Fox's Bride (22 page)

By then, Hiresha hoped to be free.

Before directing her body to heave herself up and out, Hiresha glanced back into her dream laboratory.

The reflection wrung her yellow gloves together. “What if they're still priests in the tomb?”

“Then you'll have to fight,” the Feaster said.

Hiresha nodded and Attracted the diamonds from her stomach into her mouth. Acid burned her palate.

Jerking her arms, the sleeping Hiresha slammed her spine against the metal and stone lid. The enchantress imagined the clay sealant cracking and the sarcophagus splitting open.

Chandur felt as if copper wire constricted his chest in sharp lines of pressure. His scalp smoldered under the thickness of his wig. Astonishment not only strapped his jaw closed but also numbed his thoughts.

The Incarnate of the Red Lotus flowed forward to pose beside where Pharaoh embraced Chandur. The living goddess’ voice was seasoned with darkness and bliss. “Tell me how much you love Pharaoh.”

“I...” He tried to nudge out of Pharaoh's arms, but she held on. “...I just met her.”

“Perfect.” The lord with the red collar spoke in his disinterested voice. “The easiest way to become obsessed with someone is to know next to nothing about them.”

For the first time, Chandur gazed down into Pharaoh's eyes. Starburst patterns laced white through the black of her irises. Their uniqueness filled him with a foreboding of fulfilled prophecy. He thought these could be the “eyes a'glitter” spoken of by the Priest of the Fate Weaver.

Chandur wondered if destiny had guided him to this garden. He had no great feelings for Pharaoh, but perhaps he disrespected the gods to think he could decide his own future.

“We might,” he said, “be meant to marry.”

Pharaoh clasped him closer and giggled.

The ruby-flower medallion speckled them both with red. The Incarnate who wore it said, “As soon as the high priests of the other gods arrive, my loves, we may begin.”

“They're already here!” Pharaoh waved to the row of cages. “I declared each of my birds to be a high priest!”

The sculpted brows of the Incarnate curved upward at this. Behind her, priestesses muttered.

The lord said, “You must admit the birds of paradise compare favorably. Priests are too cultured for good company.”

The birds were cooing and cackling. One bounced, shaped like a fan with a flashing stripe of blue across its breast. Another boasted a flame of a tail. One perched upside down, its small feathers puffed into rivulets in the pattern of a butterfly's wings.

The Incarnate's smile curved with wickedness. “You have not invited the other temples, Pharaoh.”

“They'd only tell Vizzy and spoil everything!”

The royal guards shifted under the weight of the gold and lapis lazuli on their chests. They frowned at each other. The servants holding the bird cages shivered, looking behind them for avenues of escape, or perhaps for nearing assassins sent by the vizier. Two of the priestesses in red shuffled away, but guards ushered them back to the grove. The name “Vizier Ankhset” flitted from mouth to mouth between the draping willow boughs.

A servant was speaking. “...I told you, the vizier doesn't know.”

“And when he finds out he'll feed us to the flies.”

One priestess threw herself to the moss. “Pharaoh, Incarnate, please delay this event until it has the approval of the vizier. And all the gods.”

Another priestess lowered herself to her knees. “The marriage of Pharaoh should be a public festival to enrapture the city, not a cabal.”

“Nonsense, Pharaoh.” The lord stalked around them, his hands hanging low to the ground. “A wedding is no time to act sensibly.”

Chandur could not tell if the nearness of the lord set his hairs on end and tensed him to a whipcord, or if the thrill came from thoughts of marrying Pharaoh, of his fate lofting him to a greatness past his imaginings. He could picture his sister provided for as long as she lived, of his sons as princes. The warmth of the idea settled into him.
Pharaoh and I are meant to be.

The hands of the Incarnate of the Red Lotus glided onto the shoulders of Chandur and the girl wearing the blue crown. “You cannot wed this day.”

Pharaoh wriggled around Chandur as if he would protect her from her words. “It's not fair! If Hiresha gets to marry the fennec, I should be able to marry the Fosapam.”

A bead of sweat squeezed out from under Chandur's wig and skid down his oiled face. He felt a breath of unease as if he had been walking through the savanna and spotted a cheetah watching him. “Enchantress Hiresha is marrying the god? She's in his pyramid?”

No one answered him. The Incarnate was still speaking. “You cannot wed, officially. You can exchange vows of love, promises that when passion cools to embers you will kindle it to a greater blaze.”

“Oh, yes!” Pharaoh kissed Chandur's chin then leaned back. “I promise! I promise!”

He had to catch her, or she would have fallen into the lotus pond. “Has Hiresha been put in the sarcophagus? With the fox?”

“Why won't you promise already?” Pharaoh's lower lip trembled. “Don't you love me?”

“Well, yes, I mean I guess so, but the enchantress—”

She said, “We'll wed as soon as we can.”

“—if she's locked up and needs my help—”

Pharaoh reeled away, and her cry pealed through the garden. “Today was supposed to be about us!”

A royal guard winced. He said to his fellow in a low voice. “If the vizier is listening, he'll find us sure, now.”

The Incarnate whispered into Chandur's ear with a cinnamon breath. “Sweep her off her feet with your love, or the moment may pass forever.”

At his other side, the lord smelled of roasted coffee bean. “Don't trouble yourself over Hiresha. She'll escape on her own, or I'll free her tonight.”

Chandur took a step away from Pharaoh, and he could feel the strands of his destiny pulling him back. To leave would mean forcing his way through a web made by the Fate Weaver, flailing against ropes stronger than enchanted bronze. He thought he owed it to the world to stay and pronounce the love he did not yet feel.

His duty to Hiresha pulled him in another direction. The tip of the Golden Scoundrel's Pyramid shone past the curved red stone of the lotus temple. He could not imagine speaking words of love and kissing while Hiresha gulped for breath, encased in stone.

If I go,
he thought,
the Fate Weaver will pull me back if I'm meant to marry.
He decided that no matter what he did, it was already destined. He could not go against his fate, not truly.
So might as well do what I think right.

Sweat poured down his face, and he felt a wheezing breathlessness. The priestesses, gold-decked guards, Pharaoh, and feathered lord all blurred together in his sight. He heard nothing but the shrieking of the caged birds.

“I think....” He parted a veil of willow leaves. “I need time to think.”

Chandur rested a hand against a trunk's flaking bark. He forced in one long breath. Then he bolted between two guards and dove through the red and white flowers of an oleander bush.

Hiresha's eyes popped open. A ceiling above her sparkled with constellations of gold. The sarcophagus lid lay fallen beneath her, tilted so her right shoulder rested against the floor. The fennec squeaked as he leaped from the open coffin.

She spit diamonds into her hand. Drawing air into her lungs, she was choked with a reek of sulfur salts. Her earrings flickered with blue light and revealed a wall poxed with hieroglyphs. Shadows washed the rest of the tomb, and silence oppressed her. She could not even hear wherever the fennec had gone.

Wobbling to her feet, Hiresha scrounged in the sarcophagus after her filmy dress. She felt as if she put on a gown of cobwebs. The linen floated around her in ripples of fabric, which struck her as ghostly until she remembered her new enchantment was Lightening both her and the dress.

When she tucked her hair back, the spread of light revealed the stares of hundreds of foxes. Their ears surrounded her like rows of spikes. All standing up on their hind legs, they watched her.

Gasping, she backed against on ornate table, and her elbow swept off two mummified foxes. They tumbled, their wooden burial masks striking the limestone floor. Woven-reed wrappings on one fox split in a burst of dust and a rain of bones. The other rolled into the darkness.

“They’re all mummies,” she said to herself. “They....”

Her voice withered, and she found she could not speak, not with all those painted eyes on her. The tomb no longer seemed silent so much as listening.

Shivering in her thin dress, she padded across stone that seeped coldness through her bare feet. Each step carried her farther than she expected because of her new Lightening enchantment. She felt like a drifting spirit. Goosebumps prickled up legs. Hiresha had thought she would hide in the tomb for a few more hours for the hubbub to die down in the city. Now she wanted nothing more than to escape as soon as she removed the Soultrapper's glyph from the dead god.

The mummies of deceased queens might also bear glyphs, but Hiresha would first seek out the pharaoh. She expected the Golden Scoundrel had commanded a rare strength of will, and his soul would give the most power to her enemy.

The gloom retreated to reveal more of the tomb. Her light frosted the walls, where paintings of people stood in contorted positions and seemed to point at her. Gilt bows and spears leaned against a rack. A love-seat's padding had faded to tatters, and fox mummies cluttered it.

She wished she was holding the fennec, the living one. Then she might feel less alone and out of place among the dead.

Her earrings pushed back the shadows from a second sarcophagus. Amid its hieroglyphs, words of other languages scrawled across the stone. One in Hiresha's home tongue read, “You whom I have harmed not, I will yet destroy. Disturb not my divine sleep.”

Hiresha hesitated despite herself. She reasoned that the god had no power to harm her, locked as he was inside his mummy by the Soultrapper's glyph.
He might even express his gratitude,
she thought,
once I free him
.

She dropped a green diamond on either side of the sarcophagus’ lid. The jewels glowed as their enchantments Lightened the stone, and she shoved. The slab flew off and drifted back and forth in the air before settling on the floor.

An inner sarcophagus snarled up at her with a fennec face and gilded teeth. The carved arms on the lid were posed as if in agony. Hiresha shuddered and let another green diamond fall from her hand.

Prying off the inner lid released a belch of marsh gas. The wave of decay burned her eyes, and Hiresha's vision swam as she peered into the coffin.

A brown ooze clung to the inside of the sarcophagus. The slime fouled scarab amulets of onyx, and an emerald burial mask posed in an expression of torment.
No mummy. No glyph.

Hiresha straightened her back, grimacing from the stench. She wondered if the pharaoh had not been embalmed. His body seemed to have liquefied, but she could not imagine the Soultrapper letting go of the power of a pharaoh's spirit, not when he also bore a grudge and had skills in embalming.

The fennec streaked past her feet with a warning yip.

Leaping in surprise, Hiresha sailed two feet to the side due to her half-weight body. Bronze glinted where she had stood, and she glimpsed a blade whisk out of the darkness.

She turned her head, and saw the sickle sword. A hand gripped it. The hand attached to an arm wider than any human's, with a scar seam running up it to hulking shoulders. A funeral mask loomed down from a height of eight feet, and it bore the copper face of the Royal Embalmer's likeness with ebonwood eyes.

A scream built up in Hiresha. Her throat locked it in her quaking chest.

A lion paw slid forward, then another, claws stretching. Where the great cat's head and mane should be sat the torso of a man. A belly caved inward, scarred from navel to chest from where the embalmer had removed the organs. The abomination reached to Hiresha with a second arm, only it did not end in a hand but the snapping jaws of five stitched-together foxes.

Chandur shuffled forward in a crouch behind the hedges, trying to stay hidden from the guards with bows. He passed a false door in the side of the Red Lotus Temple, pilgrims praying before it, and they yelped as royal guards charged by after Chandur.

In the distance, Pharaoh wailed with the sound of pipes and flutes playing in discord. The voice snared Chandur, and he found himself slowing and tearing up. A guard caught his arm. Only the thought of Hiresha in danger focused Chandur enough to tear himself away.

He sprinted below archways of flowers and wove between lotus ponds. A pile of clothes lay beside a stone bench, and a couple were kissing and fondling. Chandur thought he could hide himself behind their bench. When he dove past them, they gasped.

“A woman's life depends on me,” he said to the nude couple, “I beg you, don't—”

“He's here!” The woman gestured the royal guards to Chandur's hiding place.

Chandur bolted. Guards called out behind him.

“Surrender or embrace the afterlife.”

“Don't want to have to feather you.”

When he did not stop, bows twanged behind him. One arrow clipped a pear off its blossoming tree. Another punched him in the back, and Chandur staggered forward. A flash of orange panic subsided when he reached back to feel the arrow had bounced off his enchanted scale armor.

As he ran toward the edge of the gardens, Chandur tried to think of a plan. He would be marked in any crowd, both by his height and purple coat.
Maybe the guards will tire first,
he thought.
They are wearing gold bibs.
Chandur, on the other hand, had drank little the last few days, eaten less, and been beaten thoroughly, and he worried his legs would cramp. The day's heat fogged his vision, and he felt as if his panting drew in no air at all.

Chandur burst from the flower bush onto the city street. His boots squeaked as he stopped in front of a dozen royal guards. A man rode an ostrich among them. A false beard of blue glaze protruded from his chin, and he held a staff with a carved baboon's head. The sight of him filled Chandur with a cold slush of dread.

“I presume
she
brought you here,” the vizier said, not looking Chandur in the eye. “Arrest him.”

Several of the guards balanced pole axes studded with gemstones on their shoulders, their moon-shaped blades a sweep of bronze pointing skyward. They reached for Chandur. He swerved.

The vizier sucked in his breath, his face reddening. His eyes whipped up to glare at Chandur. “Kill him.” He contradicted his first order with a growl. “His mistress is defiling a tomb, and they both deserve to die.”

The first diamond Hiresha threw missed the abomination. The second struck him on the leathery skin of his chest, the gem a yellow glowing speck.

The Attraction spell caught the arm reaching for Hiresha. The hand made of foxes slapped against the monster's chest. The foxes snapped their fangs together and tried to turn to look at Hiresha, but their heads stuck. Within the same second, the death mask snapped off to crumple against the massive torso, revealing a dead man's face with hollow eyes-sockets. And the sickle sword dug into the abomination's ribs, though the creature did not bleed.

Hiresha, too, felt herself slipping toward the yellow diamond. She grasped the sarcophagus and pulled herself away. The thought of dying and losing the chance to rescue Chandur had stripped her of all composure. The sight of the lion-man-fox thing crumpled over itself due to the strength of her enchantment restored her to a modicum of poise.

Black stitches lashed the torso of the lion to that of the man, as well as the fox heads to the arm stump. Hiresha said, “Someone has entirely too much time on his hands.”

The embalmed monstrosity said nothing, had not so much as grunted. Hiresha supposed it could not, lacking lungs. She had to assume the Soultrapper's magic both preserved its muscle and controlled it. No glyphs reddened its parchment skin, and as Hiresha understood it, this meant the creature could not be the Soultrapper himself.

Neither could she believe it the pharaoh's body stitched into the abomination. She glanced again at the muck in the sarcophagus.
Priests and Soultrapper both would do all in their power to prevent the pharaoh from decaying.
She asked herself if she could have found a false burial, a decoy to fool tomb raiders.
Interlopers of less repute than myself.

If so, Hiresha faced a problem of finding the hidden sarcophagus, with only five enchanted diamonds left in hand.

Make that two problems.
Bones cracked as the abomination uncurled. It flayed the skin off its chest, which stuck along with the jewel to the creature's freed arms. The sword ripped from dry flesh to point at Hiresha. Five foxes aimed their black eyes at her.

Hiresha was not accustomed to blades bearing down on her, least of all in the grasp of a mummified ogre-lion. Her hands shook with alarm, and she could think of nothing but dashing away. Weighing as little as a child but with the legs of a grown woman, she matched the speed of the abomination even on its four pawed feet.