''At this moment, O Wise One,'' says a rueful Ra, ''at this precise moment I would give anything for a dull life!''
15. Sortie
They entered Libya around midnight, after a long trek across Freegypt's Western Desert. There were three vehicles in all — a ZT and a pair of flatbed trucks with guns mounted on the back. The full personnel complement was eight, including David and Zafirah. They made the crossing from one country to the other off-road, in a remote, uninhabited area, to avoid checkpoints and lessen the chances of encountering a border patrol.
As big moments went it was low-key, even anticlimactic.
''We've done it,'' David said to Zafirah, glancing up from the map. ''We're officially on Neph soil. This is it. No turning back now.''
''We can always turn back, any time,'' Zafirah replied, peering ahead at the landscape picked out by the headlamp beams. ''If we choose to.''
''Do you want to?''
''No.''
Thus was an act of war begun.
The eastern fringes of Libya played host to an assortment of Nephthysian sub-sects, which were tolerated if not sanctioned by the authorities in Tripoli. Littered across the wastes and wildernesses of the region were shrines, temples, even monasteries, each dedicated to a lesser member of the Pantheon. They had been established during the Divine Diaspora, when Pantheonic worship spilled out from what was then just plain Egypt like fruit from a cornucopia. While the renowned foreign archaeologists went racing back to their homelands with their arms full of tomb treasure and their hearts full of gnostic revelation, Egyptians themselves began spreading the good news to their immediate neighbours and to more distant nations as well. Most of the attention was on the major deities and the philosophies they represented, but the Egyptians didn't want the minor ones to be neglected. The One True Pantheon was rich and diverse. It would be a shame if, in the worldwide rush to embrace Isis, Osiris, Set, and their ilk, their less celebrated relatives ended up trampled underfoot and forgotten. In a frenzy of proselytising zeal, Egypt gave away every last one of its gods, draining its religious reservoir, leaving nothing behind for itself. In hindsight it was clear that this was what the gods themselves had willed, and so were laid the foundations of the world's one and only lay state.
Some of the sub-sects took root; some did not. None flourished to any meaningful degree, and the few that survived did so by virtue of gaining a purchase in territory that was sympathetic, or at least not hostile. This was the case in, for example, South America, where the children of Horus would never have succeeded in obtaining joint custodianship had that part of the continent not been so strongly under the sway of its neighbour to the north, their father's realm.
The same was true in Africa, where toeholds were available only to lesser gods who had some connection, however tenuous, to Nephthys or her husband.
The Lightbringer's orders to David, Zafirah, and their team were simple. Go into Libya. Find sites sacred to lesser gods. Blow them up.
They located a Wepwawetian monastery on the very first day.
It was a primitive, semi-subterranean edifice, more tomb than dwelling, more cave than tomb. A dozen monks occupied it, pallid creatures, their modesty barely preserved by the tattered remnants of black robes. Their bodies were so thin as to be almost skeletal, emaciated by a meagre diet of jackal flesh and baked dung beetle. Wepwawet was Anubis's son and a regular chip off the old block, pure darkness and annihilation, so his worshippers delighted in mortifying themselves, spending their lives teetering as close to the brink of death as possible.
Consequently the monks were too feeble to put up any resistance as the Lightbringer's troops rousted them from their sarcophagus-style beds and dragged them blinking into the sunlight. Held at gunpoint, they stood in line like living scarecrows, swaying and moaning while David supervised the laying of charges inside the monastery.
When the blast happened, the monks cried out in a strange sort of ecstasy. As their holy home collapsed in on itself in a vast billow of dust, they looked both aghast and perversely gratified, as though this act of violent desecration confirmed everything they believed in. All was ruin and decay. Life was a bleak catastrophe. Here — here was the proof.
One of them, apparently the abbot, hissed a command to the rest. The monks immediately began advancing on their captors, ignoring requests to stay put or be shot.
David realised what they were up to. He shouted to Zafirah, telling her to tell the others: on no account were they to open fire.
But too late. They did.
Bullets flew. The Wepwawetian monks went down happily, willingly. It was an act of mass suicide. They died with blissful smiles on their skull-like faces.
''They could see no need to carry on,'' Zafirah said later. ''What we did, destroying the monastery — it made their lives complete.''
''Yes, well,'' said David, guiding the ZT around a rock outcrop. The off-roader's initials stood for Zemlya Tantsovschik, Land Dancer, but it hardly lived up to the name. It was murder to drive, the steering wheel asking for effort all the way from your shoulders to your wrists before it would rotate even a few degrees. The ZT could be said to dance in the same way that a portly octogenarian babushka could be said to dance. ''Nobody else dies. Not if we can help it. That's not what we're here for. Our targets aren't civilians, remember. Or even enemy troops.''
''No. The gods. Only the gods.'' Zafirah smiled grimly. ''I wonder if we're not insane, David Westweenter. What are we doing, provoking them like this? It's asking for trouble.''
''Of course it is. But the Lightbringer'' — he nearly said Steven — ''has calculated the risks. He thinks he knows how this is going to play out.''
''And do you trust him?''
''I do.''
''You sound surprised.''
''I am, a little. But only a little.''
''Is it because he's an Englishman like you? You wouldn't have gone along with this if he was from any other country? Compatriots sticking together.''
''That's not it. I just feel…''
David wasn't sure what he felt. He knew only that he felt something. Whenever Steven spoke about his plans, his grand scheme, his crusade, it sounded right. Sounded plausible. Sounded like a cause worth fighting for and a confrontation that could be won.
''I don't know,'' he said. ''I mean, this goes against everything I believe in. Used to believe in. Somewhere inside me a faint little voice is going 'Don't!' But there's another voice, a louder one, and it's saying 'Why not?' I've never heard it before, I don't recognise it — but I quite like it.''
''I hear that voice,'' Zafirah said. ''I think it may be the voice of freedom.''
David adjusted his grip on the steering wheel. ''I think it may be too.''
It was a tiny village, a handful of houses clustered around a water hollow. In the hollow, a stone effigy of the hippopotamus-headed goddess Tawaret squatted, thigh-deep in the muddy water, belly bulging, breasts heavily pendulous.
''Ugly bitch,'' Zafirah commented. ''I hope someone will shoot me if I ever let myself get that fat.''
''Fertile, though,'' said David. ''Isn't that the point? Tawaret's all about the babies.'' He gestured at the largest of the nearby buildings, into which the villagers had all been herded, as much for their own safety as anything. They were howling with rage and indignation from inside this makeshift corral. ''At least half the women are pregnant, and I've never seen such a high child-to-adult ratio as in this place.''