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But Hassani was shaking his head. “He lived until the year 853 in our calendar, which would be . . . 1449 in yours. And even then, it was not so simple. After his bones were brought back here—”
“Wait. Wait.” Hassani obligingly waited. “You’re telling me that that . . . thing . . . died less than six hundred years ago?”
“Yes.” Hassani regarded me mildly. “In Venice.”
“In Venice. He died in Venice in 1449.” I did some mental math, and didn’t like what it was telling me. I scowled. “What didn’t Mircea tell me?”
“Anything, apparently. My apologies; I assumed you knew.”
“Knew what?”
“That it took three of them to take him down. Your consul, the European consul Antony, and your father.”
“My father . . . killed that?”
“Helped to kill that. You see, your consul and Antony were Changed by . . . well, we called him Pa-neck, meaning the serpent, although not to his face.”
“Yeah.” I stared up at the huge, fanged skin above me.
“His parents named him Sokkwi, ‘Little Fool’, but he took the reign title of Setep-en-Ra, ‘Chosen by Ra.’ He was quite capable, by all accounts, when young, and a fierce defender of his adoptive father’s interests. Some have even surmised that the serpent above Ra in the early portraits wasn’t Wadjet at all, but Ra’s chosen defender, emblematic of the army he was building for himself.”
“The army.”
This was starting to sound eerily familiar.
“Yes, the gods were constantly at each other’s throats in those days, some five thousand years ago—”
“This thing is—was—five thousand years old?”
Hassani blinked. “Well, I did say he was the first of us.”
I shut up.
“In any case,” he continued. “The old gods were a quarrelsome lot, and a selfish one, with each wanting to rule over all. But they were too well matched to be able to win a decisive victory. They therefore decided to change humans, or whatever creatures came to hand, improving them and forging them—”
“Into armies to fight their wars for them.”
The dark eyes narrowed. “This is not the first time you have heard this.”
“No.” I thought back to a strange creature I had met several times recently, the last in Hong Kong during the desperate fight for the city. He had died there, but not before telling me a strange story that didn’t seem all that relevant at the time. But then, his kind were basically the secret service of hell: fallen angels with a network specializing in information who frequently seemed to know more than they should have about what was coming.
I stared up at what remained of an ancient demigod, and wondered what he’d known about this.
“An Irin told me,” I said.
“Ah. Fascinating creatures.”
That was one way of putting it.
“Well, the Irin was absolutely right,” Hassani said. “The gods made themselves armies, but they did it so well that they began to worry. The creatures were made to battle other gods, after all. What if they decided to turn on their makers? That is why later generations had limitations added deliberately—vulnerability to sunlight, weak points at the heart and neck, helpless early years—”
“I wouldn’t say helpless,” I muttered.
“—but Setep-en-Ra had none of these. He was virtually indestructible physically.”
“And mentally?”
Hassani shook his head. “He grew progressively more paranoid and detached from a world he no longer recognized. After the gods were banished, he began to think of himself as a god himself, and his delusions grew. As his strongest Children, your consul and Antony plotted to take him down, although in the end, they were not enough. Your father had to assist—”
