Shadowhunter (Nephilim Quest Book 1) (57 page)

"Ahha! Haha! Marvellous! That's it! That's it!"

Reggie could not contain his enthusiasm, but jumped up so that he knocked his chair over and did a little victory dance by their table. We forgot our dinner and just stared at his long arms waving in the air, and his long legs kicking to an unknown rhythm.

"Mutefre! Hemetnisu Weterneheh!" he sang rhythmically while he danced, snapping his fingers.

"Does anyone else suspect he finally lost his marbles?" Elijah asked, staring at Reggie with a wide, amused grin.

"Erm... now that you mention it, the thought does arise..." Diana mused.

"Uh-huh." We all added our various agreements.
 

"Seems studying history has its disadvantages. I think his hard drive finally reached maximum capacity..." Diana observed with a tilted head.

"Follow me!" Reggie bolted at a run.

For a second we stared at him, then exchanged glances, and ran after him, leaving our food behind us. Suddenly we weren't hungry any more.
 

He ran to Lilith's office, of course. Only Lilith wasn't there.

"Lilith!" Reggie galloped past us and along the corridor that led in the opposite direction from the one where Diana and I had our room.

He knocked on a door at its other end, hollering Lilith's name. The door opened and Lilith peeked out. She had obviously been asleep (so she did sleep, after all), but was immediately awake and alert.

"What is it?" she asked. "Is there danger?"

"No, no, but Mr. Donnelly did indeed find the clue to the beginning of the trail. His mother is the Sun! King's wives live forever! Haha!"

Reggie turned around and trotted towards Lilith's office again.
 

"Where is it... I'm sure I have it..."

We followed. Suddenly he stopped and swerved to his right, into a room. Thumbing noises and muttering were to be heard. We looked inside, and found our good professor rummaging through a huge pile of books. There were several piles surrounding the bed, and towering on the table, but he seemed to know where it was - whatever it was.

"Davies, where are you..."

Daniel was standing by my side, and I enjoyed every moment, feeling his physical presence. Elijah was peeking over his shoulder and in the process pushed him against me. I tried to stand as relaxed as I could, so I would not scare him away. I so wanted to touch his hand, but didn't. I only swallowed and pretended to be looking at Reggie with interest, but it was difficult, when what I wanted to do something quite different, which involved Daniel...

Then I noticed Diana grinning. She winked at me and I made a face at her as inconspicuously as I possibly could. Right then Reggie pulled at a book, causing all the other books above it in the pile to collapse on the floor in a small cloud of dust.

"Sorry, sorry..." he said to the volumes, "Davies, found you!"

"What did you find?" Lilith wanted to know.

Reggie beamed.

"The Rock tombs of El Amarna by Davies. A book by the Egypt Exploration Fund from 1905!"

He clearly expected some sort of applause, which did not come.

"Could you clarify a bit?" Lilith asked.

"Yes, here..." he frantically flipped through the pages, "the plates, where are the plates... Here! Do you see? The lintel of the door..."

We all bent forward to see the picture he was holding towards us. Akhenaten and Nefertiti stood giving sacrifices to the Aten, with their hanging bellies and round thighs marking typical Amarna art. They stood next to an offering table filled with food for the god. Behind them were three of their daughters, shaking their sistra - sacred rattles - and beyond them were court ladies in bent positions. Behind these were two even smaller figures, standing upright.
 
There were two similar scenes, mirroring each other, with the offering table in the middle.
 

"You see it?"

"Well, no... what are we looking at?"

"These here!" Reggie pointed his finger at the two smallest figures behind the court ladies.
 

"They look a bit... odd," Diana said. "They are not children... their toes are pointing inwards. Like they had bent feet?"

"No, no, of course they are not children. They are the two dwarves that are often shown together with Nefertiti's sister. Mutbenret, or Mutnodjmet - the spelling varies."

He looked at us, clearly enjoying his moment. Then he finally told us.

"Their names are: Mutefpre and Hemetnisu Weterneheh. Translated as: 'His mother is Re', and 'King's Wives Live Forever'. The very thing the angel said to the Copts when he appeared to them in Panhesy's tomb. And this picture is from Panhesy's tomb!"

Now we finally understood, though Mr. Donnelly seemed to be more concerned about how Re could be anyone's mother, being a male god.

"The beginning of the Trail of Angels is not a thing - it is a person. Or two people!" Daniel said. "The royal sister's dwarves have the knowledge we need! In Aketaten, the royal city of Akhenaten and Nefertiti."

"Built in the 14
th
century BC..." I said, "the birth place of Tutankhamun."

"So," Lilith smiled, "now we know where to start. It seems we have a lot of planning to do for a time walk some three and a half thousand years back into the past!"

CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

72. Deal With a Goddess

Ambrogio sang the name of Artemis, but without the device on his throat. He had hidden it on the advice of Hades. But he would not have needed it anyway. The pool of silver blood at his feet seemed to remain alive, swirling slightly where the dry ground had not drunk it up. When his voice cut the darkness, the blood seemed to sing along – a faint, but clear echo, much like the voice the throat-device had created.
 

And she came just like Hades, appearing out of nowhere. Ambrogio could see her form in the silver glow of the blood on the ground. Her yellow gaze met the torso lying on the ground, and then turned to the shaking Ambrogio.

"You did this?"

"I did, oh mighty Artemis."

"Why?"

Ambrogio was not prepared to answer this. He had only been told to give the body as a gift to Artemis, and he had not thought about it any further.

"Someone told you I hunt for these?"

"Yes, my goddess," Ambrogio stammered.

She laughed.

"I can imagine who this someone was. Trying to win my favour back..."

She left it at that and Ambrogio was glad she did not press the subject.

"I am glad. You have repaid well your debt of the kithara. We shall discuss the forever in my service later."

Artemis bent down and dipped her fingers into the silvery blood. She smeared it in her fingers. It shone beautifully in the increasing morning light of the eastern sky. She laughed at the sight. And then she raised her other hand, where she held what looked like a small silver bow and slashed the air with it. A gap appeared, behind which was grey mist. She stepped into it, turned around, and the cut in the air vanished.

Ambrogio stared in disbelief. Artemis had a weapon that could slice through the air itself.

"Master..." a hoarse whisper behind him made him swirl around.

It was his shadow.

"We can return now," the shadow bowed, "the girl came and found your letter and read it."

"What... How did she react?" Ambrogio almost grabbed the shoulders of the shadowy form, but could not make himself do it. It looked too much like a demon of his childhood nightmares.

"She looked around, searching for you. I did not show myself but observed her from the misty place."

Misty place... That had to be the reality behind the human world, behind which the afterworld and the abode of Hades were situated.

"Yes? And then?"

"She folded the letter, hid the bundle she was carrying under an opening on a rock by the roadside and continued towards the temple."

The shining rim of the sun's disk appeared on the eastern edge of the sky. Ambrogio felt the pain on his face increasing. The shadow grabbed his arm and pulled him into the mist. They did not move as easily as Hades had. There was an unpleasant feeling of being stuck into a sticky substance that did not allow Ambrogio to move. But the shadow pulled and pulled, and the resistance eased slowly. Then the mist cleared, and Ambrogio could move again. A landscape appeared, and soon they were walking towards the city of Hades, across the rolling hills, that appeared almost solid and real. There was an occasional thinning here and there where the grey mist showed through, but the shadow did not seem to find these alarming and kept walking, leading Ambrogio ahead.

The sun had bruised his skin into a dull grey color, but his exposure to its light had been so fleeting, his skin soon began to return to normal.

Hades kept his word. Ambrogio got the palace for himself, and rested there every day, waiting for nightfall in the world of humans, while staying in the eternal scattered light of the afterworld. He never managed to work out where the light came from. It could not be the sun, because it did not harm his skin.

He learned to know some of the people in the eternal city. They were ordinary human beings, but every single one possessed some skill Hades found useful. Someone was an expert in poisons. Another was a skilled armourer. Yet another a talented thief. And there were hundreds more. They all had some mission given to them by Hades, and they did it gladly, in exchange for a chance to live in a place where they were not touched by time. They called the place the City of Immortals and considered themselves above ordinary mortals.

He met the oldest citizen of the city during his stay. He came from Egypt, and his name was Thutmose. He had been a sculptor and an artist at the royal Egyptian court in the distant past. He practiced his skill still, creating the most beautiful statues out of the material of this strange world. Ambrogio often sat at his studio, and observed him working, scooping the ground and forming his art from it.
 

The strange statues of the king and queen of his own past at first came out beautifully, but after a while their features changed. It was as if they were made of wax that had its own will. Nothing could stay the way they had been created.

"Does this not bother you? That your work changes?" Ambrogio asked once, when he sat with a goblet of wine, watching how the sculptor worked.

"No, it is quite fascinating," Thutmose commented, "I have noticed that this material responds to the way I feel. If I am angry, the statues become distorted into an unpleasant form. If I am in a good mood, the change can be sometimes quite beautiful."

Today Thutmose had been in a good mood. The male statue he had made distorted itself into a laughing dwarf. The men chuckled at the sight, sitting amicably side by side, enjoying the good wine.

Thutmose's paintings, however, remained the way he had painted them. The reason was obviously the fact that he used real paint and brushes, and real papyrus to paint on. These were the materials of the human world, already solid. Ambrogio admired the way he painted beautiful women out of memory. They had elongated necks and long skulls with no hair, but they were beautiful. None as beautiful as Selene, though.

Every night Ambrogio went to the human world, every time to a different location, and using the calling device lured yet another silver winged one to him. He became very skilled at killing them before they realized what was happening. They all had the same kind, concerned look on their faces when they approached him and then the expression of utter surprise when he killed them.

And they all sang, beautifully, when they died. Ambrogio began to call this music the song of a dying swan. He bent closer to see how they made the eerie sound, but it did not seem to come from their throats. It came from their whole body.

Every night he wrote a note to Hades with the silver blood as proof of yet another kill, and after that, every night he wrote a note to his beloved Selene. He began to write poems to her and his shadow told him that she read every one of them.

All in all Ambrogio killed forty-four of the swans, as he now called them. He gave them to Artemis, and she was satisfied. She always came when he sang her name; and she always expressed her joy at the sight of the corpses.

And then the unthinkable happened. The last of the silver winged ones approached, and he shot the arrow- and missed. The creature vanished in an instant, and he knew he had lost the last of the swans for good.

He stood there, on the mountainside, with his bow, without arrows. Hades had not appeared in a long time, and had not given him more arrows. And he had promised that after forty-five nights he could come and take Selene to a safe place where Apollo would not find them.

He sat down on the ground and cried. Surely now, when he could no longer send letters to Selene, she would think he had abandoned her, and would not wait for him any longer. He could not use any other blood for the letters. He was certain she would not believe they were from him, if they were not written in silver blood. And Hades would not let him return to the afterworld with Selene, because he had missed the last swan.

"What's wrong?" a familiar voice asked.

Artemis had appeared. She was carrying her magical weapon in her hand, and behind her was a slit in the air. Ambrogio knew now was his only chance to ever get Selene to himself. He had decided to try this tonight anyway, and now his mind quickly changed the plan from trying to grab Artemis's weapon.

"Oh mighty Artemis... I have run out of my magical arrows... I still have one swan to kill and nothing to do it with. I see you have a mighty weapon in your hands. Could I ask to borrow it so I could kill the last remaining silver swan?"

There was silence. The longer it stretched, the more certain Ambrogio became he had been too impudent and the goddess would punish him for talking to her so disrespectfully.

To his surprise the goddess answered:

"I don't see why not. But I will stay with you and see how you lure them to you. It will be a great joy to me when I see the last descendant of the Shadow who created the silver ones disappear."