cargo — by a skeleton crew. The watch at the base of the gangplank consisted of just a pair of junior ratings, who were more interested in the Pan-African Tournament football match they were listening to on a transistor radio than in the possibility of a sneak attack on their vessel. Two of the Liberators, the twin-like cousins Saeed and Salim, stole up behind them and briskly and efficiently slit their throats. The watch on deck were no more vigilant, and no more difficult to catch unawares, and then just no more.
Nephthysian overconfidence. They really had not got the full measure of the Lightbringer yet.
On the bridge the chief officer was keeping a sleepy eye on things. David put a gun to his head and demanded to be taken below. The man spoke excellent English. He begged not to be killed. He had a wife and six daughters back home in Dar es Salaam.
''Six?'' David said.
''Too many,'' said the chief officer, with feeling. ''I am overjoyed to see them when I am on leave, but within a week I am always overjoyed at the prospect of returning to sea.''
''Think about them, then, and everything will be OK.''
The chief officer promised he would keep his family uppermost in his mind and do whatever David asked.
Belowdecks, he led David and the others along a catwalk that ran almost the entire 500-foot length of the freighter's hull. Beneath their feet lay a couple of dozen open-topped holds, laid out in a grid pattern, each large enough to accommodate perhaps twenty of the undead creatures stacked upright. Overhead ran a system of pulleys and winches for hauling the mummies up onto a cargo elevator. All of the holds were empty.
A sound of singing grew louder, drifting through the cavernous space from a doorway at the far end of the catwalk. A trio of male voices were entwined in liturgical harmony, intoning praise for Nephthys, Queen of the Hot Lands, Consort of Set, Guardian-Goddess With the Wings of a Kite. David took a quick glance at his watch. Past 10pm. Spot-on timing. The Lightbringer's forces would have just begun engaging with the mummies. Steven wanted to give his troops a taste of combat. He wanted them blooded. He also wanted them to learn that mummies, strong as they were, loathsome as they were, were not as indomitable as their reputation suggested. Much of their effectiveness came from the natural revulsion people felt towards them. If that could be overcome, then what was left was a bunch of stiffly moving, somewhat clumsy opponents who responded slowly to commands and could be neutralised by the simple expedient of blowing their legs off. The ship's priests were aware that battle had begun. They were beseeching Nephthys to grant a favourable outcome.
They broke off from their song as David entered with the chief officer, followed by Zafirah and the two cousins. The holy men were startled, then outraged. They launched into a tirade of protest, and one didn't need Arabic to know what they were saying. We were in the middle of conducting a religious rite. How dare you people come barging in like that? This is blasphemy! Sacrilege!
Zafirah waved a gun at them. That shut them up. In the space of a second the priests went from barking hounds to whipped curs. They seemed to deflate within their robes.
''Not so keen to visit Iaru just yet, eh?'' she jeered. ''Doesn't surprise me. Life — this life — is good for a priest. Wealth, respect, status, why give it up?''
Other than a small altar with votive candles on it, there was nothing in the room but brushed-steel canisters, the sets of Canopic jars. They were piled neatly on shelves like tinned goods in a store cupboard, each stamped with the date of excision and a serial number. David fancied he could detect a faint whiff of rotting flesh in the air, but that was doubtless his imagination.
While Saeed and Salim got busy laying charges, the priests and the chief officer were shepherded towards the ship's living quarters and locked in the wardroom. David, Zafirah, and the Liberators then set about rounding up every other crewmember they could find, including the captain who was fast asleep in his cabin. By 10.45pm everything was ready. The crew and priests were escorted down the gangplank. To the west the night sky was lit up by flashes. Distant detonations rumbled and pealed. The Lightbringer's army, laying into the mummies. David could picture the looks of growing delight on the Freegyptians' faces as they scythed through the ranks of the undead, realising that it wasn't so hard to destroy these monsters, especially if you could get over thinking of them as things that had formerly been human. It helped that none of the mummies was likely to have been a Freegyptian once. As David knew, mummies were that much more difficult to deal with when there was every chance that some of them used to be your own allies, your own countrymen, perhaps even close comrades.
Saeed — or it could have been Salim — handed David the remote detonator. He passed it on to Zafirah.
''You do the honours,'' he said.
''A gift,'' she replied sardonically. ''How kind.''
He didn't want her to look at him like that, so bruised, so resentful. He hated how her eyes became narrow, dimming their usual gemlike lustre. But what could he do? He kept wrestling with his conscience. He kept trying to overcome his need to please his brother by abiding by the taboo Steven had imposed on her. He kept losing.
Zafirah raised the detonator and, with an emphatic set of her jaw, pressed the button.
The explosion was muffled, like someone slamming a heavy door in a room downstairs, but the whole freighter jolted with the force of it. She rocked as though some vital organ had gone into spasm. Deep ripples eddied out from her hull. A short while later smoke appeared, seeping out from under her cargo hatches.
At much the same time the sounds of far-off combat waned. The flashes and rumbles grew further apart, then ceased.
One of the priests fixed David with a glare and began muttering.
''What's he saying?'' David asked Zafirah.
''Oh, just cursing you. Summoning the wrath of Nephthys down on your head. Calling you a heathen and a godless monkey and a follower of a false prophet.''
Had David been in a better, more even-tempered frame of mine just then, he might have shrugged it off. In the event, fury welled up. He saw himself reaching for the priest, grabbing him by the robes, knocking him to the ground, kicking him in the face as he lay there. He saw himself, and then realised he was actually doing all this. It was as though he was not the author of his own actions, he was a bystander, someone else was responsible.
He stopped then, when the truth dawned. Leaving the priest moaning and spitting out blood and teeth, he turned on his heel and strode off in a cloud of self-disgust.
At the site of the battle, jubilation reigned. Half the mummies had been felled by gunfire and grenade. The rest had collapsed abruptly, turning to heaps of bandage and powdered flesh the moment the Canopic jars had been destroyed.
''The Nephthysians thought us cowards and fools,'' the Lightbringer told his troops, who hadn't suffered a single casualty. ''They treated us with contempt. They thought all it would take to make us turn back was a few mummies. How severely they underestimated us! How wrong they were!''
The cavalcade of vehicles traversed the canal without further interruption, passing onto the Sinai Peninsula, the immense triangular tract of land that would take them to the eastern border of Arabia. David, in the back seat of the Lightbringer's car, closed his eyes and did something he hadn't done in weeks: he prayed.
He called on Osiris and Isis. He asked them to hear him. He begged for their understanding. He was looking out for his brother, that was all he was doing. He had allowed himself to become swept up in the Lightbringer's crusade but it was Steven he was helping. He wasn't a heathen. He was not. He was still a true son of the Parent Hegemony. He still had faith.
Didn't he?
For the first time in his life David felt no certainty that the Benevolent Father and the Mother of All were listening. His prayer seemed to go nowhere, sounding hollow in his head, dull and echoless. He wondered if that was the fate of all the prayers he had ever prayed. He couldn't recall a time when any of the wishes he had articulated in them had actually been granted. He'd prayed mainly because praying had made him feel better.
It didn't now. Quite the opposite.
He opened his eyes.
How had that happened? When? At what moment had his faith deserted him?
In the desert. When he was lost. When he had been close to death and all too acutely aware of the gods' indifference, not to mention that of his military superiors, who had thought it preferable to kill him and his men rather than leave them the possibility of escaping and surviving. When he had never felt quite so abandoned and
