MANPOWER MUST BE a nagging personnel problem in every culture.
After several strange high-pitched syllables echoed against the distant stone ceiling, any warriors still standing circled the golden chariot. Twelve took up the fallen harness pole to play gazelles and bear the doll-like figures of the royal pair back into the dark safety of the stone-pillar forest.
"Hah!" Shez trumpeted, shaking a fist at the departing troops. "All blood and no guts, you foul vampires! It is an honor to lose your head to my bloodwine vintages. They feed the true pharaohs who will rule in the Afterlife as on earth because they do not ache for the false immortality of bloodsuckers."
He laid an appropriately bloody hand on Bez's shoulder. "Well fought, little brother."
Then he regarded Ric and me. "You both wear the black of Anubis's honored jackal-headed form, so I will call you the Foreign Children of Anubis. I thank you for freeing me for such a long-overdue dinner."
I turned to thank the other descended god on my right. He was gone. I gazed into the stone forest. Many men with terra-cotta-colored skin had vanished there only moments ago. Was our sudden ally a rogue vampire? Could the Royal Pains have rebels in their ranks?
I finally forced myself to turn and walk to the rim of the pit. The red dust was still settling, like ancient earth quieting. No sound from below sounded like claws scrabbling for purchase on a long climb upward.
Ric's hands on my shoulders were bracing. I sensed his shared sorrow descending on me like an invisible cloak.
"Well." Shez came to us. "I have much work here, I see. Of course we must all take ourselves away before the cursed bloodsucking breed regroups and returns."
"You're a bloodsucker too," I pointed out.
"I am a demon lord and a god. I am also a jealous god. No one, not even Pharaoh, should usurp my role. But if you, my friends, wish to kill some scavenger dogs or rabid warriors with the fangs of cats, I will joyously end them all by harvesting their heads for my winepress."
He frowned as he gazed across at the silent herds of human vampire fodder.
"Bez, my little brother of the lion, many of those are your kind. Are we to leave them for future devouring? Granted, I thirst for souls to judge after such long captivity, but these creatures have been preyed upon by their own cannibal kind and there should be some appropriate afterlife for them, although not the fine attendings due a Pharaoh and the high priests and royal figures of our true ancient Egypt before it was corrupted."
"That Shez is certainly long-winded," Ric whispered in my ear.
Gods are probably all that way.
Which made me think of the God of the Old Testament, the devious and nervy biblical lady I was named after, and other interesting things.
First, someone had to get these literally innocent bystanders out of here. Where? They were human but had become a hidden race beyond its time. Though the many dwarfs among them had been easily accepted by the true Egyptians millennia ago, even modern America was still behind that culture in accepting what we delicately called the "differently" abled.
Aren't we all "differently" abled? I sure was, and I didn't know the half of it, because I'd not yet caught up with my CSI autopsy-table double, Lilith.
I glanced at Ric, disconcerted by seeing his bare, silver-iris eye. That would not play well on the Strip. We needed to get him undercover again.
I stared into the pit. I'd saved Quicksilver's life once, in Sunset Park, where I'd adopted him when he faced death within hours at the pound. I would scour this city below-ground and aboveground until I found him.
Or I would come back and sift this noxious pit until I found his ashes and I would make Snow raise him from those ashes, like the dragon Gargouille.
Not that Snow would lift a cuticle for me now, after what I'd let happen to him. Still, I was sure he'd take my soul for vengeful laceration in trade for a favor if he could get it.
Ric stared with me into the pit, then looked across to the miserable figures swaying like penned animals.
"You've done a good job of throwing the evil souls to judgment, Shezmou," he told our ally, "but what about these age-old victims of their immortal hungers? And the few of our modern people who were forced into their same bondage? Can you imagine the hell it must be for these innocent new victims?"
"I need not imagine anything, Foreign Child of Anubis. I know Hell well. Your point is as true as your courage in coming back here."
"These new allies freed you," Bez put in, coming to tug on the larger god's wrist cuff.
"I can do nothing!" Shezmou roared, vexed. "Osiris is my lord and these people, however wronged, have no one available to prepare them properly to journey to the Afterlife."
His anger was also an expression of his powerlessness in this case.
I lifted my face from gazing into the pit. If Quicksilver was down there, dead or not, he was doomed along with all the other genuine humans in the place.
If Osiris wouldn't help them all...
I looked at the pillars.
I thought about my name.
I needed a Samson. Shezmou had pulled down a lot of vampire evil, but the innocent survivors needed to be pulled into paradise.
"Delilah," Ric said.
I could hear the anxiety in his voice. Don't worry, Ric, I thought. At least I'm walking away from the pit for now.
I stopped before Anubis's truly awesome gold-and-black figure. Maybe I could free another god. His jackal head was assuredly canine.
"O mighty Anubis," I said, adopting Shezmou's formal language. Gods tend to care about such things. "You gentle the soul through embalming and guide it on the long journey of judgment to the Afterlife. Surely, anything still living here deserves gentle judgment."
I heard my companions' feet shuffling nervously behind me. I'm sure they thought me mad, talking to pillars.
"Surely you raged in your stone heart, standing here witnessing the rise of the vampire dynasty for millennia, watching a noble race who worshipped you turn predator and turn your godly figures into crass commercial mockeries high above us.