The great falcon head swiveled to look at him, and nodded, and hissed.
“Do you understand what I’ve said? Do you understand why I hate you?”
Again Horus nodded, and began stalking slowly forward.
“So tell me now, knowing what I’ve just told you, brother, do you regret the past? Our past, our childhood?” Anubis asked.
Horus paused, his long lean frame hunching forward, his bloody talons curled and ready at his sides. The creature shook its head from side to side, and shrieked.
Anubis clenched his staff and glared. “How dare you! You prideful, selfish, worthless filth!”
Horus charged up the grassy slope and lunged at the black skinned youth with both hands. Anubis raised his staff to strike the earth, but a rough-skinned talon wrapped around his fingers, crushing his hand against the hardwood stick in his grip. The youth cried out, gasping, his eyes fixed on his hand buried in the dark scaly fist. And he was still staring when a second fist struck him in the head.
Anubis fell back and would have fallen to the ground if Horus had not kept his iron grip on his hand, holding him up, dangling him by his arm and his staff. The world flashed and sparkled for a moment and Anubis blinked hard as he hung there, helpless and trapped.
Fast… he’s so fast…
He tightened his grip on the staff still clenched in his hand, and felt Horus’s talons crush inward sharply, and he felt his fingers breaking one by one. Anubis gasped and fell to his knees.
He said, “Look how far you’ve fallen, brother. Once the mighty warrior, the beloved prince of all Aegyptus, now nothing more than a rabid animal serving a filthy harlot who AAAAGH!”
Anubis screamed as Horus lifted him up high into the air by his hand, wrenching Anubis’s arm to the side, dislocating his shoulder, and leaving him to dangle again, this time with his feet off the ground and his face hanging just in front of the falcon’s cruel beak.
The falcon shook his head.
“No?” Anubis whispered, struggling to breathe through the pain in his shoulder and the pressure stretching out his ribs and lungs as he swung from his useless arm. “What do you mean, no? No, you aren’t a hideous monster? No, you don’t serve Lilith?”
Again, the falcon shook his head.
“Of course you serve her, you idiot,” Anubis spat through his clenched teeth. “You live in her house, you bring innocent victims to her for her depraved experiments, and this very night you were terrorizing an entire neighborhood of helpless families in your desperation to return to her side.”
Horus nodded once.
“You know this is true? You know you’re her slave? Then why were you shaking your head?”
Horus pointed at himself.
“You?”
Horus pointed at the ground.
“Here?” Anubis frowned, trying to think through the pain in his arm and chest. And then the monster’s meaning became clear. “You mean to say that here and now, in this moment, you’re not her slave? You’re fighting me because you wish to?”
Horus nodded, and then screamed in the youth’s face.
Anubis winced, and then opened his eyes again. “I understand. Thank you.” He wrenched himself apart into the mist again, slipping free of the talons and the pain, and he drifted away across the grass to appear whole and healed a short distance away. “You want to hurt me, Horus? Then come here and hurt me.” He reached up and pulled his black jackal mask down over his face and let the drifting aether distort his appearance, blurring the line between flesh and wood, between man and beast.
I am Anubis. I am Death.
Horus screamed and raced toward him with talons raised.
Anubis met the assault head-on, lashing out with his ironwood staff, striking high and low, smashing the falcon across the face and into the gut. The God of Death became a whirling black cyclone of fists and bludgeons, pounding and beating on the monstrous head of his half-brother again and again. Within moments, his arms began to tire, but he pressed through the aching pain as his hands cracked and tore and broke from striking the thick falcon skull and the powerful falcon beak. And yet he fought on.
Horus reeled back, and tried to raise his talons to shield his head, but the blows fell fast and faster, and if he blocked high the strikes would come low, and soon the falcon was gasping for breath, clutching his bruised ribs and bleeding face.
Anubis felt the rage seething through his pulsing hands and aching arms.
This is our destiny. My revenge. His punishment. My justice. The universe has finally come into balance, and I shall be elevated as he is laid low.
Anubis swept the falcon’s legs out from under him, dropping him to the earth, and he planted the butt of his staff in the hollow of Horus’s throat, making him croak and gasp.
“If we were mortal creatures, I would kill you,” Anubis said. “And then perhaps I would kill myself just to end all the pain, and to silence all the memories. But such dramas are beneath us. You will suffer until I decide you have suffered enough, until I no longer care to see you suffer, and then it will end. Take solace in that. It is more hope than I ever had as a child. I lived every day with the question, will today be the day he kills me? So you see, I am kinder than fate itself. I promise you that your torments will end. When I have judged them to be enough.”
Anubis lifted his staff away and stepped back. Horus rose slowly to his feet, staggering up as he clutched his throat.
“Tonight, my task was to find you and restrain you until you could be cured. Restored. Set free.” Anubis nodded to himself. “All that will be yours, and soon. But for now, you shall know pain, until your heart is as heavy and as weary as mine.”
And to hell with the rest of the world.
Chapter 18
Bastet flitted from street to street, from roof to roof, flying gracefully and effortlessly through the warm night’s aether in search of the sounds of violence.
Where can they be? Nethys, Horus, where are you?
She paused on the top of a brick chimney at the end of a new house, a long white estate built in the Italian style with many ornate arches and colored windows and covered walkways. There were two chimneys, one at each end of the main house, and Bastet wondered idly whether the people inside ever felt the need to build a fire in their hearths to keep warm, here on the Ifrican coast.
There was no sign of the beastly immortals. No cries of fear or panic, no crash of breaking windows, no wails of frightened animals. All was quiet.
Bastet stood still, feeling the warm breeze flowing through her skirts and hair as she scanned the heavens, naming constellations and searching for bright planets. She was staring up toward the west when she noticed a star she didn’t recognize. After four thousand years of stargazing, she had come to know them all quite well, and the sight of a bright white gleam without a name startled her, making her wonder if she was even looking to the west at all.
And then she saw the star move.
Squinting and frowning, she watched the star slowly creep across the sky, moving ever so slightly from north to south.
Is it… growing larger?
She went on watching the strange little star until she realized that she was hearing a strange little sound as well. It was a soft buzzing or droning, like an insect, or a wagon rolling through the street, or a steamship idling at anchor.
An engine?
Her eyes went wide.
Taziri!
Bastet clapped her hands and smiled up at the drifting star, watching it grow slowly larger and louder high above the western plains outside Alexandria.
I can’t believe I almost forgot about her.
Bastet skipped across the rooftops, drifting lightly through the aether on her way toward the western end of the city where the railways entered the metropolis from the provinces of Marmarica and Cyrenica, and farther still from Numidia and Marrakesh itself. She headed south toward the small rail yard where she had first met Taziri, huddled alone inside her machine, roasting in the Aegyptian heat. But then she paused.