A dead body lay propped against a pillar to their left.

  It belonged to a woman, dressed in simple armour with a short sword sheathed at her waist. Her entire front was scarlet stained; blood having gushed from her ravaged neck over her clothes to pool on the floor around her. Heshtat suspected she was the one they had seen enter just before they did, but he’d only caught a glimpse of her from behind and at a distance, so he couldn’t be sure.

  What he did know was that no human-forged blade had killed her. Her throat was torn asunder, her head only standing upright because it was propped against the pillar behind. It was a gruesome sight, and the animalistic nature of the kill was worryingly familiar.

  Both Heshtat and Maatkare had ample experience traversing the Otherworld, mostly from their shared time as Tomb Guard for Queen Cleosiris’ father. It was the duty of the Tomb Guard to watch over their charge while they cultivated, and that occurred predominantly in the Other itself.

  Everyone with an awakened soul could draw small amounts of power from the Other as they slept. It was sometimes called the Dreamscape for a reason, and its logic was described as dreamlike because it was, though the cause and effect was backwards. This small sliver of power was not enough to advance one’s mastery of their soul art in a single night, but it added up over time. Essence was the power that eddied thickly within the Other, and it was the source used to power magic in the Waking. But while snatching slivers of power from the Other while dreaming was enough to subtly improve the latent powers of one’s soul, it was not enough to advance them quickly. It was not truly cultivating.

  Cultivation was a tool reserved for the wealthy and the desperate. To cultivate was to deliberately draw power from the Other, to take in that essence and use it to awaken and master the aspects of the soul in a deliberate manner. The problem was that it took time and drew notice. One couldn’t grow from acolyte to adept in even a single soul art—a single expression of an aspect—by snatching power while asleep. It needed to be harnessed deliberately, channelled into the correct spiritual pathways and cycled in metaphysical configurations to expand and reinforce the soul.

  And that brought the attention of things one would rather avoid. The wandering demons that had escaped Sutekh’s ancient cull, spirits and lost souls that hungered for life once more, native creatures animated purely through emotion and feeling, and of course, the Desolate themselves.

  Heshtat and Maatkare’s job had been to fight those terrifying creatures. When the Pharaohs and kings, the high priests and the great powers, secluded themselves inside their pyramids and holy temples, it was the Tomb Guard who would safeguard them. With the aid of traps and guardians, they would stand physically in the Otherworld and beat back the tide of monsters while their charges harnessed that strange realm’s power.

  Only when they could hold the line no longer would they return to the Waking, alongside their now more powerful charges. It was a dangerous profession, and one that required excellence in all things. Heshtat and Maatkare had not failed because they lacked that excellency, and so when the otherworldly clicking echoed through that enormous room in the Temple of Amin-Ra once more, they both instantly recognised it for what it was.

  The Desolate.

  A chimeric horde of undead creatures drawn by the siphoning of power from the Other to the Waking, they had already swallowed half the territories of Amansi’s now passed Pharaohs—five of the twelve provinces overrun by that Dreaming Tide, as they were also known. And now they were here, as well.

  They turned together, back-to-back, eyes sweeping the room.

  “How?” Maatkare whispered.

  “It does not matter,” Heshtat replied, pulling his gaze high to the ceiling and along the walls, while Maatkare swept the pillars and the floor. The Desolate came in many shapes and sizes, and an attack could come from anywhere.

  “But they should not be able to breach the Waking. Unless there is a tear in the veil here, but that’s impossible!”

  “Evidently not,” Heshtat muttered with a grimace. Though privately, he agreed. The veil was reinforced by two things; civilisation—that is to say the heavy presence of people—and the holy. Heshtat could think of few places more holy than the ancient temple of the creator god. “To the centre. We’ll go through one of the portals if we must.”

  Maatkare accepted the plan without comment, and they swept down the steps, sandals slapping a percussive tune as they descended. All the while, their eyes roamed around them and their ears strained.

  “There!” Maatkare called, pointing with one of his wide tulwars to a pillar at the far corner of the room.

  Heshtat followed the gesture, seeing a flicker of something dart behind the pillar. “What was it?”

  “Desolate,” his friend said.

  “Of what kind?” he practically spat back.

  “Ah. Sorry my friend, it has been a while since I last risked my life. The adrenaline is hard to get used to,” he said with an apologetic smile. Before Heshtat could rebuke him that now was very much not the time for jokes, he continued. “I saw wings and a tail. Spines, too many legs. You know, the usual horrors.”

  By the time they reached the foot of the stairs, Heshtat had spied further movement. The body they had seen propped against the pillar above them wiggled. For a heart-stopping moment Heshtat thought that it was about to climb to its feet, but thankfully the Desolation hadn’t managed to corrupt the human form just yet. His relief died in his throat as the woman’s body burst apart, something wriggling from within. At first, he thought it was guts flopping about from her now ruined stomach, but no. Tentacles, waving and wriggling in the crisp air of the tomb, blood spattered but otherwise very much alive.

  “By the gods,” Maatkare whispered at his side as the body flopped to the ground, then righted itself, scuttling forwards to stand—or lay?—at the top of the stairs. A few dozen writhing tentacles inhabited the corpse, carrying it above themselves like a hermit crab with its shell. Before Heshtat could express the appropriate horror at the creature, he caught a flash of movement above and looked up to see a winged creature buzzing towards them. He pushed his friend aside and ducked, slashing upwards with the curved head of his khopesh.

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  The obsidian blade smashed into the flying insectoid creature, but while it was sent spinning away, there was no wound to see and Heshtat had felt no satisfying give of carapace or flesh yielding beneath his blade. Maatkare was on it a moment later, twin tulwars flashing in the torchlight as they came down, crushing the thin membranous wings on the creature’s back.

  It was a strange mix of dragonfly and lizard, and it screeched as its wings were brutalised. Its tail—more a proboscis than a lizard’s tail, swung around, jabbing out at Maatkare with unerring precision. He parried, knocking it aside, but once again his blades struggled to cut.

  Heshtat pulled essence from the Ankh around his neck, guided it frantically through twisted and broken pathways and forced it down into his sword. The blade alighted with ghostly white fire and he leapt forwards to cleave the creature’s long head from its shoulders before it could harm his friend.

  “Ware!” Maatkare screamed, stumbling in front of Heshtat and knocking aside a tentacle aimed at his face. Heshtat turned, joining his friend in battle against the gruesome amalgamation of corpse and tentacle that had scuttled down the steps in the confusion. In reality, it was something of a parasitical creature that dwelt within the body rather than a chimeric blend of the two, but it looked no less horrifying for it as barbed tentacles slammed against their blades.

  Heshtat once again faced the pain of manipulating his soul to temporarily enliven his blade, and a flurry of precise cuts saw him through the whirlwind of appendages until he could slice the dread thing in twain.

  “My friend,” Maatkare said, panting. His exhaustion was a mirror for Heshtat’s own, given their mortal bodies, and he looked up to see where Maatkare pointed.

  “To the archway,” Heshtat said, backing away as he eyed the dozen or so monsters surging down the steps towards them. He hadn’t noticed in the chaos of their brief battle, but the noise had risen dramatically. Clicking and snarling, hisses, growls, mewls and stranger sounds besides now filled the room.

  “Which one??” his friend asked as he ran.

  “I don’t fucking care, just get us out of here!” Heshtat cried, turning to sprint at the three archways and the portals that they contained as the horde rushed closer at his heels. He followed his friend through the central portal without a backwards glance, and all was darkness once more.

  ***

  Emerging into what might have been an armoury, they hit the ground running. The moment they regained control of their limbs and awareness of their surroundings they were pounding away down the hall, all thoughts of caution forgotten in the face of the horde at their back. The Desolate were here, in the heart of Amin-Ra’s sacred temple. What did it mean? What did that imply?

  With no time to consider it further, they continued their headlong sprint through titanic rooms carved for those of far greater stature and scale than themselves. Heshtat longed for some ushabti dolls or even some good old-fashioned traps. Anything they could use to fight back against the gibbering masses that were sure to follow them. Perhaps they couldn’t use the portals though, and had to make their way manually through the maze-like temple? He could only hope.

  Heshtat skidded as he rounded a corner, ducking beneath a pincer aimed at his head. He let out a strangled yell even as his blade whipped out, aiming to eviscerate the chimera that had been hidden behind the corner. Maatkare used the warning to save himself, skirting out wider to avoid the thrashing hooves and snapping pincers of the half-horse, half praying mantis amalgamation. His tulwars let out a keening cry as they sliced through the air, which turned into a loud clonk as they impacted hardened carapace and bone; one striking the horse-like leg and another the armour-plated chest.

  Heshtat used the opportunity to surge forwards, khopesh once again wreathed in essence, and decapitated the creature with a single swing.

  “Go!” he barked, side-stepping the swipe of another boar-like creature as he did so. Maatkare needed to no further urging and set off in a mad dash down the hallway. A brief exchange of strikes, which had the pig hybrid slumping to the floor in a pile of steaming guts, and Heshtat was off after him.

  Then he fell with a scream. Blinding pain ripped through him, the fire originating in his ribcage but swiftly blooming outwards. He coughed and twisted, seeing a bone-like appendage piercing his armoured vest just above his floating rib. Far too close to the heart for comfort. Then the pressure redoubled, and he was once again screaming in pain, his body dragged across the stone floor as the chimera reeled him back in with its barbed tail.

  “Your sword,” Maatkare shouted as he sprinted over, and Heshtat retained just enough presence of mind to throw the weapon into the air. His blood spattered to the slabs below, smeared around by his kicking legs as he was dragged unceremoniously closer to his death. And then Maatkare was leaping over him, catching his khopesh mid-jump. He winced, his mind narrowing only to that strangely white obsidian blade, and he once more forced his broken pathways into place, pumping essence through to the weapon.

  It lit with a weak, guttering fire as Maatkare fell earthward, but it was enough. The crescent-shaped blade sliced cleanly through the creature’s tail, and Heshtat cried out as the barbed tip shifted in place. That abominable pressure was gone though, and he levered himself to his feet with a curse and a grunt, spittle hanging from his lips with the effort. His friend’s arm soon wrapped around his back, and they half-ran, half stumbled on.

  “Fuck,” Maatkare said, seeing the blood still spattering from the wound as they limped onwards.

  Heshtat started to speak. “You may have to finish this without-—"

  “Shut your blabbering mouth, you fool!” Maatkare cursed him. “There—we’ll hold the bridge,” he said, pointing ahead of them to a thin stone bridge arcing above an inextricably deep chasm yawning beneath.

  Heshtat couldn’t hear much over his frantic wheezing and the rushing of blood in his ears. He missed a step and nearly fell, Maatkare catching him at the last moment, though the barb of curved bone embedded in between his ribs shifted slightly, drawing out a grunt of pain from between gritted teeth. Strangely, the pain helped him focus, and Heshtat looked up.

  They had reached the centre of the bridge, and Maatkare levered him down before turning to stand between him and the horde at their back. For a moment, Heshtat just took in the scene: a single warrior standing above empty blackness, tulwar in one hand and khopesh in the other, facing the ravenous spawn of the seven hells.

  A lone warrior holding the bridge.

  “You fucking glory hound,” he managed to wheeze out as he stood, handaxe clutched in one bloodied fist. He moved to stand beside his friend, who gave him a weary smile.

  “So this is it, eh, my friend?”

  “Fuck yourself,” Heshtat bit back. “We are not done yet.”

  They turned their grim smiles on the half dozen creatures thundering down the thin bridge and readied themselves for a slaughter.

  ***

  “There are more coming,” Heshtat panted, wincing as he straightened. Blood seeped from a dozen minor wounds across his face and arms, and his axe now resembled a notched and battered spade more than a true fighting weapon. Maatkare’s tulwar was similarly ruined, through the khopesh that he wielded was still honed to a perfect edge.

  Heshtat’s magic, meagre as it was, had kept the essence-conjured fire burning along the blade, and it was with that ghostly weapon that Maatkare had killed most of the creatures. Four corpses lay scattered along the bridge before them, a couple more having tumbled over the edge in the chaos. But they’d won. For now.

  Both sported new wounds, and Heshtat knew they couldn’t handle another battle like that again. Not as they were.

  “Let’s go,” he coughed out. “Find a room to bar the entrance.”

  “And then what?” Maatkare asked with a grimace.

  The silence hung between them before Heshtat turned away. “One thing at a time.”

  Startingly green vines hung out into the void, snaking their way along the bridge and colonising the ornate stonework. They spread out from a worn archway at the back of the bridge, and Heshtat spared a moment to wonder when they had crossed over from pristine, empty rooms into degraded ruins.

  Still, as they turned their backs on the howls and chitters growing louder with each passing moment, he added it to the list of mysteries he likely wouldn’t have the time to solve before his death. That list was only growing longer, and his time seemed soon to run out. He pushed the unhelpful thoughts from his mind with a growl.

  Duty first, then death.