A day. It felt like an eternity, and he knew about eternity. Existing without his consort was unbearable, meaningless. Agony. In the flight deck of his ship, Horus sat in the command seat, morose, and gazed at the relic cradled within his palm.

"Wake up," he whispered. Nothing. He rested his forearm against his thigh and followed the sinuous curves of one of the serpents wrapped around the stave. "She needs me beside her. Just for a little while, take me back to her. Let me see her—let her know I am with her." He shifted his weight. The relic's gold relief shimmered, caught in a shaft of late afternoon sunlight, its brief glint its only response. His jaw tight, he eyed the pyramid where the Creator had returned him from his crumbling realm, back to where Sethi had retrieved the jihn and annihilated Arinna—from where Baalat had vanished.

With a muttered oath, he set the relic onto Baalat's seat. "My love," he whispered, his heart tight, gripped by dread. "Hear me. I am with you, wherever you are, you are not alone. I exist only for you. Fight this. Come back to me."

The pair of serpents twined around the relic's stave gazed back at him. Their golden eyes blank, empty, just as they had been since the Creator sent him back with his imperative: Give the relic to Istara, and when the time was right, guide her back through the tower to the indentation. Horus leaned back in his seat and folded his arms over his chest. The Creator had given him no easy task. The tower was a horrible place, saturated with distortion, and where time both failed and all times became one. Madness had clawed at him. He had barely made it to the indentation, himself. How would he manage to lead Istara there as well, as she suffered her own agonies, perhaps even pulled against him?

Doubt assailed him. He rubbed his hand over his jaw, the rasp of his stubble reminding him of the time he had already spent in Anki. Three days. And what had he accomplished for his reckless departure from Ikalur to pursue the jihn? Nothing. He closed his eyes as waves of guilt and regret slammed into him. He welcomed the pain. Baalat. If only he had been more cautious. If only—

A pounding against the ship's outer door startled him. He leaned forward, cautious, and enabled transparency. The walls shimmered. He turned and caught his breath. A grotesque creature hunched by the door, its flesh flayed. It shuddered with agony.

"Horus."

Horus lunged to his feet. He knew that voice: The Egyptian, Ahmen. But how—

He bolted to the door and slammed his palm against the sigil. The door slid open, and the eyes of the Egyptian met his, saturated with pain and something else. Despair. Ahmen eased himself up the steps and into the cabin. Horus kept out of his way, eyeing the other man's injuries. He had been skinned alive, but some time had passed since it had been done. The exposed muscles of his back and shoulders clung to his frame, pale, stiff, his blood dried out from the heat of the sun. His kilt rustled, a rusted red-brown, rigid with old blood.

Ahmen halted. He shuddered. Pain bled from him, visceral, raw. Horus had nothing to aid him. The Egyptian needed a healer. A fresh shaft of anguish shot through him as he thought of Baalat, her golden light bathing her in vibrant tendrils, as once, long ago, she had healed the fallen—had healed him. He clenched his hands into fists. No. Not now. He forced himself to focus. He turned his attention back to the suffering man. Ahmen stared at the floor, his chest rising and falling with each labored breath, his shrunken muscles taut, ready to snap.

"Where are the others?" His question rasped, harsh against the smooth contours of the cabin.

Horus couldn't bring himself to say it out loud. Arinna is dead. Baalat is . . .

Ahmen cut a burning look at him. "What happened?"

Horus liked that question better. He gestured toward the middle pyramid. "Sethi found the jihn."

"I know." The muscles of Ahmen's jaw clenched. Horus looked away, unsettled by the macabre sight. It was unnatural, a man without the clothing of his skin.

"Did the pyramid do that to you?"

"No."

"Then what—"

"Sethi didn't return to Perev alone."

Horus blinked. He took a step closer, eyeing Ahmen's flayed flesh, the precision of the work. He had seen such before, during the wars of gods and men. Marduk. He let out a slow breath. He had underestimated the Egyptian. "You went after Meresamun?"

A flash of anguish sheathed in loss shot through Ahmen's eyes. Horus caught his breath. Even after Ahmen's incredible, insane act to aid her, Meresamun had chosen to remain.

Horus cleared his throat. An unsettling thought circled him: Within the space of one day, he, Teshub, and Ahmen had lost their woman. What was it the Creator had said? He searched for the odd phrase. Ah, there it was: To defeat the darkness, the goddess must rise. What goddess? Or did he mean every female was a goddess? Horus paused. If so, perhaps it might explain why, one after another, the women had been taken from the men who loved them. Perhaps the darkness knew something the rest of them did not. Perhaps the women were the key—

"I found a way out of Perev back here," Ahmen continued, his voice rough, raw. "There is a chance Marduk will follow."

Horus's thoughts juddered to a stop. No. Anki was to be the sanctuary of the gods, if Marduk were to arrive before Thoth returned with the cores, all would be lost. Baalat would be lost.

His heart juddered, thundering to life, dread awakening his blood, fueling him with purpose "What way?" he demanded. "Was it a mirror?"

Ahmen granted him the barest of nods.

"You remember where?" Horus moved past him to fire up the ship. Ahmen didn't answer. Horus cut a look over his shoulder. "For the sake of what I once was to you, answer me. Where is it?"

Ahmen turned, bleak, and tilted his head to the south, at a palace positioned on an outcrop, overlooking the rest of the city. "It took me all day to get here. He might already have arrived. It depends on . . . her."

Horus didn't wait. He punched the ignition. The ship roared to life, its thrum invigorating him, dulling his ache for Baalat. Ahmen eased into the seat beside Horus, cautious. He set the relic into an indentation on the control panel. Sunlight washed over it, awakening its beauty, though its heart remained silent.

Grateful to at last find purpose, Horus occupied himself with the controls, scanning for thermal readings, flying low over the city toward the palace, the fronds of the tallest palm trees shuddering in his wake. He reached the palace and circled the vast structure, his weapons primed and ready to fire. The readouts showed nothing. He took the ship higher and flew over the city, crossing and re-crossing it, his heart tight. The screen remained quiescent, but he would not stop, not yet. Too much was at stake. He sailed beyond the perimeter, past the towering ziqqurati. Still, nothing.

"As far as I can tell, we are still alone," Horus said as he steered the ship back to the palace and brought it down onto an enormous, dusty terrace overlooking the city. Dust clouds billowed up, obscuring Horus's vision. Ahmen stared at the murk, unseeing, his expression impossible to read.

Horus let him be while he killed the power and shut the ship down. He stood. "I need you to tell me where the mirror is. Until the others arrive, we have to keep watch."

"I will take you to it." Ahmen rose, stiff, slow, his lips pressed into a thin line, the pain of his existence locked in the grotesque mask which remained of his face.

Horus stopped in the doorway of the flight deck to the cabin. "Once the others arrive, Istara will be able to bring an end to your suffering."

"Who says I want it to end?" Ahmen returned. "I deserve this."

Horus lifted an eyebrow. It wasn't up to him to question the Egyptian's choices. Apart from what little Baalat had said about Meresamun, he didn't know anything about Meresamun's Egyptian husband, nor did he care to. The only one who mattered was Baalat. Everything else came a distant second.

In the cabin, Horus eyed the weapons he had taken from Teshub. Their lights had stopped blinking. He tilted his head at them. "You know how to use those?"

He tilted his head at the weapon tucked into his belt. "I have made some guesses. Some worked, others didn't."

"Make your guesses with these outside, then."

He opened the door. Heat radiated from the terrace's broiling ashlars into the coolness of the cabin. He followed Ahmen out from under the ship's wing and into the blistering heat of the sun. No breeze stirred the air. The terrace's heat, devoid of the shade of the luxurious awnings it must have once borne, roasted them, the atmosphere choking, unbreathable, as hot as a bread oven.

Ahmen went ahead, leading the way in stoic silence toward the reprieve of a vast pillared hall, his gritty, dust-coated muscles creaking like the reins of a chariot. Seeking to distract himself from the unsettling sound, Horus glanced back at where his cloaked ship had been left, disturbed he had become accustomed to the company of a flayed, decomposing man who continued to exist. Immortality was no gift. It was a curse, a perversion of what the gods had been granted. If immortality were a gift, why had the Creator not offered it to him and Baalat. No. It was an abomination. The darkness's version of a god. Another distinct creak came from Ahmen. Horus suppressed a shudder, grateful such a thing could never happen to him.

He followed Ahmen deep into the palace, through halls, rooms, vestibules, and courtyards, the once-elegant furnishings laced in a creep of vines, and coated in an eon of dust.

Ahmen stopped in the opening of a corridor leading into the vestibule of another courtyard, his eyes moved, slow, back and forth, across the space, wary. In the center of the courtyard, a long silenced, once-elegant, three-tiered fountain overgrown with vines and padded with clumps of sedge filled most of the space. Around the courtyard's circumference, the pillared vestibule offered the solace of deep shadow. Horus waited, holding one of Marduk's weapons, ready to fire—at least he hoped Ahmen had been right in his guesswork and it was primed to fire.

Ahmen turned his attention to the dusty ground. A multitude of small, high-arched footprints criss-crossed the courtyard, over what Horus presumed were Ahmen's larger ones. He let out an unquiet breath, and cut a look at Ahmen. Marduk's consort had been here, her very presence jeopardizing the plans of the gods. His hand tightened on the weapon. How dare the Egyptian go rogue—the least one among them—and risk everything for a woman who no longer wanted him, who had aligned herself with the enemy of the gods—of all life. What had she done to aid Istara and Baalat when they were left caged in at Surru? Nothing. She had left them to die, without making a single word of protest.

At last, he understood Ahmen's earlier cryptic remark about Marduk's arrival depending on Meresamun. For a heartbeat, a blazing trail of rage seared through him. He no longer pitied the once-mortal. Yes. He narrowed his eyes, thinking of all the misfortunes he would have rained upon him if he were still a god. Let him suffer. He deserved it, after all. To think Baalat was alone, fighting for her existence at the hands of that thing, and Ahmen had taken it upon himself to wander, unprepared—and without informing any of the others—into the citadel of the enemy.

"No new prints," Ahmen said, a hint of approval gilding the harshness of his tone. He stepped into the vestibule. "Follow me."

Horus examined the work Marduk had wrought on Ahmen's flesh. The Egyptian would have suffered unimaginable pain. He would have talked. Horus held out his arm and blocked Ahmen's way. "You have put all of us in grave danger—and for what? Nothing."

Ahmen halted. A tremor rippled through him. "No," he said, low, "not nothing. I did what any man would have done to address a terrible wrong. She choose to stay. I got caught." His words, tarred in bitterness, regret, guilt, piled up, a wall of bones. "Marduk thought his blade could entice me to give up Istara's location. I wouldn't—even when he did this." Ahmen reached down, slow, and grasped the hem of his kilt. He lifted it up. The stiff, blood-encrusted material resisted, its ugly crackles punctuating the courtyard's dense, epochal silence. Ahmen turned, slow, ominous, toward the courtyard and its bath of sunlight. Horus caught his breath as the last of the shadows melted away.

Apart from a single, distended, rubbery piece of flesh still attached to his groin, Ahmen's testicles were gone. Above where they should have been, nothing but the savaged, scabbed stump of the Egyptian's penis remained, the flesh at the base sawn off, rough, jagged.

"He said this was for what I did to Meresamun," Ahmen said, his voice hard, gritty. "He took his time. I welcomed the pain."

Again, Horus realized, he had underestimated the Egyptian. He swallowed back the acrid burn of tannin tainting his throat. "You wanted to suffer?"

In the vestibule's gloom, the whites of Ahmen's eyes burned from his sunken, ruined visage. "For what I did to her, yes. A thousand times. Yes."

Horus forced himself to keep looking at him, to see the elegant, lean, muscular nobleman he remembered from their brief acquaintance in Babylon. He couldn't. This was who Ahmen was now, who he would be—would always be—the monster responsible for having driven the Babylonian princess he loved into the clutches of the being who brought darkness to everything he touched. Ahmen lowered his kilt.

An awkward silence slid between them. Horus turned his attention to the dark, waxy leaves of a vine encircling a nearby pillar. He touched one of them, a thin coating of amber dust slid onto his finger. In his wake, a line of brighter green shone through. He rubbed the rest of the leaf clean. "As a mortal, you worshiped me?"

"Always." Ahmen's voice was like a saw against stone, ragged with devotion. Horus cut a look at the other man. A glimmer of reverence flickered in the Egyptian's eyes. "Despite all I have witnessed since coming to Elati, to find myself in your presence once more after what happened in the Etemen'anki is nothing short of a miracle. I cannot even begin to comprehend how it must be for you."

Horus lifted his brow. He granted the Egyptian a quiet nod. "The Creator certainly moves in mysterious ways."

Ahmen made a murmur of agreement. He moved on, dignified, his gait raw with pain. Horus followed him at a little distance, Ahmen's savage determination to aid Meresamun reviving Horus's thoughts of Baalat, and of her own struggle, locked away where he could never reach her. If Baalat had been caught in Marduk's thrall he knew he would have done the same as Ahmen, but much sooner; it would not have taken him a month to get to her.

They turned a corner. Horus slowed his steps, impressed. He had expected something like the portals Thoth had made during the Golden Age, a stone frame, adorned with quiet bursts of cerulean light. But this. This was something other. The Elatian version of Thoth's portal was a stunning piece of beauty, symmetry, and perfection, untouched by the dust which permeated the rest of the palace. It stood in the courtyard just outside the edge of the vestibule, opposite the dormant fountain, a thin wall of silvered glass, as though it had erupted straight up out of the ashlars beneath it. Instead of stone, the mirror bore a delicate frame of spun diamond etched with sigils of power. No bursts of cerulean light touched it. It stood inert, quiet. A mirror. Alone in a courtyard. The most anomalous thing Horus had ever seen . . . and he had seen many things.

He went to it, examining it first from the back, where a dull wall of silver faced him, twice as wide as him and half again as tall as him. He paced around to its front and eyed its base, trying to ascertain what kept it standing. As he looked up, he caught his reflection. He blinked. A man he didn't recognize looked back at him, the days-old stubble dusting his jaw etched by the harsh white light of the sun. Sorrow carved his lips. Anguish darkened his eyes. Emptiness cloaked him. Gone was his fire, his vigor, and the passion which fueled him night and day. He gazed at his reflection, desolate. How could he fight for Baalat when he had lost himself?

The last image he had of her returned: she lay, alone, in the Creator's dying realm, her closed eyelids flickering, rapid, as the darkness encroached, its thin tendrils sliding over her skin, darkening her soul. Grief assailed him. Baalat. He reached out to touch the mirror's glass, willing it to take him to her.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you."

Horus lowered his hand. He turned. "A mere touch opens the way?"

From the shadows of the vestibule, Ahmen nodded.

Horus glanced back at his reflection again. On the other side: Marduk. Sethi, and the weapon which had taken Baalat away from him. His features hardened. "And Meresamun was able to use it."

"She was."

Horus said nothing. He wondered how long she would be able to keep a secret like this from Marduk. A day? Two? If he knew anything of Marduk, it was his ability to draw the deepest secrets from those he possessed. He backed away from the mirror and pushed aside a tangle of vines from the lowest ledge of the fountain. He sank onto it and squinted at the mirror, blinding in the glare of the late afternoon sun.

"Then," he said as he leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees and tilted the weapon toward the portal, "all we can do is wait for Teshub to return with the others. Let us hope they arrive first. I would rather not have to aim this at Meresamun."

From the shadows, a quiet shudder.

The sun slipped lower, its rays playing a game of chase across the courtyard, sliding one after another past the edge of the vestibule's roof. Shadows deepened. Horus eyed the heavens, as once again, the sky's inverted bowl raced toward twilight. A dusting of white clouds blossomed, streaked brilliant orange and shot through with streamers of pink. Lavender hues crept up from the horizon and chased the streamers. A mere handful of heartbeats later, dense purple soaked the canopy, then, in the blink of an eye, darkness roared across the heavens. Stars erupted by the hundreds. Ahmen limped out from the vestibule, rigid, his ruined muscles creaking like the mast of a barge caught in a violent storm. He sank onto the ledge beside Horus and eyed the mirror, the whites of his eyes glittering in the gloom.

"Why are you alone?" he asked Horus's reflection.

Horus cut a look at Ahmen, but the Egyptian had dropped his attention to his weapon, checking it remained ready to fire. Satisfied, he pointed it at his reflection.

Horus met Ahmen's eyes in the mirror. He shook his head, his jaw tight. He couldn't say it. Couldn't give it life.

Ahmen nodded, terse, and lowered his gaze to his weapon's reflection in the mirror. In the gathering dark, the weapons' cerulean indicators cast faint shadows over the footprints of the one Ahmen had lost. Horus caught Ahmen eyeing them, broken, defeated.

Horus granted the Egyptian his privacy. He turned his eyes to the stars, aching for Baalat, existing somewhere far beyond the stars, beyond his reach. He tightened his grip on his weapon. No, he would not think of her with despair. Their hearts would still be connected, even if hers was silenced to him. He would be strong for her. For both of them. Shoving back the paralysis of his despondency, he forced himself to relive fragments of the eons they had shared soaked in love, of his endless desire for her, his adoration for her mind, her wit, her smile—the heartbeat he found her on an Egyptian cliff top, fallen from the Immortal Realm. Her heart whispered to him, a faint skip, so weak he feared he imagined it. He pressed his palm against his chest, not even daring to breath. It came again, quiet, familiar. Tears burned his eyes. Baalat. He clung to their ephemeral connection, frantic, desperate, a drowning man. It was not over. She still fought. She would come back to him. And he would be waiting. The connection faded.

Shadows closed in on him, dense. The monolith of the mirror loomed over him, dark, impassive, ancient, a sentinel. He let out a slow breath, checked his weapon, and blinked back the heat in his eyes.

One hour passed. Two. The silence of the night slid over him, heavy, bleak. Lonely.