longer.blue

Solo | The Unpassing | Part-2 The first death-ray was not a beam from a film. It was a line of concentrated sun, thin as wire, screaming as it came. It kissed the flagstones at Am-Ankh’s feet. Stone ran. Not cracked ran, like wax given a second, hotter life. The fountain’s rim slumped into a bright orange throat. Iron shutters fifty paces off went from solid to white to vapor with a sound like a ripped sheet. Am-Ankh screamed in a language older than the coffin. A fraction of a second had been enough. The stolen youth on the left side of his face blistered down to wrapping, then to black glass. He staggered, and the town shuddered with him. Somewhere a stopped clock tried to tick and failed. “You burn the borrowed,” Am-Ankh hissed. “Burn the man too, Ra. He is only a boxer. I can smell the ring on him.” Raymond came forward the way he had once come forward from a stool. No flourish. Weight on the back foot, then the step that ends arguments. Ra let him. The champion’s body knew distance. The god knew fire. Am-Ankh shed the pretty skin. What stood in the square then was the Duat’s unfinished business: a tall geometry of resin, bone, and hungry script, the heart still sewn inside because no jackal-god had been allowed to weigh it. Sand poured from the ribs and turned to beetles that did not live long in that light. He struck like a collapsing tomb both arms, a wave of vacuum that sucked banners inward and popped the windows in a ring. Raymond took it on the shoulder and went to one knee. Blood came. Then the blood steamed and closed. The scarab ticked. Again, said Ra. The second ray was wider. It caught Am-Ankh across the chest. Linen became smoke. The lead-ghost of the coffin, still clinging to him like a habit, ran off his spine in silver tears and hit the square as hissing beads. He slammed into Raymond anyway priest-strength, chaos-strength, the strength of a thing that had been denied rest and had decided to steal it. They went over a stall. Dried beans scattered and instantly browned to ash where they touched Raymond’s sleeve. Am-Ankh’s hand found Raymond’s throat and began to drink. For one awful second Raymond was only a man again. He saw Nour’s tray. He saw the Riyadh lights. He saw his grandmother’s mouth shaping the word wait. Then Ra took the hands. The third ray did not come from the sky. It came from the scarab, through the sternum, out the palm that closed over the mummy’s wrist. Point-blank. No fraction. A white coin of sun punched through resin and script and the hidden heart together. Am-Ankh tried to speak a name that would unmake kings. The name boiled in his mouth. He broke away, trailing smoke, and fled up the minaret stairs because even chaos understands elevation. Raymond did not chase on foot. Gold tore him the falcon-wings so fast the square only saw a streak. Wings cut the heat. He hit the balcony as a man again and the fourth ray followed his pointing hand like a spear thrown by noon. The minaret’s metal cap vaporized. Brick flushed to slag. Am-Ankh, caught in the open, finally understood the old warning about mercury and lead. They had not been prisons for a body. They had been shade. There is no shade from the Eye when the Eye has decided the account is closed. He leapt. Raymond met him in the air. They struck the square together. Stone became a shallow crater of glass. Am-Ankh’s remaining arm locked around Raymond’s ribs and squeezed with the last of a town’s stolen hours. Raymond’s mouth was at the thing’s ear the champion’s grind, the god’s verdict. “You were kept from the afterlife,” he said. “I am sending you the short way.” The last ray was not aimed. It inhabited him. For a heartbeat Raymond Fayek was a vertical sun. Every metal clasp on the mummy’s wrappings vanished into concentrated sun-beam. The script went white, then absent. Am-Ankh the Unpassing came apart without leaving pieces worth burying. What remained was a smell of hot sand and a clean hole in the air where Isfet had been cheating. Silence. Then Ra did the second half of kingship, the half men forget when they only want fire. Light ran backward through the streets. The woman on the step blinked and frowned at her cold tea. The boy picked up his football, annoyed that it was dusty. In the clinic a nurse checked a pulse that had been gone and found it rude enough to return. No one screamed. No one remembered sitting down to die. The hours Am-Ankh had swallowed were put back like chairs after a gathering. Faces smoothed. Dogs stood. The loudspeaker cleared its throat and finished a call to prayer as if it had only paused for breath. Raymond stood in the glazed crater and watched a town become ordinary again. The warlock’s body, far off in the restricted shaft, was only a warlock’s body. The mercury had already begun to crawl back toward the empty lead, a habit without a purpose. Sector Seven would be resealed. The file would grow another lie. Nour would never hear this part. Raymond’s hands were his own again. They shook once, the way they had after hard fights when the arena lights were too bright. The scarab cooled to the temperature of skin. "Ma’at is not mercy", Ra said, almost mild. "It is return. They will not carry this. You will." Raymond looked at the glass in the square, already dulling as the true sun the one that belonged to the sky and not to a man’s bones took the hour back. “I know,” he said. He bought the nigella bread on the way into Cairo, because an aunt had asked, and because the living still needed supper. Behind his eyes the first king watched the road, and the Eye of Ra, new-made in a banned fighter’s flesh, did not close. The End.