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Chapter Seven Horror is a contextual thing. Hammamiya lay in ruins, black smoke rolling off its remains. Its citizens bobbed face down in the river, bloated, jammed-up feasts for crocodiles. The stink of the place sickened the refugees and the blood from it sickened the already wilted land. But misery comes in worse packages, as the fugitives from Set soon learned. Across the river, almost within sight of the stricken city, Badari thrived. Boats ran, the waterside market was filled with crowd...

Sanni was ready to go. Her children were rested, and so might walk a while on their own. Yesterday her arms had flamed by evening as she carried first one and then the other baby away from the corpse of Mahasna. She had ignored their laments of tired feet and hungry bellies until they were miles from the burned-out town. The girls had complained too stridently to feel her consuming fear; they hadn’t noticed the hints of death peeking from still-smoking doorways. Hordedev was a different matte...

Qebera struggled up yet another dune, the sand shifting under his weight, as supportive, he cursed, as water. He glanced over his shoulder to where they ought to be and, yes, they pursued him, two dunes back, though their numbers seemed fewer than the last time he’d checked. Maybe they planned some ruse to ensnare him, a flanking effort to get around front. It didn’t matter, not anymore. He was far beyond strategy. That luxury had deserted him two days back when he had lost his men to a Setim...

The next several days were a hemorrhage of grief for Abydos. After Set’s initial attack, several ships out of Abu Simbel docked at the city’s moorings and disgorged their Setim cargoes. The invaders had been anchored miles upstream, and beset the city like some awful communal nightmare. They set aflame the great temple of Osiris and smashed every altar erected to him in every house and in every street. The workman-clerics of those altars were dragged from their homes and gutted, their familie...

Isis Wept, Chapter 3 Isis staggered, almost collapsing. She had been walking the edge of her roof, a moment’s self-collection after just returning home. If not for her attending priestess, she might have fallen to the courtyard below. “Goddess!” Merferet gasped, hauling her queen from the precipice. She quickly, contritely, released Isis’s arms. “Goddess, forgive me! Are you all right?” Isis settled to the mudbrick roof. She trembled, and her body ran with sweat. “I felt something,” she said,...