Kyan settled down on his heels and stared
into the bowl of water he’d been using to scry what on earth had happened to
the High Priest and to the God.
Overnight all the images had changed and Amun now, sometimes, had the
Re-Harakhet, Face of Horus of the Morning Sun, on the Golden ‘King of the Gods’
golden body.
The demon Amat had appeared at the
doors to every temple of Amun overnight.
It was the strangest thing but suddenly everyone who had to walk between
the eater of filth suddenly became very devout and payments for the resolution
of sins was up. But Kyan had no idea how
this had happened, or why.
The bowl in front of him stayed stubbornly
blank, except for odd flashes of someone’s hands in a very specific position…
very like a prayer pose, except it wasn’t palm to palm it was finger to finger.
And then came the snake nightmares
and the invasion of every one of the Candace’s cats into his bedroom, making it
almost impossible to sleep because they insisted on lying on him in the heat
and standing on him, or kneeding organs that really didn’t need to be kneeded.
He’d tried to close the doors and
they came in the windows. He’d blocked
the windows at the expense of getting any fresh air at all and they knocked
over the grates or the blocks or even the glass, pushing through anything he
could put up.
“Bast… Leave me alone!” He finally
prayed and put down fish-oil and milk in the outer courtyard, which finally
left his sleeping quarters clear of cats.
And his nose appreciated the stop to all the sneezing, but finding lions
and cheetahs in his courtyard, licking every last scrap of fish oil out of the
lamps and off the offering plates was still disconcerting.
And the snakes. Something was calling the snakes called ‘Wadjet’s
Children’ into every nook and cranny in his home.
He’d had to put down saucers of beer
everywhere and had drunken serpents and even the occasional drunken cat snoring
in every corner. And then the mice and
rats showed up because all the predators were drunk or asleep.
Every piece of clothing he had, had
nibble marks that his seamstresses struggled to hide and re-sew and if he
managed to put anything away in a clothing chest somehow the vermin managed to
chew their way in!
And the mess they made of his
kitchen! He couldn’t even store grain in
a jar because some enterprising rat had figured out how to pee through the
seal!
He rubbed his hands over his bare
head and knocked the bowl over into the lotus pool. The Candace was entirely consumed by her
pregnancy and no one, no one was paying any kind of attention to him. If he had more information he could be effective
but he had no letters from Aegypt at all and the High Priest was missing and
the statue of the High Priest in Najat had changed… it had gone from a
proud-standing leader to the crouching demeanor of a night-soil sweeper,
complete with broom and bucket, both astonishing large. It made the High Priest look like a classless
fool.
“Ana!” He leaped up and strode into
his dressing room. “Ana! Let me attend
on the Candace! I need to be appropriately
dressed! Ana!”
Behind him, in his bed, a drunken
asp reared its head and hissed derisively after him.
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