“And, set in place instead, this one and only god.”
“The sun-disk, the bronze fire, their Ut-Aten.” She paused for a dainty bite of meat and dabbed pomegranate sauce from the corner of her regal mouth. “And of all Ut-Aten’s godly rivals, who would be most hated? Who, already, is more dreaded than even the fearsome Set?”
Khemet’s lip curved in a wry smile. “Oh, you need not remind me of that truth, I assure you.”
The serpent moves with silent swiftness.
The serpent waits to strike.
The serpent sinks its fangs.
The serpent coils, crushes.
The serpent strangles, squeezes, kills.
The serpent steals breath.
The serpent swallows life.
Moving, yes, with silent swiftness, silent swiftness through the night. Dark shapes in the darkness, unheard, unseen, undetected. Finding their prey. Waiting to strike, waiting, and then sinking their fangs, coiling, crushing, strangling, squeezing.
Killing.
Stealing breath.
Swallowing life.
First, the solitary sentries on their lonely watch. The solitary sentries, and anyone else with the misfortune to cross the serpents’ paths.
Some stonecutters who’ve sneaked from the worker’s camp to share a jug of sour barley-beer… a pair of young lovers fumbling their way through a furtive tryst… a lame old beggar wakening at the wrong moment… a physician’s apprentice selling stolen bone-of-vulture to a merchant’s pregnant wife…
It is quick. It is quiet. No alarms are raised. Around them, tents and huts and houses dream in slumber.
They converge, gathering at their appointed meeting-place for the next stage of their attack. Scaled bodies, sinuous and powerful, rippling with muscle. Flinty heads from which slitted eyes peer at one another.
Six of them.
There are six.
When there should be seven.
Khemet slipped from the queen’s salon by way of the same secret rushlit passages through which he’d entered, his presence noticed only by a very few of Neferisu’s most trusted servants.
Although it had been years since he’d set foot in the palace, his steps neither faltered nor hesitated. How often had he and Mahenef played here as boys? Making up adventures, fighting evil tomb robbers, man-headed scorpions, and other monsters… listening in on mostly-dull discussions between nobles, priests, and scribes…
He stopped, nerves pricking, pulse quickening, sensing someone else nearby.
“So, you finally return to us.” A figure emerged from an adjoining doorway, and Khemet stood stunned and blinking for the span of several heartbeats.
“Sia,” he said, once he could form words.
“Khemet.”
“You have… changed.”
“As have you.”
He looked her up and down, from the painted toenails of her sandal-clad feet to the jeweled pins holding her intricate black braids in place. His gaze could not help but linger over lithe limbs and firm curves. “I think you have changed… more.”
A smile crinkled the corners of her eyes, which were outlined in darkest khol and shadowed with the iridescent indigo dust of powdered scarab shells. “What was it that you said to my mother? Ah yes… I was a child then.”
“No longer.”
“No longer.”
Khemet found himself at a loss for words. The girl he remembered, Mahenef’s second sister, had been a reed-thin creature, pretty but shy. This was a woman grown, Bastet incarnate, and however ill-at-ease he’d been in the company of the queen, he felt far more stricken in the company of her daughter.
Then, her words came through to him, and he looked at her again, more sharply. “You heard our conversation?”
“Of course I did,” Sia replied, as if he were being foolish. “Tanit and I often played in these passages as well. We knew all the spying-places.”
“Then you know what the queen commands.”
Her graceful, bare shoulders lifted in an idle shrug, mirroring her mother’s. “She wants you to go to Sefut-Aten, to stop Pharaoh from this madness.”
“By any means necessary.”
“That, indeed, is what she said.”
“And you know… about me. What I am. What I’ve become.”
She took a step closer. He both smelled and tasted the sweet fragrances of cosmetics and perfume, and beneath those the even sweeter fragrances all her own.
“I know that after Mahenef died, you joined the Sons of Apophis. Now you are their leader. A warrior of darkness, a serpent-commander in the army of the night.”
“We are no army,” he said. “There are no chariots for us, no troops of spearmen and archers. My men are soldiers, but trained in the ways of stealth. Stealth, and murder.”
Sia nodded.
“Does that not frighten you? Fill you with abhorrence and disgust?”
“Should it?” She took another step.
“Shouldn’t it?”
In a slow, deliberate movement, she raised a hand and trailed her fingertips along his jawline from earlobe to chin.
He caught his breath. Warrior of darkness, serpent-commander, Son of Apophis, and her touch made him tremble.
Six where there should be seven.
One of their number is missing.
They move — with silent swiftness — past more tents and huts and houses.
A fat slave-master stumbles yawning into view and pauses to relieve himself against a mudbrick wall. He does not see or hear his death approaching. He only voids his bladder in a wilder and more vigorous spraying stream as breath is strangled from him. They do not let him fall, but lower him carefully behind the wall, covering him with a loose strew of hay.
Torchlight burns the night. Not solitary sentries but a group of three temple guards, a patrol. Wearing tanned-hide breastplates with yellow sun-disks painted on their chests, carrying round bronze shields, each with a sickle-shaped khopesh sword hanging at his hip. The one who holds the torch is young, barely out of boyhood.
Six against three, it would be no contest.
Six against three, in silence?
The serpent waits to strike.
In the deepest shadows. Flinty heads lowered, scale-clad bodies powerful and poised.
The guards walk past the wall behind which the slave-master’s corpse is hidden. Not entirely oblivious; they notice the drying wetness upon the mudbrick, the puddle soaking into the earth. The boy with the torch raises it. They look around. The tallest leans to peer over the wall.
It must be done.
A signal is given.
Now.
The serpent sinks its fangs.
Long and thin, sharp and curved.
Into unprotected backs, piercing linen before penetrating flesh. With unerring accuracy, avoiding ribs and shoulder blades and spine, puncturing the lungs, skewering the heart.
The younger guard, with the torch, is seized around the neck. His head is jerked violently to the side. The crack must seem loud to him, loud as the end of the world, but it is the only sound that’s made, and to any other ears would be no more than a snapping twig.
His eyes are wide and still-seeing as he crumples boneless to the ground. Perhaps he watches as the torch is deftly plucked from his hand before it falls into the straw. Perhaps he sees his companions. The taller of them is slumped over the wall, a much thicker flood of wetness running down the mudbrick now to puddle on the earth. The other sprawls facedown, and as the serpent rears up from him, the fangs slide out in twin glistening curves.