Lauren Haney - Path of Shadows

He’d seen us together in Waset, heard us talk of the Eastern

Desert and gold. I thought never to see him another time, but when he appeared at that well, I knew he must die.”

User jabbed the stick in among the burning embers. “How did you slay him without leaving footprints?”

Ahmose curled a lip, betraying a superiority he was in no po sition to feel. “I’m far more a man of the desert than Minnakht ever was. He regularly returned to the land of Kemet, shrugging off his life as a desert wanderer, while I often dwelt throughout the year with Senna’s clan.” His eyes slid toward Bak. “I know more of tracking than you or your Medjays will ever know,

Lieutenant, and I know how to hide any sign of my presence.”

Bak glanced at his men, who looked as if they themselves were ready to commit murder. “From then on, you thought to watch us night and day.”

Ahmose smirked. “The watching man, you called me.”

Noting the pride he took in the appellation, Bak said, “You carried off well the look of a nomad.”

“I dared not risk being seen by the people who came to the wells to water their flocks-they’d have known I wasn’t one of them-and most of the transitory pools had dried up. I’d not bathed for some time. When Senna told me you believed me a nomad, I thought your error would serve me well.”

He was so smug Bak had to resist the urge to strike him.

“Why slay Dedu?”

“By then I was wearying of your pursuit. No matter what

I did to discourage you, you refused to give up. So I thought to pass myself off to you as Minnakht. I couldn’t risk Dedu seeing me. I knew him from long ago, and he wouldn’t have forgotten.”

“You were the man who destroyed his daughter’s future,”

Bak guessed. “You’re the father of her child.”

Ahmose let out a barklike laugh. “When Dedu realized I meant to slay him, he tried to play on my sympathies by telling me I had a child, a girl. I didn’t believe him, and I don’t believe you.”

“You slew your daughter’s grandfather, Ahmose.”

A look of self-doubt-or possibly pain-flitted across Ah mose’s face. He erased it with a thin smile. “Dedu would never have told you, a stranger, a secret so painful to him.”

“Believe what you wish,” Bak said with a shrug. “You’ll never have the chance to see the child.”

The two boys who had traveled north earlier in the day walked into the oasis. Bak could see nothing but the don key’s head, feet, and tail, so heavily laden was it with dry twigs gleaned from the bushes that grew in the nearby wadis.

Looking curiously at the gathering of men, the youths left the laden animal in the shade of a tree and hurried to the house to learn what they had missed.

“Why slay Senna?” Bak asked, “a man you claim was your longtime friend?”

“You know why. He pushed you into the face of the flood, trying to slay you. Sooner or later you’d have gotten the truth from him.” Ahmose’s mouth twisted into a cynical smile. “I once saved his life-you saw the scar on his shoulder-so I suppose I could say it was mine to take.”

“What of Rona?” Bak demanded.

The prisoner glanced toward Psuro, sitting with Nebre,

Kaha, and Minmose, their expressions dark, threatening. He lowered his voice, as if he hoped to prevent their hearing. “I held no ill will toward him. He saw me slay Senna.”

Bak wanted to smash Ahmose in the face. Nebre, burning with rage, leaped forward, trying to reach the bound man.

Psuro, no less furious, grabbed the Medjay’s arm, halting him, and snapped an order to Kaha and Minmose, forbidding them to move.

“You met me and we talked,” Bak said, suppressing his anger with an effort. “If I hadn’t insisted you join our cara van, which was made up of far too many men who’d know you weren’t Minnakht, would you have followed us across the Eastern Sea?”

“I knew, when I failed to join you as I promised, that you’d guess the truth.” Ahmose wiped his face on his shoulder a second time, as if he could still feel the spittle. “Senna had told me you’d talked with Nefertem. I suspected you’d joined forces, and I dared not slay you in this wretched desert. I thought to follow you into that alien land, where I could slay you and slip away, with no fierce tribe of nomads prepared to avenge your death.”

Leaning forward, elbows on knees, Nefertem spoke in a voice as soft and rumbling as the purr of a lion. “Tell me of my father, Ahmose. You took his life, did you not?”

Not a man present could mistake the threat, and Ahmose was no exception. “I know nothing of his death.”

User jerked the stick from the hearth and held its flame-red end within a hand’s breadth of the prisoner’s eyes. “We want no lies, Ahmose.”

The bound man cringed. Whether he feared most the tribal chieftain or the explorer, Bak could not begin to guess. “In the beginning I believed that if I was to learn where Min nakht had found gold, Senna had to get close to him. He had to serve as his guide. But as long as your father lived, he would accept no one else.” Ahmose saw the fury on Nefer tem’s face and quickly looked away. “I placed poison in his waterbag. I meant him to die right away, but he drank too small an amount. He lingered long enough to go home, and there I heard he died.”

Nefertem bounded forward, gripped him by the neck, and began to squeeze. Ahmose pounded the earth with his feet, his face turned fiery. Bak shouted an order to Psuro, who leaped forward. Together with User, the three of them pulled the nomad from the man he meant to slay.

The tribal chief was still struggling, still trying to reach the man who had slain his father, when Bak shouted, “Nefertem!

Stop! He must see the truth.”

Bak’s words seeped into the nomad’s heart and he grew more calm. Staring at Ahmose, he shrugged off User’s grip and Psuro’s and wiped the sweat from his face. A harsh laugh escaped from his lips and he nodded. “Yes, let him see what a fool he’s been.”

Early in the evening, User’s party, the nomads, and Bak and his Medjays left the oasis with their prisoner to travel north up the subsidiary wadi. Bak had thought Nefertem would object when he said he wished the explorer and his party to come along, but his fears proved unfounded. The tribal chief agreed they had every right to participate to the end.

They rested through the darkest of the night and set out long before daybreak to follow a series of smaller wadis deeper into the desert. An hour after sunrise, they arrived at a camp, simple in construction and inhabited by nomads. Several tents that looked suspiciously like those issued to the soldiers of

Kemet had been erected near the base of a tall brownish hill. A rough wall of stone supported a lean-to of spindly poles and brush. A dozen or so donkeys stood in its shade, munching hay that might well have been stolen from a caravan crossing the desert between Kemet and the Eastern Sea.

A tall, thin nomad stood beside a tent, removing baskets of grain from the back of a mule. Bak smiled. This had to be the animal on which he had been transported during his abduc tion.

The man returned his smile. “Lieutenant Bak. I’m happy to see you again.”

Bak stared, aware that somewhere in the past he had seen this man, but where? “Waset!” he said. “You were with your wife, preparing to leave the city.”

“You came to our aid.” The man glanced at Nefertem. “I told my brother of the service you did us.”

“Your brother?” Bak looked at the tribal chieftain, surprised.

Nefertem gave him what might have passed for a sheepish smile in a man less regal. “When I took you captive, you were unknown to me. Some days later, Hor came to our camp. When I told him of you, he told me of the way you’d saved his life. His and that of his wife and unborn child. Not until then was I certain I could trust you.”