The underground chamber was echoing with voices. The sound of screaming, crying, praying ricocheted off the crack-riddled walls straight into Metjen's aching brain.
All braziers, tapers and oil-lamps were alight again, and the holy population of the temple was standing in confused clusters, talking or eddying around in endless and bewildered circles.
The roof of Iseret's prayer chamber had collapsed. Fine dust was still floating in the air, indiscriminately settling on people and holy objects alike. Through the crack gaping in the ceiling peeped a piece of sky, glowing in its early morning opalescence.
The cold of the desert had found its way into the temple and caused those gathered below to shiver in their flimsy attire. At least the holiest of the holies was still intact, and Ra and Hathor stood unharmed in their fragrant darkness.
'Shut up!' Metjen thundered. Shouting was good. It liberated the mind and helped to loosen muscles which were still coiled tightly. Nobody, apart from Trueth, his siblings and maybe Nebmutef, could understand how disoriented he felt. But it was his duty to restore order into the chaos he had allowed this sanctuary to become.
He heard a voice next to him. 'You should not have done this. Fighting her like you did. She would never hurt one of the Guardians. Ever. '
Metjen glanced down at Khafa. 'What?'
'This is what she always called you, Rani-Ra and Ranofer,' he said. Metjen noticed several nodding shaven heads.
'And your mother,' added the long-nosed priestess on Metjen's left. He kept forgetting her name; the Servants resembled each other too much.
'She used another title for herself, she said she was 'The Walker', forever lost in time.' Nebmutef folded his bony fingers over his shendyt. 'We did not hear that often, only when she was in one of her strange moods.'
'This has to be a joke! They all knew and nobody told us', Rani-Ra spoke the moment the thought entered his mind.
They might have guessed she would be part of that set-up. Why did nobody ever communicate properly in this place?
Metjen felt like banging his fist on a table, but that would require energy as well as the presence of such a piece of furniture. Apart from the treasures in the back chambers, the temple was decidedly low on household items.
'There's a hole in your temple,' Trueth pointed out. Unnecessarily, he thought. 'You might want to fix that before we explore these latest discoveries any further.'
She had this nasty habit of being right.
At Metjen's behest, the priests raised a makeshift veil to mask the gaping hole in the floor of the desert. They also mind-shifted stones to stop a least a part of the gap. It had been hard enough to camouflage the temple when it had been intact. Broken to the core as it was, the task became impossible.
'There are people coming!' One of the sisters screeched from the boulder Metjen had mind-placed her on, to watch out for intruders.
He had been right to do so. But her myopic gaze spotted the danger too late. Metjen noticed a dust cloud hovering over an army of Jeeps and Pickup trucks. And a minivan.
Minivan?
The vehicles stopped a short distance from the boulders. People got out. Some of them appeared familiar... .
'It's father,' Rani-Ra was shielding her eyes.
'And Mum,' Ranofer pumped a fist into the air. 'They've brought the Believers!'
Despite these unexpected, but nevertheless welcome, reinforcements, it took several days to clear the dust, fix the ceiling and reduce the rubble spilling out of Iseret's cell.
They did not touch the chamber itself but rescued Iseret's little statue of Hathor so it would no longer languish on its own. Before their helpers left, Metjen's father wordlessly thrust a newspaper into his hands. It reported a local earthquake in the desert beyond the Saqqara Necropolis. They had been lucky: As there was no human habitation anywhere close to the epicentre, nobody saw the need to investigate.
Of Iseret there was no trace. At one point, a jolt shot through Metjen as he remembered something important. He raced into the holy shrine and checked the pedestal with the key. The blue lights were still shining—but he noticed a flicker. That was new. The voice, however, had vanished. As had the nightmares.
The next day, Metjen sent Trueth, Rani-Ra, Ranofer into the western corridor. A second team composed of his fitter priests stayed aboveground, mind-scanning the terrain behind the wall for whispers or other supernatural phenomena. Trueth reported the engraving was still there. But the voice and the images were gone. Metjen discovered he too could get close without suffering from any ill effects.
'We need to find Iseret. I have no idea whether this is her doing or whether it would have happened anyhow sooner or later,' Metjen said to Nebmutef when they emerged from the underground passage.
'I suspect the obelisk would have failed even with her present. It has been two months since that ceremony. I am surprised it all lasted that long, to be quite honest,' Nebmutef responded. 'And she told you it was all related, did she not.'
Metjen shrugged and sat on the wall next to the steps leading to the excavation. He observed his priests as they returned and filed past the trenches where the archaeologists were still searching for the remains of the past.
'There is nothing, Brother Metjen,' Khafa reported. 'Just sand.'
He had feared as much.
'What about the Step Pyramid,' Trueth asked. 'Something could be hidden in there? I mean, the pyramid would be the obvious place to hide the odd secret? ' She pointed at the sad heap of stones in the background.
'Nice try,' Metjen said. 'Unfortunately, I did that already when you were serving your time in the temple. All I got was a headache from that bloody wall. I had the impression the effect was spreading. Given that it's gone I must have been wrong. Anyway, in terms of mysteries, I did not even find a dust mote of magic. I think this is it.'
Metjen felt tired to the bone. His sun-flow had still not recovered from that showdown with Iseret. His temple was fixed, but would it hold? The voices were gone, together with their obnoxious leader. Not a bad thing in itself. But he was no closer to solving the puzzle.
All their efforts had been in vain. Whatever that balance the voices whispered about might have been, and whoever those sleepers were, Metjen had failed them.
Lost them forever.
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A note for my readers: I have split Chapter 24 to make it more readable. Otherwise this novel is under revision in preparation for the publishing journey. What you have here is not the final version, but an improved draft!
If you liked this story, please leave me a vote or a comment. Or both XD. Wattpad writers write for feedback. We thrive on it! Thank you so much. If you REALLY liked what you read - maybe you can tell your friends about it?
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Image is from DeviantARt copyright Frenchfox