Fox's Bride (21 page)

She lay in the coffin. The heat of the metal seeped through her linen dress and singed the back of her legs. She held the fennec over her chest, and his black nose explored the flower headdress.

Ten arms lifted the lid overhead and slammed darkness on top of her. At the last moment, the fennec's ears folded down.

A blue light roused itself in her earrings. The fennec's eyes shone back at her, his padded paws turning teal. She let go of him, and he pattered over her body. He stepped onto the hot metal, too, but his chirping noises sounded of nothing but happiness.

“I'm not certain you appreciate the gravity of our situation.” She tried to stroke the fox, but he frolicked past her hands. “Does this remind you of a desert burrow?”

She smelled clay and guessed the priests were sealing the edges of the sarcophagus. The space already felt airless, and she was panting. The crowd hummed outside. Inside, the confines stifled her.

The sarcophagus shifted beneath her, the front wobbling. Men had to be pulling it into the temple with rope on a series of wooden rollers. The motion was subtle, much like sailing on a land ship. She felt herself slipping downward into sleep.

Everything tipped. Her head bumped against metal, and irritation pulsed through her at the thought of her orchid headdress crushed. She consoled herself with knowing that men must be dragging her up the side of the pyramid to reach its stone door.

She wanted to stay awake until she leveled out and could reasonably expect to be in the god's burial chamber. As it grew obvious that she would fail at that, she began to see the advantages of sleeping to pace her breaths.

Paws brushed across her belly. The fennec rested himself across her chest and made a new sound. A birdlike warbling rose from him into a trill of delight.

Her hand found his head. Without any reason for the action that she could justify to herself, she rubbed his furry ears.
Not without purpose,
she told herself. Calming the fennec would slow his breathing, and she felt more at peace with the tiny animal.
Plans can change
. Hers, she began to think, might benefit from the addition of one fennec.

Brass towers loomed overhead with their hundreds of painted stone faces. Chandur's expectations muddled into bewilderment as he was led toward a temple of red stone. It bloomed larger over the tops of buildings, curving petals of masonry shaped after a giant lotus.

Women lounged in shaded doorways, flower petals stenciled over their cheeks, and their eyes followed Chandur and the guards. The ladies were dressed in oil and henna, brown designs of leaves and vines lacing their arms and legs. Amulets dangled between their breasts.

Pilgrims walked the streets with giddiness plastered to their faces. A scribe stumbled, wine and blue petals spilling from his cup. “The second year of Pharaoh's reign begins tomorrow!”

One woman beckoned to the guard to Chandur's left and called out. “Djet.”

The guard began to smile. His face hardened instead, and he did no more than nod to the courtesan.

Within Chandur, swirling heat battled with a chilling unease. He had never heard of an execution in the Red Lotus District, but the closer they walked to a temple dedicated to passion and love, the more his guards scowled. One of them had taken to looking over his shoulder, eyes darting, hand pressed to his sword.

The spellsword saw his chance when three chortling nobles raced ostriches through the street, beaks bobbing overhead. The two guards in front of him dashed forward to make room. Chandur stuck his legs behind the other two who held him and heaved backward. They tripped, grunting when they hit the white tiles. The guards pulled down on Chandur’s arms, but he lunged free.

One lead guard had his hooked blade half pulled from its back holster by the time Chandur reached him with a jump. The block of wood attached to the spellsword’s arms bludgeoned the guard. Chandur trod over him, his wrists stinging. A woman screamed.

His heart drummed in his chest. Chandur focused his attention on sprinting shoulders-forward with the speed and pureness of intent of a flying arrow. Pilgrims shouted and dove out of his way, and the braids of his wig slapped against his cheeks. He slammed his shackles against the edge of a building, wood splintering against stone. Pain lanced over his arms as his skin was scraped, but his hands were free.

A glance behind showed three royal guards lumbering after him. Their nostrils flared as they sucked in breath. Eyes shone white and fierce.

Chandur hopped over two scarabs rolling dung balls and ducked toward a leafy paradise below the Red Lotus Temple. Another guard wearing gold jewelry strolled out from between oleander bushes. Chandur knocked him down, seizing his sickle sword.

A grin overcame his face. Were he not panting, his joy would have bubbled up as belly laughs.
Let them try to catch me now.

Sword flashing, he charged through the garden's willow trees and vaulted over a lily pond.

Water glimmered under Chandur's boots. Lily pads passed below him as he leaped. Lotuses gazed up at him with their yellow seed pods, their white petals ending in pink tips.

To his dismay, he landed in front of a pack royal guards. At the sight of his raised blade, they hefted ten of their own.

Chandur staggered to a stop, his heart lurching. Undercurrents chilled him in blasts of frigid mortality.
What're all these royals doing here?
He knew he could not rely on his fate anymore.

“You came!” The voice resounded with glee.

Pharaoh fluttered her hands beside her face. Her cheeks glittered with silver dust. She skipped toward Chandur and his blade.

He hid the sword behind his back and dropped it. The pond splashed.

She circled him with her arms. Her voice sang forward and back over his name. “Fosapam Chandur! Fossa-mossa-pam. Chandy-candy-Chandur. I love your name. Do you love mine?”

“Umm....” By reflex, he looked around for the vizier.

A petal of red granite towered above, shading a grove of willow trees speckled white with catkins. Beside the guards glaring at Chandur, servants carried wicker cages holding exotic birds. Priestesses wore a gauze of red robes. One man Chandur recognized by his mane of red feathers and expressionless face, though as far as the spellsword could remember the noble's name was Lord Not-The-Vizier.

“Nephrynthian,” Pharaoh said. “It means, 'She Who Sings Beauty for the Goddess.' For her.”

She pointed with three fingers toward a priestess. A ruby-lotus amulet cast red sparks over her cleavage. The priestess' smile kidnapped his gaze.

The Incarnate of the Red Lotus,
Chandur thought. His tongue dried and set as mortar, bricking his mouth closed.
And Pharaoh. What sort of quicksand is this?

“Aren't you worried?” Pharaoh nuzzled against him, streaking silver dust from her face designs over his coat. “I am. I had to wait thirteen years to marry, and what if the joy of this wedding bursts us into a swarm of yellow crickets!”

Hiresha gasped awake within the sarcophagus. One of the fennec's ears twitched though he still lay dreaming on her chest. Blue light tinted the curving tufts of hair within each ear.

She had enchanted her red diamond to hold them both in a state of hibernation for three hours. Now she listened for any priests who might have remained with them in the tomb. She heard only the panting of quickening breaths. Her own. The rapidness with which her lungs churned air warned her that little vital essence remained in it.

I must be expedient
. She scooted against the metal wall then rested the fennec beside her. He tucked his tail over his eyes.

Shifting her body back and forth, she slipped out of her gown. To push her magic into the sarcophagus, she would need the direct touch of skin on metal.

Plunging back to sleep, she arose in her dream laboratory.

“I was listening.” Her Feaster look-alike crouched in a mirror, sapphire claws splayed on her knees. “Someone large is in the tomb with us.”

“We must hope the last priest removes himself presently.” Hiresha clasped her hands over her chest, and the red diamond pulsed in time with her heart. She reactivated the jewel's defensive enchantment and added more scripts of magic, layering them over each other in precise designs. A dozen dream jewels floated down to dissolve into a whirl of magic. “We have little time left.”

The reflection touched the spot on her chest mirroring where Hiresha had the red diamond. “We've never made a Lightening so potent. Can the diamond hold both enchantments?”

“It is at capacity.” The vibration of power left Hiresha’s fingers, and her chest tingled around the diamond. She could not feel any difference while weightless in her dream, but the Lightening enchantment would halve gravity's force on her in the waking world. “I thought we would benefit from fleetness.”

Hiresha nudged herself through the air, toward a mirror lit blue with the confines of the sarcophagus. Within it, a nude enchantress with a glyph on her chest lay beside the fennec. Hiresha's heart fluttered as she noticed the fennec's ears followed the golden ratio, each being bigger than his head to the degree that most pleased the eye. She decided to keep this mathematical beauty to herself as it was not relevant. She had to break free before the air began to poison her body and mind.

“We want to scrub out the glyph.” The reflection scratched around the topazes on her chest. “It itches terribly.”

“The Soultrapper might sense my Attracting it from my skin,” Hiresha said, “and investigate.”

Hiresha dipped her hand through glass, into the memory of the sarcophagus, to clasp the slick skin of her sleeping self. Magic flowed down her arms from the chill of the laboratory, through the gelatinous glass, into a sensation of heat. Commanding her own body like a puppet, she rolled herself against the wall of the sarcophagus. In essence, she sleepwalked.
Sleep-moved, to be exact.

The motions came in starts and stops. Her senses were deadened, and she knew her shoulder grazed the lid of the coffin only because she calculated her width against its height. Since she was touching the lead, Hiresha could channel Attraction magic into the lid, pulling her sleeping form up to the roof of her prison. She was pressed against the topmost plate of lead.

Touching one hand at a time, then her feet, Hiresha directed her body to lower palms and soles and brace herself. Though she could not feel any sensations from her waking body, she took care the fennec had not been trapped. He might have woken and begun to move. She did not wish to crush him when she pushed herself and the lid upward.

She could determine the distance traveled by her feet and arms. Nothing seemed to separate them from the bottom of the sarcophagus.

Hiresha Lightened the hundreds of pounds of metal and stone above her to the weight of a bread board. The priests were correct that the enchantments would not last, and the Attraction spell connecting her to the lid would dissipate as soon as she woke.