Her last leap carried her all the way to the very top of the pyramid, and she landed lightly beside the white fire dancing in an iron bowl.
A signal. A guide. It calls to them in the darkness, and brings them home.
Slowly Asha prowled around the signal fire, studying the walkways at her feet for some spoor, some trail that would lead her down inside. And she found it. On three sides of the pyramid, the light from the iron brazier revealed the stone walls below it, but on the fourth side there was only darkness.
A hole.
Asha crept to the edge of the hole, and dropped down inside the citadel. The air was warmer here, and the chamber echoed softly with sounds of life. Voices, human and not-so-human. And just ahead of her, there was light. Asha edged forward, placing her feet carefully so that her claws did not click or scratch at the stone floor. At the corner she peeked out and saw a round chamber with a single burning torch to one side, and in the center of the small room, another hole in the floor.
Voices. Louder. A woman. A man.
Asha knelt at the edge of the hole and looked down. The distance to the next chamber was a rather long drop, but the chamber itself was far larger than the round room in which she was kneeling. There were many more torches and the floor was bright with flickering light and moving shadows. And from watching those shadows and the thin white figures that her dragon eyes could see through the stone walls, Asha guessed that Lilith and Omar were to her right, and something else, something larger, was sleeping to her left.
“…don’t believe that for a moment,” Lilith was saying. She spoke Eranian with an accent that Asha recognized, but it took her a moment to realize it was the same Syrian clip that Gideon and Nadira used. But where those two had allowed their speech to evolve and muddle with the passage of time, Lilith had not. “If you took on an apprentice, it must be for a very special reason. This girl Wren has something, or knows something, and whatever it is, I want it. And I’ll warrant that you have a way to find your precious protege, as well. Some little aether trick, perhaps?”
“None comes to mind,” Omar said. “But at my age, my memory isn’t what it once was. You should probably consider me an unreliable source.”
The sound of a wooden truncheon smacking bare flesh, and a man’s groan.
“You’ve actually been very reliable,” Lilith said. “You’ve already confirmed so many things that Nethys told me. What the girl looks like, what she wore, how she spoke. A red-haired girl from Rus will be fairly easy to find in Alexandria, don’t you think?”
“She won’t be easy to find at all. I taught her well,” Omar said softly. “And if you do find her, she won’t be easy to capture.”
“Really? Does she have an immortal’s pendant? Does she have a seireiken? Because you had both, and my little ones didn’t have much trouble with you at all.” Lilith hummed as she moved around the edge of the room, out of Asha’s line of sight.
“Wren is different,” Omar said. “You’ll never lay a hand on her.”
“Oooh, how intriguing,” Lilith purred. “I can’t wait to meet her. What sort of souls should I pierce her with? An ostrich? Or a crocodile? There are so many to choose from.”
She wants Wren!
Asha gripped the edge of the stone floor in her ruby claws, and the lip crumbled in her grasp. A trickle of dust and tiny crumbs of rock fell down into the lower chamber and crackled on the naked floor below.
“Set!” Lilith barked. “Up! Smell! Hunt!”
Asha stood up and backed away from the hole.
The dog-man. Aardvark.
The danger is small. I can defeat one of them. And then I’ll save Omar.
“Nethys!” Lilith shouted. “Horus!”
Three of them? Damn my luck.
A huge shadow flashed across the room below, and a throat growled. A figure in a black robe dashed into view under the hole and the murderous white eyes of the beast-headed Set glared up at Asha.
She turned and ran back down the narrow corridor and heard barking and yipping echoing through the chambers behind her. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw a long black head rise up through the hole as the robed man hauled himself up into the round room. Asha ran lightly, her razor-sharp claws scoring the stone floor with every fleet-footed step. At the end of the passage, she leapt up and out of the corridor and stood on the exposed face of the pyramid high above the black streets, knowing that somewhere down in the distance, Gideon was waiting for her.
A vicious snarling and growling came roaring up to the entrance behind her, and Asha turned and smashed her armored fist into the black snout that emerged from the passage. Set howled and fell back down inside.
Asha strode to the front side of the pyramid and began descending the stepped walls, hopping down one level at a time.
Wren. She wants Wren. She wants to make Wren one of her monsters! It wasn’t enough to take Omar. It wasn’t enough to kill Priya…
SET!
She stopped and turned to look up. Her dragon eyes showed her a giant dark stair rising up into the subterranean chamber, all cast in faint hues of red, and there at the top stood Set. As a man he must have been quite tall and lean, a figure of great speed and grace, a runner and perhaps even a dancer. He moved with a liquid ease, flowing across and then down the side of the pyramid behind her, moving on both his hands and feet. He did not leap or crash about as he came down the tiers, instead he ran and slid on his side and rolled on his shoulder like a living flood of muscle and black cloth.
“You!” Asha raised her clawed hands and felt her back and head throbbing as the dragon yearned to grow its magnificent horns and flailing tail, but she held it back.
You will serve me, dragon. You are mine to command.
Set growled and leapt at her, and Asha struck, driving her burning ruby claws into his neck and arm. She grabbed him and held him, and slammed him down on the stone ledge. Pressing her scaled knee into his throat, she whispered, “You killed Priya.”
The monster said nothing. His long thin snout snapped at her, his long thin teeth clicking and scraping together.
Asha stood, lifted the beast over her head, and hurled him down into the darkness, and then she leapt after him.
“Why Priya!?” she screamed. She crashed down onto the dark street in a pool of dim red light from her own claws and scales, and she felt the street stones crunch and crack beneath her. “Why!?”
She stood and turned just as Set crashed into her, shoving her back into an obelisk, crushing her windpipe. But his fingers had no strength to match her golden armor, and Asha stared down the length of his arm into his mad eyes, two white blanks in the darkness. She reached out slowly and took hold of his neck and squeezed her burning claws together around his soft flesh.
“What sort of man kills an innocent woman!?”
Set howled and flailed, trying to escape her grip, but she was stronger by far. He felt small and fragile under her hands, a soft and brittle thing that gave way before her, twisting inward, cracking.
“You’re not even a man anymore, are you?” She blinked. “You’re just an animal now. You don’t even know what I’m saying, do you?”
She loosened her grip on him, and then let him go. He fell back to the ground, one hand clutching his throat while the other hand struggled to drag him away from her feet.
“Asha!” Gideon called to her.
She looked up through the darkness and saw a dim shape coming toward her. Everything was so dim, so dark. And she felt cold, so much colder than before. She wrapped her arms around herself and rubbed her goose-pimpled skin.