Although he doubted the archer had the faintest idea where he was, he took no chances. He beached his skiff as close to the game as he could, hastily pulled the vessel out of the water, and darted into the nearest lane. Keeping to the shadows, moving fast and silently, he sped along the unfamiliar streets of Abu. The faint afterglow vanished from the sky, the stars brightened, and the narrow thoroughfares were blanketed in ever-deepening gloom. Voices sounded on the rooftops above, families sharing their evening meal. A lone goat wandered down a lane, bleating. Dogs howled in first one sector of the city and then another, urging each other to greater voice.
As he hurried along, he thought of the unwanted gifts that had been left each evening in his quarters, followed by the blatant attempt to slay him with bow and arrows. Why the threats? Why the more forthright attempt to take his life? He had learned a lot since coming to Abu, but felt himself no closer to the slayer than when he had arrived. He was a long way from the truth. Much too far away.
One thing he did know: if the archer and the slayer were one and the same, Ineni could not be the guilty man. He had been far from Abu all day, on the island with the horses.
Bak saw ahead the mouth of the lane leading to his quarters. He slowed his pace and approached with care, scanning rooftops and pitch-black doorways for any sign of the archer, thinking of the herd, wondering where Ineni would take them. Not far from Nubt, he suspected. Someplace where people knew and liked him., So great a number of horses would be impossible to hide. Ineni would need the helpand the silence-of men and women he could trust.
Finding nothing suspicious, Bak slipped into the narrow lane. The way ahead was cloaked in darkness, a black tunnel with a faint wedge of light at the far end. A figure appeared there, vaguely illuminated and hard to see, a patch of white. His heart leaped into his throat. He dodged sideways and flattened himself against the wall, making less of a target. The figure vanished, probably around the far corner. A neighbor, most likely, going about the business of living.
Laughing at himself but taking care nonetheless, he hurried on. As he neared the end of the lane, he realized the light came from his own quarters. Murmuring voices on the roof and the odors of stewed fish and onions. told him Psuro and Kasaya were there. They must have lit the lamp so neithei he nor they would be accosted by an uninvited guest hiding in the dark. He smiled, pleased by the reassuring glow, the though of warm food and friendly faces.
He walked up to the door, stopped in his tracks, sucked in his breath. A stool stood just inside the threshold, barring the way. A bright puddle adorned its upper surface. Fresh blood. He ducked aside, out of the light and the line of fire. Fearing he knew not what, he stood silent and still, every sense alert. He heard no movement inside, felt no human presence. He peered around the doorjamb. A small baked clay lamp cast a feeble light from the stairway, enough to see the room much as he and his Medjays had left it, cluttered with their possessions but empty of life.
Yet the blood made clear that something was wrong. Puzzled, curious, unsure what to expect and strangely reluctant to find out, he slipped past the stool and ducked off to the right, out of the lighted doorway. He scanned the room a second time, finding nothing altered and no one inside. He half swung around to look again at the stool. His eyes were drawn upward to the woven reed mat, tightly rolled and tied out of the way above the door. Hard against the mat, pinned upside-down with a short, sharp dagger, was a full-grown gray-brown rat, so fresh-killed a final drop of blood clung to its neck. The stool had been carefully aligned below to catch the creature's blood, to draw attention to its murder.
Snapping out an oath, Bak crossed the room in three quick strides, scooped up the lamp and, shielding the flame with a hand, carried it back to the door for a closer look. The dagger was bronze, a plain, unmarked weapon common to the army. The rat's neck had been cut before it had been pinned to the mat. The creature, he knew without doubt, symbolized the slain sergeant Senmut, from all reports a rat in his own right.
The message could not have been more clear, yet Bak was confused. He had been so sure the slayer would leave no more unwanted gifts. Why this now? Why this kind of message when the bow was more direct?
He backed off and stared. The rodent so recently slain, the fresh blood on the stool, sent a chill up his spine. This gift was disgusting, sinister, its delivery demonstrating contempt for himself and his men. The intruder could not have been gone more than a few moments. He had taken the rat's life and left his ugly message, with Psuro and Kasaya on the rooftop only a few paces away.
And Bak himself had missed him by a hair.
Chapter Nine
"Why would a man use a bow and arrow at midday and go back to a more insidious threat that same evening?" Bak, his forearms resting on either side of the prow, scanned the unfamiliar waters ahead of the skiff, searching for rocks lying beneath the surface, awaiting a lapse of attention. "I don't understand."
Psuro sat farther back, manning the sail. "Are you sure he meant to slay you, sir? His arrows never once came close, you said."
"I'm not certain of anything," Bak grumbled. He was firmly convinced someone had set out to slay him, but to argue the matter with Psuro was futile. The stocky Medjay was a good man, but he was not Imsiba. Bak needed the sergeant's ear, his common sense arguments that sent Bak's thoughts down untraveled paths.
"There's the island where we're to meet User," Psuro said, pointing. "The place of inscriptions."
Bak eyed the patch of land rising from the river some distance ahead, an outcrop of granite larger than Abu and as stubbornly resistant to erosion. Acacias and tamarisks lined the water's edge, while mounded boulders, their surfaces blackened by time, rose above a blanket of yellow sand too sterile to support much life. He was not impressed.
Rising to his feet, he turned around to study the river behind them, as he often had since their departure from Abu. Among the many islands through which they had threaded their way, bits and pieces of ships darted into and out of sight, as if playing the child's game of hide-and-seek. He glimpsed mastheads, portions of sails, sometimes a fully rigged craft that vanished in the blink of an eye behind islands crowned with vegetation or massive clumps of boulders devoid of foliage. Distance shrunk the vessels, light and heat waves distorted them, preventing him from identifying any one boat that might have remained behind them all along. He did not think anyone was following, but he could not be sure.
"According to Pahared," Psuro said, "we'll find a multitude of writings left on the rocks from ancient times." "Rapids to the right," Bak warned, spotting a stretch of foaming water.
A minute adjustment of the braces eased the vessel left. The stiff breeze sped them southward, making light of the northbound current. With their sail fully ballooned, the water whispering beneath the hull, they sped past the eddy and through an irregular row of islets guarding their approach to the island: a channel separating the rocky barrier from the east bank of the river. Patches of froth warned of hidden hazards. The chill of night had passed, and the warm breath of the lord Khepre, the morning sun, had lifted the mist from the water. Birds wheeled overhead, riding the air currents in lazy circles, ready to dive at any fish foolhardy enough to rise to the surface.
"The patterns I spotted the day we arrived in Abu point to a solitary slayer having a single reason for his actions," Bak said, thinking aloud. "If I weren't so sure of that, I'd suspect a second man fired those arrows yesterday."
"Anything's possible, I suppose," Psuro said doubtfully. Bak scowled at the channel ahead. Imsiba, too, would have doubts, he thought, but he would have alternate suggestions as well.