Where He Was
Chapter 6 — Where He Was
A god has just stolen my dress.
It’s rude. It’s also the clearest invitation I’ve had since I woke up, and I grin into the darkness and go after it.
I pick up the alabaster jar. Its cool curve settles into my palm, and the oil inside shifts with a small, thick sound. The dead lamp leans against the corridor wall where I left it. There will be no more light. “Anubis.”
Cloth brushes limestone beyond the burial doorway, and I follow.
The antechamber begins three paces ahead. My bare foot finds the shallow seam at the threshold, then the smoother floor beyond it. The lion couch stands to my left, and the rows of beer line the east wall. I know the distance between them because four men once insisted the couch wouldn’t turn, and I measured that doorway with my own shoulders.
A fold of linen passes over wood near the couch. I reach toward the sound and close my fingers on empty air. His dry mineral smell lingers for one breath, then thins into the damp. He’s big enough to lift me off the floor, and somehow I’ve lost him before I even reach the couch. “You have confused returning a garment with conducting a procession.”
Something taps the floor behind me.
I turn, and my free hand meets the carved lion’s head. He crossed behind me while I reached for the cloth and walked me around the couch without my once hearing him pass. Warm air closes at my back. Fingers skim my waist, and I squeak, which is mortifying.
The couch gives me one advantage. Its wooden frame stands only high enough for a woman willing to crawl, and his shoulders would have to go around. I wedge the jar into the crook of my arm and drop to my knees. I crawl under the couch with the wood grazing my spine, and for two breaths his smell falls behind me, and I’m so pleased with myself I could sing.
Cloth stirs beyond the far side. I reach for it. My head and shoulders clear the frame, and linen passes across my fingertips.
A hand closes around my bare foot.
His fingers circle my ankle and heel. I could hook a knee around the carved leg and hold on. I lock the jar against my ribs and let him pull instead, laughing under my breath, and limestone slides beneath my knees and belly until my head clears the frame. His grip loosens before I need to ask.
I roll onto my side and get my knees under me. The jar is safe. My dress is gone again.
The places his hands touched are still warm, and the wanting tightens low in my belly. He’s a thief, and I shouldn’t reward him. The ache between my thighs rewards him anyway.
“The cloth belongs to Henuti,” a low voice says from the burial doorway.
The voice may have crossed the room, or it may have spoken right beside my ear. Either way, he’s chosen to speak.
“Henuti agrees.”
“She removed it.”
“Removal is not surrender.”
A rough sound begins somewhere above my head. Before it ends, warm breath reaches my ear, close enough to catch if I turn quickly.
I turn quickly.
My palm passes through warm air. I reach higher, and one fingertip grazes a surface smoother than skin, and then it’s gone. I stamp my foot on the limestone, which I haven’t done since I was small.
Every place he touched before wakes up. My thighs remember his weight, and the skin below my ear tightens for his mouth. A dress is a thin excuse for following him. It’s mine, so it will do.
I move toward the sealed-jar shelf, where the cedar smell grows stronger. My hand finds four sealed jars exactly where Kesi placed them, with no god between them, and I realize the cedar is coming off the oil jar in my own arm. I’ve been chasing my own scent. He has hidden himself among Ishenre’s things, and I’m furious, and a little impressed. “The Jackal should know,” I say, “that I arranged this room.”
The next whisper comes from beyond the sealed baskets.
“The Lord of the Sacred Land knows.”
I cross the antechamber. The small stone workers wait along the west wall with their little tools, and my calf brushes none of them. Eight days ago I set the last row straight after a priest declared that eternity wouldn’t notice the difference.
A breath touches my shoulder.
I swing my arm behind me. The jar knocks my hip, and my other hand closes around a long wrist for the space of a heartbeat. My fingers can’t meet around it. The wrist turns once in my grip, and a claw slides along the inside of my forearm, light enough to leave the skin whole.
Then I am holding nothing.
Heat runs up from the claw toward my elbow. My mouth dries. The old green bitterness of the cup comes back under my tongue, and the floor tips under one foot, and suddenly I’m frightened.
I put one hand against the wall and hold the jar tight to my ribs. The first basket starts beneath my smallest finger. The burial doorway lies across from it. The lion couch is two paces right and four forward. I say the distances to myself one by one, as steadily as a list of linens, and I press my palm flat until the limestone stops moving. “Anubis.”
A thin hitch sounds in the darkness. It may be my own breathing.
The bitterness fades, and the floor comes back under my feet. Only then does cloth stir near the retainer passage, and I’m so grateful to hear it that I forgive him the claw.
I follow more slowly this time. My shoulder finds the narrow bend exactly where I remember it. Nefru’s alcove is just past it, and I whisper an apology to her for the racket. Something long moves the air ahead of me. I reach and touch the dress, and he pulls the linen across my knuckles before my hand can close. “That was nearly honest,” I say.
His voice comes from farther up the corridor. “Henuti nearly held it.”
The words are faint with distance. I can’t tell whether I heard him or made them up myself, and that is what stops me five paces later.
Chasing him gives him every advantage. He chooses where the cloth touches the stone, and he says he can hear my heart through walls. He could be standing behind me now, listening while I chase a dress through rooms I know better than any priest who blessed them, and the thought makes me hot in the face.
I’ve followed far enough. If Anubis wants the game to go on, he can cross some darkness himself.
The retainer alcoves lie beyond the bend, and I know a place there where lying still has a purpose. Thirty-seven women are lying still in it already. I turn toward them with the jar against my ribs, and my heart is pounding with the plan.
This time, Anubis may follow.