Stop it, he commanded, swinging the torch back around and finding only sand and emptiness.Nothing could have followed you here on foot at that speed. Nothing. Not even—
He froze.
A figure stood in front of the thorny shrubs. It hadn’t beenthere a moment before.
A man.
The figure was cloaked in rough robes of indeterminate color, his face shrouded under a ragged hood. For a moment, Karim felt relief. This couldn’t be the creature he’d seen in the desert that had killed Djet in the depths of the earth.
But then, then…
The firelight reached the man’s hands. The skin was dark with decay, his curling, skeletal fingers capped with golden tips. His feet were clad in fine leather sandals inlaid with gold, sandals far too fine for a man such as this. Strips of fine linen wrappings, soiled with time, their ends shredded, dragged serpentine along the ground behind him, trailing from the body beneath the robe—
The wind blew off the river, filling the man’s hood like a sail and allowing the firelight to reach his face.
Suddenly, despite being outside, surrounded by endless space, Karim felt as if he were back in the press of that suffocating tomb, with its walls closing in around him. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, couldn’t scream.
As a child in the Red Lands, Karim often imagined the face of fate, the grim visage that followed in your footsteps all your life, waiting for the moment you finally belonged to him.
That was the face that peered out from behind the shroud.
A gaunt, hairless, desiccated face, its skin stretched taut over a skull exposed in places to reveal sinew stretching between cheeks and mouth. No visible eyes looked back at him from the two black gaping holes, but only twin glints of reflected firelight, glittering with malice.
Somewhere in the distance, a jackal howled.
Then, as if the sound had broken a spell, the creature took a step forward.
Behkai shot past Karim, tearing toward the creature with aferocious snarl.
“Behkai, no!”Karim shouted, finally finding his voice.
He imagined the dog crashing through the specter, revealing it to be nothing but a loose cloth held up by a bundle of dry sticks, a false man constructed to scare away predators. But instead, the thing reached out, grabbed a fistful of scruff behind the dog’s neck, and hurled Behkai away as if he weighed nothing at all. The dog slammed into a boulder, yelping in pain before sliding to the ground and lying still.
Karim stared at Behkai’s body in shock.
The creature took another step forward. And another.
Karim should have run. Should have bolted back to the skiff and left everything behind. He might have made it too. But something had overtaken him, something stronger than terror.
Rage.
In one fluid motion, he lobbed the flaming embers inside his torch at the creature. The rough fibers of its robe caught instantly and began to burn. The thing hissed, throwing off its smoking robes, revealing the horror of a half-wrapped mummified body beneath. Where the skin of its chest had worn away, a network of gray tendon and muscle crisscrossed, and beneath that, a hollow cage of bone. An intricate scarab collar hung around its neck, and an ornamental pendant depicting the same doglike creature he’d seen in the tomb—with a downturned snout and tall, blunted ears—hung from a gold belt looped loosely around its waist.
The creature turned its head toward Karim, light still burning in the hollows of its eyes. With a chilling, unearthly roar, it lunged for him.
But Karim was ready. Sidestepping the creature’s reach, Karim used its forward momentum to thrust his dagger deep into its abdomen, and then upward into its chest cavity. But the dagger found little purchase with no flesh to pierce or tear. Karim stabbedagain and again, but the creature took no notice. It reached up, its bony, gold-tipped fingers closing around Karim’s throat.
The creature’s grip was so strong, so abruptly suffocating, that the dagger slipped from Karim’s fingers. He raked at its hands, using every bit of his own strength to try and pry them off his neck.
Already his head felt light and swollen with blood, each pump of his heart pulsing through his eyes as he stared into the gruesome face of the creature.
It has a name, he thought as he felt his body grow limp, his defensive blows growing weaker and weaker with every passing moment. A name he’d whispered into the night. A name like a curse.
Setnakht.
The monster held on to him as he collapsed to the ground, his vision blurring at the edges, the roar of wind in his ears. Dimly, he felt one of its hands release his throat and move to his torso, ripping his robes aside and exposing his bare chest.
What is it doing?
