Free Day of the False King by Brad Geagley Page A

Elamites. This was not easy,
as most of Elam’s army seemed to be stationed in the capital city — an
intimidating, menacing presence on almost every street corner.
    It was noon when Semerket realized that the
signs and notices painted on the brick walls had changed from cuneiform
to glyph. He had at last arrived in the Egyptian Quarter. To his
dismay, however, the upper floors of his own hostel loomed over the
rooftops not a furlong away; Semerket had come almost full circle from
where he started.
    He cursed aloud, using an epithet he rarely
spoke.
    Though the quarter’s featureless mud-brick
facades resembled every other place he had seen that morning,
eventually his eye found some rudimentary Egyptian embellishments. A
single lotus column supported a sagging roof, while a fallen statue of
some ancient pharaoh lay forgotten in its courtyard, covered in bird
droppings. At best, the quarter was only a tired and dusty refuge for
Egypt’s unwanted outcasts.
    These outcasts congregated in the square,
loitering in doorways and stables. None seemed to be actually doing
anything, and they stared back at him with vacant, surly expressions.
Semerket bent to ask a woman sitting in the shade of a spindly palm
where he might find the local temple. Listlessly, she pointed to an
alley.
    “End of the street,” she slurred, idly
waving away the flies that foraged on her grease-stained robes.
    His two spies waited for him behind the
temple’s walls, ducking out of sight when he approached. He was pleased
to see them, for then they could honestly report to King Kutir that
Semerket had done what he said he would do: he had gone to pray to his
gods. The two men would never guess that he intended to go directly to
the rear of the temple and over its wall to continue his investigations
alone.
    Once inside the temple compound, however,
Semerket was temporarily flummoxed. There was no hall of columns, no
sacred lake, no altars — in fact, the place did not seem like any
Egyptian temple he had ever seen. Tentatively, he went inside the
unkempt courtyard, where a couple of parched fig trees were its only
ornamentation.
    Crossing into the darkened sanctuary, he met
a miserable collection of chapels and shrines, though not a single
statue of the gods occupied them. The murals, too, seemed poorly
painted. A faint though pleasant smell of stale incense clung to the
room, but it was clear that no rituals had taken place in there for
some time. He looked vainly about for any priest or acolyte.
    Shrugging his shoulders, he plunged forward
into the temple, toward what he assumed was its rear. He had gone no
more than a few paces when he heard footsteps coming down one of the
gloomy hallways.
    “My lord!” A thin craggy voice bleated in
Egyptian to him from the dark.
    A gnarled priest of incalculable years was
advancing slowly toward him, all the while attempting to straighten his
threadbare wig. Behind him padded an elderly woman, her lips quivering
in alarm.
    “You must not go that way, my lord,” the
priest said. “Only a consecrated priest may enter.”
    “I’m a priest of the second grade,” Semerket
said, not precisely lying. All who learned how to write the 770 sacred
writing symbols of Egypt in a House of Life, as Semerket had, were
designated second-grade priests at their graduation. It was just that
Semerket had never truly graduated.
    “Nevertheless, you are a stranger here and
you have not been purified…” The aged priest’s voice trailed into
muffled uncertainty. “You
are
a stranger, aren’t you? We’ve
never met?”
    “No.”
    The old priest seemed relieved that his mind
still functioned, and stood up straighter. “Then I must ask you to
leave the way you came.”
    Semerket thought quickly. “But I wanted to
offer up a prayer of thanks to Amun, for seeing me safely to Babylon.”
    The old priest glanced at him sharply. “A
prayer —? You will make an offering?”
    This was more than Semerket meant to do, but
he