One
Mid-afternoon
Thursday, June 9, 1898
Cairo, Egypt
T he forecourt of the grand, modern Cairo railway station bustled with carriages, donkeys, street vendors, and the odd rattling, backfiring motorcar. The air rang with a mix of languages—English, French, Greek, and Masri, the Egyptian dialect of Arabic.
Ellie Mallory hovered at the edge of the chaos, squinting over a sea of black headscarves, bright red fezzes, and the occasional bowler hat for any sign of the ride that should be waiting for her.
The air was hot. Golden sun shone down on her from a hazily cloudless sky. She adjusted the brim of her straw boater hat to shield her eyes, grateful that she was dressed sensibly in a white blouse and practical tan waistcoat over her olive-hued summer skirt.
A stray cat lounged in the shade by her worn leather boots, as did a small brown valise. The bag was the same one that Ellie had carried with her when she had made a precipitous departure from London two months before. It was mostly stuffed with exactly the same rushed and somewhat random collection of belongings.
Between dodging nefarious antiquities thieves, discovering a lost civilization in the unexplored wilds of British Honduras, and then fleeing the colony after she’d inadvertently dropped said civilization into a sinkhole, she hadn’t exactly found the time to update her traveling gear.
It had been a rather busy few weeks.
The circumstances that had brought her from British Honduras to Cairo were… unanticipated , to say the least, but Ellie still thrilled at the notion that the ancient, storied earth of Egypt lay beneath her boots. Towering date palms lined the canal that lay between the railroad station and the city’s weathered medieval walls. From her current vantage, Ellie had an excellent view of the famous gate of Bab El Had. Its round, crenelated towers and arrow-slit windows dated back to the time of the Crusades. Beyond it rose the tightly clustered rooftops of Cairo proper, pierced by the elegant needles of the minarets from which the city’s muezzins issued the five daily calls to prayer.
Within the city, Ellie would find the famous mosque and university of Al-Azhar, home to one of the oldest libraries in the world. On the far side of the Nile stood the pyramids of Giza along with the current home of the Egyptian Museum, which was stuffed with the most fascinating and important artifacts of the Ancient Egyptian civilization.
The City of the Dead. The palaces of the Fatamid caliphs. Ellie inwardly buzzed with the desire to explore it all, filling in the gaps in her knowledge of both Medieval Islamic culture and the ancient world.
And she would, she promised herself… just as soon as she stopped a pair of dastardly villains—the sweaty, self-important Professor Dawson and his menacing handler, Mr. Jacobs.
Ellie knew that both Dawson and Jacobs had survived the somewhat explosive conclusion of her adventures in British Honduras. She had seen them picking their way along a precarious mountainside as she and Adam made their escape from the cataclysm.
Thanks to Adam’s snooping when they were Jacobs’ captives, Ellie also knew where the two ne’er-do-wells had planned to go next—to Egypt, to seek yet another historic object with legendary powers… one that sounded even more dangerous than the dark force that she had encountered in the caves beneath the lost city of Tulan.
The impact of that encounter, and of her other experiences in British Honduras, continued to linger. Ordinary mirrors now made her feel uneasy—though she recognized that to be an entirely irrational response, as they were innocuous and useful pieces of household furnishing that would under no circumstances begin to whisper haunting and dangerous things to her. Though her bruises had faded, her guilt about the fate of the legendary civilization that she had discovered and then destroyed was still strong enough to tighten her throat.
Then there were her memories of that other Tulan—the living, breathing city that she had never seen, but which still somehow lurked inside of her brain as though impossibly planted there in the matter of an instant.
Ellie couldn’t draw upon that vast well of knowledge at will. If she had been able to, she might at least have tried to write some of it down—for all the good that would do in the complete absence of any surviving physical proof of the city’s existence. She had only little bits and pieces that popped into her mind by way of some bizarre association, like looking at the pattern on a scarf in Jamaica and thinking, yes, that’s rather like the ladies of Tulan used to do it. Or when she tracked the flight of a falcon and found herself calculating auguries using the methods of a civilization that had died two hundred years before she was born.
Those fragments were as frustrating as they were tantalizing. She was the last living resource on a people and a way of life that had shaped the Mesoamerican world… and there was absolutely nothing she could do about it.
Now it looked as though she was going to have to do it all again here in Egypt. Ellie couldn’t possibly allow another powerful arcanum to fall into Dawson and Jacobs’ clutches—or those of whatever organization had hired them.
She knew next to nothing about who pulled the two villains’ strings, but any group that would hire a man as ruthless as Jacobs to do their work for them certainly couldn’t be trusted with the artifact they sought here in Egypt—namely the Staff of Moses, the Biblical relic with the power to turn water to blood and sink the world into an eternal night.
Never mind the plagues of locusts.
Ellie had raced from British Honduras with barely a stop to pick up her valise. She didn’t see how Dawson and Jacobs could possibly have gotten a lead on her—but she had also learned the danger of underestimating the resources at their disposal. She had been on guard for their reappearance from the moment she stepped off the boat in Alexandria. It wasn’t a question of whether Dawson and Jacobs would turn up—but when .
Ellie’s only advantage lay in surprise. Dawson and Jacobs had no reason to suspect that she and Adam knew where they were headed next.
That was good—because to defeat them, she was going to need every edge she could scrape together.
“Nice hotel?”
The voice chirped up from beside her with startling volume. Ellie jolted as she looked around for the speaker—and then down.
The words had come from a boy of around eight who stood roughly the height of Ellie’s shoulder, dressed in a skullcap and a galabeya with a tattered hem. His dark hair fell over his eyes, which fixed on her with an intimidating determination.
“Bag carrier? Donkey ride?” the boy pressed forcefully.
“No, thank you,” Ellie replied.
“Pyramid tour? Dancing girls?” the boy tried.
“Dancing girls!” Ellie narrowed her eyes in disapproval.
The boy glared right back at her. “For your gentleman,” he pressed.
Ellie stiffened. “I am sure I don’t know what you mean.”
The boy pointed to the valise at her feet. “That bag is yours,” he said confidently. He shifted his finger to jab at the bag that slouched beside it—a battered, stained canvas rucksack. “ That bag is not.”
The stray cat by the two pieces of baggage rolled over, stretching out luxuriantly to expose its white and orange belly.
“How do you know?” Ellie challenged crossly.
“It smells like old donkey,” the boy returned authoritatively. “If you carry it, you smell like the donkey too.”
Ellie had to admire the perspicacity of his deduction. The truth was, the bag’s owner was occasionally capable of smelling a little… well, less than perfectly fresh. He had freely admitted as much on more than one occasion, including a memorable morning where he had remedied the situation by cannon-balling into Ellie’s bathing area.
She found herself vividly recalling a splash of water, an excess of bare male skin, and an irrepressible grin.
Trust me, Princess. You’ll be glad I did this.
The memory brought a telling flush to her cheeks.
“That one belongs to my… traveling companion,” she conceded.
“Aywa.” The boy crossed his arms over his chest. “I ask him. ”
Ellie’s jaw dropped slightly at the child’s sheer audacity, but her frustration was offset by a grudging note of respect. The little monster was nothing if not determined.
She readied herself to give him a stern talking-to about reinforcing patriarchal notions of a woman’s subservience to whatever man might happen to be a member of her party. Before she could begin, a call from the milling crowd of animals and travelers nearby caught her ear as one of the vendors switched from rapid Masri to simple, practiced English.
“Authentic artifacts! Ancient treasures! Best Egyptian souvenir!”
Ellie’s gaze locked unerringly on a burly figure with a great black beard and a striped galabeya. The gentleman stood beside a bored-looking donkey tied to a wheeled display, which was thickly packed with trinkets.
“On second thought,” Ellie said, “why don’t you watch my bags for a moment?”
She plucked a pair of silver milliemes from her pocket and tossed them to the boy, who caught them deftly. He promptly took up an intimidating pose over the battered valise and slightly smelly rucksack, the unbothered cat lounging at his feet.
Her belongings secured, Ellie pushed through the shifting bodies to the hawker, where she cast an assessing gaze over the assembled objects that lined his cart. Her attention snagged on a row of identical statuettes roughly six inches in height, crafted from a softly gleaming blue ceramic.
“Salamu ?alaykum, Sitt el Kol,” the large fellow said as he noticed Ellie’s presence. “You want very fine Egyptian artifact? Take home with you? These are very nice.” He picked up one of the figurines and held it out for her inspection. A gold tooth winked from within his grin.
The little statues had all the appearance of being shabtis—representations of servants and courtiers that were meant to offer service to the Ancient Egyptian dead during their afterlives. Shabtis were depicted in the form of mummies, with crossed arms holding the crook and flail of Osiris and bodies covered in hieroglyphic inscriptions.
They were found in great numbers in tombs dating from the New Kingdom to the Ptolemaic period. Ellie had previously studied several specimens that had found their way to England. The small blue statue that the hawker held in his hand looked like a perfectly reasonable example of the type.
“Authentic Ancient Egyptian,” he said proudly, offering the figure to her.
“I should certainly hope not,” Ellie retorted.
At Ellie’s words, the vendor’s face blanked.
“Because selling Ancient Egyptian objects is, of course, illegal. ” Ellie paused, her mouth creasing into a frown. “Unless one is the director of the Antiquities Service of Egypt, of course, in which case one may pick any artifacts that one deems extraneous and offer them up for sale like a common street hawker.” She caught herself as she glanced up at the common street hawker in front of her. “No offense intended, of course.”
“Sitt?” the hawker said.
“It is only that no respectable gentleman can claim to be rigorously upholding his responsibility to preserve Egypt’s ancient heritage while at the same time offering mummy pieces and amulets for sale like a Portobello Road pawnbroker!” Ellie continued pointedly.
Ellie had strong feelings about the Service des Antiquités d'Egypte. For one thing, it wasn’t Egyptian at all. The department was directed by a bespectacled Frenchman and run under the auspices of the British Consul General—the English civil servant who had been ruling the country in everything but name for the last fifteen years.
The Antiquities Service claimed half of all the artifacts excavated in Egypt, allowing the rest to be carted back to whatever country the archaeologist—or the wealthy fellows who funded him—happened to hail from.
But even the relics retained by Egypt weren’t safe. The director of the Antiquities Service was also empowered to declare artifacts ‘duplicates’ of others in the collection, in which case they were put on sale in a designated room within the museum, where they might be bought as trinkets by any tourist who happened to pass through.
Like most aspects of Britain’s unofficial rule in Egypt, the system was designed to benefit privileged Europeans and Americans at the cost of the Egyptians—who likely had a thing or two to say about which parts of their heritage ought to be hawked off to the highest bidder.
Ellie plucked the shabti from the vendor’s hands and gave it a careful examination.
“It appears to be made from blue faience—a commonly used material for such objects,” she explained to a white-haired Turkish gentleman who had stopped beside her.
At her words, the gentleman cast an uneasy look up at the looming, narrow-eyed vendor, and then fled.
“The figure is in a traditional Osirian pose with crossed arms, tripartite wig, and false beard,” Ellie continued. “All typical for a New Kingdom funeral shabti. The faience also exhibits the patina one would expect for an artifact of this age.”
A crowd had gathered around Ellie, looking with nervous interest from her to the glowering street hawker. Ignoring her onlookers, Ellie flipped the shabti over for a peek under its feet. Her examination was interrupted by the cry of a familiar voice.
“There you are!”
Ellie turned to see a lacy peach parasol barreling through the crowd. The sunshade tilted back as it reached the souvenir cart, revealing the smiling face of Constance Tyrrell.
Ellie’s childhood best friend barely topped five feet in height, her petite figure currently shown off by an elegantly tailored summer dress in the same rosy hue as her parasol. Her rich black hair was pinned up under an expansive hat flush with soft feathers, while the white arc of her smile contrasted prettily with her warmly brown complexion.
Behind her, a motorcar beeped an irritated horn at a well-appointed carriage bearing Constance’s family crest, the door of which hung open.
“Eleanora!” Constance squealed happily as she threw her arms around Ellie. A pair of bystanders ducked back to avoid the sweep of her parasol. “But what are you doing here? How on earth have you come to be in Egypt? And why am I only hearing about it in a telegram reading ‘Arrived Alexandria. Three-ten train to Cairo. Transport appreciated.’”
“They charge by the word,” Ellie countered reasonably as she frowned at the tiny lines of painted hieroglyphs on the base of the shabti.
Ellie had known Constance since they were schoolgirls. Their paths had parted after that, as Ellie fought her way into university and Constance was shipped to finishing school to be polished up for a future husband. She had so far managed to avoid acquiring one, shaking off all the would-be suitors that her well-meaning parents threw at her.
When Ellie had last seen Constance two months before, she had been packing for the family’s move to Egypt, where her father, Sir Robert, served as the new Comptroller General charged with auditing the budgets and economic policies put together by the country’s British administrators.
As Sir Robert was cheerfully, obliviously, painstakingly good at his job, it would undoubtedly make him a burr in the side of any government officials who hoped to rig the books in their own favor.
Constance had always been eagerly willing to assist in any adventures that might involve trespassing, fisticuffs, or a bit of light burglary. Ellie’s current race against Professor Dawson and Mr. Jacobs would most likely entail all of the above, making Constance a useful ally.
“As to what I am doing—at the moment, I am trying to determine whether this fellow is attempting to sell me a genuine New Kingdom funeral shabti, which would be a blatant violation of Egyptian law.” Ellie flashed the looming vendor a disapproving glare.
“Are you quite certain that’s a good idea?” Constance craned her neck back to give the large fellow an assessing look.
“Now let me see,” Ellie continued, returning her attention to the shabti. “The figure is inscribed with an excerpt from Chapter Six of the Book of the Dead, as one would expect. And then there is a nice little spell that empowers Paw-er—that would be the name of the servant this shabti is meant to represent—to do all the necessary works for his master in the Beyond.”
A pair of women nearby whispered behind their face veils, casting a nervous look at the increasingly red-faced hawker before hurrying away through a growing crowd. Ellie paid them only half a mind as she plucked up another shabti from the line of solemn-faced figures in the vendor’s cart.
“Let’s see.” She twisted the second figure in her hand and raised an eyebrow. “This one is Paw-er as well. Our Paw-er really gets around, doesn’t he?”
The hawker’s jaw twitched.
“I knew I should have come armed,” Constance sighed, snapping closed her parasol.
Back at the carriage, the motorcar blared its irritated horn a second time. In response, a long figure ducked through the carriage door and unfolded to a substantial height.
The imposingly tall fellow was dressed in an excellently tailored French linen suit with a crisp black bow tie and an elegant silk pocket square. A dapper red fez topped his close-cropped hair. The appearance of unimpeachable respectability was only slightly offset by the three deliberate horizontal scars that marked his mahogany cheeks.
He tugged on the ends of his jacket as he straightened, setting his suit back into perfect order, and then strode purposefully toward them with an air of resigned exasperation, seemingly oblivious to the crowd that parted around him like a shoal of fish.
Ellie stared up at the newcomer in surprise, the shabtis in her hands momentarily forgotten.
“Oh—Hello, Mr. Mahjoud,” Constance said cheerfully. “Ellie, this is Aai’s dragoman, whom she insists accompany me when I am out in the city to make sure I don’t run into any trouble.”
Ellie was familiar with the Turkish term, dragoman , which referred to a general guide, translator, and facilitator for foreign travel. It did not surprise her that Constance’s grandmother would assign someone in that position to herd Constance about. The noble lady in question gave her granddaughter a longer leash than most grandmothers might, but she was still an extremely practical sort of person.
“I might even succeed in keeping you from running into trouble,” Mr. Mahjoud declared in precise English, “if you refrained from leaping out of moving carriages.”
“It wasn’t moving very fast,” Constance pointed out before returning her attention to Ellie. “Mr. Mahjoud is from the Sudan, where I have heard all the boys are raised fighting with lances and swords on horseback.”
Constance shot Mr. Mahjoud a challenging look as though daring him to either confirm or deny the assertion.
Mr. Mahjoud raised a disdainful eyebrow.
“Miss Eleanora Mallory. Pleased to make your acquaintance.” Ellie went to extend a hand to the dragoman and realized that she still held a shabti in it.
“Charmed,” Mr. Mahjoud replied flatly. He shifted an assessing gaze to the glowering vendor. “And were we hoping to start a riot?”
“Oh, don’t be dramatic,” Constance scolded.
Ellie glanced back at the figurine in her hand. “Oh! But they are numbered! I had heard that many sets of funerary shabtis came in sequences.” She looked closer. “This one is seven of forty-six. And this one…” She flipped over the statue in her other hand and squinted down at the tiny characters painted into the glaze by its feet. “This one is also seven of forty-six!” She waved the figurine playfully at the simmering hawker. “Why, you very nearly had me! These are excellent reproductions. Really, I don’t know why you are misrepresenting them as originals. You ought to simply promote them as very high quality copies. I am sure that you would find even more customers eager to purchase them as souvenirs if they knew that in doing so, they were not removing part of Egypt’s cultural heritage from her borders without permission.”
“Somehow I doubt that,” Constance cut in dryly. She plucked the two shabtis from Ellie’s hands and thrust them at the vendor, who fumblingly managed to catch them. “Thank you. Excellent work. Best of luck to you.”
With the shabtis disposed of, Constance hooked Ellie by her elbow and unceremoniously hauled her away from the cart with a strength that belied her diminutive size.
Mr. Mahjoud gave a deliberately audible sigh of relief as he followed after them, his long legs needing only a stroll to keep up.
“Now that we’ve settled the matter of those dolls—” Constance began.
“Dolls!” Ellie protested, stiffening. “Egyptian funerary shabtis, authentic or otherwise, can hardly be categorized as—”
“—it is high time that you explained what you are doing here in Egypt!”
Constance steered Ellie to the edge of the pavement. They stopped near the boy who still stood over Ellie’s bags. He had been watching her exchange with the hawker with morbid interest.
The orange-and-white cat looked less horrified, calmly cleaning an extended leg.
“ …and what happened with that dastardly Mr. Jacobs and your map!” Constance continued relentlessly. “Did you find your lost city? Was it full of ghosts and hidden occult treasure?”
“Ha ha ha,” Ellie laughed uncomfortably. “You are quite letting your imagination run away with you, Connie.” She deliberately shifted her attention to the boy. “Here’s another millieme for you, young man, and I think we can quite manage for ourselves now.”
The boy took the coin and gave it a brief inspection. He cast an appraising look up—and up—at Mr. Mahjoud, who glanced down his nose at the child with a disapproving frown.
The coin disappeared into a ragged pocket. “Salam bye-bye.” The boy scampered off into the crowd.
“Now that’s settled,” Mr. Mahjoud cut in, “might we return to the carriage as soon as we have collected your…”
Mr. Mahjoud’s gaze moved to the luggage by Ellie’s boots. It halted on the smellier of the two pieces, and his expression shifted to one of quiet horror.
“You will catch me up on everything that has happened,” Constance pressed Ellie darkly. “But don’t tell me that you really came all this way on your own!”
“I suppose one might…” Ellie began, flashing an involuntary and guilty look at the slightly malodorous rucksack still resting by her valise. “That is to say, I have not been entirely —”
“Hey Princess!” a boldly masculine voice called out from across the crowd. “How about some camels?”
Ellie turned at the sound. Beside her, Constance’s eyes widened.
Adam Bates pushed through the shifting mass of bodies. He was still wearing a coat over his braces and shirtsleeves—which was a small miracle in itself, as Adam was not very good at keeping coats on… or shirts, for that matter. In a somewhat less respectable twist, he had pushed up the sleeves to expose his well-muscled forearms. His sun-kissed blond hair peeked out from under a battered, flat-brimmed fedora that Ellie had watched him yank out from under his bed two weeks before. His wide grin and piercing blue eyes contrasted with his deeply tanned skin.
Ellie’s pulse automatically and inconveniently kicked up at the sight—just as it had insisted on doing for the better part of the last month and a half.
Familiarity, in the case of Adam Bates, had not bred contempt. In fact, it seemed to be doing the opposite, and over the course of their two-week voyage from British Honduras to Egypt, Ellie had come very close to doing things with him that would make their torrid embrace in a cenote in the tropical wilderness look like a church society dinner.
The memory of those stolen and entirely inappropriate encounters on the boat to Egypt flared to life inside her mind. She closed her hands into fists. It felt like the only reliable way to make sure that she did not reach out and run them over Adam’s remarkable pectorals.
She should not be putting her hands on pectorals—or any other part of Adam Bates, for that matter. Not when their situation remained decidedly… complicated.
“Who… is… that? ” Constance demanded in a low voice.
“That is my… er… traveling companion, Mr. Bates,” Ellie replied.
“Delightful,” Mr. Mahjoud said in a tone that sounded distinctly unenthusiastic.
“He is an old college friend of Neil’s,” Ellie added hopefully—as though the fact might make her situation slightly less awkward.
"Is he?" Constance returned flatly as her eyes roved appreciatively over Adam’s figure. They hitched on the eighteen-inch sheath strapped to his belt. “Your brother's college friend appears to be wearing a sword.”
Mr. Mahjoud scoffed. Ellie glanced back at him in surprise. By the sound, one might almost have thought that the neatly dressed fellow was both familiar with swords and accustomed to ones larger than Adam’s blade.
“It’s a machete, actually,” Ellie weakly corrected her. “It’s very… useful.”
Constance fixed Ellie with an alarmingly focused gaze. “And what uses have you found for the rest of it?”
Ellie clamped her mouth shut even as her cheeks flared with heat.
Constance’s eyes narrowed to a dangerously knowing glare. “You have a great deal of explaining to do, Eleanora Mallory.”
Ellie was saved from further interrogation by Adam’s arrival as he popped through the press of rail travelers.
“He said we can have them for a week for a reduced rate.” Adam pointed through the crowd to where Ellie could now see a wizened old man holding a pair of enormous dromedaries by their leads.
“How nice,” Ellie said weakly.
Adam turned to her petite companion. “You must be Constance. I’ve heard all about you.”
“And I have clearly not heard enough about you, which I hope will be remedied shortly.” Constance flashed Ellie a dagger-pointed look before returning her attention to Adam. She assessed the firm curves of his biceps like an art scholar might a Greek statue.
Adam extended his hand to Mr. Mahjoud. “I’m Adam.”
The hand was work-roughened, the palm of it crossed by the still-red line of a recent cut. The wound was accented by a frankly uneven row of pinpricks from a line stitches that had only recently been removed.
Ellie felt just a little bad about those pinpricks. Then again, she had never been exceptionally handy with a needle.
Mr. Mahjoud eyed the hand skeptically as though worried that it might smell like the bag beside his flawlessly polished shoes. He finally accepted it with an air of resignation. “Abubakr Osman Mahjoud.”
Adam bent down and gave the stray cat a rub between its orange ears as though loath to leave it out of the introductions. “Hi Kitty.”
Ellie hurried to regain control over the situation.
“Constance, I am afraid that I have not come to Egypt purely for social reasons,” she announced. “Mr. Bates and I do hope to impose upon your hospitality for the evening, but we must arrange travel to my brother’s excavation at Saqqara at the first opportunity. It is imperative that I speak to Neil as soon as possible.”
Thanks to Adam’s snoop through Professor Dawson’s notebook, Ellie had deduced that he and Mr. Jacobs had an interest in her stepbrother’s dig… and yet, it was not the thought of convincing her brother of the threat posed by those two villains that left her nerves feeling rattled. She was rather more intimidated by the prospect of informing Dr. Neil Fairfax that she had spent the last six weeks traveling across half the world in the sole company of his best friend—a man who had once convinced Neil to put a stuffed emu on top of the King’s College Chapel.
For a good portion of the voyage to Egypt, Ellie had puzzled over how to explain her connection to Adam in a way that would not send her brother into hysterics. But how could she—when she wasn’t at all certain of the nature of their relationship herself?
“We can take the morning train to Saqqara,” Constance declared. “That will get us there before lunch.”
Adam flashed a disappointed look back at the old man with the camels, one of which promptly spat onto the pavement.
“It will give us a little time to catch up,” Constance finished—and shifted a pointed look to where Adam gazed longingly back at the dromedaries.
Ellie swallowed thickly and wondered just how much more complicated things were about to become.
“Shall we, then?” Constance prompted, flashing Ellie a smile as threatening as a knife blade.