"I don't like strolling through the city of the dead at night, Tcha." Kysen swept an arm around, indicating the endless conglomeration of burials that stretched far to the north and south.
"We're almost there, lord."
Kysen planted his fists on his hips and stared into the night. Now he could distinguish the outline of the step pyramid. Six rectangles with sloping sides rose high above, each successive stage smaller than the previous one. The burial place of King Zoser was at least twelve times the height of any of pharaoh's palaces. With a buttressed and recessed facade, a vast enclosure wall surrounded the tomb and its complex of buildings.
Meren had taken Kysen into the place when he was a boy. Within the enclosure wall lay another, smaller pyramid and replicas of palace ceremonial buildings the king would have used in life, such as those for his thirty-year jubilee. There were also storage buildings to house the king's possessions and food and drink to provide sustenance and comfort to pharaoh's spirit. But the most valuable of these lay with the king beneath the massive house of eternity—pristine in its coat of polished limestone—in a vast complex of galleries and chambers.
Kysen had explored some of the storage buildings. One great magazine had been filled with the remains of grain sacks looted long ago. Others were shells filled with rubble. He remembered the reedlike columns; they had been carved from the surface of the stone walls so that they were still engaged to them. Meren had told him that the whole complex had been built to imitate an ancient royal palace, but in stone, the building material of eternity, not brick, the ephemeral substance used by the living. Kysen hadn't asked his father if he thought the king and his treasures still lay beneath the mountain of stone.
Zoser must have been a mighty god-king to have ordered the construction of so vast a house of eternity. The step pyramid even dwarfed the straight-sided pyramid of a later king sitting beside it. Yet it lay deserted now, its storehouses empty, its endowments turned to other uses by succeeding kings. No great staff of mortuary priests and attendants performed the offering rituals for this once mighty ruler. Kysen assumed the royal spirit had to rely on the magical sustenance of food, drink, and provisions carved and painted on the walls of his tomb.
"Lord," Abu said. "We should go."
They followed Tcha down the slope. Farther to the south and also near the pyramid of Teti to the east lay the new cemeteries. All around them rose countless chapels, some still with their stone facades, others stripped down to their brick cores, and still others that appeared little more than mounds of dried mud. The city of the dead had been here as long as Memphis, its origins stretching so far back in time that no one knew its true age. It was said that the first king of Egypt had founded the city. How many dynasties had succeeded him?
Tcha scrambled over and around a group of aged and crumbling tombs. These clustered in rows, rectangular with sloped sides, plain but once filled with riches. Many still sealed within their underground shafts the princes, ministers, and their wives and families who once served the god-kings. These old ones lived so long ago that no one remembered their names.
A blur of movement raced across Kysen's path. He and Abu both crouched and drew daggers. A black silhouette leaped on an overturned statue and hissed at them. They waited, not daring to move. A black cat. Was it someone's prowling pet, or a disguised spirit of the netherworld? The cat hissed again and fled.
Kysen let out a long breath while Abu growled his irritation. They kept their weapons unsheathed. Tcha appeared around the corner of a tomb.
"Come, lord. We're almost there."
"We'd better be," Kysen replied. "And I'm not staying long."
He climbed over a pile of rocks left from long-dead robbers' invasion of a tomb and followed the thief. Tcha scurried across one of the few clear areas between the nobles' tombs and the bastion wall of the step pyramid. As they walked, Kysen could discern the top of the steep-sided pyramid to the south. In daylight, if he stood on some vantage point, he would be able to see farther, to distant pyramids up- and downriver, even to the greatest of them all on a plateau guarded by the sphinx of Khafre.
Abu stumbled, and Kysen turned to see the charioteer pick up something. He went closer and barely made out the remains of a boning rod, one of a pair of wooden pegs tied with string. Masons used them to make blocks of stone perfectly smooth by resting the pegs on the stone, stretching the string tight, and chiseling away any imperfections. It had probably been here for centuries.
Abu tossed the peg at Tcha's head as it appeared out of the ground several paces away. "This way, lord."
Kysen walked over to the thief and looked down the slanting ramp upon which Tcha stood. The walkway pierced the ground between piles of rubble that looked recent, and then plunged beneath the ground to disappear into complete blackness.
"I'm not going in there," Kysen said.
Tcha knelt and fumbled with something on the ground. "I have a lamp—" Tcha stopped when Abu suddenly loomed over him. "O great master," he added with a gape at the charioteer.
Abu snarled at him. "The lord will not go down into a hole to be trapped and slaughtered. Where is Othrys, you sniveling little carp?"
"I am here."
All three of them whipped around as vague light appeared at the bottom of the shaft. A man came up the ramp holding a torch, and, looking like the men in old wall paintings of Greek bull leapers, Othrys followed him. The Greek wore a cloak of some dark Asiatic design over a plain kilt. The torchlight revealed the pirate's sky-colored eyes and honey-and-sunlight hair. The man at the barbarian's side was also dressed simply. He was a stranger.
"Come along," Othrys said without any greeting or ceremony. "There isn't much time."
Kysen stayed where he was and pointed at the torch bearer. "Who is he?"
"My scribe. Come now, I haven't much time."
"This scribe wasn't with you the last time we met," Kysen said. He signaled to Abu.
The charioteer stalked down the ramp to glare at the stranger. The scribe was slight, his bones small, but strong in the way that the acrobats at Ese's tavern had been. Long, wind-tossed hair fell to his shoulders. He shoved a brown length of it back from his face and met Abu's challenging glare with a spark of humor in his eyes. Kysen immediately became intrigued. He'd never seen anyone react to Abu the way this man had. He'd seen men regard the warrior with fear or admiration, and some great ones, usually those of royal blood, ignored Abu. Never had anyone looked at Abu with indulgence, as if he were a boy of four playing a game of war.
Even more curious—the stranger only observed Abu for a moment before swinging around to Kysen. The torch in his left hand dipped and highlighted his face. Kysen found himself subjected to a scrutiny so intense it was as if he were a minute piece of lapis lazuli being examined by a royal jeweler. He could even imagine this man's heart assessing the most strategic point at which to break the stone, or himself.
Intensity, brooding severity, and menace soared at him from the torch bearer. The impact was as startling as it was unexpected. This man was no ordinary scribe; his features and manner were too refined. He had a sculpted nose, fine brows, and a mouth curved like the open bud of a lotus. Yet he wore a plain kilt, no jewels, no sandals,
"Leave off," Othrys said. "By the Earth Goddess, neither of you is going to ravish the other's soul while I wait like a slave."
"Then who is he?" Kysen demanded.
A voice like the trill of a dove, a strummed harp, the cool north wind, answered before Othrys could. " I am Naram-Sin."
Kysen frowned, took a step closer, and examined the stranger carefully. "You're Babylonian."
All he got was a slow, almost wicked smile, but he hardly noticed because his memory was coming alive. And something was bothering him. Several years ago, when he was still being tutored, Father had given him copies of ancient texts, part of an old family collection passed down for generations. The papyrus had turned yellow and brown, fragile. His task had been to reproduce it.
"Naram-Sin," Kysen said. "I know that name."
The torch bearer raised an eyebrow but said nothing.
The papyrus had been a translation of a record from the ancient times of a kingdom called Akkad in the region near Babylon in the land of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. It told of a mighty king who had conquered so many lands and cities that Kysen couldn't remember all of them. He'd conquered cities in the land of Sumer and spread his domain as far as the Great Sea and to the mountains of the land of the Hittites. He made great Elam a vassal state. He even fought with Egypt. But his downfall was the sack of Nippur, the great city of the god Enlil on the Euphrates.
Naram-Sin, drunk with his own glory, had performed vile acts of desecration and defiled the sanctuary of Enlil. In revenge, Enlil had called down upon Naram-Sin and his capital, Agade, barbaric hordes from the mountains, ruthless and utterly destructive. When the invaders were finished, Enlil and other gods of the two rivers laid a curse upon the city—that it remain forever desolate and uninhabited. Now nothing remained of it but an eroding mountain of mud brick and broken pottery.
"Naram-Sin," Kysen repeated. "You have an ancient and famous name. I might even say it's notorious."
The torch bearer's smile hardly faltered as he turned to lead the way down the ramp. "I could say the same of yours, son of the Falcon."
Kysen exchanged looks with Abu. Falcon was the nickname Maya, the royal treasurer, had given Meren when they were youths. Only Meren's closest friends used it.
"I am continually astonished at Othrys's intimate knowledge, and how high it extends," Kysen murmured to the charioteer.
Abu grunted. "I like it not, nor do I like the Babylonian. He reminds me of the mandrake plant, lush, perhaps pleasing to the senses, but full of death."
"You're overwrought, Abu."
"He smiled at me."
"A great transgression, I know, but you must endure it."
"I'll bury my fist in that delicate little nose," Abu grumbled under his breath as they followed their hosts down the ramp. He scowled at Naram-Sin's back. "A foreigner's nose, that is. No strength to it."
They descended west toward the step pyramid at a steep angle beneath the ground. One of Othrys's bodyguards waited at the point where the shaft widened. Several lamps had been set in wall sconces of archaic design, and beyond the opening in the walls, the shaft continued, no longer sinking but maintaining a level grade. Kysen glanced down the shaft, then looked again.
Beyond the opening the shaft became a finished corridor. Someone had smoothed the stone walls, ceiling, and floor and covered them with fine, hard plaster. An outline draftsman had begun his work. A grid of faint red lines marked out the proportions of a register, and within the grid had been drawn the beginnings of a scene. He could see the figure of a man holding a cup to his lips, seated before a table laden with food. The scene was unfinished and hadn't been painted. Perhaps the man featured in the scene had changed his mind about it, or he may have died and been hastily buried before this portion of his eternal house had been completed.
"Planning a bit of tomb robbery?" Kysen asked as he rounded on Othrys.
Othrys barely glanced at the corridor. "Don't pretend to be a fool. This shaft is almost as old as the one it intercepts. Your own people did whatever looting has been done long ago."
Abruptly, before Kysen could reply, Othrys took his arm and thrust his own out to forestall Abu. Pulling Kysen away from the others, he stopped beside the unfinished drawing. For the first time Kysen realized that there was something different about the pirate. Lines had appeared on his face that hadn't been there before. One ran across his forehead parallel to his hairline, and a spray of fine lines issued from the corners of his eyes. But what alarmed Kysen more was that Othrys had lost his air of cheerful deadliness.
"By the curse of Tantalus, what pit of vipers have you cast me into?"
"Why are you so disturbed?"
Othrys clamped a hand around Kysen's neck, yanked him close, and hissed into his ear. "Because I sent three searchers to begin your inquiries. Only one returned, and he didn't live long after he reached me. These are
my
men, not simple servants. Do you know what it takes to destroy even one of them?"
The men who serve Othrys ranked among the most skilled and deadly. He'd seen even a Hittite avoid a confrontation with them.
Shoving Othrys away, Kysen fought his own increasing dread. "One man dead and two vanished. Where did you send them?"
"It doesn't matter," Othrys said. "But I remembered what you said about the woman Satet and her sister the favored cook, so I sent another man to the village to speak with the youth Tentamun." Othrys leaned against the outline of the tomb owner and stared past Kysen's shoulder with such intensity that his eyes narrowed to slits. "Both have disappeared. Those I sent after them haven't even found bodies. And the village is full of dolts with the wits of sheep. No one even saw Tentamun and my man leave the place."
"They can't have vanished without any sign."
The pirate hardly glanced at him. "You're not that innocent. Of course they could." Othrys beckoned to Naram-Sin, who joined them as if it was his right. "Tell my friend about the man who returned to us last night."
Naram-Sin seemed not to have caught Othrys's dread. He put his back against the grid wall and crossed his legs at the ankles. Folding his arms, he cocked his head to the side and began as if he were a bard telling a tale at a feast.
"He crawled to the back gate, where the porter called for help. Guards dragged him inside, but left him in the kitchen yard because of his state."
"What do you mean?" Kysen asked.
"He was bleeding from all his body openings, and even from small cuts that should have healed. There was a torrent of blood."
His voice faint, Kysen stared at Naram-Sin. "So he died soon after he reached you."