Slayer of Gods (3 page)

He lost consciousness briefly, and when he opened his eyes, the man who’d branded him was smearing a salve on his burned flesh.
The pain receded as he was lifted and held so that he faced the king. Akhenaten’s black fire eyes burned into him as no brand
ever could. Pharaoh took Meren’s hand, turned it to expose the mutilated wrist, and examined the crimson symbol of his god.
He placed Meren’s hand in Ay’s.

“He is yours now. But remember, my majesty will know if the boy is false. If he falters from the true path, he dies.”

He dies.
Meren shook his head and tried to banish the sound of Akhenaten’s voice, high, hard, like the sound of a metal saw drawn
against granite. Oh, yes, he still remembered that voice even after sixteen years.

Rubbing the back of his neck, Meren shivered and stepped out of the path of the night breeze. There had been something different
about this night’s evil dream. At the last, when the brand burned into his flesh, something strange happened to him. Suddenly
it was as if he’d left his body and floated, invisible, beside the tortured figure on the floor. Only the prisoner who suffered
at his feet wasn’t himself. It was Tutankhamun. The boy king writhed in agony, screaming, his dark, haunted eyes wide with
terror, his body streaked with blood, dirt, and sweat.

“Damnation.” Meren paced back and forth beside the bed.

What did this new vision mean? He couldn’t consult a magician priest and expose the fact that he’d dreamed about the living
god of Egypt.

“Calm yourself, you fool,” he muttered. “You dream about things that worry you. You always have.”

And he’d been worried about pharaoh for some time. Only fourteen, Tutankhamun had lost most of his family, including his mother,
Queen Tiye, and the woman he thought of as a second mother, his brother’s wife, Nefertiti. Now that he knew the queen had
been murdered, Tutankhamun grieved anew for Nefertiti’s loss. He’d been very young during his brother’s reign and so had understood
nothing of the violent hatreds engendered by the Aten heresy. Tutankhamun remembered Akhenaten as a doting older sibling,
a limitless source of toys, sweets, and exciting chariot rides.

Akhenaten’s sudden death had brought both confusion and relief to Egypt, but after a period of turbulence during which the
next heir, Smenkhare, succumbed to illness, Tutankhamun became king. Inheriting the throne of Egypt and becoming a living
god who controlled a vast and fabulously rich empire had been a formidable task for the boy. But he’d succeeded, only to find
himself condemned to opulent isolation. Grave, beautiful, and headstrong, Tutankhamun had faced the burdens heaped upon him
with courage, but in the last few months those burdens had grown. Evildoers had desecrated the bodies of Akhenaten and Nefertiti
in their tomb at Horizon of the Aten.

Tutankhamun had faced that crisis and endured, but after years of trying hard to be a great king, he was beginning to show
signs of strain. More and more he would slip out of the palace with a single guard to accompany him and seek relief in escapades
that terrified his ministers. So far no harm had come to the king, but how long could this good fortune continue?

What was worse, Meren could see the strain in the king’s face. During an audience or ceremony at a temple he would see a distant
look come over Tutankhamun, and Meren knew he was thinking of Nefertiti, wondering who could have killed his beloved second
mother. He was wondering if her ka wandered lost and mad in the desert, as the souls of unavenged victims were said to do.
Did she haunt the boy’s dreams, visit him and cry out for vengeance? Meren saw evidence of it when he looked at the king,
in the shadows beneath those large, somber eyes. And then Meren would wonder—how long could the living god, who was after
all a mortal boy as well, continue to bear this intolerable burden before he succumbed?

Meren shook his head, went to a chest and pulled out a kilt, which he belted around his hips. He covered the Aten brand on
his wrist with a leather band. Finding Nefertiti’s killer was urgent. As strong and brave as the king was, he was far too
young to endure such anguish and the torture of uncertainty for long. The only solution was to find the truth and present
it to the king. If Meren could give Tutankhamun the murderer, perhaps the boy could find peace. Perhaps Meren could find some
peace as well.

Still rubbing the brand on his wrist beneath the leather band, Meren left his bedchamber. He wasn’t going to get any more
sleep, so he slipped out of the house with a brief command to his own guards to be silent regarding his absence. During his
enforced rest he’d gone on long walks in the hours before dawn before his daughter Bener was awake. Arguing with her tired
him as no exercise could.

This would be his last walk, a test of strength before he went in search of Nefertiti’s favorite bodyguard, Sebek. He’d had
his men searching for the queen’s old servants, including Sebek, for some time, but they’d been unable to locate him. However,
his persistence and patience with Satet had borne fruit unexpectedly when the old woman had mentioned the guard last night.
He’d been surprised that she remembered Sebek, but her memory tended to appear and disappear like the ephemeral clouds in
the Egyptian sky. Learning Sebek’s whereabouts was a good sign. Perhaps the guard knew something that at last would reveal
the identity of Nefertiti’s murderer.

He left the house and walked down the avenue between the two reflection pools to the gate. He glanced at the water lilies
floating on the surface of the water, their buds closed and invisible. He heard a fish snap at an insect and felt a tiny spray
of water drops. He reached the gate. One of his guards let him out, and he set off in the direction of the temple of Ptah,
the god of the city, thinking as he walked.

He knew who had supplied the poison to Nefertiti’s cook, Hunero, but someone else had conceived of the idea of killing the
queen. Nefertiti had been engaged in a dangerous attempt to reconcile her husband with the old gods of Egypt. Losing her had
nearly sent Egypt into chaos along with her pharaoh. That had been more than eleven years ago.

Now Tutankhamun was king, and bore the responsibility for healing Egypt’s open wounds. Some who had suffered at Akhenaten’s
hands wanted to keep those wounds open and bleeding. It was this group who fostered the unspoken belief that the boy was tainted
with the blood of a line that had nearly destroyed Egypt. Tutankhamun lived with the certainty that they wanted to rid the
throne of its tainted occupant. A heavy burden for a boy not yet fifteen.

Meren shook his head as he remembered how, despite these adversities, the king was determined to become the epitome of a warrior
king. In pursuit of this ideal he’d insisted on going with the army on a raid against an outlaw band. The boy had taken too
many risks in that skirmish. Tutankhamun was the incarnation of the king of the gods, but he was still mortal. A bandit’s
arrow could kill him in an instant, and then what would happen to Egypt?

Turning down the avenue that led to the temple, Meren breathed deeply, taking in air laden with moisture. The floodwaters
of the Nile were receding, and soon pharaoh’s surveyors would spread across the land to remeasure field boundaries and estimate
crop yields. During inundation the population of Memphis swelled with laborers from the country ordered into the service of
temple and government projects. Royal granaries and supply houses dispensed vast quantities of grain, wheat, barley, oil,
and other commodities to pay such workers who would otherwise have little to do.

Indeed, it was a busy time of the year for pharaoh’s ministers, including Meren’s old mentor, Ay. Meren had been concerned
for his friend ever since he’d discovered that Nefertiti had been murdered. He had never told Ay of this discovery, and the
old man still believed what everyone had assumed when Nefertiti died—that the queen had fallen ill from a plague that had
killed her daughters. Meren was reluctant to tell Ay about the murder until he knew who the killer was. If he could capture
the one responsible, the old man might bear the news better.

Thinking hard, Meren turned down a side street, away from the temple’s massive pylon gate with its carved and painted reliefs
and giant doors covered with gold. He would make his way around the walls that surrounded the temple complex and return home.
Before an enemy had tried to kill him a couple of months ago he’d been on the track of three suspects, men powerful enough
to have arranged the queen’s death. Yamen the army officer was dead. Another was the Syrian Dilalu, who sold weapons to anyone
rich enough to pay for them. The last was Zulaya, an elusive merchant from one of the Asiatic kingdoms, perhaps Babylon. This
was one of the reasons he’d asked that one of the Eyes and Ears of Pharaoh stationed abroad be summoned home. He needed to
speak with someone whose task it was to keep an eye on people like Dilalu and Zulaya.

Yamen had been killed before Meren could question him about the queen’s murder. An unseen, unknown enemy always preceded him
before Meren could question someone who might shed light on the mystery. That someone had caused the deaths of the cook Hunero
and her husband. He’d brought Hunero’s sister to Memphis in the hope that she might remember something of use, but her memory
faltered often. Meren was of the opinion that Satet deliberately forgot things that were inconvenient or frightening to her.

Turning a corner Meren paused, realizing he had taken a wrong turn and was in an unfamiliar area. The neighborhood around
the temple was old, as old as the ancient ones who built the pyramids. Over the years the houses and storage buildings had
multiplied and expanded, taking up parts of streets and creating a network of roads that dead-ended, alleys that zigzagged
and looped back on themselves and burrowed into the warrens of mud brick that served as combination dwellings, mangers, and
workshops.

Having taken one wrong turn, Meren now found himself in a narrow little alley that ended in a blank wall. At one time an exterior
stair had stood against this wall. Only five mud brick steps remained, leading nowhere. Meren backtracked only to find himself
in an alley hardly wide enough for one person to pass, and this took an abrupt turn that went back the way he’d come. Meren
stopped and sighed. He would have to find another stair so that he could climb high enough to see where he was from a rooftop.
Luckily he spotted one a few houses down. He reached it quickly and set his foot on the bottom step.

“Out for a stroll, is we?”

Whipping around, Meren found the way blocked by a man with the mass of a temple column. Although light was only beginning
to permeate the darkness of early morning, he could make out a skewed smile filled with broken teeth and eyes the whites of
which had yellowed. Meren’s hand went to his side. Where the scabbard for his dagger should have been there was emptiness.
He hadn’t brought a weapon. What madness. He always carried a dagger. That cursed nightmare must have disturbed him more than
he’d thought.

Meren planted his feet solidly and said, “Go away.”

“Not before I get my hands on that pretty belt. Give it to me.”

Sighing, Meren waved the man away. “I’ve no patience with thieves. Leave before I decide you’re worth the trouble of dragging
you to the city police.”

He should have realized the thief was too dim-witted to recognize authority when he encountered it. His rank protected him
most of the time. Few commoners would dare speak to him, much less steal something from him. But he’d wandered into the Caverns,
the disreputable area of the city near the docks, the denizens of which recognized no higher authority than the edge of a
blade. If he hadn’t been thinking so hard he would have realized the danger. As it was, his new friend responded to the dismissal
by drawing a knife.

“You got one last chance to do what I say. Gimme the belt.”

As he finished speaking the man waved the knife at Meren, who grabbed his arm and jammed it against his knee. The thief grunted
but didn’t let go of the blade. He rammed his fist into Meren’s jaw and kneed him. The blow caught Meren in the side at the
site of his healing arrow wound. He cried out as his knees buckled. He caught himself by planting his palms on the ground,
but fell when his attacker rained blows on him from above. He felt a knee on his back, twisted, and grabbed the thief’s arm
as the knife came at him. Staring at the tip of the blade, Meren felt his arms quiver from the effort to hold off the man’s
full force.

Just when he thought his strength would give way, a dagger blade descended from nowhere and settled against the thief’s throat.
The man went still, his eyes protruding while he made a high-pitched squealing sound.

“Be good enough to stop that, if you please,” said a low, easy voice.

Meren felt the thief remove his weight. He sat up as a dark figure herded the thief away from him. The man backed away from
the dagger, eyeing the newcomer. Suddenly he growled and took a threatening step toward his enemy. The dagger snaked out and
carved a neat X on the thief’s belly. He yelped and clutched his stomach.

“Run along now, or I’ll have to kill you, and that would be so tiresome.”

The thief staggered away from his tormentor, turned, and ran. Meren was too surprised to move. He sat down, his hands braced
on the ground, and gaped as his rescuer cleaned the dagger, stuck it in a scabbard, and whirled around to offer a hand.

“Rescuing the great Lord Meren. A most edifying experience after my long absence from Egypt.”

Speechless, Meren stared at the small hand with its immaculate nails and the row of gold bracelets above it. He followed the
delicate line of an arm to a curved shoulder, and finally his gaze found a smiling mouth of dusky crimson and eyes that tilted
up slightly at the outside corners. His amazement grew as he took in a small-boned frame taut with disciplined musculature.
His rescuer wore a gown of the finest and softest wool. Red with a blue border, it fastened over one shoulder and cinched
at the waist with a belt of lapis lazuli and gold beads. There were few in Egypt who dressed in such a foreign style.