Shadow Fall (8 page)

Other than its age, nothing remarkable about the box jumped out at her. Knowing the Balm of Gilead, that meant the box was anything but unremarkable.

Her gloved hand edged along the lid. She could feel a slight thrum through the dense fabric shielding her fingers.

Khafer touched her shoulder. “Do you want to be alone for this?”

She shook her head. “It’s magically locked. That means it’s going to require using my touch ability and pushing beyond the Veil to open the lid. I don’t think I’m ready to receive whatever extra message the box might have in it, so I think I’m going to hold off on opening it. At least for a little while.”

“Why?”

“I’m pretty sure it’s not going to be fun, no matter what’s in there. I think it might be best if I go through everything alone. But I’ve got to prepare for it. Maybe tomorrow. The gala wiped me out mentally, and my brain could use a rest.”

“All right.” He kissed her forehead, an unexpected tender gesture. “I’m here if you need me.”

Are you?
she almost asked, but bit the words back. She had no reason to doubt him. He’d died for her, fought for her, shared his body with her. He’d given her a priceless bracelet and promised to end her life if she slipped into Shadow. He’d suspended his four-thousand-year-old quest for redemption in order to help her. He’d put off joining his slain family in the afterlife in order to stay with her. That was enough, wasn’t it? She didn’t need more, no matter how much she wanted it.

Khefar had given her everything. She didn’t need his heart too.

“Come on.” He grabbed her hand, tugging her toward the stairs. “You’re exhausted. The box will still be here in the morning. And who knows? Maybe Balm will be more talkative during the night.”

T
he sky spread cloudless above her, a turquoise bowl cupping the brilliant yellow-white light of the sun. She stood on a slight rise, the beginnings of the desert. To the east lay the Nile valley, a fertile swath of lush, dark-green life split by the river itself. On her left, to the west, stretched a high plateau, the gold-red sands of the desert, dotted with thousands of burial sites. The timeless place, the resting place of those whose souls no longer had use of their physical forms.

Voices swirled on the hot wind, indecipherable. Voices of those long gone, or perhaps waiting their time to return. Kira wrapped her arms about her torso, careful not to touch anything. She had no idea if this was merely a simple dream or a dreamwalk. If it was more than a dream, there was the possibility that millennia of death and life might overload her brain, render her useless.

This was not the Valley of the Kings, she knew. Nor was it Saqqara. This was somewhere else. She walked through a deserted town built of mud bricks, ruins claimed long ago by the desert. With a sinking feeling, Kira realized the desert only claimed what had already been his, a town dedicated to the golden lord, the lord of the desert, the lord of chaos: Set.

She was in Naqada, birthplace of Set.

The desire to excavate filled her, pushed aside her apprehension. She wanted to stay, do an extensive survey, to rework the field evaluation William Flinders Petrie and others had completed, conduct her own excavation.

“Why can’t you?” a familiar voice asked.

Bernie Comstock, her former mentor, came to a stop beside her. He was dressed for excavation in his khaki cargo pants, rugged work boots, a madras shirt, and a wide-brimmed hat. Though her own attire was much the same, he managed to give the field dress a dapper air.

“Because I’d first have to secure the permits from the Egyptian military and the Supreme Council of Antiquities and hire the crews needed to launch a dig,” she said. She then felt compelled to point out, “Besides, I’ve got other work to do, and you’re dead.”

“Yes, but this is a dream, isn’t it?” the old man asked, a smile crinkling the corners of his eyes. “We can do whatever we want in dreams.”

He gestured at the landscape around them. Sure enough, it bustled with activity, native workmen scurrying about, digging in meter-square sites with trowels for up-close work and picks and shovels for larger earth removal, carrying buckets of detritus to a dump site to be sifted. She could feel the heat, the grit of the sand, the thuds and rapid patter of the workers working and talking. She could smell the sweat of everyone toiling beneath the hot sun and, faintly, the scent of the Red Sea.

She turned back to Bernie, who grinned at her with all the eagerness of a young boy with his first bike. “You’re good, old man.”

“Thank you.” He gave her a slight bow.

Even though it was a dream born of wishes and longing, Kira gave herself over to the excavation work. Native workers did the actual digging. Students and interns, many of whom looked a lot like her college classmates, sorted through the sifted materials for any fragment of potential archaeological value. Kira picked up a framed screen and began to gently sift the sand in it.

Comstock straightened, surveying the site. An extensive pre-dynastic cemetery lay in the west, one of the largest on record, from the earliest settlements in the region. More burial sites lay upriver of South Town. All told, more than two thousand burial sites had been found for a city that housed perhaps two hundred and fifty people at its peak.

“Why excavate here, Kira?” he asked. “Why not the Valley of the Kings? Or Luxor?”

“Everyone wants to dig in the Valley of the Kings, hoping to be the next Howard Carter,” she answered, heading for the temple site. “Saqqara is a close second. As for Naqada, I know there’s been extensive work here with plenty of artifacts recovered and catalogued, but layers and layers of sand hide thousands of years of history. People lived and died here, and I’d like to know more about them and their lives.”

It was more than that, though. Nubt was Set’s town, where he reigned as
Set Nubti
. She wondered what life had been like for the people who lived here, in this outpost between the gold mines of the eastern desert and the cities of Lower Egypt. She knew it had been a thriving area since before there were pharaohs. From the collection of homes in the southern town to the remains of structures around the temple and a structure that some argued was a pyramid, scholars knew Nubt had been a vibrant city with a large necropolis, a living city supporting a larger city of the dead, proud to have Set as its patron god.

She couldn’t help wondering what it was like to have the god of chaos at the center of one’s life. She’d been programmed from her studies at University College in London that Set was the bad guy. From the story of Isis and Osiris in which Set killed and dismembered Osiris because he coveted the throne—and Isis—to his battle with Horus for the right to rule Egypt, few stories existed that cast Set in a positive light.

One of the few stories that did was the recounting of Ra’s journey through the Duat, the Egyptian netherworld. In that story, Set was more of a hero, standing at the front of Ra’s solar boat, slaying the snake demon Apep to prevent it from killing Ra. Yet, even in that instance, Set didn’t show modesty or humility. He boldly proclaimed that Ra was safe due to him—Set, his mighty arm, his sound aim.

If ever a god was in need of a public relations expert, Set was the one.

There had been pharaohs who had honored the desert god, though. Peribsen from the First Dynasty had, as did the eighteenth-dynasty military genius Thutmose III. Seti I and his descendants bore the god’s name. So, Set wasn’t all bad.

Memories sifted through her mind as she and Bernie sifted a quadrant of the dig site. Slipping through a portal and landing on an alternate Giza Plateau, upon which had stood a temple dedicated to the Egyptian god of chaos. Talking to the Lady of Balance, who looked like an older version of Balm, causing her to question herself. Seeing Khefar tortured by a new Shadowling adversary, Marit. Channeling power, gorgeous power, Light and Shadow roiling through her, one hair short of too much. Knowing she could feel it again, if she allowed herself to slip.

“What’s weighing so heavily on your mind?” Comstock asked.

Kira realized she still held the screen, but had been standing motionless, lost in thought. “What makes you think anything’s wrong?”

“Kira.” Comstock’s voice brimmed with remonstration. “I’m dead, not senile. More than that, I’m a metaphysical construct that includes part of your psyche. I know when you’re out of sorts.”

“I never could hide anything from you, could I?”

“No.” Comstock smiled. “Most of the time, I pretended not to notice. I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

“I think I would have appreciated having you to talk to, Bernie,” she said, her throat tightening. “I’m sorry I didn’t confide in you.”

“You can confide in me now.” He lifted a trowel of debris onto the screen. “I always find that it’s easier to apply myself to thinking things through by digging my hands into my work.”

Kira looked down at her hands. Even in her dreams, she wore gloves. “When I get my hands down into my work, I’m either incapacitating or killing someone.”

Her mentor reached over, took her hands. “True, if all you consider yourself to be is a Shadowchaser. But you are more than that. Your hands also help to properly identify and catalog hundreds of artifacts. Your hands are tools, not weapons. And there’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Thank you.” She squeezed his hands. “I needed that.”

“It’s what I’m here for.” He gave her an encouraging smile. “Now, why don’t you tell me what’s bothering you.”

“Balm had a crate delivered to me today,” she told him. “A driftwood box.”

“A jewelry box?”

“No, more like a chest.”

“I see. What sort of treasure is in this chest?”

Kira poured debris onto the sifter. A couple of dozen workmen were clearing away several grids while the field assistants documented each layer. The sounds of a dig soothed her, allowed her to think. “It supposedly contains some of the answers I’ve been looking for. The great mysteries of my life.”

“Supposedly?” Comstock echoed. “You don’t know for certain?”

“I haven’t looked inside yet.”

“Seriously?”

She could hear the surprise in Bernie’s voice, and understood it. “I want to look, and yet I don’t want to look at the same time. I know I’m being chickenshit, but I can’t seem to help it.”

“You are Kira Solomon.” Comstock said sternly. “You take the Apis bull by the horns. You spit into the eye of Set’s storm and laugh as the eclipse’s Shadow engulfs the world. You walked behind the Veil of reality and sent a Fallen back to Shadow. You, my girl, are not afraid to look into a box.”

“You have an amazing talent for putting things into perspective, Professor Comstock,” Kira said, chagrined. “I guess it’s stupid to be so cowardly.”

“You aren’t a coward.” Comstock leaned forward. “Everything you’ve done, everything you’ve lived through, has been about this moment, about finding the truth. You even worship Ma’at, the goddess of truth. You have never once turned away from the truth, no matter how awful the view.”

“So?”

“So open the box and acquire the truth,” Comstock urged. “What is the worst that could happen?”

Kira didn’t want to voice her fear. To speak it aloud, even here in this dreamscape, would be to give it life.

“You need to confront your fear.” Comstock examined a piece of rubble. “If you can’t do that here, where can you?”

Comstock had a point. She had to examine and acknowledge her fears. Only then could she face them, understand them, and then conquer them.

“Balm told me a bit about my mother,” she finally said. “That she was part of a family of lightning spirits in West Africa. That her clan had made a decision to become human. But Balm didn’t know anything about my father.” She chewed on her lower lip. “What if—what if I find out that he’s a Shadowling?”

“What if you do?”

Kira blinked at her mentor. “Well, it changes everything!”

“Why does it have to?” Comstock asked, the epitome of reason. “Why would that knowledge change who you were five minutes previous?”

“Because … because …” Kira thinned her lips. She didn’t even have a half-assed rebuttal. So she’d find some lemons on the family tree. So what? She’d pick herself up as she usually did, make a big batch of lemonade, and go on with her life. She’d continue being the Hand of Ma’at. She’d continue being a Shadowchaser for as long as her Lightblade responded to her touch.

“You’re right as usual,” she said ruefully. “I’m tired of this hanging over my head. I’m tired of the what-ifs. I’m going to find the truth and then I’m going to deal with it.”

Comstock beamed. “That’s my girl!”

A shout rose from the workers near the outer wall of the temple. Kira quickly made her way up the rise to the mud brick barrier, Bernie following. Workers and field assistants parted like waves breaking before the bow of a ship as she approached. They huddled close as she knelt on the dry, hot earth.

“It’s a
was
scepter,” she said, carefully brushing bits of debris away. “One of the best preserved I’ve seen since the cache found in Tutankhamun’s tomb. And it’s intact.”

She took a brush from one of the workers, then slowly worked to free the staff from its baked tomb. Somehow, here, it had been protected from the Nile’s annual flooding, perfectly preserved by the dryness and heat of the western desert. If she thought about how something like this could still be found now, after thorough excavations by Petrie and others, the collection of red and black pottery, the dried bodies and other artifacts that enabled dating of several distinct pre-dynastic Naqada cultures, it was a fleeting thought.

The power staff was beautiful, about five feet long, wood sheathed and banded in gold. Two forked prongs served as the foot of the scepter, with the head of the Set-animal carved as the top. The
was
scepter was often depicted in carvings and tomb paintings in the hands of pharaohs and the gods as a symbol of their power and their ability to keep chaos at bay.

“Amazing,” Comstock said, eyes dancing with the joy of discovery. His excitement erased years from his features. “Absolutely stunning. Go on, then.”