Читать книгу Mistress of Pharaohs. Daughter of Dawn - Natalie Yacobson - Страница 4

Alais found a sickle in the sand. Apparently it was formed from a shard of sunbeam, curved in a strange shape. The sickle was still hot. And yet it was nighttime. The sand is not red-hot.

Black letters stretched across the golden blade, as if drawn in darkness.

“I’m still with you.”

What could that mean? Who was still with her? All around are her fallen legions, mutilated and burned. There is no one extra in them. Perhaps the inscription is a message from someone she counted among the dead? Hardly a message from God, but there is power in the words, as if someone stronger than the Almighty were present.

An aura of darkness enveloped the golden sickle, and suddenly the black letters on the blade were golden, too. You couldn’t read them now. The reliefs were barely visible.

Alais weighed the sickle in her hands. As long as it touched her skin, she had the magical feeling that there was someone she couldn’t do without.

“You’re just like a friend to me,” Alais whispered to the sickle, and the sickle glowed brighter. It resembled a month in the sky. And that was the month she held in her hands.

“We are like night and day. We are one! As day does not exist without night, so you do not exist without me.”

The mysterious voice sounded only in her head. It enveloped her consciousness in a black mist. Alais grew wary. There was definitely someone nearby, but she didn’t see him, and her armies didn’t see him either. Otherwise they would have panicked. There was as much danger from the invisible creature as there was magnetism. she wanted to see it.

Perhaps someone’s soul was hiding inside the sickle. Alais examined the sickle more closely. Wasn’t the face of one of the dead angels shining through on the blade? Only the writing was visible. The letters of the angelic hieroglyphs echoed the words of the invisible being: “We are night and day, merged together. Without each other we do not exist. We are the pillar of creation and the ruin of the universe.”

And where is her name? She puffed on the sickle, and the letters of her new name stuck out at the tip. That’s better. Only her name is here; the name of the invisible being is not nearby. She set her seal and hammered the sickle to herself. The voice of the invisible creature fell silent. In time, however, the sickle proved useful.

It was easier to kill with a sickle than even with a claw. In one fell swoop, you could cut the heads off a whole troop of men. Alais was harvesting bloody crops when she barely saw the travelers arriving in the wilderness.

Someone had spread rumors that there were gold mines hidden beneath the dunes. Greedy people rushed to check it out and fall into the claws of the fallen legion.

The sand was increasingly sprinkled with blood. Alais was chopping away. The sickle had become her favorite weapon. It was like part of her arm or wing. It was so comfortable and easy to use. The sickle is her faithful helper and protector. No sword or shield is needed with it. Too bad she didn’t have the sickle before, or she would have won.

The desert greedily absorbed the spilled blood. The dunes vibrated as if they were alive. They made the desert look like a humpbacked giant with an angelic legion treading on its back.

It didn’t need a legion at all, as long as it had a sickle. One sickle could easily harvest the blood of a whole army. One day an army of men marched past the deserts. Alais swooped in and mowed them all down like bloody ears in a field. She made the raid out of inertia. She didn’t like the people. They were trespassing on angelic territory and rushing to do things her way. Humanity is an anthill that should be destroyed. But the more time passed, the more civilized this anthill became.

And one day a man appeared, worthy of the angel’s respect. It was a pharaoh who had lost a battle.