Tomb of the Sun King, page 47
part #2 of Raiders of the Arcana Series
Ellie’s throat tightened with fear… and a curious, buzzing question.
Why Constance? Jacobs must have a far better sense of what Adam meant to her, and he was sitting right beside her. Why the friend he’d barely seen her with as opposed to the man he must know she cared deeply for?
“You rotten bastard—” Adam started, the words a growl of outrage as his arms tensed against the ropes binding his wrists.
“What is all of this about, Miss Mallory?” Jacobs’ voice was taut with impatience and barely suppressed ire.
She was exquisitely conscious of the impossibility of putting Jacobs off with a lie—and of just how easily Jacobs might snap his blade and leave Constance to bleed out on the stones.
Constance held herself still—for now. She hadn’t yet revealed that her hands were untied, keeping them at her back. She had likely calculated that even her more advanced jiu jitsu maneuvers couldn’t help her when someone had a knife at her throat.
“Answer my question, and I will tell you,” Ellie pushed back in a desperate gambit. “What did the mirror show you?”
“You are hardly in a position to bargain,” Jacobs pointed out.
“I am if I have something worth telling you,” Ellie retorted, glad her hands were behind her back so that Jacobs could not see them shaking.
Jacobs stilled. When he spoke, every word rang with a clear, deliberate comprehension. “And do you?”
“I do,” Ellie replied, glaring up at him with all the certainty and fortitude she could muster.
Something flickered through Jacobs’ black eyes—something that looked like a flash of grudging respect.
“What did you see, then, Mr. Jacobs?” Ellie carefully, deliberately prompted. “What is your innermost desire?”
The knife in Jacobs’ hand was steady. His look never broke.
“Justice, Miss Mallory,” he replied. “I want justice.”
Ellie wondered if the world had just turned inside out. “You want justice?” she burst out. “Justice for what?”
His expression closed. “Your turn.”
Ellie had run out of moves. She only hoped that she had played the game out long enough for whatever Zeinab had been hoping to accomplish.
She forced herself to speak calmly as she gave the only answer she could to a man who could sense every falsehood. “I am trying to distract you from whatever is happening on the ridge.”
Jacobs’ face flattened with surprise. He whirled to the crown of stone that rose around them, dropping the knife from Constance’s throat.
The mountain bloomed gold with fire.
𓇶
Forty
Hair askew, waistcoat open, and spectacles in place, Neil gazed at the entrance to the tomb of Neferneferuaten in the eerie glow of the sock-obscured firebird bone. The plaster that covered the doors was unbroken, still stamped with the pharaoh’s royal seal and the seal of the Amarna necropolis.
Whoever had entered the tomb three thousand years earlier to return the staff had not come this way. The only ones using this portal were the scarabs.
The alabaster that lay on the other side of the plaster was visible here and there where the ancient compound had crumbled away. The stone glowed softly in the light from the bone. Instead of the portraits of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, the outside of the rosy slabs was covered in tiny columns of hieroglyphs.
“The seals are intact,” Neil noted uncomfortably. “I’m not sure anyone has ever found a completely intact royal tomb entrance before.”
“No.” Sayyid stared at the doors, his shoulders slumped morosely. The crowbar dangled limply at his side.
“This is… this is an extraordinary find.” Neil’s stomach twisted. “Couldn’t we just… Might there not be another…”
Sayyid didn’t answer.
They should have been removing the plaster carefully, scoring through the unmarked portions and delicately lifting it from the door. He and Sayyid should have been arguing about the right methodology, possibly over a matter of days and many cups of sweet, minty tea.
“It is us or the seals,” Sayyid reasoned with a pained wince.
“Not just us,” Neil added, rubbing a hand over his exhausted features. Worry for his sister and friends was a growing, nagging buzz at the back of his mind.
He closed his eyes as two opposing forms of guilt fought wretchedly inside his chest.
Sayyid gave a long, eloquent sigh—then jammed the crowbar into the doors.
He wrenched back on the iron, and ancient plaster popped and burst into the air around them. Neil turned his face to avoid being peppered by it, coughing against the dust that suddenly filled the air.
Sayyid yanked again, and the massive panel of alabaster scraped against the stone of the quarry floor until Neil could see a dark gap opening into the interior.
A trio of scarabs raced through it, scurrying across the ground. Sayyid danced back from them with a strangled yelp, nearly dropping the crowbar.
Neil’s nerves jangled against the silence that followed. “Do you think anyone heard that?” he asked in a whisper.
Sayyid flashed him an uneasy look, and by silent consensus, the two men eased up to listen at the finger-thin opening.
The hall beyond the door was quiet. As Neil held his breath, tuning his ears even more carefully to the silence, he could just make out the murmur of distant voices.
“I think they’re down in the—” Neil began.
The rest of his words were cut off by a deep, resonant thunder that drummed through the stillness of the quarry.
Neil pressed himself against the doors as the sound boomed around him. Chips of stone shivered down from the cavern ceiling, cracking softly against the ground as they fell.
The rumble faded into a low echo before drifting back into silence.
“What…” Neil swallowed against a dry throat. “What was…”
Sayyid had flattened himself against the wall. He looked up nervously. “It sounded like firecrackers. Extremely loud, very powerful firecrackers?”
A few more bits of stone pinged down by Neil’s shoes. “Is the quarry going to collapse?”
The question ended in a somewhat humiliating squeak.
“I truly, sincerely hope not,” Sayyid replied fervently.
Neil jolted at the sound of voices through the crack in the alabaster doors. They were coming from much closer than before, and one of them was most distinctly that of Mr. Forster-Mowbray.
Neil couldn’t make out Julian’s words, but the high-pitched reply came to him in the tones of Professor Dawson.
“Attack?!” Dawson echoed wildly. “From whom? We’ll be cornered down here!”
Neil quickly looked at Sayyid, who was still prudently plastered to the wall. Sayyid raised an eyebrow.
A rush of harsh whispers followed, and then Neil heard the creak of a winch.
After that, everything went quiet.
Neil met Sayyid’s eyes with an unspoken question. Sayyid drooped with a distinct lack of enthusiasm, then nodded. Peeling himself from the wall, he hefted the crowbar like a cricket bat and waited.
The firebird bone flickered, reminding Neil that he was more or less carrying a beacon. He shoved it into his pocket, dropping them in a deep, thick gloom, then felt his way to grip the rough edge of the cracked door.
The heavy stone slab ground against the floor with a noise that sounded like the groan of a giant to Neil’s paranoid ears. He forced himself to keep pulling, knowing that leaving the door half-open at this point would only invite some burly, well-armed enemy to set up an ambush.
Sayyid rushed inside, the crowbar raised. Neil followed him, lifting his fists… for all the bloody good that would do him.
The hallway was empty. A lone paraffin lantern sat under the hole in the ceiling like a neglected relic. A rope sling dangled down from the opening, clearly a more elaborate system for lifting people and gear than what Neil and the others had managed an hour before.
Sayyid’s favorite scarab curse decorated the wall beside him, reminding Neil of the divine punishments intended for those who violated tombs.
Fear tugged at him—not of curses, but of the possibly murderous thugs who might lurk around every corner.
His worry about Ellie and the others outweighed it. As quietly as possible, he crept up the hall to where the fissure opened in the ceiling. There were no more explosive sounds, but he could hear the bark of angry voices.
Sayyid held the crowbar uneasily. “Have they all gone?” he whispered.
“I… think our people must have been taken outside.” Neil glanced up at the hole.
“How can you be certain?” Sayyid demanded.
“I think we would hear them if they were still here,” Neil pointed out. “None of them are particularly quiet.”
“That is true,” Sayyid acknowledged.
“Should we go up?” Neil looked anxiously to Sayyid.
“And defeat them with a crowbar?” Sayyid retorted in a hiss, waving his questionable weapon.
He grabbed the sleeve of Neil’s shirt and hauled him forward.
They picked their way down the precarious stairwell. Someone had lain boards over the place where Neil had nearly fallen through. He still preferred not to test them, keeping to the safer edge.
Moving silently, they peered into the treasure room and found it empty. Neil stepped inside—and heard the rush of low voices from the burial chamber.
With a thrill of fear, Neil threw Sayyid a questioning look. Sayyid frowned down at the crowbar in his hand uncomfortably.
Neil didn’t even have a crowbar. He made a wild survey of the treasure room for something he might use to defend himself. A finely carved alabaster shabti? A faience vase?
The notion of using any of those precious historical objects to bash someone on the head horrified him on multiple levels.
The timbre of the voices rose in urgency and speed, like the crest of an argument.
It ended, and quick footsteps approached down the corridor.
Neil didn’t have time to think. He simply snatched up the nearest thing that came to his hand from the jumbled pile of grave goods by his boots and raised it up over his head.
Two unfamiliar Egyptians hurried through the door—and then froze, gaping at Neil and Sayyid. They threw up their hands, stammering in quick and obviously conciliatory Masri. Neil struggled to keep up.
Following orders… Please don’t kill us…
The pair were clearly crewmen from the Isis rather than Al-Saboors, but Neil was still surprised at how easily he and Sayyid had managed to cow them.
Then he glanced up and realized that he was holding an enormous scimitar over his head.
“Oh bugger!” he exclaimed, fumbling his grip on the weapon and nearly dropping it. He just managed to catch it again before it hit the floor.
Thankfully, he had grabbed it by the hilt. The bronze blade still looked wickedly sharp.
Sayyid burst out in stern Masri, jabbing a finger at the two crewmen. Neil picked up the gist of it even as he worked to stop his heart from pounding.
Looting your own history… Have you no shame… What would your mothers say?
He finished it off with a particularly pointed remark, and the two men startled, then burst out into a round of abject apologies. Neil struggled to keep up.
We are so sorry, uncle! Wretched… tricked… By God, we did not mean…
Sayyid cut in. “La ilâha illa Allâh.” He waved impatiently toward the door. “Yalla!”
“Shukrân, ya ‘amm!” they exclaimed, inching around Neil and Sayyid nervously. “Shukrân!”
Once clear, the crewmen hurried up the stairs.
Holding the scimitar limply in his hand, Neil looked wide-eyed to Sayyid. “What did you say to them?”
“I told them they were working for an English bandit and that the police would be here momentarily with the Antiquities Service,” Sayyid replied. “And that if they did not wish to be imprisoned, they had best tell their reis and take the boat as far from here as possible.”
Neil straightened, impressed. “Well done!”
“Enough standing about.” Sayyid pulled him into the burial chamber.
The space around Neferneferuaten’s sarcophagus was empty of threats, save for the red powder around the coffin. A wet canvas covered most of it, while a half-full bucket of red sludge sat at the foot of the granite box.
Sayyid peered at it with a thoughtful frown. “They are dampening the hematite and removing the stabilized mud.” He sniffed a bit. “It is not the worst idea, but they should have better protected the coffin first.”
Across the room, Neil could see the ragged hole in the floor where he and Sayyid had fallen. Broken artifacts dangled over the black edges.
He realized he was still holding the scimitar. He set it down awkwardly beside the sarcophagus.
“I can see the seam of the coffin lid.” Neil tentatively bent down closer to the covered hematite for a better look. “Should we open it?”
He was uncomfortable with the suggestion. Part of Neil itched for the chance to examine the mortal remains of a woman he had studied for most of his life… and yet something about it felt surprisingly wrong.
It was not a feeling he had ever had when examining a mummy, which he had done a half-dozen times before. Perhaps that was because this mummy wasn’t just an anonymous find or a priest or courtier with little more than a name attached to it. This was Neferneferuaten, who had been Nefertiti—a woman who had played a critical role in a religious revolution, who had ruled with her husband through one of the most profoundly transformative periods of Egyptian history. Neil felt like he knew her… and the idea of disturbing the eternal rest of someone who was quite a bit more to him than a name made him feel desperately uncomfortable.
“I don’t know,” Sayyid retorted with a pointed look. “Should we?”
A flush came into the tips of Neil’s ears. He knew what Sayyid was asking him—but it was impossible.
“This is ridiculous,” he said aloud, trying to let the sound of the words comfort him. “I don’t know where to find the Staff of Moses. I haven’t known where to find any of these things! They’ve all been informed, scholarly hypotheses, each of which I’ve investigated in a perfectly rational, orderly manner.”
“That is not what you did when you found Horemheb’s tomb,” Sayyid countered stubbornly.
“Of course it is!” Neil protested wildly. “My brain just has… a bit of a knack for putting those hypotheses together without me needing to sit down and spell out every little step. There’s nothing supernatural about that. It’s… neurology,” he finished awkwardly.
Sayyid looked both impatient and unimpressed. “Well, then, what does your neurology tell you about where the staff has been hidden?”
Neil automatically looked over at the solar barque.
The model boat was roughly two feet in length, executed in exquisite detail with a shaded canopy and a cluster of little plaster sailors. But it was what lay beneath it that tugged at his attention like a fishhook, just as it had in the moments before Julian Forster-Mowbray had entered the tomb.
The object was a simple, slender whitewashed wooden box.
He tore his gaze from it quickly—only to find Sayyid staring at him.
“It’s nothing!” Neil protested. “It’s just… I only…”
Sayyid’s mouth firmed into a determined line. He grasped Neil by the shoulders, spun him, and marched him over to the model boat.
Neil faced the whitewashed box as though it were crocodile-headed Ammit rising up to devour him.
“It’s a cubit box,” he blurted uncomfortably, recognizing the little cluster of hieroglyphs stamped on its surface. “It doesn’t make any sense that the staff would be in cubit box. A cubit rod has absolutely no relevance to the Atenist faith or early Judaism. And anyway, it’s too small. The staff wouldn’t fit. Well—I mean, it could fit, if it isn’t as big as we think it is, but then the Hebrew terms used to refer to it would be…”
Neil trailed off as Sayyid continued to stare at him.
“That’s all very sensible,” Sayyid replied calmly. “Except that the cubit rod is on the floor.”
He pointed to the distinct, blocky shape of the Egyptian ruler, which was leaning against a bundle of reed arrows.
Neil closed his eyes as dismay and a mild, gut-clenching terror washed over him.
“But the solar barque must be extremely fragile,” he pleaded, starting to sweat. “We couldn’t possibly risk moving it.”
“I can move it.” Sayyid picked up a piece of scrap wood that Julian’s men had dropped on the floor of the tomb. He set it parallel to the cubit box. “Hold this.”
Out of sheer habit, Neil obeyed. After all, he’d been following Sayyid’s orders when it came to matters of conservation for two years now.
Sayyid expertly eyed the three-thousand-year-old boat, slipped delicate fingers under either end of it, and shifted it onto Neil’s board. He set it down carefully on the floor nearby, then rose to fix Neil with a waiting, implacable look.
The cubit box lay before them.
“I don’t want to open it,” Neil confessed tightly. “I don’t…” He drew in a breath, feeling dizzy.
Somewhere on the mountain above them, his sister was in danger. His best friend. Sayyid’s wife. And a woman who had grown from a nerve-wracking hellion into someone he found he cared very much for.
“You do it,” Neil blurted helplessly. “You’re… better with wooden pieces than I am.”
Sayyid absorbed Neil’s plea, then set his expert hands to the box.
The front panel slid free on grooves that had remained straight and true through three thousand years of rest. Inside lay two pieces of elegant bronze, green with a rich layer of verdigris.
One was shaped with the slender head and pointed ears of the Set beast. The other formed a forked tail.
They were hollow at the ends, made to slip over a staff of wood.
“It’s…” Neil’s throat was as dry as the sands that stretched out over the world above them.
“A was-scepter,” Sayyid filled in, his voice thick with wonder. Tears gathered at the corners of his eyes. “Wallah—it is a was-scepter!”
