Every city stands upon its dead. Sekhemhut kept them. Here is how Menkhef’s night begins.
Every city stands upon its dead. Sekhemhut kept them.
They brought Nakhtmin down at the second bell, and Menkhef carried the ink.
The stair to the deep vault ran eighty steps into the glacier, and the air sharpened at every turning. At the door bound in iron a young priest of the Hem Ka barred the way with his staff.
“The rite is closed,” he said. “Priests and bearers.”
“He’s my hands,” Khahor said. “I’m an old man. My hands write badly in the cold.”
The priest looked at the ink case, then at Menkhef, and stood aside.
“You lie well,” Menkhef said on the next turning, low.
“I didn’t lie. You’re the best hands I’ve had.” Khahor took the steps one at a time, his breath loud in the dark. “She said as much to me once. She’d never have said it to you.”
“No,” Menkhef said. “She wouldn’t.”
Somewhere below them the glacier groaned, long and low, and the sound climbed the stair to meet them.
“The Pillar’s restless tonight,” Khahor said. “My grandmother would’ve thrown salt.”
“Do you believe it? That the Pillar lies down there?”
“I believe the ice moves.”
The vault opened below them, a round room cut from the living ice, and it held the lamplight as linen holds oil. The cold there wasn’t the city’s. What blew off the harbor came with the wind and left with it, and a man could quarrel with it. This one never moved. It had held its place since before the first king raised the first spire.
“Do the kept hear the bell?” Menkhef said.
Khahor walked three steps before he answered. “Ask me a smaller question.”
The Hem Ka worked with bare arms at the table, six of them, slick to the wrist, and they sang while they worked.
“What is kept is not lost,” sang the eldest, whose hands were inside her.
“What the cold holds, the cold holds whole,” the five answered, their breath going up white with the words.
The body on the table had a face, and the face had taught Menkhef his letters. He set his board where the lamplight pooled and fixed his eyes on the ink going black in the water. An apprentice did not touch the dead. He ground his ink and waited.
The Ib they left where it lay. The Ib is wanted.
Read the rest when it’s finished. Join the list for new chapters from Kemet and Letheion as they’re written.