Leaving Maatkare’s compound with a slightly lighter heart, Heshtat set off out of the city. While the task was still daunting, knowing that he had his old friend with him—something of a mentor, even, in those early years at least—settled his nerves. He once more had someone reliable by his side to watch his back.

  Now, he needed more specific expertise, and that unfortunately come with a much less reliable personality attached. Still, Neferu was good at what she did, and she did a great many things, so it would only behove him to recruit her.

  She was Maatkare’s former apprentice, back when he had been a tomb-raider rather than a humble teacher. She’d caught the disease that the lust for ancient treasure so clearly was, and had spent the last year running around beneath Amansi’s obscuring sands in the hunt for lost history. And, it could not be downplayed, treasure.

  Maatkare had kept in touch with her more reliably than Heshtat had, and he’d pointed him towards a tomb close to Idib city that she was currently delving. Close was a relative term though, and thirty miles through the sun-drenched desert would take him far too long under his own power. So it was that he found himself cutting across town to reach the stables on the outskirts.

  He grunted a greeting to Antep, the stablemaster, on arrival. He was a tall man, thin enough to verge on emaciated, and yet the animals seemed to tolerate him well enough. Perhaps they simply feared his whip, but there were some creatures that you couldn’t control with fear alone and the old man wasn’t dead yet, so he must have some secret way about him.

  The stables housed the usual fair; horses and camels, alpacas and donkeys, even a few oxen for rent to the poorer farmers that needed help during the harvest. But the reason Heshtat came to Antep’s stables and not one of the other half dozen that bordered the city was because he also traded in a far rarer type of beast.

  “Back so soon?” Antep asked with a scowl when Heshtat ducked under the wooden doorframe—surprisingly low for a store owned by one so tall.

  “It’s been nearly a year, you old bastard,” Heshtat replied, matching the man’s scowl with his own. “Are you truly so sad to see me?”

  “What d’ya think?”

  “Well,” Heshtat said, dragging out the word as he pulled a hand from behind his back and held it out to the man. “I think this might change your mind.”

  In his raised fist, he clutched the swooping neck of a slender clay jug, black glyphs smeared around the lip with flecks of gold paint to give it vibrancy. He smiled as he watched the stablemaster’s eyes snap to the gift, and Heshtat made sure to waggle it back and forth a few times to get the liquid within to slosh about some. He was half expecting the crochety man to start salivating at the sound.

  Antep eventually flicked his gaze back to Heshtat, narrowing his eyes as he did so. “What d’ya want?”

  “Shuti. Just the one, and I’ll return it within the day, but I need to get to Sendar’s Point before noon, and there’s only one way that’s happening.”

  “Aye, on your budget at least,” Antep remarked sourly. “Fine! But I’ll take this,” he said, swiping the jug from Heshtat’s outstretched hand before continuing. “And I’ll consider our debt wiped clean.”

  ***

  Heshtat turned his gaze back to the ravine, and the structure that hid within.

  It had only taken a couple of hours to traverse the great dunes that bordered Idib given his mount, but the sun was already scorching. The shuti—a spiritual cousin to the humble ostrich, but larger and with a far more carnivorous temperament—had born him over the dunes with a grace and speed that he could only envy, and while it had taken a few swipes at him here and there with its wickedly curved beak, he was familiar enough with the creatures to avoid any injuries.

  Giving the leather-wrapped hilt of his khopesh a firm squeeze for comfort, he dismounted and stretched. A few hours riding an overgrown bird may be preferable to a trek of thirty miles across scorching dunes under his own power, but that didn’t mean it was painless. The shuti snorted as if reacting to his thoughts, its flat nose flaring and emitting a disturbingly deep clicking sound, like drums in the deep. Heshtat sighed and gave the creature an affectionate scratch on the neck.

  “Many thanks for your strength, my friend,” he muttered quietly, receiving a soft headbutt for his troubles. “I’ll be back in a few hours. Have your fun, but don’t wander too far.”

  Another sonorous croak, reminding Heshtat of the gators found so often floating in shaded spots near the banks of the Nikea, and then the shuti was off. Great wings flared and beat at the air as two scaled legs propelled it up the steep wall of the ravine, until it reached the empty sands above, and the promise of prey on an open horizon.

  Heshtat watched it go, thoughts a whirl. It had looked so free in those final moments, cresting the sheer red rock and scarpering off across golden sands, wings spread wide to disperse its weight. But he’d also caught the wink of steel flashing as buckles on its harness caught the sun. Free, but only for a time. Only for a task, before it would be yanked back to the stables and imprisoned once more.

  Shaking away the errant thoughts, he turned back to his goal, descending further into the canyon.

  It did not take long to find the tomb. High on one cliff with zig-zag steps cut into the sandstone and pillars carved from the soft rock, it was an impressive and hard to miss sight. Dominating the cliff face, the entrance was easily a hundred feet high with nine pillars worked to resemble the Ennead—the nine-fold pantheon worshipped throughout Amansi—in loving detail. Falcon-headed Haruw stood side by side with the elephant-headed Nebet, each detail rendered with the aching precision that Amansi’s architecture was famous for the world over. The pillars were topped with upraised bowls brushed with gold paint, casting each into a torch with a corona of blazing yellow crowning the various depictions of the major gods.

  He climbed the steps beneath the holy structure, wincing as he reached the top and took in the jagged fall behind him. He was no stranger to heights—none who had regularly traversed the halls of power could be, given the ridiculous tendency that seemingly all humans had to build them so tall and grand—but there was a practical concern with this tomb.

  If he needed to sprint out of the entrance like the Desolate Hordes themselves were on his tail, then it would prove inconvenient to navigate the steps as he did so. A fall to the death might be preferable to being torn apart by hungering wraiths driven by an anger beyond mortal comprehension… but it still wasn’t optimal. And given who he was here to meet, it may very well end with him running for his life. It somehow always did when Neferu was involved.

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  Turning back to face the entrance of the tomb, he spent time examining the inscriptions and hieroglyphs worked into the stone. Mostly the standard fare, as with the tomb he had raided for Sensuret’s prize so recently, but this was of a grander scale. The hieroglyphs were more complex, and while he was no expert, he thought he could make out the hints of apotropaic magic hidden in the patterns of ancient script. It was a delicate art, and one he didn’t fully understand, but there was a whisper of that protection magic present.

  Not a good sign. Nebet was the god most closely tied with that obscure school of magic, and it suggested that something may lie buried within the earth that would be best left entombed.

  “Neferu,” he whispered to himself. “Why is it always the eldritch and ancient with you?”

  The wind gave him no answer, and Heshtat squared his shoulders before stepping inside. The transition from midday sun to gloom was abrupt, and he felt it keenly.

  “Neferu?” he called out, hoping to catch the woman leaving, her task fulfilled and a jaunty tune on her lips. Only his own echo greeted him though, and as his voice bounced around the looming pillars that lined the entrance hallway, Heshtat wished he had kept his mouth shut.

  He saw a satchel beside an unrolled canvas on the ground nearby and squinted. He recognised the tool bag as belonging to his versatile friend. It was full of lockpicks, measures and weights, chisels, small hammers, protractors and strings and all manner of arcane tools. One enchanted tuning fork measured the spiritual weight within an object or area through sympathetic vibration, and that was probably the simplest of her magical artifacts.

  That plain canvas carrying case—little more than a tent with pockets sewn into it and rolled up tightly—was Neferu’s pride and joy. For the woman to have left it here, at the entrance of a relatively well-known tomb near a major population centre… It did not make sense. The woman was carefree to a fault, and her reckless nature made many suspect her to be a fool, but Heshtat knew her better than that. She was a meticulous planner and a careful hand with her tools. She was not the type to leave such valuables lying around within reach of strangers.

  … Which meant she had left in a hurry. That didn’t bode well for her safety. Nor Heshtat’s, for that matter. Footsteps lead from the bundle of provisions off towards the back of the room, the dust that had laid patient for likely many long decades disturbed by the soles of his friend’s sandals.

  “Neferu…” he cursed under his breath once more.

  Still, he had a task to do. The grand hall gave way to a single passage heading deeper into the cliff, and Heshtat started forwards. With each step away from the open air, the shadows lengthened. The walls closed in around him, narrow as two men walking abreast. It soon became too dark for an unawakened like himself to see, so he lit a torch he’d snatched from his friend’s canvas bag, holding it aloft in his off hand.

  The light of the flame flickered and danced off the walls, illuminating the many-hued carvings and turning the dark tunnel into one lined with gold, red and blue. The ancients had always been a fan of colour, and while the modern people of Amansi copied them as best they could with rich dyes from Sasskania and jewels mined from the sky-isles of Helexios, they could not quite match the vibrancy of stonework that was present when the gods walked the earth.

  Tombs like these, ancient even at the time of the Desolation, held an otherworldly beauty in the light of the day. In the darkness, with nothing but the wan flame of a single torch to repel the shadows, they took on an altogether different tone.

  He’d once asked Neferu why she chose a profession that required so much time in these eldritch places, and her answer had been wistful. “Each of Amansi’s tombs is a doorway to the past. A portal to a time of wonder, when the Other and the Waking were conjoined, when the gods strode the sands and the people worshipped for free. For a woman of my means, this is the closest I can get to the great mysteries of both realms.”

  Heshtat did not have the same feelings of fondness for the dreamscape of the Otherworld that his friend seemed to. His last memories of the Other were of dust and blood, gnashing teeth and slavering jaws, screams and claws and roars and shattered dreams.

  He continued on until he reached the end of the hallway where it opened out once more. Into what exactly, he could not tell, but as he stepped forwards to find out, the soft slap of his sandalled feet against the dusty stone was interrupted by a slight sucking sound. He looked down and felt the hairs on the back of his arms prickle. Lifting his foot, he saw the smear of blood, now bearing his footprint.

  The grisly trail continued before him, patters of blood every few feet combining with centuries of dust to form congealed crimson blobs that set Heshtat’s heart to thrumming. He slowly turned back, seeing no blood behind him, and a quick inspection of the hallway around him showed no splash or splatter marks either. Just a few trickles on the floor wending away into the darkness ahead.

  No confrontation then. Neferu was a flamboyant woman, but she knew how to use her many daggers and she was meticulous in her preparation for a tomb dive. Even caught off guard, she would put up more of a fight than the evidence suggested.

  Gods, how he wished he could examine the magical skein of this world. A single glimpse into the Other would tell him far more about what had transpired here than his pitiful deductions could piece together. He was too weak for this.

  Both of them were little more than babes when faced with the monsters and traps that could lurk within these ancient places, but at least Neferu had a few magical tricks and the power of three awakened aspects on her side, even if she hadn’t advanced any past the initiate level. She might not have been much of a warrior, but an awakened soul could bridge unexpected gaps.

  An unawakened mortal, however, was a different story. For perhaps the hundredth time this year, Heshtat cursed his shattered soul. He longed once more for that strength, that glorious power that had once filled him. Even a single awakened aspect could be transformational. But then again… even as a trifold adept, it hadn’t been enough then. Why should it be any different now?

  Good point, that. Hard to argue.

  He squeezed the hilt of his khopesh, then thought better of it and drew an axe from the loop at his waist. The short-hafted Hyksos-style hatchet was better suited to the tight confines of the hallway, and the extra weight at the head gave him a measure of comfort. He didn’t usually carry both weapons openly in the streets of Idib, but one would be foolish to travel into the lonely desert without a proper armament. And despite his sister’s words last night, Heshtat was no fool.

  He squared his shoulders and continued on, following the trail of blood deeper into darkness. Whatever comfort his weapon had brought him abruptly vanished when he reached the hole in the floor. Rather than even stone slabs, there was a gaping pit some twenty feet across. Perhaps it was simply subsidence, but the children of Amin-Ra were known for one thing above all others: architectural brilliance. A tomb didn’t stand proud for a thousand years only to fall to disrepair when a single daring tomb-raider entered.

  Not to mention the streaks of dust and blood around the lip of that hole. Despite how much he fervently hoped it wasn’t the case, Heshtat was imagining only one scenario. A body dragged over the edge, scrabbling against the smooth stone as it was pulled deeper into the earth. He fancied he could even see a few handprints in amongst the crimson smears.

  Which begged the question, if his friend had indeed been dragged down into the earth… what was doing the dragging?

  He raised his torch once more, examining the hieroglyphs carved with devotion over every spare inch of wall. He thought once more of Cleo and her warning—that the True Thrones were marshalling their forces, that a mythical artifact had been uncovered. How many other ancient secrets lay buried beneath the uncountable sands of Amansi? And how many were even now stirring in their ancient tombs?

  “Neferu, you fool,” he whispered once more, as he gazed down into the yawning abyss before him. There was nothing he wanted to do less than descend. But Heshtat was not a man to give up on duty—he needed his friend. And from what he had seen so far, his friend needed him, too.