CITY OF THE GODS: FORGOTTEN (40 page)

D’Molay visually searched the rest of the rooftop for other guards and saw none. He then approached Tenh-Mer, smiling at their good fortune. “Just how many passengers have you carried before?”

Still lying on her side, she rested her face on her hand and looked up at him a little mischievously. “Counting you? Umm, three.”

He smiled at her answer then started to feel unnaturally attracted to her again. He stepped away. “Well, it could have been much worse. There could have been a whole garrison up here, or you might have dropped me to my death on the way.” A pang of guilt ran though him as realized that he had worried she might betray him, when in fact she had risked her life to bring him here.

D’Molay walked to the edge of the roof where the guard had fallen. Though there were some torches in the gardens below, it was very dark and there was a thick cover of foliage. He saw no sign of where the man had landed. The guard’s drop had lasted only a second or two, so unless someone had been watching or was walking in that area right then, no one would have seen anything. It occurred to him that people were probably used to hearing screams from the prison. Chances were good that he and Tenh-Mer were still undetected.

He turned around to face her, but she had moved. She was lying on her stomach now with her head hanging off the roof. At first glance it looked like her head had been chopped off, but he quickly realized she was looking off the edge of the building and trying to see under the eaves. Either that or she was throwing up. The urge had certainly hit him while they were flying.

“Tenh-Mer, are you all right?” he asked earnestly.

Her head popped back up and she turned around. Still lying on her stomach, she explained herself. “I’m looking for that gap in the roof I told you about. It’s not on this side,” she added.
 

Slowly she got up, and stretched her arms. “Mmm, my strength is coming back already.
 
Don’t worry. I’ll be able to carry you both to the outer wall. It’s actually closer than where we flew from,” she said, walking over to the next nearest roof edge and pointing to the outer wall below. Then she flattened out on her stomach and peeked over the edge. “Oh here it is.
 
Come see!”

D’Molay got down on his stomach to lie next to her. He immediately felt the overwhelming urge to put his arm around her and kiss her, but managed to suppress it even as he felt warmth spread through him. He looked down and saw the excited face of Tenh-Mer, her hair hanging straight down, although from his perspective it looked like it was sticking straight up.
 

“See?” She pointed at the back of the roof where it met the wall. Sure enough, there was a covered hole in the stone. “That piece of wood just slides out of the way and then you can crawl in.” D’Molay wasn’t quite sure how he could get to it without some tricky acrobatics, but it certainly looked like a potential entrance.

“Tenh-Mer, you are amazing, I could just kiss you!” Unable to hold back any longer, he gave her a kiss, while they were both lying there with their heads hanging upside down.
 
It was possibly the strangest kiss he had ever given. He was filled with an ecstatic joy. The blood was rushing to his head from the way he was laying and his heart filled with happiness now that the goal of finding Aavi was in sight. Fortunately for him, the odd position they were both in made it difficult for anything but a kiss to happen. He kissed her and kissed her. It was Tenh-Mer who withdrew.
 

“Stop. You have to go save your friend now.” She got up and stepped back from the roof’s edge.

His head cleared. “Wha . . .? Yes, yes of course.” He stared at the entrance, and after an encouraging nod from the demoness, shimmied along the roof’s eaves while using the beams under them for support. When he reached the wood planking covering the opening, he was able to slide it aside with his foot. He was startled by Tenh-Mer’s voice behind him. He turned around to see her head poke back below the roof, her long black hair cascading like a waterfall around her pink face.

“I’ll wait here until dawn. If I don’t see you by then, I’ll assume you were captured.
 
Then I’ll tell Sekhmet and beg her to help free you. Good luck,” she beamed. D’Molay smiled his thanks and disappeared into the hole in the building.

At the moment D’Molay gained entry to Set’s compound, the usually vigilant guards had more to worry about than a random prison break in. The pyramid had been rocked by an inexplicable explosion just moments before. The strange burst had affected a circular area about three hundred feet in diameter. Every living thing within that area had been destroyed.
 
Each person was petrified wherever they stood, transmuted into statues of white sand.

Just down the hall from Aavi’s cell, Kafele had attempted to run away from the flash of light when he first saw it, but it was too fast. When Kafele had been turned to sand, he simply fell to the floor and broke into several pieces. Dozens of Set’s guards and other visitors to that part of Set’s temple had met the same fate. In Aavi’s cell, Set was also frozen in place, although he seemed to have a more stone-like texture to his skin. His ebon form looked like it had been coated with a layer of gritty grey paint.
 

Aavi lay motionless on the floor, but unlike Set, she had not been turned into a statue. She was merely unconscious, arms and legs at odd angles, looking like a puppet whose strings had suddenly been cut in the middle of a performance. As she stirred, the shattered shackles that had once held her to the torture slab dangled brokenly from her wrists. Seeing Set, an unmoving figure standing with his back to her, she cringed, thinking he would suddenly turn around and strike her again.

After a few terrifying moments, she remembered the flash of light. Someone must have made him stop; someone had saved her. Aavi shook the weight of broken shackles from her wrists and cried out in joy. Her fingers were whole and healed. Tears ran down her cheeks as the pain and the horror of Set breaking them one by one spun around in her mind. She could breathe easier now too, and the blood that had filled her mouth and throat was gone. It was like waking from a bad nightmare, but like the fickle flow of a dream, she thought she saw Set move a little. Aavi held her breath in fearful anticipation, but he remained still.

As the feeling of panic faded, she checked the rest of her body. All the wounds she had suffered were gone. Aavi tried to sit up, but despite being mysteriously healed, she felt exhausted and heavy. She managed to prop herself against the wall of her cell, nervously watching Set for fear he might reanimate to torture her again. But even if he didn’t, she needed to get out of here before one of his guards discovered her. What would they do if they found her here with Set immobilized? Fear of those consequences was enough to get Aavi moving. Crawling along the floor, she reached up to the door handle. She fumbled with the latch for a moment with awkward fingers that still shook from all that had been done to her. Finally the latch clicked and the door swung slowly open into the corridor. Leaning against it, she fell forward as the door moved, her hands striking the floor.

Aavi looked up and down the hallway, but there was no movement. It appeared deserted. The desperate need to get away from Set was the one thought that kept echoing in her mind as she started to crawl down the smooth polished granite hall.

She had met many people and deities since she had arrived in the City of the Gods. Some had been kind, many were uncaring, and others had been mean; but none of them had possessed the evil she had found in Set. The High Sulgi had been cruel and threatening to her, but his darkness came and went. The bat creature had grabbed her from behind and dragged her off.
 
Guards had been rough with her and pushed her around, but they paled by comparison. The god from the north, who had put his hands on her in strange and unpleasant ways, wasn’t dark, really, but some other color she didn’t fully comprehend. But Set’s inner glow, his colors, they were so very, very dark.
 
His heart was only evil and malevolent. There was nothing else in him.
 

Aavi realized now exactly what she was seeing when she looked at someone. She was peering into the soul and seeing the feelings hidden within.
 
Aavi felt as if she had made some kind of breakthrough, something that gave her a clue as to who or what she might be, but the pieces hadn’t come together yet. Freedom was still her foremost need. She crawled on.

Behind her, in the cell she had just left, a slight cracking sound broke the silence.

D‘Molay crawled into the gap in the wall of the prison building.
 
There was not much space in the hole, just enough for him to slide himself along. The passage fed into a small dark chamber, a bathroom judging from the smell. He held his breath and hoped no one would be using it when he dropped in.

His progress was blocked by a free-standing wrought iron grate. Peeking through it, he saw that the room beyond it was unoccupied. Moving the grate aside, D’Molay slid himself in the rest of the way and landed quietly on a stone ledge.
 
His foot almost fell through a toilet hole that was in the center of the ledge, but he caught his balance just in time.

As his eyes adjusted to the darkness and his nose wrinkled at the stench, D’Molay took stock of the room. It was cramped, lit only by light leaking around gaps in a door frame. He stepped off the ledge and moved to listen at the door. Hearing nothing, he slowly opened it a crack. The corridor beyond was empty, giving him a moment to consider his options. Ignorant of the prison’s layout, finding Aavi was going to require considerable exploration. He stepped out of the bathroom and walked along the corridor as if he belonged here. As he went along, he tested the handle latch of each door he passed to see if it would open.

The first four doors he passed were locked, but at the fifth, the latch responded with a soft click. D’Molay opened the door a crack and peered in. There was no reaction to his intrusion, so he pushed the door all the way open and stepped inside. Against the back wall of this chamber were four tiered shelves. Lining one side wall were wooden crates and an assortment of items: clay pots, wooden staffs, small figurines of Egyptian gods and other, mostly broken, odds and ends. The other side of the room looked more promising for looting.
 
A quick search of racks and crates rewarded him with enough pieces of a worn out Egyptian uniform to disguise himself as a guard.
 
D’Molay traded his clothes for an Egyptian-styled leather chest plate with turquoise colored shoulder pads, a white linen kilt, and a wide dark leather belt with hieroglyphs etched into it.
 
Most of the gear was tattered or damaged, but his leather working skills came in handy and he was able to jury rig them well enough. At a distance, no one would really notice the deficiencies. He even located a scimitar to carry, though the blade was gouged in several places and the hilt was mostly unraveled.

Unfortunately, he did not find the sandals that the guards usually wore, and his hair and complexion were nowhere close to the standard style. Most of Set’s guards had deeply tanned skin and pageboy haircuts formed their black locks. D’Molay pulled his dark brown hair into a pony tail, a style he had seen on a few of the guards, to blend in a little better. He hoped his efforts would be enough to avoid detection. He chastised himself for not thinking of a better strategy in advance, the rush of time and the distraction of Tenh-Mer’s charms had made it almost impossible to think. D’Molay hid his clothes in an empty crate, taking only his treasured knife, Council seal and bag of coins with him, slid into the belt he now wore. As a last thought, he grabbed a parchment scroll to carry with him so he could pretend to be checking the cells for some official reason.
   

He slipped out and proceeded down the hallway, once again in search of Aavi. As he explored Set’s prison and checked each door he passed by, it was evident that something was distracting all the guards. Several ran past D’Molay as he walked down the corridor, paying him no attention. D’Molay kept a stern, grim expression on his face and pretended to be reading the scroll he was carrying as he wondered where they were rushing. He hoped the reason for their hurry was not the discovery of the guard who had fallen to his death.

As he wandered the halls, D’Molay paused at each cell and checked through the small barred opening for Aavi. If the room was too dark to see into, he would softly call out her name.
 
As he stood at each door, he held out the parchment he had taken to make it look like he was checking the cells occupants in some way. When he actually took a look at the hieroglyphics on the papyrus, D’Molay was unable to read any of them. For all he knew, the scroll might be a list of local brothels. He rolled it back up to prevent its unknown contents from alerting someone who could read Egyptian to his trick.