Seven
T he ground in front of Ellie fell away steeply, the layers of earth peeled away to expose the roofless walls of Horemheb’s ruined funerary temple.
The paving stones of the ancient floor lay about seven feet down from where she stood. A few Egyptian workers carried buckets of debris up a steep ramp to where a cluster of women in dark blue cloaks and headscarves sifted the rubble. Younger boys hauled the processed spoil to a heap further away.
Other men set down their picks, shovels, and buckets to close out their day’s work, chatting together comfortably. It was nearly time for supper, and they would soon return to their homes in the village for the evening.
The sun had fallen in the west, and the air cooled ever-so-slightly from the burning heat of the day.
“Well?” Constance prompted as she hopped off her donkey. “Are we going down?”
Ellie instinctively glanced back at Adam. His eyes narrowed as he scanned the roofless maze of the temple like a potential battlefield.
Carefully dismounting, she followed Constance down the ramp to a narrow opening framed by a pair of pylons—thick walls filled with rubble that served as impressive gateways to sacred Egyptian sites. The two that flanked her were no longer tall, having crumbled down to waist height when their materials were scavenged by later builders for other projects at the necropolis.
Beyond the pylons lay a wide antechamber marked out by more half-tumbled walls, where a cluster of workers eyed Ellie and the others with surprise and a touch of discomfort.
“Very sorry!” one of them called over. “No tourist!”
“Wait here,” Mr. Mahjoud ordered.
He strode over to the men, engaging in a rapid and authoritative exchange of Masri. One of the workers detached himself from the group to dart back up the ramp to ground level, obviously set on some errand.
Nothing about the scene spoke of the sort of tension Ellie might expect if the excavation was under siege. But then again, why would it? Adam’s snooping had only revealed that Dawson and Jacobs thought Neil’s site might contain some clue to the location of the next arcana they hoped to acquire. They might come in with guns blazing to snatch it—or with a smile and a letter of recommendation from one of Neil’s sponsors. Ellie still hadn’t a clue who Dawson and Jacobs worked for, but she did know the pair were exceptionally well-funded and connected, which meant that the latter possibility couldn’t be ruled out. The scribble Adam had spotted in Dawson’s notebook had simply mentioned receiving another update . Who was to say whether that update came through official channels or by way of a spy or informant on the excavation’s staff?
Still, it was hard to imagine that any group of workers would look this relaxed if someone like Jacobs was lurking about.
Somewhat reassured, but still wary, Ellie let her attention drift to the temple itself while Mr. Mahjoud chatted with the staff.
Beyond the antechamber lay another roofless room, this one framed by a row of tumbled columns. The pieces of debris were all neatly tagged and labeled, the fragments set into tidy piles.
More of the walls had survived here than in the antechamber, including some limestone panels covered in carved text and images. A worker squatted comfortably beside one of the larger murals, making a neat, careful copy in his sketchbook. The piece was done in bas relief, with the surrounding stone shallowly cut away from the image.
The heads of the larger figures on the panel were lost, as they fell above the level of the surviving portion of the wall. Smaller forms had survived mostly intact, save for a few places where details had flaked away.
The more diminutive people were kneeling with their heads bowed in supplication. Their arms were bound and linked together with ropes. From the distinctive curls of their hair and the fact that their faces were bearded, Ellie suspected they represented members of some Semitic tribe that the great general Horemheb had conquered.
She pulled her attention from the bas relief to the worker’s sketchbook. His page was lined with neat rows of the hieroglyphs that he had already copied from the wall. Ellie’s mind instinctively leapt to translate them, though the knowledge was somewhat rusty. She hadn’t found much cause to read hieroglyphs while working at the Public Record Office.
“Flame… Isis… speaks…” she read.
The writing system of the Ancient Egyptian language combined ideograms—symbols meant to represent entire concepts—with symbols that stood for the phonemes of ancient words… at least, in as much as anyone knew what those had been. The sounds of the Ancient Egyptian tongue had been lost for centuries, and scholars were still struggling to reconstruct it.
“ Surround… ” Ellie muttered, lifting her eyes from the worker’s sketchbook to pick out the relevant section from the text on the wall. “ Hidden… tomb… ”
“Are you reading those hieroglyphs, Eleanora?” Constance pressed with delighted interest.
“I am trying to,” Ellie retorted, frowning at the symbols, “once I recall what this figure with the stick on his head is meant to be. Oh wait! Not a stick—an ax!”
“Why does he have an ax on his head?” Constance asked.
“Because that’s the sign for enemy ,” Ellie replied dismissively as she focused on the text. “It’s meant to be sticking out of his brain.”
“Is it really?” Constance pressed with obvious relish, moving in for a closer look.
“Now then,” Ellie continued, excitement driving her onward. “That would make the whole of it, The Flame of Isis says—I surround the hidden tomb with sand and drive thy enemy away. ” She smiled brightly. “How splendid! I am quite certain that’s from one of the later chapters of the Book of the Dead. I wonder if I can remember which one…”
“I see we have done a marvelous job of waiting ,” Mr. Mahjoud commented blandly.
Ellie turned to see the dragoman approach, followed by an Egyptian gentleman with a neat silver beard and a fine black quftan. A clean white turban crowned his head.
“Mr. Abdelrahman says that Dr. Fairfax went down the shaft,” Mr. Mahjoud reported.
Ellie sparked with scholarly interest. “Shaft, did you say? Do you mean he found the entrance to Horemheb’s actual tomb? But how far have they excavated? Did they survey the entirety or have they been proceeding chamber-by-chamber?”
“Have there been any other recent visitors to the site?” Adam cut in, his tone serious. His eyes were on the doorway while his hand rested on the hilt of his machete.
Mr. Mahjoud exchanged a few more words with the Egyptian.
“No,” the dragoman reported. “Not for the last six weeks, since the tourist season died down.”
Ellie felt a quick wave of relief. “Where is the shaft?”
Mr. Abdelrahman waved toward the next chamber.
Ellie couldn’t see what lay there, as the walls in that portion of the ruins had survived to a height of over ten feet, but it must be the inner and most sacred chapel of Horemheb’s funeral temple—an entirely sensible place for the ancient priests to have situated the vertical tunnel that would lead to the great general’s tomb.
She picked up the hem of her skirts and stalked inside, the others following as Mr. Abdelrahman let out a stream of protests.
The sanctum was smaller than the other chambers. The walls of it rose high and close. There were more surviving bas reliefs here, though Ellie could also see places where the panels of limestone had been sheared off—probably stolen by earlier visitors to Saqqara, like the soldiers of Napoleon who had come here a century before.
On the right side of the room lay a perfectly rectangular hole in the floor, revealed by the removal of one of the paving stones. The opening was clearly a tomb shaft.
“Of course, my beastly brother didn’t write to tell me that he had found this!” Ellie exclaimed. She dropped to her knees at the edge of the hole and peered down. The tunnel descended straight into the rock for roughly ten yards. Someone had left a lantern at the bottom.
Adam came up to the opposite side of it—and then promptly stepped back. “That’s… farther down than I thought it’d be.”
“Is this setting off your vertigo?” Ellie demanded, surprised. “But it’s going into the ground, not out of it.”
“Ss’ good,” Adam replied queasily. “I’m good. Just gonna… stand over here.”
Constance took his place and studied the wooden scaffold that hung over the shaft. A rope dangled from the pulley rigged to the top of it. Ellie could just see the bucket tied to the far end of it at the bottom of the hole.
“Is this how we get down?” Constance suggested.
Ellie felt a dart of hopeful interest. Though descending thirty feet into the ground in a bucket was a moderately daunting prospect, she would happily attempt it for the chance to venture into a bona fide Eighteenth Dynasty tomb built by one of the most important figures in Egypt’s New Kingdom period.
“You are not going down,” Mr. Mahjoud calmly and flatly informed her. “Mr. Abdelrahman will descend and inform Dr. Fairfax that you are here.”
“Hmph,” Constance replied with a dissatisfied frown.
One of the other workers called down to them from where he stood on the high ground outside the dig site.
“Abdelrahman! Ya amir hena!”
“Mashi. Ana gai,” Mr. Abdelrahman shouted back. He gave the three foreigners a narrow-eyed look. “You stay,” he ordered firmly before striding back toward the entrance.
“What’s all that about?” Adam’s eyes narrowed. He seemed to have recovered from his brief encounter with the pit.
“He said their amir has come.” Mr. Mahjoud watched the older man depart with a thoughtful frown.
“Their amir?” Ellie echoed.
“It means boss,” Constance clarified as she gave the winch for the bucket a thoughtful, deliberate turn.
“But Neil is in the tomb,” Ellie said, pointing down the shaft.
“Then they must mean the man with the money,” Constance replied.
“Oh. Of course,” Ellie agreed uneasily.
The funds for Neil’s excavation had been provided by the British Athenaeum for Egyptological Studies, a well-established and respectable scholarly organization. This newly arrived amir must be their local representative.
The sky above them was streaked orange with the decline into evening. It was a bit late for someone like that to be paying the excavation a casual visit.
Adam moved to the doorway of the chapel, standing in the shadow of the remaining wall as he cast a wary look over the rest of the funerary complex.
His body tensed like a jaguar before a pounce as his voice went low with warning. “We’ve got company.”
A moment later, Ellie heard the cause of his alarm for herself.
“I don’t care what time it is,” a familiar voice complained in pretentious, Scots-accented tones. “I will speak to Dr. Fairfax immediately!”
The sound tossed a bucket of ice water over Ellie’s brain.
“Dawson!” she hissed.
He couldn’t be any further than the next chamber.
“Looks like it’s just the idiot,” Adam reported warily from his post by the entrance. “There’s no sign of Jacobs— yet .”
Ellie quickly assessed their options. Though the chapel was roofless, the walls that framed the space were still over ten feet high. Adam stood by the only door—which led right to where Dawson approached.
“Should we go over the top?” Constance prompted in an eager whisper. “I’m sure Mr. Mahjoud can vault us up there.”
“I beg your pardon?” Mr. Mahjoud retorted, aghast.
Ellie’s mind whirled furiously. She had accounted for the possibility that Dawson and Jacobs might have already beaten them here—but not for the chance that her enemies would arrive right at the same time.
Adam’s gaze met hers from across the chapel, his hand still ready on the hilt of the machete. “We gonna run? Or fight?”
Ellie fought for an answer. “If we run, we risk Neil telling Dawson about anything he might have already found. We have to at least try to warn him before Dawson gets here.”
Adam yanked the machete from its sheath. “Sounds like fight,” he concluded.
“You are forgetting a third option,” Constance hissed, grasping Adam by the elbow and pulling him back from the doorway. “The one where both of you go into the tomb while Mr. Mahjoud and I remain behind as a distraction!”
“We what?!” Mr. Mahjoud protested, stiffening with alarm.
“This professor of yours doesn’t know who we are,” Constance pressed. “As long as he isn’t aware that you are here, his guard will be down. We’ll just… er, inconvenience him until you can fetch Neil and get him out of there,” she finished with an awkward look at the obviously disapproving dragoman.
Adam met Constance’s eyes, his blue gaze narrowly assessing. “Fine,” he concluded, shoving the machete back into its place at his belt. “But you see one sign of a snake-eyed, black-haired English bastard—”
“We won’t do anything foolish,” Constance assured him, already reeling up the bucket.
“This is already foolish!” Mr. Mahjoud pointed out.
“Well, what do you think we should do?” Constance retorted.
“Go home?” Mr. Mahjoud suggested.
“Would you be telling my grandmother to go home? ” Constance pushed back.
Mr. Mahjoud blanched at the thought.
Constance pointed into the tomb shaft. “Get in the bucket, Eleanora.”
The makeshift elevator hung just inside the mouth of the thirty-foot drop. The notion of balancing in it while clinging to a rope made Ellie’s stomach tighten.
The grating tones of Dawson’s voice were growing louder as he approached. She hesitated, looking to Adam.
He nodded.
With an exasperated sigh, Mr. Mahjoud firmly cut in front of Constance to take hold of the winch. Constance crossed her arms and shot him a glare at the intervention.
Gingerly, Ellie set her boot into the bucket. The opening only had enough room for one of her feet. The other was left to dangle uncomfortably as she wobbled. She managed to straighten herself, then went into a slow, awkward spin.
“La sahla illa ma ja 'altahu sahla,” Mr. Mahjoud muttered.
“What does that mean?” Ellie pressed curiously.
“It is a dua for trying circumstances,” Mr. Mahjoud retorted with a pointed look at her and turned the winch.
With a jolt, Ellie descended, bumping awkwardly against the tight, evenly cut sides of the shaft. She looked up to see Constance’s face framed in the pale square of the opening.
Adam joined her there, immediately turning a bit green.
The bucket thumped to the ground with an impact that made Ellie’s teeth clack. She scrambled out and tucked herself up against the wall by the lantern as Mr. Mahjoud reeled the bucket back up again.
“It’s perfectly fine,” Ellie lied, hissing up at Adam. “You’ll hardly mind it at all.”
“You should probably scoot,” Adam replied as the bucket reached the top of the shaft again, and he wearily moved to set his foot in it. “In case I puke.”
A narrow opening stood in the wall nearby, just large enough for Ellie to crawl through. She plucked up the lantern—lest Adam’s fear of heights do it any untoward damage—and brought it with her. She emerged in a narrow, unadorned passageway.
A scrape and a muttered curse from behind her marked Adam’s arrival. He spilled through the opening, landed on the floor, and sprawled out his arms as he stared up at the ceiling.
“Maybe it’ll be better on the way up,” he offered without much confidence.
“I’m sure that it will,” Ellie assured him awkwardly. “But now, we’d best get moving. We haven’t any time to waste.”
Adam staggered to his feet, bracing himself with a hand to the wall for a moment before he straightened.
“Guess it’s time to find your brother,” he concluded wearily.