SNAFU: Black Ops

SONS OF APOPHIS Christine Morgan

It will be, when it is finished, a great and glorious city, a shining palace-temple, a fitting home and place of honor for the one true eternal shining ruler of the land.

Sefut-Aten.

The Bronze Fire of the Sun.

Where Pharaoh will rule his people in benevolence and peace. Where the waters will flow as honey, the land give forth its fertile bounty, and rich treasures be rewarded for both this world and the world beyond to those who serve with loyalty.

At the moment, the great city might be a jumble of clay and hay and scaffolding, but will soon rise anew in its full splendor. The statues lifted, the cut stones placed, the murals painted. In cool courtyards, pools will ripple. In gardens, bright birds will sing.

Over Sefut-Aten, day will never end and night will never come.

Teb smiles to think of it.

Those who serve with loyalty.

Rich treasures. Rewards.

This world and the world beyond.

Such thoughts keep him brave through the dark hours. Though born to humble farmers, facing a life of planting and the plow, now here he is, entrusted with this most sacred and dangerous of duties, standing watch against the outer reaches of the night.

When the city is finished, when the sun no longer sets, when he and his fellow sentries have well done their duty, they will have fine houses. Plump wives. Many children. Lives of pleasure and ease. Respectable tombs.

Such promise is well worth these lonely watches as the sky stretches black and the stars cut sharp. He listens to the breeze-stirred rushes, the croak and plop of frogs, the distant cry of a jackal, and sleep-sounds from the workers’ camp.

Further on, a single light blazes in the tower shrine where chosen priests hold their own late vigil, tending the sacred sun-flame in its bronze brazier, catching of its rays in polished mirrors so as to not let them all be swallowed up by darkness. Teb touches the miniature sun-disk amulet he wears. Though the metal is cool beneath his fingertips, a warmth goes through him. He feels his chest swell with pride, and smiles again.

He, Teb, who came from mud and dung… whose parents were superstitious peasants, little better than slaves… is here. Will be here to see the everlasting dawn—

A sudden loop drops over his head, a heavy length cinching tight against his throat.

Teb gags and chokes. His spear falls to the dirt as he brings both hands to claw at the strangling constriction. His mouth forms screams, shouts alarms, but only the thinnest whistle of air emerges. He feels his heart-pulse thudding like the pounding of bull’s hooves. The night sky’s star-sharp blackness seems to sweep over his eyes.

As his nostrils flare, inhaling desperately, a strange scent fills them… something earthen and oily and coppery and cold. The breeze-stirred rushes whisper louder than ever, hissing cold and harsh in his ears. The frogs have fallen silent.

He lurches forward and is yanked back. His sandals kick and scuff. He can get no purchase on whatever is twisted taut around his neck. He cuts the pad of his thumb on his own sun-disk amulet’s edge—

Ut-Aten!

Seizing it, he uses that edge to slice and saw, frantic, hardly caring how he slices and saws his own skin, hardly caring as blood runs down his body… blood, blood is nothing, it is breath, breath he needs!

Roiling turbulence fills his head, stormclouds in evil colors of yellow, grey, and green. Portending rains of poison, portending floods and death. No life of ease, no fine house, no plump wife to give him many children—

Then a sense of give, of fray and loosening stretch, of snap—

— and fall, the ground leaping up to strike Teb in the face—

— a grunt from behind him as if of surprise—

— wheezing and gasping, miserly air, miserly breath through throbbing bruise-meat, sobbing-throbbing breath—

— his spear, his spear crossways under him, he’d landed atop it, scrabbling to clutch it in his blood-slicked hands—

— something seizing him, seizing him by the shoulder, heave-rolling him onto his back—

— the sight, a glimpse, a looming shadow outlined by sharp white stars, a man-like shape but scaly-hairless-sleek-supple—

— the spear, grasping it, bringing it with him as he rolls, bringing it with him and swinging it—

— sweeping the bronze tip in a wide, wild arc—

— slashing it through scales and flesh—

— another grunt, not just surprise but shock, but of pain! Yes, good, praise Ut-Aten, pain!—

— a scraping of bronze on bone, a stumble, the looming shadow, the man-like shape a weight falling—

— Teb wrenching himself sideways with all his strength, his draining fading strength, what strength? and driving harder with his spear, a rupture a puncture a gush and a thump—

— the spear shaft jarring from his grip, its bronze head buried, embedded—

— the stench of bowels, of bladder, of death—

— as he crawls, crawls through sticky-wet dirt, through mud—

— mud and dung, he had come from mud and dung and now was here again—

— but a brightness grows, a brightness and heat… shining and brilliant, warming, eternal… the sun, the sun rising in the middle of the night…

…to be swallowed whole by darkness.

“Will you take refreshment?” Neferisu inquired. “Wine and bread?”

At his nod, she did not gesture for a servant but went to the side-table and poured from the jug herself. The salon was cool and private, shaded, secluded amid garden courtyards and behind walls. Cats lounged, a tame white monkey picked at bits of fruit, a harpist strummed the strings, and her maids kept a discreet distance.

When she turned, a tray of alabaster drinking cups and dishes in her hands, Khemet’s expression of discomfort at being so waited upon was such she could not help but laugh.

“There was a time,” she said, “not so long ago, when you would run to me with skinned knees, or begging honeyed dates.”

“I was a child then, my queen.”

“Yes. You and Mahenef, like brothers, as if I’d borne two sons.”

She placed the tray between them, on a low stool carved in the overarching likeness of Geb and Nut. Along with the small loaves of emmer-bread were boiled quail’s eggs and a plate of sliced cold meats in pomegranate sauce.

“The pair of you,” she went on, smoothing her fine linen garment as she sat. “Up trees, and down wells, and into everything. We despaired of what to do.”

“As I recall,” Khemet said, “you threatened more than once to take us by the side-locks of our hair and knock our heads together.”

Neferisu laughed again. “But I never did.”

“No. You were always kind.” He rubbed the side of his shaven, oiled scalp, his side-lock long since a thing of the past. “Though I would gladly have my head knocked, if it meant seeing Mahenef again in this world’s life.”

“He will be waiting for you in the Seven Halls,” she said. “Then, let your boyish mischiefs be the problem of Osiris.”

“My boyish mischiefs may be well behind me now, my queen.” His eyes had gone dark. “You know what I am, what I’ve become.”

“A guest who has not yet touched his refreshment,” she said, regarding him with a look of gentle chiding over the rim of her cup.

Khemet sighed, picking up a piece of bread, dipping it in wine. “You make it very difficult to be a dangerous figure, dark, and grim.”

“Be at ease. That is why I’ve summoned you, for a business dark and grim.”

Firelight dances down the tower’s mirrored throat, casting caught radiance from the bronze brazier above to lavish chambers below.

By day, the sun’s own reflected light itself illuminates the murals — bulls and lions, scarabs, horse-pulled chariots, fields of grain, spearmen and archers, falcons, maidens with baskets of flowers — in bright and vivid color. By night, as now, the effect is more a honeycomb of dappled gold, softening stark angles and edges.

It cannot, however, soften the stark angles and edges of two priests, standing like tall herons with their heads bent together in conversation. Gangly of leg and neck and nose, they are brothers, only just beginning to sport the small round bellies of comfortable station.

“I do not know how much longer we can keep him alive,” says Sennu.

He is the younger by half a day, and the fact of their unusual birth — one son at the dawning, a second at the zenith — made their long-suffering mother an object of some fame.

“For so long as Ut-Aten wills it,” Bennu replies.

Unkind village rumor has it there’d been a sickly third brother born at dusk, and perhaps a midnight fourth, who’d come dead and breathless into the world… or been hastened to that fate… but no one in their family has ever spoken of it, and they have never asked.

“But if he dies before—”

“It is in Ut-Aten’s hands. Until then, we tend to him. We protect him.”

Sennu nods. “When he last woke,” he said, “he called again for her.”

“If anything in this world will finish him…” mutters Bennu, pinching the patch of skin between his plucked and narrow, gilded brows.

“What should we do?”

“What else can we do? Send for her. Bring her. He is still our king.”

“The royal blood,” Khemet began, troubled, when the queen had finished telling him just what her dark and grim business was. “The blood of Pharaoh, the bloodline of the gods…”

Neferisu shrugged mildly as she peeled the shell from an egg. “Spills as red and readily as the common, as you and I both know.”

He fell silent again. Thinking — no doubt, as she was — of Mahenef. How sudden it had been, his death. How senseless, even for war.

The day had been theirs, the battle won, the enemy vanquished and scattered and bleeding on the sands. Khemet himself had been with the prince, the two of them and their drivers, racing side by side in their chariots, chasing down fleeing Hittites. And it had not been a broken axle, a stumbling horse, Mahenef sent flying to break his neck or be trampled… it had not been a final desperate challenge from a still-standing adversary… it had simply been some stray arrow out of nowhere.

“We will be famous for this,” he’d said, grinning. “Our victory painted in murals, our names chiseled in stone. We will be famous, and I will be Pharaoh, and I will marry Sia and you’ll marry Tanit—”

“Tanit likes you better.”

“Then I’ll marry her and you’ll marry Sia; it doesn’t matter to me, they’re already my sisters. What matters is that then you and I shall truly be brothers!”

One moment, he’d been there, grinning and brandishing his spear, their drivers laughing along with them in great good spirits. The next moment, a bristle of ibis-feather fletching jutted from where Mahenef’s twinkling eye had been. His breath and soul had left his body before it hit the ground.

Some stray arrow out of nowhere.

However much Khemet had wanted to believe otherwise — even treacherous murder would have given the chance to punish and avenge! — in the end, that was all it was. A twist of chance, a spiteful whim of the gods. No way of knowing from whose bow it had sprung, friend or foe. No way of knowing anything, or doing anything, except to bear Mahenef to the houses of purification and rest, to be prepared for his journey.

No way of knowing, no way of doing, nothing to be done.

Khemet looked at Neferisu, who held his gaze with a calm steadiness few others could. But, then, as she’d said, she remembered him as a child who’d run to her with skinned knees or to beg honeyed dates, as a youth who’d been her son’s constant companion, as a young man who might have married one of her daughters.

She remembered the Khemet from before, yet she also had need of the Khemet of now.

What she asked of him… no.

What she commanded of him.

“To save Egypt,” he said, more musing aloud than speaking to her.

“Our history has shown us what happens when madnesses take hold.” Neferisu gestured around with an elegant hand, indicating the salon’s furnishings, the low stool in the likeness of Geb and Nut, a statuette of wing-armed Isis in her regal beauty, the Eye of Horus over the door, a woven hanging depicting Thoth and Ma’at. “They would destroy all of this. The images, names, and symbols of the gods… painted over, chiseled out. Temples torn down. Priests attacked and people punished for their worship.”

“And, set in place instead, this one and only god.”

“The sun-disk, the bronze fire, their Ut-Aten.” She paused for a dainty bite of meat and dabbed pomegranate sauce from the corner of her regal mouth. “And of all Ut-Aten’s godly rivals, who would be most hated? Who, already, is more dreaded than even the fearsome Set?”

Khemet’s lip curved in a wry smile. “Oh, you need not remind me of that truth, I assure you.”

The serpent moves with silent swiftness.

The serpent waits to strike.

The serpent sinks its fangs.

The serpent coils, crushes.

The serpent strangles, squeezes, kills.

The serpent steals breath.

The serpent swallows life.

Moving, yes, with silent swiftness, silent swiftness through the night. Dark shapes in the darkness, unheard, unseen, undetected. Finding their prey. Waiting to strike, waiting, and then sinking their fangs, coiling, crushing, strangling, squeezing.

Killing.

Stealing breath.

Swallowing life.

First, the solitary sentries on their lonely watch. The solitary sentries, and anyone else with the misfortune to cross the serpents’ paths.

Some stonecutters who’ve sneaked from the worker’s camp to share a jug of sour barley-beer… a pair of young lovers fumbling their way through a furtive tryst… a lame old beggar wakening at the wrong moment… a physician’s apprentice selling stolen bone-of-vulture to a merchant’s pregnant wife…

It is quick. It is quiet. No alarms are raised. Around them, tents and huts and houses dream in slumber.

They converge, gathering at their appointed meeting-place for the next stage of their attack. Scaled bodies, sinuous and powerful, rippling with muscle. Flinty heads from which slitted eyes peer at one another.

Six of them.

There are six.

When there should be seven.

Khemet slipped from the queen’s salon by way of the same secret rushlit passages through which he’d entered, his presence noticed only by a very few of Neferisu’s most trusted servants.

Although it had been years since he’d set foot in the palace, his steps neither faltered nor hesitated. How often had he and Mahenef played here as boys? Making up adventures, fighting evil tomb robbers, man-headed scorpions, and other monsters… listening in on mostly-dull discussions between nobles, priests, and scribes…

He stopped, nerves pricking, pulse quickening, sensing someone else nearby.

“So, you finally return to us.” A figure emerged from an adjoining doorway, and Khemet stood stunned and blinking for the span of several heartbeats.

“Sia,” he said, once he could form words.

“Khemet.”

“You have… changed.”

“As have you.”

He looked her up and down, from the painted toenails of her sandal-clad feet to the jeweled pins holding her intricate black braids in place. His gaze could not help but linger over lithe limbs and firm curves. “I think you have changed… more.”

A smile crinkled the corners of her eyes, which were outlined in darkest khol and shadowed with the iridescent indigo dust of powdered scarab shells. “What was it that you said to my mother? Ah yes… I was a child then.”

“No longer.”

“No longer.”

Khemet found himself at a loss for words. The girl he remembered, Mahenef’s second sister, had been a reed-thin creature, pretty but shy. This was a woman grown, Bastet incarnate, and however ill-at-ease he’d been in the company of the queen, he felt far more stricken in the company of her daughter.

Then, her words came through to him, and he looked at her again, more sharply. “You heard our conversation?”

“Of course I did,” Sia replied, as if he were being foolish. “Tanit and I often played in these passages as well. We knew all the spying-places.”

“Then you know what the queen commands.”

Her graceful, bare shoulders lifted in an idle shrug, mirroring her mother’s. “She wants you to go to Sefut-Aten, to stop Pharaoh from this madness.”

“By any means necessary.”

“That, indeed, is what she said.”

“And you know… about me. What I am. What I’ve become.”

She took a step closer. He both smelled and tasted the sweet fragrances of cosmetics and perfume, and beneath those the even sweeter fragrances all her own.

“I know that after Mahenef died, you joined the Sons of Apophis. Now you are their leader. A warrior of darkness, a serpent-commander in the army of the night.”

“We are no army,” he said. “There are no chariots for us, no troops of spearmen and archers. My men are soldiers, but trained in the ways of stealth. Stealth, and murder.”

Sia nodded.

“Does that not frighten you? Fill you with abhorrence and disgust?”

“Should it?” She took another step.

“Shouldn’t it?”

In a slow, deliberate movement, she raised a hand and trailed her fingertips along his jawline from earlobe to chin.

He caught his breath. Warrior of darkness, serpent-commander, Son of Apophis, and her touch made him tremble.

Six where there should be seven.

One of their number is missing.

They move — with silent swiftness — past more tents and huts and houses.

A fat slave-master stumbles yawning into view and pauses to relieve himself against a mudbrick wall. He does not see or hear his death approaching. He only voids his bladder in a wilder and more vigorous spraying stream as breath is strangled from him. They do not let him fall, but lower him carefully behind the wall, covering him with a loose strew of hay.

Torchlight burns the night. Not solitary sentries but a group of three temple guards, a patrol. Wearing tanned-hide breastplates with yellow sun-disks painted on their chests, carrying round bronze shields, each with a sickle-shaped khopesh sword hanging at his hip. The one who holds the torch is young, barely out of boyhood.

Six against three, it would be no contest.

Six against three, in silence?

The serpent waits to strike.

In the deepest shadows. Flinty heads lowered, scale-clad bodies powerful and poised.

The guards walk past the wall behind which the slave-master’s corpse is hidden. Not entirely oblivious; they notice the drying wetness upon the mudbrick, the puddle soaking into the earth. The boy with the torch raises it. They look around. The tallest leans to peer over the wall.

It must be done.

A signal is given.

Now.

The serpent sinks its fangs.

Long and thin, sharp and curved.

Into unprotected backs, piercing linen before penetrating flesh. With unerring accuracy, avoiding ribs and shoulder blades and spine, puncturing the lungs, skewering the heart.

The younger guard, with the torch, is seized around the neck. His head is jerked violently to the side. The crack must seem loud to him, loud as the end of the world, but it is the only sound that’s made, and to any other ears would be no more than a snapping twig.

His eyes are wide and still-seeing as he crumples boneless to the ground. Perhaps he watches as the torch is deftly plucked from his hand before it falls into the straw. Perhaps he sees his companions. The taller of them is slumped over the wall, a much thicker flood of wetness running down the mudbrick now to puddle on the earth. The other sprawls facedown, and as the serpent rears up from him, the fangs slide out in twin glistening curves.

And perhaps he sees, by what had been his own torchlight, the looming scaled shapes around him. The slitted eyes glinting from beneath ridges of flint. Then the torch is rudely snuffed, and whatever the young guard may have seen, he now sees nothing more.

The men are dead, their breath stolen, their lives swallowed, but this will be much harder to conceal. Time is of the essence, time and speed.

From The Book of Beginnings:

Then, when the first floodwaters receded, there arose from them a primal mound of rich, red earth. Atop this mound sat a goddess, who soon gave birth to the sun.

This newborn sun blazed so brightly, he blinded his mother with his brilliance. The goddess, unable to see her child, to find and hold and care for him, began to weep. Her tears fell. Sorrow filled her heart and despair filled her throat.

Before she choked, she spat out that black bile of despair. She spat it into the vast waters surrounding her mound of earth. And as she did so, it became an immense snake, with a head of ridged flint and a long, scaly body.

“Why do you weep, oh goddess?” asked the snake.

“The sun,” she said, “my child, burns too bright to look upon! His brilliance blinds my eyes! What mother would not weep?”

Meanwhile, the child, who also could not see through his own brightness, cried tears of his own as he wailed for his mother. His golden tears, when they fell onto the earth, would become the seeds from which men and women sprung.

“Ah!” said the snake. “If that is what’s the matter, it is easily remedied!”

So saying, the snake unwound his mighty coils to stretch his length up from the sea. Water sheened and glimmered like oil on his scales. Swift and silent, sinuous, he moved toward the young sun.

“What are you doing?” asked the goddess, who was of course still blinded.

But the snake did not answer, for he had gaped wide his jaws, gaped them so wide he closed his mouth around the sun and swallowed him down whole.

Then, the burning brilliance gone — gone down the snake’s vast dark gullet — the goddess blinked her eyes and found she again could see. When she realized what had happened, she let out an anguished cry.

“You have devoured my child!”

“Now you are no longer blind,” said the snake.

“Give him back to me, you monstrous beast!”

“This is some gratitude to show me; I shall do no such thing!”

As it was, however, the sun yet lived, and went on to fight and force his way through the snake’s seething innards — which caused the snake no small amount of discomfort — until he emerged from the other end. Much of his light had been dimmed by the difficult journey, so that his brightness was no longer blinding his mother.

The goddess was overjoyed to be reunited with her child, but the snake warned her he was far from finished with them.

“I will swallow him again!”

“And he will win free again!”

“I will keep swallowing him!”

“He will keep winning free!”

So they said, and so it was, and so has it ever been, and so there are day and night.

While Bennu consults with the physicians, Sennu gathers the folds of his yellow skirt-robe to his bony knees and makes haste up a sloping corridor.

His sandals slap flat echoes of his footsteps. The walls are tight-fit blocks of stone, covered floor to ceiling with sacred writings from The Scrolls of the Arisen Sun. In alcoves spaced at intervals, bronze sun-disk dishes hold burning candles.

He reaches the inner gate, puffing and sweating.

It is night. It is dark. He does not want to go out there, even bearing with him the fire of Ut-Aten in one of the sun-disk candle holders. The blackness looms so large, so ominous and deep.

But, Sennu reminds himself, it will not last for long. Soon, the sun will shine eternal. Soon, the serpent will be banished forever into chaos, and order will rule all.

Comforted by these thoughts, he passes through the gate.

Once, the pillars supporting the roofs of the walkways edging the courtyard were statue-images of the old beast-headed gods; their features have been chipped and chiseled into anonymity, awaiting the sculptors who will remake them in more appropriate design.

As the work continues.

As the money is brought in.

As the fame and power of Sefut-Aten rises, gaining strength.

Everywhere are piles of materials, skeletal cages of scaffolding, stacks of bricks, slabs of stone, beams and winches, casks of oil and lime and river-water, half-hewn obelisks, levers, ladders, tools. A crude and temporary arrangement of slats and rope serves as the outer gate until the massive bronze one can be finished, the massive bronze gate with its sun-disk of gold and rays of precious gems, which will surely dazzle and humble all who come to this place.

Sennu’s feet grind and crunch on grit and gravel, pebbles, dust, debris. He crosses the courtyard — it will be a lush garden when all is said and done, perhaps with a menagerie to rival those of the greatest Nubian chiefs — and enters that section of the structure given over to the royal living quarters.

Pharaoh has been calling again for her.

His Lily-of-the-Nile, his flower, his golden lotus.

Personally, privately, Sennu considers the woman to be something of a she-jackal: clever, opportunistic and sly. But, even in his priestly celibacy, he cannot deny her striking beauty… and she is a devout worshiper of Ut-Aten, her influence even having helped convert Pharaoh himself to the true faith.

Her chambers are guarded by two of her own hand-picked warriors, who wear leopard-skins, gold pectoral collars set with polished onyx, and very little else. They wield long, thick, stout staves capped with sharp-edged disks of burnished bronze.

The Lily-of-the-Nile claims that they are eunuchs. No one dares suggest otherwise.

They smirk as Sennu scurries past. He wakes a round-faced, round-bodied slavewoman, who goes to fetch her mistress.

Left briefly alone, feeling out of place and out of sorts, he wanders the room. It is opulent. There are palm fronds and feathered fan-plumes, hangings, cushions, decorative chests and coffers. He frowns briefly over a shelf of small jade figurines, but they are merely trinkets.

The sudden creeping sensation of no longer being alone, of being watched, makes him turn. Too fast, the candle jitters in his hand so that its light flickers.

The child stands there. His pudgy body is half-hidden by the shadows of a luxurious reclining-couch, but his wide and wide-spaced eyes catch the candle’s flame like yet more polished mirrors. Unlike most boys his age, his head is not shaven into a side-lock; his hair tumbles in sleep-tousled ringlets to his naked, dimpled shoulders.

Sennu twitches. He has never been much at ease in the company of children. This one, least of all. Soft of feature, full of lip, weak of chin, bow-legged, with smooth and chubby little fingers…

They look at each other. Man and boy, priest and prince.

Silence hangs between them, a thick and tangible thing, growing and swelling, the gas-gut bloat of a waterlogged corpse, a hippopotamus left to rot in tepid river shallows.

Where is that wretched slavewoman? What is taking her so long?

He manufactures what is meant to be a reassuring smile, wondering which of them he’s trying to reassure.

Those wide and wide-set eyes stare, unblinking, filled with mirrored fire. A fat pink tongue squirms between full lips. One of his chubby fingers pokes into his navel. His other arm, he slowly raises, and extends. Something dangles from the child’s hand. A length of cord, a strip of cloth, some sort of toy, Sennu thinks.

As he lifts the candle to shed a better light, he sees it for what it is. Long and limp and slender, a dead snake held by the tail.

Its fine scales are green and black, delicate patterning fading to a paler underbelly. Its head… its head is misshapen, squashed, oozing. Like an overripe date or fig that has been stepped on, or squeezed in a strong fist.

Sennu’s mouth and throat are dry, desert-dry, sandstorm-dry. He fears his knees will give way.

Then, from behind him, he hears voices and movement. Pharaoh’s Lily-of-the-Nile glides in, pinning closed a garment of linen so sheer it makes the gesture of modesty moot. She has taken the time to apply fresh cosmetics. The slavewoman waddles after her, muttering, offering up choices of rings and bangles from a jewelry case.

“He has a snake,” Sennu says, pointing. It is not what he’d intended. It is hardly a proper greeting. The words just… fall from him, like a crumbling rill of sand.

Lily-of-the-Nile sways past and bends, reed-supple, over the boy. She somehow gives the impression of stroking his tousled hair without touching him at all.

“Yes,” she says, all but crooning. “I have one brought for him every afternoon.”

Sennu gapes, incredulous. “But why?”

“We kill it at the moment of the sunset, don’t we, my shining little god? To show the demons of the night they cannot hope to harm us, no, oh no, they cannot.”

The child giggles, lifts his arm again — the dead snake trailing — and licks a smear of congealed gore from the back of his hand.

It is all Sennu can do not to shudder.

“Do you also remember,” Sia whispered, settling her palm against Khemet’s cheek, “how Mahenef would speak his plans of the future? How he and you would marry Tanit and I, and become true brothers at last?”

“Sia…” he said, resisting the urge to lean into her caress.

“Before she died — it was the bone-weakness, same as our Uncle Thut — she requested her sarcophagus be placed alongside Mahenef’s in his tomb. To be united with him in the next world, ba and ka and soul and body.”

“I had heard.” His voice was not quite steady. “May they be forever happy in the houses of Osiris.”

“While here we two still are, yet among the living.”

How beautiful she was, how confident and sure. He had never, until this moment, so regretted his decisions. By Ma’at, by Isis, she was lovely. And to have a woman look at him, touch him without apprehension… he did not like to think how long it had been since that had happened, since he’d enjoyed the pleasures of such company without paying a price… even then usually to be met with stoic endurance …

“The last time we saw each other,” she said, “we shared a kiss.”

He shut his eyes and did allow his cheek to press against her palm. Her skin was as warm and fine as oasis sand. He savored her scent, yearned to part his lips and taste her unique salt-sweetness upon his tongue.

“It was a clumsy thing, that kiss, and awkward,” she went on. “Our noses bumped. I couldn’t stop blushing, and you were so anxious we might be seen. Do you remember that, as well?”

“Vividly,” he said.

“I wonder.” Her murmur, a soft evening breeze rich with promise… the nearness of her… “Would we be better at it now?”

He nearly groaned. “Sia…” he said again, struggling for word, for thought, for action. “I’ve already given your mother my answer. You do not need to—”

From caress to stinging, ringing slap!

They find their missing seventh at the end of a long trail of blood. As if having dragged or been dragged through the dirt. Struggling, slithering, a painstaking crawl.

Scales and skin slashed open.

A bronze spearhead lodged deep.

Organs and bone.

The spear-shaft snapped off, broken, trailing.

Nearby is a sentry, his throat a garish red weal, swollen and angry—

— the serpent strangles, squeezes—

— but somehow eluding, escaping for a moment. Getting a chance to strike back. Desperation and luck, raw luck. Enough to wound, wound badly, even fatally.

Not, however, enough to save himself.

The sentry is dead. Smothered, suffocated. Face pushed into mud. Held there. Held there as clay clogged his nose, filled his mouth, covered his eyes. The scent of dank silt. The gritty taste, the feel, wet sand in his teeth. The hot, coughing pain of damp earth-clots being sucked into his lungs.

The serpent steals breath.

The serpent swallows life.

To take his killer with him is the best he has been able to do.

Which is far better than many could say, given the circumstances. Far better than most.

The sentry was also at least unable to raise an alarm. Their seventh has done that much, has kept the swiftness and the silence. Has kept to the purpose, the mission.

Now they know. The question is answered, the mystery solved.

Honoring the loss of one of their own must come later.

This is their time, in the dark hours.

The sacred fire burns bright in its tower. A tiny sun, arrogant, insolent, defiant. A bronze beacon behind the temple-palace walls.

They make for it.

Swift and silent, scaled and sleek, the serpents of the night.

No other unfortunates get in their way. No workers and no witnesses; no whores, drunkards, or slaves.

Fanged and ready. Shadow to shadow.

Toward the temple, the tower. Walls and scaffolding surround palace houses and courtyards. The shoddy wooden temporary gate is guarded, an open-walled hut to each side and four men to each hut. Not sentries here but soldiers, again in tanned-hide breastplates, with shields and curved khopesh-blades.

These guards are alert, not dozing, not gambling, not telling jokes and lies about women. Lanterns shed broad circles of light, overlapping on the great flat slab-stones in front of the gate.

The serpent waits to strike.

Glances. Gestures. Flinty heads nod understanding.

Two, the stealthiest, move forward. Move to the very fringe-edges of the light. Their fangs have been withdrawn; sometimes the serpent must strike from afar.

With a whisper-soft hiss and snap, no louder than the click-whir of a scarab’s wings, each finds its mark. Not stinging vulnerable flesh but snuffing, blink-fast, the lantern-flames from their wicks.

Blackness drops like a weight. The guards gasp in surprise.

It is a last breath to be stolen. There is no time to cry out, no time to draw their weapons. The serpents are already upon them.

Khemet’s eyes flew open at the slap. His nostrils flared and his body tensed.

He caught her by the wrist almost before the sharp crack finished ringing in his ears, the stinging heat still spreading on his face.

Sia did not flinch. Her fierce gaze held and challenged his.

“Is that what you think I’m doing?” she demanded. “Is that what you think of me?”

The serpent coils, crushes.

His fingers coiled, poised to crush. To crush her fine and fragile bones. To crack and grind them in his fist.

“You think I would seduce you on my mother’s behalf?” she went on.

The serpent…

No.

Not here. Not now. This is not the serpent’s place.

“No,” he said, aloud, and relaxed his grip. “That is not what I think. Sia, I am sorry.”

She yanked her arm away. “Though you might be right to think so. Why not whore myself for her purpose, instead of being whored for Pharaoh’s?”

Khemet almost asked what she meant by that, but then he understood. He closed his eyes again, exhaling through clenched teeth, letting his shoulders fall.

“I am the eldest surviving daughter.” She uttered a bitter laugh. “It would make me queen of all Egypt, the dynasty secure.”

“Yes,” he said heavily. “Yes, it would.”

Fangs plunge and impale, piercing lungs, piercing hearts. Muscles curl and constrict, tightening, powerful, inexorable.

Windpipes and voice-boxes collapse in muted crunches of cartilage. The guards grope feebly, kick with futile struggles as they strangle. Gristle crackles in their necks. Bodies fall with meaty thumps.

In a nearby hut, a dog whuffs. Once, and twice. A third is interrupted by a man’s impatient, drowsy grumble. The dog whines plaintively.

Then all again is silent.

The sacred fire in the tower burns on, unabated. Those who tend it go on doing so, chanting, oblivious to danger.

For now.

To raise the gate would mean risking noise, its wooden creak and rattle, the squeal of pulley and rope. The serpents go up it instead, swarm up it with fluid ease, up and over, dropping soundlessly into the courtyard.

They flow across it like currents of dark water, parting and passing around piles of bricks and cut stone, mounds of dirt and gravel, beams, casks, straw-bales, and the disfigured visages of gods.

Swiftness. Silence.

Dark shapes within the larger darkness of the night.

First, they will strike at the barracks. In that long, low-ceilinged room, more guards sleep on woven mats. Unarmed, naked, unprepared, presenting no challenge to the sinking fangs, to the strangling coils. From there, they will go to the tower—

But, before any of that can be done, a moving firelight flicker strengthens brighter in a doorway.

“However…” said Sia, “I am the eldest surviving daughter anyway. No matter who I marry, would I not still be queen?”

Khemet glanced at her, feeling even more uncertain, as if their conversation took place upon some deceptive stretch of quicksand.

He almost, in that instant, yearned for the dark caverns below the desert, carved in sunless secrecy by age-old underground rivers. There, at the hidden stronghold the Sons of Apophis called home… there, where the immense black avatar basked and rested, accepting offerings of flower-garlanded heifers with gilded nubs of horn… there, where he had lived, had trained… where their ways, their rules, were simple and easily understood…

The serpent…

The serpent, yes, the Serpent. Apophis, Apep, the Maw of Night, Eternal Devourer of the Sun.

The serpent swallows life.

His life as well? Khemet’s own? Freely given, offered up like any other sacrifice, offered and accepted?

And why not? He’d had no close family — a soldier father long since dead, a mother who’d put him in the care of an aging aunt when she remarried, a stepfather and various half-siblings he barely knew. The aging aunt, a cosmetician to the ladies of Pharaoh’s court, had done her best to raise him, and her favored status afforded him much freedom and indulgence. Even she was gone now, having succumbed to the damp-lung before the war in which Mahenef had died.

So, indeed, why should he not have taken on the Scales and Fangs and Coils?

It seemed, at the time, a reasonable decision. One he could anticipate little cause to regret. Although he had learned no other trade but battle, the armies did not want him, believing unluck was his shadow. Likewise, he would have no wife or children to support. And, despite a princely education gained at Mahenef’s side, his aunt had left only a scant inheritance once her final arrangements were complete.

Might as well make the most of his solitude and ominous reputation. Might as well pledge himself to the Serpent.

Yet now, here he was… and Sia… if she was suggesting what it seemed she was suggesting…

Their youthful infatuation, her brother’s joking plans, and that single fumbling awkward kiss of bumped noses and blushing… those belonged to another time, a gone time, another world. Didn’t they?

The way she touched him, though. The way she looked at him and stroked his face. The soft warmth like fine, smooth, heated sand in her caress, her voice, her gaze.

How could she want him, knowing what he was? Knowing what her own mother had commanded him to do?

This business dark and grim, as she had phrased it.

If he did not — if he refused, or failed — then any hope with Sia would be gone. But if he did, if he succeeded…

There was no crime greater than the shedding of royal blood. The bloodline of Pharaoh was the bloodline of the gods.

Ordinary murder was more than wickedness enough.

Her words and his, speaking of Mahenef and Tanit… united with him in the next world, ba and ka and soul and body… may they be forever happy in the houses of Osiris.

And Neferisu’s words as well… he will be waiting for you in the Seven Halls.

No crime greater than the shedding of royal blood. No crime more certain to weigh a heart heavier than stone in the balance-scales held by Anubis. Instead of the houses of Osiris, it would be the monstrous Ammit. It would be utter obliteration.

Conflicting thoughts and emotions seethed in him, roiled like a pit of snakes, churned like the primal seas of chaos.

With a sudden, violent cry and gesture, he dashed them all from his mind. He stood, jaw clenched, hands raised, fingers stiffly splayed, air hissing harsh and rapid through his teeth.

The serpent…

“Khemet?”

She took a step, began to reach for him.

…coils, crushes.

He seized her, pulled her to him, coiled his arms around her body, crushed her to his chest—

…steals breath.

— and claimed her lips in a fierce kiss.

The firelight flickers.

Brightening, strengthening.

A false dawn.

Gleaming gold in a doorway, casting a gangly moving shadow against a wall.

A man appears, tall and thin, angular as a heron. Even with a heron’s walk, beak-nosed head bobbing with each stilted step.

His robe and sun-disk jewelry proclaim him a priest. He carries a candle in a dish of bronze. It quavers in his grasp, and his eyes dart about like anxious flies.

The swiftest and most silent of them, at the signal, moves to attack.

Fangs emerge whisper-quick. And strike. Piercing just below the collarbones, just above the ribs, to either side of breastbone, plunging hilt-deep into lungs.

A single, startled gasp, barely begun… eyes bulging wet with horror… and it is done. The bronze dish falls from the priest’s loosening fingers but is caught before it hits the ground. The candle tumbles from it, rolling across flagstones, flame guttering and sputtering.

Then, it all goes wrong.

Then, somebody screams. A high voice, piping and shrill. In the doorway is a child, a boy, soft and well-fed, his hair a mass of curls. Other voices join in, a clamoring alarm. Two women are there, one short and squat, the other slim and shapely. Several men rush past the women, muscular men in leopard skins and gold pectorals. They carry stout staves topped with rounded, sharp-edged blades.

Coils lash and snap, black in the dim-lit gloom. One twines about a staff and yanks it from the hands of the wielder, sending it to clatter. A second snares the same man by the calf and ankle; a hard pull flips him off his feet. The lengths of other coils entangle wrists, encircle throats.

The closest serpent, the one who struck the priest, darts at the screaming boy. But the boy, surprisingly fast for his soft pudginess, scurries out of the way. He flings something limp and ropelike in the serpent’s face — a cold, dead snake. The squat woman seizes him, pulling him back as if to hurry him to safety.

“Murderers!” shrieks the shapelier woman, she of the exquisite beauty garbed in sheer, thin linen. “Murderers and thieves!”

Another coil whips toward her. She dodges with a dancer’s grace. It misses wrapping her slender neck; its tip splits the skin of her shoulder. Blood runs down her arm. She shrieks again, as much in outrage at her marred perfection as in pain.

With a lunging leap, the priest-killing serpent is upon the shorter woman. The curved fangs plunge again. Her last act is to shove the boy through the doorway, to almost throw him in a final desperate burst of strength.

From rooms around the courtyard come the sounds of waking query, confusion, concern. On high in the sun-tower, the chanting abruptly stops. Burnished mirrors swivel, casting sunbeams of false day over the commotion. Shadows leap stark and strange against the walls and pillars, against the ruined visages of gods.

The fangs draw blood. The coils constrict.

A staff swings. A serpent twists aside; the rounded blade’s bronze edge shears through scales and flesh in a long but shallow cut. It swings again, up-around-down in a whistling arc. Heavy wood cracks on flinty head, on bone. The serpent drops, stunned… or worse.

Releasing her was as difficult as he’d expected, and he’d expected it to be all but impossible.

Khemet stepped back, every sinew feeling drawn tight as a bowstring, his body surging like the rising Nile floodwaters.

Breathless, yes, she was breathless. The carefully-daubed carmine of her lips had become a rich, red smear.

“You will be queen,” he said.

Sia gazed up at him, eyes hazed with desire, heavy-lidded in a slow cat’s blink. Her cheeks were flushed, her intricate braids in disarray. The fine-pressed pleats of her linen garment hung rumpled and askew.

The way she had melted against him, molded to him, melded, her own kiss as fervent, her own hunger as intense… in the privacy of that rushlit passage, unseen, unknown, they could have…

“You will be queen,” Khemet repeated.

Then he turned, striding perhaps not silent but still swift. He dared not linger, dared not wait for her to speak. Dared not tempt himself further.

In a matter of moments, he had reached a sunlit alcove overlooking a bustling crafter’s yard. Potters and painters, weavers and carvers, and others of such normal trade went about their business. The bright air rang with voices — chattering, haggling, laughing. Children ran about, side-locked naked boys just as he and Mahenef had once been, getting into mischief. He smelled pan-bread frying in oil, fish and water-fowl roasting on spits.

Life, this was life, ordinary daily life. And here he was, apart from it. Squinting; his vision, like his spirit, more accustomed to the dark.

With the ease of much practice, he slung a loose fold of his black shoulder-wrap to drape around his head. A lozenge of polished onyx, set with chips of flint and two small green gems, weighted the cloth at his brow.

He made his way through crowded streets and marketplaces, avoiding contact, being avoided in turn. Those who happened by chance to notice him were quick to divert their attention elsewhere.

At the river’s edge, a small boat waited, likewise studiously ignored by most along the docks. The serpentine design woven into its reed construction was subtle, as was the stitching in its shade-awning. The men waiting with it wore garments similar to Khemet’s, their shaved and oiled heads similarly covered.

They nodded as he approached, picked up their steer-poles as he boarded, and pushed the small craft off into the wide and smoothly rippling waters.

They are five now.

Five, and more guards are coming.

Charging from the barracks, some with tanned-hide breastplates hastily buckled, having grabbed shields and spears, brandishing khopesh-blades. Many priests run into the courtyard as well, priests carrying bronze knives or torches.

And, beyond the wooden gate, others have begun to gather. Workers. Merchants. Sentries. Slaves. The builders and people of Sefut-Aten, calling out to one another, shouting with confused consternation. Most are men, strong men, builders, arming themselves with whatever tools they find most handy.

The last of the leopard skin-clad warriors has fallen. A serpent has snared the beautiful woman in his Coils. Pharaoh’s mistress, his favored concubine, his Lily-of-the-Nile. She struggles and spits and scratches like a cat. She curses them with vile language for presuming to lay their hands upon her.

Then the boy, the irksome and obnoxious child who’s caused them all this hardship, comes running back out. Demanding they release his mother, promising them the burning deaths of a thousand angry suns, do they know what they are doing? Do they not know who he is?

He snatches up the dead priest’s dropped candle. Before any of the serpents can stop him, he hurls its guttering flame into a broken bale of straw. The dry and brittle stuff ignites with a gusty flare. The boy’s next action is to heave all his pudgy weight at an oil-cask, which overturns.

Two serpents seize him by the arms, haul him off his feet, carry him suspended between them. He is visibly shocked by this, astounded, as if he earnestly believed they could not touch him.

But the damage has been done; the spreading spill of oil feeding hungry fire, hastening its appetite for wood and rope and scaffolding.

In a mere span of heartbeats, the entire courtyard is ablaze.

The sun had set into cooling darkness by the time Khemet and his men emerged from their hidden stronghold in its deep river-carved caverns below the desert.

He chose six to go with him, six of his best, six of his fellow Sons of Apophis.

Instead of their simple tunics and shoulder-capes, they wore the Scales. The close-fitting armor covered their entire bodies, made from supple oiled hide to which small overlapping pieces of stiff black leather and greened copper had been sewn. On their heads were helm-caps covered with angled wedges of flint.

At his waist, each man carried the Fangs, twin knives with narrow, curving blades and needle-sharp points. Around their wrists and forearms were tied the shorter sets of Coils, sturdy lengths of cord suitable for binding or strangling. The longer Coils, loops of limber rope-whips, hung on their backs, snakeskin-wrapped handles within easy reach.

“To betray our king,” one said, in a musing, thoughtful tone.

“To save Egypt,” another replied.

“By any means necessary,” added a third.

“Even the shedding of royal blood?” the fourth asked.

“No crime greater,” said the fifth.

“No crime more certain to weigh the heart heavy as stone,” the sixth agreed.

“I will not put so great a burden upon you,” Khemet said. “No, that task I shall take upon myself, and answer for it to Anubis and Ma’at.”

They rode for Sefut-Aten on the dark winds of the night.

“Now you are done for, you wretched crawling snakes!” says Lily-of-the-Nile, as the fire grows and the guards advance. “Pharaoh will flay you alive and leave your corpses for the jackals.”

She is terrified, but she is also furious. Her shoulder is a sheet of pain where the whip split her flawless flesh. They’ve bound her wrists behind her back and hold their knives poised at her throat. Her most faithful slavewoman and half a dozen of her hand-chosen warriors are dead.

And they have her son. Her precious Utatenhotep. The look he gives her is a strange mix of betrayed belligerence and fear. How many times has she told him this would never happen? It must be her fault, his sullen pout proclaims. She must have lied to him or failed him; how could she, when he has been so good? Her own little shining god, and now she has let the demons get him!

The guards seem cautious, even hesitant. None wish to be the first to charge, whether for their own safety or hers and the child’s. The priests also hesitate. She sees Bennu or Sennu among them, whichever of the heron-legged brothers is not splayed in the dirt with holes piercing his lungs.

Rising flames leap and roar, racing up ladders and scaffolding. At the gate are cries of Fire!, cries for water and sand, to quench it before all their work is undone, before Sefut-Aten lies in ashes.

A shape moves in front of her, blotting hot light with his dark shadow. Beneath the flinty edges of his helm-cap, his eyes are not the monstrous slit-pupiled glowing green she has imagined. Ordinary eyes. An ordinary man, after all. Not some creature of Apophis.

“Where is Pharaoh?” this serpent — this man! — asks her.

Lily-of-the-Nile spits in his face. The movement earns her a sharp pinprick jab to the neck, but she does not care. It is worth it.

The man, leader of serpents, gestures. The two who hold Utatenhotep between them by the arms drag him forward.

“Where is Pharaoh?” he repeats, placing a scaled hand on the boy’s shoulder.

Utatenhotep begins to snivel.

“You dare not harm my son.” She lifts a defiant chin. “He is Pharaoh’s child, of the royal bloodline of the gods.”

The flint-edged head tilts one way, the man’s grim mouth tilts the other. “The gods you have forsaken?”

“Not Ut-Aten! My son is Ut-Aten’s chosen, Ut-Aten incarnate and reborn! He will rule over all of Egypt—”

“With Pharaoh’s daughter as his sister-queen,” he finishes.

“Ha!” Lily-of-the-Nile scoffs. “He’ll have no need of her!”

Even as she says this, she realizes it is somehow a mistake. The man’s eyes — which still are not slit-pupiled, still do not glow — narrow and become more dangerous than ever. He moves his scale-covered hand to encircle the boy’s throat. Strong fingers press deep indentations into soft and vulnerable flesh.

“Oh, she will be queen,” he says. “I have promised her that.”

In the cool, shaded salon, wine sat untouched. No music wafted on the garden-fragrant air; the harpist had been sent elsewhere, as had the maids. Even the tame white monkey nibbled its fruit in some other corner of the palace, though the cats, of course, sleek and pampered, with their collars of gold, continued lounging wherever they pleased.

Neferisu waited, tranquil and elegant as a statue of a goddess. Her serene, noble features displayed no outward sign of impatience.

Sia was another matter.

“You’ll wear holes in your sandals,” Neferisu said, after a while of her daughter’s pacing.

“There should be more news by now.”

“We shall hear it when there is.”

What little they so far had heard was, as such news tended to be, fragmentary, filled with rumor and exaggeration and contradiction. Sefut-Aten had been destroyed, the entire city swallowed up by the desert just as the Great Devouring Serpent swallowed the sun. Sefut-Aten had not been destroyed, far from it, but would-be murderers of Pharaoh had been captured and burned alive.

Pharaoh was murdered. Pharaoh may have been murdered, but rose again from the dead to take his revenge. Black snakes rained from the skies and killed a hundred of Ut-Aten’s priests. A thousand bronze fire warriors were marching, would be here with the dawn, and brought with them a mirror so immense it would sear people to cinders and melt the sands to glass.

That famous beauty, Pharaoh’s Lily-of-the-Nile, was a witch, a witch dripping her sweetly poisoned nectar into his kingly ear. No, Lily-of-the-Nile had been bestowed to him as a gift to guide him on the path of the new god. No, she was a test, a trick, sent by Isis to determine if he could be so easily swayed.

Her child was Pharaoh’s own son, of the royal bloodline. So Lily-of-the-Nile claimed, and no one would publicly dispute her, but hadn’t it been years since he fathered any children by any wife or concubine? Why her, why then? The will of Ut-Aten, of course! Though it was hardly as if she lacked for company.

So it went, the news, on and on as the long day passed.

“The sun is setting,” Sia said.

“You did not truly believe they would banish night forever.”

“Of course not. I believed Khemet would do what must be done.”

Neferisu smiled gently. “To save Egypt.”

“By any means necessary.”

“And if he did, if he has, could you still love him?”

“I always have.”

“I expect,” said Neferisu, her smile widening as she glanced past Sia toward the discreet doorway of the hidden passageway, “he’s glad to know it.”

Sia whirled, braids flying, crossed hands pressed upon her breast. A cry burst from her lips. She all but sprang across the salon to meet the dark and weary, wounded figure who stepped into view.

He had paused long enough to divest himself of Scales and Fangs and Coils, Neferisu saw, and to rinse away the worst of the travel-dust, blood, and smoke. Wildly improper though it was, and painful though it looked, he caught Sia in his arms. He held her to him, shaking, head down upon her shoulder.

“Well?” Neferisu prompted, after giving them a moment.

Without raising his head, Khemet replied, “It is done. The Fire of Ut-Aten is snuffed out, the priests and their followers slain, the survivors scattered.”

“The woman and the boy?”

“The serpent sinks its fangs,” he said. “The serpent steals breath.”

“And Pharaoh?” asked Neferisu. “What of my husband and king?”

At that, he did lift his head to look at her. “As you commanded. We have brought him home.”