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CHAPTER
THIRTY-EIGHT

The host crumpled in separate ragged lines. Marty or Surjan might have intended some sort of fallback maneuver, but that intention didn’t last beyond a few brief seconds, and then the fallback became a stampede.

Lowanna stood her ground, hurling sling bolts at the enemy. Lowanna’s stones didn’t seem to faze Seth, the biggest of the monsters—who had turned his attention away from her to focus on the battle—and rarely seemed to bother the ordinary Sethians, either. Still, she couldn’t bring herself to concentrate on just shooting humans.

A few of her sharpshooters, including Idder, rallied around her. Idder’s left arm hung bloody at his side, which slowed down his slinging considerably; he had to pick up the stone and put it into the pouch, start the pouch spinning and fire, all with just one hand. He fired at maybe a third of his ordinary rate.

But he kept slinging.

It was hard to feel that the humans on the other side were really the enemy. They were slave conscripts, or duped conspirators, maybe, but did they really want to crush and rule other men?

Also, she didn’t feel that victory could come from killing them, no matter how many human warriors might die. She saw herself on a living chessboard, and the enemy king was the hulking, lightning-fast Seth, and until Seth died, the battle wasn’t over.

Or could Seth be captured? Could Seth surrender?

And who was the king on Lowanna’s side? Whose loss would ensure their defeat?

She thought of Marty Cohen falling in battle and felt sick to her stomach.

Three enemy swordsmen rushed toward her, and for a moment she thought she would have to retreat. But two spearmen crashed into the enemy from the side, downing one man instantly and trampling him underfoot, and then setting themselves as a defensive hedge in front of Lowanna.

But they couldn’t hold for long. A wave of enemies was running their way, and with them Sethians, and behind them Seth.

Marty and Kareem stood with a knot of warriors, totally surrounded by the enemy now. There were bodies heaped under their feet.

Was this how they were going to die? Five millennia before their own births, in a forgotten battle in the desert? On the day of Lowanna’s birth, were her bones lying desiccated beneath the dunes somewhere west of the Nile?

Abdullah’s were.

Her skin crackled with excitement, and with the distant flashing lightning of the oncoming storm. Her chest felt that it would burst. The tempest had started as a damp wind at their backs, but now the dampness was all around her and the sky overhead was a scudding lid of dark gray and lightning struck here and there in the broad valley. It came fast, with only brief interludes between the electric stab and the rumble of the following thunder. She was a sitting duck, an easy target for the lightning, standing on the open ground, but she didn’t run for cover.

Could she hear voices in the lightning, too?

But no, those were trumpets.

A volley of missiles launched overhead. They weren’t the stones of Lowanna’s slingers, but a swarm of javelins. The projectiles slammed into the charging enemy, dropping every fifth man with an injury, some of them mortal. The charge slowed.

Lowanna’s slingers jeered, and three more men rallied around her and resumed slinging stones at the foe. But who had thrown the javelins? The missiles were too short to be the spears of Surjan’s warriors.

The two spear-fighters defending Lowanna broke ranks to run forward and down two enemy warriors, battering them with their heavy shields and then running them through.

Lowanna risked a look over her shoulder. A host was advancing, in a rapid but disciplined march. She blinked to see clearly as lightning flashed behind the army, but she could make out the banner, and it showed two horizontal rectangles with dots alongside them.

The Two Lands, Marty had said.

Narmer’s flag.

And where was the banner of the host?

Lowanna pivoted to face the enemy again and began to advance. She had long run out of sling stones in her pouch, but the ground was stony, and she had perfected the quick, fluid movement of stooping to grab a rock, snapping it into the sling’s pouch, and winging it at a chosen foe.

Marty was in motion, and she tried to give him cover. He left Kareem and their warriors where they were and moved like a fish, ducking, diving, and spinning his way through the enemy. Like a fish moving upstream, or like a talented forward on the football pitch. Lowanna dropped a hulking man with an axe who loomed up to threaten Marty, sinking a stone into his forehead. When a swordsman rushed him, she struck the enemy under his arm, knocking him sideways; Marty’s attack looked like a gentle touch, but he planted a knife-hand into the warrior’s throat and the man dropped.

A Sethian swinging a mace charged Marty. Lowanna hit it three times with stones, but the Sethian didn’t slow down. Marty dodged a mace attack, and then he had his sharpened ankh in his hand. The Sethian parried Marty’s first attack, and then when Marty pivoted to stab at the Sethian’s side, the Sethian caught his hand and held him.

Lowanna nailed the monster with a stone in the eye.

The Sethian dropped Marty with a howl and Marty stabbed it.

The ankh sank into the Sethian’s hide like Surjan’s spears never did. The Sethian’s howl ended in a gurgle and it collapsed, dead.

The tide of the battle surged back toward Lowanna and she found herself skipping backward. She kept her eye on Marty and saw him rushing toward Seth. He was doggedly moving toward Seth. He was going to kill the enemy king.

And he was going to do it with his ankh.

“Help Marty!” Lowanna shouted at Idder and her other men. They dropped a storm of sling stones into the fray around the Egyptologist, knocking down warriors here and there who were trying to stab him in the back or tackle him, and then he was out of range.

Marty charged Seth, and Seth hit him with its mace.

Marty went flying across the battle, sailing like a baseball, body limp as a rag doll.

Kareem and his warriors began to drag themselves through the murderous fight in Marty’s direction. For the moment, he lay away from enemy soldiers, and he had an arm raised to the sky. Was he shouting? But Lowanna couldn’t hear what he was saying.

Her body shook. She felt like a vibrating guitar string, like the skin of a booming drum. The wind seemed to blow through her.

Seth turned and stomped in Marty’s direction. It moved like a freight train, rushing past its men and sometimes even trampling its own wounded warriors. It roared, an ear-splitting sound that started in the bass register and then echoed against the distant cliffs with the shrill shrieking pitch of angry gulls. Lowanna slung stones at the monster, but it was moving too fast.

Birds circled over Marty’s body. Carrion birds? Was he dead? But his arm was still raised.

Lowanna felt a shiver race up her spine.

But it wasn’t from the roar.

The lightning struck closer to her. She felt a strange connection to the crackling power overhead. She heard its static-filled singing, she felt a reverberating sensation in her chest that matched the cadence of the noise she was hearing. Lowanna focused on the clouds above and she could almost taste the energy buzzing all around her. Her heart began racing as she felt the gathering power.

She felt as if she was suffocating on pure energy.

It made her feel scared . . . no, not scared . . . uncertain. Flexing her fingers, the energy coursed through her and she felt like she was communing with the clouds above. She imagined a tendril of power reaching toward her and through.

It was seeking a target.

She pointed at the monster Seth.

Seth raised its mace to strike Marty.

The entire world flashed white as a tremendous bolt of lightning erupted from the cloud and slammed into Seth. Thunder exploded in the same instant, deafening Lowanna.

Her own men staggered away in confusion, surprise, and awe, and the oncoming ranks of enemy soldiers tumbled to the ground, stunned.

The monster convulsed, jerking from side to side like a marionette whose puppeteer was having a seizure. It dropped its mace and sank to its knees. Its own men drew back, leaving it standing in a circle of scorched grass on a sand dune that was now crusted with an upper mantle of glittering glass.

Fatigue washed over Lowanna. She nearly fell.

There was a moment of silence across the battlefield.

Except for birds, singing over Lowanna’s head.

The nose ring, they sang.

Shoot the nose ring.

Her head snapped around to look at Marty. His arm was still raised. Had he passed her a message by shouting it to the birds?

She looked back to Seth. The big monster was shaking its head and lumbering slowly to its feet. The lightning strike that had melted sand into glass hadn’t killed it. Like every Sethian Lowanna had seen, it did indeed have a ring through its nose.

“Hit the monster’s nose ring!” she shouted to her slingers. “Every Sethian you face, destroy its nose ring first!”

She trusted Marty.

And she fired a stone at Seth’s nose.

So did Idder, and so did the three other men who stood beside her. A volley of sling stones crashed into Seth’s face. It shook, like an annoyed cow swishing its tail when stung by a deer fly, and then it raised its hands to cover its face.

But it was too late. Lowanna thought she could hear a bright cracking sound, or a tinkle, as of shattering glass, but that was probably in her imagination. She didn’t know whose stone it was, either, but one of the projectiles hit Seth directly in its nose ring, snapping it in two.

The fragments fell to the ground.

Seth bellowed. The sound was less fearsome than its roar of only moments earlier. This was a strangled sound, with notes of bleating in it.

The trumpets blew again, and soldiers surged past Lowanna with a roar, moving forward. They didn’t march with the careful precision of Surjan’s trained fighters, but they were more numerous, and they were fresh.

They swarmed over the western bank and into the battle-plagued enclosure.

Narmer strode among them. The sight of him took Lowanna’s breath away—he wasn’t lying ill, broken, and nearly dead any longer. He looked the vision of health, a warrior in his prime. His limbs were long and muscular, with no obvious sign of the rot that had afflicted him, and his lungs were hale. He shouted out a battle song in time with his men, and he carried a shield and mace like any warrior.

This was her side’s king.

They had thought him dead, but he lived, and was back in the battle. Had the penicillin done the trick? No, he’d “died” before he’d been able to consume any, and it was doubtful François’s mold had ever been anything more than wishful thinking, in any case. And she and Gunther had failed in their attempt to heal the king.

Had it been the ankh, after all?

Seth staggered forward through the line of its own men. It was gasping for air, a loud, industrial rasp that Lowanna could hear now, but its assault on Narmer’s front lines threw the men back, and Seth’s lines gelled and held.

The enemy king was not dead. Lowanna’s heart sank.

But Marty had earned a reprieve, at least. With the Sethians’ lines moving forward to meet Narmer’s men, Kareem and the knot of warriors with him darted forward to grab Marty. They dragged him aside; Gunther was with them, and he knelt to minister to Marty. A white glow spilled around the ankles and spear butts of the warriors, and Lowanna took a deep, steadying breath.

Where were Surjan and François?

She found that she was kneeling over a corpse.

Not just any corpse—the warrior Usaden. He lay dead, clutching Marty’s banner, eyes open as if he was astonished.

She shook herself, like a dog emerging from water. There was a battle to be fought. She and her band of slingers, which had grown to ten, were now unmolested, at least for the moment, and with plenty of targets. The Sethians’ troops seemed to be out of arrows, and Lowanna should take advantage of that fact.

“High ground,” she said to Idder. “We’ll get better shots from high ground.”

She seized the banner and stood.

Idder pointed to the nearest bank, and she staggered up with sharpshooters in her wake. From there, she could see the battle lines more clearly; they had ground to a halt and the forces stood toe to toe again, slugging it out. But Narmer’s forces had lost their impetus and they didn’t have the crisp, disciplined lines of the host’s spearmen. They now began to slide back, one foot at a time. In terms of human troops, the armies had reached an equilibrium. But a dozen Sethians or more remained among the enemy forces.

And there was Seth itself.

The biggest of the Sethians moved more slowly, now, and its breath sounded like the chains of a ship, thundering through its hull as it struggled to raise anchor. But it still moved, and it still swung its mace. Narmer’s men shattered their spears on its hide and lost their swords beneath the relentless march of its feet and lost their lives as its mace brained and mangled and pulverized them, leaving a slick of blood and a chaotic constellation of severed body parts on the sand.

Had Marty been wrong? Or had he been right, but his insight was insufficient to turn the tide of this battle?

But she had nothing else.

She shoved the banner’s butt into the sandy soil of the bank. Beside the pole, she saw shards of pottery and earth stained black—a grenade that had shattered without exploding? In the gathering storm, the flag whipped and streamed magnificently.

“Shoot at their nose rings,” she told her men again. “Every Ametsu you can reach, I want you to shatter its nose ring above all else. If enemies approach, bring them down, but otherwise, we are up here to break jewelry.”

“For Narmer!” Idder shouted.

“For Narmer!” Lowanna cried, and began to fire stones at the enemy. “And Marty!” she added, under her breath.


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Framed