While she slid seductively to and fro, he was sitting frozen on the couch, his mind momentarily calcified. Hori was right, he was thinking idiotically. Hori was right. The gods have mercy, Hori was right. I have loved a corpse. “Yes,” he choked.
“Good!” she smiled, and he thought of her accent, so enigmatic. It is not something foreign, he told himself frantically. It is good Egyptian, but Egyptian as it must have been spoken hundreds of years ago. Oh how could I have been so blind!
“Prince Khaemwaset, she went on. “Master physician, master magician, above the laws of the gods in his arrogance. You cannot rid yourself of me now. Is your punishment fitting, do you think?” She paused, not really expecting an answer, and Khaemwaset thought, Yes, my punishment is entirely fitting, entirely pitiless, I have been guilty of an academic arrogance unsurpassed in Egypt. But was that any reason to punish my son also, and my daughter, and my poor, long-suffering wife? Is the judgment of the gods so merciless?
“I am in your heart, your guts, your genitals, and there I stay,” she purred, coming closer so that her obsidian eyes gleamed inches from his own and her charnel breath fell cold on his mouth. “I control you. You allowed me that power every step of the way. You fool!” She lidded her gaze and swung away, and, mesmerized, Khaemwaset watched her go, buttocks flexing, hair flying. “Nenefer-ka-Ptah and Merhu will move in here. Nenefer is my rightful husband. But I presume you have guessed that. Nubnofret has gone. Hori is dead. Sheritra is immured behind her own self-loathing. What a happy family we will be.” She turned on him with a manufactured surprise, her eyebrows raised, her eyes open wide. “Oh, incidentally, I am not pregnant. I told you that to introduce one of the little tests Thoth decreed, another chance to save yourself. But you failed it, Khaemwaset, as you failed all the others. You disinherited your children, and so furthered your moral and spiritual destruction at our hands. Never mind. You and Nenefer can share me. That will be interesting, won’t it? Come.” She opened her arms and gyrated her hips in a slow, seductive movement. “Make love to me anyway. You want to, I can tell. No man could ever resist me, Khaemwaset, in the old days. In the old, old days!” He heard her laughter, and in spite of himself, in spite of the numbing shock, the horror, the disbelief to which he could no longer cling, he was as desperately fired as he had been the first time he saw her. He rose, trembling. Bereaved, crushed, sick, he was compelled to obey.
“Good,” she encouraged him. “Good. I need warming, Khaemwaset. My flesh is so cold. Like the Nile, so cold, so thick in my lungs when I clung to Nenefer and screamed in the hope that we would be saved. And we were saved.” She came to him, running her hands over his head, down his neck, trailing her fingers across his stomach and down to where he was helplessly, involuntarily engorged. “You saved us, Khaemwaset,” she murmured, her mouth to his throat. “You did it. Come inside me, Prince. I want you to make love to me.”
Khaemwaset’s knees gave way and he fell back onto the couch, Tbubui on top of him. Hori, he thought. Hori, Hori … But the name was nothing, the name was inconsequential and he gave himself up to this abomination with a cry.
Afterwards he lay beside her, stiffly, in the grip of a deep horror, his limbs rigid, terrified to touch her as she sighed and moved imperceptibly in whatever dark state passed for her sleep. This is my fate, he thought wildly, to be gradually reduced to two states, helpless lust and an equally catatonic fear, the one alternating with the other as the months turn into years and my life oozes away, to be slowly lost in the shadow world of a living death. Already I am almost paralyzed. My senses obey only her. My faculty of righteous judgment has atrophied to nothing. My ability to love has vanished. I have lost my son, my wife, my daughter, and soon I shall lose what is left of myself. Thoth has made me Tbubui’s creature, and what has been cannot be changed. I will remain her creature until I die, until my own self-loathing kills me, for I do not think that any power on earth can rid me of this burden.
All at once his breath was stilled and he sat up. No power on earth, perhaps, he thought, a seed of hope blooming, but what of magic, of the unseen powers that emanate from the gods? You fool! You are a magician! Now is the time to put forth all your skill, or live in prison forever.
It was still dark when he let himself out of his suite and padded barefoot along the passage towards his office, Ib and Kasa following. He did not think, except to wonder if he was on the verge of insanity, for if he tried to think he immediately faced a chasm in his mind that made him sick, dizzy. He paused at one of the huge jars full of water standing by an exit to the garden and plunged his head deep, gasping at the fresh, wet shock, before going on. At the door to the office he turned to Ib.