“Who could have created something like this?” she whispered. “And why would they? Why would they even dream of such a place, let alone build it?”
“I don’t know,” Gideon said. “I asked the same question when I came here for the first time.”
“But Bastet and the other Aegyptians are four thousand years old,” Asha said. “Weren’t they here when it was built?”
Gideon shook his head. “They were here when the Aegyptian kings allowed the Hellan engineer Alexander to transform the surface world from a struggling fishing village into a city worthy of being the capital of a great and powerful Ifrican nation. But this place? No. Horus and Osiris discovered this place much, much later. And they found it just like this. Deserted. No one knows who built it, or how, or why.”
Asha stopped walking and stared up at nothing and everything all at once. The pillars, the towers, the pyramids, the ceiling so high she wasn’t certain she could see it, and the walls so far that she was certain she couldn’t see them at all. It was too big. It was too old. It was too impossible. Nothing else she had ever seen could compare to it, in any way. The immense space and silence reached down, pressed down, crushing her chest, making her head spin.
It’s just a place. It’s just a thing. Stones, bricks. People made it, bit by bit. They cut the stones, dragged them here, and arranged them.
Thousands of people.
Millions of people.
She swallowed and tried to breathe.
How long would it take to build even one of these pillars? Just one? How many years?
And to build it all, an entire vast city, and then to cover it over, hide it from the world. How many centuries?
What sort of will would demand such a labor? What sort of mind would demand that these works be raised from the dust? That millions of people should slave for centuries, for generations, from cradle to grave, to build an entire world like this?
“Are you all right?” Gideon asked.
Asha swallowed again and closed her eyes.
How many people suffered and died to make this obscenity?
Tears spilled over her cheeks, and her chest shook in silent sobs.
How many people choked to death on the dust, and were crushed by falling stones, and bled beneath the overseer whips, and…
She fell to her knees, her whole body shaking as the vision consumed her mind. She couldn’t look away from the sight of it, painted across her mind’s eye. People beyond number, men and women and children, for time unmeasured and unremembered, screaming for mercy and begging for reprieve and praying for death, and all for some forgotten tyrant’s vanity, lust, and pride.
She smelled the blood on the hot wind, and heard the voices crying out, and felt the earth groaning as it was torn apart and twisted into these strange stone shapes, far from the sun and the rain and green, growing things.
So much death.
So much suffering.
On and on and on.
For nothing.
FOR NOTHING!
Asha gasped and felt Gideon’s arms around her, and she fell against him and cried, and beat on his shoulders, and screamed, and shook, and sobbed until she was empty.
She fell back from Gideon and sat on the cold stone road, just breathing, trying to be empty and flat and cold herself, trying not to remember everything she had just thought and felt. She didn’t have the strength to see it again.
“Asha?” Gideon sat beside her, his sword withdrawn to hide all but the smallest gleam of its light, his eyes wide and frightened as he gazed at her face. “Asha?”
“I’m all right.” She cleared her throat and spat a foul taste out into the darkness. “It’s all right, it’s over.”
“Priya?” he asked.
She pushed her hair back over her head and wished she had some cold water to wash her face and to rinse the faint taste of sick from her mouth. “Yes, some of it.”
“And the rest?”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. It’s all in the past now.” She stood up and took a deep breath. “Come on, we should hurry. We need to find Omar before something happens to him. Before something worse happens to him.”
He stood and nodded. “All right.”
They strode on down the dusty highway, between the great pillars and dark pyramids and the lonely towers, through empty squares and past deep amphitheaters where their footsteps echoed over and over in the dark. There were rats in the ground and bats roosting in the empty towers, but Asha heard them only with her dragon’s ear, only their tiny animal souls and not their tiny animal voices. No living thing crossed their path, or skittered in the shadows, or squeaked overhead.
Asha felt her impatience rising with each passing moment, but she didn’t ask Gideon how much farther, how much longer. Instead she listened with her dragon’s ear, searching the vast echoing silence for the strange sound of dual souls, of soul-shreds trapped in sun-steel trinkets, of immortals, and of monsters.
Eventually she heard it, the humming and keening of living things in the distance, and slowly the aetheric sounds grew louder and clearer.
Immortals. Humans. Animals. Scores of them, all crowded together.
“Close now,” Gideon whispered.
She nodded.
A dark shape loomed out of the deep shadows, one of the larger pyramids with the step-fashion walls that rose high above the road between two of the cyclopean pillars. A tiny yellow light writhed and shuddered up at the peak of the pyramid and Gideon pulled the tip of his sword back into his gauntlet, dousing its light and leaving them in utter darkness to gaze up at the lone yellow star dancing in the subterranean night.
Gideon kept walking. “They won’t hear us, or see us,” he said. “Not unless we go right inside and announce ourselves. The beasts aren’t clever enough, not clear-headed enough for that. They’re all instinct and nerves and rage. I think Lilith’s hold over them isn’t as strong as she’d like, but it’s strong enough to keep her safe.”
“You’ve done this before?”
“Just those two times, like I mentioned. We didn’t run in, swords drawn. We went in carefully, just like this,” he said. “Fighting a monster is like fighting any other big animal. Like a bear.”
“I’ve fought bears,” Asha said. “And tigers. With needles.”
“Sun-steel needles?”
“No, just the regular sort.”
“Really? You’ll have to tell me about that sometime.” He paused. “But we’re not just fighting monsters now. Set and Nethys, and Horus and Isis. They’re immortal, like me. Wounds will close as soon as they’re made. And in their current state, they don’t feel much pain. And they don’t feel much fear.”
“And they’re family,” Asha finished. “For Bastet and Anubis, at least.”
“Right. This is more dangerous than anything I’ve done before.”
“Well, I don’t wish to die today,” Asha said. “So we will be very careful in the house of the monsters.”
Chapter 11
“I see no windows,” Asha said. “Is there a way to see inside without going inside?”
“No.” Gideon stopped at the edge of the dark avenue behind a small pointed obelisk to check his gauntlet one last time. “We have to go inside to find Bashir. I mean, Omar. And there’s only one way in. Through the front door.”
Asha peered at the black pyramid, but could not see the door. “How many of the immortals do you think are inside? I can’t tell from the sounds of them. There is too much noise.”
“I would guess that they’re all in there,” Gideon said. “Lilith, the Aegyptian immortals, and some number of poor souls who were snatched off the street to work down here as servants and test subjects.”