Chapter Seven Horror is a contextual thing. Hammamiya lay in ruins, black smoke rolling off its remains. Its citizens bobbed face down in the river, bloated, jammed-up feasts for crocodiles. The stink of the place sickened the refugees and the blood from it sickened the already wilted land. But misery comes in worse packages, as the fugitives from Set soon learned. Across the river, almost within sight of the stricken city, Badari thrived. Boats ran, the waterside market was filled with crowd...

Sanni was ready to go. Her children were rested, and so might walk a while on their own. Yesterday her arms had flamed by evening as she carried first one and then the other baby away from the corpse of Mahasna. She had ignored their laments of tired feet and hungry bellies until they were miles from the burned-out town. The girls had complained too stridently to feel her consuming fear; they hadn’t noticed the hints of death peeking from still-smoking doorways. Hordedev was a different matte...

Qebera struggled up yet another dune, the sand shifting under his weight, as supportive, he cursed, as water. He glanced over his shoulder to where they ought to be and, yes, they pursued him, two dunes back, though their numbers seemed fewer than the last time he’d checked. Maybe they planned some ruse to ensnare him, a flanking effort to get around front. It didn’t matter, not anymore. He was far beyond strategy. That luxury had deserted him two days back when he had lost his men to a Setim...

The next several days were a hemorrhage of grief for Abydos. After Set’s initial attack, several ships out of Abu Simbel docked at the city’s moorings and disgorged their Setim cargoes. The invaders had been anchored miles upstream, and beset the city like some awful communal nightmare. They set aflame the great temple of Osiris and smashed every altar erected to him in every house and in every street. The workman-clerics of those altars were dragged from their homes and gutted, their familie...

Isis Wept, Chapter 3 Isis staggered, almost collapsing. She had been walking the edge of her roof, a moment’s self-collection after just returning home. If not for her attending priestess, she might have fallen to the courtyard below. “Goddess!” Merferet gasped, hauling her queen from the precipice. She quickly, contritely, released Isis’s arms. “Goddess, forgive me! Are you all right?” Isis settled to the mudbrick roof. She trembled, and her body ran with sweat. “I felt something,” she said,...

Isis Wept, Chapter 2 Abydos hummed with activity. The barter shops did brisk business, the boats ran, and the priests performed their frequent rituals. But Osiris himself had come to his home, so the streets were packed with gawking pilgrims. They came to the temple for the scheduled rituals. They came between chores, in the midst of chores, tools still in hand, and from the idle luxury of noble villas. Most were strangers to Abydos the city, but Abydos the kingdom extended far up and down th...

The queen’s bed was huge, its mattress stuffed with soft, beaten flax and padded with layers of linen. There she renewed her marital union with vigor enough to kill a mere human. But, these were gods, with all the capacity that birthright implied. And they were, after all, in love. Osiris lay on his back, his fingers intertwined behind his head. He was satisfied for now, so he carefully avoided looking at his wife, as the sight of her scalded him with desire. He watched the ceiling thoughtful...

The procession was unpretentious considering the king at its heart. Osiris walked the river promenade with a wooden smile and a randomly waving arm, the obligatory monarch on parade. The high priest and a dozen assistants forged ahead, clearing the crowd from the street and tossing out flower petals by the handful. Qebera walked to Osiris’s left and a slight pace behind. Set strolled to his brother’s right, paying the humans as much mind as he would to weeds on the roadside. Eight of Qebera’s...

Isis hurried to the roof of her apartments when she learned of her husband’s return. From there she could see beyond the palace enclosure to the tree-shaded western bank of the Nile. She would glimpse him there, no doubt, amid a telltale crowd of adoring subjects. Osiris was order, he was enlightenment; to emerge from the throat of the wild desert was poetry of a sort. Isis thrilled at her husband’s homecoming, so unexpected after so many months. She missed his laughter; it was food to her, a...