XII.

"Oh dear," Ferdinand Lyle said, peering in great distress at the scroll they'd found near the last standing wall of the Temple of Amun at Umm 'Ubeida. It was part of Wahat Siwah, the Siwa Oasis where Alexander the Great had once been recognized as a son of Amun, and there they'd found the last relic of their quest in a chest that held several scrolls besides. Since then, Lyle and Catriona Hartdegen had taken to studying the writing, while the rest of them, by now bedraggled veterans, awaited whatever creatures would inevitably be summoned.

"What?" Ethan asked. "Locusts? More crocodiles?"

"Oasis or not, we're in the middle of the desert," Malcolm commented. "Desert storms are far more likely. And lethal."

Agitatedly, Mr. Lyle waved with his hand. "Alas, no, it is nothing as simple as that. According to this scroll, Miss Ives may be able to collect all of our foe's immortal relics in the Duat. But she can only destroy them here, on the mortal plane."

That caused the rest of them to stare at him in various stages of numb shock and outrage.

"No," Ethan said. "I refuse to accept this. We've come this far, and I've finally started to believe the fact that I spent time each month as monster has a purpose better than murdering innocents. I begin to think that Vanessa did find a way to deal with this bastard for good, and now you're telling me..."

"Let me see the exact phrasing," Catriona interrupted, addressing Lyle. They spent some time debating the translation, then Catriona said: "Very well. It doesn't say Vanessa has to do it, or that she has to do it here. It says that the immortal anchors of the Great Dragon are safe in the Duat, because they only can be destroyed by mortal means, created by the living. That they are indestructible because no creature who has not died can enter the Duat, and since a soul cannot carry anything mortal with it..."

"We get the point," Victor said. "Spare us more mystical ditherings."

Catriona shook her head. "No, you don't get the point, and you of all people should, Doctor." She looked at them all, Lyle's scroll in her hand. The growing excitement in her eyes was palpable. "These conditions aren't metaphorical but literal. It means just this: no creature who has not died. The people who wrote this could not imagine someone dying and living again who wasn't a god. That something like this could be accomplished not by Isis putting Osiris back together, but by science. But you and Mr. Clare here have been telling us that it can be done, and that it has been done. Or were you exaggerating?" she ended with a challenge.

Stunned, Victor shook his head. By contrast, John Clare looked at her in incredulous joy.

"So you think I can enter this Duat without dying again, and can carry the means we used to dissolve the relics here with me, physically, then join Miss Ives?"

Some of her excitement began to die down. "In theory. But in practice, I have no idea how you should enter the Duat in the first place."

"And even if we did know that," Lyle added sadly, "it is not possible to cross the Duat unless one uses the barge of Auf-Re, that is something all the myths agree with. If what we hope is true, that barge is currently used by Miss Ives."

To have come this far and not further, so close to achieving their goal, that was unbearable. The ruthless core in Malcolm that had enabled him to leave his dying son at a camp because not to climb the mountain he had sought for so long stirred again.

"If one of us were to die," he said slowly, "right now, that person could at least alert Vanessa to the problem. Armed with such knowledge, she could find a way for Mr. Clare to enter the Duat."

Ethan's head snapped up. "You're not going to get out of living without her by shooting yourself, old man," he said between clenched teeth. It said something about Ethan and his fundamentally decent nature that despite having known Malcolm for a while, and despite being raised by Jared Talbot and adopted by Kaetenay, that it had not occurred to him Malcolm might intend to shoot someone other than himself.

"Malcolm," Kaetenay said, who had to know better, "there is no need for anyone to die. I shall seek her out the way I did once before. That is why we have brought the earth from her grave with us."

What you and I have done, Sembene once have told Malcom, cannot be undone in a thousand years. So we must guard each other's conscience now.

And what conscience is that?

"As long as it gets done," Malcolm said, wondering, not for the first time, whether the years of his own refusal to believe in an afterlife weren't motivated by the awareness that if it did exist, his judgment had long since been spoken.

The twelth gate consisted of a serpent's coil. Behind it, the coil continued, and Vanessa realised that there was nothing else, just endless coils and coils of a serpent that stretched from horizon to horizon, in all directions.

"Yes," a voice said. She knew it well. "There is only me. Nothing else is here. Welcome, beloved."

She picked up Jeanne's sword, which had been lying next to the mast on board her ship since the last time she'd used it.

"This is unworthy of you," he said. "Of us. Did you not accept me, of your own free will? You love me!"

"I accepted myself," Vanessa said. "Not you."

"Who gave herself to me then," he asked, "whose blood did I drink, who felt more joy when we became one than she ever did among the pathetic people who never understood her?"

Incredibly, there was a true sense of hurt behind his bluster. It had been this vulnerability that had drawn her to him when he had been Alexander Sweet, that had served to convince her he truly did feel for her.

"Feel for you?" he asked. "I have loved you through all the millennia. I have waited for you to return to me longer than any man has for any other woman. There has never been a love such as mine, and you know it."

There was no lie in his words, and yet he was utterly wrong.

"I know that you believe it," Vanessa said. "Maybe Amunet did, too. But I am not her, if ever I was."

"You are," he insisted. "You are the Mother of Evil. That is what you have accepted."

She shook her head. "I am myself. Vanessa Ives. And Vanessa Ives does not stand by to see the innocents slaughtered."

A shudder ran through all the coils and her barge shook. It took her a moment to understand that he was laughing.

"But you love the slaughter, and those who kill," he said. "Your wolf kills every moon, and you love him for it. Your witch killed the unborn, and you loved her. And then there's him, the first you've loved, who you kept coming back to. How many did he kill, before he finally got around to his own flesh?"

That was the truth he'd recognized in her which he had caught her by before. She made herself face it, and acknowledge it. Then she thought of Ethan's kindness and determination to protect. She thought of Joan helping those who hated her, those who had cursed Joan for it. She thought of Malcolm holding her after they had returned from the Grand Guignol, the tears they'd both held back for so long moistening her face as she pressed it into the hollow of his throat.

"You never see the whole," Vanessa said. "You see the fragment, and you want to make me it. I am not, any more than Jeanne was, when you tried to do it to her - Gilles de Rais."

"She was but a shadow of you, Amunet," he replied. "There is no need to be jealous. I was always yours, as you are mine."

He truly was incapable of understanding anything outside of what he wanted to see. Even Malcolm at his worst had not been so blinkered. Was this a result of immortality? Well, she had not come to enlighten him. She'd come to end him. Her head ached as she tried to scan the masses roiling around her for something that could be his head.

"But you can't," he said. "Surely you know that by now. For all you've done, and all you've suffered, you can't. You've only delivered yourself to me again."

Her headache increased. It is mind, not matter, Vanessa told herself, but the pain would not go away, stabbed inside her as with arrows, and she began to get distracted while he continued: "You'll stay with me now, forever. I'd have preferred it on the other plane, for you were such a delightful creature of the flesh, Vanessa, and I enjoyed it so. But be that as it may. We're one now."

She fell down on her knees, and the voice, calling to her from all sides, trying to drown out everything else she could ever hear, roared: "Mine! Forever!"

"Mr. Clare," Vanessa whispered, for she had learned to listen for the quiet in the middle of the storm a long time ago.

There was a sound of lightning and of thunder, a crack through space and time in this realm where all else was him, and through it stepped her friend, who'd loved her in the white place where no shadows were. In his hands, he carried something that her mind formed into the book he'd once read her from, the brush he'd used, the mirror he had given her to find herself again. It was all of this, and was a flask containing acid, too.

"No," the eater of souls thundered, and the coils around her started to pull together, started to crash her barge despite her warding sigil.

There was no time for greetings, or for gratitude. "Quickly," Vanessa said, and pointed to her spoils, which she had put together under the mast. He started to pour out his flask on them while the ship began to break apart, then asked: "But where is the twelfth?"

"All around us," she said. The acid dissolved the items, started to eat into what remained of the paper floor, and then the rest of the ship broke apart as the coils pressed into it. Vanessa held Jeanne's sword in one of her hands while John Clare's hand, with his inhuman strength, held onto her other arm. All the other relics and the ship were now gone while the coils started to draw around the two of them, would soon crush them. But not kill them. No. They would continue to exist like this forever.

She would not let this happen to her friend. She would not let this happen to herself.

In his free hand, John Clare still had the flask with the rest of the acid in it. She imagined it a jacket with long strings and cords, like the one she had to wear at the hospital, only this time it was so large it was wrapping itself around both of them, not like a binding but like an armour, protecting them. She imagined it as a sheath around her sword, drenching the sharp silver in its bite. She imagined it becoming one with the sword, as her scorpion sigil had become one with her. And then, with all power that was in her, had been, and would ever be, she pushed the sword into the serpent's body.

Such is my power, Vanessa thought. Such is my kiss.

The world exploded around them.