Chapter 58: Blood Close to Home
The night in the pottery workshop was a shared fever. Men huddled on the sooty floor, not for warmth—the air was still thick with the day's heat—but for the faint, animal comfort of contact. The greasy smell of the death-pyre hung everywhere, seeping into their clothes, their skin, the back of their throats. No one slept deeply. The dark was punctuated by ragged breaths, the shift of a body on gritty ground, and sometimes, the muffled sound of a man weeping into his hands.
Akhren sat propped against a wall, his knees drawn up. The cold void inside him had solidified into a sharp, crystalline focus. He watched the square of moonlight from a high window crawl across the floor. He listened to Karem’s breathing, heard the anger in each exhale. He heard Dagan, a few feet away, breathing shallowly through his broken nose, a wet, obstructed sound. The story was over. Now came the accounting.
With the first grey wash of dawn, the guards roused them with kicks and curses. The water jar was empty, the journey-bread long gone. They were given nothing. They were herded back into the square, which was now a staging ground. The women and children were already there, looking even more hollow-eyed, their faces pinched with exhaustion and fear. For a terrifying moment, Akhren couldn't find Nesira. Then he saw her, helping Meret sit against the same shrine base. Meret's face was the color of old linen, her eyes closed. Sadiya stood nearby, her bandaged hand held close, her gaze scanning the men as they entered. It locked onto Akhren, a quick, fraught flash of recognition before she looked down.
Zareth stood in the center again, speaking with Tjeku and a few other scarred warriors. He was pointing, giving quiet, precise orders. Tjeku nodded and strode over to the assembled villagers.
“Listen,” he barked, his voice raw with morning. “You have tasks. Men, you go with Merek’s group to the eastern wall. You will clear the burned timbers, you will gather stone from the fallen sections. You will rebuild it, higher and stronger. Women, you go to the river with Untu’s group. You will fill every water skin, jar, and pot you can find. You will bring them to the granary for our stores. Children old enough to carry, you will go with the women. Anyone too slow will be left behind. Left behind means dead. Move.”
The machinery of occupation began to grind. The crowd was split again. This time, there was less resistance, just a numb, shuffling compliance. As Akhren was pushed toward the eastern gate with the other men, he saw Sadiya being herded with the women toward the river path. Her shoulder bumped against Nesira’s for a brief second; a silent communication passed between them, born of shared helplessness.
The work was brutal. The eastern barrier wasn’t just breached; it was a scorched and shattered mess of blackened wood, shattered mudbrick, and tumbled stone. The sun, still low, promised a day of merciless heat. The Setari overseer, Merek, a bull-necked man with a permanent squint, didn’t work. He watched, a coiled whip in his hand.
“You! Lift that beam together! No, you idiots, like this!” He would shout, then demonstrate with impatient gestures, the whip flicking at the air. The first time a man fumbled a heavy stone, dropping it on his own foot, Merek brought the whip down across his back. The crack echoed off the broken walls. The man cried out, a sharp yelp of pain, and then bit his lip, tears of shame and agony streaming down his face as he bent to lift the stone again.
Akhren worked beside Dagan and Iru, heaving chunks of cracked mudbrick into a growing pile for reuse. Dagan moved stiffly, his face swollen, each breath a labor. Every few minutes, he’d pause, hand on his lower back, his eyes scanning the horizon beyond the ruined wall—not looking for rescue, just looking at the emptiness.
“Keep moving,” Iru muttered, not unkindly, as he nudged a brick toward Dagan. “Just keep your head down and your hands moving.”
It was midday when the first collapse happened.
A group of men, including Karem and Rahu, were trying to free a massive, charred roof beam that was pinned under a mound of rubble. They’d been levering it with smaller poles, grunting with effort, the beam groaning in protest. Merek stood nearby, glaring.
“Put your backs into it! It’s wood, not a mountain!”
They heaved. The beam shifted suddenly, a violent lurch. The mound of rubble it had been stabilizing gave way with a dry, rushing roar. Stone and brick cascaded down.
“Get back!” Karem yelled, stumbling away.
Rahu wasn’t fast enough. A flood of debris crashed over his legs, burying him up to his thighs. He screamed, a high, shocked sound, and fell backward, his upper body hitting the ground hard. A large, jagged piece of mudbrick slammed into Dagan, who had been hauling refuse nearby. It caught him across the ribs and side of the head with a sickening thud. He went down silently, like a sack of grain.
At the same instant, a sharp, splintering crack echoed from the top of the remaining unstable wall. A shower of smaller stones and dust rained down. Sadiya, who had been part of a chain of women carrying water jars from the river along a path that skirted the interior base of that same wall, was directly below.
There was no time to shout a warning. One moment she was walking, her face drawn with effort, the heavy jar balanced on her good shoulder. The next, a chunk of limestone the size of a man’s head struck her squarely in the back, between her shoulder blades. The sound was a wet crunch. The water jar exploded on the ground. She dropped, face-first into the mud and shards of pottery.
Chaos erupted. Merek started bellowing, not in concern, but in fury at the disrupted work. “You! Get that fool out of the rubble! You two, move that trash!” He pointed at Dagan’s still form and Sadiya’s, not distinguishing between the injured and the debris.
Akhren was already moving. He didn’t think. He slid down the small slope of rubble toward Dagan. Karem and two others were frantically digging at the pile covering Rahu’s legs, Rahu whimpering and clawing at the stones. But Dagan was alone.
Akhren reached him. Dagan was unconscious, a deep, ugly gash above his temple bleeding profusely, matting his hair and ear with dark red. His breathing was ragged, a bubbling, irregular sound. One of his arms was twisted underneath him at a wrong angle.
“Dagan,” Akhren said, his voice tight. He pressed his fingers against the man’s neck. The pulse was there, frantic and thin.
From the women’s path, a wail cut through the commotion. It was Nesira. She had broken from her water-carrying line and was running toward Sadiya’s prone form, ignoring a Setari guard’s shout. She fell to her knees in the mud.
Akhren’s gaze snapped to them. Sadiya wasn’t moving. Nesira rolled her over gently. Sadiya’s face was grey, her mouth slack. A trickle of blood ran from her nose. Her eyes were half-open, unseeing. Her chest hitched, a shallow, desperate gasp, then went still for too long before another agonized, wet inhalation rattled out of her. The hitches were becoming weaker, farther apart.
“Sadiya!” Nesira cried, her hands fluttering over the girl’s body, unsure where to touch. The back of Sadiya’s dress was already dark and damp with blood. “No, no, no…”
A Setari guard stalked over, grabbing Nesira by the arm. “Get back to the line!”
“She’s dying!” Nesira screamed, yanking her arm free with a strength born of pure terror.
The guard raised his hand to backhand her. Akhren was on his feet, instinct screaming in his head, the cold focus sharpening to a needle-point. But before he could move—or decide what moving would even mean—Merek’s voice cracked over the scene.
“Enough! The old one and the girl, move them out of the way. Over there, in the shadow. Let them die in peace. The rest of you, back to work! Now, or I start whipping until the work resumes!”
It was a logistical command, not a merciful one. The injured were obstacles. Dead ones were easier to move than living, struggling ones.
Akhren looked from Dagan’s broken body to Sadiya’s dying form. The choice was made for him. He bent, hooking his hands under Dagan’s armpits. He was far too frail to carry him, so he dragged him, stumbling backward, across the broken ground toward a sliver of shade offered by a collapsed section of the interior workshop wall. Dagan’s head lolled, leaving a smeared trail in the dust.
Nesira, with help from an older woman whose face was streaked with tears, half-carried, half-dragged Sadiya to the same pathetic patch of shade. They laid her down beside Dagan. The two of them looked like broken dolls discarded after play.
The guard glared at them. “You stay with them. No moving. When they are dead, you call. Then you go back to work.” It was a punishment detail, a sentence to watch life drain away.
Nesira nodded, numb, collapsing onto the ground beside Sadiya, taking her limp, cooling hand. Akhren knelt by Dagan, using a strip torn from his own already ragged kilt to press against the head wound. The blood soaked through almost instantly.
The world shrank to this three-foot-wide strip of gravelly shade. Behind them, the sounds of work resumed—the grunts of men, the crack of the whip, the scrape of stone on stone. Life, in its new, brutal form, went on. They were in a bubble of quiet calamity.
Sadiya’s breathing was the only sound in their bubble. Each inhale was a slow, laborious effort, a scrape of air through damaged lungs. Each exhale was a soft, burbling sigh. The intervals between breaths grew longer. A minute passed. Then two. Her hand in Nesira’s grew cold.
“She’s leaving,” Nesira whispered, her voice shattered. She looked at Akhren, her eyes brimming with a hopeless anguish. “Just like Panehsy. Just like… everyone. Just gone.”
Akhren looked at Sadiya’s pale face. He remembered her cautious friendship, her shared silence, her warning shake of the head. She had survived being an orphan, only to be killed by a falling stone in her own conquered home. It was so stupid.So pointless. The cold focus inside him began to churn, not with the directed energy of the vermin-swarm, but with a rising, acidic fury. It was a feeling so alien it frightened him.
Dagan stirred beside him. A low groan escaped his cracked lips. His eyes fluttered open, clouded with pain and confusion. He tried to move his head and gasped, fresh blood welling from the gash.
“Don’t move,” Akhren said softly, applying more pressure.
Dagan’s blurred gaze found Nesira, then the dying Sadiya. Understanding dawned, bringing a fresh wave of agony. “Rahu?” he mumbled.
“They freed him. His legs are broken, but he lives,” Akhren said, the information delivered like a report. Karem had shouted it across the yard minutes ago.
Dagan closed his eyes. A tear squeezed out, cutting a clean track through the grime and blood on his temple. “My workshop… your mother… and now this girl…” His voice was a broken thing. “What world is this, Akhren? What world have we made?”
Akhren had no answer. The world was the sound of a whip, the smell of a pyre, and the slow, failing breath of a friend.
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The world was the sound of a whip, the smell of a pyre, and the slow, failing breath of a friend.
Sadiya’s next inhale didn’t come. Nesira held her breath too, waiting, her fingers tightening around Sadiya’s cold hand. The silence stretched, a taut wire in the hot, dusty air. Then, a shallow, rasping pull of air trembled into Sadiya’s lungs, weaker than the last.
“She’s clinging,” Nesira whispered, but it was the desperate cling of a leaf in a storm.
Akhren kept pressure on Dagan’s head wound, the cloth now saturated and slick. The flow was slowing, but Dagan’s breathing remained that wet, troubling rattle. He was fading too, just slower. The metallic scent of their blood mixed with the omnipresent reek of smoke. Akhren’s mind felt scraped raw, empty of everything but the twin rhythms of dying beside him.
A shadow fell across them. It was Merek, the overseer, his squat frame blocking the sun. He looked down at the two broken forms, his face indifferent. “This one’s done,” he grunted, nudging Sadiya’s leg with his boot. “The old man’s not far behind. Call out when they stop moving. We need the space.”
He walked away, yelling at a group struggling with a stone. The cruelty was administrative, devoid of even the energy of hatred.
Nesira bowed her head, her shoulders shaking with silent sobs. Akhren stared at the darkening stain on the cloth in his hands. The cold focus inside him, the void that had answered with scorpions and snakes, stirred again. It wasn’t a command this time. It was a pull, a terrible, gravitational draw toward the fading light in the two people beside him. He didn’t understand it. He feared it more than the whip.
Almost against his will, his gaze fixed on the ragged line of the gash on Dagan’s temple. He watched a fresh, slow bead of blood well up and trace a path through the grime. He thought of the vermin, how his silent will had drawn them, directed them. Could that same will… push? Not outward, but inward? Into the broken flesh, the struggling breath?
It was a blasphemous thought. Healing was for priests, for herbs, for prayers to Sekhmet. Not for something like him. Not for a contaminated thing who brought omens of teeth and venom.
Yet the pull persisted, a hum in his bones below the threshold of hearing. He let his hand, still pressing the cloth, relax slightly. He didn’t pray. He didn’t envision health. He simply pushed the cold, sharp focus into the wound, imagining it sealing the torn vessels, cooling the furious heat of damage. He poured that silent, terrifying intent into Dagan’s broken skin.
Nothing happened. Dagan groaned again, his eyelids fluttering.
Akhren felt foolish, exposed. He glanced at Nesira, but she was lost in her grief over Sadiya. He looked back at Dagan. The bleeding had stopped. Not slowed. Stopped. The edges of the gash, which had been ragged and open moments before, now seemed to cling together, a stark, clotted line against the pale skin.
Dagan’s wet, rattling breath smoothed. It deepened. The terrible bubbling sound was gone, replaced by the steady, if pained, inhale and exhale of sleep. The unnatural angle of his arm beneath his body hadn’t changed, but the tense agony seemed to leach from his face.
Akhren snatched his hand back as if burned. He stared at his own fingers, clean of any new blood. He looked at Dagan’s peaceful, unconscious face. Coincidence. Shock. The body finding its own final reserve. He recited the explanations silently, frantically.
A soft sound from his left made him jump. It was Sadiya. A cough, weak but clear, erupted from her lips. A trickle of dark, clotted blood followed it, spilling onto the ground. Then she took a deep, unlabored breath. Her chest rose and fell, cleanly.
Nesira jerked upright. “Sadiya?”
Sadiya’s eyes, previously glazed and distant, blinked slowly. They focused on Nesira’s face with a dazed confusion. “Nes…?” Her voice was a dry croak.
Nesira’s hands flew to her mouth, her eyes wide with disbelief. She looked from Sadiya’s waking face to the blood now steadily oozing from the girl’s back, the flow having somehow reversed from a fatal seep to a manageable wound. She looked at Dagan, sleeping peacefully despite his injuries. Finally, her gaze landed on Akhren, who was frozen, his face a mask of horror.
He had done this. He knew it with a certainty that chilled his soul. The ring on his finger felt like a live coal.
“How…?” Nesira began, but her question died in her throat. The answer was sitting right beside her, looking as frightened as she was amazed.
“Don’t,” Akhren whispered, the word barely audible. It was a plea.
Before Nesira could respond, a commotion erupted near the water chain. A woman—Henut, the baker’s wife—screamed, clutching her side where a slipped carrying-yoke had struck her hours before. She’d been working through the pain, limping, her face grey. Now she collapsed, her cry sharp.
A Setari guard stalked over, his whip coiling. “On your feet! No laziness!”
“I can’t,” Henut gasped, her face contorted. “Something’s… broken.”
The guard raised his whip. He was the same one who had threatened Nesira. His face was all bored malice.
Akhren watched. The cold focus, now awakened, latched onto Henut’s pain like a scent. It was involuntary, a reflex. He didn’t want it. He fought it. But a thread of that intent slipped from him anyway, a filament of will crossing the dusty space.
The whip descended. It snapped across Henut’s back. She cried out, bracing for the next blow.
It didn’t come. Henut pushed herself up onto her hands and knees, her movements tentative. The wrenching pain in her side was gone. The deep ache from the yoke blow had vanished, leaving only the fresh, superficial sting of the lash mark. She looked at the guard, then at her own hands, bewildered.
The guard, mistaking her shock for defiance, raised the whip again.
“I’m up! I’m up!” she cried, scrambling to her feet. She picked up her discarded yoke, moving with a fluidity she hadn’t possessed minutes ago. The guard grunted, satisfied, and turned away.
Henut stood there, holding the yoke, her face a puzzle of fear and wonder. Her eyes swept the yard and landed, almost magnetically, on Akhren. He was the only one not moving, sitting in his patch of shade with two people who were, against all possibility, no longer dying.
She stared at him. He looked away, but the damage was done.
Word began to move through the exhausted, terrified workers, not in shouts, but in glances. A man with a crushed finger found the swelling receding as he passed the shade where Akhren sat. A woman with a bleeding gash on her leg from a fall felt the flow stanch, the throbbing dull. None of it was miraculous healing. It was subtle, a sudden turn for the better where decline had been certain.
By the time the sun began to sink, casting long, skeletal shadows from the broken walls, a new current ran beneath the fear. It wasn’t hope. It was something more primal, more unsettling. Eyes followed Akhren as he finally, under Merek’s shouted order, helped a now-ambulatory but confused Dagan to his feet. They watched as Sadiya, supported by Nesira, took a few shaky steps, her breathing even.
The whispers started, sewn into the sounds of dragging stone and cracking whips.
“…the omen-boy…”
“…did you see Henut? Couldn’t walk, now she’s…”
“…Dagan was gone. I saw the wound.”
“…his touch? His look?”
“…not just death. It’s something else.”
Akhren felt their stares like physical weights. He kept his head down, focusing on the ground, on Dagan’s unsteady steps. Nesira walked beside him, her silence heavy with unasked questions. He had saved them. He knew that. He had also, inescapably, revealed himself again. Before, they feared him for the death that followed. Now, they were watching him for the life that inexplicably remained.
Merek called a halt to the work as the light failed. The guards began herding everyone back toward the square for their meager ration of water and gruel. As the crowd shuffled forward, a space cleared around Akhren, Dagan, and Nesira. It wasn’t the hostile avoidance of before. It was a ring of awed, frightened distance.
An old woman, her face a map of deep wrinkles, reached out a trembling hand as Akhren passed. She didn’t quite touch him. She just held her fingers near his arm, her eyes closed, her lips moving in a silent plea. She was seeking a blessing.
Akhren recoiled as if stung, pulling Dagan along faster. The gesture, the terrified hope in it, was worse than any curse. He had become an altar, and he didn’t know the god he served.
The community had a new truth, forged in the ashes of the old. Pharaoh’s divinity had died in the dust, proven false. But something walked among them, something that could bend the flesh and mock fate. They didn’t know if it was a god, a demon, or a curse made flesh.
They only knew it looked like Akhren. And they were starting to believe.