“What prophecy?”

He winced, and looked like he didn’t want to say more, but then, without even looking at the thugs surrounding them, his bright eyes flickered back to her and he said, “It has been said for many years in some circles that a great leader would arrive to take his place at Pharaoh’s side and finally subdue Burkan, but he could only do it with the blood of a foreign Skymancer and the bodies and possessions of six hundred and sixty-six of Burkhan’s followers—those who carry the ancestry of the Chosen.”

“Okay, so when I saw him collecting people last night, it wasn’t to make a city of his own?” Crash asked, having to readjust her take.

Khayu gave her a slight frown, but then shook his head. “No,” he said. “If he has the Skymancer, he’ll try to fulfill the prophecy. He’s…” He hesitated. “My brother craves power.”

“I saw that much,” Crash said. “I just wasn’t sure if he’d go for New Cairo or try to start a new country.”

“He wants the Pharaoh,” the man blurted. Then, wincing, he lowered his gaze and continued, “He took it personally she…never invited him to her bed. He watched from the shadows as she bedded everyone but him, growing more and more resentful… Me, I was smart enough to realize it was a curse and not a blessing, but Sabbaht resented her choice.”

“A regular Cleopatra,” Crash noted. “Bet she kills herself too, once she sees the hornet’s nest she just kicked up. Travis’s guys are pissed. They’re, like, wanting blood.” She’d overheard a conversation by a couple of grunts about a raid Travis had planned to send a message, and though Crash usually didn’t pay attention to stuff like that, she’d heard them say the words, ‘kill everyone, even the children’ before they noticed her listening and suddenly went quiet.

“You can’t fight her,” Khayu insisted. “Pharaoh is dangerous.”

Crash raised a brow, thinking of how her fish tanks kept mysteriously imploding and how it had become a running joke to Travis and the rest of the country, so much so that Travis had started threatening to do it himself. “More dangerous than a Quadrino Ray at ten miles?”

“Yes. She’s the most dangerous one on the planet. Sabbaht knows this. He’ll distract her in order to get to Burkan to offer his sacrifice to the Steward before she finds out.”

Crash hesitated at the inference. “So you’re telling me… Sabbaht will go to the volcano in New Cairo and kill a bunch of people thinking Burkan will give him the Pharaoh for it?”

“And her kingdom, as it’s written,” Khayu said, nodding. “It’s said that her consort many years ago died to appease Burkan, and Burkan thus promised her another mate as she crawled from his heart, once she had served enough time in his shadow. A god who would rule the world for her so she could retire. Many generations of my sect have hoped it would be them, and Pharaoh never dissuaded us of the notion.”

“How motivational,” Crash said. “Sex with a living goddess with the unspoken potential for godhood, if he was the ‘right’ one. I could see that as one hell of an incentive to play along.”

“Such was the hope of many generations of my kin,” Khayu said reluctantly.

“And you?” Crash asked.

Khayu hesitated, his yellow eyes flickering to her, then down to his hands. It took him a while to respond, and Crash saw the remnants of a broken heart in the tension in his face. “Any fool can see her heart is spoken for by another. I…don’t see a good outcome for any who try to forcibly usurp that position. Not even her Skymancers share her bed—she saves it for the eunuchs…or the members of my sect she’s using to make the governor jealous.”

She sighed, thinking about the kind of manipulative bitch that would pull that sort of long-term stunt. Cleopatra, indeed. “Okay, so who wrote this prophecy and what, exactly, does it say?”

Khayu frowned. “Pharaoh spoke the prophecy to the First Priest, when she crawled from Burkhan, delirious, bleeding, covered in the ashes of her dead mate. She had been within the center of the Earth, had seen its power, had swum its oceans of fire at her Skymancer’s side, and she was being returned her life for the chance to bring the prophecies of Burkan back to the masses.”

“Interesting,” Crash said, wondering how much of the tale was historical and how much a power-play by the religious class. “What’d she say?”

“It’s in the old scriptures,” Khayu said, looking suddenly wary. “Not many are taught them.”

“Were you?”

For a long moment, Khayu looked at her, then glanced at the floor between his knees. “I was not supposed to read them, but I spent enough time in the temples alone…”

Crash watched him carefully. “The way you say that… You’re not supposed to be able to read, are you?”

His flinch was enough. “That is not a Jackal’s duty,” Khayu admitted. “The Steward had his priests beat me once, for touching the holy relics. We are considered unclean because we have to touch the Skymancers. Many things are forbidden to us because of our duties babysitting the Pharaoh’s slaves.”

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

Crash, however, was having trouble hearing him over the pounding of her heart. She had doubted the liver-eating savage had had any written education so she hadn’t even asked, but the idea of having written correlation to document the word morphology was making her head spin. “Can you write? Like, say, a letter?”

Again, Khayu got a hunted look. “I never tried.”

Because he wasn’t supposed to. Crash, however, was thrilled. “Okay, we’ll cover that later,” she said, waving it off for another time. “What did those relics the priests didn’t want you touching say about the Pharaoh climbing out of the volcano?”

Khayu cleared his throat, looking nervous. His eyes flickered to her again, and she could see the indecision in his eyes, the simple fear. Then, reluctantly, he spoke. “Burkan’s Chosen will come for me,” he intoned, as if reciting holy scripture. “He will face the volcano and remain untouched. He will wade through the ashes of his brethren and stand before me and I will recognize his power as my Pharaoh. When he comes to me, I will crawl to him and kiss his feet and thank God for the gift he gives me. Until my Hero awakes, I will wait here for him, however long it takes. He will free me of my servitude, and only then will I be liberated to leave this hellish place. Until then, I will be forever bound to serve Him.”

Crash raised a dubious brow. “I don’t hear anything about sacrificing six hundred and sixty-six virgins or anything like that.”

“That was added later, by the prophet they called the Sixth Priest, though he was much older than that,” Khayu said immediately. Then he hesitated, his dark face flushing even darker. “I had many, many hours watching Ptahmohtep in the Steward’s library. He promised not to tell anyone I was reading the books if I promised to do the same. They thought he was utilizing the sacred pools beneath the temple. They were right across from the library.”

“Hot springs?” Crash asked.

Khayu nodded. “New Cairo is filled with them, but none as close to Burkan as those under the temple of the Steward. This is where he will sacrifice your friend. Probably the next floor down, in the caves.”

“Nobody’s sacrificing my friend,” Crash snorted, thinking of Quad. “I mean, they’ll try, but it won’t happen.”

Khayu didn’t look convinced. “The Sixth Steward of Burkan saw the future as a traveler in the soulscape. The future…and the past. He speaks of a great sacrifice in his holy scriptures, one wrought in blood, a curse meant to trap a heart. He saw many things, jumped many places. He was a great prophet. He said he saw what came after Pharaoh crawled from the center of the Earth, and saw her eyes glow of roses with the final life-force of her Skymancer and heard her words himself, spoken as truly as the First Priest wrote them down. Then, once the First Priest carried her away from the lava to recover, Burkan himself turned to him and spoke to him, showed him what was to come.”

“And what is to come?” Crash said, intrigued by the way myths had such an interesting way of forming from layers upon layers of human perceptions of reality.

Khayu’s face paled and he looked slightly ill. “Chaos,” he whispered. “War. Burkan’s wrath. He frees the Pharaoh and begins to awaken. There are great cataclysms and he starts to tear the Earth…”

“And this mate for the Pharaoh is supposed to stop this cataclysm?” Crash demanded.

Khayu blinked at her in total confusion. “No,” he said, like she were stupid. “He’s supposed to begin it. Only the faithful will survive the great Purge to follow. It will be a cleansing of the Earth.” Khayu made a face, lowering his eyes again. “At least, such is how many of my sept see it. The most zealous see it as a much-needed rebirth. My brother is one of those.” He glanced up, again looking wary, like his words would be considered blasphemy to speak aloud. “He is one of the fools who looks forward to the awakening of Burkan. They call it the Holy Purification, and a group of them secretly sacrifice a slave to the volcano every week, hoping to trigger it to finally bring an end to the Age of Man and usher in the Age of the Chosen.”

“And what do you think?” Crash asked.

“I think they are playing with fire,” Khayu said. “I think Pharaoh’s first Skymancer died to save the world, and his death drove her a little crazy. The priests documented her…decline.” He hesitated, eyes flickering to Crash again nervously. “And I think that if she dies, like the prophecy says, the entire world will die with her.”

“Wait, wait wait,” Crash said, holding up a hand to stop him. “You said she gained a consort, a mate to stand at her side. You didn’t say anything about dyin—” She felt her breath catch. She, of all people, knew how to see the double-speak in the words. She reviewed it in her mind, and, indeed, saw what Khayu had deduced was just as likely as some great hero rising from the ashes of a volcano. “Someone’s going to kill her,” she said. Then she shook herself, knowing that prophecies weren’t real and the whole thing was a silly idea.

But Khayu’s eyes had sharpened, and she saw that he recognized that she had seen what he’d seen. “The priests think it means a man will take her place as Pharaoh. I think it means she will be murdered and she knows it.” He hesitated. “I think she even suspects it’s Gregory.”

Crash blinked. “The only guy who survived the expedition to your continent?”

“Further,” Khayu said softly, “I think she grows tired of holding the world together, and no longer cares if it dies.”

Crash squinted at the man, his words niggling at something very ancient she had read about, something about a certain volcano in what used to be the area of Old America that they had dubbed Yellowstone…

“Wait a minute,” Crash said, the breath slowly going out of her. “That’s where New Cairo is located, isn’t it? What used to be Yellowstone? The topographical maps Travis showed me of where they assume you guys climbed down and where you climbed up…it matches.”

He gave her the strangest look she’d ever received from a man. That day, anyway. Lowering his voice, he said, “The Pharaoh sometimes refers to the hall of Burkan as Yellowstone to her closest followers in private sometimes, when no unbelievers are around to hear her.” He spoke as if he thought it were some sort of secret. “The Steward warned us never to use it, that the mere breath of it is blasphemy from our lips.”

But Crash’s breath left her as if she’d been kicked. She thought of the story of how the Pharaoh had lost her mate, supposedly ‘taming’ the great ‘Burkan’ to prevent the destruction of the world and hence being unable to ‘leave’ until someone else ‘took over’.

“Holy shit,” Crash said, getting chills. “She stopped the supervolcano from going off back in the Fall. And she’s still doing it.”

Khayu just nodded. “Everyone knows this.”

“No, I mean she really did,” Crash said. “Saved the world.”

“Yes,” Khayu said, frowning like she was an ignorant savage.