As he lifts the candle to shed a better light, he sees it for what it is. Long and limp and slender, a dead snake held by the tail.
Its fine scales are green and black, delicate patterning fading to a paler underbelly. Its head… its head is misshapen, squashed, oozing. Like an overripe date or fig that has been stepped on, or squeezed in a strong fist.
Sennu’s mouth and throat are dry, desert-dry, sandstorm-dry. He fears his knees will give way.
Then, from behind him, he hears voices and movement. Pharaoh’s Lily-of-the-Nile glides in, pinning closed a garment of linen so sheer it makes the gesture of modesty moot. She has taken the time to apply fresh cosmetics. The slavewoman waddles after her, muttering, offering up choices of rings and bangles from a jewelry case.
“He has a snake,” Sennu says, pointing. It is not what he’d intended. It is hardly a proper greeting. The words just… fall from him, like a crumbling rill of sand.
Lily-of-the-Nile sways past and bends, reed-supple, over the boy. She somehow gives the impression of stroking his tousled hair without touching him at all.
“Yes,” she says, all but crooning. “I have one brought for him every afternoon.”
Sennu gapes, incredulous. “But why?”
“We kill it at the moment of the sunset, don’t we, my shining little god? To show the demons of the night they cannot hope to harm us, no, oh no, they cannot.”
The child giggles, lifts his arm again — the dead snake trailing — and licks a smear of congealed gore from the back of his hand.
It is all Sennu can do not to shudder.
“Do you also remember,” Sia whispered, settling her palm against Khemet’s cheek, “how Mahenef would speak his plans of the future? How he and you would marry Tanit and I, and become true brothers at last?”
“Sia…” he said, resisting the urge to lean into her caress.
“Before she died — it was the bone-weakness, same as our Uncle Thut — she requested her sarcophagus be placed alongside Mahenef’s in his tomb. To be united with him in the next world, ba and ka and soul and body.”
“I had heard.” His voice was not quite steady. “May they be forever happy in the houses of Osiris.”
“While here we two still are, yet among the living.”
How beautiful she was, how confident and sure. He had never, until this moment, so regretted his decisions. By Ma’at, by Isis, she was lovely. And to have a woman look at him, touch him without apprehension… he did not like to think how long it had been since that had happened, since he’d enjoyed the pleasures of such company without paying a price… even then usually to be met with stoic endurance …
“The last time we saw each other,” she said, “we shared a kiss.”
He shut his eyes and did allow his cheek to press against her palm. Her skin was as warm and fine as oasis sand. He savored her scent, yearned to part his lips and taste her unique salt-sweetness upon his tongue.
“It was a clumsy thing, that kiss, and awkward,” she went on. “Our noses bumped. I couldn’t stop blushing, and you were so anxious we might be seen. Do you remember that, as well?”
“Vividly,” he said.
“I wonder.” Her murmur, a soft evening breeze rich with promise… the nearness of her… “Would we be better at it now?”
He nearly groaned. “Sia…” he said again, struggling for word, for thought, for action. “I’ve already given your mother my answer. You do not need to—”
From caress to stinging, ringing slap!
They find their missing seventh at the end of a long trail of blood. As if having dragged or been dragged through the dirt. Struggling, slithering, a painstaking crawl.
Scales and skin slashed open.
A bronze spearhead lodged deep.
Organs and bone.
The spear-shaft snapped off, broken, trailing.
Nearby is a sentry, his throat a garish red weal, swollen and angry—
— the serpent strangles, squeezes—
— but somehow eluding, escaping for a moment. Getting a chance to strike back. Desperation and luck, raw luck. Enough to wound, wound badly, even fatally.
Not, however, enough to save himself.
The sentry is dead. Smothered, suffocated. Face pushed into mud. Held there. Held there as clay clogged his nose, filled his mouth, covered his eyes. The scent of dank silt. The gritty taste, the feel, wet sand in his teeth. The hot, coughing pain of damp earth-clots being sucked into his lungs.
The serpent steals breath.
The serpent swallows life.
To take his killer with him is the best he has been able to do.
Which is far better than many could say, given the circumstances. Far better than most.
The sentry was also at least unable to raise an alarm. Their seventh has done that much, has kept the swiftness and the silence. Has kept to the purpose, the mission.
Now they know. The question is answered, the mystery solved.
Honoring the loss of one of their own must come later.
This is their time, in the dark hours.
The sacred fire burns bright in its tower. A tiny sun, arrogant, insolent, defiant. A bronze beacon behind the temple-palace walls.
They make for it.
Swift and silent, scaled and sleek, the serpents of the night.
No other unfortunates get in their way. No workers and no witnesses; no whores, drunkards, or slaves.
Fanged and ready. Shadow to shadow.
Toward the temple, the tower. Walls and scaffolding surround palace houses and courtyards. The shoddy wooden temporary gate is guarded, an open-walled hut to each side and four men to each hut. Not sentries here but soldiers, again in tanned-hide breastplates, with shields and curved khopesh-blades.
These guards are alert, not dozing, not gambling, not telling jokes and lies about women. Lanterns shed broad circles of light, overlapping on the great flat slab-stones in front of the gate.
The serpent waits to strike.
Glances. Gestures. Flinty heads nod understanding.
Two, the stealthiest, move forward. Move to the very fringe-edges of the light. Their fangs have been withdrawn; sometimes the serpent must strike from afar.
With a whisper-soft hiss and snap, no louder than the click-whir of a scarab’s wings, each finds its mark. Not stinging vulnerable flesh but snuffing, blink-fast, the lantern-flames from their wicks.
Blackness drops like a weight. The guards gasp in surprise.
It is a last breath to be stolen. There is no time to cry out, no time to draw their weapons. The serpents are already upon them.
Khemet’s eyes flew open at the slap. His nostrils flared and his body tensed.
He caught her by the wrist almost before the sharp crack finished ringing in his ears, the stinging heat still spreading on his face.
Sia did not flinch. Her fierce gaze held and challenged his.
“Is that what you think I’m doing?” she demanded. “Is that what you think of me?”
The serpent coils, crushes.
His fingers coiled, poised to crush. To crush her fine and fragile bones. To crack and grind them in his fist.
“You think I would seduce you on my mother’s behalf?” she went on.
The serpent…
No.
Not here. Not now. This is not the serpent’s place.
“No,” he said, aloud, and relaxed his grip. “That is not what I think. Sia, I am sorry.”
She yanked her arm away. “Though you might be right to think so. Why not whore myself for her purpose, instead of being whored for Pharaoh’s?”