in sadness. “The gates are closed.”

Without the strength of Void, not daring to reach for it again, Sam sagged and crawled backwards down the steps. The priceless stick of the spine scraped against the granite and sand-choked stairs as she descended. Cries of the dying filtered through the pyramid’s entry. The battle resumed. The Sisters and Shemsu Hor, although freed of their Void bonds, still had mundane means of warfare and protection.

“I’m sorry, Samiya,” Tara said and grasped at her daughter as she passed.

Sam jerked away and crawled beyond.

Beneath the sarcophagus, Zarab breathed in short gasps. The luminescence, which had cloaked him when the Fullness was freed, decayed. Water from the empty vessel of the Eucharist, bent and folded at his hip, had sprayed his face.

Sam tossed the staff and pushed at the stone crypt. Sand from the ceiling clogged her eyes and mouth. Her back and leg seared. The coffin did not move. She knelt and sobbed.

“I failed,” she told the dull, pain-filled eyes of Zarab. She shifted and slipped his head onto her lap. Darkness crowded the periphery of her vision. From that angle she could see that the corner of the coffin had crushed his leg. Pain and the heady guilt of Faris’s leg consumed her. She looked for the throb of Void and found it. Her skin burned and itched.

Her mother stumbled upward to David, sliding on the sandy slope that now covered the stairs.

“I have failed, but I do not have to fail in this,” Sam whispered. The light that surrounded Zarab dimmed. She looked into the Void. It stood agape for her, and hungry. She reached for it, but stopped.

Zarab’s dark eyes followed the path of a golden snake. Sam stiffened. The spine had disappeared under the corner of the tomb. Sam’s stomach churned as it slid under Zarab’s back. She pushed him forward. The spine’s diamond head lifted and then struck. It punctured his flesh, and clambered upward. Zarab convulsed with each rung of vertebra the staff climbed. Finally, it protruded like the fin of an eel. Zarab’s eyes blazed full and bright.

When Sam laughed, it racked her chest and echoed strangely in the gallery.

The stone coffin tumbled away. He was free.

Zarab rose to his feet, his leg whole and healed.

Unbidden tears tumbled from Sam’s eye. When he turned, she could not see Zarab. An inner light blasted from his pores so that his hand was a ray that touched her cheek.

A sense of peace filled her, and her conscience lightened. The ache of her leg and back eased. A balm spread over her skin and she saw it smooth and clean. She knew that if she tried to connect, the Fullness would be waiting.

“No,” she said, as her torn eye began to heal.

The light retracted, and she lamented its loss.

“I need to remember,” she added.

The radiant figure drifted past, as silent as the sun, and left the temple. The Prophet Osiris returned.

Sand covered Sam’s shins.

At the top of the gallery, her mother crawled on hands and knees.

Drifts of sand already blocked the opening to the King’s Chamber. A hand protruded from the pile and waved back and forth.

Sam started up the slope. The sand beat at her back, and her knees slipped in the fine grains as she inched upward.

Her mother had reached David and pulled at him with her arm half-buried. All sound faded but for the steady hiss of the sand that filled the chamber and Tara’s calls. Sam couldn’t understand her mother’s hysterical cries as she heaved, face pressed against the growing dune.

“Mother,” Sam shouted, but it was no use, she shouted at Tara’s buried head. Sam wondered just how far her mother would go to save the man. Sam stood over her and grabbed under her armpits. Tara slid free of the sand, but left David below.