My skin? When did…?
“Asha!” Gideon’s body burst into view as he released the locks on his gauntlet and the blazing white blade of his seireiken erupted from its sheathe. “Behind you!”
“What?” She turned slowly and saw Set scrambling to his feet, his whole body coiled and springing toward her, one side of him painted silver by the light and the other side utterly black.
Asha threw up her arms to shield her face as the beast-man’s hands reached for her.
“No!” Gideon crashed into Set and the two rolled aside in a whirlwind of light and shadow. The creature in the dark robe screamed as it burst into flames, blue-white flames that consumed its clothing in an instant and then raced across its flesh an instant later. Gideon rolled against the obelisk beside Asha and came to a stop with a smoking gray skeleton cradled in his arms.
Asha stared down at him, wincing from the glare of his sword, but unable to look away from the charred remains of the creature that had taken away her Priya.
“But…” She swallowed.
Why did…?
When did…?
“I’m sorry, I had to. You turned back,” Gideon wheezed as he stood up. “Your scales and claws were gone. He would have killed you.”
“But… he was…”
He was Anubis’s father.
She tore her eyes away from the bones and looked up into the young and worried eyes of the soldier. “We were supposed to save him, too.”
A screaming roar boomed across the chamber and she turned to look back at the summit of Lilith’s pyramid where she saw three figures silhouetted by the signal fire.
Gideon slid his sword back into its mechanical scabbard, plunging them into darkness. “Three of them. Nethys, Horus, and Isis. It’s going to be all right. We can fight three. I can fight three.”
“No.” Asha listened with both ears and she heard the cacophony of souls and half-souls writhing about near the top of the pyramid. “There are more than three.”
Chapter 12
Asha ran, and Gideon ran behind her. They raced down the dark stone streets of the undercity, their footsteps echoing through the vast chasms between the massive pillars. And behind them followed the thumping of heavy feet and the flapping of long wings.
Again and again, Asha tried to rouse the dragon, just enough to make her legs stronger and faster, just enough so she could carry Gideon to safety. But each time she lost focus, lost the memory, lost the will to rage and fight and defy the world. Each time, all she could see was Priya’s covered face beyond a veil of funeral flames, and the charred skull of a man, of a father, whom she had failed to save.
They ran and ran through the dark. Gideon pointed his gauntlet at the path ahead, letting his blade shine a thin beam of white light to guide them around holes and stones and rats. Asha felt her legs turning wooden and hollow, and she forced them to go on and on, one foot after the other, no matter how much they ached and cried out to her to stop.
On two occasions, a screaming shadow dove down at them from above in a rush of feathers and talons, and each time Gideon would turn back and draw his seireiken to force Nethys and the others back. Whatever mad rage drove the three beasts to follow the fleeing man and woman, the creatures still feared the white blade and its blinding light.
But farther back behind the immortals, running on soft bare feet and wailing with mangled voices, came the others, the slaves, the mortal victim’s of Lilith’s twisted imagination. But Asha couldn’t see them, and she didn’t try to.
The race through the undercity dragged on, and Asha peered up at every pillar, at every tower, hoping that she might see something familiar, some sign that they were near the tunnel that would take them back up to the fountain and the world of sun and sky. Finally Gideon grunted the word “Right” and they turned and plunged into the dark and narrow confines of the rocky passage that angled and spiraled up and up as the air grew warmer. Asha limped as fast as her cramping legs would let her, shoving off the curving walls as hard as she could to keep moving forward.
“Here!” Gideon looked up through the ceiling to a piercing blue sky streaked with thin white clouds. The soldier made a saddle with his hands and Asha climbed up into the dusty fountain where Anubis and Wren caught her hands and helped her out of the darkness. Gideon leapt up on his own, clutching at the rim of the hole, and then hauled himself up with one long, miserable grunt, and he rolled away. “Close it!” he gasped.
Anubis lunged toward the stone fixture with its plinths and carved fishes, but he had barely touched it before a sea of filthy, sooty hands appeared in the tunnel below, and heads and bodies began surging upward, struggling out of the cavern.
Asha took one brief look at a man with the head of a horned bull, and she grabbed Wren’s hand, and ran. They made it to the end of the street, to the edge of the intersection, when Wren forced her to stop.
“Asha! Asha, I can stop them!” Wren yanked her hand free and held out both of her arms to her sides, her many silver bracelets jangling on her wrists.
Asha saw the creatures climbing up out of the pit. She saw wings, claws, horns, and tails, and the half-naked slaves screamed and roared, bleated and barked as they scrambled up into the afternoon sun. Anubis gave up trying to shove the fountain back into place, and the black-skinned youth vanished in a burst of aether. Gideon waved his blinding sword at the creatures, shouting at them to go back into the pit, but they only flinched away from his blade as they continued up and out onto the street on the far side from him.
And then Wren waved her arms.
From the pale dust clouds hovering around their feet, a thin white haze rushed up out of the earth. The aether mist washed down the street toward the fountain and crashed into the mound of angry bodies, where the wave broke into dozens of writhing misty snakes that coiled about the deformed people, wrapping around wings and claws and horns, and hauled them downward, pulling them back into the dark mouth of the tunnel.
“Gideon!” Asha shouted. “Close it!”
The soldier nodded his astonished face and he dashed around the creatures wrestling with the aether serpents to the far side of the fountain, and he started shoving the dais back into place, pushing even more of Lilith’s hideous servants back into the darkness.
The creatures wailed and shrieked and howled as they fell onto one another, kicking and clawing, and tumbling one by one back into the undercity, bodies thumping on one another in the shadows. Wren stood perfectly still, her arms outstretched in front of her, her hands held flat, palms down, and she slowly pushed downward through the empty air as the aether serpents forced the creatures into the pit.
Asha didn’t move, unwilling to risk breaking the northern girl’s concentration.
She truly is powerful.
“Look out!” Gideon yelled as he shoved the fountain across the opening.
At the rear edge of the pit, three of the creatures were climbing up as the pale aether whips slipped from their bodies. The first one Asha recognized.
Nethys.
The woman flapped her wings with powerful, vicious strokes and broke free of the aether web, crashing into the back wall of the dead-end street. She turned, and Asha saw her face. Nethys stared back with the same dead white eyes as Set, with the same enraged expression on her snarling lips. Her black hair stood up in ragged, tangled knots and half her face and neck were covered in small white feathers in uneven, discolored patches of gray skin.
To her left, a second figure rose, a man. He wore a ragged white tunic and loose white trousers streaked with soot and ash, and nothing else. Like Set, it was his head that Lilith had transformed. From the shoulders up, this one was a falcon with a dark brown crest of feathers across the top of his skull and many lighter browns down the sides of his inhuman face. He had huge round eyes, as white and unfocused as those of a blind man, and in the center of his face was a sharp little beak, which he opened to shriek at the creatures in the pit. And when he raised his fists, Asha saw that instead of hands, the man had gray-scaled talons.