It had been a cloudy day when Heshtat had emerged from the Temple of Amin-Ra. The sun had still wheeled across the open sky, but it was shrouded at times by the scudding formations. Now, that sun was barely visible at all.

  The last ten minutes of frantic battle and flight had given him little time to take in the sky above, but as they bobbed down the river away from the island, Heshtat finally saw the ominous swirling clouds for what they were. A portent of change.

  Some in his homeland placed great emphasis on the patterns that clouds formed in the sky. The citizens of Amansi cared less for such superstitions, instead focusing their efforts on understanding the teachings of their many gods. No reading the knucklebones or the entrails of sacrificial animals for the civilised people of this land. But even the most ardent and faithful child of Amin-Ra would pay attention when the skies behaved thusly.

  The occasional clouds had grown over the last several minutes, thickening and twining until they swirled high above the island in a whirling black stormfront. The most concerning thing about the weather pattern wasn’t its size—which was intimidating—nor the speed that it had formed—which was shocking. No, the most concerning thing was its location. When Heshtat gazed around himself, it seemed as if every cloud in the sky, from the tiny whisps to the heavy cumulous, had been sucked up to fuel the swirling vortex above the island. Directly above the Temple of Amin-Ra.

  Heshtat could feel it now in the air; a draw, as if some impossibly vast leviathan opened its mouth in the sky and inhaled with the force of a hurricane. He had noticed the essence in the air behaving strangely already. Trembling. Braiding and twisting and rising towards the temple’s central pyramid. Now it seemed the air itself was following suit.

  Then the essence in the air pulsed.

  Heshtat felt the reverberation down to the base of his spine, and somehow further still. A deeper part of him, more attuned to the spiritual skein of the world, felt that thump. His soul stirred, and belatedly he realised the true scale of the calamity brewing behind them. A whirlwind in an empty sky, and a roar beneath it, a thumping, pounding wall of sound that seemed to grow with each moment.

  Heshtat felt his eyes widen in shock. On a rickety raft in the centre of a bulging river was not a good place to be in a storm, and that was twice as true when it was one of such size. But the weather—the air and the wind and even the very sky itself—wasn’t the proximate cause. It, like Heshtat, was simply responding to something deeper. A reaction to a more fundamental change in the fabric of the world itself.

  The world pulsed, and the island exploded.

  One moment it was there, looming out of the river behind them like a teardrop of volcanic rock, and the next it was overcome by a frothing tide of furious water. Black rock blasted skyward, smashed into its brethren and then hurled into the air from the impact. The tall cliffs that ringed the central depression housing the lake simply disintegrated, blown apart under the force of an unstoppable flood from upriver.

  “Neferu!” Heshtat bellowed, mind racing at a gallop.

  There was no time for steering or clever navigation; they had a bare handful of seconds before the torrent of water hit them, and it would be loaded with an entire island’s worth of rubble and wreckage. He heard Ahhotep start chanting but paid it no mind. He considered cutting through the veil again and delivering his companions into the Other, but he could feel the strain in his soul—he didn’t have the essence left in his newly awakened aspect to do so. Besides, the Other was a twisted reflection of the Waking World, and an event of this magnitude would surely occur in both simultaneously. They would be no safer on the other side.

  There was no way out of this, and only one thing they could do.

  Endure.

  Strangely, the thought brought him a measure of calm. No time for plans, no second guessing himself on the best approach. No doubt, no room for failure. Just an elemental force of nature that had to be met face on. Fate would decide. Whether it be left to sheer randomness or Tufnet’s grand plan, it was out of Heshtat’s hands now. He’d leave the praying to those more beloved by the gods. His role was now a simple one—survival. Bitter, gritty, unpredictable survival.

  And so he stood, sheathed his weapon, and reached for the ropes still trailing from either side of the raft. He took them in hand, standing at the stern and watching the tidal wave thunder towards them. He saw Maatkare grabbing hold of the priest with one arm and securing himself to the single central branch with the other, even as Ahhotep held his staff aloft and continued to chant. Pages flitted through the air, torn from his ancient tome by the squall.

  Harsiese was somewhere behind him at the prow, and from the sudden steadiness of the raft, Heshtat knew him to be doing the same as him—holding the ropes on either side taught, grounding the planks of the raft against each other until they were snug and tight.

  He took a breath and steadied his heart. Let it out slowly, eyes on the approaching wave. It wasn’t slowing, the meagre resistance put up by the island a mote of dust in comparison to the mountain that approached. There was no point fighting it—some things couldn’t be fought—but anything could be endured. Heshtat wound the ropes around his forearms several times, crouching slightly as he felt the grain of the wood against the soles of his feet. When had he lost his sandals? Didn’t matter. Seconds left now.

  Something shivered in the air in front of him perhaps a foot away, and he half-saw, half-felt Ahhotep slump behind him, energy exhausted.

  “Brace!” he called, seconds before the frothing beast of water arrived.

  He heard Neferu cackle behind him. A mad sound of hysteria, but there was joy in there, too. A fierce giddiness in the face of annihilation; to be free to witness something of such sheer power, to stand before it and pit oneself against something so utterly unassailable… That was how Heshtat interpreted it at least. He suspected he’d never get to ask her what she truly felt.

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  He sucked in a deep breath, and then the water rushed to meet them.

  ***

  Chaos.

  They flipped and spun, rolling end over end in the churning mire of water and rock and elemental fury. Heshtat had taken a breath before the wave hit, but it had been knocked out of him in an instant, like a punch from a god. Even Anubian’s contemptuous backhand felt like a love tap in comparison to the fist of water hitting him in the chest. In the thighs. In the entire body, honestly.

  He held on for as long as he could, but eventually his animal instincts overrode his conscious control and he gasped in a breath. Water filled his mouth, tried to clog his lungs, but somehow he could breathe. Something prevented the water from snaking its way down his throat, and his chest remained light and airy. He could still breathe.

  He remembered Ahhotep’s shimmering barrier, but had no time to contemplate the strange magic. The wave had picked them up and now it carried them along inside it, churning them up and down, round and under in a constant flurry of movement that he was entirely helpless to stop.

  The ropes bit into his wrists as he held on for dear life. All he could hear was the dull, muted roar of rushing water, and all he could feel was the buffeting currents that picked them up and spun them around for a time before discarding them, only for another to take its place. Like a beautiful farm-hand at a palace ball, they were snatched into one dance after another, their striking beauty enough to get them noticed, but their low station giving them no recourse to refuse the advances of the curious and mercurial currents.

  On and on it went; around and around, up and down. Occasionally, they would break the surface, and Heshtat would blink through his sodden eyelashes at the empty sky above before being dragged back down once more. Rocks and branches careened past them, but Heshtat barely saw them. His acolyte cultivation of Khet enhanced his body enough that his eyes weren’t immediately scarred by the force of the running water, but the floods had turned the river into a mud-filled mess of silt.

  He sometimes caught a flash of darkness headed their way, and whether those were inanimate objects caught in the currents or creatures themselves, it was impossible to say. Anything large seemed to miss them, diverting course or bumping into some invisible barrier around them—Heshtat couldn’t say which. He spent most of the journey with his eyes squeezed tight, forearms burning as he held the raft together.

  All he knew was that nothing of any real size had hit them by the time they surfaced for the last time, and when he squinted through the gritty layer of mud covering every inch of his face, he saw that they had travelled far indeed. There was no real way to tell how long they’d been underwater, but by the burning in his forearms and the frantic galloping of his heart, Heshtat guessed it to have been nearly an hour.

  He eased his grip on the ropes and nearly cried out from the pain. His muscles were thoroughly rung dry, cramping and seizing as he moved them from a position they had held under strain for far too long, and the momentary release made them flare in agony. Silt and worse, still swirling in the water, slipped in between the ropes and his burned, tortured skin, biting into the wounds on his arms and singing their own burning song.

  The river was no more. The bi-centennial floods—much delayed this cycle—had come with a vengeance, and the Nikea had burst its banks. Now they floated down what had formerly been the vibrant green floodplain on one side of the river. It was a brown mess, currents and eddies visible on the flat surface of the water where large rock formations still stood. Any trees had been destroyed by the tidal wave and were no doubt headed downstream like ballister bolts cast by the gods themselves.

  Heshtat took in a shaky breath, letting his heart slow as they drifted at a more sedate pace. Still too fast to steer, but at least they were in no danger of being swept under again. They still had to worry about being dashed against rocks, but the waters were so high that it didn’t seem a major concern.

  Heshtat instead spent some time looking to the sky, marvelling at their survival and thanking whatever gods and spirits he could name for their favour. Given that he had made a study of Amansi’s vast pantheon on coming to the ancient land, it took him a while to get through the list. The Land of a Thousand Gods was named so for a reason.

  Eventually he turned and sat, eyeing his companions more critically.

  Maatkare had formed bloody callouses from the rough branch he’d clung to during the flood, and now that the scouring waters were no longer rushing over them, they began to weep red once more. They would take days to heal, given their depth, but the man was in one piece, and he hadn’t let go of the priest. He clutched Ahhotep’s limp body so tight in one arm that when Heshtat tried to slowly unwind it in order to lay the insensate priest out flat, Maatkare had screamed. There would be tendon damage there.

  Ahhotep was unconscious. He clutched his tome to his chest, hunched over it like a drunkard protects a bottle of wine. His staff was long gone, lost to the flood, but physically he looked fine. Heshtat suspected he’d drawn too deeply on his aspects, straining his soul. When his own soul had been cracked, he had laid in bed for a week, unable to rouse himself even to eat. He’d only survived because his adoptive sister had trickled water into his mouth every few hours, never leaving his side. The memory was painful, and Heshtat winced in sympathy for the old man. All they could do was wait though, so he moved on after laying him out properly.

  Neferu grinned tiredly at him from where she was slumped against the tiller. It had snapped off in the flood, but the little stub was enough for her to cling to, and she clearly lacked the energy to move.

  “What are you smiling about?” he asked.

  “I’ve done a lot of things in my short life,” she started, “but I’ve never ridden the Nikean floods before.”

  “I do not think there is a soul alive who has, honestly. Perhaps one of the True Thrones? Or an itinerant master. Either way, you are in treasured company.”

  He noticed her eyes drooping and knew she had exhausted herself. “Get some rest,” he said.

  “But—”

  “No. You need rest, and it will be hours before the floods are calm enough to navigate again. I will wake you if we have an opportunity to make land, but currently we are still at the mercy of the river. Rest and be ready when the time comes to act.”

  It took less than a minute for her head to loll forwards, and soon he heard a soft snoring coming from her hanging head. Heshtat smiled. It was easy to forget that she was almost a decade younger than him, and despite her vast experience, she’d not spent more than a year in any single trade. Until dungeon-delving, that is. He once more considered his old friend—Maatkare must have been a better teacher than Heshtat gave him credit for.

  He saw Harsiese’s silhouette at the bow, steady as a rock with the ropes still gripped in his powerful hands, looking like a statue chained to the ground in the glow of the afternoon sun.

  They were all accounted for. They could still make it back in time. And best of all, there was little chance of pursuit from the island—he doubted any caught unprepared by the wave would have survived, no matter their cultivation.

  Now they just needed to make land before they reached the bridge city of Men-nefer and were picked up by Khaemwaset’s spies.