The Barbarian King

Chapter 42

The human part of him kept him alive during the tech. That also meant he was weak while the magic was gone. Weak was good. “I thought you’d look more Egyptian,” I told him.

“And how do you think the original Egyptians looked?” Anapa raised his eyebrows. “What do you know of us? Were you there at the birth of the glory that was Egypt? Were you there to watch as we mixed with Nubians, Hittites, Libyans, Assyrians, Persians, and Greeks, you dumb little puppy? Colors, pigments, texture of skin and hair, those things are mere glaze. The vessel underneath is always clay.”

This was above my pay grade. “Meldrin?”

“He might be a nut job,” Meldrin said. “If he’s telling the truth, he isn’t at full strength.”

Anapa sighed. “So tiresome. Very well.”

Wind swept through the office, streaming from behind Anapa—hot, heavy with moisture, streaked with decay, the odor of spiced wine, and heady aromas of resins. The flames bent away from Anapa. A jackal howled, a long eerie wail that gripped my throat in a ghostly fist and squeezed.

The man on the chair leaned forward. A translucent outline shimmered along his skin, expanded, and a different creature sat in Anapa’s place. He was tall, long-limbed, and lean. A network of muscle bound his torso, crisply defined, but far from bulky. His skin was a warm, rich brown with a touch of terra-cotta. His face with its wide brown eyes was beautiful, but it wasn’t the kind of beauty you wanted to touch—it radiated too much power, too much regal disdain. As he looked at us, the contours of his head flowed like molten wax. His nose and jaw protruded forward and narrowed to a dark nose. Two long ears thrust up. Black and gray fur sheathed his face. The flash of white fangs in his mouth was like lightning.

Magic streamed from him, potent, powerful, overwhelming.

He rose from the chair, an impossibility, a man with a human torso and a jackal head. Outside, the two Ammit roared in unison. The press of his magic was impossible to bear.

The illusion shattered. I realized I had forgotten to breathe and sucked in air in a hoarse gulp.

Anapa smiled at me, sitting in his chair again, languid and mildly amused. “Now, that we have that settled, let’s talk. I have a bone to pick with you. All three of you, as a matter of fact.”

Raphael took a step forward. “I will reimburse you for the beast.”

“The one you killed?” Anapa’s animated face turned puzzled. “Oh, there was no need. I resurrected her the moment the magic wave appeared. I did very much enjoy your battle. A stunning display of strategic thinking.” He looked at me and then at Raphael. “You and you, you work well together.” He turned to Raphael. “Except at the end when both of you went a little mad.”

A muscle jerked in Raphael’s face.

“Don’t worry.” Anapa wrinkled his nose. “Happens to the best of us.”

Raphael took a step forward. I put my hand on his forearm.

Anapa rubbed his hands together. “Now we’ll have ourselves a bit of show-and-tell, shall we?”

The floor of the office between him and us turned lighter. Stylized figures formed on its surface.

“Neat, isn’t it?” Anapa grinned. “I got an idea from an old movie. So, listen and watch. Please feel free to sit down if you wish.”

Brown figures came down from the hills toward the blue river.

“That would be the ancient Egyptian cattle herders. The climate changed, and all of their grass fields are drying out, so they have to go back to the Nile. Look at them, they are so sad.”

The figures fell to their knees and started drinking from the Nile. On the other side a second group of figures started throwing rocks at the newcomers.

“Those are the people who had remained in the valley. They don’t want the poor cattle herders there. See, they are all upset.”

One of the figures held up a crooked staff.

A huge triangular head broke the surface of the water. An enormous brown and yellow snake slithered out of the Nile and began to feed on the newcomers.

Anapa leaned forward. “That would Apep. The God of the River. These guys, the ones who stayed in the valley, they worshipped him, so he wouldn’t eat them. He is a nasty bugger.”

The dismembered bodies of the ancient Egyptians fell in the water.

“But what’s this?”

Four figures appeared, shaking swords and spears. One had a hawk head, the second had a cat’s head, the third a jackal’s, and the fourth seemed to be a bizarre cross between a donkey and aardvark.

“That would be Ra, his daughter Bast, me, and Set.”

“I know that myth,” Meldrin said. “It was Ra who killed him.”

Anapa looked at him in mild outrage. “I’m sorry, were you there? No. Then hush. Of course, myths say that Ra killed him. That’s what you get when you’re a sun god and crops depend on you, my friend. Look, I’ll prove it to you.” An ancient mural appeared on the wall, showing a yellow spotted cat resembling a mountain cat stabbing a snake with a curved blade. “Supposedly this is Ra slaying Apep. Small problem: Ra has a hawk’s head on his shoulders. He doesn’t turn into a cat, except for this one time. Keep that in mind. Now where were we?”

The four figures attacked the serpent, chopping at him with strange curved swords and poking him with spears. The serpent flailed, knocking them aside, and biting at their bodies. Finally the picture-Anubis turned into a huge jackal and bit Apep’s neck, clamping it down. The three other figures rushed him. The snake convulsed, knocking aside everyone except for Bast. The nimble cat jumped over the flailing body and stabbed the serpent in the heart.

“So why do the myths say that Ra killed him?” Meldrin said.

“Because priests were men and we can’t have the big enemy getting killed by a girl, can we now?” Anapa winked at me. “Holy texts are written by committee, and Ra had more priests. His cult was stronger. He is the sun, the life-giver, while Bast was only the protector of Lower Egypt. She used to be a lioness. Very fierce. By the time the priests were done with her, she’d turned into a domestic kitty cat. Took them a thousand years or so, but they crippled the lion.”

A bright flash of light exploded from Apep’s body, knocking the four figures down.

“Look at us, all knocked out.” Anapa smiled. “Lots of magic is released when you kill a god. Look at me there. See, I only have one fang? It broke off in the snake’s neck. Took me two days to grow a new one.”

The light faded. The four gods still lay prone on the ground. Little figures swarmed Apep, chopping his body to pieces.

“Who are they?” I asked.

“Saii. His priests. They’re trying to save parts of him. That one took a scale. And this one got a vertebrae.”

“Those four are eating the corpse.” Raphael pointed at the four figures on all fours biting Apep’s side.

“They are devouring his flesh, so it will live through them. Nasty business.”

The final person pried Anubis’s fang from Apep’s dead body and the figures ran away.

“Of course, we chased them, but they were crafty,” Anapa said. “They scattered to the four winds, hoping to eventually reunite and resurrect their god.” Anapa clapped his hands. The mural faded. “And that brings us to our current calamity, gentlemen and the lady, of course.”

The god smiled and pointed at Raphael. “You cost me my fang. It was dipped in metal and made to look like a knife, but inside it’s still my tooth with the blood of Apep in it. It was in the vault of that damned ruin and you had to buy it out from under me.” He turned to Meldrin. “You lost the staff carved from the vertebrae of Apep and his rib. They hid it in a room full of magical artifacts, so their magic would mask its location from me. You found it, took it out, and instead of taking it someplace safe, you practically served it back to them on a silver platter. Your own holy relic. Here is your award for stupidity. CongratulationsMeldrin opened his mouth and clamped it shut.

..

Anapa turned to me. “And you helped them both, stuck your nose where it didn’t belong, set the other furballs on me, and made my life difficult all around. I can’t move around the city, because there are two of your kind following me like a tail follows a dog. And half of the time, one of them is a cat. Do you have any idea how much I despise cats?”

Anapa took a long, calming breath. “Right now, Apep’s cult has the staff, the fang, and likely at least a few descendants of the Saii, the four priests who engaged in that creative gastronomy. So the question is, what are we going to do about it?”

“What happens if Apep is resurrected?” Raphael asked.

“Well, let us review.” Anapa leaned back. “He is the god of darkness, chaos, and evil. Let us agree to put aside philosophical concepts of evil and good, as they are subjective. What is evil for one is good for another. Let’s talk instead about chaos. Chaos, as our priest here will tell you, is an extremely powerful force. Do any of you know what a fractal is?”

-- .. --

Meldrin raised his hand.

Anapa grimaced. “I know you know. Here.”

A dark equilateral triangle ignited on the floor.

Anapa waved his hand. A smaller equilateral triangle appeared in the middle of the darker one, its corners touching the sides of the original triangle.

“How many triangles?” Anapa asked.

“Five,” I said. “Three dark, one light in the middle, and the big one.”

“Again,” Anapa said.

A smaller light triangle appeared in the middle of each dark triangle.

“Again. Again. Again.”

He stopped, pointing at the filigree of triangles on the floor. “I could go on to infinity. In basic terms, a fractal is a system that doesn’t become simpler when analyzed on smaller and smaller levels. Keep that in your head.”

A system that can’t be broken down to basic components. Okay, got it.

Anapa leaned forward. “To understand chaos, you have to understand mathematics. A lot of your civilization—most of any civilization, really—is built on mathematical analysis, the guiding principle of which is that everything can be explained and understood, if you just break it into small enough chunks. In other words, everything has an end. If you dig deep enough into any complex system, you will eventually unearth its simplest parts, which can’t be broken down any further. That sort of thinking works for a great many things, but not all of them. For example, the fractal. It doesn’t end.”

I felt like I was back in the Order’s Academy at some lecture. “This is surreal.”

“The fractal?” Anapa asked.

“You. Explaining this.”

Anapa gave a long-suffering sigh. “What do you know about me?”

And now I’d been singled out of the class. “You are the deity of funeral rites.”

“And what else?”

Umm…

“Medicine. The exploration of biology and metaphysics. Knowledge. This is my primary function. I impart knowledge. I teach. One can’t just give man fire. It’s like giving a toddler a box of matches—he will burn the house down. You must teach him how to use it.” Anapa shook his head. “Back to the fractal. It can’t be explained by mathematical analysis, so humanity, as it so often does, declared it to be a mathematical curiosity and swept it under the rug. Except the fractal occurs again and again.”

An earthworm appeared on the floor of the office.

“A line,” Anapa said. “So simple.”

He sliced the air with his finger. The earthworm divided in two. Two became four, four became eight, eight became sixteen, more and more. A swarm of worms roiled and writhed on the floor.

Anapa pondered the knot of bodies. “Left to its own devices, nature defaults to a fractal. A human settlement is a fractal. It is a complex system with randomly interacting components that is adaptive on every level. The pattern of the evolution of a single cell to complex organism