The streets were blessedly full as he strode toward his sister’s house the next morning. Children laughed and vendors hawked their wares, though both were overshadowed by outraged squawking as ibis and vulture stated their disagreements on territorial boundaries in the northern outer district of Idib.

  Above him circled great fan-like wings, their shadow passing over the wagon-tracks worn into the earth by the passage of hundreds of traders each day bringing. He wondered for a moment at the cut that Senusret and his like would take from that trade. A vulture honked indignantly above as it flew off towards the dunes in the distance. He could only hope man would follow nature’s example soon.

  Mutemwia’s home was modest but beautiful, much like the woman herself. He greeted her with a warm hug, the familiar scent of the lavender oil she used in her hair and the chickpea flowers that circled her little vegetable garden filling him with a measure of calm. There was something undeniably homely about the place, and as the two bundles of energy he called nieces barrelled into his legs, he stumbled his way into the house with a smile.

  “Aaahh!” he cried in mock pain as he fell—carefully—to the tiled floor of the kitchen as the two little terrors clambered over him like starving gators swarming across a dying hippopotamus. They wrestled about for a while, Heshtat making sure to protect their heads when they threw themselves around a little too savagely. His respect to his adoptive sister for raising the two young girls increased every time he saw them—their suicidality could not be understated.

  Eventually though, he needed to extricate himself from the game and attend to the reason for his visit. Unfortunately, his nieces didn’t seem to agree.

  “You bit me!” he exclaimed as he stood, and the youngest—Meryt—pouted.

  “Just a nibble,” she mumbled, before regaining her fire. “You said you’d come over yesterday and you didn’t!”

  “So you bit me?”

  “Maybe next time you think about not coming over you’ll remember what happens,” Meryt harrumphed with an entirely serious expression. He couldn’t help the laugh that bubbled up in response, and then yelped as their mother thwacked him with a towel.

  “Don’t encourage them!” she scolded, and he put his hands up in defence, backing away to the relative safety of armchair in the corner. Tiye, the older of the two siblings, stalked menacingly towards him even as he retreated.

  “My apologies, Wia,” he replied in a placating tone, turning to his nieces once more. “I’m sorry for not coming yesterday. Truly. Something important and unavoidable happened and I didn’t get home until well past your bedtime.”

  Tiye didn’t stop her stalking, head held low like the jaguars he’d seen fishing for gators in the Nikea; eyes fixed, hackles raised, great muscles bunching beneath their skin. The posture should have looked ridiculous on an eight-year-old that was entirely devoid of both hackles and great muscles, but Tiye had always had a strange intensity about her. His sister’s influence bleeding through the generational divide, no doubt.

  “Wait!” he called, voice a little shrill. Mutemwia smiled indulgently from behind her children as she watched them herd him further into the corner. “I stopped at Mama Ramose’s bakery this morning…”

  Both children stopped dead. Tiye’s unsettling gaze brightened, and Meryt turned and ran at her mother. “Mama pleaseeee!” she wheedled, before he’d even shown his hands to them.

  His sister caught his gaze, raising an eyebrow, and Heshtat mimed a rough approximation of a loaf.

  “Spelt or wheat?” she asked.

  “Wheat,” he replied, to which she harumphed herself. The apple didn’t fall far in this house.

  “We have honey. But only after you carry out your chores!” his sister proclaimed, but the two children were already running from the room, shrieking to one another about how they’d divide the burden of their shared labour.

  Mutemwia turned back to him again, a tired smile on her face. “Are you well? It’s not like you to miss a visit.”

  Heshtat shook his head, letting his hand roam over the stubble on his scalp. It hissed against his palm, blending with the perpetual droning of insects from the little garden outside.

  “Mama Ramose had a favour to ask, so I got home later than planned,” he explained.

  “Another one? Heshtat, you can’t!”

  “Too late.”

  She huffed, pulling fired clay plates from beneath the counter and setting them out on the small table in the centre of the room. “At least tell me it won’t come back to bite you?”

  He shrugged. “Could do, but Senusret’s getting restless, anyway. He’ll be looking to dispose of me soon, so what does a little extra debt matter?”

  His adoptive sister whipped around to pin him with her fiery gaze, and he waved his hands in the air before him to dispel the hostility. “Relax, Wia. Things have changed. It won’t be a problem for long.”

  “’It won’t be a problem, Wia’” she quoted, doing a rough impression of his voice. “’I’ve got it handled, Wia, trust me’. How many times have I heard such nonsense, hey? When are you going to look after yourself first? Or is that my job now?”

  He walked over, bumping her hip to move her out of the way while he grabbed some cutlery. “When have I ever let you down?” he asked.

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  “Every single time that you come over without a pretty young wife to look after you,” she groused, but he could hear the softening of the frown in her voice. “You said things have changed—what do you mean?”

  He found himself staring at a spoon in silence for a few seconds midway through laying the table and pulled his gaze away. “When I got home yesterday… She was there.”

  “Who—” she began, but Heshtat spoke over her.

  “The General of the West has left Idib. For good.”

  He turned back to look at her, and her confusion cleared in an instant. Outrage took its place. “That bitch!” she hissed. “Tell me you threw her out into the street, Heshtat. Tell me you didn’t listen—”

  “She needs my help, Wia.”

  “Oh, how perfectly predictable! Her ‘benefactor’,” she said with scepticism dripping from the word, “leaves the city, and the same night she’s already knocking on your door hoping to entice another man into saving her by simply spreading her—”

  “That’s enough,” he said, and though his words were quiet, there was a rage hidden beneath them that silenced her faster than any shout could hope to. “Don’t, Wia. Just don’t. You don’t know what I know. I appreciate your advice and support, but don’t speak of her like that.”

  They were silent for a time, Heshtat feeling the familiar tightness returning to his chest. Then Mutemwia huffed to herself and smacked him on the arm with the towel that seemed more or less a permanent fixture on her shoulder these days.

  “You sappy oaf,” she said, though there was a sad smile on her face as she said it. “You still love her? That’s why you’ve not brought anyone home to meet us?”

  “No! I—”

  She ignored him though, talking over his feeble protestations. “That’s why things never went anywhere after I set you up with Kheti! She was devastated, by the way.”

  “Her father was killed in a border skirmish with the Sasskanids. It was never going to work out, regardless.”

  “Regardless of what?” his sister asked innocently.

  “I…” he narrowed his eyes and then sighed. “I should have warned Amenmose about you. It is my greatest shame that I let him walk into the lion’s den with nothing more than an eating knife to protect him. Poor man never stood a chance, did he?”

  She grinned, and it was wide enough to rival the best of Bestat’s many children. “Of course not. He was mine from the moment he laid eyes upon me. And then after we spent our first night together, you’d have needed a rope to drag him away—”

  “Wia!” he exclaimed, scandalised, though it quickly devolved into laughter at her smug expression.

  They shared a few more minutes of idle chatter as the children bumped around next door, sorting out their rooms and generally trying to bring order back to the chaos they left in their wake whenever they moved.

  “So what did she need help with? And why are you so sure that things are changing?” she asked, turning serious as she regarded him over the rim of a clay mug filled with karcade—picked from the local mountains and dried and mixed in this very house.

  “The general is gone, and with him all of the Aquiline Empire’s support. It won’t be long before the other powers realise that Idib province is up for grabs, and they’ll start moving in. It will be even sooner that the gangs realise there is no central power in Idib capable of enforcing order across the whole city, and they’ll make their own plays, too. Cleosiris is in a precarious position, and she’s only got a few months to sort something out.”

  He sighed. “She has asked me to retrieve something for her. An artifact that can help propel her to new heights of power; let her compete with the other provinces, if not the three remaining True Thrones.”

  “Why you?” Mutemwia asked. “Why not send her guards or advisors? Or hire a few mercenaries?”

  “That’s the tricky part,” Heshtat said quietly. “I can’t tell you.”

  Her eyebrow climbed gracefully up her forehead, its trajectory as perfect as any cut he’d ever made with a blade.

  “I swear, Wia. This is… It’s bigger than all of us. This involves the gods and the Immortal Pharaohs that rule Amansi still. I‘d only be putting you in danger if I told you.”

  “Oh you think an adept of Jb will come knocking on my door to ask if I know the greatest secrets of the land, hmm?” Her question was rhetorical, but he held her gaze levelly.

  “I don’t know. It’s big, that is all I shall say. If something goes wrong and someone does come knocking, you tell them everything I’ve just told you, understand?” She waved him off, but he gripped her hand firmly between his, pulling her gaze back to his face. “You tell them everything you know. All of it. If somebody comes looking for you, it is because something has gone horribly wrong and I’m probably already dead anyway, so you do and say whatever you need to get yourself and those girls out of here, understand?”

  After a long, uncomfortable silence, she nodded. “Can I bring Amenmose as well?” she asked, a slight smile curling the edge of her lips.

  “You’d need a rope to stop him,” I reminded her with a smirk.

  “So why are you here, Heshtat?” she finally asked. “If you won’t tell me why it has to be you, I’ll simply have to trust you on that. But how can I help?”

  He sighed, leaning back and taking a long sip of his own karcade. The hibiscus infusion was fresh and floral, and the liquid warmed his belly, providing a measure of calm. “I need to know if I should do it.”

  She laughed then, a noise of disbelief. “You’re not asking for advice, you dolt! You want permission and absolution. Take it. My advice would have been to forget about that woman the moment she banished you, but what do I know? You’ve never listened to me before, so why start now?”

  “It’s not as simple as that,” he protested. “She had no choice.”

  “Let’s not re-hash this argument, Heshtat. I’ll never see eye to eye with the woman that broke my little brother’s heart.”

  “It’s not about my heart, Wia. It never was. I swore oaths.”

  “To her father!”

  “And they included her! She’s not just a woman. This city is filled with wonder, and there are thousands of women here more than worthy of my love. But she is my duty, Wia. Do you understand that?”

  She turned sad eyes on him then, and when she laid a hand over his own, it felt to him like pity. “And when does it end, Heshtat? When you’re old and your sword arm no longer works? Or is it only death that will absolve you of your duty?”

  He nodded. “When I leave this mortal body behind and step through the Final Door to the After. When Osirion himself beckons me through the Field Of Reeds. When Sebek takes my soul and the Gobbler drags me down to nothingness. Only then does my duty end.”

  “Oh, Heshtat, you fool. You poor, lovestruck fool.”

  “That is the life I chose, Wia. Don’t pity me.”

  “And when did you choose it? Did the poor orphan choose when he was recruited into the God-Queen’s Janissaries? Did the young boy choose when he was sold to the Pharaohs? Did the na?ve teenager choose when he was groomed by a cunning old man? Or was it later than that, hmm? Was it when that beautiful princess cast her spell on you?”

  She jabbed him in the arm to emphasise each question, and he was surprised by the force behind it. He held her gaze, declining to answer. She nodded, like that was answer enough.

  Then she frowned. “Is that why you started working for that oily bastard in the northern district?” she asked, eyes widening at the implications.

  “Well, it wasn’t for the pleasant company,” he replied, smile soft.

  She smacked him. “Heshtat! Go then, if your duty is so all-consuming. You’d be more a fool to stay. But you will need someone you can trust by your side, and I don’t mean her.”

  “Thank you, Wia,” he said earnestly. “I’m heading out to find Maatkare tomorrow.”

  Rather than appeare relieved by his agreement, she groaned. “Why does it have to be him? It’s always stupidity and danger with the two of you together.”

  He grinned. “Well, this will be the stupidest and most dangerous thing I’ve ever done. Seems only fitting that I should bring him along.”