The head lay there staring to one side, the blood flowing slowly out of it. Who knew what prayers, what pleas, what desperate entreaties, still came from her?
“Look at it, the body!” Benedict wailed. He beat on Rhosh’s back with his fists. “She’s crawling to it.”
Rhosh charged forward, his boot crunching into the headless torso, crushing it down into the mud, and switching the machete to his left hand, he grabbed up the bleeding head by the copper hair.
Her eyes shifted and fixed him firmly as the mouth gaped, and a low whisper came from the quivering lips.
He dropped the machete. And backing up, shoving Benedict out of his path, nearly stumbling over the flailing body, he swung the head against the wall again and again, but he could not break the skull.
Suddenly he dropped the thing, dropped it into the dirt, and he was down on his hands and knees, and Benedict’s boot came down right in front of him, and he saw the machete come flashing down and slice into the shining copper hair, slice through it, slice into the skull, and the blood bubbled up crimson and glittering.
The head was on fire. Benedict was blasting it. The head was in flames. He knelt there a mute witness—helpless, utterly helpless—watching the head blacken and burn, watching the hair go up in sizzling smoke and sparks.
Yes, the Fire Gift. Finally he rallied. He sent it with full fury. And the head was curling up, black, like that of a plastic doll on a burning trash heap, and the eyes gleamed white for one second before they turned black, and the head was as a lump of coal with no face, no lips. Dead and ruined.
He scrambled to his feet.
The headless body lay still. But Benedict was now blasting this too, blasting the blood that was flowing out of it, and the whole prone figure there went up in flames, the cotton robe consumed.
In a panic, Rhosh turned right and left. He stumbled backwards. Where was the other one?
Nothing stirred. No sound came from the garden enclosure.
The fire crackled and snapped and smoked. And Benedict was catching his breath in anxious musical sobs. His hand was on Rhosh’s shoulder.
Rhosh stared at the darkened mass that had been her head, the head of the witch who had come to Egypt long ago with the spirit Amel, who had gone into the Mother, the head of the witch who had endured for six thousand years without ever going down into the earth to sleep, this great witch and blood drinker who had never made war on anyone except the Queen who’d torn her eyes from her and condemned her to die.
She was gone now. And he, Rhosh, had done this! He and Benedict, at his instigation.
He felt a sorrow so immense he thought he would die from the weight of it. He felt it like his very breath gathering in his chest, in his throat, threatening to suffocate him.
He ran his fingers back through his hair, tearing at his hair, pulling it suddenly in two hanks, pulling it till it hurt, and the pain sliced into his brain.
He staggered into the doorway.
There, only ten feet away, stood the other—unchanged—a lone robed figure in the night, looking around her with a drifting gaze, a glinting drifting gaze at leaves, at trees, at creatures moving in the high branches, at the moon far above the compound.
“Now, you must do it!” roared the Voice. “Do to her what you have done to her sister, and take the brain from her and into yourself. Do it!” The Voice was screaming.
Benedict stood beside him, clinging to him.
Rhosh saw the bloody machete in Benedict’s right hand. But he didn’t reach for it. The sorrow was knotted inside him, twisted, like a rope pulled tight around his heart. He couldn’t speak. Couldn’t think.
I have done wrong. I have done unspeakable wrong.
“I’m telling you, do it now,” said the Voice in a tone of perfect desperation. “Take me into your body! You know how to do this! You know how it was done to Akasha. Do it now. Do it as you did to that one! Do it. I must be freed from this prison. Are you mad? Do it!”
“No,” said Rhosh.
“You betray me now? You dare? Do as I tell you.”
“I can’t do it alone,” Rhosh said. For the first time he realized he was trembling violently all over, and a blood sweat had broken out on his face and on his hands. He could feel his heart knocking in his throat.
The Voice had given way to cursing, babbling, screaming.
The mute woman stood there unchanged. Then the distant cry of a bird seemed to waken her, and she bowed her head just a little to the left, towards Rhosh, as though she were looking upwards for that bird, that bird outside the wire mesh of the garden.
Slowly she turned and walked slowly away from Rhosh through the gentle crowd of fern and palm, her feet making a soft unhurried trudging sound in the soil. A kind of humming came from her. On she moved, away from him.
The Voice was crying. The Voice was weeping.
“I tell you I cannot do it without help,” Rhosh said. “I need help. The help of that vampire doctor if I’m to do it, don’t you see? What if I start to die when she does, what if I can’t do what Mekare did when she killed Akasha! I can’t do it.”
The Voice whimpered, and sobbed. It sobbed like a broken and defeated thing. “You are a coward,” the Voice whispered. “You are a miserable coward.”
Rhosh made his way to a chair. He sat down, leaning forward, his bloody arms clutching his chest. And I have done unspeakable evil. How can I live now after what I’ve done?
“What do we do?” asked Benedict frantically.
Rhosh scarcely heard him.
Evil. Without question. Evil by all I’ve ever held to be right or just or good.
“Rhosh,” Benedict pleaded.
Rhosh looked up at him, struggling to focus, to think.
“I don’t know,” Rhosh said.
“Khayman is coming,” said the Voice miserably. “Will you let him murder you without a fight?”
It was an hour before Khayman appeared.
They had buried Maharet’s remains. They lay in wait, the two on either side of the door, both armed now with the machetes from the garden.
Khayman returned weary and listless, windblown and sad, and came into the room like a laborer so tired from his work that he couldn’t even seek a chair to rest. For a long moment, he stood there breathing slowly and evenly with his hands at his sides.
Then he saw the dark greasy bloodstains all over the mud floor. He saw the soot, the ashes.
He saw the earth churned up where she had been hastily buried.
He looked up and then he spun around, but he had no chance.
With the two machetes, they hacked at his powerful neck from both sides, almost instantly decapitating him.