24 Bones (14 page)

Chapter Nineteen

I
n his crater, David shifted and pulled his robes tighter. When a stone rattled down a rock ledge, he peered over his sandy rampart and searched for stalking snakes, scorpions, or wild dogs. Only shadows lengthened under the moon, and he slumped back.

Scorpio’s tail curled in the sky. The constellations made their slow precession into the Age of Aquarius. The Age of Matter. Technology battles waged in America. Hungry Asian countries grabbed for resources. It was an appropriate moniker for the era. The battle for matter. The battle to matter.

The hole in his stomach had grown. A thick paste filled his mouth that he struggled to swallow. When he meditated on his hunger, a shiver broke his concentration, and he sighed. Each time he stared into the hunger-hole, his body shuddered and rebelled.

I have to connect … have to connect ... the pail—remember the pail.
He pictured Askari drawing the bow, aiming it in the pail’s general direction, the slow arc of the arrow and Askari calling to it, the arrow changing course, and the pail exploding. David began his mantra.
Power of the pail. Pail, pail, pail. Power.

Scorpions approached in silence. Their eight legs disturbed only grains of sand. Unlike a herd of camels, a clutch of hens or a murder of crows, no name exists for a group of scorpions. If scorpions arrived in groups, it wasn’t due to any instinct other than the hunt for food. Had David seen their arrival, he might have called them a
scream
or a
sting
of scorpions. He might have screamed himself.

A dozen scorpions, yellow and black, climbed David’s carefully constructed walls. Some slid backwards and toppled onto their backs. Only one, a scarlet scorpion, took the ridge at a conservative angle, slowly spiraling upward in a patient march, its tail poised, the red tip glistening like a drop of blood—a distant brother of the scorpions that had stung and stung David’s father.

Faris’s
hands balled into fists, his back to David’s fort, which lay across the desert bowl. That Askari would initiate the stranger and not him. That companions must only reach Fullness—Void was power too. Faris raged not simply at these hypocrises; another, brighter fire blazed. He trudged along a rocky ledge and kept from the treacherous sands. The sun’s final rays had bled from the sky and his steps quickened as he scanned for shelter. His initiation would happen even if he needed to complete it himself. The dark companion would avenge Haidar.

When the companions attacked the Temple of Seth, Faris had traced Askari’s connection through the tunnels to Haidar. While Haidar’s attention was on a snapping crocodile, the pharaoh’s staff rose at his back. In the deir’s inner sanctum, Faris’s physical body had squeezed tears from beneath clenched lids, but Faris’s spirit had no eyes to shut.

Haidar’s skull had collapsed under the pharaoh’s blow. Clods of mealy brain fell to the floor. The djed staff’s sweep sprayed blood. Faris cringed from the pharaoh’s criminal hulk and his foul psychic scent. Realizing that the battle was doomed, Faris then gathered those willing and returned to the deir, crippled by loss.

Those companions who had accepted his Void skill as a bridge survived. Thus, they had already accepted his initiation as a companion; for them to think otherwise was betrayal. He had only to complete the ritual. That the foreigner would also be initiated cheapened the brotherhood. But Faris would become something greater.

The pharaoh’s knowledge of the Shemsu Hor attack nagged at Faris as he surveyed an outcropping sheltered from the wind and too steep for predators such as scorpions. He sat and the heat stored in the layers of stone seeped into his thighs. His mind cleared of concerns outside his control.

The red
scorpion breached David’s meager fort as the first rays of the new day crested a distant ridge. David’s breathing shuddered with cold, eyelids fluttering as he continued a fitful sleep. The scorpion teetered on the edge, ready for a mad descent, and its tail drawn up in preparation to sting. But then, the sun slipped over the segmented tail and it tensed, indecisive at the brink.

David grumbled and rolled in his pit.

The scorpion skittered back down the slope it had struggled so long to climb. As David’s eyelids cracked open, the scorpion scrabbled to shelter under a nearby rock shelf.

David sat erect, shivered, and stretched his arms to catch the full warmth of the sun. He smacked his lips and ran a pasty tongue across their cracked flesh
.
His throat constricted. He wanted to speak aloud, to test his voice, but didn’t want to seem delusional, if only to himself.

From under his robe, he withdrew a small cloth bag. He looked left and right: No one was watching. Inside the bag were two unleavened loaves and several dried dates. To David, there was fasting and then there was starving. Askari surely didn’t want him to die.

He had never liked dates, but he scraped the fibrous sweetness with his teeth and sucked the pits bare. The small moisture in the dates served only to whet his thirst. He stood and brushed the night’s sand from his robe. His fingers probed the crust from the corners of his eyes. Like a lizard soaking in the sun’s regenerative warmth, his blood began to flow. He shook out his anxiety over the desert’s callous nature.

Bracing his palm against the sun’s glare, he searched for better shelter. He sniffed. Later he would bury his body and cover his head with his robe. And when the heat grew uncomfortable, he slowly drizzled sand over his feet and shins, watching it sheet. With his torso buried, he pulled down the pit’s walls. The motion reminded him of how children had made snow angels in Canada. Worlds away.

As he cowered from the sun, a mesh of light filtered through the robe and over his face.

Across
the sun-drenched bowl, Faris coasted on the connection. Askari had once told him that the Fullness was different for everyone. This was unfortunate, since he ached to discuss his experience, to describe how it swathed him in comfort, like a fetus in a womb. Still, he was disappointed; he could see the Fullness, even sense it, but not connect. He hauled on the cord of energy and tried to milk strength and nutrients that he knew pumped so close, but in vain.

Playing on the astral plane, twisting and turning, flipping above the Fullness, his desire to know its secrets burgeoned. His sinuses clogged, as if he had a terrible cold, but without the pain and discomfort. Voices swirled about him, voices he could not draw upon, not quite hear.

He reached toward the Fullness and pushed against its reddish lining, veined and tough but thin in spots. Against a translucent window, he pressed fingers. It grew sheer, like a leaded windowpane. Inside was a putrefied bowel, blocked with rot. He gasped. Each edge of the Fullness twisted into space, curled back upon itself, and slid under him to pass on again in a figure eight. The Void swirled and burped below, nothing and anything. His hands broke through the lining, and he recoiled. Through the punctures, Fullness dribbled into Void.

No!

But his palms were too small to stem the flow.

Faris struggled to maintain his grip, but the vacuum of the Void yanked, sucking not just the Fullness but him as well. It wrapped his ankles and hauled. He clutched at the Fullness’s lip and its power trickled over him into the cosmos. Without its oozing wound, he would have been lost. He now understood the purpose of the test. The Fullness stretched in an infinite yet closed loop, and perforations marred all its smooth curve, shedding voices and thoughts into Void. Fullness ever corroded until Osiris returned, once every five hundred years. It was a finite resource, and in that knowledge he affirmed his duty to protect it.

He touched his chin to his chest and stared downward as he strained to hold on. He could sense the Void’s nature. It was not simply a nothing, it was anything, it was all else. If the Fullness that cascaded over him was a sort of universal consciousness, the Void represented a chaotic animal power. All else but that which makes humans different. He resisted a wild urge to plummet into it.

The Fullness tore wider, a ragged slash at his fingertips. He flipped into the spray of thought, and crawled up the stream until he lay on the ledge of Fullness, the connection still elusive, but feeling it trickling between his toes, through and over his form, out. Into the Void.

David
tried mentally to burn a hole in the robe still covering his face. Maybe just knowing that the power existed was enough.
Here I am, my body baking like roast pigeon in a clay oven.
His mind pictured a table laden with roast meat and potatoes. He licked rough lips. The snack of bread and dates had only perpetuated his hunger and inspired his thirst. When he pictured the pail now, it appeared full of water.

Inwardly focused, all my outer senses blocked, but I can’t connect.
He pushed onto his forearms, sand cascading from his chest. David muttered and rubbed his stomach. He cast long stares back toward the deir. He would have returned if not for
the pail
. Light was failing, and he would soon need to rebuild his fort.