It creaked open, revealing a broken wooden brace beyond the threshold.
They all stared at Nefermaat, who blushed with pleasure.
“How could you know such a specific spell?” Sita asked her.
“I didn’t. I made it up. I can’t believe it worked!”
Sita scrutinized the young priestess. She hadn’t studied a lot of heka, but she knew that spells were sacred, written only by the sagest of priests, who often spent lifetimes in trial and error, combining objects, words, and actions to create a successful result.
Yet this girl had done it on a whim.
Truly, the gods must be at her ear, Sita thought.
They rushed inside the citadel, Raetawy and Karim at the front, Sita and Neff following behind them. Inside, they faced an empty antechamber, with long corridors stretching to the left and right.
“Which way?” Karim asked.
Raetawy pressed her ear to the wall and held up a hand forsilence. After listening intently for a few seconds, she said, “Left,” and turned down the corridor.
They’d only gone a few steps before they heard a strident shout and half a dozen armed guards poured out of a doorway ahead, charging toward them.
“You take three and I take three,” Raetawy said to Karim.
Karim grinned, then ducked as a khopesh blade sailed over his head. “Your generosity, sena, it is boundless.” The guard took the full force of Karim’s attack as he rammed into the man’s hips and slammed him—and the guard behind him—into the stone wall.
Meanwhile, Raetawy blocked a guard’s first strike, dealt him a punch to the gut, and spun out to kick another man into the opposite wall, bashing the sword from his hand with her scepter as he bounced back. It all happened in a whirl of flashing blades and bellows while Sita looked on, holding Nefermaat behind her and her serpent staff as a shield.
After thirty seconds of frenzied fighting, Karim and Raetawy stood over the unconscious guards, panting.
“You saidthreeeach,sena, and yet you took four,” Karim complained.
“You hit that last one first.”
“Yes, but you took him down, so I hardly think that counts.”
“Can we please argue about this later?” Sita said, rushing past them both to the doorway ahead.
When she reached the portal, Sita found a smaller chamber within, boasting high ceilings, tall windows, and a line of cold braziers terminating at an austere wooden throne. Near the throne, the ram-masked priest chanted, his arms raised to the heavens. Kenna knelt before him in a pool of sunlight, dust motes floating around him.
Kenna looked up when Sita entered the room, and when their eyes met, she saw a slight brightening in his pale, somber face.
Then Mery stepped out from the shadow of the throne behind him. “Goodbye, brother,” he said, and hefted the stone mace into the air. His face alive with malice, Mery brought it crashing down upon Kenna’s head.
38Sita
The staff’s beam of protective light was halfway across the room when the mace connected with Kenna’s skull. It didn’t reach him in time.
Blood spattered Mery’s bare chest as Kenna jerked with the impact of the blow. His eyes, which had been focused on Sita, rolled up into his head and he slumped to the floor.
“No!”Sita screamed, running to him. She dropped the staff and fell to her knees beside her fallen brother, heedless of the sibling who loomed over them both.
“Kenna, please! Stay with me, please!” she cried, gathering him into her arms. Blood leaked onto her dress as she put pressure on his wound, her fingers slipping in the wet tangle of his hair. Behind her, Nefermaat released a choked sob, and Sita fought back her own tears as she looked down at Kenna’s face. It was slack and gray.
“No.”
We were finally together again. We’d finally put the past behind us, and now, and now…
The pain in her heart was too much. She held his thin body to her chest and began to rock back and forth, weeping.
