LIII

THE SANCTUM OF KA IS a marvel of massive, brightly painted columns that support a roof almost eighty feet above, and form a central row that extends at least two hundred ahead. Past them to my left and right, the polished-smooth obsidian that forms the outer walls is met by equally tall white stone internal ones, every inch of the latter decorated, the reliefs of enormous statues carved between pillars. A high window to the north allows the light from Ka’s pyramid to flow down into the space, pouring richly off inlaid glyphs of gold and precious stones.

I am not often impressed by such things, but its immediate grandeur is hard to ignore. Perhaps not as tall or as refined, but in many ways, more overwhelming than anything the Catenans ever built with Will. This feels crafted to impress not only with beauty but also the thought of how many hours, how many men, it must have taken to construct.

And in its very centre—pulsing a startling gold—is an Aurora Columnae.

More than anything else, it’s the sight of that which brings me to a halt. Partly from surprise, partly from the instinctive anxiety it invokes. The sudden itching that stretches across the old stripes along my back. The light emanating from the obelisk’s symbols is bright, far brighter than my memory of the one at Letens. Perhaps they are different in this world, just as Will itself is. It would make sense, I suppose.

I, fortunately, am not the only one to stop and stare. Many of the dancers with me have not been here before either, and from Zai’s expression, admiration is an expected rite of passage. “This is where I leave you,” she announces to the group. “You have a few minutes to familiarise yourself with the space. Introduce yourself to some of the guests. After that, you will be needed in the preparation area through that arch.” She points out the one she means. “Do not be late, or you will not be paid.”

With that she departs, her stern expression melting as she spots someone to whom she actually wishes to talk.

The other dancers expectedly continue to ignore me; I allow myself to fade to the back of the group and then detach entirely, slipping away as they’re still gaping around in wonder. The Sanctum is not just this space but the entire vast inner network of structures surrounding Ka’s pyramid; several archways lead to hallways or connecting rooms, but fortunately Netiqret has told me exactly where I need to go. I keep to the sides and blend in as best I can. If I had concerns that my attire would make staying unnoticed difficult, I needn’t have worried. Entertainers and outlandishly inadequate clothing are everywhere. I stand out no more than anyone else.

I slip through the crowd, politely fending off some uncomfortably straying hands, and then make for the right-most archway to the north. No one stops me.

This isn’t the way Netiqret told me to go, but it is one I made her sketch out when I insisted on knowing every detail of the layout in here.

And I still have a few minutes before she expects to meet me.

The tall corridors angling toward the Pyramid of Ka are soon echoing with the absence of life; fifty-foot-high obelisks line my way, no roof above to prevent the pulsing pyramid ahead from dominating the remainder of what I can see. I hurry with cautious purpose, ready to give the excuse of a dancer who has lost their way, but there’s no one. Just the unease of intruding alone through an impossibly vast space.

And then there’s a darker section marring my path, the end of the long open corridor of columns, and I hear it.

My stomach drops. The stones reflect green ahead, the wide offshoot of the Infernis acting as a moat between me and the pyramid’s sheer obsidian walls, and I can already feel the low thrum pressing against my ears. Those far walls shimmer to my sight, flicker and fade. They slide directly upward from the green-tinted water’s edge and where the poison touches, steam rises, giving the polished stone a beaded, impossibly slick surface. Even from here, a few hundred feet away, the fumes burn my lungs.

An enclosed bridge crosses the gap ahead. Triangular but far larger than those beneath the city, fifty feet on all three sides and completely, utterly dark. No lines of illumination to guide the way through. An absence of light from its far side, too.

Thrum. No time to hesitate; I take step after reluctant step forward, peering into the yawning passage in front of me, pushing myself against the instinctive terror of that sound. The golden glow everywhere makes the blackness of the tunnel harder to penetrate, but my straining eyes slowly pick out darker shapes as I approach. Lining the sloping walls. Suspended, somehow stacked atop one another.

A few more seconds, and I can see the blades that form their arms.

I stop. Breath short. Kiya said that entering the tunnel would trigger their wakening, and as she was right about their presence, I see no reason to disbelieve it. Vek. How many did she say? I can only see a few, but she claimed eighteen. Eighteen. All stronger and faster than me. Vek.

I study the flow of the moat. Nothing has changed, there. With my Vitaeria, maybe I could swim it. But getting over the wall would be another matter entirely. Too high, too smooth, and even if a climbing apparatus lasted through the acidic water, it wouldn’t survive contact with the mutalis.

My fists clench as I peer up at the golden light of the pyramid, bright enough that it stings my eyes. Gods. I’m so close.

I exhale my trembling frustration, turn, and hurry back.

No one marks my brief return to the main hall; I flit through the drunken laughter and soft music and through an archway to the east. The way here is as deserted as my first excursion, if not as grand: narrower corridors and smaller colonnades that lead out onto eerily empty courtyards, a few turns, and then I am faced with the yawning stairwell that Netiqret told me to watch for.

“You got through.” Netiqret detaches from the darkness of a nearby column.

“Yes,” I say, a little petulantly. “The assessor was very impressed with me.”

“She should have been, given how much I paid her. And then told her you were a struggling cousin who had been dropped repeatedly on his head as a child.”

“Hilarious.”

“The cousin part, yes. The payment part is true though.”

I glower. “You couldn’t just let me have it?”

“Some things are morally wrong to encourage, Siamun. Even by omission.” She gestures to the stairs. “Shall we?”

Behind her, there’s abruptly movement.

I flinch, hand straying for a weapon I don’t have, as a figure appears from the same shadows Netiqret had concealed herself within. My concern only abates a little as I recognise the small form, long braided hair looping over her face. “Gods. What is Kiya doing here?”

“We need her. Come on. We don’t have much time.”

I stay planted in place. “Need her for what?”

“Siamun. I have spent a great deal of capital in ensuring that this hallway is unattended, tonight. But we have minutes, not hours.” She stares at me with stony resolve, then starts ushering Kiya down the stairs.

I grit my teeth but, left with little choice, follow.

“There really won’t be any Overseers on guard?” I ask it to the back of her head as I descend. My voice echoes off the obsidian walls.

“Not down here. Any closer than the hallway above, and they can become unstable.”

“Unstable?”

Silence, then, “Dangerous. To the iunctii down here, as well as the living.”

I frown. Has Kiya told her this? Netiqret has been cagey about how she knows so much, but since my conversation with the small iunctus, I’ve suspected.

We come to the end of the stairs, which flatten out into a short corridor with a sealed obsidian door at the end. Netiqret shepherds Kiya over to it and then waits patiently as the young girl begins pointing out symbols around the doorframe, which Netiqret confidently presses. Not four or five as I’ve come to expect, but a full dozen in quick, careful succession, each one lighting up an ominous green.

And then the door folds away.

“This is the Nomarch,” says Netiqret, somewhat unnecessarily, as Kiya wanders unfazed ahead of her.

The hall before us is vast; for as far as my eyes can see, lines upon lines upon lines of prone bodies are arrayed, each one lying atop its own obsidian slab edged in pulsing green. They stretch away not only into the distance but upward for hundreds of feet as well, stacked atop one another on the ledges of parallel black walls that cut the space ahead into narrow pathways.

Every single one of the green-tinged forms, barely clad in strips of thin linen, is motionless. Eyes closed. As if they are sleeping.

“Clothed. Not stabbed. Maybe even still have their eyes. Could be worse,” I mutter uneasily to myself. Astounding in scope, undoubtedly. But not entirely unfamiliar.

Netiqret’s been watching me with a frown. “You’ve seen a Nomarch before?” Probably, I imagine, expecting a more perturbed reaction than this.

“No. Not exactly.” I keep gazing around, brow furrowed, trying to find where the lines of bodies end. I can’t. “It was smaller. A room… I don’t know. Still big, but tiny compared to this. There were a couple of hundred of iunctii in there, maybe.” I decide not to mention the blades, or the fact they were all naked and eyeless.

“Where?”

“In some old ruins. A long way from here.”

Netiqret looks fascinated, even as she urges me forward again, between the lines of bodies. “There are smaller Nomarchs in the other cities, but I’ve never heard of anything elsewhere. What did they do?”

I shake my head slowly. “I don’t know, exactly. My friend thought they were a kind of key, made to circumvent security made by Ka.”

“They must have been linked in somehow, then. At least tangentially integrated. Even a couple of hundred… that’s a complex system. Where did you say it was, exactly?”

“I didn’t. You seem to know a lot about it?”

Netiqret decides her secrets are more valuable than mine, and doesn’t answer. A strange, energetic air to her as she presses on, Kiya matching her pace at a stiff trot. “This hall houses the bulk of the iunctii down here,” she explains from in front of me as we hurry along. She moves with assurance, seems unaffected by our surrounds. “We have to get to the central chamber. The ib. There will only be a dozen or so in there.” Something about the last part sounds reluctant.

I watch her. Her nerves are revealing more than she wants, I suspect. She’s too thoughtless in her movements, too confident in the way she navigates.

She knows this place.

I’m not sure what to do with that information, just yet. But it’s more than I’ve had since we met.

It’s not long before an archway reflects dark emerald up ahead between the rows of the dead, set into an obsidian structure with a flat roof and sloping sides. Golden light spills from its interior, warm against the cool greens surrounding it. It’s ten feet high, if that. Perhaps thirty across. Beyond, I can see walls of eerily lit iunctii continuing to stretch away.

“The ib. These are the ones who can make a difference,” says Netiqret, her pace increasing. No hiding her eagerness, now.

We pass beneath the arch, into the enclosed space. More iunctii in here, but just as Netiqret says, far fewer. And the slabs on which they lie are lit in gold, rather than green.

I stumble to a stop as I take them in.

They’re all children.

“Why?” I take a half step toward the nearest, as if there was something I could do about it.

Netiqret quickly puts out a hand to stop me. “They’re more flexible, mentally. More capable of adapting and learning, taking on information and problem-solving in creative ways.”

Her voice is hollow as she says it, though.

I shiver as she bends to listen to a whisper from Kiya. The older woman hesitates, then nods. Points. “This one.”

A small boy with a shaven head. He cannot be more than six or seven. “Why him?”

“Because he is the one I’m telling you to use.”

I scowl, but arguing isn’t going to help at this point. My skin crawls as I approach the boy. His eyes are shut. He seems almost peaceful.

I touch his shoulder, and focus. Think about how terrified the boy must be. Trapped. Alone.

Nothing.

I frown. This has always worked on the Overseers. Could the boy be happy here, then? Or at least content? I try again. Still nothing.

I step back.

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know.” I lick my lips. Heart pounding. This isn’t the time for withholding. “I need a… point of commonality. Something I can relate to, in order to make the connection. With the Overseers, I usually use their sense of surprise or if that doesn’t work, being trapped. Somewhere deep down, they all seem to feel it. But this boy…”

Netiqret hesitates. “Try exhaustion,” she says quietly. “The worst, mind-numbing, wearying exhaustion you have ever experienced.”

She nods at my horrified glance. I grimace, then lay a hand on the boy’s shoulder once more. Think of my time training. The early days with Lanistia, those impossibly hard first mornings, injured and dragging myself from bed too soon, forcing my thoughts through the sludge of fatigue to prove myself. Again, and again, and again. As if it were never going to end.

Connection.

I snarl, snatch my hand away and immediately lose my link at the abrupt, chaotic flood of information. Random images flashing in unbearably rapid succession. Faces and names and details but passing like water through a sieve, impossible to grasp, impossible to focus upon. This is nothing like what I’m used to, nor anything like the thoughts of a normal person. They’re too specific and too fast, not ordered in a way I can understand. Just a flickering, haphazard torrent of knowledge.

“Did it work?”

“Sort of. He’s…” I stare at the boy. “His mind’s different.”

Netiqret frowns. “How so?”

“I don’t know. It’s chaos. When I do this, normally I only get a sense of what they’re feeling. What they’re feeling in the moment. But this was… information.” I trail off. The dismay in my voice isn’t feigned.

“Can you command him?”

“I don’t know.” I swallow. Close my eyes and brace myself. The connection comes easily this time; the wild rush of images is still a shock but I’m ready for its impact. Like having a thousand people screaming dissonantly at me. Awful, disorienting to the point of painful. But plenty of my time at the Academy, especially in the higher classes, was spent learning techniques to deal with mental disruption. I withstand it.

“Tell him to add us to the list of Ka’s chief priests.” Netiqret’s voice is distant through the maelstrom.

“I’m still trying to connect properly.” How do I get rid of the Gleaners in the tunnel entrance to the Pyramid of Ka?

Images. Forced into my mind, too many to process, too many to handle. People screaming. Gleaners lit gold as they swarm from the tunnel. Explosions somewhere in the west, shouts and clashes of steel in the east. Flames and crumbling stone and blood. A hot knife through my brain. I groan and stagger back, palms against my temples, losing my connection to the iunctus a second time.

“Are you alright?” Netiqret’s concerned. More for our wasting time than for me, I’d wager.

“It’s fine.” I straighten, the pain behind my eyes easing. It’s not fine. Perhaps there was a useful response somewhere in all of that, but I need plain answers. Something I can use. I touch the boy’s shoulder a third time. Grit my teeth as I connect once again. “How do I get past the Gleaners in the tunnel to the Pyramid of Ka?”

“What?” I can hear Netiqret’s confusion and mounting anger in the single word, but I’m focused on the iunctus.

He opens his eyes. They are blue and lifeless and focused on me. “Avoiding detection is impossible.”

“Can I kill them?”

“Impractical.”

“Siamun.” Netiqret, interrupting again. Purely angry this time, but we both know she’s in no position to do anything about this. The more she delays me, the longer she has to wait for what she wants.

I ignore her. “Then can I clear them out, somehow? What would cause them to leave?”

“They are secondarily tasked for emergency defence. They are activated to eliminate existential threats.”

I swallow. “What would such a threat entail?”

“Significant structural damage to the city. Disruption of primary processes or defence. The last instance of complete activation was six hundred and forty-two years ago.”

Six hundred and forty-two years. Vek. “What was it caused by?”

“Destruction of the original filtration system. Gleaners were deployed for protection, and then the prevention of riots during the subsequent panic and drought.”

“So they prioritise the welfare of the city over protecting Ka?”

“Yes.”

“Will Ka intervene if he thinks he is being threatened?”

“Ka sleeps. He would be unaware.”

Interesting. “Can you create a disaster big enough to draw them out?”

“I cannot.”

“That’s enough, Siamun.” I feel steel rest across my throat, vaguely surprised that Netiqret let me fire out as many questions as I just managed. “You tell him to add us to the records as chief priests. And Kiya as a living child. Now.”

She’s got no bargaining power here, but the edge to her voice is more worrying than the one against my skin. There’s something desperate about it, raw and furious and manic.

“Alright.” I make certain to keep still. She won’t kill me yet. Not until she has what she wants. “Forget anything you currently know about myself, or these other two here. Then, for as long as you’ve seen me alive within the past month, have myself and her be identified as chief priests, and her as a living child, to any iunctii checking on us.” I point as I say the words; the boy’s dull blue eyes roll to follow my gestures and take in the faces, though his head never twitches. “And forget anything you currently know about Ahmose al Maq. Register him as a Westerner with full access to the east.”

“Take out the provision, Siamun.” A catch to Netiqret’s voice. The blade pushes at my throat. I feel a slow trickle down my neck.

“No.”

A hiss of air releasing between her teeth that admits she has no play here, and the pressure relents. “Then tell him to remove the changes made by Kiya’s time in the Nomarch.” Kiya is suddenly being ushered forward to stand next to me. “Tell him to restore her mind.”

“What? Is that even…” I glance around in confusion, my link to the blue-eyed iunctus fragile as its torrent of images continues to assault me. Through it, though, I see Netiqret’s eyes. See the ready blade in her hand. Vek. This is why she’s here. “Alright. I’ll try.”

I focus back. Thinking furiously. Kiya was once in here, evidently. There’s an ache to Netiqret’s voice, a desperation leaking through. How long has she been trying to get in here and do this? Kiya has to be a relative. Her daughter? If that’s the case, though, then she was killed… at least a decade ago. Likely longer.

Rotting gods.

“Restore Kiya to the way she was before she was part of the Nomarch. Restore her mind.”

“That cannot be done.”

Silence, and then, “Try again.” Netiqret’s voice is almost a whisper.

I do. The wording slightly different, the intent the same. It elicits an identical response. Kiya just stands there absently, staring down into the mirror of the iunctus, arms hanging loosely by her sides. Netiqret is next to her. Holding her hand. Smoothing her braids out of her face. “Again.”

“Netiqret—”

“Again, Siamun. Word it differently. Tell it to reverse the effects, this time.”

I do, to the same response. I gaze at the boy sadly. Breath short as I battle to maintain the connection. Through the chaos of his thoughts—if that’s what they can even be called—I can feel his profound, unending exhaustion.

And then the iunctus to the right—a girl, maybe eight or nine years old—opens her eyes and stares at the roof.

“Netiqret. It’s not working. We have to go.” I focus again on the boy. “Forget every question I’ve asked here. Forget our presence.”

“No. No. They said it would work,” she counters in soft, disbelieving frustration.

I look at her, and for a moment I forget what she was likely planning to do to me. Her expression is lost. Sick with a shock that I don’t think is entirely unexpected, no matter what she says.

She had faith this would work, because the alternative was unfathomable to her.

“Breach,” whispers the second iunctus, her brown eyes still staring glassily upward.

The other children’s eyes snap open. The golden light around us fades to a throbbing, virulent red. And then every eye rolls and focuses on me. Just me. As if Netiqret and Kiya did not exist.

“Breach,” they whisper together, eyes lifeless and glinting crimson.

Oh, vek. “Stop the alarm. Forget anything was wrong.”

“Breach.”

I release my connection. “It’s over. We need to go.”

“We need to try again. We won’t get another chance.”

“Breach.”

My heart drops at the manic desperation in her voice. I don’t want to abandon her and Kiya. I cannot imagine what she’s been through to get here. And more practically, if she’s caught, she knows too much.

“Breach.”

“We can try again, Netiqret,” I lie into the red beneath the chillingly intent stares. “Try something different. Once we’re out.” I edge around her and Kiya.

“Breach.”

“We’ll never get back in here. Not now.” She turns to continue facing me, but doesn’t release Kiya’s hand. The young girl hasn’t reacted to what’s going on around us at all, as far as I can tell. “Siamun, you need to—”

I run.

“SIAMUN!” She screams it after me but I don’t look back; I’m faster than her and more than that, I don’t believe she’ll leave Kiya to chase me. No sound but the panting of my breath, nothing to see but the red-drenched, open-eyed iunctii. “Breach.” My feet slap against stone. “Breach.”

Then there’s the way up ahead and I take the ruby-tinged stairs two at a time. No sign of anyone, iunctii or otherwise, coming down yet. My mind strains after the map Netiqret drilled into me. There is only the one way out of the Sanctum, and if I’m compromised—if the Nomarch just saw my face, as I suspect it did—then the Overseers will know exactly who to look for.

I spill out of the stairwell into the shadows of the colonnade. The cavernous space echoes with the screams and laughter of festivities continuing in the distance, apparently uninterrupted by the alarm we’ve raised.

I stop, just for a second. Catch my breath and think. The Nomarch said that it was unable to create a distraction large enough to draw out the Gleaners.

Still.

I jog cautiously, only once having to hide as a group of priests—I think they’re priests, not iunctii—hurry past my concealing shadows, muttering to one another in anxious low tones. It doesn’t take long for me to reach the enormous open path to the triangular tunnel, the warm glow of the pyramid blinding as it looms up ahead.

My heart sinks as I reach the short shadow of the tunnel entrance and my eyes reluctantly adjust. Nothing’s changed. Dark forms still hang on the wall, dormant and silent and ready to wake the moment I step foot on that obsidian bridge. The intrusion into the Nomarch doesn’t seem to have disturbed a single one of them.

I turn to go back to the main hall—if I can find the woman who let us in the secret entrance, it stands to reason I can force her to let me out again—and spot the Overseer.

The black-clad woman is distant, at least a hundred feet away, and I’d be little more than a silhouette against Ka’s Pyramid. But she’s running. A dead sprint, directly at me.

It takes only a breath to realise that even if I can make physical contact with her, it won’t be before she registers who I am. And that, in turn, will tell the Nomarch exactly what I can do.

I dive into the nearest passageway, and run.

Left. Right. Skidding around corners but I don’t know where I’m going, have no idea what this section of the Sanctum even is. I can hear the sound of pursuit. Not gaining, but not falling behind. My heart pounds through my chest. Reminding me of the Labyrinth, but at least there I had some façade of control. I simply can’t escape like this. Any turn now could reveal no path forward, and my end.

Another left, and there’s a window in the obsidian. Three feet wide, maybe. I slide to a halt. The Infernis flows below. About twenty feet to the sliver of riverbank that separates obsidian and poison.

Footsteps behind me, too loud.

I scramble up onto the ledge, squeeze through, and slide off the edge.

It’s an awkward, clumsy fall in my haste; my stomach is in my throat and then I’m hitting barren soil and stone, pain jolting through my body despite my best efforts to brace. I fling myself back, away from the green-tinted water, lungs immediately scalding from my proximity to it. Then I stumble to my feet, propping myself against the smooth surface of the temple wall. Inches from the acid that flows through Duat’s veins.

A thud, dull and heavy, behind me.

I turn to find the Overseer already stalking toward me. Ten paces away. The bank is too sloped and narrow to run.

Before I can fear enough to stop myself, I step into the river.

My breath is a hissing escape as fiery pain immediately consumes my legs. It’s like the skin is burning; I groan and risk a glance down, almost weeping, but there’s no blistering. The Vitaeria concealed around my upper thigh at work. They do not stop the agony.

And then the Overseer is upon me.

I fend off grasping, clawing hands as they try to haul me out of the poison. Resist the urge to command it, my ability even now far too great an advantage to expose. It is smaller than me but its eyes are completely black, and I can feel imbued strength behind each touch.

And yet my efforts in blocking it still, somehow, seem to be effective.

My mind clears enough to manoeuvre. I stagger forward, swat away a punch and get in one strike. Two. It’s dazed. Reeling. I get in a third before it can recover and then grab its shoulder. Swivel. Wrench.

It loses its footing.

The thundering splash peppers me with agonising droplets everywhere lower than my neck, but I ignore it, determined now. The Overseer’s eyes are wide with shock and pain as it struggles, flails. I lunge. Crouch in the water and, snarling at the agony coursing through me, force it beneath the surface.

The water excoriates my hands, the waves of the Overseer’s thrashing flicking it up almost to my neck. I moan but steel myself, keep exerting pressure on its shoulders. It kicks and slips on the slick surface beneath the poison. I weep and push harder. Through the fire, something changes beneath my fingers.

And then I’ve lost my grip. The Overseer has slipped away somehow. There is black clouding the clear green.

I barely stop myself from retching as I raise my hands to find masses of red, blistered flesh oozing between my fingers. What is left of the Overseer’s shoulders.

With a wordless wail the iunctus surfaces in a final, desperate shower of acid. Its face is drooping, suppurated and boil-covered. I can see bone where the flesh and muscle from my grasp came away.

And then it expires. Subsides and slumps and becomes an incoherent black shape beneath the surface.

I’m too pained to do anything but tremble and wipe my skin vainly against my sheer attire, watching the cloth flake away wherever I touch. I’m beyond lucky I didn’t go any deeper, I realise shakily; my Vitaeria may have survived, but the thin straps holding them against my thigh would have undoubtedly dissolved in short order.

I gather myself enough to glance around, then up at the window through which I came. No sign of anyone, not yet, but the Overseer would have communicated where we were. Would have communicated my face.

Distantly, the sounds of revelry continue.

I stagger in the green light of the Infernis, the golden glow of Ka’s pyramid a mocking sun above. I can see the bridge a little way away. I know where I am.

I take a breath. Two. Temporarily force back the disaster of the night; my anonymity is gone and my task harder than ever, but right now I just need to find refuge. There are plenty of ways to escape the riverbank, once I navigate around the temple walls. And there is a tunnel not too far. With some fortune, I may just be able to make it before the Overseers intercept me.

To the faint strains of joyful music, I stagger my way back into the heart of Duat.