Author's note: The Judges of Ma'at, a group of near-divine beings, are at war with the Wyrm, the spiritual incarnation of corruption. To act as their soldiers, they have created the Amenti – amalgams of spiritually weak souls of the newly dead and the last fragments of spirits from ancient Egypt, restored to their bodies and given immortality and magical powers.

This is my first attempt to write Amenti characters. Tell me what you think.

Otis Pern had tried being bad, and he had tried being good. Right now, he was trying to kid himself into thinking that bad had been more fun.

It really hadn't, of course. It had just been a lifetime of punching people as hard as he could, because he had thought that was the only way to keep them from punching him at first opportunity. It had been scars and aching bones and countless petty humiliations and the constant nagging knowledge that hard as he might try, there were people out there who were tougher than him, and there was really nothing but blind luck stopping them from tearing into him at any time.

But you could say this much for being bad. No one had ever felt at liberty to keep him waiting on the street for half an hour, when he had been bad. He would have broken the legs of anyone who dissed him like that, and everyone had known that. Now he was a card-carrying, bona fide goodie-two-shoes, and people were happy to let him wait.

Just one leg, he thought, absently tapping his baseball bat against his foot. Would the Judges really come down on me for just one leg? It's not like I would be doing it for no good reason. I'd be doing it to teach people not to let me wait here, alone, in a pretty rough part of town, for half an hour. It'd be to teach them manners. It'd be to make the world a better place!

He sighed. No, he didn't even buy it himself.

He heard the sound of shoes hitting the pavement, right behind him. Otis spun, baseball bat whirling – and found it caught in a bony but very strong hand.

"Ooooh! Jumpy!" Pietr said. He grinned, showing a startling length of bad teeth. He was thin, and pale, and had greasy black hair hanging down to his chest. He was, all in all, not the kind of person you wanted to leap off of a roof and land right behind you.

"Would you mind not doing that?" Otis said. He tried to make it a growl, but somehow the growl just wouldn't manifest. Instead, it came out as a timid, polite request.

"Sorry," Pietr said, without sounding sorry. He released Otis' bat. "So how's it hanging?"

"It's about forty-five minutes until the bars close, and I'd really like a chance to have a quiet beer after we're done," Otis said. "Where's Jonas?"

Pietr giggled.

"I left him in the dust a few blocks back. Soldier-boy's gotten out of shape since he resigned from the army. Too many donuts. Shameful."

Soon enough, he was proven truthful – both about Jonas being on his way and about him having eaten too many donuts. The man in the army jacket was still large and imposing, as much so as Otis himself, but he was building a stomach and was panting and gasping as he ran the last stretch towards his comrades.

"Sorry… I'm… late…" he puffed as he slowed down. "Traffic… chaos… horrible…"

"I've been thinking I should kill the head of the department of communications," Pietr said conversationally. "The way it is now, every morning thousands of people have to sit in line to get to work and feel annoyed about it. Wyrm breeding ground, that is."

"I don't think we kill people for botching their jobs, Pietr," Otis said.

"Well, maybe that's our problem right there," Pietr sniffed. "I remember the minister of trade miscalculated and didn't buy enough grain for a lean year, so that people starved. The Pharaoh had him ritually tortured to death. The next minister of trade was very, very good at his job."

There were days when Otis envied those of his fellows who could recall the days of ancient Egypt. This was not one of those days.

"Right," Jonas said, straightening up. "I'm ready. What are we dealing with tonight?"

"Fomor," Pietr said. "Sneaks around the neighbourhood after dark and rummages through garbage cans. It hasn't hooked up with anyone else yet, so this is the time to take it out."

"What does it do?" Jonas said. "I mean, why are we killing it?"

"Do?" Pietr shook his head, annoyed. "It goes around being a fomor all the time, that's what it does."

Jonas glowered. Otis realised that he had, at this point, about a second and a half if he wanted to stop Jonas from delivering a long speech on liberal ideology. When Jonas made one of those speeches, they tended to last for a minimum of twenty minutes, and Otis was already down to forty minutes before the bars closed.

"It eats kids," he therefore said.

Jonas struggled to find words and choke back an unranted rant at the same time.

"You're sure?" he finally said.

"Yeah." Otis grimaced. "Kids have been going missing in the neighbourhood, one every week or so for the last three weeks. So I've been listening to the wind lately. Two nights ago, I caught something."

He didn't really want to think about it. It had been far away, at the very edge of what he could pick up. The hurried, nervous voice, harsh with effort and shame and fear, telling someone to hold still, stop fighting, it didn't have to hurt… and the other, childish voice whimpering, the sound muffled behind a hand, and then a that voice had died away and there had been these… gurgling sounds, and someone smacking his lips…

Otis had run straight out into the night, not grabbing a weapon, not thinking it through, just running and willing all his strange senses to bring him to the right place so he could break the fucking neck of the sicko who had just done what he had heard it do. They hadn't, though. By the time he got close, the creature had already slipped away somewhere, out of reach for the wind.

"Okay, I'm in," Jonas said. "Are we packing?"

Pietr grinned smugly and flung open his coat. From the looks of it, he had guns enough to equip a minor army in there.

"Right." Jonas took a revolver out of his jacket pocket and glanced at Otis. "And you're taking the low-tech route as usual?"

"Always worked before," Otis said. He smacked the bat against the palm of his hand.

"I don't see what you've got against guns," Pietr said. "You were in a gang, weren't you? You have to have handled them before."

"Yeah, but guns in gangs aren't for shooting with," Otis said. "They're for waving at people so they see what a big man you are. I never actually practiced with a gun."

"Practice now," Pietr suggested, reasonably enough. "There are things out there that you can't just pound with a piece of wood, you know."

"Save it for some other day," Jonas said. "You know where this thing is hiding, right?"

"Of course I know." Pietr sniffed and straightened out his coat. "When you can command the spirits of the dead to do your bidding, you know these things."

"Your contribution is greatly appreciated," Otis said. "You are very powerful and valuable. Please lead the way now so I can still catch that beer afterwards?"

Pietr's ego was suitably mollified. He led the way.

The way, in turn, led to the basement of a condemned building – a sadly common thing in Otis' adopted neighbourhood. Otis could feel the taint of the place against his skin, like the air itself was moaning. This was the home of something sad and hungry and destructive.

Pietr produced a flashlight from some hidden pocket, gripped it in one hand and a gun in the other. He flung the door opened and rushed in through it. Otis followed at his heels, and Jonas brought up the rear.

The stench of the cellar felt like a wall. It was rot, and sewage, and something chemical. Otis' eyes teared, but he blinked them clear and tried to make sense of what he saw.

The floor was covered in some kind of chunky slime. He thought he could make out half-dissolved bones in it, though he didn't know what they were bones of. Someone was cowering in the corner, as if trying to escape the glare of the flashlight.

"Leave me alone!" The voice was thin and whiny, with a slur to it, like its owner's mouth was anesthetized. Otis recognised it all too well.

"You've been killing people," he said. It wasn't an accusation. He just felt he should explain why it had to be this way.

"No… well, yes." The creature looked up, sullen. "I didn't want to! I had to!"

It had been a chubby middle-aged man, once, with nondescript features and thinning grey hair. It still was, mostly. But its mouth had been hideously, impossibly stretched, so that its corners almost reached the ears, and the throat was wide as a barrel. The body beneath what had been a cheap charcoal suit before weeks of wear and tear had turned it almost into tatters was lumpy and grotesque, like one big cancerous tumour.

Otis had been doing this for a while. He knew the rules. Keep thinking of the target as 'it.' Convince yourself that while it was obviously a man once, it's not anymore. Remind yourself that what the Wyrm has done to it is incurable, that its condition is uncontrollable, that death will be a mercy for it. And hope like hell that that's going to be enough to keep you from going insane.

"It's the hunger, don't you see?" the creature whimpered. "The terrible hunger! You have no idea! How could you? I have to feed it! It'll kill me if I don't feed it! I have to eat anything I can find, vermin and filth and anything, but every now and then, oh, every now and then it wants something fresh and tender and young…"

The creature might be frightened and miserable, but it wasn't stupid, and all that whining had just been a distraction. One that had worked, too – Otis and Jonas, at least, had been shrinking back in sick disgust, trying to gather the will to do what had to be done. When the creature leaped, Pietr was the only one who was prepared.

Two shots rang out and echoed between the cellar walls, then the flashlight fell to the floor and everything became vague shadows. Pietr was laughing wildly, the creature was screaming, Jonas was swearing. Otis concentrated, sensed his way forward in time and found a path that had him hit the creature, and then he brought down the bat just so. He hit something too soft and yielding to be any part of Pietr, so he slammed the bat down again. This time it was struck aside, though, and a soft, reeking weight, like a sack of garbage, tackled him. The charge pushed both him and the fomor out of the door. They dropped to the ground just outside of the threshold, the fomor on top of him.

Its mouth was open and stretched wide enough to encompass a pumpkin; the huge maw filled Otis' vision like a cavern of pulsing flesh and dripping mucus and broken, splintered teeth. He pushed back with every ounce of strength in his muscles, trying to keep those flabby lips from closing around his head.

Then there was the thunder of several guns firing at once, and the fomor's body was pounded into his as if in some parody of passion. Then it went limp on top of him, and the mouth shrunk back together to merely grotesquely large as the strange, mutated muscles around it relaxed.

When Otis was sure it was dead, he pushed its body away and let Pietr and Jonas help him up. Together, the three of them silently watched the pathetic, crumbled form on the ground.

"Think he had kids of his own?" Otis said. "You know. From before?"

"Probably," said Pietr cheerfully. He had to know perfectly well that it was exactly what Otis didn't want to hear, and he had to know equally well that it was true. "People always resort to plopping out kiddies when they don't have anything better to do."

"I'm going to drive him out of town and bury him," Jonas said. "Do you want to help?"

"Me? Forget it." Pietr tittered. "The night is young, and I have a city full of wickedness to purge! Toodleloo!" He ran over to a drainpipe, climbed up it as agilely as a monkey, and disappeared across the rooftops.

"You know," Jonas said, looking in the direction Pietr had gone, "I know that he's on our side and all, but sometimes I think he might…" He looked around nervously. "… vote conservative," he whispered.

Otis guffawed.

"Pietr? Vote?"

"Hmm. True. Well, that's a small mercy, at least," Jonas allowed.

"Didn't you used to be, like, an uber-Republican?" Otis said.

Jonas squirmed as if he had just gotten an awkward personal question.

"Well, yes," he admitted. "But I was a different person then."

Otis nodded. They had all been different people once, all in their own way.

"So, I guess we'd better go fetch a garbage bag or something to carry him in," he said. "So we're not so obviously dragging a corpse across town."

Jonas glanced at him.

"I thought you wanted to go get a beer."

"Aw, man." Otis grinned joylessly. "One drop would make me an asshole, and an ocean of the stuff couldn't make me feel human again tonight."

"Yeah," Jonas said. "I hear you."