Khemet almost asked what she meant by that, but then he understood. He closed his eyes again, exhaling through clenched teeth, letting his shoulders fall.
“I am the eldest surviving daughter.” She uttered a bitter laugh. “It would make me queen of all Egypt, the dynasty secure.”
“Yes,” he said heavily. “Yes, it would.”
Fangs plunge and impale, piercing lungs, piercing hearts. Muscles curl and constrict, tightening, powerful, inexorable.
Windpipes and voice-boxes collapse in muted crunches of cartilage. The guards grope feebly, kick with futile struggles as they strangle. Gristle crackles in their necks. Bodies fall with meaty thumps.
In a nearby hut, a dog whuffs. Once, and twice. A third is interrupted by a man’s impatient, drowsy grumble. The dog whines plaintively.
Then all again is silent.
The sacred fire in the tower burns on, unabated. Those who tend it go on doing so, chanting, oblivious to danger.
For now.
To raise the gate would mean risking noise, its wooden creak and rattle, the squeal of pulley and rope. The serpents go up it instead, swarm up it with fluid ease, up and over, dropping soundlessly into the courtyard.
They flow across it like currents of dark water, parting and passing around piles of bricks and cut stone, mounds of dirt and gravel, beams, casks, straw-bales, and the disfigured visages of gods.
Swiftness. Silence.
Dark shapes within the larger darkness of the night.
First, they will strike at the barracks. In that long, low-ceilinged room, more guards sleep on woven mats. Unarmed, naked, unprepared, presenting no challenge to the sinking fangs, to the strangling coils. From there, they will go to the tower—
But, before any of that can be done, a moving firelight flicker strengthens brighter in a doorway.
“However…” said Sia, “I am the eldest surviving daughter anyway. No matter who I marry, would I not still be queen?”
Khemet glanced at her, feeling even more uncertain, as if their conversation took place upon some deceptive stretch of quicksand.
He almost, in that instant, yearned for the dark caverns below the desert, carved in sunless secrecy by age-old underground rivers. There, at the hidden stronghold the Sons of Apophis called home… there, where the immense black avatar basked and rested, accepting offerings of flower-garlanded heifers with gilded nubs of horn… there, where he had lived, had trained… where their ways, their rules, were simple and easily understood…
The serpent…
The serpent, yes, the Serpent. Apophis, Apep, the Maw of Night, Eternal Devourer of the Sun.
The serpent swallows life.
His life as well? Khemet’s own? Freely given, offered up like any other sacrifice, offered and accepted?
And why not? He’d had no close family — a soldier father long since dead, a mother who’d put him in the care of an aging aunt when she remarried, a stepfather and various half-siblings he barely knew. The aging aunt, a cosmetician to the ladies of Pharaoh’s court, had done her best to raise him, and her favored status afforded him much freedom and indulgence. Even she was gone now, having succumbed to the damp-lung before the war in which Mahenef had died.
So, indeed, why should he not have taken on the Scales and Fangs and Coils?
It seemed, at the time, a reasonable decision. One he could anticipate little cause to regret. Although he had learned no other trade but battle, the armies did not want him, believing unluck was his shadow. Likewise, he would have no wife or children to support. And, despite a princely education gained at Mahenef’s side, his aunt had left only a scant inheritance once her final arrangements were complete.
Might as well make the most of his solitude and ominous reputation. Might as well pledge himself to the Serpent.
Yet now, here he was… and Sia… if she was suggesting what it seemed she was suggesting…
Their youthful infatuation, her brother’s joking plans, and that single fumbling awkward kiss of bumped noses and blushing… those belonged to another time, a gone time, another world. Didn’t they?
The way she touched him, though. The way she looked at him and stroked his face. The soft warmth like fine, smooth, heated sand in her caress, her voice, her gaze.
How could she want him, knowing what he was? Knowing what her own mother had commanded him to do?
This business dark and grim, as she had phrased it.
If he did not — if he refused, or failed — then any hope with Sia would be gone. But if he did, if he succeeded…
There was no crime greater than the shedding of royal blood. The bloodline of Pharaoh was the bloodline of the gods.
Ordinary murder was more than wickedness enough.
Her words and his, speaking of Mahenef and Tanit… united with him in the next world, ba and ka and soul and body… may they be forever happy in the houses of Osiris.
And Neferisu’s words as well… he will be waiting for you in the Seven Halls.
No crime greater than the shedding of royal blood. No crime more certain to weigh a heart heavier than stone in the balance-scales held by Anubis. Instead of the houses of Osiris, it would be the monstrous Ammit. It would be utter obliteration.
Conflicting thoughts and emotions seethed in him, roiled like a pit of snakes, churned like the primal seas of chaos.
With a sudden, violent cry and gesture, he dashed them all from his mind. He stood, jaw clenched, hands raised, fingers stiffly splayed, air hissing harsh and rapid through his teeth.
The serpent…
“Khemet?”
She took a step, began to reach for him.
…coils, crushes.
He seized her, pulled her to him, coiled his arms around her body, crushed her to his chest—
…steals breath.
— and claimed her lips in a fierce kiss.
The firelight flickers.
Brightening, strengthening.
A false dawn.
Gleaming gold in a doorway, casting a gangly moving shadow against a wall.
A man appears, tall and thin, angular as a heron. Even with a heron’s walk, beak-nosed head bobbing with each stilted step.
His robe and sun-disk jewelry proclaim him a priest. He carries a candle in a dish of bronze. It quavers in his grasp, and his eyes dart about like anxious flies.
The swiftest and most silent of them, at the signal, moves to attack.
Fangs emerge whisper-quick. And strike. Piercing just below the collarbones, just above the ribs, to either side of breastbone, plunging hilt-deep into lungs.
A single, startled gasp, barely begun… eyes bulging wet with horror… and it is done. The bronze dish falls from the priest’s loosening fingers but is caught before it hits the ground. The candle tumbles from it, rolling across flagstones, flame guttering and sputtering.
Then, it all goes wrong.
Then, somebody screams. A high voice, piping and shrill. In the doorway is a child, a boy, soft and well-fed, his hair a mass of curls. Other voices join in, a clamoring alarm. Two women are there, one short and squat, the other slim and shapely. Several men rush past the women, muscular men in leopard skins and gold pectorals. They carry stout staves topped with rounded, sharp-edged blades.
Coils lash and snap, black in the dim-lit gloom. One twines about a staff and yanks it from the hands of the wielder, sending it to clatter. A second snares the same man by the calf and ankle; a hard pull flips him off his feet. The lengths of other coils entangle wrists, encircle throats.