the city within these walls a place of law and order, a city pleasing to the lady Maat. And you can help me.”
She sat dead quiet, her expression a mixture of wariness and doubt.
“First,” he said, “you must control your customers. I want no more complaints from your neighbors about brawls in this lane. Second, you must speak at all times with respect when you talk of my men. They’re Medjays, yes-but their loyalties lie with Kemet, and you must tell your customers this truth. Third, old woman, you must tell me all you see and hear within these walls that will help me with my task.”
“You’d make me your spy?” she asked, stiff with indignation.
“Would you prefer to face the viceroy?”
She studied the set of his jaw, gave a harsh but not altogether unfriendly laugh, and heaved her bulk off the stool. “You’re a hard man, Officer Bak. And I like hard men. If I were twenty years younger…”
“Sir!”
Bak’s glance swiveled toward the outer door. A slim young man stood in the portal, panting, sweat running down his bare breast. He carried the shield and spear of a fortress guard.
“You must come at once, sir. It’s Commandant Nakht. He’s been slain! His life taken by a hand not his own!”
Chapter Two
Nakht lay on his back in the middle of his private reception room. His eyes were closed, his face contorted in an impossible smile. Fresh blood was everywhere. It was smeared across the white-plastered floor beneath him. It stained his hands and his bare torso and his kilt. A reddish trickle ran from his mouth to the hair at the nape of his neck. A second, wider stream had flowed from the dagger imbedded in his breast and down his ribcage to a streaked puddle on the floor. His death could not have been easy, but with luck and the quick intervention of the gods, his ka, his eternal double, had slipped from his body soon after the attack.
Bak stood on the threshold, barely aware of the armed guard at his shoulder or the murmurs of disbelief and curiosity issuing from the lips of the dozen or so people clustered in the torchlit courtyard behind him. He stared with dismay at the scene. All he could think of was Nakht’s reference to offenses against the gods and a burden he alone must shoulder. Had he been slain to keep secret the knowledge he had refused to share? If he, Bak, had been less concerned about himself, if he had urged the commandant to speak, would he still live and breathe?
The watch officer, Lieutenant Mery, the man who stood at the head of the fortress guard, knelt beside the bloodied form. His slim, boyish torso glistened in the light of a flaming torch mounted in a wall bracket next to the door. His face, as perfectly molded as a statue of royalty, was drawn and pale, accenting a small livid scar at the corner of his mouth.
An overturned chair lay behind Nakht’s body. On a narrow cedar table standing beside it, a pair of pottery oil lamps burned with a dull glow. Several chests, low tables, and stools, all simply but beautifully crafted, were scattered around the room. A lean, hard-faced spearman was posted before a second open door. Through the portal, Bak could see part of the long mudbrick stairway that climbed the inner side of the fortress wall from the ground floor to the battlements, dark and enclosed to roof level, open to the air from the roof to the walkway atop the wall. A stairway for soldiers to use in time of battle, unlike a more formal stone stairwell in another part of the building, which rose to the private apartments on the second floor and opened onto the courtyard.
A fleeting whimper, like the mewling of a newborn kitten, drew him into the room. Standing next to the wall to his right, beside a cedar chest inlaid with ebony, was a shapely young woman of no more than twenty years. Her face, her hands, her ankle-length white sheath were smeared with blood. Her eyes, pools of amber in a rigid, stark white face, were locked on the dead man. Her red-brown hair was pulled back and braided, the thick plait hanging to her waist.
Hovering by her side, his cheeks wet with tears, was a stocky man of middle years wearing a belted white knee-length tunic. His brown braid was as thick and long as the woman’s. He was the commandant’s personal servant, Bak knew, a man named Lupaki, whom Nakht had brought with him from the land of Hatti. If the woman’s hair and pale eyes told true, she too must have come from that distant place. Bak wondered who she was. A servant, most likely, or perhaps Nakht’s concubine.
He recalled the words of Maiherperi, who had advised him at length before sending him to Buhen with the Medjays. When a man is slain in his home, the commander had said, look first to the members of his household; learn which had reason to hate him and which had the most to gain from his death and you’ll very likely learn the name of the guilty man-or woman. If the burden Nakht had mentioned concerned domestic matters, Bak thought, that might well explain his reluctance to speak.
He crossed to the body, relieved this death would be so easily resolved. Kneeling beside Mery, he placed his fingertips on Nakht’s neck to search for a pulse of life. As he expected, he found nothing but the chill sweat of the dead man’s last fatal struggle.
“Who did this, Lieutenant? The woman?”
“No,” Mery said. “No!” His dark eyes were clouded with unhappiness and something else. Uncertainty? “I saw him in her arms, Bak. I saw the pain they shared at the end. She couldn’t have done this.”
“You were here when he died?”
“I came as soon as I heard her scream. Too late to see the one who stabbed him, but he still lived- barely.”
“Tell me what you saw.”
Mery glanced toward the woman and his mouth tightened. “Her husband is dead. Must she stand there and listen? Must she be forced to relive those moments while I describe them?”
“She was his wife?” Bak asked, surprised.
Mery nodded. “Azzia, she is called.”
“She speaks our tongue?”
A humorless smile formed on Mery’s lips. “Better than you and me.”
Bak eyed the lifeless commandant, who had been a healthy, vigorous man of at least fifty years. More than twice the age of the foreign woman. Not unusual for a man to desire a young wife, but a choice which often led to domestic troubles. Yet he saw no reason to keep her here.
He stood up and walked to her. “You may go to your chamber, mistress. I’ll speak with you later.”
She moved not a single muscle and her eyes never left the face of the inert form on the floor.
“You may go,” he repeated, making it an order this time.
“The shock of my master’s death has stolen her reason,” Lupaki said, his voice husky with emotion.
He placed a brawny arm around her waist, clasped one of her blood-stained hands, and led her like an un- resisting child through the door and into the courtyard. Exclamations of shock and dismay filtered through the open portal.
Bak ordered the guard posted there to stay with her. Closing the door, he turned to Mery. “Tell me what happened.”
Mery stood up, his glance accusing. “Must you treat her as a prisoner in her own home?”
“For the love of Amon, Lieutenant! She’s covered with his blood. What do you expect me to do?”
Mery glared at him, but his defiance quickly melted. “You’re right, of course, but I can explain her appearance.”
Pulling a stool away from the wall, Bak placed it a few paces from the body and motioned Mery onto it. He chose his words carefully lest he offend this officer who was his superior in rank if not in authority under the laws he had been sent to uphold.
“I see you admire her,” he said, “but you must do nothing to protect her. If I’m to find the one who committed this terrible deed, I must be led along a straight and true path.”
With an unhappy nod, Mery sank onto the stool and clasped his hands between his bare knees. Bak walked around the body and knelt on its opposite side so he could watch the officer’s face while he talked.
“I was making my rounds,” Mery said. “After checking the sentries on the battlements, I realized I’d forgotten the list of men assigned to the gates. I came here to get it. I found the audience hall filled with the rabble your Medjays had brought and your scribe Hori placing their names on a scroll. Twenty or more other men, clerks and
