After the fifth time, as Horus ran off into the darkness, Anubis sat in the grass rubbing his chest and massaging his eyes.
What if I don’t come back one of these times? What if the sun-steel chooses this night to fail me? What if I’m left only half alive, trapped in that broken hell, unable to think, barely able to feel?
Then Horus screamed, and Anubis rose to his feet, and set out again.
After the eighth time, Anubis simply lay in the crater, staring dully at the grains of earth and the green stalks of grass right in front of his eyes. A single tear ran down the side of his nose, and his breathing was thin and rapid.
Horus screamed in the night, and a dozen frightened people screamed back.
Anubis lay very still, and held his breath.
Four thousand years of life, and I have become a hail stone.
He blinked.
I fall from the sky, and I die, and then awaken to life, rising back into the sky again.
He closed his mouth and inhaled through his nose.
Only to fall again, and die. Again and again and again…
Anubis moved his head and looked up at the stars out of the corner of his eye.
Is this the paradise you’re waiting for, Father?
He sat up slowly, clutching his head. There was no pain in his bones now, but there was something else in his mind, in his soul. A gnawing fear. A nameless terror. A thing that looked like death, but wasn’t death, because he couldn’t die.
I am Anubis. I am Death.
He stood up and clutched his staff in both hands.
What is death?
Horus screamed in the distance.
Anubis exhaled and became one with the aether again, but he did not rise into the star-drenched heavens. He whisked through the grasses and the groves, and over the little hills and the tiny streams in the ditches until he found a group of several dozen people huddled in a copse of sycamores. As he stepped out of the aether, he heard them gasp at his masked face and he raised his hand to quiet them. And in his booming aether-whisper, he said, “Follow me.”
He led them quietly through a low ditch where their heads could not be seen above the level of the tall grasses, and they followed the winding path of a tiny stream northward until a small wooden bridge appeared before them, spanning the ditch.
“Take this road back to the city,” he told them. “You’ll be safe now. Go quickly. I will find the others and bring them to you.”
The people pressed in against him, their faces stained with dust and tears, but he slipped away into the aether, ignoring their words of thanks and praise. He found two more groups hiding in the hills, and he led them north to the road. Once he saw Horus striding in their direction, and Anubis flitted away to the far side of the field and led the monster south, away from the people.
It took another two hours to find the rest of the stragglers, people hiding in ones and twos in ditches and up trees, some too terrified to follow Anubis on foot, so he took them in his arms and carried them across the fields to the road. And each time Horus came too close, Anubis would slip across to the south and lead his half-brother farther out into the wilderness.
At last he stood on the little bridge over the ditch, and paused. The last refugee, a young woman with a miraculously sleeping infant in her arms, stood beside him.
“Thank you,” she was saying. Her arms shook and her wide eyes still stared out across the savanna for some sign of the beast. “You saved me. You saved us all, Lord Anubis.”
“No one should suffer for the sins of another,” he said softly, not in his terrifying God of Death voice, but in his own small human voice.
“Please come back with us,” the woman said. “Please, let us honor you for your labors and your mercy, Lord Anubis.”
At first he didn’t hear her. And then the words penetrated. He focused on her and said, “If you want to honor me, love your child. But do not worship me. Forget you ever saw me.” He stepped off the bridge and started walking through the tall grass.
The woman called to him, “Why won’t you come back with us? Where are you going?”
And he said to her, “There is still one person left to save.”
Anubis inhaled, struck his staff on the earth, and fell into the aether once more and let the currents carry him across the plains to the south until he found a familiar shape and heard a familiar cry, and he emerged back into the real world. Horus stood less than an arm’s length away, a monstrous falcon with nightmare eyes and vicious steel talons and a cruel bronze beak, all hovering over the slender black youth.
“It’s time, brother,” Anubis said. “It’s time you and I had a talk.”
Chapter 16
Omar lay on the table, trying to shift his back and shoulders and hips to get comfortable, but the straps and chains kept chafing and digging into his flesh. The room was well-lit with flaming torches set into braziers at regular intervals along the walls, and there was also a warm breeze blowing through the chamber from the stairwells and the hole in the ceiling, although an unpleasant fecal odor sometimes tickled his nostrils. Omar tried again to rest his arms and legs more naturally, but the thick iron shackles bent him at every angle.
“I’m not entirely comfortable,” he said.
“So you keep saying,” Lilith replied. She walked over to the table, looking exactly as he remembered her from nearly two thousand years ago. He recalled the night he first saw her as she danced for the prince of Damascus, her arms weaving through the air like serpents, her hips shivering beneath a belt of jangling gold coins, her lovely features half-hidden by a thin golden veil. And unlike Gideon and Nadira, she had remained precisely the same through all the long years. She still wore the elegant flowing silks and the shining trinkets around her neck, and the bright stones in her long black hair. The only thing missing was the veil, and a primitive corner of Omar’s mind considered it a wonderful improvement.
She was gorgeous, not in the way that a fresh young girl is pretty but in the way that a woman in her prime is beautiful, both soft and strong, powerful yet delicate, caring and cruel, dominating yet inviting, a thousand contradictions and more that he didn’t have the words to express. And two thousand years ago, he hadn’t bothered with many words.
“Oh, you know how much I like to be the center of attention,” Omar said as he pulled on his chains.
Back then, he had spent only a single stolen hour with her in a shadowed alcove of the palace. He hadn’t dared to linger, or to return, because the prince of Damascus was not nearly as apathetic or as gullible as a man of his wealth ought to have been. But there had been other meetings, walks in the garden and in the gallery, evenings at the supper table, long rides through the orchards with the prince and his other companions. They were all meetings in which there was more talking than looking, and no touching at all, and he had grown more and more impressed with her as she surprised him over and over again with her knowledge of the world, of politics and science, of art and history, and of the human mind and spirit. Looking back, he often liked to think that she had seduced him a second time, although he doubted whether that was really true. He had wanted to be seduced, and that was cheating.
“Well, you have my undivided attention now,” Lilith said. She moved around the table, her clothing and jewels a delicate cascade of blue waves and silver flashes, like a school of sharks circling a corpse. “I’m still waiting to hear about Ysland and your pretty little friend with the red hair. I’m told she somehow managed to push all of my lovelies back down into the tunnels, all by herself, with a wave of her hands.” Lilith nodded to the far side of the room where there stood a young woman in a torn brown dress, and from her shoulders hung two sickly white tentacles that gleamed wetly in the torchlight.