Light and pain returned at regular intervals. As he lay on the ground, Anubis felt his mind returning from oblivion to his body, from dreams to the brief but harsh reality of his heart struggling to beat in his chest, the blood struggling to travel through his veins, the air struggling to flow through his lungs. He would see a bit of grass and sky and blood, and then he would convulse and slip away again.
Over and over, he slid back and forth between the bright, bloody plains and the dark, bloody dreams where he hid in the shadows from the fire and the ice that scorched his flesh and screamed at him in many voices. Each time that he emerged into the daylight world, a small corner of his mind would remember who he was and where he was, and why. And he would dare to hope that this time the pain would end, this time he would breathe deep and sit up and feel the sun on his face. But each time, he only had a fleeting moment on that bright shore, gasping and shaking, before the dark tide pulled him back under into the recesses of madness.
There was one inconsistency that he could see but not understand in his shattered mind. Each time he returned to reality, the sky would look slightly different, slightly dimmer and redder, and it felt slightly cooler. And during those scant moments of life, he wondered if the world itself was dying, and if perhaps he might awaken sometime to find it as dark and dead as his nightmares.
He was in his fiery, icy hell when a great and terrible force ripped him outward, tearing him up from the depths of pain and confusion and darkness into the bright world of the grasslands one last time. He blinked up at a sky painted violet and slate blue, with tiny white specks beyond the thin white clouds. A red, tear-stained face leaned over him, a girl’s face.
Bastet.
In her hand he saw his own staff painted in dark blood, and all across his chest he saw more of the same glistening on his skin, congealing in his clothing, weighing him down. He could see the huge wound in his chest as well, a ragged hole that was slowly shrinking.
“Bastet?” he croaked.
“Shh.” She stroked his face. “Just wait. It’ll all be over in a moment. Just rest. You’ll be fine in just a minute. Everything’s going to be fine now.”
He nodded and laid his head back to watch the stars and wait for the throbbing, pulsing waves of pain in his chest to subside. But the stars grew dim, winking out one by one, and the throbbing pain faded away, and the sounds of the crickets in the grass fell silent, and…
Omar lifted his head and watched the monstrosity enter the room.
Oh, Horus. Your poor boy. You poor, beautiful boy. Look at what she’s done to you.
The falcon-man glared around the torch-lit chamber with his mad white eyes, and let his vague stare pause in the direction of the man on the table.
Omar nodded at him, hoping for some sort of recognition, some hint of the youth he had known ages ago when Aegyptus was a free nation, and a wise family of immortals had ruled it as living gods.
Horus turned his head and crossed the room.
Lilith met him at the doorway on the far side. “Horus! I knew you would find your way back here sooner than the others. The ladies always did enjoy their time out more than you.”
He held out one of his talon-fists. Lilith held out her hand beneath it, and Omar saw a glint of gold fall into her palm.
No, no, no…
“What’s that?” Omar asked. “What is it?”
“Hm.” Lilith glanced at the hovering, hulking form of Horus. “Go back up to the city and find the others. I want them back here where they belong. Go.”
The falcon-man snorted and thumped his way out of the room and out of sight, leaving only the beautiful woman, the chained man, and the poor serving girl with the slithering arms in the corner.
Lilith studied the thing in her hand as she paced closer to Omar’s table. She approached him on the right side, the side of his nauseating beetle-arm. He winced and tried to look past it. Lilith turned her hand and a pendant dangled from her finger. A small, lumpy, golden heart. She smiled. “I wonder whose it is? Not yours or mine. And not Horus’s. I wonder. Not his mother’s, or Nethy’s either, I assume. And who does that leave?”
Omar shook his head. “Lilith, whatever you’re thinking, don’t. Just don’t. Don’t do anything with that, please. Leave it alone.”
“Of course you would say that, old man.” Lilith turned away, still playing with the sun-steel pendant. “So whose is it? The handsome and noble soldier, Gideon?”
“Leave it alone!”
“Or could it belong to the sweet little girl. The homeless, friendless child you found in the street. The poor beggar you took in and called your granddaughter.” Lilith passed around to the other side of the table. “Could this belong to your darling Bastet?”
“Lilith, please.” Omar strained at his chains, even with his deformed arm, but they held him fast and he could not rise, could not even reach out to her. “Please, leave it alone. Leave her alone!”
Lilith bent down out of his field of view for a moment, and suddenly the corner of the room blazed with pure white light. She rose up with his naked seireiken in her hand. Tiny blue arcs of lightning danced along the burning edge.
“No! I’m begging you, don’t do it!” Omar pulled on his chains. “Lilith! Please!”
She smiled and dropped the pendant onto the blazing sword, and the little heart vanished in a flash of light and hiss of aether.
Bastet shook his shoulders. “Anubis?”
She glanced down at the wound and saw that it was no longer closing, no longer knitting itself shut, no longer shrinking away. And the steady trickle of blood at the edge of the torn flesh had stopped trickling, stopped pulsing with the faint beating of the young man’s heart.
“Anubis?”
She touched his cheek and gasped. It was cold. And as she peered down at him in the twilight gloom, she saw the change in his skin and hair, no longer shining black but dull gray like old stone.
“No, no, no…”
Bastet shook his shoulders again, and patted his cheek, and held her ear over his dry lips. But there was no warm, no breath, no life at all.
“Anubis?” She felt the tears running down her cheeks as her own breath caught in her throat.
No, not him, not now, no, no…
“Anubis?” She lay down beside him in the bloody grass, put her arm across his cold body, and closed her eyes, clutching his bloody tunic tightly in her little hands, praying for sleep, and praying to wake from this nightmare soon.
Chapter 22
Taziri glanced over her shoulder for the tenth time at the quiet man sitting in the first passenger seat. Jiro had only given the Halcyon III one quick distrustful look as they climbed on board, and over the following half hour, while she started the engine and backed the Mazigh locomotive out onto the main rail lines and struck out southward from the station, he had merely folded his arms over his chest and bowed his head, eyes closed.
Either he’s sleeping, or he’s trying not to be motion-sick.
Now as they clacked along through the poorer neighborhoods on the west side of Alexandria, Taziri found herself wishing that she wasn’t alone with this man. Both of them struggled to speak Eranian clearly enough for the other to understand them, and their brief moment of bonding over the aetherium magnet had been shattered along with the man’s workshop. He withdrew from her the moment that they emerged from under his work table, and he remained quiet and distant now.
