Slayer of Gods Read online

  It was so late that no one was around the well, except Beauty. She joined the goose beside the well and saw that her pet was feasting on crumbled fig bread. Someone had been careless.

  Beauty was almost finished eating. Satet tried to pick up a piece of the fig bread, but the goose nipped at her fingers and honked.

  “Naughty girl!”

  As she bent to try again, she heard something behind her. Satet turned her head only to encounter a moving shadow. It swooped at her, and her head burst into dazzling pain. Beauty screeched and flapped her wings when Satet fell beside her. The bird scuttled out of the way before her owner hit the ground. Dazed, aware of little but the agony in her head, Satet felt her body leave the ground. She opened her eyes, glimpsed the yawning blackness beyond the spiral stairs leading to the base of the well, and felt her body drop. She cried out as her head banged against the side of the well. Darkness deeper than that of the well enveloped her as she hit the water.

  In the street above, Beauty the goose fussed and flapped and attacked bare toes. She honked and launched herself out of the way when her assailant tried to bash her with a long-handled weapon. The blow landed on packed earth with a crack. Beauty spread her wings, sprang into the air, and flew out of reach. The attacker cursed the goose, looked over the edge of the well at the body floating in the water, and faded into the shadows.

  Meren rose from his bed and shoved aside the sheer curtains that hung from the frame surrounding it. The vent in the roof caught the night breeze and funneled it into the room as he listened to the quiet. In a house this size, with its gardens, kitchens, stables, barracks, and servant’s quarters, silence was a rarity. He fumbled around until his hand met a table of cedar inlaid with ivory. Using it to steady himself, Meren cursed quietly.

  An old nightmare had torn him from sleep as it had many times since his eighteenth year. Usually his own gasps and moans jolted him to consciousness while at the same time pain lanced through his wrist. Now he turned his face to the cool wind issuing from the vent and gulped in air. He tried to calm the racing voice of his heart. Sweat covered his body, and he shivered. In the darkness his fingers searched out the scar on his wrist; it always hurt after he had the dream.

  In the night vision he was back in Horizon of the Aten, and his father had just been executed for refusing to abandon the old gods in favor of the pharaoh Akhenaten’s new one, the Aten, who was the sun disk. It had been midday, but the city had fallen silent in the way that small creatures do when they sense the presence of a predator. Meren was alone in his house except for a few servants, and his father hadn’t been dead more than a few days. Without warning shouts broke the unnatural silence, and Akhenaten’s guards burst in and dragged him into the streets.

  They took him to a cell near the palace. For days they’d beaten him and asked questions to which he had no answer, certain he was a traitor to pharaoh’s new religion. Suspicion had become a sickness with Akhenaten, for Egypt refused to believe in the Aten and clung to the old gods who had created and governed her for thousands of years. As the firstborn son of a traitor, Meren was suspected of aiding the rebellious priests of Amun, the king of the old gods.

  After days of starvation and beatings, he hadn’t cared when his tormentors came into his cell to kill him. He lay on the floor, naked, his wounds caked with dirt, his vision blurred with sweat, and watched several pairs of feet walk toward him. Rough hands lifted him, and he bit his lip to keep from crying out at the pain. They dragged him into another room where dancing shadows cast by torches made him dizzy.

  A cold hand lifted his chin, and Meren opened his eyes to stare into those of Akhenaten. Black as netherworld darkness, brittle as obsidian, those eyes raked him as if trying to divine the very essence of his ka, his soul. Then Akhenaten began to speak, saying that Queen Nefertiti’s father had defended Meren.

  “Ay speaks on your behalf. He says you’re young enough to be taught the truth. My majesty thinks not, but the One God, my father, commands me to be merciful to our children.” Akhenaten toyed with a lock of Meren’s hair. “We will ask once, Lord Meren. Do you accept the Aten, my Father, as the one true god?”

  Meren blinked and swiveled his head. There was Ay, standing silent, looking hard at him. Meren stared into the eyes of his mentor and gave his head a slight shake. Ay was asking him to bring damnation upon his ka. Father had died rather than risk his eternal soul; could he do less? But Ay wanted him to live; Meren could see it in his eyes. And may the gods forgive him, Meren wanted to live.

  That was when he’d opened his dry cracked mouth and said, “The Aten is the one true god, as thy majesty has pronounced.”

  Ay nodded to him, but the movement was so slight that Meren could have imagined it.

  “Words come easily for you,” the king said as he turned away, “but my Father has shown me a way to claim your ka for the truth. Bring him.”

  The guards dragged him after the king and stopped before a man who crouched behind a glowing brazier. Meren’s vision filled with the red and white glow of the fire. Without warning, he was thrown to the floor on his back. This time he couldn’t stop the cry that burst from him as his raw flesh hit the ground. A heavy, sweating body landed on his chest. Meren bucked, trying to throw the man off, but the guard was twice his weight.

  He could see the brazier and, beyond it, the fine pleats of pharaoh’s robe and the edge of a gold sandal. He fought the guards when they spread out his right arm. In spite of his resistance, the arm was pinned so that his wrist was exposed. The man behind the brazier lifted a white-hot brand. A guard knelt on his upper arm, making it go numb.

  Although he couldn’t see his arm, Meren felt a wet cloth wipe the flesh of his wrist, saw the brand lift in the air. It was the Aten, the sun disk, whose symbol was a circle with sticklike rays extending from it and ending in stylized hands. The glowing sun disk poised in the air, then the guard pressed the hot metal to Meren’s arm.

  There was a brief moment between the time the brand met his flesh and the first agony. In that moment, Meren smelled for the first time the odor of burning flesh. Then he screamed. Every muscle convulsed while the guard held the brand to his wrist. When it was taken away Meren broke out in a sweat, and he shivered. Pain from his wrist rolled over him.

  He lost consciousness briefly, and when he opened his eyes, the man who’d branded him was smearing a salve on his burned flesh. The pain receded as he was lifted and held so that he faced the king. Akhenaten’s black fire eyes burned into him as no brand ever could. Pharaoh took Meren’s hand, turned it to expose the mutilated wrist, and examined the crimson symbol of his god. He placed Meren’s hand in Ay’s.

  “He is yours now. But remember, my majesty will know if the boy is false. If he falters from the true path, he dies.”

  He dies. Meren shook his head and tried to banish the sound of Akhenaten’s voice, high, hard, like the sound of a metal saw drawn against granite. Oh, yes, he still remembered that voice even after sixteen years.

  Rubbing the back of his neck, Meren shivered and stepped out of the path of the night breeze. There had been something different about this night’s evil dream. At the last, when the brand burned into his flesh, something strange happened to him. Suddenly it was as if he’d left his body and floated, invisible, beside the tortured figure on the floor. Only the prisoner who suffered at his feet wasn’t himself. It was Tutankhamun. The boy king writhed in agony, screaming, his dark, haunted eyes wide with terror, his body streaked with blood, dirt, and sweat.

  “Damnation.” Meren paced back and forth beside the bed.

  What did this new vision mean? He couldn’t consult a magician priest and expose the fact that he’d dreamed about the living god of Egypt.

  “Calm yourself, you fool,” he muttered. “You dream about things that worry you. You always have.”

  And he’d been worried about pharaoh for some time. Only fourteen, Tutankhamun had lost most of his family, including his mother, Queen Tiye, and the woman he t
hought of as a second mother, his brother’s wife, Nefertiti. Now that he knew the queen had been murdered, Tutankhamun grieved anew for Nefertiti’s loss. He’d been very young during his brother’s reign and so had understood nothing of the violent hatreds engendered by the Aten heresy. Tutankhamun remembered Akhenaten as a doting older sibling, a limitless source of toys, sweets, and exciting chariot rides.

  Akhenaten’s sudden death had brought both confusion and relief to Egypt, but after a period of turbulence during which the next heir, Smenkhare, succumbed to illness, Tutankhamun became king. Inheriting the throne of Egypt and becoming a living god who controlled a vast and fabulously rich empire had been a formidable task for the boy. But he’d succeeded, only to find himself condemned to opulent isolation. Grave, beautiful, and headstrong, Tutankhamun had faced the burdens heaped upon him with courage, but in the last few months those burdens had grown. Evildoers had desecrated the bodies of Akhenaten and Nefertiti in their tomb at Horizon of the Aten.

  Tutankhamun had faced that crisis and endured, but after years of trying hard to be a great king, he was beginning to show signs of strain. More and more he would slip out of the palace with a single guard to accompany him and seek relief in escapades that terrified his ministers. So far no harm had come to the king, but how long could this good fortune continue?

  What was worse, Meren could see the strain in the king’s face. During an audience or ceremony at a temple he would see a distant look come over Tutankhamun, and Meren knew he was thinking of Nefertiti, wondering who could have killed his beloved second mother. He was wondering if her ka wandered lost and mad in the desert, as the souls of unavenged victims were said to do. Did she haunt the boy’s dreams, visit him and cry out for vengeance? Meren saw evidence of it when he looked at the king, in the shadows beneath those large, somber eyes. And then Meren would wonder—how long could the living god, who was after all a mortal boy as well, continue to bear this intolerable burden before he succumbed?

  Meren shook his head, went to a chest and pulled out a kilt, which he belted around his hips. He covered the Aten brand on his wrist with a leather band. Finding Nefertiti’s killer was urgent. As strong and brave as the king was, he was far too young to endure such anguish and the torture of uncertainty for long. The only solution was to find the truth and present it to the king. If Meren could give Tutankhamun the murderer, perhaps the boy could find peace. Perhaps Meren could find some peace as well.

  Still rubbing the brand on his wrist beneath the leather band, Meren left his bedchamber. He wasn’t going to get any more sleep, so he slipped out of the house with a brief command to his own guards to be silent regarding his absence. During his enforced rest he’d gone on long walks in the hours before dawn before his daughter Bener was awake. Arguing with her tired him as no exercise could.

  This would be his last walk, a test of strength before he went in search of Nefertiti’s favorite bodyguard, Sebek. He’d had his men searching for the queen’s old servants, including Sebek, for some time, but they’d been unable to locate him. However, his persistence and patience with Satet had borne fruit unexpectedly when the old woman had mentioned the guard last night. He’d been surprised that she remembered Sebek, but her memory tended to appear and disappear like the ephemeral clouds in the Egyptian sky. Learning Sebek’s whereabouts was a good sign. Perhaps the guard knew something that at last would reveal the identity of Nefertiti’s murderer.

  He left the house and walked down the avenue between the two reflection pools to the gate. He glanced at the water lilies floating on the surface of the water, their buds closed and invisible. He heard a fish snap at an insect and felt a tiny spray of water drops. He reached the gate. One of his guards let him out, and he set off in the direction of the temple of Ptah, the god of the city, thinking as he walked.

  He knew who had supplied the poison to Nefertiti’s cook, Hunero, but someone else had conceived of the idea of killing the queen. Nefertiti had been engaged in a dangerous attempt to reconcile her husband with the old gods of Egypt. Losing her had nearly sent Egypt into chaos along with her pharaoh. That had been more than eleven years ago.

  Now Tutankhamun was king, and bore the responsibility for healing Egypt’s open wounds. Some who had suffered at Akhenaten’s hands wanted to keep those wounds open and bleeding. It was this group who fostered the unspoken belief that the boy was tainted with the blood of a line that had nearly destroyed Egypt. Tutankhamun lived with the certainty that they wanted to rid the throne of its tainted occupant. A heavy burden for a boy not yet fifteen.

  Meren shook his head as he remembered how, despite these adversities, the king was determined to become the epitome of a warrior king. In pursuit of this ideal he’d insisted on going with the army on a raid against an outlaw band. The boy had taken too many risks in that skirmish. Tutankhamun was the incarnation of the king of the gods, but he was still mortal. A bandit’s arrow could kill him in an instant, and then what would happen to Egypt?

  Turning down the avenue that led to the temple, Meren breathed deeply, taking in air laden with moisture. The floodwaters of the Nile were receding, and soon pharaoh’s surveyors would spread across the land to remeasure field boundaries and estimate crop yields. During inundation the population of Memphis swelled with laborers from the country ordered into the service of temple and government projects. Royal granaries and supply houses dispensed vast quantities of grain, wheat, barley, oil, and other commodities to pay such workers who would otherwise have little to do.

  Indeed, it was a busy time of the year for pharaoh’s ministers, including Meren’s old mentor, Ay. Meren had been concerned for his friend ever since he’d discovered that Nefertiti had been murdered. He had never told Ay of this discovery, and the old man still believed what everyone had assumed when Nefertiti died—that the queen had fallen ill from a plague that had killed her daughters. Meren was reluctant to tell Ay about the murder until he knew who the killer was. If he could capture the one responsible, the old man might bear the news better.

  Thinking hard, Meren turned down a side street, away from the temple’s massive pylon gate with its carved and painted reliefs and giant doors covered with gold. He would make his way around the walls that surrounded the temple complex and return home. Before an enemy had tried to kill him a couple of months ago he’d been on the track of three suspects, men powerful enough to have arranged the queen’s death. Yamen the army officer was dead. Another was the Syrian Dilalu, who sold weapons to anyone rich enough to pay for them. The last was Zulaya, an elusive merchant from one of the Asiatic kingdoms, perhaps Babylon. This was one of the reasons he’d asked that one of the Eyes and Ears of Pharaoh stationed abroad be summoned home. He needed to speak with someone whose task it was to keep an eye on people like Dilalu and Zulaya.

  Yamen had been killed before Meren could question him about the queen’s murder. An unseen, unknown enemy always preceded him before Meren could question someone who might shed light on the mystery. That someone had caused the deaths of the cook Hunero and her husband. He’d brought Hunero’s sister to Memphis in the hope that she might remember something of use, but her memory faltered often. Meren was of the opinion that Satet deliberately forgot things that were inconvenient or frightening to her.

  Turning a corner Meren paused, realizing he had taken a wrong turn and was in an unfamiliar area. The neighborhood around the temple was old, as old as the ancient ones who built the pyramids. Over the years the houses and storage buildings had multiplied and expanded, taking up parts of streets and creating a network of roads that dead-ended, alleys that zigzagged and looped back on themselves and burrowed into the warrens of mud brick that served as combination dwellings, mangers, and workshops.

  Having taken one wrong turn, Meren now found himself in a narrow little alley that ended in a blank wall. At one time an exterior stair had stood against this wall. Only five mud brick steps remained, leading nowhere. Meren backtracked only to find himself in an alley hardly wide enoug
h for one person to pass, and this took an abrupt turn that went back the way he’d come. Meren stopped and sighed. He would have to find another stair so that he could climb high enough to see where he was from a rooftop. Luckily he spotted one a few houses down. He reached it quickly and set his foot on the bottom step.

  “Out for a stroll, is we?”

  Whipping around, Meren found the way blocked by a man with the mass of a temple column. Although light was only beginning to permeate the darkness of early morning, he could make out a skewed smile filled with broken teeth and eyes the whites of which had yellowed. Meren’s hand went to his side. Where the scabbard for his dagger should have been there was emptiness. He hadn’t brought a weapon. What madness. He always carried a dagger. That cursed nightmare must have disturbed him more than he’d thought.

  Meren planted his feet solidly and said, “Go away.”

  “Not before I get my hands on that pretty belt. Give it to me.”

  Sighing, Meren waved the man away. “I’ve no patience with thieves. Leave before I decide you’re worth the trouble of dragging you to the city police.”

  He should have realized the thief was too dim-witted to recognize authority when he encountered it. His rank protected him most of the time. Few commoners would dare speak to him, much less steal something from him. But he’d wandered into the Caverns, the disreputable area of the city near the docks, the denizens of which recognized no higher authority than the edge of a blade. If he hadn’t been thinking so hard he would have realized the danger. As it was, his new friend responded to the dismissal by drawing a knife.

  “You got one last chance to do what I say. Gimme the belt.”

  As he finished speaking the man waved the knife at Meren, who grabbed his arm and jammed it against his knee. The thief grunted but didn’t let go of the blade. He rammed his fist into Meren’s jaw and kneed him. The blow caught Meren in the side at the site of his healing arrow wound. He cried out as his knees buckled. He caught himself by planting his palms on the ground, but fell when his attacker rained blows on him from above. He felt a knee on his back, twisted, and grabbed the thief’s arm as the knife came at him. Staring at the tip of the blade, Meren felt his arms quiver from the effort to hold off the man’s full force.