IX. Shifting Sands

Tap tap tap tap tap. It was the sound of the delicate chiseling of stones, carried over the susurration of shifting sands, carried over the heave-hos of massive plinths being lifted into place, carried even over the thunder of enormous limestone blocks grinding into position.

Tap tap tap tap tap. It was the continuous song of grateful refugees working for their new king, building a city with the full knowledge that it would never be theirs. Because when the flooded Nile fell back, it was the rich black earth left behind, not this wasted desert, that was their new homeland.

Tap tap tap tap tap. It was a steady knocking, a rapping on the massive double doors leading to the Temple at the heart of the necropolis.

With a grunt and a groan, Mathayus hauled the door open.

A dead boy stood on the other side.

"Give me a sword!" Thomid demanded. "You slew my brother, Akkadian. It is my right, by the law, to avenge him!"

"That is the old law," Mathayus heard himself reply. "My law is kinder." Then he drew his scimitar and slew the boy. The body that fell to the floor, though, was not Thomid's.

"It was an honor," Jesup whispered, "to die by my brother's blade."

Mathayus sat up, trembling, and rubbed his face. He looked over at Cassandra, but she slept on, unaware of her husband's troubled mind.

And then he was huddled at the head of the bed, staring. At the foot of the bed, where there had been only darkness a moment before, now stood an imuit fetish, not unlike the one he'd seen in another dream.

A golden urn. Inside it stood a wooden pole, from which a headless pelt hung, tail up. But where the previous had been a lion's, this hide was long and thin, with a cheetah's pattern of spots.

"Sekhmet!"

Mathayus sat up, trembling, and rubbed his face. He looked over at Cassandra, who was just beginning to stir in the first light of dawn. She opened her eyes and smiled at him.

His double nightmare slowly evaporated in the promise of a pleasurable morning.

Some time later, Mathayus kissed his still-smiling wife and said, "Remind me to have the handler check over Menes' cheetah. That boy will kill me if anything happens to the beast while he's away."

* * *

"There are reports that Nubia expects to be overrun by Anakronos' forces." Wekil had taken over the captaincy of the king's red guard after the death of Goshur at Abydos.

The king looked up from the map with a frown. "And Nubia expects aid from us? I've heard nothing about this from Balthazar."

Wekil shifted nervously. "Forgive me, my king, but you would not have. King Balthazar has been engaged with preparations for war." He waited for the king to ask just how he knew this, but the man only cocked an eyebrow and went back to examining the map. Feeling eyes on the back of his neck, he turned to see the sorceress gazing expressionlessly at him.

Wekil suppressed a superstitious shudder and went back to the particulars of the kingdom and its neighbors.

"Expansion is not in question," King Mathayus growled. "The more people I accept into my borders, the more stream in behind them. They need food and homes, and I can't just send them packing." He paused, then said, "Sheba?"

"Would you be willing to fight a war across the sea?" Wekil asked.

The king's eyes shifted immediately to his sorceress.

Silence for a moment, and Wekil could imagine the blankness that came across the face of the sorceress behind him when she used her mystical sight.

"Uncertainty," she finally replied. "If you lead the army yourself, my lord, the outcome is death for you and for all you lead. Otherwise... otherwise it's all shadows."

There was a sudden, sharp rapping at the doors, and the king spun around, his hand on the hilt of his enormous sword. The massive double doors opened with a groan, and Arpid scuttled in, followed by an old man Wekil didn't recognize.

Arpid came to a trembling halt before King Mathayus. The ex-horse thief had become the king's eyes and ears around the kingdom, bringing him the sorts of news that always seemed to escape the magistrates and tax collectors. Now his keen face wore an expression somewhere between apology and terror. His mouth moved soundlessly, and he threw himself on the ground at the king's feet.

"What is this, Arpid? Get up."

The sorceress laid her hand on the king's broad shoulder, a look of dawning horror on her pale face. "Oh, no... Menes. And Philos?"

With a shriek of leather on steel, King Mathayus' scimitar was out of its sheath and pressed under the old stranger's chin. "What have you done with them?"

"No!" Arpid shouted, jumping to his feet. "No, my king, you misunderstand!" He pushed the sword gently away. "This is only a ferryman. He had no hand in what happened--he only saw it."

The king's eyes shifted from the old man to Arpid, then back to the old man. "Tell me my son is alive."

In a tremulous voice, the old ferryman spoke, his age-yellowed eyes watering. "My lord, I can tell you no such thing."

King Mathayus staggered as though physically struck.

"'Tis my custom," the ferryman said, "to sleep in my boat, i'case o' late night business, like. The river goddess, she's taken a likin' to me, I gather, since nary a crocodile's worried me fer some years." He paused, scratching his head. "I can't rightly say as what happened, ye see. They's not too far offa me, I'm wonderin' if I might not have a call for service soon--but next thing, them three big men're stackin' the boy and th'old man inna that wagon o' theirn. They's killed 'em, they have. Killed 'em in their sleep, I suppose, since I heard on'y a shout from th'boy."

In a hollow voice, the king asked, "What three men?"

"Why, the three as came with 'em!"

Wekil felt the blood leave his face as his stomach turned to lead.

"I've had enough of Balthazar's contrivances," the king growled, his voice shaking. "He'll have no military aid from Gomorrah." He turned a deadly gaze on Wekil. "You'll take your men to the shores of Sheba. You'll either win me land, or win me your deaths."

His legs trembling, Wekil gave a short nod, then marched out to find the remainder of the red guard. If Balthazar had betrayed Mathayus, then he had betrayed them as well, and there was only one thing left to do.

They would dig their graves in Sheba.