Eater of souls lm-4 Read online

  "But now we have the golden one," Kysen replied. "Tutankhamun, may he have life, health, and prosperity, grows in power daily. Pharaoh is favored by the great gods, beloved of the people. What good will it do to risk your life when Nefertiti has been dead so long?"

  Meren strode back to Kysen, halted within an arm's length, and planted his fists on his hips. "You know why I have to find him, this murderer of queens. If he would dare to kill a Great Royal Wife, he would dare an even greater anathema. Such a criminal might dare to kill a pharaoh." Meren inclined his head as he gazed at his son. "You've been training as the Eyes of Pharaoh for a long time. Why are you so worried now? This is what we do-inquire into dangerous secrets, offenses, and transgressions, shield and defend the king."

  "Of course I know," Kysen said. He drew nearer to his father, hearing his voice lower and at the same time strengthen in tone. "But something's different. You're different. I see it in your eyes, in the way you take refuge in isolation and the way you stare into nothingness, as if you see something so frightening you can't look away." His voice dropped to a whisper. "I have seen you afraid, afraid for me, for my sisters, for pharaoh. But now you're not frightened for someone. You're frightened of someone, or something, so frightened that you won't even speak of it, for fear of giving this mysterious terror power. It's as if you're afraid speaking of it will let this evil that tortures you loose to ravage without hindrance and destroy us all."

  Kysen kept his gaze fixed on Meren's. As he'd spoken, Meren had drawn over his features a mask of diplomacy, courtliness, and artifice. Kysen had seen him do this when confronted by intrigue among his fellow nobles or when playing a part to draw out victims suspected of anything from stealing royal grain to plotting pharaoh's death, but he'd never been subjected to it himself. That his father would use this mask against him chilled his bones as if they were encased in that frozen whiteness he'd seen on foreign mountains. His hurt and bewilderment must have shown, for Meren turned away, lowered his head for a moment, then faced him, his features released from cold composure.

  "I'm sorry. You're not the enemy," Meren said.

  Kysen sighed his relief. "Then you'll let this old evil rest."

  "No."

  "But-"

  "Enough!" Meren closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them and went on. "I've had someone search the tax rolls and found Queen Nefertiti's favorite cook. She and her husband have retired to a family farm south of the city. I'm going there to begin our search."

  "And what will pharaoh say when you leave court to visit a humble cook?" Kysen said, throwing up his hands.

  "I'm going as an ordinary scribe." Meren held up a warning finger. "No objections. You're going to be too busy to fret about me. You're going to prowl among your friends in the dock taverns and beer houses. Find that woman-is her name Ese? Find Ese and ask her about the old days when the heretic ruled. I don't have to tell you what methods to use."

  "Ese is a mistress of a tavern. What could she know of the wife of a living god?"

  It was Meren's turn to sigh, only with an air of tried patience. "You know very well that common villains often are privy to unspeakable evil long before royal ministers. I leave in a few days. And you, my son, will do as I command. You will also abandon these foolish suspicions that I'm hiding something from you."

  Pressing his lips together to stop himself from protesting again, Kysen nodded, a slight, grudging gesture.

  Meren eyed him suspiciously. "I'm determined on this, Ky."

  "Yes, Father."

  "And your worries are groundless."

  "Of course, Father. If you declare it, it is so."

  He bore Meren's inspection with calm, knowing Meren would soon be distracted by the business of the Eyes and Ears of Pharaoh. Then he'd have to take certain measures without his father's approval or advice. It was a thing he'd never done.

  Egyptian sons followed the paths of their fathers. They obeyed, or they were disciplined. Kysen knew Meren would expect no less of him. It had taken him years to accept Meren, but once he had, he'd realized that his father was a man of great discernment and authority.

  As Meren began to speak of the day's duties, Kysen's thoughts strayed. Unlike his blood father, Meren had never raised his hand against Kysen. Everyone obeyed Meren. It would never occur to his father that they wouldn't. This attitude, Kysen had discovered, was one of the most important sources of a great man's power. Another, even greater source arose from the fact that, if he chose, Meren could decree punishments far worse than any his miserable blood father had produced.

  Kysen remembered stealing pomegranates from the kitchen with Bener years ago. Meren had made him copy the unending precepts of the sage Ptahhotep five times. To Kysen it had seemed like five thousand copies. He had suffered sore fingers and excruciating boredom. But never once had Meren struck him. If Meren was in danger, Kysen would protect him at the cost of his own life.

  "Are you listening to me, Ky?"

  Kysen blinked once. "Of course, Father." He smiled for the first time in two days. "I was remembering how Bener and I used to steal pomegranates."

  Meren grinned at him.

  "I must confess something," he said. "Sometimes I'd tell the servants to let you steal them without complaining."

  "Did you, by the gods? Why?"

  Shaking his head, Meren said softly, "Sometimes a child needs the freedom to be just a little wicked."

  Perplexed, Kysen studied his father, who looked away toward the reflection pools and gardens in front of Golden House. Then he sucked in his breath. "We are visited."

  "By whom?" Meren asked.

  Kysen pointed to an ebony-black Nubian wearing a short military kilt and thick gold wrist- and ankle-bands and carrying a spear. It was like watching a colossus walk, for Karoya was a royal guard, member of a select and secretive group. Karoya was one of the few men in the world who answered to no one, not even Meren or the great minister Ay. He was personal bodyguard to the golden Horus, the living god, ruler of the empire, the pharaoh Tutankhamun, aged fourteen years.

  Chapter 2

  Sokar, chief of watchmen of the city of Memphis, rounded the corner of a street crowded with sailors, foreign merchants, vendors, and donkeys. He took big steps, leading with his ample belly, and changed course for no one. Children playing in the road scattered before his walking stick, which jabbed into the earth with a smack, sending flakes of packed earth into their faces.

  One of his underlings hurried before him, shouting to warn of his master's approach. "Way! Make way for the chief of watchmen. Move your carcass, mongrel of the desert."

  Each time his stick nearly impaled a passerby, each time his attendant snarled at some unsuspecting citizen, Sokar's shoulders lifted a bit higher and his chest expanded. He wasn't a man of great stature. An onlooker would note that most of Sokar's growth had taken a sideways path. He had a head like a fat mud brick, big, fleshy red lips, and a sparse forehead beneath a wig fatter than his head. His feet, encased in papyrus sandals, hadn't seen a washbasin or cloth in weeks, and he proceeded through the growing street crowds with the gait of a duck that has reached the end of its fattening period.

  The belligerent expression on his face was moderated only by those protruding, feminine lips. Sokar was intensely annoyed at having his morning meal interrupted by a report from one of his more excitable watch leaders.

  "Goat-witted fool," Sokar had muttered to himself as he stuffed the remains of a slice of date bread in his mouth. "Dragging me out for the murder of some farmer. I'll dock his rations, I will."

  Sokar preferred reducing rations to administering beatings as punishment. He kept the confiscated grain and beer for himself. The attendant led him past a house concealed behind high walls and into a street hemmed in on both sides by narrow dwellings and a beer house with cracked and pitted plaster, tightly shut doors, and blank windows.

  Upon turning another corner, they left the crowds behind to enter a lane that seemed more tunnel than street, so clo
se were the surrounding structures. Littered with refuse thrown from upper stories and the droppings of geese, ducks, and donkeys, it was almost deserted. The only inhabitant lay across the bottom stair before a front door, his head hanging over a pool of vomit. Sokar followed the watchman into an alley opposite this door and stopped abruptly. Three men from the day watch stood with their backs to a prone figure. One of them held his hand cupped over his nose and mouth. Sokar's walking stick stabbed the ground near this man's bare foot; he jumped and bowed several times to his master.

  Wiping a stray crumb from the shelf of his belly, Sokar launched into his habitual bellow. "This had better be worth my time, Min, or I'll have your beer rations for a month!"

  "Yes, master. I-we-that is, it-" Min glanced over his shoulder, swallowed, and covered his mouth.

  Fat furrows appeared between Sokar's brows. "What woman's weakness is this? Get out of my way."

  He shoved the men aside and loomed over the body they'd been shielding from him. He was immediately assaulted by the odor of exposed and decaying raw meat. Sokar covered his nose and mouth while swiping at the hordes of flies buzzing around the body of a man lying on his back. He stepped back, almost stumbling.

  The man had obviously been one who labored with his hands, one of moderate height, thinning hair, and skin turned almost black from working in the sun. His nose had been broken and had healed crookedly, but the parallel slashes across his throat were far more conspicuous than this facial flaw. The cuts exposed tendon and flesh and distracted the viewer from the bloody wound above his ear. But what had made Sokar retreat and nearly gag was the hole in the man's chest.

  Something heavy and sharp had cleaved flesh and bone in slanting blows deep enough to expose the heart. But the heart wasn't there. In its place, stuck upright into the tangle of vessels, muscle, and chipped bone at the bottom of the cavity, was a feather. Cloud-white, a little more than the length of a man's hand, it seemed to defile the dead man by its very beauty and purity.

  A fly launched itself off the exposed meat of the wound and buzzed at Sokar. The chief of watchmen yelped and flailed at it with his walking stick. The fly soared away to perch on the dead man's nose. Sokar straightened from his defensive pose and scowled at the other men.

  "Fools!" he barked. "This is a peasant come from his farm to the city on some worthless errand. No doubt he came with fellows and quarreled with them. We do not concern ourselves with the doings of lowlings, however grotesque. Get a shroud-a heavy shroud-and send him to the necropolis. And bother me no more with such insignificances, or I'll set you to guarding dung heaps."

  "But, master, the feather," Min wailed.

  "An accident." Sokar cast a furtive glance at the body and its obscene decoration. "Some goose or other fowl strayed near the body and left it. You're nearly soiling your kilt over something that has an ordinary explanation. Some quarrel has ended in death and a little magic."

  Keeping his gaze averted from the body and making the sign against evil, Sokar shook his walking stick at Min. "No more wild imaginings. If you bother me with something like this again, you'll regret it."

  Sokar spun around and tramped out of the alley before anyone else could speak. Once he reached the street, his pace quickened, and he kept looking over his shoulder as if he expected the heartless corpse to get up and chase him. He went so fast that his attendant was forced to trot after him.

  Back in the watch compound, Sokar called for beer and more date bread. He scurried into his workroom, shoved apprentices and citizens waiting to see him outside, and collapsed on a cushioned wicker stool. The seat creaked in protest at his weight. He settled into the cushion and wiped sweat from his forehead, nose, and upper lip.

  Everyone knew peasants had been ordained to their brutal existence by the gods. The sacred ones had created the orderly society in which Egyptians lived, each man and woman assigned a place with certain work, certain duties. Some, like the dead man, led a rough, contentious life that ended in violence. Who knew why such low ones behaved as they did? No doubt some netherworld demon had caused the quarrel in which the farmer was killed.

  Vengeful spirits of dead ones who had been abandoned by their descendants lurked in the darkness. Their kas had been left to starve for lack of offerings, and these miserable spirits often wrought havoc among the living. They incited evil as surely as a pretty woman evoked lust. And Min hadn't the sense to recognize such a common truth and behave accordingly.

  Sokar sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly. Taking a long sip of beer, he picked up a length of papyrus that rested beside him on the floor. He drew a lamp closer, picked up a rush pen, and dipped it in water and black ink from a palette. Now, to continue his reports. Each day he composed one for the mayor, a copy of which would be sent on to the office of Lord Meren, Eyes and Ears of Pharaoh. When one's writings might be inspected by a great one such as Lord Meren, one chose one's subject and phrases most carefully.

  Under a column headed "Happenings of the Day" Sokar wrote in cursive script: "One death, a farmer not of the city." No need to disgust a great one with meaningless details. He moved on to list the theft of valuable chisels from a stone worker.

  A little girl followed her mother past a fruit stall in a crowded market near the palace district. She yanked on her mother's skirt and pointed up, past the rooftops, at a bird of prey soaring on the invisible winds that swept the sky. Horus, the falcon, "Far-Above One," god of the sky, son of Osiris, protector of pharaoh. This was the sky-falcon, whose eyes are the sun and the moon.

  The Horus falcon embodied the majesty and power of Egypt and her king, from its hooked upper bill to the tips of its slate-gray wings. Gray darkened to black as it reached the bird's nape and head, creating a startling contrast with the white of its underside. A curved black slash marked its white cheek.

  The bird suddenly dove straight down and vanished near the bank of the Nile, then reappeared, its attack aborted. Banking sharply, it left the market behind to glide easily over the massive ramparts of the royal palace. Uttering an ascending wail, weechew-weechew, weechew-weechew, it began a long, graceful descent. The falcon's path took it over colossal pylons, palace lakes and gardens bursting with exotic flowers and incense trees, masses of lofty palms around courtyard after courtyard filled with festival-dressed men and women. At last the bird landed on top of an obelisk carved in pink granite and covered in electrum. Strong wings swept back and forth for balance before folding to the creature's sides.

  The sky-falcon tilted its head. The eye of the sun, round and obsidian-black, looked down at a gravel path lined with guards along which two men walked. The taller, darker one followed the other, and they disappeared into the palace. With a rasping kack-kack-kack, the Horus falcon sprang aloft, climbing the sky to leave behind the palace called Domain of Tutankhamun, Great of Conquests, and the court of the Golden Horus.

  As Meren stepped inside the royal palace he heard the harsh cry of a falcon. If he could have escaped on wings like that bird, he would have. But a summons from pharaoh couldn't be escaped, even if his mood was as foul as a chamber pot. Why had fate thrust upon him this burden of discovering secrets so dangerous that even suspecting them could result in the annihilation of his whole family?

  Thus preoccupied, Meren spared no glance at the dozens of guards on alert in the palace corridors and faience-tiled reception rooms through which he walked. Trying to hurry without seeming to do so, Meren reached an antechamber behind the imperial throne room. It was protected by the largest and most formidable of the king's personal bodyguards, under the command of Meren's even more formidable escort.

  None of the guards took notice of Meren as Karoya came forward and opened the polished cedar door. The antechamber was filled with more of Karoya's men. Each was armed with a scimitar and a dagger thrust into his beaded belt. All wore engraved bronze-covered leather corselets wrapped across their chests.

  Meren felt almost naked without his own armor. He was dressed for court, bejewel
ed and painted, decked in gold, lapis lazuli, turquoise, and malachite. His own weapon was a ceremonial dagger with a hilt of beaded electrum. A brief thought flitted into his heart. If he pursued Nefertiti's killers-there had to be more than one- and made the slightest mistake, it would take an army of royal bodyguards to keep him and the family safe.

  He should be making preparations, not wasting time at court. The moment he'd seen Karoya at his house, Meren knew his plans for the morning were ruined. Karoya only appeared when pharaoh sent a personal rather than official message. He had been summoned to a ceremony he'd thought to avoid-the king's reception of the long-awaited Hittite royal emissary. Meren's own web of informers was convinced that the king of the Hittites, Suppiluliumas, had been using rebellious vassals and disgruntled rival claimants to princely thrones to create unrest at the edges of the Egyptian empire.

  Several princes loyal to pharaoh had already been attacked and defeated in their city-states in Syria and Palestine. Ordinarily Egypt would have attributed such events to the perennial eddies and currents of warfare that plagued the region. But Suppiluliumas was a conqueror. If he was allowed to continue his depredations unchecked, Egypt might someday find the Hittite armies at her own borders. It had happened once, with the Hyksos. That humiliating conquest had left Egypt with an abiding determination never again to fall victim to an invasion of Asiatics.

  Pharaoh must have decided he needed all his foremost servants beside him to present a united phalanx to the Hittite emissary. Thus it was that Meren had donned court garb and come to the palace. Karoya had taken up a stance beside the door that opened into the imperial throne room, a vast, pillared audience hall fabled throughout the world for its magnificence. Nodding to Karoya, Meren waited for the Nubian to open the door, then sighed and walked into a blaze of gold. Blinking in the light of a thousand tapers and alabaster lamps perched on stands, he entered behind and to the right of the throne itself. Karoya went to his place in front of the right-hand support column of the dais.