Free Year of the Hyenas by Brad Geagley Page A

vapor. As he waited for the Ripper Up to appear, his eyelids
began to close against his will. Soon he was oblivious to the
omnipresent droning buzz of black flies that swam lazily around him.
    A distant
laugh that
erupted into a wracking cough exploded in Semerket’s head. “By Anubis’s
shiny red pizzle, it’s Semerket! After all these years!” The dry
hacking filled the gloomy hallway. Semerket awoke, almost choking as he
swallowed his wandering ka once again into his body. His eyes opened
calmly, and he beheld his old friend and former mentor, Metufer.
    “But here you
are,”
the old man coughed out, “snoring away in my house, when I expected you
to be up and amazed that I am still alive!” Metufer was grotesquely
obese. Though it had been ten years since they had last seen one
another, Semerket was surprised to find the Ripper Up so little
changed. His hands did indeed shake a bit and his voice seemed a trifle
querulous, but Semerket marveled that not one line or wrinkle creased
his face.
    “Metufer.”
Semerket
clasped his arms as far as they could reach around his friend. “You
look fit.”
    The old priest
threw
back his head and laughed, which again induced a fit of savage
coughing. “Never… better… in my… life,” the old man managed to gasp
between breaths.
    As long as
Semerket
had known him, Metufer always had the cough; he claimed that natron
irritated his lungs. But if the cough had robbed him of clear speech,
it had somehow enhanced his powers of intellect. Metufer in fact was
regarded as something of an oracle in the House of Purification, both
for his intelligence as well as his skill with the basalt dagger. It
had been the reason he was appointed the Ripper Up.
    Something of
the
oracular seized Metufer at that moment. As he regarded Semerket, he
ceased laughing. “Something troubles you,” he remarked, his mouth drawn
down. “But if I remember correctly, that’s nothing new. You were always
a surly youth.”
    “Trouble does
bring me
here, Metufer,” Semerket answered. “A priestess is dead. If it is
murder, I am to find her killer.”
    “So once again
you are
the clerk… of…” The old man clutched his wide stomach and bent double
to retrieve his breath.
    “Investigations
and
Secrets,” Semerket finished for him. “Vizier Toh appointed me.” He
lifted his mantle and revealed the badge inscribed with the vizier’s
insignia. It hung about his neck on the long chain of jasper beads. “I
must first determine if the priestess’s death was accidental,” he said.
“Her body was found in the Nile. She might have drowned. A crocodile
might have made the wounds, or perhaps they were made after her death;
I don’t know. I only know that you, Metufer, are able to hear the dead
speak long after their lips have ceased to move.”
    “Your timing
is
fortuitous,” Metufer said. “Hetephras’s body has been here in the
natron baths, as the tradition prescribes. I was just about to open her
up when you came along. Come and help me, then, as you did in the old
days.”
    The room to
which he
followed Metufer was the largest in the compound. Like all the others,
it nestled in gloomy, torch-lit twilight. A large pool, filled with
Nile water stained yellow with natron, took up most of the southern
corner of the chamber. Here Semerket could pocket his bag of cedar
chips once again, for the smell of rotting meat had been replaced by
the harsh medicinal smells of juniper resin and bay.
    Beyond the
pool, in
neat rows, were large stone tables upon which lay bodies in various
stages of purification. Boys, wakened from their noon naps, began again
to sweep the floor, sluicing it down with jugs of water. This was a
necessary chore, for drains on the altar tables carried a constant
stream of fluids from the dead. Other youngsters carried baskets of
natron that they scattered about on the floor, which helped to absorb
the runoff from the tables.
    Metufer went
to a
table that was free and from there