He emerged onto a stone plinth, wind whipping his robes about and buffeting his person. Ahhotep followed a moment later.

  “What—” he began, but the priest shouted over him.

  “Silence! We have seconds left. Jump when I tell you. You will emerge high above the city. When you do so; cut through the veil.” Heshtat frowned, but the priest continued on. “You must. Drink this, take its power. The largest cut you can manage. Do not stop, do not let your blade catch. Open the realm from nape to nave. You understand?”

  Heshtat didn’t. There was too much happening. Even now, the yellow tint of the sky in the Other had somehow crossed to the Waking, clouds of noxious-looking fumes billowing above the half-dozen great temples and small pyramid-structures that formed the temple district they stood above. Heshtat barely had time to take in their current location. They were tucked atop a giant statue to Toth, the god of knowledge and madness. Considering the plan, it felt appropriate.

  Jump off the statue? They were a hundred yards high, at the least. Even with his enhanced physique, he would stand no chance of surviving the landing. And there was no chance he could cut a gash in the veil large enough… large enough for what? To usher the demon forth to begin with?

  He turned back to the priest, but saw the man looking not at him, but the city itself. He was muttering incoherently, the pages of his strange tome flipping in the breeze. His eyes flashed and the pages began to tear themselves free of the leather spine, rising to spin about him in complex patterns. His staff glowed the same sickly green as his eyes, and in that moment he looked less a priest than an ancient magus challenging the gods themselves.

  Heshtat looked to his own hand, where the priest had pressed a small vial of glittering, shimmering liquid. Trust. Why should he? What if he was wrong? He could be just as likely to summon the demon as banish it, but… something on the priest’s face stopped that train of thought dead.

  It wasn’t the tears. They glistened on his aged face, tracking thin lines down the waxy skin only to be whipped from his jaw by the wind, but that could mean anything. Sadness at a comrade’s death perhaps? Or even guilt at an upcoming betrayal. No, the tears didn’t factor into his decision. What changed Heshtat’s mind was the hope in the man’s eyes. Hope could not be faked, and for someone who had lived without it for so long, Heshtat knew genuine hope when he saw it.

  He downed the vial, feeling the thick liquid scald his mouth. Then he took three quick steps and leapt off the statue’s edge. His tongue tingled, the metallic taste of the alchemical concoction lingering even as the wind and smoke burned his throat on the descent.

  Down he fell, the ground rushing towards him with shocking speed. And then darkness swallowed him once more. His stomach flipped, his momentum somehow maintained but his orientation altering in a heartbeat. He emerged high above the city, thousands of yards above, and he was flying. The sky boiled above him, a hurricane with something at its eye. He felt light, not weighed down by any law of earth or sky, just blazing a trail across the heavens.

  The shadowy portal behind him, the one he had emerged from, hung in the air upright for a moment, but soon winked out. He continued his slow fall across the firmament, momentum not yet guttered.

  Eventually the glory withdrew and Heshtat’s sense reasserted itself. He had a purpose here. His sword rung like a bell as he drew it from the iron ring on his belt. Held in both hands before him, the deep curve of its sickle-shape framed his face. His soul was still almost empty, and he knew that he wouldn’t have much left inside himself for this cut. But he had to try.

  Then a new noise cut through the world. A reverberation. Something deep and alien and wrong. Reality seemed to shiver, and from the eye of the hurricane emerged a hand. Clawed, the same deep yellow as the clouds around it, with nails rimmed in grime and blood and split in many places down to the cuticle. It was enormous, easily several yards across at the palm, and it reached down towards the city at the end of a distressingly long arm. The shoulder soon emerged, then a head, and before Heshtat could so much as draw breath, a humanoid figure was falling towards him.

  The demon must have been thirty yards tall, thick with muscle and covered in things. Horns erupted from each joint, as if small mountain ranges burst forth from beneath the skin. Mouths covered the creature’s upper body, and they trailed thick tongues that waved in the air. The demon was humanoid but looked nothing like a human. Its proportions were all subtly off; arms too long, legs too thick, midriff somehow at once too thin but also far too squat to house the necessary organs.

  Its eyes, each nearly the size of Heshtat’s head, were filled with many pupils that all snapped towards him. In its nine-fold gaze, he saw malice and glee. Here was a creature that would fall on Idib like a vengeful star and slake its hunger and lust on the populace.

  He was still exhausted, his channel to Nemty not yet refilled enough to do what Ahhotep had asked of him. But as he saw the creature of nightmare descend towards his home, he attempted it anyway. His blade rose above his head, and he whispered a prayer to He Who Travels.

  The moment he pulled essence from the aspect of Power in his soul, something happened in his body. As divinely augmented essence was drawn into channels he had so recently carved, the liquid in his belly lit aflame. It erupted in spiritual fire, somehow sensing the directed movement of essence and reacting to it like a match to the flame.

  His sword, glowing weakly one moment, suddenly burned in the whipping wind. It blazed forth with an intensity Heshtat had never before seen, and he wasted no time. He struck out above him, drawing a line of fire in the heavens as he fell to the earth. The sky parted at the tip of his blade, and his speed dragged that sword dozens of yards in an instant.

  But it wasn’t enough. He finally understood what Ahhotep had wanted, what this master plan was. The mad priest had timed things perfectly—Heshtat had cut open a portal that intersected the demon’s trajectory after it emerged. The creature would emerge from the Other into the Waking, only to fall back through to land in the Other once more. But the demon was too massive, and Heshtat’s momentum had already slowed. He fell down now rather than across, and even with the alchemical empowerment of the vial, he was too weak to make the necessary portal.

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  It might take an arm, or maybe a head, but if the demon had any part of itself still in the Waking, it could tear its way back out without nary a thought.

  Heshtat fell to the earth on his back, eyes fixed on the demon rocketing towards him on a collision course with his too-small portal. It had been a good plan. Better than he could have come up with on the fly. A shame that it would end like this. He hoped Harsiese and Neferu made it to her in time, that she learned of his sacrifice.

  Green light caught his eye. Runes in the sky, tracing the edge of his portal. Behind it loomed the demon, yawning mouth grinning at him as it came closer to its first meal. And then the portal bloomed. From a dozen yards across to a hundred, the tear in the veil widened in an instant, pulled apart by strings of glowing green light. Ahhotep’s magic, his ritual command of the highest aspect at its highest level, stretched the portal to its limit until it looked like a great ovular eye blinking open in the sky.

  The demon roared, glistening fangs bared and tongues lashing, but it had no time to sprout wings and move. It fell. Swift as sin, straight into the ovular gap between realms. Heshtat grinned, laughed, punched at the air. He let his control over the wild magic in his soul slip, and the portal winked out, the sky returning to blaze its yellow light down upon his face. But no, not yellow any longer. Deep blue at the top, fading to a burnished orange as the horizon reflected the burning city beneath. The yellow stain of the demon’s incursion was gone, and the night sky took its place.

  Heshtat fell earthward, awed at Ahhotep’s plan. It was audacious, ridiculous even, but the man had done it. The cultists still remained, but such a ritual as had summoned the demon could not be repeated in an hour or even a day. This was months of work in the making, and they had thwarted it with a single channel to an irrelevant god, a single high priest, and perfect timing.

  Heshtat smiled as he fell, happy to die without failure in his heart. And then shadow opened beneath him and he was spat out onto the smooth marble floor of the throne room once more, the priest staggering in after him with a smile full of crooked yellow teeth. For once, Heshtat didn’t note his leering skull-like visage with distress, and instead embraced the man in joy.

  They’d done it.

  ***

  [Neferu POV]

  She had always thought of life as mostly boring. Mundane. Never enough happening, always too many distractions. But here and now, she was beginning to rethink that perspective. Her ears brought her a hundred sounds, and her eyes a thousand more sights with every moment.

  Tomb Guard fighting: men as strong as Harsiese ripped people apart with weapons of war right next to stunning displays of heroism as others threw themselves in front of deadly attacks to protect their fellows. And then there were their enemies. Gods, the enemies! Men and women, lithe and quick, clothed in red sashes and headwraps, wielding smaller blades and strange magics, but no less deadly for it. They darted in, no care for one another, but they moved with such speed and subtlety that it made up for the lack of cohesion. A shoal of piranha’s harrying a group of sharks.

  The metaphor broke down a little, but that was okay. Neferu had no time to keep track of semantics while running for her life, anyway.

  Harsiese bulled his way through a group of three men fighting ahead, two wearing the red of the Scarlet Feathers, and one the white and gold of the Idib Tomb Guard. The big man’s axe cleaved straight through one of the assassins from shoulder to hip, his charge bawling over the other, and the remaining Tomb Guard shouted with relief and joy to see him arrive.

  No time for a happy reunion though, and Harsiese turned to beckon her on. She took a breath and darted forwards, keeping low to the ground. Like a bug, she scuttled, trying to keep a low profile as she slipped through the long throne room that was engorged in violence. There were only a score or two of people here, and yet the massive room felt full to bursting simply from the speed and power of its occupants. She tucked behind a pillar, gasping for breath as Harsiese surveyed the area, one hand held up to halt her. As if she was eager to move forward. Gods, what she wouldn’t give for the physicality of that man right now. Instead, she focused on sucking great lungfuls of air down as he twitched and tensed and tracked the pattern of the fighting.

  There was apparently a current to each battle. At least, that was what Heshtat and Harsiese had discussed around the fire days ago. The ebb and flow, ‘the violent tides’ or whatever high-minded poetry they’d tried to use to dress it all up. What nonsense! This was a clusterfuck of chaos. Nobody knew what was going on here. Men and women killed and died, and as far as she could tell, none of them knew which they’d be doing in the next moment.

  She’d spent a summer with a travelling troupe of troubadours, and one night the head choreographer had taken ill before a new show. The following performance had felt much the same as this—a bunch of idiots running about screaming with no idea what to do.

  “Go!” Harsiese shouted at her, and she was brought out of her panic-induced introspection.

  Her body responded, even if her mind was left a few paces behind. By the time it caught up, she was mid-way between pillars, leaping over a twisted body. The man’s limbs looked to have been noodled. Not a technical term, but she didn’t know what the fuck else to call it when someone’s limbs had been cut into thin little strips and twisted about one another. How had that even—No. No time, keep running!

  She was near the pillar now, over halfway there, when a fireball screamed past her head, cauterising the air behind it with a violent whistle, and she ducked even though it had already passed her by. She coughed and stumbled. Caught herself. Carried on. Almost there, a few more yards to the relative safety of the next pillar, and the shadows that offered her anonymity and cover from the chaos.

  Then she saw a man step out from those shadows. Hooded, red-robed, and raising his stained hands out towards her, daggers emerging from voluminous sleeves. She clutched at a flask of something from the belt around her hips in response. Didn’t know what it was, and quite frankly didn’t care at this point. Let the bastard find out at the same time she did.

  She whipped it forwards, the alchemical flask smashing against his armoured wrists and the hopefully toxic contents splashing across his face. The man flinched, but nothing happened. No screaming as skin melted, no whoomph of a flammable substance catching fire.

  “Fucking water?” Neferu choked out in surprise as she stumbled on, carried by her momentum and entirely helpless to stop herself.

  The assassin seemed to come to the same conclusion at the same time, for his grin returned redoubled. It split his greasy face, and she noted crooked yellow teeth in his killer’s smile as he raised his paired daggers high.

  She wasn’t surprised, not after seeing his dirty nails, but she did take a heartbeat to wonder at the strangeness of her thoughts. Here she was, sliding headfirst towards a smiling assassin wielding entirely too many knives, and she was focused on his dental hygiene. Funny, what details you notice in your last moments.