She rounds the corner, and disappears from view.
“We’re safe,” I tell Ahmose.
“Hm.” An unconvinced response, as usual. Still uneasily focused on where the Overseer vanished.
I sigh and clap him on the back, making him start. Ahmose is far from the bravest man I know, but it’s hard to begrudge him his anxiety; the Concurrence has been searching for him—distributing his description, setting up checkpoints like the one we just avoided—since that first night I set him free.
And as Ahmose has continued to evade capture, our options have gradually decreased. More Overseers, more checkpoints. Random searches of Neter-khertet, building to building. Only my ability, and the fact thateveryonehere is a iunctus, has saved us thus far.
But we can both feel the net slowly closing around us.
We make our way back onto the main street, rejoining the slow stream of bodies and passing the Overseer without issue. Duat’s west lours green around us, mute but for the shuffling of feet. The distant roof to the east reflects a golden glow, almost orange, from the Pyramid of Ka. Softer and deeper than an hour ago. It adapts to the time of day, on that side of the river. It’s the equivalent of dusk in here.
A few more turns and then we detach again from the main flow, which has already thinned as the weary dead return to their abodes. All the equivalent of Octavii, from what I can tell: there are no clear pyramids here but every single one of them is seemingly ceding to either Ka’s priests, or his officials, or the Ka-shabti, or even other more privileged iunctii. We merit no interest from them as we slide away down an echoing street, hurrying to the base of one of the two great Colossi of Ka that guard the exit of this district.
“You’re sure about this?” Ahmose cranes his neck to take in the brooding stare of Duat’s ruler, flicking his thumb with his little finger. A sure sign that he’s doing everything he can to keep his nerves under control.
I don’t respond, carefully examining the black stone that sits at the base of the hundred-foot statue on the right.
“Ka-sheut. Siamun?” The sound of several sandals slapping against Duat’s hard streets. Not far away.
“I’mlooking.” I ignore the steadily increasing sound and locate the familiar set of symbols, sitting slightly apart from the inscription. Rapidly stab thecombination Caeror had me memorise. Each glyph glows a brief green beneath my finger before fading.
There’s a soft grinding, and then a panel in the ground is folding away.
“Done.” I let Ahmose lead us down the white-lit stairs, quickly jabbing the symbol to close the entrance again as we pass, and exhaling as Neter-khertet’s dark emerald streets vanish behind us. We reach the bottom quickly. The triangular passageways of Duat’s underbelly stretch away, lit by relieving cool white rather than the ubiquitous green of above. I grin at Ahmose. “Told you we could make it.”
He sniffs. “Yes. You had it completely under control.” Making a valiant effort at cheer but eyes still twitching, unease still in every line.
We walk for a few minutes, me carefully tracking the openings we pass and comparing them to the map in my head. It’s not quite the Labyrinth, down here, but the maddening uniformity of it all means that losing track of our position would still be a very big problem.
“You never did answer my question before, you know. Before we left.”
“Hm.” I’m only half paying attention, mentally checking off another passageway on our right. “Which was?”
“What makes you so sure we can trust this Netiqret?”
“He helped someone get out of the city. If he knew how to do that, maybe he knows how to get us across the bridge,” I answer absently.
An exhalation from Ahmose. “That is calledknowledge, Siamun. I asked why we should trust him.”
“We shouldn’t.” I slow as we come to our exit. Turn to face him. “But we both know we can’t survive much longer in the west.”
Ahmose’s expression is the dubious one he makes every time I talk about Netiqret. I’ve been searching for the man for weeks, ever since I finally accepted that some of Caeror’s information about Duat’s tunnels was catastrophically out of date. They still exist—Ahmose and I would have been caught long ago otherwise—but their route beneath the Infernis is gone. The underground passageways that should have led beneath the deadly river are completely choked with white stone. Old, I think—the thick layers of dust and grime suggest decades—but solid and cut to fit, very deliberately blocked. I spent days trying to clear a way through anyway, without even a hint of success. I suspect I could spend a lifetime and arrive at the same result.
Which leaves one way, and one way only, to access the eastern half of Duat.
We approach the doorway at the end of the tunnel. “You could still try to command the Overseers to let us across.”
I just shake my head, a tired response to a conversation we’ve had a hundred times. “I can control two at a time. Maximum. And you said yourself, there’s never less than a half dozen guarding the entrance on either side.” Controlling one Overseer doesn’t allow me to alter what the others know, either, I’ve found. They’re just as Caeror described them. Tools to relay information. Semi-autonomous limbs answering to a distant, inaccessible mind.
My thoughts flash briefly to the friend I left behind in Qabr, as they have so often over the past weeks. Guilt and hope mixed in the remembrance. He wasn’t captured, otherwise these old ways beneath Duat would have been compromised long ago. But I also know that if he was faced with being taken by the Gleaners, he would have rendered himself useless to Ka before allowing it.
I trust again, desperately, that he found a way out.
Ahmose grimaces but doesn’t dispute or complain, for once, as I start tapping the glyphs to remove the obsidian wall blocking our way. The shaven-headed man with the large hazel eyes has been a mercurial companion, at times, these past six weeks. Jumpy and irritable, often difficult to convince to go along with even a simple plan of action. Unconsciously wary of me, too, I think. Hard to blame him for that.
And to be fair, I did consider—seriouslyconsider—imbuing him, during our first, tense week together here. Finally hidden in the relative safety of the tunnels, Ahmose balled up and all but refusing to move as he tried to contemplate what he had been meant to become. To accept that this wasn’t some divine test, and that the afterlife he had been promised was not the afterlife Ka actually intended for him. I explained what I could about his false god and howmaat, the laws of Duat and supposedly the universe, were nothing but a means of control. Railed, and cajoled, and pleaded with him for days to pull himself together. He was in too fragile a state to leave alone for long but I needed food, and water, and to get my bearings in case the tunnels were not as abandoned as I hoped. My forays away from him were brief and largely unsuccessful. It would have been so easy to command him to obedience, even just temporarily.
