With this in mind, he took to the air once more, heading for the river, scanning the skies for birds in flight.I am alone now, but it will not always be so, not always, the ibis assured himself.
As he traveled south, he glanced down at the river and saw an unusual sight. Men, women, and children had gathered along its banks and were staring at the water. Some were silent. Others exclaimed in wonder and dismay. It was only when the ibis coasted out of the glare of the sun that he saw what they were seeing.
Usually blue-green in color, the river was turning crimson. The red waters flowed north, powerful, ominous, and very, very wrong.
A whisper of the ibis’s earlier terror returned.
Over the amalgamated shouts of the people, one woman’s voice climbed the western wind and reached him.
“Beware!” the woman cried. “The Great River of Khetara has turned to blood!”
1Karim
Karim died young, violently, and with much left unfinished.
The manner of his death surprised him, but it really shouldn’t have. There had been many indications of its coming: the wrongness of the dark tomb he’d found in that valley, its unfathomable riches, the blood, the broken and dying boy he’d left behind.
And the creature he’d awoken.
It had pursued him across the desert, relentlessly, like the wind. He’d stabbed it, burned it, impaled it on a tree—and still it came. The creature wanted something. Karim had thought it wanted the amulet he’d stolen, but no.
It wantedhim.
He had been the one to summon it, after all. Summoned his own demise, like a mouse blundering into a viper’s den. Just as the painting on that temple wall, the Oracle of the Lamb, had predicted he would.
Dying wouldn’t have been so terrible if he’d done it with a clear conscience. However, Karim’s death not only marked theend of his life—but also the beginning of another’s.
The forgotten king.
Setnakht.
The undead pharaoh needed Karim’s heart—the heart of an acolyte—to truly live again. Once he’d gotten it, Setnakht was free to finish the work he’d left undone when he’d died a thousand years ago.
The Oracle of the Lamb gave hints about where that work might lead. To a river of blood. To chaos, sorrow, and ruin. To a kingdom forever broken. And it was Karim’s still-beating heart, savagely ripped from his chest, that would enable Setnakht to bring those ill portents to pass.
Karim had never meant for it to happen. None of it.
I’m sorry.
Those had been his final words, the words of a man who, in his last agonizing moment, recognized that his sacrifice hadn’t saved the people of Khetara and the Red Lands as he’d intended.
In fact, he had doomed them all.
***
There had been pain, unfathomable pain. A lurch that shook his body to the core, and then—
Silence.
The quiet fell over him like a thick blanket, blotting out sound and light, erasing the weight of his body and the sensation of his breath, which he’d never quite noticed until it had gone. Karim’s consciousness hovered in the darkness.
There was nothing, nothing, nothing.
And then there was light.
The light did not originate from any specific point—it simply came into being, like an idea. It engulfed him, and Karim could sense something, or many somethings, within that light. Slowly,the shapes became defined.
A man’s silhouette, visible but ethereal. The man’s voluminous robes swirled, their many folds billowing as if underwater. Karim studied the contours of the man’s face, and a name formed within his consciousness.
