“Horus.” Anubis held out his arms as if to embrace the monster before him, but he stopped walking well short. “You have to stop. I can’t let you hurt these people.”
Horus hissed.
“You aren’t yourself,” Anubis said. “And it isn’t your fault. And it isn’t fair. But that doesn’t matter. You have to stop. Or I will have to stop you.”
Horus dashed forward and slashed down at the grim youth with five gray talons as vicious as daggers, but Anubis loosened his body into the aether, just a bit, and let the talons swipe cleanly through him without leaving a mark, without even knocking him back.
“You can’t hurt me,” Anubis said quietly. “Can you even understand me?”
Horus stepped back, flexing and curling his long talons into hideous, beastly fists. And his huge feathered head nodded once.
Anubis narrowed his eyes. “I thought so. You can hear me, and understand me, but you can’t speak with that beak?”
Horus shook his head once.
“A pity. I went to see Father today. Our father. I asked him to help me, to help you.” Anubis paused. “You can see for yourself what his answer was.”
Horus charged again, slashing left and right with both talons, screeching and hissing, but Anubis simply shifted apart and let the beast stumble about in a small cloud of aether.
“Is Lilith’s hold over you so strong that you can’t even pause to listen to me for a moment?” Anubis asked from the side of the street.
Horus glared at him with white-eyed rage.
“Then come at me.” Anubis backed up closer to the brick wall of the house behind him, a wall already cracked and compromised by the monster’s rampaging earlier. “Strike me down, if you can. Kill me. Come here and kill me!”
Horus arched his back and screamed his falcon cry at the uncaring stars, and he dashed away up the road in pursuit of the fleeing families through the burning pools of oil and the fallen walls of the houses.
“No! No!” Anubis started to run after him, and then slipped into the aether, whisking up the street, and planting himself in the middle of the road again between Horus and the people of Alexandria.
“Horus, stop!” He raised his staff, commanding the handful of souls trapped in the sun-steel rings to bring out their meager light, to set the staff head aglow, hoping to catch his cousin’s eye.
Horus charged up the street, running light and swift on his bare feet, and when he reached Anubis, he thrust out one clawing talon to grasp the youth by the head, but his talon swept through empty aether and the creature ran on into the night.
Anubis grimaced.
I need Gideon’s blade, or Asha’s dragon. But there isn’t time to find them.
He took a few running steps and slipped back into the aether with a light crack of his staff on the road, but this time instead of rushing ahead of Horus, he swept up into the cold night air above the city. He felt the world spread out around him and below him, opening up from the narrow confines of the city streets to the vast roofless expanse of the sky itself. On countless nights just like this one, he and Bastet had drifted high into the heavens to watch the stars, floating in eternity as aetheric clouds, wondering at the universe and all its hidden mysteries.
Tonight he did not look up. He looked down at the dark streets and saw the flood of bodies running east along the crooked roads, and he saw the feathery speck driving those bodies onward. Anubis released the aether, letting his flesh become whole once more, and he began to fall.
He fell with his feet together and legs held straight beneath him, plummeting like a spear hurled down from the moon itself. He raised his staff over his head and looked down once to be certain that his aim was true, and then he looked back up at the sky and closed his eyes.
The moment of impact was only a moment. A moment of pain and confusion. Anubis lay on the ground and knew that his legs were shattered, and his back was broken, and something was wrong with his chest and head, but he couldn’t move, or look, or speak. The pain and shock and dizzying sense of brokenness lasted for a brief eon as his mind refused to grasp anything, including the passage of time. But then the pain in his legs and back faded and he began breathing, and all the nauseating sensations swirling through his brain vanished.
He was lying in the street on his side, breathing easily and feeling a bit refreshed from his brief sojourn into death. Anubis blinked and sat up, and found himself in the bottom of a small depression in the center of the street, and at his feet lay Horus. But already, the falcon-beast was twitching and wheezing, with one talon clawing at the ground.
Anubis stood up.
How many moments was that worth? How many paces did those people manage to run in the seconds when we were here at death’s threshold?
He gazed down the road and saw the hundreds of men, women, and children still running into the distance. They were at the edge of the city already, having crossed the neighborhood and passed through the thin strip of old warehouses that stood between Alexandria and the eastern wilderness.
Horus hissed, and pushed himself up to his feet. Anubis stepped a bit farther back and picked up his staff.
“Remember, brother,” Anubis said. “I’m immortal too. I can’t fight you, but I can crush you into the earth as many times as needed to save those people. Let them go.”
Horus screamed, took a half-hearted swipe at the youth’s face, and then took off in pursuit of his prey.
Anubis sighed. “So be it.”
For an hour, Horus chased the people of Alexandria out into the grassy fields through groves of date palms, and for an hour Anubis glided up into the sky and fell upon his half-brother, crushing him into the earth and leaving them both broken and stunned. After the third time, Anubis felt his will wavering. The threat of having to fall again, to feel his bones shattering, to feel his organs sliding, to feel all his senses and thoughts set on fire and spinning through a vat of acid as his sun-steel pendant slowly dragged all the bits and pieces of his body back into place… it slowed his steps and stooped his shoulders. But still, he carried on.
After the fifth time, as Horus ran off into the darkness, Anubis sat in the grass rubbing his chest and massaging his eyes.
What if I don’t come back one of these times? What if the sun-steel chooses this night to fail me? What if I’m left only half alive, trapped in that broken hell, unable to think, barely able to feel?
Then Horus screamed, and Anubis rose to his feet, and set out again.
After the eighth time, Anubis simply lay in the crater, staring dully at the grains of earth and the green stalks of grass right in front of his eyes. A single tear ran down the side of his nose, and his breathing was thin and rapid.
Horus screamed in the night, and a dozen frightened people screamed back.
Anubis lay very still, and held his breath.
Four thousand years of life, and I have become a hail stone.
He blinked.
I fall from the sky, and I die, and then awaken to life, rising back into the sky again.
He closed his mouth and inhaled through his nose.
Only to fall again, and die. Again and again and again…
Anubis moved his head and looked up at the stars out of the corner of his eye.
Is this the paradise you’re waiting for, Father?
He sat up slowly, clutching his head. There was no pain in his bones now, but there was something else in his mind, in his soul. A gnawing fear. A nameless terror. A thing that looked like death, but wasn’t death, because he couldn’t die.
I am Anubis. I am Death.
He stood up and clutched his staff in both hands.
What is death?
Horus screamed in the distance.
Anubis exhaled and became one with the aether again, but he did not rise into the star-drenched heavens. He whisked through the grasses and the groves, and over the little hills and the tiny streams in the ditches until he
