As the priest babbled his agreement, the woman returned, carrying medicines and a pile of linens under one arm. She was followed by two other women bearing urns of steaming water. They hesitated at the doorway, their eyes wide, until Rune gestured them forward impatiently.
“Tend to her,” he said to them.
Whispering to each other, the women did as he ordered. He watched them. When he saw for himself how carefully they treated Khepri, he began to ease himself away.
Her small hand clenched on his and anchored him in place. He bent over her, and smoothed the hair from her forehead. She watched him with a mute entreaty. He did not understand what she wanted. Perhaps she didn’t either, and she only clung to the one person who had made her world safe again.
He said to her, “I am not sure when or how, but I can promise you one thing, darling. We will see each other again. Would that be all right with you?”
She nodded, her smudged face half hidden by the slippery dark silk of hair. On impulse he bent forward and pressed his lips to her forehead. Her fingers tightened on his hand, and then she let him go.
He stood and stretched his spine as he looked around. Gods. The scene was so intense, so real, he had completely fallen into it.
Could it be an illusion or a hallucination? Could it be something else, something more real? Could he somehow be affecting things in the past? He felt the impulse to laugh, to shove the idea aside. Then he looked at the whip marks that were still bleeding on Khepri’s back and lost the impulse.
When he turned away, the priest was watching him with close attention. Rune stared at the man, his gaze brooding. In the Bible’s Old Testament, Gideon laid out a fleece to ask for evidence of God’s will.
Rune shrugged. He might not be a Christian and he did not depend upon the gods’ will, but asking for evidence seemed like a hell of a good idea. He turned his back to Khepri and her attendants, dug into his jeans and pulled out his pocket-knife. It was a thoroughly modern, sturdy Swiss Army knife. He wondered how it would hold up for roughly forty-five hundred years.
He asked the priest, “What is your name?”
“Akil, my lord.”
“Who is your king, Akil?”
The whites of the priest’s eyes showed. It was clear he could not imagine why a god would not know such a thing, but he answered readily enough, “Djoser.”
Rune relaxed. He knew a little about Djoser, not least of which the man’s architect Imhotep had built one of the biggest, most famous ancient structures known to men. He held the knife up to the priest and pulled out all of its blades, watching as Akil’s eyes grew round with wonder.
“This is my gift to you,” he said. “Do not show this to Khepri or to anyone else. Do not write of it or leave any record of its existence. As proof of your devotion, I want you to bury it at the entrance of Djoser’s temple in Saqqara.” Saqqara was the giant necropolis, or city of the dead, that served as a burial ground for Ineb Hedj and later on for Memphis. “It might be a very long time before I can return for it, but I will.”
He closed the knife again and held it out. Akil took it with reverence. “I will, my lord. You can be sure of it.”
Yeah well, Rune thought. We’ll see about that.
Carling’s gaze focused on the interior of her office.
She was sitting in her desk chair. The cedar cabinet lay dismantled in a bundle against one wall. The slant of the sun had shifted from afternoon to early evening. The sunlight poured through the window in lethal bars of burning gold. She shuddered and looked away.
The room echoed with the emotional aftermath of aggression and violence. Rune prowled the office with the intensity of a caged animal. His face was set, his eyes roiling with the restless flicker of rapid thought. His long athletic strides made the roomy office seem stifling and too small. He shifted the heavy bundle of cedar to check underneath it. Then he moved to search alongside the floors beside the filing cabinets, and the space between the desk and the wall.
She cleared her throat and asked in a rusty-sounding voice, “What on earth are you doing?”
He swung around, his gaze flaring. He sprang to crouch at her feet. “How are you?”
“I’m fine,” she told him. It was a ridiculous thing to say, given everything that was going on. “You looked like you lost something.”
“I was looking for my pocketknife. I had it in this room and now I can’t find it anywhere.” He searched her face with a peculiar intensity that felt like a physical touch. “Do you remember seeing it anywhere?”
She scowled. “Of course I remember seeing it. I watched you cut the twine with it. Why do you ask?”
“It’s been an eventful afternoon,” he said.
“That doesn’t really answer my question,” she said.
“I don’t have any answers,” he told her. He gripped the arms of her chair. “I’m busy grappling with too many questions of my own. Do you remember going into a fade?”
“That’s right,” she murmured. “Of course I did.” She fell silent as she studied him. She thought of the memory she had gone back to when she had slipped into the fade, back and back, to one of the most painful, traumatic and pivotal times of her early life. She had been kept pristine, her virginity intact, saved and trained until she could be given as a gift at a strategic time to an important personage.
Then an immense, dark and terrifying god had touched down to earth to regard white-walled Ineb Hedj and its people with a passing curiosity. In the end, he had been indifferent to the city, its devout priests and religion, and uninterested in her as a gift. He had left, and she had been punished for it.
Then, with a crystalline clarity that the many intervening centuries had not dimmed, she remembered the whistle of the whip as it snaked through the air and plunged her into the most savage, transcendent pain, turning her world raw with the screams she did not have the breath to cry out.
And into that raw place an enormous golden monster had erupted, roaring with an agony as if he had been the one who was whipped, bringing with him both death and salvation.
The world rattled. Carling’s mouth opened. She tried to form words.
“God, you’re shaking like a leaf,” Rune muttered. “Talk to me.”
“I’m trying,” she gritted. She grabbed his strong, tanned wrists. He seemed to be the only thing that wasn’t shaking, that held steady. Their eyes met. “I s-see you went back a second time.”
He turned his hands to grip her wrists as well. “Yes. Can you tell me what happened to you? There was another Wyr involved, or at least there had been before I got there. Do you know who it was?”
The other Wyr had been Tiago, of all people, who had never remembered what had happened, because to him the whole incident had been unimportant. He had never known what the consequences of his indifference and departure had meant for her.
She shook her head. She had been angry and resentful at Tiago for so long, but for once, she meant what she said as she told Rune, “It doesn’t matter. It was just a curious Wyr who looked around briefly and then left again. The priests wanted him to stay, of course, which was why they gave me to him, but he wasn’t interested.”
Something unpredictable and razor-edged prowled in his lion’s eyes. “So he didn’t come back.”
“No,” she said. “At least not while I lived in the city.”
“Okay.” Rune seemed to relax only slightly. “Does . . . what happened . . . feel as real to you as the first time when I appeared?”
The world started to rattle again. She nodded.
His hands tightened on her wrists as he whispered, “It does to me too. Carling, I need to have a look at your back.”