Set cursed, and the prongs of the metauh rod stabbed toward Ryan, light dancing in a strobing flicker from them. Ryan felt like a bucket of water drawn from a polar sea had been dashed into his face. A shocking cold penetrated to his bones. He kept lunging, and a sweeping backhand swept the metal rod from Set’s fist and caught him squarely across the belly.
The Incarnate bent double and staggered, fetching up against the wall. He bounced away from it and directly into an overhead blow with the handle that cleft his helmet and the cranium beneath. He fell face first to the floor, staining the stone with blood and brain matter.
Tremors shook Ryan’s body, but they passed quickly. Fingering the ankh beneath his tunic, he felt it tingle to his touch. He whirled toward a square doorway at the end of the short hallway. Yellow light streamed from it. Pausing at its edge, he looked out. Wonder rose in him.
The chamber was shaped like a pyramid and much larger than looked possible from the outside. A dim glow shone down from the pointed roof, two faint columns of light beaming from twin openings. The light gleamed from an elaborately carved sarcophagus resting in the exact center of the floor.
Between the slanting shafts of light stood three people—a shaved-headed man dressed in an elaborately embroidered robe reading aloud from a scroll, Akhnaton and Krysty.
The bald man Ryan took to be a priest or mummer of some kind, since he mumbled and bobbed his head over the square of papyrus. He looked at Krysty’s pale face and felt prickles of pain all through his heart and mind. Dressed and made up as she was, she looked heartachingly beautiful, but her green eyes were dull and vacant, and her lips moved silently, as if she were mouthing the words read aloud by the priest. Like, he thought despairingly, a puppet.
Akhnaton towered over her, as grim and as impassive as a statue wrought of brass. He slipped an arm around her waist and rested a hand possessively on her hip.
Fury erupted within Ryan. He became the fury, filled with the mad need to claw, to bite, to kill. His surroundings receded and faded, and he saw only Krysty with Akhnaton’s hand on her body.
Ryan bounded forward across the chamber, vaulting the sarcophagus, swinging the winch handle over his head like a battle-ax. The iron bar crunched against the back of the priest’s bald head. His mumblings terminated in a gurgling cry before he rolled to the floor.
For a split second, the scene held frozen and motionless. During this interval, Ryan realized that the rage in his eyes had a sudden, answering reflection in those of Krysty’s. Roaring, he leaped at Akhnaton.
Akhnaton thrust Krysty aside and lunged to meet Ryan’s charge. His hand locked around Ryan’s right wrist, and as his free hand went for his throat, Ryan clasped it. They strained against each other for a long moment.
Akhnaton’s breath was hot on his face. The muscles of both men bulged. From far away, on the very fringes of his awareness, Ryan heard a thready, breathy whisper. “Mother of the Earth, give your daughter the power, the power, the power…”
Akhnaton’s knee flashed up, splitting and ripping through the thin material of his robe. It pounded into Ryan’s lower belly like a sledgehammer, and he folded over in the direction of the pain. Bile boiled up his throat.
The hand of Akhnaton wrenched brutally at his right arm, snapping his entire body up and over in a half cartwheel. Agony ripped up and down his arm, a deep, boring pain that settled and exploded in his shoulder socket. The winch handle clanged loudly on the floor.
Ryan’s back slapped against the polished veneer of the sarcophagus, the bone-jarring impact slamming air out through his mouth and nostrils. Blinking against the swirling pain-haze, he saw Akhnaton saunter toward him, carrying himself with the self-assured manner of a tiger approaching its wounded prey.
“I allowed you to live after our encounter two nights ago,” he said. “I don’t extend the same mercy to the same fool twice in one lifetime.”