The Exodus and creation of the Winikin

Chapter One

Summer solstice, A.D. 1988 Syracuse, NY

Times have sure as shit changed, Jox mused as he dried and shelved the last of the dinner dishes.

Five years ago on the summer solstice, he’d been a puffed-up peacock, full of himself and his duties as winikin- servant and protector- to the jaguar prince and princess. Among the winikin, he’d been second in rank to his father, who had served and protected King Scarred-Jaguar himself.

Then, one year later on the summer solstice, the king of the Nightkeepers had led his warrior-magi in an attack on the barrier of psi-energy that separated the earth from the underworld, Xibalba. The king had seen the attack in a dream, and had followed the so-called vision despite his advisors’ counsel against it. In the end, they’d been proven right and the king wrong, with disastrous consequences.

The demon Banol Kax had come through the barrier and struck, slaughtering all but one of the Nightkeepers and then sending their lava creature boluntiku after the children and winikin, who should have been safe back at the warded training compound, but had proven vulnerable.

Jox had done his job: he’d saved the prince and princess, and tucked them safely in hiding. A handful of other winikin had gotten their children away, too, and they’d scattered, as the directives required. The dispersal weighed on his heart, which ached with the knowledge that the survivors included Hannah, the woman who’d been most important to him next to his Nightkeeper charges. She was alive, but he couldn’t go to her, couldn’t risk it.

Every solstice and equinox since the attack, Jox and the sole surviving Nightkeeper mage, Red-Boar, had gone to the sacred chamber beneath Chichen Itza, where Red-Boar had tested the barrier, to see if it held fast, as the king’s vision had promised.

For nearly four years, nothing had happened. Then, just this past spring, something had changed- not in the barrier, but in Red-Boar. Always twitchy and moody, and prone to violence, he’d attacked Jox just after the equinox ceremony.

When Jox had regained consciousness, bruised and battered, the son of a bitch had been long gone, leaving Jox alone with the last remaining jaguar prince and princess of the Nightkeepers. And oh, holy hell did that make him feel completely inadequate.

He knew he could raise and love them- had been doing that since Anna’s birth into the royal family some seventeen years earlier, and doubly so since her brother Strike was born. He could tell them the creation myths that their ancestors had shared with the Maya, and the stories of the history that belonged to the Nightkeepers alone. He could- and would- protect them with his life and beyond.

But he couldn’t teach them the magic. Only Red-Boar could do that. Granted, the barrier was offline at the moment, had been ever since the massacre. But what if. . .

“You start in with the ‘what ifs’ and you’re going to lose your mind,” Jox muttered under his breath, pushing away from the cheap Formica countertop and jerking the dishrag from his belt.

“Too late,” said a voice from the kitchen doorway, one that cracked with the beginning of the boy’s transition to being a man. “I’m pretty sure you lost it a long time ago.”

Strike, the young jaguar prince, leaned against the doorframe, his too-long arms crossed over his scrawny chest. His dark shock of hair was a spiky mess, and he was wearing a too-big hockey jersey that draped like a tablecloth, a pair of month-old jeans that were already two inches too short, and a shit-eating grin at the promise of poking at his mentor and guardian.

On one hand, Jox thought, it was good to see the kid smile. Ever since Red-Boar had taken off, Strike and Anna had been unsettled, alternating between clinging and snapping at each other, and at Jox. He couldn’t blame them, either. Like it wasn’t bad enough they’d lost their family, friends, home and entire way of life in one terrible night, Red-Boar had to go and take off, yanking fifty percent of their remaining support system. So yeah, the kids were due some acting out, and it could be a good sign of healing if Strike was getting back to his normal wise-assed thirteen-year-old self.

On the other hand, Jox wasn’t really in the mood for sass. Not on the summer solstice. The cardinal days- the solstices and equinoxes- were the Nightkeepers’ sacred ceremonial days. In the absence of a mage- and gods damn Red-Boar’s selfish ass, anyway- Jox couldn’t take the kids down to the intersection, couldn’t lead them through the ceremonies. But he’d be damned if he let them forget where they’d come from.

Remembering- and helping the Nightkeepers remember- was one of a winikin’s most important tasks, along with protecting and serving the magi they were blood-bound to.

He glanced at his own right forearm, where the aj winikin glyph marked him as a protector, the royal ju marked him as servant to the jaguar house, and the two balaam jaguar glyphs denoted his bond to Strike and Anna.

Before the massacre, smaller jaguar glyphs had marched up his arm, row upon row of them, each representing a member of the bloodline to which he was bound. Those marks were all gone now, had been for exactly four years, erased upon the death of each member of the bloodline, through the magic of the bloodline bond.

Never forget, Jox thought. What has happened before will happen again. He shot Strike a look. “Go get your sister and meet me in the TV room- but leave the bloody TV off. We’re starting our own solstice tradition.”

“She’s on the phone,” Strike said, like that made a difference. And to an extent it did, because both Strike and Jox had gotten the sharp side of Anna’s tongue over interrupting her oh-so-important and drama-filled conversations with her equally drama-filled friends.

It’d been bad enough when she’d gotten her period and Jox had been forced to deal with the woman stuff. . . but seventeen had proven to be ten times worse, especially with Red-Boar gone. For reasons passing understanding, Anna had always idolized the older mage, even before the massacre. She’d tried- more or less- to act like a human being when he’d been around. Not that he’d noticed, being too caught up in mourning his dead wife and twin sons. But Strike and Jox had reaped the rather grim benefits of the mage’s presence.

But no longer. With Red-Boar gone, Anna had done a serious grief-and-hormone-driven spiral, seeming almost grimly determined to act exactly like all of her friends- human, rather than Nightkeeper. Normal, as she called it.

“Go get her,” Jox repeated.

“Okay, but I’m blaming it on you.” Strike did an about face and disappeared down the short hallway to the bedrooms. Moments later, Jox heard him knock and shout, “Anna. Jox wants us in the TV room like yesterday!”

In response, the music leaking through her closed door got louder. Jox caught the tail end of the lyrics and winced. He’d thought the kids’ Michael Jackson years had been bad. The George Michaels years were proving far worse.

He wasn’t a prude. Hell, most Nightkeepers were sexually active by their mid-teens, when the magic really kicked in and they needed the extra power boost brought by orgasm. But that was Nightkeeper on Nightkeeper, which made power sense. In the absence of Nightkeeper partners, he wanted to keep Strike and Anna as far away from the whole sex thing as possible, he didn’t appreciate hearing all about it from some stubble-cheeked pop-star.

Making a mental note to avoid singers- or hell, anyone- with Michael as a first or last name, Jox headed for the TV room figuring he’d give the kids five minutes to work it out before he called bullshit and dragged them in by their hair or something.

Not that he’d do that, but it didn’t hurt to visualize occasionally. Kept the blood pressure down.

Like the rest of the six-room apartment, the TV room was big and plain, good construction leaning toward shabby from lack of upkeep. Located in a decent suburb of Syracuse, it was safe and meant the kids could go to a decent school system. It was reasonably priced, too, but that wasn’t why Jox had chosen it, or the half-dozen other similar places they’d rented for anywhere from a few months to a year over the past four. The Nightkeeper Fund, begun in the nineteen-twenties with the proceeds from sold-off artifacts and built through decades of wise investments since, had been intended to fund hundreds of warriors and the war to save mankind when the end-date came in 2012. It wasn’t like a dozen surviving kids and the same number of winikin were going to make much of a dent.

No, he’d chosen the big old shabby place for exactly the reasons that had undoubtedly failed to recommend it to other renters: its complete and utter unremarkability. The walls were cracked, the wood floors scuffed and stained, and the appliances were hit or miss on the whole working thing. But it felt safe, and that was what the directives required of him: the safety of his Nightkeeper charges.

At the four and a half minute mark- on the heels of lots of banging and shouting- Anna sulked her way into the room, followed by Strike, who looked devilishly pleased at having had official sanction to torture his older sister.

“Sit.” Jox pointed to the blah sofa, which had come with the blah apartment along with the rest of the boring-assed furniture.

Anna plonked herself down with ill grace. She was as tall as Strike, each of them topping Jox by a good four inches already. But where Strike was long, dark-haired and gangly, Anna was coming into her physical self- lean and coltish, but subtly curved and carrying the elegance of her bloodline. Her hair was a rich mix of red-highlights and dark undertones, and danced like flame. Both of them had their sire’s cobalt blue eyes, but where Strike’s were open and more often than not laughing, Anna’s were dark and hurt, and carried secrets Jox knew he couldn’t touch.

“It’s summer vacation,” she protested now. “You know, vacation? As in, no command performances? Free rein and all that?”

Nightkeepers don’t take vacations, Jox wanted to say, but knew that wouldn’t get him far- and would likely prove the point she’d been trying to make, with varying degrees of subtlety, for the past few months, i.e. that the barrier was closed, the end-time countdown was shut down, and the world didn’t need the Nightkeepers anymore.

And yeah, he’d like to believe that, too. Had to believe it, because if Scarred-Jaguar’s magic hadn’t sealed the barrier and stopped the countdown to December 21, 2012, then the Nightkeepers and winikin had died for nothing. Worse, their deaths would leave the earth and mankind unprotected with the zero date came.

But the small doubt that remained, the fear that the barrier would come back online some time in the future, was what kept Jox going from day to day, what kept him raising the kids in the Nightkeeper traditions, or at least as well as he could under the circumstances. It was that fear that had him holding onto them, had him restricting them, even though Anna, at seventeen, probably would’ve been married and a mother by now if she were still within the Nightkeeper culture.

Knowing she was already straining at the restrictions, and not sure he could blame her, Jox said only, “Humor me, okay? It’s a bad day for all of us.”

Four years ago that night, their world had died. It was difficult not to live life around that one horrible night, when everything had changed.

“Oh. Right.” Strike looked surprised, then guilty. “It’s the solstice. Dude. I can’t believe I forgot. I was just thinking. . . you know, the first day of summer and all.”

He’d been nine on the night of the massacre, and his mind had blocked off just about everything, with only the occasional nightmare breaking through. Of all of them, he was the lucky one.

He wasn’t the one Jox was most worried about, though. It was Anna he looked at when he said, “It’s not wrong to move on, as long as we remember what’s important.”

Her expression all but shouted “like what?” but she pressed her lips together, stifling the retort, then said, “Okay, I’m here. What did you want us to do?”

Strike’s eyes lit. “Should I get the knives and bowls?”

Jox held up a hand. “No bloodletting, no rituals. You know I can’t lead the magic.”

“Then what can you do?” Anna sniped.

I can smack your backside, you spoiled brat, he thought, but didn’t say, and wouldn’t ever actually do. Instead, he waved Strike to the sofa beside his sister, and took the overstuffed chair opposite. “I can force your traditions and history down your ungrateful throats,” he said mildly, “starting now. So sit down and shut up. You make it through the whole story without annoying the shit out of me, we go for ice cream. You bug me before we get to the end, you’re both on dishes for the rest of the month.” He waited until the expected groans died down, and fixed each kid with a look. “Well?”

Anna gave her trademark drama-princess sigh. “Fine. Start talking.”

Determined to take the small victories where he could find them, he ignored the tone and began, “Many generations ago, in the year we now call 1351 B.C., your ancestors lived in Egypt, where they were called stases, which meant ‘guardians of the barrier.’

“They lived in fine houses and had many servants, and their ruler, Uro, was proud of their accomplishments, and their place within the society. Uro was high advisor to the pharaoh Akhenaten, and his beautiful wife, Nefertari, and the stases were firmly entrenched as the priests of the Egyptian’s most important gods.” Jox paused, his voice dropping. “However, Nebi, a mage of the panther bloodline, was worried that the king’s pride had blinded him to approaching danger of the sun god, Aten. . .”

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Chapter Two

Summer solstice 1351 B.C. Armarna, Egypt

“Idiots!” Nebi kicked at the dust in the chariot track, his sandaled feet doing little more than scuffing a bare spot on the hard-packed surface. Worse, he was having more effect on the road than he was on his stubborn king. The panther bloodline held far less power than the hawk or scarab families, and Uro was a stickler for rank, which meant that Nebi’s voice held little weight. . . even when he was right.

Not that calling the stases’ king and the advisory council a bunch of idiots was likely to improve matters, but there was nobody within earshot to hear the disrespect.

“You tried your best,” a small, soft voice said. For a moment, Nebi thought it was his own soul speaking to him. Then he turned and saw that it was, indeed, his soul, but not coming from within. It was his wife, Banafrit, coming toward him from the city center.

“Merit,” he said. Beloved. He crossed to her, feeling the worry shift from his shoulders to theirs, as the sun dropped to the blood-red of dusk.

Banafrit was nearly as tall as he, both of them a head taller than the pharaoh and his people, though they bowed low when Akhenaten was near, so as not to force the point. With her pale hair streaked with a startling black stripe down the middle, and her wide eyes the secretive green of the Nile come flood-time, Banafrit had been a jewel of Amarna in her younger years. As far as Nebi was concerned, the years and their two sons- whose pranks were written in the lines beside her kohl-smudged eyes- had only enhanced her beauty.

He took her hand and felt the stars realign in his world. “You heard the news?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Which part? That you disrupted Uro’s council with dire warnings- again- or that he had you expelled from the assembly. . . again?”

Nebi grimaced. “I guess it’s not exactly news.”

Her eyes went soft. “You can only tell them what you believe, you can’t force them to believe it.” She tugged on their joined hands, urging him away from the chariot track, which ran between the Northern Palace and the Maru-Aten temple south of the city. “Come home. Ki has prepared a special meal.”

Ki was one of the hemu; higher ranking than the enslaved prisoners of war they were descended from, the hemu were dedicated to tending the children of the stases. As much family members as servants, each hem acted as a moral compass to the growing magi, urging action or caution depending on the situation.

Both Banafrit and Ki agreed with Nebi that they were in grave danger, but they were part of only a tiny minority who believed there was danger in Akhenaten’s sudden obsession with the Great Sun God, Aten. Uro believed it was nothing more than a phase, that Akhenaten would return to the old ways in time.

Nebi wasn’t so sure about that. Akhenaten had a fanatic’s gleam in his eyes, and his guards walked with both short swords and scimitars at their hips, and the charioteers rode with wickedly edged spears, though the empire was at relative peace.

“You’ve done your best,” Banafrit said. “Come home. The boys have something they want to show you.”

“Then let us be off,” he said, the thought of their sons bringing a smile that was tainted with the worry in his heart. They walked in silence for a moment before he could bring himself to say the words he’d been avoiding for too long. “I think we should leave. Or if not leave, then send the boys away.”

Her steps didn’t falter, but he sensed the change in her, the closing-off that meant she didn’t want to discuss it. “We talked about this already and decided they’re safer with us, and with Ki. He would give his life for the boys if it became necessary.”

“It wouldn’t be necessary if all five of us we were gone.”

Her jaw went tight. “I won’t leave my parents and sisters. Would you leave your family, our friends? The magic is strongest with all of us together, you know that. Would you make your prophecy fulfill itself by weakening the stases?”

“I’m no seer,” he said, stung to his core by her talk of prophecy, which was the domain of women alone. She shot him that ‘you’ve just made my point’ look that always made him squirm. “Exactly. And the seers haven’t foretold anything like what you’re describing. So perhaps it’s not everyone else who is wrong this time.”

“You don’t believe me,” he said softly, his heart cracking with it.

She avoided his eyes. “I believe in you.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“Right now, it’s all I have.” She turned to him, letting him see the grief and strain beneath the beauty he’d been blessed to have in his life. “Uro came to see me. He said there would be sanctions if you disrupt another assembly.”

Cold gathered in Nebi’s center, radiating outward to numb his hands and feet, despite the lingering warmth of the day. “He threatened you?”

“He threatened all of us, Nebi. The boys most of all, because what will their future be with a father who’s been stripped of his rank and magic?” Banafrit was staring straight ahead, as she did when she was either very sad or very angry. Or both.

Nebi glanced at his forearm marks, which symbolized his status as a member of the panther bloodline and a married man. He tried to imagine them stripped away, and failed. Tried to imagine life outside of the city and succeeded, but only because he’d been thinking long and hard about it for many ten-days.

“We could find a small place down by Thebes,” he said softly.

“And do what?” Her voice cut knife-sharp. “Herd goats? Run a ferry? Would you really be content with that?”

They both knew the answer to that: he might be, but she never would. A daughter of the hawk bloodline, she was accustomed to living in the city and wielding power in matters of state. She had accepted the small declines in their status that had come when he’d started openly challenged Uro; she’d accepted them because she loved him. There was no telling, though, whether she would- or could- accept more of a fall.

“What will it take to convince you?” he asked. “What can I-“ He broke off at the sound of a scream, and a puff of smoke from the nearby Central City, with its stone buildings and open market. His heart jammed in his throat at the sight of the pharaoh’s guard marching openly in the street, some menacing townspeople with their short swords, others carrying lit torches.

It was too dark to see details, but the screams grew louder and they heard men shouting, something about false gods and the wrath of the Great Sun God, Aten.

Gods help us, Nebi thought, freezing in horror. It has begun. The pharaoh was bringing his one true god to the fore by killing all who opposed.

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Chapter Three

“Come quickly!” Dragging Banafrit behind him, Nebi ran as fast as he could, trying to block his ears to the screams coming from the living quarters of the other stases. The pharaoh’s guards were grim-faced and tight-lipped, acting under orders rather than blood lust as the warrior-priests fell under their swords and pikes. Magic flared, sputtered and died.

Nebi threw up a light shield spell as he ran, covering him and Banafrit both. But though he felt the drain of the magic, there was no sense of the shield. The magic was dull and sluggish; the shield refused to form. Something was blocking the power. Aten? He didn’t know.

“There! I see them!” Banafrit yanked away from him and sprinted toward their home, where three figures were trying to sneak out the back: Ki and the twin boys, Alu and Khenti.

“Wait!” Nebi grabbed for her. “Don’t draw attention to them!”

But she didn’t hear, didn’t heed, started running toward her babies, crying their names.

Nebi saw the guards’ heads snap to her. In the firelight from a burning cottage, he saw recognition cross the face of one, a man named Mdjai who had a daughter the same age as Alu and Khenti. Grief crossed Mdjai’s face, followed by resignation, and he lifted his bow and took arrow-aim at Banafrit.

“No!” Nebi screamed, his voice cracking on the word. He threw himself at Mdjai, but he was too far away. The guard loosed his arrow in the moment before the men’s bodies collided. Nebi and Mdjai went down.

A heartbeat later, so did Banafrit.

“Banafrit!” Nebi’s voice broke; his heart broke. He pulled himself off Mdjai and stumbled across the beaten dirt to where his wife lay, pierced through by the arrow. Her blood leaked into the dust, staining it dark red, tainting the air with the smell of salt and death. “Banafrit.” He took her in his arms, hunching over her, cradling her as her eyes met his.

Her face was drenched with pain, and in her eyes he didn’t just see the woman he’d loved more than half his life. He saw beyond her to the others who’d come before her and lived on the other side of the barrier, waiting for her.

Her lips trembled, then formed words. “Our time here is done. Take the children and go.” It wasn’t his wife’s voice, though; it was a multi-tonal voice made of many voices at once, all speaking in synchrony. The voice of their ancestors.

A huge shiver crawled down Nebi’s spine, a jolt of religious awareness existing alongside the grief. “Banafrit,” he breathed, unable to say more than that, unable to process anything beyond the spreading stain in the dust beneath her. But she didn’t answer. Life had left her body, taking the ancestors’ voices with it.

Seconds later, a heavy hand clamped on Nebi’s shoulder. He bowed his head, as much relieved as resigned. “Do it,” he said to Mdjai. “I can’t leave her.”

The guard dragged him to his feet and shoved, sending him stumbling several paces away. “You have to.”

Nebi jerked his head up. “What?”

“Go,” Mdjai grated, his voice low and urgent. “Run now, because others are coming. Once they get here, I’ll have no choice.”

Which meant he was making a choice now, Nebi realized, shock numbing him at first to the opportunity. “Why?”

“Gods go with you,” the guard said, turning away and refusing to answer.

Or maybe that was his answer. Like Nebi, Mdjai had spent his life worshiping Horus and Osirus, Isis and Bastet. . . only to have his pharaoh say there was only one true deity, that the followers of the old gods had to die.

Nebi didn’t say anything else. He turned and ran, leaving his wife’s body in the bloodstained dust. He ached to carry her with him, but knew he couldn’t, ached to stay with her and join her in death, but knew he couldn’t do that, not while there remained a chance that Ki had gotten the boys away.

So he ran, leaving his heart behind.

Spears rattled behind him, shouts spurred his footsteps. Running full-out now, he darted behind the house where he and Banafrit had lived and loved. Sluggish smoke rose from the interior; he didn’t dare look, didn’t dare slow, could only run harder as he left his old life behind.

All around him, the screams raged on, battle cries and spluttering magic cutting through the air as the stases died.

When Nebi reached the clearing beyond the city, he didn’t know where to go, knew only that he hadn’t passed the bodies of his sons and their protector, though it seemed as though he’d passed the bodies of everyone else he’d ever known.

The river, a voice whispered inside Nebi’s skull, sounding like many voices and one all at once.

He stopped dead. “Banafrit?”

There was a shout behind him, the clatter of footsteps, and there was no more time to think or mourn; there was only time to run as far and fast as he could. He headed for the riverfront. How could he not?

At first he thought there was nothing there beyond abandoned punts and the bodies of the dead, slumped where they had fallen, bereft of their magic when they’d needed it most.

Then he saw a shift of furtive movement, a boat easing away when it should’ve been tied. And three suspicious lumps beneath a dusty tarp, one extending a paddle and using it to give a surreptitious shove against the dock, heading them out into the current.

It was Ki. Nebi knew it as surely as he knew his own powers, or his love for his wife and children. He didn’t shout, didn’t do anything that could draw attention. He turned downstream and started running, but kept low, skirting from one building to the next, paralleling the slow river. Gods, he prayed as he ran, please help me catch them. Help me find them.

You will, said that voice inside his skull. You’ll find them all.

He wanted to ask what “all” meant, wanted to know how to find them, but he didn’t dare ask, and something told him if he did, the voice wouldn’t answer. It was gone, snuffed out by the smoke and the violence, and Banafrit’s passage to Xibalba, and from there to the sky.

She was gone to him now. But their sons weren’t. Not yet.

There! He saw the punt up ahead, caught in a slow eddy that built at a bend in the waterway. He heard a shout behind him, thought he heard the pharaoh Akhenaten himself exhorting his men to keep up the work of the one true god. The soldiers were close behind him now, a few more moments and they would see him and all would be lost.

Breath sobbing in his lungs, Nebi hurled himself off the river toward the punt, and started swimming. He heard a shout, and blessed the gods when he recognized Ki’s voice, but then heard the splash of frantic paddling as the hem fought to escape the pursuit.

“It’s me,” he called out in a low voice, trusting it to carry across the water. “It’s Nebi.”

There was a pause and a gasp, and more splashing. This time coming back for him. “Get them!” a man shouted from the bank. “Kill the stases!”

Suddenly, spears and arrows rained into the water around Nebi, but then Ki was there, grabbing onto the back of his robe and dragging him aboard. The boys tried to help at first, but the hem snapped, “Get back and stay down.”

Once Nebi was aboard, Ki tossed him a paddle and the dug in. Nebi paddled hard, feeling the pull of muscles across his back and ribs, along with the bruises of the day. Those physical inputs were all that he felt, though. Inside, he was hollow.

Then the tarp in the center of the craft stirred, and Alu poked his head out. The bolder of the twins, it was always his head poking up first, his bright, inquisitive eyes scanning the scene, looking for mischief.

Any other day, Alu would’ve been up and squalling, trying to tip the boat or run the adults ragged. Now, though, he only reached out and touched his father’s ankle; a soft tap that said “you’re here.” His eyes were dark and somehow old, making him look as though he’d turned into a little old man since just that morning.

Nebi knew how he felt.

Moments later, Khenti crept from hiding and did the same, reaching out to touch his father’s other ankle. And in doing so, he filled some of the hollowness inside Nebi. A hard, hot ball of emotion rose up to jam his throat, and he dug in harder, sending the punt into the faster current at the center of the waterway. Soon, the shouts and screams, and the orange glow of fire fell away behind them.

In the front of the shallow-draught craft, Ki paddled with grim purpose. He looked back once, his eyes meeting Nebi’s in the dim moonlight.

“Where are we going?” Nebi asked.

“Up ahead,” the hem said, which wasn’t an answer at all, but was one Nebi was willing to accept because of the numbness that was taking over his body, spreading cold everywhere except for the places where the boys’ fingers touched.

They paddled a long time, until the moon hung fat in the sky. Then Ki turned the punt toward the small, pinprick glow of a campfire.

Only it wasn’t a campfire, Nebi saw as soon as they closed on the bank. It was a small sphere of fireball magic, cast by a young man who was not yet a mage, but was doing the magic because he was the only one close enough to puberty, to the power of stasis magic.

It was a signal flare, Nebi realized. A sign for survivors. “How many?” he croaked through his screamed-raw throat.

Ki didn’t answer, because how could he know? Then again, how had he known which way to come?

“We knew you were right,” the hem said without prompting. He grounded the punt and jumped out into the shallows to drag it ashore, with the help of several other hemu, their silhouettes dark in the darkness, and unidentifiable. Ki added, “We knew the pharaoh was likely to do something like this, though not when, or how swiftly he would strike.”

Nebi closed his eyes against the hideous images he knew he would see in sleep and waking for a long, long time to come. “Nor I.”

The hem plucked the boys effortlessly from the punt and set them ashore safely, then held out a hand to Nebi. “We hoped you would be successful in persuading Uro and the others to leave, or at least let us get the children to safety. But we planned for ourselves, just in case.”

When the young mage let the fireball gutter out, and the moonlight took over the riverside tableau, Nebi saw what his heart hadn’t wanted to see- or believe- before. There were maybe thirty of them on the shore: ten adults and twenty or so children. All of the children were stases. Of the adults, he was the only mage. All the others were hemu.

When he realized what had happened, what Ki and the others had done, his throat clogged with gratitude that they’d planned what their masters had not, and grief over the same, because he knew what the absence of the others meant, knew it from the bodies he’d seen in the streets, and the madness in the pharaoh’s eyes.

In the blink, he had become the last living mage of the stases.

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Chapter Four

Shuddering with the weight of it, and with the mad desire to curl up and howl for the lost, Nebi faced the small, sad band of hemu and children, all of whom looked up at him with hope, with need.

I have nothing to give you, he wanted to say. I have no hope, no reassurance.

The pharaoh’s death orders would be all over the kingdom by morning, if they weren’t already. How could a band of thirty-three, more than half of them children wearing the bloodline marks of the stases, possibly escape to safety? And where, exactly, was safety?

The legends of old spoke of a long sea voyage, and lands beyond the pharaoh’s shores. Such a journey would put them beyond the reach of Akhenaten, but how could they accomplish it? Where could they find a craft and crew capable of such navigation, and one that could be persuaded, whether by threat or bribe, to take them across the sea when the threats and bribes of the pharaoh would be so much greater?

As Nebi stood, transfixed with grief and hopelessness, the crowd shifted, then parted, and a tall, white-haired girl, maybe a year short of menarche, approached him and took his hand. When she did so, he saw a flash of amber in her eyes, and felt a punch of power.

“I see green leaves and clouds that touch the ground, and stone pyramids that touch the sky,” she said in a voice that wasn’t that of a child.

Nebi’s heart shuddered in his chest as he realized that she was an itza’at, a seer whose powers shouldn’t have worked until she’d had her second blood-ritual. Yet it seemed the magic knew crisis, and was punching through the barrier to aid the children, sending this one a vision. But of what? She wasn’t describing any of Akhenaten’s pyramids. His was a land of sand, not greenery.

“Where?” Nebi’s word was a whisper, a cramp of hope in a gone-dry throat.

“You already know where,” she said, her voice sounding, for a second, like Banafrit’s.

“Yes,” he said, bowing his head against the mad hope of it, and the fear. It wouldn’t be an easy journey, or a short one, but his sire, and his grandsire before, had told him the stories, had made him memorize them as though he was going to cross the ocean himself one day.

Had they known, even then, that the cycle would repeat, that the people who had been driven from their homes once before by upheaval of the earth would be driven once again by upheaval of their leader, their religion?

“Are all of the others dead?” he asked, nearly whispering now.

“You are the last of the stases,” the small itza’at said, her eyes glowing the gold of her power, the gold of the gods. “You must be the first in the new land, lead a new people. Be their father; be the First Father. Teach them. Love them. Make sure, above all, that they remember who they are when the end-time comes.”

He bowed his head. Gods, he thought, sending his prayer to the sky where they dwelt in a thirteen-layered heaven, please help me. He didn’t want this- had never wanted to lead or travel, had wanted only a quiet home further down the river, and a small flock to tend.

For a moment he felt nothing in response to his prayer, heard nothing. Then, out of nowhere came a compulsion. An obsession.

He needed to bleed.

There was no reason behind it, no precedent in living memory. Akhenaten and his people had worshipped their gods for centuries without blood. The old stories mentioned it, yes, but who knew what was true and what had shifted with the telling, becoming more than it had really been? Bleed for me, the pressure inside his skull seemed to say. Bleed for us all.

“Ki,” Nebi whispered from between grief-chapped lips, “I need your knife.”

The slave turned. Frowned. “Why?”

“I don’t know. Just give it to me.” When the slave handed over his plain, functional blade, Nebi didn’t think, didn’t hesitate. He drove the tip into his palm and slashed a long furrow.

Pain hit, cutting through the duller thud of grief and shock. Blood bloomed, dark in the moonlit darkness, and the tang of salt hit his nostrils, warm and sharp and alive this time- not the blood of the dead from before. The dark liquid spilled over, and started dripping to the sand. The moment the first drop hit, the air changed, snapping tense with power, humming with magic. The sound was hushed, expectant, as though the gods themselves were waiting.

What next? Nebi thought, sluggish panic gathering in his gut, alongside nausea at the damage he’d just done to his own flesh. What now?

It was Ki who answered, taking Alu’s hand in his on one side, Khenti’s on the other, and leading the children to face their father. The boys stayed standing, but the hem knelt and offered his right arm, where the stases were marked. “Cut me,” he said. “Bind me. I offer myself to these children; offer myself as their servant and protector, as their moral compass. I will die for them. I will kill for them. I and my descendants, until time ends.”

The hum of magic surged higher, kicking the tension a notch and making Nebi feel like all he had to do was reach out and touch the power, and he could do anything.

He’d never been a strong spellcaster; he knew the theories and the words, but he’d lacked the will- or maybe the desire?- to make the spells work. And what kind of a spell could he cast now? Fireball and shield, the basic magics of the stases- didn’t apply, and the smaller magics didn’t seem to fit any better.

He started to ask the itza’at, but as he opened his mouth to voice the question, a curtain parted in his mind and words came from nowhere and everywhere at once. He was dimly aware that he was speaking the words, and saw himself take Ki’s wrist, and carve a bloody furrow across the other man’s palm. But it was like he was someone outside himself, acting out the will of another. The will of the gods.

Then he moved to each of the other hemu and did the same. Without speaking, they linked hands, blood to blood, in a circle that curved around the children, keeping them inside, keeping them safe as Nebi cast a spell he didn’t know, couldn’t understand.

The words were strange and foreign, the magic so much stronger than he’d ever experienced before, a river of power that flowed from somewhere beyond him, through him to the man who knelt at his feet, bowed and shaking. Ki tensed and cried out, and the boys clung to him, wide-eyed and scared.

Lightning spat overhead, and thunder rumbled, though the rainy season had come and gone some months ago. The surge of sky-fire lashed through Nebi and from him to the others, cracking wildly and lighting the sky. As one, the hemu bowed back, their mouths open in silent screams.

Then, in an instant, the power and the storm were gone.

The air was still.

The children wept softly.

After a long moment, the adults began to move. The hemu rose wearily, as though their joints hurt and their bodies ached. Nebi didn’t know how he felt, didn’t know what had just happened, only that he wasn’t the same man he’d been when he’d awoken that morning.

“Fire,” he said quietly. “We need to see.”

The boy who had called the fireball earlier kindled another small offering. Ki stepped forward and flipped his arm to bare his forearm to the light.

Where his skin had been unmarked before, now there were four symbols. Three were the same pictograms Nebi wore on his own forearm, and his sons as well, the panther’s mark. Two were larger, one small, as though the magic had bound the hem more surely to the boys than to their father. Which was only right, as he was the twins’ protector, not Nebi’s.

The fourth symbol was one of protection: a hand cupping the face of a sleeping child. From deep inside Nebi, a phrase arose. He said it aloud: “Aj winikin.”

It was from the old language, the one his ancestors had set aside when they’d become part of the pharaoh’s world. He didn’t know what it meant, though.

It was Ki who lifted his chin and said softly, “I am your servant.” He took the boys by their hands. “I am their servant, and you are the First Father. From you and these children, the stases will be reborn, though they will be called something else in our new home. You will teach them the magic; we, the winikin, will teach them their history. Together, we will ensure that the dark lords will not stand unopposed on the final day.”

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Chapter Five

Summer solstice, A.D. 1988 Syracuse, NY

When Jox stopped talking, silence reigned in the apartment.

Strike sat sprawled on one half of the sofa, Anna cross-legged at the other end. Both were staring straight at the winikin, and in their eyes he saw, not the sulks and pranks of childhood, but the look of their parents. Strike had his father’s jawline and stubbornness; Anna the former king’s defiance of tradition. They both had their sire’s eyes, which could look through a man and judge his worth.

In that frozen solstice moment, Jox thought he could’ve been trapped between times. He saw the past in their resemblance to the dead king, and saw the future in the two of them, saw fire and flame, and world fate hanging in the balance, depending on the decisions they alone would make.

Or was that a fancy brought by the power of the solstice and the story? He didn’t know. He was just a winikin.

“The winikin made us,” Anna said softly. “They saved us. You saved us, over and over again.”

The hair on Jox’s arms riffled softly, as though a breeze had moved through the small room. Anna had been an itza’at before the barrier closed, it was true, but there was no access to the magic now. Her words were a lucky guess, not prescience. >

“I’ve done my duty,” he said thickly, forcibly reminded for the first time in a long, long while of the things he’d lost, the things he’d given up to care for his charges.

A name whispered at the back of his skull. Hannah. They’d said they’d be together after the king’s battle, when the end-time countdown was ended. After, they’d said. And they’d kissed.

Gone. Long gone, he thought on a spike of grief. She might not be dead like the others, but she was just as surely lost to him, taken by destiny, and the winikin’s imperative encoded in their forearm marks by the First Father himself.

“That’s it?” Strike said, shaking himself like he was waking from being zoned out in front of a video game, or awesomely bad TV show.

Startled from his memories, Jox looked from one kid to the other, saw the expectancy in their faces. “Right. I promised ice cream, didn’t I?” He wasn’t sure the winikin’s imperative to teach the history had included bribery, but he was going the best he knew how.

But Strike and Anna shared a look. Some sort of message passed between them, and Strike shook his head. “Wasn’t talking about the eats. I want the rest of the story.”

A tightness loosened inside Jox’s chest, one he hadn’t even been aware of until it broke free. “You’ve heard it a hundred times, just like you’ve heard this one a hundred times.” And as the kids had grown older, it’d become more and more difficult to get them engaged in the oral history.

“It’s the solstice,” Strike said, as though he was the one who’d had to remind Jox, not the other way around. “I want to hear it again.”

Warmth bloomed in the winikin’s chest, but he glanced at Anna. “You?” She hesitated, glancing at her bedroom, but then zeroing back on him and saying, “Yeah. I’d like to hear it. It’s the solstice, after all.”

“Okay.” Jox settled back in his chair. “You tell it.”

She jolted a little, then cocked her head, interested. “Really?”

The winikin nodded. “Really.”

She paused, then nodded. Took a deep breath. “Okay. Here goes. . . Once upon a time, nearly five-thousand years ago, a man named Nebi lost his wife and all his friends, and set out on a terrible journey, leading ten winikin and twenty-two child magi to a new land, and a fresh start. . .

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References

• Ancient Egyptian names: http://www.geocities.com/wally_mo/names.html
• Akhenaten: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akhenaten
• Armarna: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amarna
• Slaves in ancient Egypt: http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/slaves.htm
• http://nefertiti.iwebland.com/timelines/topics/slavery.htm
• Weaponry in ancient Egypt: http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/weapons/index.html

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- To see a timeline of the Nightkeepers' history, click here.