Serpent's Kiss

EIGHT

He didn’t walk a path this time, but the shift in energies felt just like a crossover again, a crossover that somehow turned, was bent in some fundamental way. It was like taking a flight of stairs that doubled back on itself, or turning a corner and discovering a different landscape than expected. He tried to hold on to the feeling so he could examine it more closely. He had the sense of almost grasping it, but then the feeling flowed past him and was gone.

Carling’s office faded, and a hot, humid evening enfolded him. Disoriented, he stood still and soaked in impressions.

Somewhere nearby there was the hoarse rhythmic bellow of bullfrogs. He looked up. The shadowed, spiked tops of palm groves dotted the edges of the night sky, which was brilliant with stars in a way that modern cities with their light pollution never saw anymore.

He stood in the shadows of a columned building built of granite blocks, close by other, larger buildings. Indirect torch-light flickered in various places. The air was pungent with the fetid smell of the nearby river, and the lingering odor of rich food. He smelled yeasty things, beer and bread, along with spiced fish and meat. The evening must still be fairly young.

He also smelled people, and he heard raised voices. A man, shouting in rage. A lighter, younger feminine voice, spilling out a desperate-sounding patter of rapid words. Too accustomed to modern languages, his mind felt rusty as it tried to switch gears and make sense of what he heard.

There was no mistaking the meaty sound of a blow, and a sharp pained cry that was cut short. Nor the sound of a whip as it sliced through air.

A whip.

Fucking hell.

Moving on panic and instinct, Rune lunged forward. He slammed into a wall and sprang off it, and hurtled up wide carved stairs, following the projection of echo back to its source.

Come on. Kick up the speed, goddamn it. He moved faster than he could ever remember moving in his life, but the flat wicked slice of the whip tore through the air in a second stroke, and the sound flayed him alive.

He exploded into a large, luxurious room. Arranged for a seduction, it had become the scene of a torture. Metal braziers lit the space with an abundance of flickering light. The room was open on three sides to a simple balcony and the night air, and framed with gauze hangings that kept out the river insects. There was artfully arranged bedding, untouched. A low table held a feast of meat, fish, spiced vegetables, beer, bread and honey.

A girl child sprawled on the floor, her narrow honey-colored back split and bleeding with whip lashes. A dark man stood over her. He wore a shenti, tooled sandals, and a collar made of beaten copper, and he had a close-clipped beard and a gaze glittering with fury. The man pulled back his arm and shook out his whip.

Rational thought vaporized in an internal nuclear explosion. What was left was a murderous beast. Claws sprang out. The gravelly roar that burst out of his chest split the night with the force of a rocket launcher.

The beast leaped. With a single swipe of his paw, he nearly split the man into four pieces. The whip fell discarded. The man was dead before he hit the floor.

The killing had happened too soon to assuage the beast’s rage. He roared again, scooped up the corpse and flung it. Blood sprayed through the air. The corpse hit the wall. Bones cracked audibly upon impact. The broken body left a wet smear of crimson as it slid down along the wall.

Utter stillness filled the night. Even the bullfrogs and night insects fell silent in the presence of an apex predator. It seemed the whole world held its breath.

Except for the whimpering gasps at the feet of the beast.

He looked down, breathing hard. The girl child cowered into the floor, digging at it with the nails of both hands as if she would tear the stones open and disappear if she could. She wore the shreds of some filmy garment, along with a necklace made of copper and lapis lazuli, and bracelets of carved bone. Her delicate rib cage shuddered, the skin of her back torn and bleeding.

Whimper-gasp.

The beast became Rune again. “Poor baby,” he whispered. He bent down to touch her shoulder.

She cried out and cringed, and his beast resurfaced just enough to claw at him from the inside. He came around to kneel at her head. She was older than the seven-year-old he had met, but not by much, maybe by five or six years. Her emerging beauty had been carefully emphasized, those long eyes lined in kohl and green malachite, and her shapely mouth painted with red ochre. The malachite and kohl streaked her tear-stained face, and the red paint was smeared. Underneath the extravagant wreckage of color, the normal honeyed warmth of her skin was pallid with shock.

His stomach roiled. It did no good to tell himself that this was a much more primitive time and that girls were often married by the time they were twelve. She still looked like the victim of child porn. For a few scorching moments his sanity slipped. He did not know what he would have done if the smell of sex had been in the room.

She was in too much of a panic. At a loss, he hesitated then he did the only thing he could think of to do. He lay down on his stomach beside her and put his head on the floor, face toward her, so he was down at her level. Then he began to talk in a quiet, soothing patter of noise.

“Khepri, my name is Rune. We met once a few years ago. Do you remember me? I remember you very well. I was flying overhead when I saw you watching me, so I came down to talk to you. You had been working to harvest grain from the field.”

Did the blind panic in her young face ease just a little, or was that his imagination? Her shaking lips struggled to form a word. She whispered, “A-Atum.”

Rune’s eyes grew damp. “Yes,” he murmured as softly as he could. “You thought I was Atum, and I told you I wasn’t. Do you remember that?”

Her overbright gaze focused on him. She gave him a jerky nod.

Dimly he was aware of other people running into the room. The beast was still roused and tracked their movements with cold precision. If they had come an inch too close, they would have died, but they stopped at the edge of the room. After exclaiming to each other, they prostrated themselves on the floor.

That was well enough. To them he was, after all, a god, and this time he did not try to deny it.

He smiled at Khepri. “Please, darling, don’t be afraid of me. The man who was hurting you can’t hurt you any longer.”

She lifted her head. Her gaze tracked left toward the shredded corpse that lay in a crumpled heap by the wall. He shifted to hold his hand as a shield between her and the sight, not quite touching her cheek. She whispered, “Is he dead?”

This was no modern sheltered child. He knew she had already seen death before. He said, “Yes. He injured you. It made me very angry, and I killed him.”

She took a deep, shuddering breath and let it out. Ferocity flashed in her eyes. For a moment she looked as feral as a tiger cub. “Good.”

Just like that, he fell head over heels in love with the child all over again. “May I help you now?”

The spark of ferocity vanished. Her lips trembled and her eyes swam with tears as she nodded again.

At that the beast threatened to take over again. He rose up on his hands and knees, and gathered her carefully in his arms, working to make sure he didn’t touch the wounds on her back. He carried her over to the bedding and eased her onto it so that she was lying facedown. Then he looked at the humans who remained prostrate before him. There were four, a woman, two men with spears, and another, older man. Judging by the ornamentation of his clothing, the older man was the most powerful of those present.

Rune restrained the urge to kick them. He said, “Get up.”

The humans peered at him, saw that he was talking to them and cautiously eased upright. They remained on their knees and stole glances at the bloody corpse and at each other. He said to the older man. “I want hot water, medicine and bandages, along with something clean for her to wear. Be quick.”

“Yes, my lord.” The man hissed at the woman, who backed out of the room. A moment later, Rune heard her running footsteps on the stairs.

He settled beside Khepri. She moved her head closer to put her cheek against his knee, and he stroked her hair as he struggled with his self-control. He said to her, “Beer would help with the pain. Would you like some?”

She nodded. He gestured to the older man, who sprang to his feet to bring two full goblets to him, the rich, heavy liquid shivering in his unsteady grip. Rune took one goblet, ignored the other, and helped Khepri to drink while the man knelt at his feet and awaited further commands. The beer would have a strong alcoholic content, but she had probably been drinking it since she was two or three. It was a wheat beer, and no doubt the grain had gotten a little moldy. That meant there would be tetracycline in the liquid, which was good. It would help to stave off any infection from the lash marks. He encouraged her to finish the goblet.

When the hectic brightness of her eyes began to glaze over, he said to the man, “Are you a priest?”

“Yes, my lord.”

He was unsurprised. Ancient Memphis had a surfeit of temples and necropoleis. He said, “Do you have authority?”

The man bowed his head. “Yes, my lord.”

“You will listen to me now and do as I say.”

“I live to serve you.” The man dared to look up, the fanatical light of devotion in his dark eyes.

Rune’s lip curled. What the fuck ever. He thought for a moment, choosing and discarding things to say. There was so much that would simply make no sense to this man. Finally he said, “What happened here tonight is an abomination to me.”

The man said quickly, “My lord, I promise you, the slave was not being disciplined without reason. She failed in her duty to please another god who was here—”

Another god?

Rune’s eyes flared in quick, jealous reaction. He looked around, taking in again the feast that had been so carefully laid out, the scene of seduction that had not been enacted. The man cowered before him. Khepri’s fingers stole behind her head to touch his hand, and he realized belatedly that he had started growling.

He made himself stop. He took a deep breath then another, analyzing the many scents in the room, and he realized what panic and rage had not let him realize before: another Wyr had recently been in the room.

Gently, he curled his hand around Khepri’s fingers, as he leaned over the priest. “Look at me.” The priest looked up, eyes wide, and Rune bared his teeth in a show of naked aggression. “A god chooses to do what he will. How dare you place the responsibility of that onto the shoulders of a mere girl?”

The priest fell forward to prostrate himself again. “My lord, I am sorry! We did not know we transgressed. Forgive us!”

“This is my decree,” Rune said. “You will take this slave and treat her as your most favored daughter. You will educate her as well as any man, and protect her, and see she has the best life you can give her. You will do this, and no other. If you fail in the slightest to do this one thing, I will find you. I will pull out your entrails, and leave you to watch them bake in the noonday sun. Do you understand me?”

As the priest babbled his agreement, the woman returned, carrying medicines and a pile of linens under one arm. She was followed by two other women bearing urns of steaming water. They hesitated at the doorway, their eyes wide, until Rune gestured them forward impatiently.

“Tend to her,” he said to them.

Whispering to each other, the women did as he ordered. He watched them. When he saw for himself how carefully they treated Khepri, he began to ease himself away.

Her small hand clenched on his and anchored him in place. He bent over her, and smoothed the hair from her forehead. She watched him with a mute entreaty. He did not understand what she wanted. Perhaps she didn’t either, and she only clung to the one person who had made her world safe again.

He said to her, “I am not sure when or how, but I can promise you one thing, darling. We will see each other again. Would that be all right with you?”

She nodded, her smudged face half hidden by the slippery dark silk of hair. On impulse he bent forward and pressed his lips to her forehead. Her fingers tightened on his hand, and then she let him go.

He stood and stretched his spine as he looked around. Gods. The scene was so intense, so real, he had completely fallen into it.

Could it be an illusion or a hallucination? Could it be something else, something more real? Could he somehow be affecting things in the past? He felt the impulse to laugh, to shove the idea aside. Then he looked at the whip marks that were still bleeding on Khepri’s back and lost the impulse.

When he turned away, the priest was watching him with close attention. Rune stared at the man, his gaze brooding. In the Bible’s Old Testament, Gideon laid out a fleece to ask for evidence of God’s will.

Rune shrugged. He might not be a Christian and he did not depend upon the gods’ will, but asking for evidence seemed like a hell of a good idea. He turned his back to Khepri and her attendants, dug into his jeans and pulled out his pocket-knife. It was a thoroughly modern, sturdy Swiss Army knife. He wondered how it would hold up for roughly forty-five hundred years.

He asked the priest, “What is your name?”

“Akil, my lord.”

“Who is your king, Akil?”

The whites of the priest’s eyes showed. It was clear he could not imagine why a god would not know such a thing, but he answered readily enough, “Djoser.”

Rune relaxed. He knew a little about Djoser, not least of which the man’s architect Imhotep had built one of the biggest, most famous ancient structures known to men. He held the knife up to the priest and pulled out all of its blades, watching as Akil’s eyes grew round with wonder.

“This is my gift to you,” he said. “Do not show this to Khepri or to anyone else. Do not write of it or leave any record of its existence. As proof of your devotion, I want you to bury it at the entrance of Djoser’s temple in Saqqara.” Saqqara was the giant necropolis, or city of the dead, that served as a burial ground for Ineb Hedj and later on for Memphis. “It might be a very long time before I can return for it, but I will.”

He closed the knife again and held it out. Akil took it with reverence. “I will, my lord. You can be sure of it.”

Yeah well, Rune thought. We’ll see about that.

Carling’s gaze focused on the interior of her office.

She was sitting in her desk chair. The cedar cabinet lay dismantled in a bundle against one wall. The slant of the sun had shifted from afternoon to early evening. The sunlight poured through the window in lethal bars of burning gold. She shuddered and looked away.

The room echoed with the emotional aftermath of aggression and violence. Rune prowled the office with the intensity of a caged animal. His face was set, his eyes roiling with the restless flicker of rapid thought. His long athletic strides made the roomy office seem stifling and too small. He shifted the heavy bundle of cedar to check underneath it. Then he moved to search alongside the floors beside the filing cabinets, and the space between the desk and the wall.

She cleared her throat and asked in a rusty-sounding voice, “What on earth are you doing?”

He swung around, his gaze flaring. He sprang to crouch at her feet. “How are you?”

“I’m fine,” she told him. It was a ridiculous thing to say, given everything that was going on. “You looked like you lost something.”

“I was looking for my pocketknife. I had it in this room and now I can’t find it anywhere.” He searched her face with a peculiar intensity that felt like a physical touch. “Do you remember seeing it anywhere?”

She scowled. “Of course I remember seeing it. I watched you cut the twine with it. Why do you ask?”

“It’s been an eventful afternoon,” he said.

“That doesn’t really answer my question,” she said.

“I don’t have any answers,” he told her. He gripped the arms of her chair. “I’m busy grappling with too many questions of my own. Do you remember going into a fade?”

“That’s right,” she murmured. “Of course I did.” She fell silent as she studied him. She thought of the memory she had gone back to when she had slipped into the fade, back and back, to one of the most painful, traumatic and pivotal times of her early life. She had been kept pristine, her virginity intact, saved and trained until she could be given as a gift at a strategic time to an important personage.

Then an immense, dark and terrifying god had touched down to earth to regard white-walled Ineb Hedj and its people with a passing curiosity. In the end, he had been indifferent to the city, its devout priests and religion, and uninterested in her as a gift. He had left, and she had been punished for it.

Then, with a crystalline clarity that the many intervening centuries had not dimmed, she remembered the whistle of the whip as it snaked through the air and plunged her into the most savage, transcendent pain, turning her world raw with the screams she did not have the breath to cry out.

And into that raw place an enormous golden monster had erupted, roaring with an agony as if he had been the one who was whipped, bringing with him both death and salvation.

The world rattled. Carling’s mouth opened. She tried to form words.

“God, you’re shaking like a leaf,” Rune muttered. “Talk to me.”

“I’m trying,” she gritted. She grabbed his strong, tanned wrists. He seemed to be the only thing that wasn’t shaking, that held steady. Their eyes met. “I s-see you went back a second time.”

He turned his hands to grip her wrists as well. “Yes. Can you tell me what happened to you? There was another Wyr involved, or at least there had been before I got there. Do you know who it was?”

The other Wyr had been Tiago, of all people, who had never remembered what had happened, because to him the whole incident had been unimportant. He had never known what the consequences of his indifference and departure had meant for her.

She shook her head. She had been angry and resentful at Tiago for so long, but for once, she meant what she said as she told Rune, “It doesn’t matter. It was just a curious Wyr who looked around briefly and then left again. The priests wanted him to stay, of course, which was why they gave me to him, but he wasn’t interested.”

Something unpredictable and razor-edged prowled in his lion’s eyes. “So he didn’t come back.”

“No,” she said. “At least not while I lived in the city.”

“Okay.” Rune seemed to relax only slightly. “Does . . . what happened . . . feel as real to you as the first time when I appeared?”

The world started to rattle again. She nodded.

His hands tightened on her wrists as he whispered, “It does to me too. Carling, I need to have a look at your back.”

She stared at him. “Why?”

The handsome, clean lines of his face were rigid with an emotion that rioted through the heavy afternoon air. “I need to look at your scars. It’s important.”

With a bewildered shrug, she leaned forward and bent her head. She held the caftan in place over her breasts and allowed him to ease the loose cotton material away from her neck. With a featherlight touch he pulled her hair to one side. He handled her as gently as if she were spun glass, and his big body was so near as he knelt in front of her, that she let herself lean a few inches farther to rest her cheek on his wide shoulder. He caressed the nape of her neck as he slid the caftan down her back.

She felt the breath leave him hard. His fingers were unsteady against her bare skin. She lifted her head to stare at the clean, spare lines of his profile. She was so close she could see the fine lines deepen at the corners of his eyes, and sense the shift in his throat muscles as he swallowed hard.

“What is it?” she asked.

She craned her neck to look over her shoulder. She could just see the ends of the long, white sinuous scars that crossed her spine like two snakes winding around a staff. She had lived with those scars for thousands of years. She knew them like she knew the back of her hand. She would never forget the night they happened, or how Rune had broken into the room to stop a third one from falling on her . . .

She stiffened. No. That hadn’t happened thousands of years ago. That had happened just minutes ago, this afternoon. What had happened before Rune took action? What had really occurred to her, four and a half thousand years ago?

“Something else happened before you showed up,” she whispered. “I don’t remember. I don’t remember what originally happened to me.”

Before Rune had burst into the room, the priest had stood over her in a rage. He had shaken out the whip. He would have struck her again, except that Rune had killed him with one savage blow.

Rune looked at her, his eyes darkened. He said in a low voice, “All I know is that a couple of weeks ago you went swimming in the Adriyel River and when you walked out, you didn’t have just two whip marks on your back. Your whole body was striped with scars.”

She remembered it well. She walked nude out of the water while Niniane and Rune waited on the riverbank. Rune had stared at her with such a fire in his eyes they had glittered like yellow diamonds. His handsome face had become a carved mask, and every muscle in his body had stood in etched relief against the long masculine frame of his bones, as if he had been created by a classical sculptor.

She said, “You’re changing me?”

“I think what we are doing together must somehow be changing something,” he said. “Because I swear to all the gods, Carling, your back was not like this before.”

She stared at him in horror.

She had compared him to a sirocco. She’d had no idea how accurate that was. A sirocco was a hurricane that came out of the Sahara. In Egypt the hot desert wind was called Khamsin. It could reach speeds of up to eighty-five miles an hour. She remembered the howl of the wind at night. It was an immense, unearthly, inhuman sound. It stripped flesh off of bones, literally reshaped the land.

First she thought she would lose her life. Then she became afraid she would lose everything else. Her Power, her sanity. Her dignity.

She had not known there could be anything more to lose, that bits of her past might slough away like flesh peeling from the bones. The change was vaster and more Powerful than anything she had ever experienced, and she had never felt the difference.

She had not known she might be in danger of losing her self.