You are the Great Cat, the avenger of the gods, and the judge of words, and the president of the sovereign chiefs and the governor of the holy Circle; you are indeed the Great Cat.
Ferdinand Lyle pinched the bridge of his nose and looked up from the hieroglyphic text. He was reading the seventeenth chapter of the Book of the Dead, it concerns Ra taking on the form of the Great Cat named simply Mau, meaning cat in ancient Egyptian. Ra took on this form to kill the serpent Apep.
He continued with the text: I am the cat (Mau), who fought hard by the Persea tree in Annu on the night when the foes of Neb-er-tcher (a form of Osiris) were destroyed. The male cat is Ra himself.
You are the Great Cat, the avenger of the gods, and the judge of words, and the president of the sovereign chiefs and the governor of the holy Circle; you are indeed the Great Cat.
Lyle was distracted by a soft thump near his feet. He looked down to see a plumb gray mouse lying dead with a very pleased small, sleek, black cat next to it. Lyle smiled as the cat jumped onto his lap. He stroked her soft fur and said, "Why thank you, Baast." Sometimes he swore he loved the dear little beast more than he loved his wife.
The watery gray-blue light filtered through the curtains of Sembene's room. He winced as he cleaned the welts left by claws across his chest. He knew it was the result of no ordinary dream. In Africa dreams such as this only occurred in conjunction with certain rituals and preparations. What had brought about this magic, ancient, powerful, and dangerous magic.
It was a dream of the type that seemed like waking reality. Sembene was walking through night time streets of London. It was the in the perfectly respectable neighborhood in which Malcolm, his employer's, townhouse stood. He walked along quiet streets of elegant houses and garden walls. Occasionally carriages passed by him.
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He sensed a woman following him. Sembene knew how to avoid her — and to begin to track her. He simply wanted to observe who would choose to follow him. She moved lightly, almost silently. He moved to get a better view of who she might be. She was young, lithe, and . . . African.
This was unexpected, to be stalked, much less as to even see an elegantly dressed African woman in London. She was dressed in the height of iEuropean fashion. Sembene knew she was of Africa, even though she was one of those women that Malcolm would describe as looking "almost white". At first he thought she was Somali because of her slender grace and elegant face. The color of her of her skin was not that of a Somali. While he would never think her a white woman, he could understand why Malcolm would say she looked "almost white". Her skin was the color of the desert, a light red, golden brown. Still, she was African. He was sure of it.
The woman walked a caracal on a beautifully worked leash. Sembene had last seen a caracal in Africa. Three times the size of a house cat, the caracal was almost a phantom, a rarely seen small, but powerful hunter. The cat's tawny fur was the same shade as the woman's skin, and it moved with a barely contained energy as it walked along with her. The cat and the woman moved in perfectly synchronous grace. Sembene didn't recall even noticing when she unhooked the cat from its leash. He only noticed the cat as it was hurtling toward him, launching itself for his throat. He barely had time to pull out his knife before the caracal batted the knife out of his hand, and clawing a furrow across his chest.
Sembene sat up fully awake, jolted from his sleep by the shock of the clawing, The dream had seemed real, not the hyper-reality of many dreams, but like the everyday world. He had felt everything just as in waking reality. He touched his wrist and his chest and felt the sting of a wounds and the wetness of blood. The caracal hadn't clawed in deeply, but enough to make him bleed.
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Night huntress with sharp eye and pointed claw.
She sat with her legs pulled up to her chest on the casement. It was cold and wet here, the sun was rising over the jagged gray profusion of slate rooftops, its savage redness muted by the clouds. This damp, massive city was the center of a great empire. She recalled other times, other empires and kingdoms. Civilizations lost, or partially found, still holding their mysteries.a
The woman had gold-green eyes, and tawny skin, her finger nails were stained red — but not from henna. She sucked blood from under a thumbnail. The African man had deserved his injuries. He had killed one of the children of Baast.
Her companion with whom she shared a chamber, another woman, who like she was tawny skinned and lithe, was removing pins from her elegant coif. A great cloud of crinkled black hair, diffused with streams of copper and gold like a sandstone through it, tumbled halfway down her back. She wore a red linen dressing gown and her amber eyes were as unnaturally bright as the noonday sun. In a growling, sensual voice she said, "It will take far more blood than that bit of blood beneath your nails to assuage me."
The other woman merely replied, "You are the Eye of Ra, not I."