She Walks in Shadows(68)
Nai’uchi burned sweet herbs; arousing Ayahuasca’s spirit. Chanted words set her spirit heart beating. The shaman spoke the high language only royalty and shamans understood. His words meant: Go unto the cat, great Empress. Infuse the cat and return to living land. The chant went on, entreating her to live, creep into the pet’s body.
Entreating. She had a choice: Return to the poisoned world of pretended love, pretended loyalty. And in the cat’s body, in this house of traitors, how long would she survive?
She had a choice. As incense floated around her, her soul flowed like blood from a chalice.
Her eyes opened. The colors of the trees filled her vision. She felt blood in her veins, the hair on her back rise. The smell of manure from the baboon cage flooded her senses. She flexed her great claws, and muscle and fur rippled on her flanks. Her screams brought the keeper.
The keeper looked at her with terror. She bore down on him, broke the gate latch and bounded down the boulevard, out of the zoological gardens. Toward the shaman house.
QUEEN OF A NEW AMERICA
Wendy N. Wagner
THE LITTLE GIRL hunkered down to study the beetle, its shell a shimmering rainbow of colors like the ones she’d seen on the mud puddles beside the street. She was only six, but she had already learned that beauty could exist in places others would fail to look. She dropped a stick in front of the insect to force it to turn aside and make its colors play in the light.
A part of her mind went to sleep then. She did not remember when these moments occurred, although they happened more and more frequently as she grew taller and cleverer and more self-sufficient. Her brown eyes went blank for a second and then lit bright with some sharp intelligence that hadn’t been there before. They narrowed at the beetle. It was no royal scarab, no sacred icon, but only some ordinary creature. All the creatures of this continent were ordinary. It pained her to know her soul was bound to this tedious, ill-bred, and utterly mundane place.
At home, there would be magic. She settled down on the sidewalk, allowing her thoughts to stretch out and fill the small mind she occupied. She spent so much time hiding, keeping herself small to keep from breaking the child’s tiny brain. She had never been good at restraining herself. Once, she had killed a thousand guests at a state dinner, just to see if she could. Her lips twitched at the memory. Murder was a mere frivolity to a woman such as herself, Queen Nitocris, who had challenged the gods in the great necropolises of Egypt, and won out over life and death.
The smile vanished. Death, yes, she had vanquished. From the dead, she had made herself an army of creatures, hybridized beings whose disparate strengths were held together by her husband’s embalming art and her own will. She hardly needed his skills, not with powers like hers. From her own embalmed body, she had captured her soul and held it to roam of all of Egypt as she pleased.
Until the interloper came. Thinking about that magic-less chicaner made her momentarily lose her grip on the host. The little girl moved to stand up. For a second, Nitocris’s view of the iridescent beetle went gray as she began to dissolve into the depths of her borrowed mind.
She snapped back, wrenching the girl’s consciousness into a prison of waking sleep. Sweat dampened her armpits and pain throbbed behind her eye. Damn, but the girl was strong. Since the illusionist had carried Nitocris out of Egypt and into this dry, drab America, she had almost forgotten the thrill of wrestling with another magical talent. In a place of less science and more emotion, the child could have been a real threat.
Nitocris recrossed her legs beneath the hem of her ruffled blue skirt and noticed the beetle moving slowly away from her. She scooped it up and lifted it to eye level. Deep within her, the child whimpered as the bug ran up her brown arm with prickling feet. The undead queen squelched her host’s complaint. The little one would be in charge of their body all too soon. Nitocris would have her pleasures now.
Beautiful things had always been her love and she had missed them after her death. Her subjects had filled her tomb with all her most glorious treasures, but over the centuries, tomb robbers had carried them away. She had plenty of ways to punish them, of course. In the hidden parts of her tomb, her mummies were always at the ready, their jackal teeth and nimble ape fingers ready to rend and tear the flesh of her enemies. But they always returned to her shabby and dirty, her minions’ linens unraveling in the wear of battle and the track of time.
Her treasures, too, lost their luster. Golden urns returned dented. Jewels were chipped. Her carefully preserved and gilded cats were ground into dust and mixed with wines Nitocris wouldn’t have served to even her coarsest slaves. Even the once-great nation of Egypt had become a dirty, sad place. The energy ran out of it, drained like the nation’s fortune into its conquerors’ pockets.
Poverty and filth had weakened her. She understood that now. She scowled at the beetle, which stopped in its tracks. Its antennae trembled. Nitocris hated to recall herself in that weakness, but she had come to understand the source of her magical power and her own formidable will, and now that understanding had become its own kind of strength. Like removing the bandage from a festering wound in order to encourage healing, she could now allow herself to remember the moment she laid eyes on Harry Houdini.
He had come to her tomb on the kind of necropolitan tour so popular in those days. He wasn’t a handsome man, but there was something mesmerizing about his eyes, something that drew her to him, that practically compelled her to slip inside him. But his mind! She shuddered to remember it. Such a painfully logical mind. It nearly smothered her. It drained the energy out of her before she could even begin to mount an escape. She fought back with mad dreams and strange headaches, but without the power of the old ways for her to draw upon, his will had dwarfed hers.