Serpent's Kiss (Elder Races #3)(43)

“This is my gift to you,” he said. “Do not show this to Khepri or to anyone else. Do not write of it or leave any record of its existence. As proof of your devotion, I want you to bury it at the entrance of Djoser’s temple in Saqqara.” Saqqara was the giant necropolis, or city of the dead, that served as a burial ground for Ineb Hedj and later on for Memphis. “It might be a very long time before I can return for it, but I will.”

He closed the knife again and held it out. Akil took it with reverence. “I will, my lord. You can be sure of it.”

Yeah well, Rune thought. We’ll see about that.

Carling’s gaze focused on the interior of her office.

She was sitting in her desk chair. The cedar cabinet lay dismantled in a bundle against one wall. The slant of the sun had shifted from afternoon to early evening. The sunlight poured through the window in lethal bars of burning gold. She shuddered and looked away.

The room echoed with the emotional aftermath of aggression and violence. Rune prowled the office with the intensity of a caged animal. His face was set, his eyes roiling with the restless flicker of rapid thought. His long athletic strides made the roomy office seem stifling and too small. He shifted the heavy bundle of cedar to check underneath it. Then he moved to search alongside the floors beside the filing cabinets, and the space between the desk and the wall.

She cleared her throat and asked in a rusty-sounding voice, “What on earth are you doing?”

He swung around, his gaze flaring. He sprang to crouch at her feet. “How are you?”

“I’m fine,” she told him. It was a ridiculous thing to say, given everything that was going on. “You looked like you lost something.”

“I was looking for my pocketknife. I had it in this room and now I can’t find it anywhere.” He searched her face with a peculiar intensity that felt like a physical touch. “Do you remember seeing it anywhere?”

She scowled. “Of course I remember seeing it. I watched you cut the twine with it. Why do you ask?”

“It’s been an eventful afternoon,” he said.

“That doesn’t really answer my question,” she said.

“I don’t have any answers,” he told her. He gripped the arms of her chair. “I’m busy grappling with too many questions of my own. Do you remember going into a fade?”

“That’s right,” she murmured. “Of course I did.” She fell silent as she studied him. She thought of the memory she had gone back to when she had slipped into the fade, back and back, to one of the most painful, traumatic and pivotal times of her early life. She had been kept pristine, her virginity intact, saved and trained until she could be given as a gift at a strategic time to an important personage.

Then an immense, dark and terrifying god had touched down to earth to regard white-walled Ineb Hedj and its people with a passing curiosity. In the end, he had been indifferent to the city, its devout priests and religion, and uninterested in her as a gift. He had left, and she had been punished for it.

Then, with a crystalline clarity that the many intervening centuries had not dimmed, she remembered the whistle of the whip as it snaked through the air and plunged her into the most savage, transcendent pain, turning her world raw with the screams she did not have the breath to cry out.

And into that raw place an enormous golden monster had erupted, roaring with an agony as if he had been the one who was whipped, bringing with him both death and salvation.

The world rattled. Carling’s mouth opened. She tried to form words.

“God, you’re shaking like a leaf,” Rune muttered. “Talk to me.”

“I’m trying,” she gritted. She grabbed his strong, tanned wrists. He seemed to be the only thing that wasn’t shaking, that held steady. Their eyes met. “I s-see you went back a second time.”

He turned his hands to grip her wrists as well. “Yes. Can you tell me what happened to you? There was another Wyr involved, or at least there had been before I got there. Do you know who it was?”

The other Wyr had been Tiago, of all people, who had never remembered what had happened, because to him the whole incident had been unimportant. He had never known what the consequences of his indifference and departure had meant for her.

She shook her head. She had been angry and resentful at Tiago for so long, but for once, she meant what she said as she told Rune, “It doesn’t matter. It was just a curious Wyr who looked around briefly and then left again. The priests wanted him to stay, of course, which was why they gave me to him, but he wasn’t interested.”

Something unpredictable and razor-edged prowled in his lion’s eyes. “So he didn’t come back.”

“No,” she said. “At least not while I lived in the city.”

“Okay.” Rune seemed to relax only slightly. “Does . . . what happened . . . feel as real to you as the first time when I appeared?”

The world started to rattle again. She nodded.

His hands tightened on her wrists as he whispered, “It does to me too. Carling, I need to have a look at your back.”

She stared at him. “Why?”

The handsome, clean lines of his face were rigid with an emotion that rioted through the heavy afternoon air. “I need to look at your scars. It’s important.”

With a bewildered shrug, she leaned forward and bent her head. She held the caftan in place over her br**sts and allowed him to ease the loose cotton material away from her neck. With a featherlight touch he pulled her hair to one side. He handled her as gently as if she were spun glass, and his big body was so near as he knelt in front of her, that she let herself lean a few inches farther to rest her cheek on his wide shoulder. He caressed the nape of her neck as he slid the caftan down her back.