“Come here,” Akhnaton said.
Nefiron soft-footed to his side. He nodded to the feasting hall. “Look there. Whom do you see?”
“Your counselors and retainers, my lord,” she responded crisply.
“Whom do you not see?”
Nefron hesitated a long moment before answering. “I do not understand.”
“I think you do. You do not see Mimses. Do you know where he is?”
“No, my lord Pharaoh, I do not.”
Like a pair of striking asps, Akhnaton’s hands darted out, clasped the sides of Nefron’s head and turned it up and toward him. He stared unblinkingly into her eyes. She didn’t struggle or glance away. She returned his stare, and a reflection of his crimson orbs glinted in her dark eyes.
He released her as swiftly as he had grabbed her. “I had hoped to take you by surprise, before you had the chance to erect your defenses. I should have known that you never let your defenses down.”
Nefron didn’t respond.
“One of Mimses’s Incarnates came to me not an hour ago,” Akhnaton said conversationally. “He reported he had found the sack of suet dead by strangulation. He mentioned the female newcomer. Your name figured prominently, as well.”
Nefron still refused to speak.
Akhnaton sighed. “I will not miss Mimses. Nor will I divert my attention to finding either the woman…or your other conspirators in whatever intrigue you have schemed. I will say only this and I urge you to believe it—if anything happens to disrupt today’s ceremony, before, after or during, I will hold you responsible, even if you are not. You will die a particularly undignified death.”
Nefron finally spoke, a contemptuous edge to her voice. “Like mother like daughter.”
Akhnaton’s face twisted into an ugly scowl of sudden rage, then quickly composed itself into a mocking smile. Softly, intimately, he said, “You know me so well, daughter. Now, get out of my sight.”
THEY WERE SOME of the grimmest, most bleak and hopeless hours Ryan Cawdor had ever known.
He mingled with the crowd flowing and eddying in the compound. His jaw muscles ached with the strain of keeping a half-witted, vacant grin frozen on his face. He allowed wine to be poured on him, garlands of flowers hung around his neck and drunken women to plant slobbery kisses on his lips. He kept moving, constantly shifting, sometimes joining in with a snatch of ludicrous song, moving his lips to the lyrics he didn’t know.
Always he kept watch for an animal-headed Incarnate. He assumed the worst, that Mimses’s body had been discovered or that Fasa had been released from his cramped confinement. Regardless of the riotously festive mood in the city, the newcomers would be sought out.
As the afternoon staggered toward sunset, Ryan found it more and more difficult to keep the fire of hope and courage burning inside of him. He had believed he had lost Krysty before, but to death, the inevitable dark embrace no one could truly escape. The possibility that she was enraptured, seduced by the charismatic Hell Eyes, was almost too agonizing for him to consider.
Ryan had called him a mutie with an attitude, but that was so far from the truth it wasn’t even a lie. He realized he couldn’t truly comprehend exactly what he was. He wondered if the last Neanderthal had felt the same way when he snarled at the smooth, intelligent countenance of the first Cro-Magnon, understanding on a deep, visceral level he had met not only his superior but the symbol of his extinction.
Ryan tried to dispel the notion. A superhuman Hell Eyes might conceivably be, but he was still driven by ordinary human emotions, still weakened by human frailties.
He joined a clot of people near the open gate and relaxed into them, allowing himself to carried by the current out of the compound. Already a considerable number of Aten’s citizenry clustered around the base of the pyramid. He looked up toward its apex and saw the capstone resting on a platform made of wooden timbers. The sun shone from its crystal-shot surface in a thousand dancing, sparkling pinpoints.
From what he had overhead in the crowd of celebrants, the pyramidion had been rolled into place right at sunset, by a select crew of laborers—evidently purified, as Fasa had said. When the time came, men with huge mallets would knock the supporting timbers out from under it, and the capstone would settle atop the monument and imbue Pharaoh and his bride with the power of the gods.