Mistress of Pharaohs. Daughter of Dawn. Natalie Yacobson

of the warriors rotting alive.”

      “The people must be kept in fear,” Alaïs leaned over the parapet of the roof and looked down. “Get me the head of the king’s messenger. I don’t want him wandering around here.”

      Remy wanted to dive down, but it wasn’t necessary. The sand walls crumbled, burying beneath them the man who dared to enter a palace made of sand. It was meant to be. This palace was built for the angelic race. Man is not welcome inside.

      Alais flew down, shoveled the sand, and looked over the corpse. The king’s messenger had already managed to suffocate. Sand had clogged his nose, mouth, and ears. A strange bundle was found on the envoy’s chest. Alais turned it in her hands and unfolded it, the royal seal glittering underneath.

      “This is called papyrus. Or is it parchment?” Remy scratched the back of his head with a black claw. “I think people call it something like that.”

      “Don’t give a damn about people! Do you even know a subject other than them?”

      “Humans breed faster than fleas. But angels don’t know how to breed.”

      “I’ll think of a way,” Alais thought of the dead armies of Meneses, who had managed to inhabit the bodies of the dead warriors of her angelic legion. Using human flesh could give the dead angels temporary shelter. Even though a dead human body decays, it can be lived in.”

      On the messenger’s scroll was written, “For the desert deity.”

      “It must be for you,” Remy suggested.

      The Egyptian hieroglyphics were indeed like angelic secret writing. Alais read it without difficulty:

      “I have won! Thanks to you! Let me offer you praises and build a temple for you. Appear to my kingdom. Gardens and lotus ponds are spread out for you alone. My palace is prepared for you.”

      Alais pulled the ends of the message too hard and accidentally tore the scroll.

      “Pharaoh must have thought my interest in him too personal.”

      “And it wasn’t?” Remy looked at the scraps puzzled. “You helped him, after all. And other people you just killed. Kings and peasants alike – all are equal to angels.”

      “How can I tell you?” Alais didn’t know whether to speak or whether admitting it would undermine her reputation in the eyes of her subordinates. “Menes was like me the day I rebelled in heaven. Of the two of us, at least he made it to the final destination. Thanks to me! It felt so good to meet my twin in the desert and help him. It was as if I had helped myself. But I didn’t need Menes’s gratitude.”

      The desert was full of gold, jewels, and magic. Why did she need gardens and lotus ponds? All it took was a pinch of magic to turn the desert into an oasis. Alais could plant such flowers here that the king himself would envy her gardens. But she didn’t need to. The golden desert is more beautiful than all the gardens of the universe.

      The palace of sand was crumbling, burying a whole troop of new messengers beneath it. Apparently Menes had sent them again to seek out and summon the desert deity to his palace. Alaïs watched the death of the party from the air. The messengers were suffocating under piles of sand. They were too weak to climb out of the rubble.

      “Let them sleep! They would never wake up!” Alais had long ago noticed that, unlike dead angels, humans didn’t come back to life. But their dead bodies can be used as a shell.

      Not a moment after the death of the messengers, black spirits emerged from beneath the sands and seeped into the nostrils and eye sockets of the corpses. The dead bodies hissed. They rose to serve Alais. And yet she couldn’t even remember the names of her dead legionnaires. Nevertheless, barely had they had a chance to come back to life from the darkness of non-existence, they were coming back to her. Human bodies were a ridiculously rotten shell for disembodied demons. It’s a shame that once the bodies are fully rotted, the spirits will have no place to dwell. They’d have to find new shells.

      “What if you put the souls of dead angels back into people’s bodies, and they’re still dwelling?” Alais pondered.

      “That would be difficult,” Remy said. “Dead angels are attracted only to dead flesh. As long as there isn’t a human corpse nearby, they cannot be summoned out of the darkness of non-existence.”

      “You could try a rite of summoning,” Alais said tensely. “You catch a living man, and I’ll use my sword to mark his body with angelic signs.”

      Remy immediately obeyed the order. Another of the king’s messengers was beating in his claws, while Alais tore his clothes off and drew the signs of the rebellious angels on his skin with her blade. At first it seemed that the experiment was about to fail. The unfortunate man lost his mind as soon as the angelic signs appeared on his body. The messenger convulsed for a long time, and then he gave up the spirit.

      “It is a weak flesh!” Alais kicked the body with the tip of her golden sandal, and the corpse suddenly twitched, convulsed. Something was tearing at it from the inside. The rib cage burst. Black claws ripped from the gutted flesh. In less than a minute, the monstrous creature stood before Alais, hatching out of the messenger’s body like a shell.

      “Are you Zeno?” Alais recoiled, recognizing in the black freak the former golden-haired angel. It became unpleasant to look at. She turned away. The Angel Legion had become an army of monsters. But now she knows a way to bring back to life those who died in the fall. It doesn’t matter that they come back as monsters. What matters is that her army will become stronger. They need to prepare for the next war. In the deserts they got only a temporary respite.

      The next traveler who appeared in the desert was not a rider. He ruled a foursome of horses, while he himself stood in a strange contraption with wheels.

      “A chariot,” Remy called the vehicle. “Noble men ride in one of these. Your ward, Pharaoh Menes, likes to ride in one.”

      “Do you think it’s another message from him?” Alaïs soared into the air and intercepted the chariot at a gallop. The reins were in her hands. The horses bucked. The bewildered charioteer fell into the sand and stared into the face of the angel. He must have mistaken her for a deity, too, for he was stunned. Good thing he didn’t yet know how dangerous and cruel angels could be. Otherwise he would have run without a second thought.

      Alais grabbed the wretched man and ripped his throat open with her claws. Only then did she take over his chariot as the new owner.

      “It’s a good thing! Handy! Pity there weren’t more of those in Heaven,” she whipped her horses. The chariot started moving. The ride was like flying. Swirls of sand surged beneath the powerful wheels.

      A grim shadow flew behind the chariot. Alais could no longer remember the last time she had seen that shadow. The shadow’s enormous wings covered the sun.

      “Do you like human toys?” The shadow asked softly.

      “Yes, I do!”

      “Human things are practical, but not perfect. They lack heavenly brilliance.”

      “So it’s well worth giving humans something new to invent. I want a chariot of pure gold like that!”

      “It will be unusual if you want to appear to mortals.”

      “And if it is beautiful, I want to dazzle them like the sun, but our sun is frozen in gold metal. And human inventions are very comfortable.”

      “Your demons teach people what to do. You sent them to them yourself. Don’t you remember?”

      “They seem to have overstepped their authority, things like that are only worth doing for us.”

      Alais rode slowly, then faster. The ride felt like flying. The wind whistled in her ears.

      “They weren’t angels now. It was time to change their