Osiris’s forehead creased ever so slightly with confusion.
“Stand up!” Anubis shook his father. “Come with me, help me!”
Osiris wriggled weakly against the youth’s iron grip, and eventually twisted loose and fell back to the floor. He sat on his side, leaning over, wheezing quietly. “There is so much rage in you, my son. There always has been, just below the surface. I’m sorry. Please, sit down. Sit with me. Together, we can calm your heart, and find peace for the long wait between here and paradise. Please, sit.”
“Isis!” Anubis knelt down again. “Your beautiful Isis! Remember when Set killed you, hacked you up into a dozen pieces and threw your body to the jackals of the desert? Isis, your love, she came for you. She found you, all the twisted and horrible pieces of you, and she brought you back, she healed you, she stitched you back together and brought you back to life. She fought beasts and men and storms to bring you back, safe and whole. Why won’t you do the same for her now? She needs you!”
“My Isis?” Osiris shook his head. “My Isis was a lovely girl from Karnak, not an immortal creature who played with kings like a child plays with dolls. Isis is not my Isis anymore. My Isis is gone.”
“What about Horus? What about your son?”
Osiris shrugged. “I will see them both in paradise.”
Anubis spat on the old green man, who did not react, and the black youth picked up his staff.
“I don’t know why I bothered,” he said. “I thought there was still a human being inside of you. I thought that if you still cared about anything or anyone, it would be us. But you’re not human anymore.”
“What is human?” Osiris asked. “Is it flesh? Or thought? Passion, or instinct? Or memory? Can it be taken away, and can it be restored? I don’t know.”
“I’m not surprised.” Anubis stared down at his father, watching the strange figure fold his legs up under him and return to the same seated posture as before. “I won’t be coming back. I don’t think anyone will. Enjoy paradise.”
He raised his staff and struck the floor, and burst his body into a million tiny pieces, more than he could count or feel. The world itself, so hard and sharp and real, became soft and indistinct and distant. Anubis focused his mind on the task of holding his body apart, pushing each tiny particle away from the others and holding them all suspended in the aether. He focused on that task, and nothing else. And for several long minutes, as he drifted up through the empty cavern and through the earth and through the city, he was at peace.
Then he stepped out of the mist onto the hot, bright streets of Alexandria, into the noise and the chaos, and smells and the bodies, and he began to think and feel again as he stood in the shadowed entrance to an alleyway just an arm’s length from a hundred other people.
And in the shadows, Anubis covered his eyes, and wept.
Chapter 14
Asha strode through the marketplace, surveying the damage. Stalls lay on their sides, carts rested on smashed wheels, pottery lay shattered in the mud, and shreds of cloth fluttered in the evening breeze. The people were still picking themselves up off the ground, prodding themselves for injuries, limping out of the road, and staring at their smashed livelihoods with bleak, despondent eyes. A score or more of soldiers in red lay scattered over the ground. Some were beginning to stand up. Many were not.
“Here, let me help you.” Asha knelt and lifted an older woman to her feet. The gray-haired lady gazed around the square as Asha asked, “When did this happen?”
“It came from nowhere,” the woman muttered.
“When? Just a moment ago?”
We have to be close now.
The woman nodded.
“Was it a man or a woman?” Asha asked.
Does it really matter at this point?
The woman raised her empty hands to say, I don’t know.
Asha nodded and hurried on past the woman with Wren and Gideon close behind. They kept pausing to help people up, or to lift a fallen table or cart, or a bundle of food, and she kept calling back to them to leave it where it was, to hurry up, to keep looking. But in her heart, she wished she didn’t. She wanted to stop, she wanted to help. Out of the corners of her eyes, she saw the injuries and the blood, and she heard the cries of shock and pain. Her right hand clenched the strap of her medicine bag, and she wished she could stop and help them all, and she wondered whether there were any other sorts of healers nearby who would be coming soon, who would help these people. She doubted it.
The sun was setting quickly now and the streets were growing darker. Torches were being lit, and through the windows of some of the houses on either side of the street Asha saw electric lights coming to life, glowing with their steady yellow gleams.
How long are we going to run blindly through the streets, chasing after these people, these creatures?
Most of the afternoon had been a complete waste as they set out into the city with no idea where to begin their search for falcon-headed Horus, or kite-winged Nethys, or steer-horned Isis. They circled and circled for hours, wandering through the streets and alleys and markets. It should have been easy to find a person, or even a crowd, who had seen one of the monstrous immortals. But there had been none, and Gideon suggested that the immortals may have gone into hiding somewhere on the roofs, out of sight. They didn’t often emerge in broad daylight, and they may have been confused, or even partly blinded by the afternoon sun.
But then they heard the screams and heard the crashing, and Asha had found the trail at last. Chaos and ruin and pain, leading south across the city. Bastet had vanished in a burst of white mist, and returned again a moment later to confirm that one of Lilith’s creatures was indeed crossing the streets on foot and tearing up everything in its path.
So it’s not Nethys. That leaves Horus and Isis.
Asha hurried down the street, following the scattered signs of violence through the evening crowds.
“She’s never sent them out before,” Gideon said, just behind her. “Not Horus and Isis. Lilith always keeps them at home. Her personal bodyguards, I think. It was always Set and Nethys that she sent out, or one of her mortal slaves.”
“Why? What’s different about Horus and Isis?” Wren asked.
“I don’t know. Isis and Nethys are sisters, and not just in blood. They’re nearly one side of the same coin, if you know what I mean,” he said. “Very similar personalities. They even look similar, side by side.”
“And Horus?”
Gideon shrugged at the girl. “He’s about the same age as Anubis. They grew up together before they became immortal. And you’ve seen Anubis, you’ve seen how serious and quiet he is? Horus is the opposite. He’s bright and passionate. But Horus never had any interest in the same things as Anubis and Bastet. Aether things, I mean. Horus can’t move the way Anubis and Bastet can.”
“Well, maybe Lilith just likes them better,” Wren said.
“Or she trusts them less,” Asha said. “Maybe she keeps them close to keep them under control.”
At the next intersection, the trail of destruction, injuries, and shocked onlookers grew thin and Asha stood in the middle of the road with animals and people and machines jostling past her on every side as she looked and listened for her quarry.
Her dragon ear murmured with a thousand soul-sounds. Men and women, noisy children, tired and angry animals, and even the tall palm trees in the parks and the untended lots behind the older buildings. If she could hear the twinned soul of an immortal, or a hybrid creature, Asha couldn’t tell it from the noise of the crowd.