24 Bones (21 page)

Chapter Twenty-nine

D
avid tottered through the halls toward Pharaoh’s voice. Blue threads of electricity trailed his fingertips. He grinned at the physical manifestation of power, but still he could not harness it at will. Zahara followed close behind, still clutching the wound of her missing thumb. Her face was the color of ash and she shied away when the gauze of energy leapt at her.

While dressing in the chamber, David had asked Zahara if Pharaoh had touched her. She had held up her injured hand in response. But David repeated the question. Her downcast gaze had furnished his answer. He had not hugged nor consoled her.

Clothed in finely woven pants and tunic, David soon gained his balance and strode through lightless halls. Pharaoh’s garbled words rumbled through the stone. When the passage ended, David entered a large room; beyond, another portal glowed awash with crimson light. He crept forward, fingertips no longer brushing stone. Zahara’s hand pinched the hem of his tunic, and he jerked the cloth from her grip. Pharaoh’s voice was still obscured by echoes. At the arch, the red glare pulsed, lighting hieroglyphic script carved as deep as David’s fingers were long.

“Welcome,” Pharaoh greeted.

David stepped beyond the gateway and into the room. Black, red, black, red—the light beat and David lifted his palm to block it.

“The dwarfs dislike light, David, my apologies.” Pharaoh pulled a cover from several blue vials and illuminated the room with a diffuse glow that dulled the pulsations emanating from the interior of the anthropoid sarcophagus.

Inscriptions covered the room’s rectangular walls. At the centre, before the coffin, stood Pharaoh dressed in a simple black robe. Red hair cascaded down his shoulders. His eyes glowed like the vials, but yellow. “How’s your chest?”

Hair rose on David’s neck, and his pupils contracted.

“I am better, a little tired and hungry.” Empty cups had littered the room where he had convalesced. Zahara had fed him, but the liquid diet had left him drained. His fingers probed his stomach. Muscle flexed under his robe. He had not felt muscle there in a decade.

Pharaoh clapped his hands, and a dwarf entered.

“Trand, the beast wishes food. Bring it,” Pharaoh ordered.

David looked into the white eyes of the dwarf. He sensed awe in them and was pleased.

Pharaoh grunted, his molars grinding. Trand bowed and obeyed.

“
Beast
is not very appealing, is it?” Pharaoh asked, standing over the person-shaped crypt. “And
David
is too North American. Not right for the chosen one, and
Chosen One
is pedantic.” Pharaoh looked pensive, but a smile curled at his lip. “How about
Seth
?” His fierce gaze grilled David.

“Why did you let me live?” David asked.

Pharaoh smiled. He leaned onto the sarcophagus’s rim, its contents hidden from David. “I am a powerful leader. I lead hundreds, and a horde of creatures, a host of terror you cannot imagine.” Pharaoh’s tone carried no pride, it stated fact. “I have the strength of chaos.” Pharaoh reached first into the crypt to clutch something. Then he gathered the Void and blue flame burst in his palm; next he stretched to lift a massive stone table. It tapped rhythmically upon the floor.

“Do you know what is more powerful than this, Seth?” Pharaoh straightened.

David’s eyes warmed to an orange glow.

“Myth,” Pharaoh answered. “Myth raises armies. Myth builds empires and civilizations. My hounds and crocodiles are not the deadliest scourge I could unleash on Cairo, but they frighten.” His arm swept the room. “Upon these walls are the ancient Egyptian myths.”

David’s gaze absorbed images of Isis, Horus, Seth, Sobek, Re—the pantheon of Egyptian gods.

“You were martyred by Sam, by a false judge and a betrayer. You died and were reborn before witnesses. The prophecy speaks of a beast that shall rise. Already, the myth of the beast, Seth reincarnated, is begun. I cannot stop it, but I can wield its power.”

David smirked. “If you think you can use me as a figurehead, Pharaoh, you are mistaken.”

Pharaoh’s laughter echoed.

David flushed. Zahara touched his hand, and he shook it off.

“I did not wish to embarrass you, but you misunderstand. The creation of a myth requires many players, and you are but one player on the Senet board.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Osiris.” Pharaoh reached deep into the sarcophagus. “The myth—it requires an Osiris.”

A cold chill ran through David. Zahara loosed a stifled gasp. “I thought you were trying to halt the Fullness from returning. You have killed all the potential prophets.”

David’s mind began to churn.

“You don’t believe I can be the prophet?” Pharaoh’s eyes danced.

“You?” David spluttered.

“Me. I am Osiris.” Pharaoh lifted the golden staff from the tomb. Its central red heart throbbed. The staff, the Spine of Osiris, was symmetrical and perfect. Cloth wrapped its vertebrae. The staggered light penetrated the material.

“Seth killed Osiris.” David pointed to the coffin. “Maybe you want to get in?”

“And Horus defeated Seth,” Pharaoh replied. “Let’s see if we can’t change that outcome too. I offer you godhood, David. You will rule chaos, but I will rule all.”

David looked from the throbbing staff to the stone altar. Zahara cowered behind the arch. Power tingled at the tips of his fingers.

“Yes, Osiris.” David bent his head.

“Good. Let us discuss your first failure.” Pharaoh indicated the cloth wrapping.

“You could not translate the tablet?” David lifted his head.

Pharaoh twisted the staff and his face darkened. “The spinal cord—Horus’s piece—remains unknown.”

“The tablet—”

“The hieroglyphs were copied accurately.” Pharaoh hurled the tablet.

It spun and cracked into a panel. Stone fragments showered the floor. Zahara screamed and shrank back.

David walked over to the tablet. The gold felt cool. His fingers traced the inscription, as if he were blind and read Braille. When they stroked over the sides, he paused and smiled. He stared at the Wedjat and peered into the deep carving of the glyph. Suddenly, his eyes flared, and he exalted in his access to Void. Ankhs, falcons, pillars, and a clutter of images peeled from the Wedjat. The heiroglyphs drifted toward the Spine of Osiris.

“The eye, Osiris. The power of Horus is in his Eye.”

Where the cloth binding halted, Pharaoh, like he collected a drool of honey, rolled the glowing strip of letters onto the diamond pyramid. Fractured light lanced over the walls. Pharaoh’s eyes burned brighter.

“The Sphinx shall roar.” He laughed and twisted the staff as he read the inscription.

“The Sphinx …” David whispered.

Pharaoh stood silent.

David wondered, was the Sphinx far older than Egyptologists suggested? Did it hide subterranean cavities?

“Beneath the Sphinx?” David asked. He looked to Pharaoh for confirmation.

The corner of Pharaoh’s mouth rose in satisfied appraisal. “The Sphinx guards the spinal cord.”

Comprehension whisked the seams from David’s brow. A month ago, to solve the mystery of the Great Pyramid’s purpose would have seemed a great achievement; now it barely registered.

David looked to Zahara, who had regained a measure of her composure and stood at the arch with a hand on her hip. Trand stepped into the room. Saliva flooded David’s mouth at the sight of food piled high on the platter. He clutched handfuls of shish kabob, mezze, and falafel. He waved to Zahara with greasy fingers that he cleaned on his linen shirt. She took some fragrant hummus and pita, her gaze flitting from the food to the spine. David’s stomach burbled. Then it rebelled and heaved up most of what he had swallowed.

“Trand, it seems Seth has to recover before he will have an appetite.” Trand grinned beneath his beard. “You will help him in his recovery.”

“Yes, Pharaoh,” Trand replied.

“Osiris,” David corrected and wiped vomit from his lip. “He is Osiris.”

“Yes, Osiris.”

Pharaoh regarded David a last time. Then he turned to leave. Zahara started to follow.

“Zahara, stay,” David commanded.

Zahara stopped and then looked to Pharaoh. He smiled and drew her to his side with Void.

David cleared his throat.

“Osiris needs his Isis, and besides, Seth was presumed by many to be gay.” Pharaoh’s laughter faded as he continued down the passage with Zahara in tow.

David shrugged. Seth had torn Osiris to pieces once. David turned his back on Trand and started into the passageway, but he stopped, frustrated by the darkness. Underground and blind, he was at a disadvantage.

“Dwarf, how do you see in the dark without Void?” David demanded and turned to Trand.

Trand placed a cloth over the blue vials. Darkness swallowed the chamber.

“Now what?” David asked.

“Relax. Darkness itself does not hurt. Everything remains as it was. Let the room tell you what is in it,” the dwarf explained. David scoffed. “No need for the Void, dwarfs do not use the Void to see.”

“I can’t see a thing.”

“Use your ears, make sound and listen to its reply, in it you will see the room’s dimensions, the sarcophagus, altar, all. In time, your mind will recreate the shape and contents using sound.”

David woofed once and then listened. He clenched his fists when nothing appeared. “How long does this take to figure out?”

“Some never learn—others, a few years.”

“Years!” David flexed his jaw and reached to the Void. It ran like a spinning grindstone. Each time he touched it, he bounced away and sparks blazed in his mind. He reached inside to focus his energies and then launched toward the Void. He hit stone. His brain ached as if it had concussed against his skull. He slumped.

“Seth, do not fight the Void, or it will fight you. It is a primal entity. It senses your hostility.”

David looked up in surprise, but his sight remained frustrated by darkness. Trand’s words were logical and echoed Pharaoh’s lessons. David let his body relax, and slowly he eased the fingers of his mind into the whirling Void. They burned, but they did not skid away. The fingers crept deeper until his hand, and then his wrist was enveloped. He drew upon the Void. Energy, confidence, and power surged. Withdrawing his arm, he leaned forward and pressed his forehead into the Void. He buried his head up to his neck; to breathe became an uncomfortable choking, like he inhaled liquid.

Within the Void, he grinned. He wormed the rest of the way through until the Void cascaded about him.

“I see, Trand. Finally, I see.”

Chapter Thirty

S
am studied the men in the flickering firelight. The orange glow burnished silver hair to gold and deepened the craggy lines of their faces.

The companions hunched, breath misting in the cold. Askari’s expression was grim. Lean in a manner only attainable after decades of physical work, his sinewy body had eliminated all that was not useful; thin skin emphasized knurled muscle.

Sam contemplated the training she had completed, both as an initiate and then as a full member of the Shemsu Seth. Pharaoh’s ranks numbered a thousand hardened men. There could be only one outcome against six old men and a traitor.

They had ridden into the deep desert, away from roads and settlements, to camp at a tiny oasis unknown to any but the companions and Bedouin nomads, a place where, if one dug deep enough, water sprang. The water in Sam’s cup was brown with silt. While journeying through the labyrinth, Faris’s falcon, Syf, had found them, trailing them from above like a hound with a scent. The companions had followed the falcon and while Faris rafted down the underground river, Syf followed in the sky above and led the companions to the Qar tomb on the Giza plateau.

Syf preened and hopped from foot to foot on a rock near Faris, who slept with his head in Tara’s lap.

The companions had provided each of them with a coarse brown robe. After almost a full day beneath ground, the hours of sun and the clothing around their bodies felt luxurious. Sam’s bones ached, and her back wept from its scrapes, but she now relaxed under the blanket of stars. Despite her anxiety over Faris’s injury and the approaching new moon, Sam felt better than she had in many years. Free. She enjoyed the freedom like a condemned man took pleasure in his last meal.

The companions huddled on the far side of the fire. She stirred its coals with a twig. Abu scratched at the dust, running in his dreams.

“What can be done for Faris, Askari?” Tara asked and stroked Faris’s forehead under Syf’s watchful eye.

“Little,” he shrugged. “He requires medical attention, not monks. We haven’t the time to go back to the deir.”

“Can’t you heal him with Fullness?” Sam asked, and a dozen dark eyes fell on her.

“Some of those dead could use the Fullness to aid the healing process, but the Fullness is a psychic power, it draws on our unconscious. With it, we can move objects, comfort, communicate, but not create. Neither the Fullness nor the Void can create or destroy.”

“The Void can destroy,” Sam corrected.

“No, Sam, it cannot,” Askari stated. “It can bash an object against another object, but always the pieces will add to a whole. Creation and destruction is magic, it is the power of the gods.”

“Then what’s the difference between the Void and the Fullness?” Sam asked.

“Sam, are you human or are you animal?”

Sam bristled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It makes all the difference,” Askari replied solemnly.

“Man, human.” Sam sniffed.

“Man draws from the psychic force of the Fullness. The key differentiator between the Fullness and the Void is conscience. Animals are without conscience. The Void can be used without conscience, the Fullness cannot.”

“That’s all?”

“It is enough. Without conscience there is no empathy, no compassion, nothing that makes us human, and nothing which differentiates us from animals.”

Sam considered what would happen if conscience disappeared. “Chaos,” she whispered. “Chaos would reign without conscience. A psychopathic world.”

Askari nodded. “Chaos is an aspect of the Void.”

“The Shemsu Seth must be destroyed,” Sam said with finality.

“Not destroyed, Sam,” her mother said. “The balance must be retained.”

Sam struck the coals. Sparks rose into the night. “Balance led us here. Balance has lost Faris’s leg.”

The campfire crackled in the ensuing silence. Until now, no one had mentioned that Faris might not keep his leg, but anyone who looked at his blackened foot and the red tendrils that climbed his thigh knew the truth. Askari’s face darkened, and he turned from the fire.

“Balance did not lead us here,” Askari said. “The sisters.”

Something jarred in Sam’s memory, a conversation without faces, like a recording. “How did the Shemsu Seth determine the locations of the vertebrae?” Sam repeated Faris’s question of Tara. “Mother?” Sam demanded.

Tara held her gaze steady and answered: “If the Shemsu Hor had given us power over the Fullness, none would have died.”

Askari stood, his face purple.

Tara’s voice rose over the crackle of fire. “We were the balance before it was stripped from us.”

“No, Sister,” Askari seethed. “You have traded balance for bodies.”

“There is still time,” she said.

Askari’s arm swept over the downcast men.

“The Shemsu Hor let the Fullness languish, let it tarnish in the darkness of your caves. We wish to bring it into the light,” Tara said. “There is still time.”

A companion tugged on Askari’s wrist. It was a sign of how very tired he was that he sat. “Pharaoh doesn’t have the complete Osiris,” the companion said. “He doesn’t know the location of the spinal cord.”

Another memory of her joining with Faris flashed. “No, he does. David lives,” Sam said.

Askari’s gaze swung back to her at the name.

“I killed David,” Sam continued. “I stabbed him through the heart before I jumped into the pit with my mother. He was going to unveil the secret of the tablet, so I killed him. At least I thought I had, but Faris—his memories say he lives, and that they believe him to be the chosen one, the beast.”

Askari’s gaze dropped to the fire; his eyes reflected red and yellow. “The beast … the Qu’ran calls him the Najjal … He was first called Seth. David has a powerful connection to the Void. I felt it as he …” His voice trailed away until only the hiss and pop of coals remained.

Sam recalled David’s embrace of the Void as he had killed the companions at the deir. Sam had saved David from the consuming Void. She had earned Askari’s distrust, as had her mother.

“If we can get to the spinal cord first, we would at least have that,” Sam said into the silence.

“Without the tablet, how are we to know where the final piece resides?” Tara asked.

“Essam.” Askari pointed to a man whose beard was nearly white. “You worked upon the tablet.”

Essam looked up from the coals, his eyes glittered with the few flames that rose and dipped. “It is simple really, we should have expected it.” His voice held a low timbre edged with excitement. “The trick for us, since we lacked the complete backbone, was to find the starting point of the text. The first time we tried the result was meaningless, but then we realized that the script could be read as easliy top down as left to right. We recopied it—”

“Do you know, Essam?” Askari cut in.

Essam nodded. “It’s an inventory of course, and the part attributable to the spinal cord—it was written hidden within the Eye of Horus—and read something like this …” He closed his eyes:

“
Osiris sleeps at the center of the world, one eye on Orion and the other on the Pole Star. In the Temple of the Phoenix, he shall be reborn
.”

Essam stared around the campfire. “We can find the piece easily enough, but we won’t be able to take it unless we can move millions of tons.” He smiled and watched the others. He avoided Sam’s stare. “The Great Pyramid!” he blurted. “The King’s Chamber, whose star shafts would have pointed to those star systems so many millennia ago, it is the spinal cord. It enervates the Osiris. There, he shall return.”

“It’s a place?” Sam asked.

“Yes,” Tara exclaimed. “The Great Pyramid is a geodesic marker, its walls align with the four cardinal points … and it only makes sense that rebirth take place in a pyramid that symbolizes the primordial mound, the Benben.”

Askari regarded her through narrow slits.

“Sorry, but I’m not sure it
represents
the primordial mound,” Essam stated. “The tablet called it the Temple of the Phoenix. I believe it lies atop
the
primordial mound.”

“Where the gods were made,” Askari whispered.

“So, Pharaoh has the Osiris. He has the power. We are lost,” Sam stated.

“No,” Askari spoke the word faintly, but all heard. “Not lost. You, Sam. You are the one in the prophecy. You are the corruptible who must put on incorruption.”

“I’m sorry, in another time I might have been a watcher, perhaps a Sister of Isis,” Sam glared at her mother, “but I am no prophet.” Five of the six companions hung their heads. One more disappointment changed little.

Askari stared at Sam until she looked away. “I did not say that you were the Prophet Osiris. You are Wedjat, standing by like the watchers.”

Sam scowled.

“Surely you see that the prophecy has come to fruition,” Askari spoke swiftly. “The Fullness fails. The backbone is assembled. The beast has risen. The Wedjat is—”

“Not found,” Sam interrupted. “If I am the Wedjat, then who is the prophet?”

“That is for the Wedjat to determine,” Askari said.

Sam thought for a moment. “Do any of the ancient texts mention what the prophet will be like?” she asked.

“One,” Askari nodded. “The boy doesn’t speak. He is dumb and will have neither form nor comeliness.”

“What did you say?” Sam met his eyes.

“He won’t speak. He’ll be mute.”

“Tariq?” Sam asked.

“Tariq was no prophet,” her mother said, mouth grim.

“How do you know the prophet will be mute?” Sam questioned.

“Isaiah speaks of it in his prophecies,” Askari explained.

“Pharaoh asked me to kill a boy.” Sam stroked at her cheek’s raised network of veins. “I will fetch your chosen one and bring him to you.” Sam stood, and no one made any motion to stop her as she packed a few loaves of bread and took a waterskin.

“How will I
know?
” Sam asked Askari, suddenly uncertain.

“The Wedjat will know.”

She snorted.

“Islamic tradition teaches that only true believers will know the false prophets. You will know the true prophet if you believe.”

Sam stooped to kiss Faris. His lips were cool. “Take care of him, Mother,” Sam ordered. It was clear to all that the relationship between mother and daughter was dependent on Faris remaining alive. Tara nodded.

“Take my horse, Sam,” Askari stated. “And these.” He produced a string of three aten, untied it, and handed two to Sam with a roll of bills. “Go with haste.”

Sam inspected the sundiscs and judged their weight. “I have never used one,” she said.

“Reach for the Fullness. The aten is an extension of you and Re,” Askari explained. Sam stood and clutched the aten. She took a practice swing and shouted, “Re riseth!” The shout was lost in the pop of an ember. Words spoken, not felt.

As a falling man reaches for his crutch, Sam reached for the Fullness. She touched its blistered surface and withdrew.

She gritted her teeth and reached again. She threw the aten. It glinted in the light of the moon, its metal flaring. The disc clanked and rebounded from a rock. Askari’s gaze followed the aten’s path.

“Go,” Askari said. “Time is short indeed.”