“You used your seireiken?” Anubis asked quietly.
“Yes. It happened very quickly.”
The young man nodded solemnly. “I understand, Gideon. Thank you.”
Asha frowned at them both, but said nothing. And then she saw Wren looked at the young man with pain in her eyes, and Asha took her hand, and they all stood and sat together in silence.
Gideon broke the stillness, saying, “We need to find the others. We can’t let them run wild in the city. They’ll kill dozens, hundreds. And the more people who see them, looking the way they do, the more panic they’ll spread through the city. If we can’t catch all three of them soon, they could ravage Alexandria in a matter of days. The city guard will attack them with guns and steel, but neither will give the immortals much pain or pause.”
The others nodded grimly.
“I’m back!” Bastet’s voice echoed faintly down the street as she ran down toward the fountain, her long black hair flying out behind her, a bright smile on her young face. “Did I miss anything?”
Asha looked from one face to the next, wondering what to say, what to think, what to do. Anubis was a cold wall, Wren looked tired and uneasy, Gideon stared into space with a haunted look in his eyes, and Bastet was still smiling, though she was beginning to look confused.
Asha sighed.
I’m going to have to kill them. Horus. Isis. Nethys. And Lilith, too. This isn’t some game of egos and politics. It’s not even a disease to be cured, and I don’t have time to try every option before the patient dies.
I’m going to have to cut out the cancer, quickly and soon, or everyone will suffer even more. I can’t save everyone, and I’ll have to choose the innocents in this city over the enslaved innocents in the undercity.
So, somehow, some way, I’ll end up killing them with my own two hands. Maybe today. Maybe tomorrow. And then Anubis and Bastet will be all alone. They asked me to save their family, and instead I’m going to destroy them. That’s how this ends. Because if I don’t, then there will be more Priyas all over this city, and it will be my fault.
I let them out.
“Gideon and I went into the undercity,” Asha said a bit too loudly. She set her jaw, trying to look stern and focused. “We went to Lilith’s home, and I went inside to find Omar. But before I could reach him, the immortals attacked me.”
“Are you all right?” Bastet asked, rushing toward her.
Asha nodded. “I’m fine. We’re all fine. Gideon and I made it back here, but… we killed Set, down there, when we were trying to escape.”
Gideon straightened up. “I-”
“We killed him,” Asha said. “I’m sorry.” She looked up at Anubis, who continued gazing dully at the wall behind her. “I’m very sorry.”
Bastet rushed over to her cousin and wrapped her arms around his waist. Anubis merely pulled one hand free of her embrace and rested it on her back.
“There’s more,” Asha said. “When we came back here to the fountain, there was an army of creatures on our heels. We fought them back. Wren fought them, she pushed them back into the tunnel without hurting them. She was… very impressive.”
The northern girl blushed.
“But three of them escaped into the city. The immortals. Your family.” Asha frowned and glanced at Gideon, who looked up into her eyes, but said nothing. “And now we need to find them and stop them before they hurt anyone else. It’s the middle of the day. The streets are full of people. It’s crowded, it’s dangerous. It will be easy for three crazed monsters to start a panic. People will be hurt, or killed.”
Bastet turned her face to look up at the tall Indian woman and nodded. “I understand. I know. You need to stop them. And I wish you could save them, but I know… I know what you need to do. So it’s okay.”
“It’s not okay,” Asha said. “But it may be necessary.”
Bastet smiled a sad little smile. “I know I look like I’m twelve, Asha, but I’m four thousand, one hundred, and something years old. I’m not scared of death, or loss. I’m just sad. But it’s okay. Just go do it, please. They would want it too, you know. Aunt Isis, and the others. They don’t want to be like this. And they don’t want to hurt people. So it’s okay.”
Asha nodded slowly. “I know it’s asking a lot, but can you help us find them? You can move around the city faster than we can. Can you help us look?”
Bastet wiped her sleeve across her tear-streaked face and nodded. “Sure. I’ll help. Anubis? Will you come too?”
Anubis looked down at her, and looked up at Asha, and he said, “You go. Do what needs to be done. There’s something else I need to do first.” He stepped away from Bastet and slammed his staff down on the stone street and the youth shattered into an aether mist, and blew away on the breeze.
Asha looked at Bastet. “All right. Whenever you’re ready, let’s start looking.”
Chapter 13
Anubis let the aether wind carry the tiny particles of his body and the drifting cloud of his mind across the city, slipping swiftly and painlessly through walls and floors, through people and machines. When he found the place he was looking for, he nudged his misty form downward and plunged beneath the streets, through the earth and the huge stone plates that separated the world above from the world below, and he floated down into the undercity.
It took a constant effort, a constant mental focus to hold his body apart, suspended in space as the tiniest of elements, but he had many long centuries of practice and the effort was no distraction to him. He held himself open and apart as he drifted down through the darkness, and when he reached the floor of the forgotten city, he simply stopped pushing outward and let the natural forces of flesh and soul push him back together. He felt himself become solid and whole all at once in one great thump and there he was, standing in the darkness. He thumped his staff again and the golden rings at the head of the staff glowed with a warm golden light.
He stood in the middle of one of the many ancient, dusty roads of the black city. Bits of rock from the crumbling ceiling and chunks of the pillars and obelisks lay in the dirt here and there, casting long shadows that leaned away from his light. A thick white mist rolled and flowed lazily across the ground, lapping coldly at his ankles. The fragile tendrils of aether moved around him, mostly flowing to his right but also occasionally floating up and over a stone as though exploring the world with its blind fingers, searching for something it had lost.
Before him stood one of the small onion-domed towers, nearly identical to every other tower down in the dark, except that he knew that this one was not empty. Anubis walked up to the front door and glided through the solid stone and iron barrier in a quick swirl of aether and stood inside the base of the tower for a moment, listening. And after a long pause, he heard breathing.
“It’s me,” he said. “Anubis. I’m coming up.”
He started climbing the stairs that spiraled up the wall of the tower, rising slowly toward the distant chamber above. The only light came from the head of his staff and the only sound came from his soft sandals chuffing lightly on the dusty steps. He passed a window and through it he saw nothing but the endless black night of the undercity.
The door at the top of the stair no longer existed and Anubis stepped out into the room at the top of the tower. It was just the same as the last time he had seen it, and he was not surprised. A single square carpet covered the floor, reaching nearly from one wall to the other so that only a few edges of the scratched floorboards could be seen around it.
There was no furniture in the room at all. No desk or table or chair, no hearth or stove, and no bedding of any kind. Only the carpet, and the man sitting on it.
Anubis stood on the edge of the carpet and for a moment he ignored the man and gazed through the window at the unbroken darkness beyond, where he knew a forest of massive pillars stood, holding up another, very different city above their heads. But he couldn’t see it. And somehow, despite everything he knew and had seen over countless years and mortal generations, being unable to see it now made it feel less real, as though he had only dreamed it, and had no proof that any of it truly existed.