Chapter 19 Beneath the Ice #2
“May I share your vision?” I asked. “It is too dark for me.”
I reached out with my mind, and my vision shifted to Yuánchi’s eyes.
The black blur of trees became sharper than day, each wrinkle of bark and edge of dried leaf perfectly rendered in shades of violet.
I was centered in his view, my face bright warmth against my cool hair, my clothed torso and limbs dimmer but also shining.
The golden aura of a great wyfe surrounded me.
Curious, I raised my hand. The motion appeared reversed. Or unreversed. Which was correct, this or a looking glass?
“Would you show me to the river?”
Yuánchi turned his head, and the view swung.
I picked my way to the frozen riverbank, struggling to navigate through someone else’s eyes and leaving footprints that glowed with borrowed warmth.
I felt sticky and hot in my coat, but the frigid air bit my eyes and nostrils.
I sensed Yuánchi’s perception inventorying nearby creatures.
The closest humans with line of sight were specks across the river.
There were gouges in the river’s surface where Yuánchi’s claws had scraped, but no cracks. The ice must be thick. “Are you able to break a hole?”
His wings spread again. Through our link, I felt the balance they provided.
He stretched a clenched foot over the river, then deftly extended a single scaly toe as thick as a man’s leg.
The tip of his claw touched the ice and sank in.
The motion was as smooth as pushing a finger into warm butter, but the river ice chattered and shook.
His toe hooked, the ice groaned, and with a heavy crack, he levered up an irregular chunk several feet around and eight inches thick.
He caught it like a cat flipping a mouse in its claws, then placed it aside.
I walked carefully onto the ice, then abandoned pride and crawled to the edge of the hole. Falling in would be terrifically unpleasant. Yuánchi stretched his neck above me, and I looked over my own shoulder into lapping black cold.
What are you doing? he asked, sounding extremely curious.
I drew my vision back to my own eyes and looked up at red glimmers in the night.
“Have you not guessed?” I said. “Do you not sense the presence?”
Yuánchi’s wings tensed and spread. He backed onto the shore, claws grinding the frozen earth. Each step vibrated the ice under my knees, and through our binding, I felt heat gather in his chest like the stoking of a god’s forge.
When his thoughts came, they were stripped of his usual comforting, human-like cadence. They chimed pure and alien.
A great wyfe’s senses are unknown to us.
“Well, this great wyfe is about to either feel very foolish and very cold, or to make a discovery.” I lowered my fingers into the water.
Dawn revealed the flooding river, swollen and silty. My god-falcon swooped to my feet, folding her limber wings. Her silver-bronze scales gleamed red in the early light.
The royal physician pointed his hand at the god-falcon. “Queen, abandon this ritual. Your husband is entombed, but your god-falcon remains bound. Only the greatest queens have this blessing. Your divinity is proven.”
I shook my head. “A god-falcon will not defeat Rome’s armies. A god-falcon will not save Egypt, nor protect me from being led through Rome, a spectacle for Octavian’s triumph.” I turned to Imhotep, my high priest. “You swear you can raise Ra?”
Imhotep was a lesser man than his famous father, but he too spoke with the authority of magic.
“I have read secret histories. In the great river, the scarlet sun god sleeps. This is Ra’s winged form.
I know the sacred song to call him.” He licked khol-blackened lips.
“To bind him, you must journey to the hall of Ma’at.
You must die and return.” He raised a stone cup half-filled with a foul-smelling tar.
“I bring the venom of one hundred vile scorpions. We must add the god-falcon’s blood, freely given. ”
I drew my god-falcon to my lap, her folded claws hard and warm on my thighs. To her black eyes, I whispered, “Aid your queen,” and she did not flinch when I pressed a bone needle into the soft flesh between her toes.
Imhotep held the cup, catching drops as golden and clear as sun. Exalted sky mixed with crawling foulness, a blasphemy that hissed and spat. Imhotep cackled, added a handful of withered leaves, then a dank powder. A vile scent spread, and my god-falcon fell from my lap, thrashing on the ground.
“It is not enough that I drink the poison,” I said. “Octavian will discover soon that I have fled. Death must be quick.”
I held my hand to Charmion, my most loyal advisor. Unwillingly, she passed the dried jaw of an asp, fangs proud. I coated the fangs in the bubbling black of the cup, then punctured my arm. The poison burned up my veins, through my shoulder, and into my heart.
I fell to my knees, stunned.
Through blurring eyes, I saw Imhotep splash poison from the cup onto the god-falcon. Charmion shouted, “Betrayal!” as the god-falcon writhed and stilled, then was lifted high by Imhotep.
Imhotep sang strange words, and my spirit journeyed from my body. Betrayed or not, the underworld summoned me.
I threw my spirit deep into the river and found a magnificent presence. A goddess.
“I am dying,” I whispered. “Honor my command. Fight my war.”
The earth shook. The river parted, and a goddess rose, but not the scarlet glory of Ra. Her wings, broader than ships, were black as night.
In triumph, Imhotep shouted, “Apep!” the name of Ra’s terrible serpent enemy.
He stabbed a bronze knife at the god-falcon’s breast until the scales parted.
Clumpy, yellow bile spilled—the corrupted blood of an unwilling sacrifice.
He scraped it into the stone cup. Globs of smoking brown-black spat from the rim.
The monstrous flint-fanged head approached us, her spread jaws dripping river water and cold mist. Her goddess voice filled me: I seek the passion of your vengeance. But the wars of your kind are without purpose. They flicker, endless as the seasons—
Imhotep threw the cup of poison into the goddess’s throat, then the twitching carcass of the god-falcon. The goddess reared and roared.
Imhotep cried, “Rise, Apep! Bring your darkness! If Egypt falls, the world falls with it!”
The silver thread of binding pierced my stopped heart, weighing it for worthiness, and our minds became one. As the poison smothered my dying thoughts, I felt Imhotep’s potion break the mind of the winged goddess. Her judgment turned hard and brittle, then fractured into fury and madness.
I came back to myself. Frantic, I yanked my dripping hand from the water and clutched at the suffocating compression in my chest. My fingers were so chilled they were senseless, but I felt my lungs inflate. My heart beat. The jeweled, olive-skinned hands I had seen were not mine.
I pushed my hand inside my coat, shivering and shocked. The familiar cold rattled my bones. Mist roiled on the ice around me. The air tasted metallic and tinny.
The open patch of water skinned with silver, crackled, then froze with snaps and pops, shuddering upward into a block inches thick. Like the Thames had frozen when I stepped from the pier onto the ice.
Yuánchi was a motionless shadow on the riverbank. The binding between us was vivid. He had shared my vision.
“What horror was that?” I whispered.
The fracture. His voice brimmed with loss. The breaking of dragon names.
“That is why no dragon song is finished? That… ritual? Why did you not answer when I asked before?”
I did not know. The fracture was a mystery. You saw a lost memory.
“Not lost. It is the memory of another dragon.” Yuánchi furled his wings but did not answer, so I voiced what I knew to be true. “That is the dragon I touch through this water. The dragon that sleeps in the Thames.”