Chapter 76
LXXVI
I RASP AWAKE, HACKING BURNING LIQUID FROM MY lungs and gradually realising that I am naked, lying on something cold and hard.
The pain in my chest and mouth has vanished from the rest of my body.
I’ve been stripped. Scrubbed, judging from the lack of stinging against my skin.
I’m sprawled not far from the edge of the underground canal, in sight of the massive wreckage of twisted, rusting metal and just out of reach of the nearest cloud of toxic mist.
“When you said ‘meet,’ you could have mentioned the work that entailed.”
I roll and prop myself up on an elbow. Netiqret is sitting a short distance away against the wall. Watching me wearily. Kiya stands a little farther along, the child’s gaze as absent as ever in the faint green light.
“You pulled me out?” Netiqret raises an eyebrow, the motion asking how the hells else I thought I’d ended up here, and I grunt. “Thanks.”
“It seemed safe to assume you weren’t planning to float all the way back out again.” She nods toward the pipes I used only days ago to escape the city.
I struggle into a seated position. “How long?”
“A few minutes. Maybe ten. I came as soon as I heard the screams, got here just in time to see you get spat out. What in the hells did you do up there?”
“I damaged the bridge. We need to go.” I’m on my feet, urgency replacing the energy that pain and tension have sapped. “My weapons?” A flash of panic as I realise they’re nowhere to be seen.
“You damaged the …” Netiqret trails off her repeating of my words. “What weapons?”
Vek. “A crook and a flail.”
“They don’t sound very useful,” notes Netiqret doubtfully. “They might be down there, I suppose.” She nods to where the nearest waterfall crashes into the canal from the darkness above.
Wonderful. “I’m going to need something to wear. Do you have anything nearby?”
Netiqret thinks, brow still furrowed. “Maybe five minutes away?”
“Then meet me back here in ten. I need those weapons, and we need to hurry.”
“So that you can kill Ka?”
I pause, and immediately know that it’s all the confirmation she needed.
Not a wild guess, I suppose, given what she overheard of my questions to the Nomarch.
We watch each other carefully. Netiqret never believed Ka was a god.
She’s been working against the system he maintains for twenty years, trying to save her daughter.
“So that I can kill Ka,” I confirm.
Netiqret considers. Her gaze drifts to Kiya, and a sadness I’ve not seen in her before flashes in her eyes. “Ten minutes, Siamun.” She touches the iunctus’s shoulder lightly, and the two of them start walking.
I conceal my relief, and start down toward the green-lit water.
IT TAKES ME ALMOST THE FULL TEN MINUTES TO FIND the crook and flail.
The crook was easily spotted, lying above one of the lines of green light.
The flail had washed much farther down, dangerously close to the pipes, and I was about to give up, eyes searing, before I spotted the slightly darker shape against the shadows.
Neither, thankfully, seem to have been damaged by the acidic water.
I’ve barely finished scraping the worst of the toxin from my skin again when Netiqret and Kiya emerge from the dim. The older woman winces as she sees me. “You’re dry?”
“Enough.”
She tosses fresh clothes at me and I shrug them on—smaller than I’d like, but they’ll do under the circumstances—and then hook the weapons on my belt. Netiqret watches with a frown. “You went back in for those?”
“They’re stronger than they look.”
She gives a disbelieving snort. “What else do you need?”
“A priest to get me back into the Sanctum.” I could blast my way in, but that will draw the Gleaners before I reach the pyramid. I’ll have to face them eventually, but once I’m surrounded by the mutalis, my chances will at least be improved. Still low, but improved.
Netiqret examines me. Latent anger, still, in those hard brown eyes. But something else as well.
“Tell me how you got my name.”
I nod slowly. I’ve been thinking about this, too. About how we ended up together. There was never a chance of me succeeding in here, without having met her. “I told you the truth—a iunctus called Djedef said you helped him escape from the city. It’s all I know. Truly.”
“So he was sent to you.”
“He was sent by Ka. At least, that’s what we thought.”
Netiqret says nothing for a long moment, then nods. “Alright. When do we head for the Sanctum?”
“Now.” I stand, and start wrapping my face.
Netiqret grimaces, but accepts it without comment. The three of us begin making for the passage up to the east.
“Do you have a theory about Djedef, then?” My voice echoes as we cross the last of the culverts.
Netiqret glances at Kiya, then away.
“I worked in the Nomarch, before I had Kiya. Every child in Duat is eventually tested in the temple and I knew why, knew what might be asked of me from the day she was born. I didn’t think it would matter.
It was meant to be a great honour, and so when the priests came, I convinced myself it was alright.
I convinced Kiya it was alright. I let them take her.
Even knowing what would happen. Even knowing what she would go through.
” Staring straight ahead, jaw set, eyes fixed.
Old hatred in her voice, directed inward.
“I told her it was alright, and I let them take her.”
Kiya walks beside her. Listless. Listening but not reacting.
“I got a message about a year after, through a iunctus who had been controlled just like you can control them. He knew all about Kiya. He said that she was being prepared for one of the surrogate systems, but if I was willing to kill a priest, and make it look like a natural death, I could get her back before she was fully integrated. They would give me a house, and a way to move through the city without being seen, so that she would be safe.”
“And you did it?”
Her glance drips disdain, though I’m not sure whether it’s for the question or herself. “What mother wouldn’t?”
We start into the dark tunnel leading away from the canal.
There’s silence for a time, and then she continues.
“When the iunctus brought Kiya, he said she could never be the same, because the Nomarch itself would have to restore her. She’d been commanded to obey me but she was still linked to the Nomarch, and if she ever tried to manipulate it, tried to do more than gather information from the connection, it would … reclaim her.”
My brow furrows as we walk the narrow passageway. “So you became a mesektet?”
“I tried to find another way to save her.” Not particularly defensive or apologetic, just stating the fact of it.
“I learned everything I could about the Nomarch from Kiya, but in the end I realised that I needed whoever had gotten her out: If they could control iunctii then with the right access, maybe they could control the Nomarch itself. I had no way of contacting them, though, so I needed information. Favours. Access to the sort of people who might have heard things.”
“But you didn’t find them?”
“Only hints and whispers, until you showed up.”
I exhale, nodding. She’s right. It’s more than a coincidence that we met. Still. “Twenty years is a long time to lay a plan like this.”
“Not so long if you’re trying to kill a god, I imagine,” she observes quietly.
We walk on, the conversation turning my thoughts toward what’s ahead. Though I have known its necessity for a long time now, it makes the concept of it no less dark to me. No less repugnant.
“How do you do it, Netiqret?” I ask suddenly. “How do you prepare yourself to kill someone?”
She cocks her head to the side. Seems about to answer, then glances at Kiya and considers a second longer.
“I don’t. It’s different every time—sometimes violent, sometimes peaceful.
Sometimes fought and sometimes welcomed.
You would be astonished at how many times it turns out people have hired me to kill themselves, wishing to remain young and virile for the Field of Reeds without obviously violating Ka’s law against suicide.
Imagining it will be one way or another only invites surprises. ”
The end of the tunnel appears up ahead. “Doesn’t it … get to you? Affect you?”
She gives a rueful smile. Shrugs. “When you were a child, did you ever cry because you’d scraped your knee and saw you were bleeding?”
“Of course.”
“But now?”
I process the meaning behind her words in silence, then, “It’s not the same thing.”
She touches glyphs around the entrance in practiced order. “It’s not so different, either.”
The streets near Ka’s temple are packed and weighted with the grumbling of shocked murmurs as we emerge.
Crowds gathered in frightened clumps, the occasional individual threading their way through the throng with evident urgency, though I have no idea where they could possibly be going.
Nobody bats an eye as we emerge; almost every head is turned away, toward the Infernis.
Netiqret falters to a halt as she sees what everyone else is seeing, caution forgotten.
I join her and, even expecting the sight, still gape.
A haze of black dust still hangs like a dirty fog over the space where the bridge once was.
The lines of emerald light have all but vanished from the river below, the small amount of illumination peeking through highlighting hundreds of misshapen bodies, drifting, as far as the eye can see.
Gleaners are hovering all along the river, the gathered crowds shifting and stumbling whenever one of the monsters floats near.
“‘Damaged it,’ you said,” whispers Netiqret, unable to drag her eyes from the sight. “How?”
I don’t answer but when she finally looks at me, and her gaze slides to the crook and flail at my belt, I nod.
“Alright.” She’s dazed, turning back to take in the enormity of the devastation for a few more seconds. “Alright.”