They leave him for dead, not once but three times over. Shot and shot again and drowned, when any one of those would have been sufficient. But then, she thinks as she kneels by the pool, if anyone was going to outstubborn a single bullet it would have been Marc.
The surface of the water is smooth, mirrorlike. If it weren't for the wavering ribbons of red spreading like kelp she could almost imagine that she's caught sight of their reflections in a window, Marc away behind her and oblivious to her gaze. A tear slips from her cheek and the ripples makes the illusion shiver, briefly bringing the familiar face to life. But without Marc's burning intensity - or Steven's awestruck bewilderment - behind it, it's uncanny and just plain wrong; it just makes the emptiness of death more apparent.
She stifles a scream when the hippopotamus looms over her reflection. They kill over 500 people a year she thinks. What a stupid way to go after all this.
It's not a hippo. Exactly.
In retrospect, it's ridiculous to think a hippopotamus could somehow make its way to a chamber in the tomb of Alexander the Great. A chimera ancient Egyptian goddess is far more probable. Obviously.
She takes in the full absurdity of her new companion, who stands off to one side with her hands clasped anxiously in front of her chest. A visibly nervous mostly-hippopotamus goddess with a solar disc headdress. No, an visibly nervous -and very pregnant- mostly-hippopotamus goddess with a solar disc headdress. Even within a pantheon with an assortment of deities with animal features, there's only one hippo-croco-lion up the duff she can think of. Taweret, Lady of Heaven and the Pure Waters. Who, based on what Layla can remember, wasn't generally regarded as a particularly anxious figure. Although they also didn't typically describe the god of the Moon as a 'bit of a dick' which seemed to be the consensus from those who had met him.
The voice in her head is surprisingly light and soft, not at all what she is expecting.
Your fractured man is not truly dead, Layla El-Faouly. And we need his help.
The tiny flicker of hope is tempered by suspicion. The last few days have been an object lesson that offers of assistance from these gods come at a heavy price.
"Go on." She prompts.
Too many of our kin have been imprisoned. For all his previous transgressions, Khonshu is not a liar, and that sham of a trial has proven that there are some among us who seek to thin our numbers for their own ends.
Taweret's not just jittery because she's bending the rules being here, Leyla realises. This is a last throw of the dice for her and her allies. There's more at stake for them than Ammit's pre-emptive judgement of the human race. A goddess with no skin in the game doesn't suddenly step in to subvert the punishment of an outcast god already on his last warning.
"And where does Marc fit in this?" She asks. She's already getting a picture of where this is going, and she's not sure she likes it.
As an avatar he still has an affinity with Khonshu, despite his imprisonment. He can free him from the ushabti, where others could not. Together, they can free our kin.
"So where is he?" She waves a hand at the pool. "The rest of him, I mean. His soul, or whatever you want to call it?"
He is barred from the Field of Reeds and waits, trapped with a tomb of mind in the Duat. He cannot return unaided.
And there it is, she thinks. The stumbling block that's dropped another god into our lives. They need Marc, but they also need someone in our world to help them send him back.
The return is a vulnerable time, and we must avoid prying eyes. Protective magics are needed to allow your husband to safely regain his body.
"OK, so cast your magic, I'll pull him out of the water and with any luck he can be smashing statues by tomorrow evening." She doesn't mean to sound flippant. This is what she wants more than anything else in the world, but Taweret is dancing around something here and she's had enough of these gods and their bullshit.
I cannot. You need to become my avatar, my Guardian of Pure Waters, and place the wards yourself.
Oh. Well at least we got there quickly.
"Like Marc and Khonshu?"
Not exactly. I do not call upon my followers to fight for me. And it would be temporary, until my kin are free. The goddess' tone changes, becomes almost pleading. And you will have Marc back.
A sudden panic overtakes her. She's seriously considering pledging herself to an ancient god for Marc's sake, but just who will this actually bring back? The thought of Steven left behind, lost and alone in the dark constricts her heart like a fist.
"You call him my fractured man. Will you return both Marc and Steven?"
He will be remade as he was when he died, but carrying the knowledge of self bought dearly in the Duat.
Unhelpfully cryptic, but not a no. It will have to do. It does feel uncomfortably like she's gambling against the universe with Steven as the stake, though.
Marc's going to kill her when he finds out. On both accounts. But at least this way he'll have the opportunity to be really, really pissed off with her. Which is at least better than where things are now. As an afterthought, she empties her pockets; she doesn't know how this works, doesn't trust the goddess to understand what's important and what's not. She takes a deep, calming breath.
"I, Layla El-Faouly, pledge myself to Taweret, Lady of Heaven and the Pure Waters as her Guardian until such time as her kin are freed from their prisons."
Your pledge is accepted, Daughter.
The voice is inside her head now, in a way that it wasn't before.
Her awareness becomes malleable, and suddenly time means nothing. The world wheels about her, distorted and stretched. The sensation of spinning continues even as her surroundings seem to wobble and jolt to a halt and fade to nothingness a lifetime-eyeblink later. The air she breathes is fire, and every inch of her skin is alive with the hiss of static electricity. None of it hurts, it's a sensation beyond pain and pleasure as she's remade from the inside out. The crackle of static spreads outwards carrying her perception with it. She can feel every living thing that burrows and crawls in the desert around them. Feel the unnatural voids where the tomb guardians lurch in their grotesque parody of life. Sense the hearts of Harrow's followers as they move away from the tomb in their triumph. Birds wheel overhead, and further afield still she is aware of the vast and complex ebb and flow of the city. Then when it seems like she's stretched too thin to ever coalesce again, with a snap, she is herself. If she listens she knows that all of those things are still there, but the overwhelming oneness of life is gone. Of more immediate concern, she's also feeling rather chilly.
"It's very beautiful, but this isn't exactly practical," she observes, looking down at the elaborate jewelled collar and sheer gown of minutely pleated white linen cinched at the waist with an equally ostentatious belt carrying the ivory wand and knife of a Chantress of Taweret. Her feet are bare. She gestures with one heavily be-ringed hand. "And if this one wakes up as Steven and sees me in it he might have a heart attack, and we'd be right back to square one."
I have been without an avatar for generations of your kind. Taweret sounds almost sheepish. And before that they were always Chantresses. Are the robes of my Chantress of the Pure Waters no longer suitable?
"Not exactly, no."
She hesitates before closing her eyes and trying to picture what she needs. She saw what happened when Steven tried to summon Marc's armour without fully understanding what was going on. She's fairly certain that doing the same while distracted by musings on how her husband-and-not-husband might react to the flimsy robes would result in something similarly literal. And quite possibly even nearer to total nudity than she already is.
Practical, she thinks. Suitable for hiking through the desert, fighting for my life and not likely to scandalise little old ladies. Surely not too much to ask.
In the end the compromise is still more elaborate than she would like, but at least includes underwear, trousers with pockets and, most importantly, boots.
If you are quite ready, we have work to do.
She feels ridiculous as she touches the hippopotamus ivory wand to her lips and whispers the incantation Taweret taught her. There's no way this can work. Marc was shot. He died. This is all some kind of grief induced hallucination.
By this point, she's not even sure why her mind is trying to cling onto the notion of a rational world without magic. Somehow it's one thing to have a husband who acts as the avatar of a god and has an array of powers and protections she doesn't fully understand, but an entirely different proposition to have a patron, powers and protections of her own, however temporary they may be. That, to be fair, she doesn't understand in the slightest. But if Marc can practically fight an army unaided and Steven can hold an illusion of the sky in place as his patron is torn away and imprisoned in stone, she can damn well draw a magic circle. And return her husband from the realm of the dead.
Even so, she's glad that there's no-one to witness her walking awkwardly backwards, hunched over to trace the protection spell onto the ground. She half expects there to be nothing visible, just a few faint scratches, but as the tip of the wand scrapes and jumps along the stones hieroglyphs burst to life in brilliant spring-green light where it passes. The air smells of ozone and rain and new life, pushing aside the dust and decay of the chamber.
She manages a full circuit of the pool, surrounding it in a glowing green ring. It's a little lopsided from where she had to dodge immovable objects she couldn't kick out of the way, and if she was feeling uncharitable she'd be more inclined to describe it as an egg of protection rather than a circle. But it's there, and it glows and it brings her a step closer to her goal. She goes to drop the wand and rush to the pool, but Taweret's alarmed ear-flick gives her pause. She brings the wand back to her lips and recites the closing incantation before reverentially returning the wand to her belt. Around her, the ring of glowing symbols becomes a wall of green flame, obscuring the tomb from view.
Abruptly she's tired. Exhaustion falls across her shoulders, heavy and unyielding. Taweret had said the protection spell would be draining, but she hadn't expected this. Every second it remains in place she can feel herself bowing under the weight of holding back all the influences outside this tiny pocket of protected space. She draws the ivory knife from its sheath and kneels at the edge of the pool. Kneeling... kneeling is good. Her legs don't want to work, and kneeling leaves less distance to fall. She stumbles through the next incantation, the otherworldly tiredness greying her mind and making it hard to form the unfamiliar sounds. There's a moment of sharp red clarity when the chanting stops, but she can't work out why. She stares uncomprehendingly at the knife in her hand. She needs to do something. Cut something. Free something.
Someone.
Marc.
Where's Marc?
He went away.
And then he was someone else.
Maybe he'll be back when she wakes up.
A voice behind her is singing. It's pretty, but it's keeping her awake. That's ok, there was something she meant to do before she slept. She stares at the knife, the blood on her hand. She should probably wash those. There's water right there.
The ivory knife glows with the same spring-green as the ring of hieroglyphs where it touches surface of the pool. The formerly mirror-like surface is pocked and rippled as if by raindrops. It's only as the fog of exhaustion in her mind lifts that her perspective shifts and she watches with awe as drops lift away from the water, falling upward, an inverted storm that steadily empties the pool. It's deeper than she had first thought, the clarity of the water had been deceptive. Caught by the fringe of the spray, by the time the last drops are whirling away her hair and clothes are damp and she's kneeling in a puddle. Behind her, the green flames sputter and fail. She's left holding the knife awkwardly out over empty space. It's oddly anti-climactic as she returns the knife to the sheath on her belt and stands on legs turned numb from kneeling too long on a cold stone floor.
She's not certain it has worked; Marc's still unmoving at the bottom of the empty pool. Beside her, Taweret wrings her hands, a picture of nervousness made flesh. Perhaps this is not the sure thing the goddess implied it was. She's close to jumping down into the pit to help him, but the goddess beside her catches her wrist as she starts to move.
This he must do himself, Daughter.
But he still isn't moving.
She shakes free of the goddess' grip and scrambles down anyway. Screw the gods and their delusions of infallibility.
His pulse is there, and the wave of relief is so intense it nearly drops her to the stones beside him. But he's too still. There's no rise and fall to his chest, no sign of life at all beyond the rhythm of his heart beneath her fingertips.
So she breathes life into him. It seems ridiculously mundane in the midst of the fantasy adventure her life has spiraled into; rescue breaths from half remembered first aid with the Girl Guides. Chin up, 1-2-3-4-5- breath, 1-2-3-4-5- breath, Marc, you've made it most of the way back- breath, finish the damn job!- breath, breathe you fucker breathe- breath. The last becomes a chant in her mind repeated over and over until at last, wonder of wonders, he does. It's an ugly, ragged, bubbling thing but he drags a lungful of air down for himself. Then another, and another, gradually settling into a steady cycle of gasping breaths.
He rips his wrist from her fingers and rolls convulsively to his knees, coughing and retching. Fluid splatters onto the floor as he expels the mess from inside his chest; blood, water, bile, and, impossibly, two small clicks as he spits the damned bullets onto the stones. Wracked by the effort, he can no longer support himself and drops to his elbows with a weak, keening cry.
"Marc?" She's frozen, hands outstretched, scared that if she tries to touch him he'll prove to be a phantasm and all this will melt away, leaving her alone in a tomb cradling the body of her dead husband.
"Ow. Ow ow ow." He flops weakly onto his back, rubbing at his chest. "Nah, 's me," he croaks. "Just gimme a minute, yeah?" He drifts off into a string of quiet groans and curses that clearly answers the question of who she's getting back. She squashes down the tiny burst of disappointment that it's not Marc. Steven's smart, observant - and oh-so sweet, but that's really not the point right now - where what she actually needs is efficient capability, not puppydog enthusiasm and an unexpectedly wide vocabulary of swear words.
When he does finally focus on her, the smile he gives her is glorious, but fades rapidly as the doubts start to roll in. And, Steven being Steven, he has to ask the one question she's not sure she can answer.
"This is real, yeah?"
She can't help it. The sobs - or is she laughing, she can't quite tell - are beyond her control.
"I have… no… fucking… idea!" She gasps through her hiccuping cries. And maybe, just maybe, Steven is the right one to come back for now because he doesn't try to push on, keep the mission on track. Instead, he shuffles himself laboriously to the side of the pool and sits up, arm extended for her to join him.
"Hey, hey, we'll figure it out. Pretty sure this is the real one. I hurt too much for it to be anything else." It's weak, but it does make her huff out a laugh.
"You look…" He begins, and breaks off with a cough, scrubbing a hand across his face. Tries again. "It's great to see you Layla. I thought I was a goner there. But I'm not, so it's all good." His brittle smile makes it clear things are anything but all good.
She's not sure how to ask, or if she actually wants an answer, so in the end she blurts it out,
"Are you on your own? I mean, did Marc come back too?"
He almost conceals the fleeting moment of hurt when she asks, but not quite. She can't decide whether she reads him so easily because he really does telegraph every thought or feeling he has or if she's so used to picking up Marc's more subtle cues that it just seems that way. Right now, he just looks… defeated.
"Marc's knackered. It was a lot while we were…" He pauses, clearly searching for the right word "…away. And he took the brunt of it. So looks like I'm driving for now." He swallows. "For a while, actually. Probably until we free Khonshu." His eyes are anguished. "I think… I think Marc needs his help to fix himself."
Oh Steven, she thinks. Right now you could have exactly what you wanted. Go home to your books and your fish; Marc just a dormant jumble thoughts tucked away in the corner of your mind. No more gods, no more danger, no more loss of control. But you won't will you? Even if it does occur to you, you won't. You'll keep going and try to fix this because that's who you are. So far out of your depth and yet still trying to do the right thing.
The subsequent effort to get out of the pool is an undignified scramble despite her enhanced strength from Taweret's Gift. Even setting aside his current battered physical state, how Steven manages to be so completely uncoordinated in the same body Marc can use as finely tuned weapon is beyond her. The experience isn't improved by the silent scrutiny of Taweret.
"You could at least have tried to help," she snaps. Steven's look of betrayal cuts her to the bone.
"I'm doing my best," he protests. "You try getting shot to death, brought back and then climb a bloody vertical wall."
"I didn't mean you," she says irritably, glaring at her patron.
I think you need to free my brother and get the other aspect of your fractured man back as soon as possible. This one is a liability.
"He's not!" She replies hotly.
"Leyla, last I checked, I was the one who could have an argument in an empty room." He looks at her quizzically, as if noticing the stupid robes for the first time. "Wait. You weren't wearing that before, were you?" She can practically see the moment when the penny drops as his eyes widen almost comically and he claps his hands over his mouth. "Oooh. Oh, oh shit. He's not going to like this much. Neither's Marc, but it does bugger up one of that bloody obnoxious pigeon's threats." He backs away to better take in the change, then reaches out and rests one finger on the wand at her hip. "Taweret, right?"
She nods, not entirely trusting her voice. He looks around, as if he might have somehow missed a bipedal hippopotamus standing in the chamber with them.
Taweret's tone is censorious.
This one also needs to learn respect. Khonshu is not a bloody pigeon. She pauses. I will however grant that he is obnoxious.
"She still here?" Steven waves enthusiastically in completely the wrong direction. "Sorry for screaming at you before. All a bit new to me, this."
It feels like fainting. Darkness bleeds in from the edges of her vision and the world seems far away, with sound muffled as though through deep water. She hears her own voice, outside her control.
Yes, Steven Grant, I am here and Layla Al-Faouly has agreed to be my avatar in your world until you release my brother from his prison. Do not waste this second chance. It comes at great cost. To all of us.
From the bottom of the well, Steven's voice seems distant.
"So that's what it looks like when Khonshu does it to us. Freaky. Well, hi again and thanks for the help, Great One. Any suggestions on where we go from here?"
But she can feel Taweret slipping from her body even as she opens her mouth to speak again. The goddess has gone for too long without an avatar to directly seize control easily, or relinquish it gracefully.
Steven steps forward, close enough for her to see the glowing reflection of her own eyes in his as they dim, supporting her as Taweret releases her control. Close enough for her to hear him mutter "Bloody typical." Then she's back wrapped in his arms, which seems to be happening rather a lot, and entirely too easily.
"You alright there?" He asks, resting his forehead against hers. "'s a bit weird innit, when they do that. Bloody rude if you ask me."
Reluctantly, she steps back. A covert glance around the chamber confirms that Taweret has indeed gone back to wherever it was she came from, something Layla had somehow already known. She sighs. While the respite is welcome, they can't stay here any longer.
"So what now?" She asks, hoping Steven has a suggestion. Everything she's come up with seems, quite frankly, ridiculous.
"I dunno about you, but I reckon we should do what your new mate Gloria asked: break into the Great Pyramid to rescue a shouty pigeon and his god mates, so they can help us and the angry American who shares my head defeat a homicidal crocodile goddess and her Poundland David Koresh sidekick." He grimaces. "OK, so that sounds even more bonkers when I say it out loud."