After a few minutes, though, I shake myself from the process. I found the clothes I needed an hour ago. The light outside is vanishing.
I clench my fists, leave, and start back toward the garden along the increasingly dim crevasse.
Though it’s been several months, my memory of how to get to the golden door is uncomfortably clear. I light the torch at the entrance to the narrow tunnel system, grateful for its flickering defence against the rapidly encroaching night. Press through long dark corridors of stone and obsidian and then stone again. Only a few turns, only a few minutes. My still-sore legs and leaden feet make it feel forever.
Long before I can see the end, I hear it.
The hair on the back of my neck prickles as I feel the rhythmic pulse in my bones. Steps slowing, despite myself. I came here so many times before the Gleaner attack. Inoculating myself. And in some ways, it has worked. I’m not going to run. I have control. Especially now I am certain, after Duat, that contact with the terrible power won’t destroy me.
Still, this is far worse than that escape into the city almost six months ago; without the deadly pressure of the Gleaners behind me, this time, the sound evokes something primal, and I find myself steeling desperately against the memories it conjures.Thrum. Thrum. The naumachia’s there. Even with all the horrors I have seen since, I have yet to feel that same sense of terror. The complete, helpless, suffocating purity of the panic that gripped a hundred thousand of us together as we watched a single man transform swathes of our number into nothing but a red haze in the thundering dark.
But it is a memory. Amemory. I cannot help but bring it to mind but I am not there, anymore. I amnot there. It is a past pain.
I round the final corner. The flickering image of the crossed crook and flail on the golden door shatters and fuzzes and re-forms, ethereally lit one moment and plunged into darkness that my torchlight does not breach the next. Once again I find myself stopped. Staring. Trying to make out those glyphs, even knowing I won’t be able to decipher them.
Then, fingernails digging into palms, a step. Slot my torch into a sconce on the wall. Another. Another. Closer than ever before and it’s a physical presence pushing back against me now, but I continue. Ten feet. Five. I can see the intricate gilding on the face of the door. Nofret’s words scream in the back of my mind.
I am there. Hand hovering over soft metal. My fingers flicker and fuzz in my vision. My breath is violently short.
I push.
The soft gold is hot beneath my hand, though not painfully, and nor doesit quiver the way the stone stylus did at the naumachia. A tremor runs through my arm as I make contact with the metal.
The door solidifies, freezes in time for just an instant before it swings away from my touch. Immediately, the wild, frantic fuzzing around it begins again.
I wait, heart pounding, not sure what to make of it. But nothing happens. I am alive. Unharmed.
I step inside.
The room beyond is bathed in warm golden light and is as large as the massive door intimated. The walls slope gently inward as they rise, eventually meeting at a point high above; the intricately carved ceiling has a glittering illumination worked into its design, highlighting the reliefs that cover both it and the walls. More gilded symbols are inscribed everywhere, glinting and shimmering in the glow.
It would be beautiful, if it were not for the way the entire space wavers and judders and seems to threaten to break apart at any moment.
Aside from the elaborate carvings, there is only one thing in the room to draw the eye. At its very centre—lowered from the entrance by four concentric triangles cut into the stone, stepping down—is a pool, surrounding and submersing a long golden altar. Though everywhere in here shudders viciously, the water is particularly agitated, an ocean of shimmering, throbbing motion that scatters and breaks the reflected light above. Shimmering with ethereal energy, dizzying even to glance at. Even from here, several feet away, the immense force of that energy—the invisible crashing and grinding of it all around me—is nauseating, disorienting. Flickers of concealing black streak through it at intervals, water and everything in it vanishing to complete and utter darkness for less than a heartbeat before returning.
Finally I adapt, steady enough to realise the boxlike gold in the pool is not a shrine at all. It’s tapered slightly, shaped. And while hundreds of intricate designs cover its sides, there is only a single, massively detailed image on top.
A man. Eyes closed. Arms folded over his chest. A long, gold-and-blue striped headdress drapes down past his shoulders.
It is a sarcophagus.
I frown at it as I carefully move around the edges of the pool. I’ve seen plenty of these in the other tombs in Qabr—even slept in one—but never anything approaching this extravagant. Beneath the fiercely buzzing water, the writing on it crawls to my sight as if alive.
I’m curious about it, about who in all the hells would be buried down here like this—assuming there is even a body in there—but the fact is, it doesn’t matter. Immune to its effects or not, I’m not about to step waist-deep intothat. Not unless I’m desperate.
And thankfully, I’ve realised that it is not the only object of note in this tomb.
The golden crook and flail hang crossed on the far wall. The real thing, this time, not just a symbol. They have to be important, surely. And there is little else in the room to interact with.
I skirt the pool of sputtering darkness and stand in front of them. Beautifully crafted for such simple implements. Gilded glyphs on the handles of both, lapis lazuli inlaid to the gold. They do not pulse like the door and pool behind me.
Hesitantly, I reach out and grasp the crook.
I am bound, desperate and fearful and cold and pained, as I am carried on horseback toward the howls of battle.
My heart races as I try to calm a black-eyed man while he grips a panicked, struggling Aequa by her head with one hand.
My left arm screams. It is metal. It is gone.
