Eight
D usty and sweating in the depths of an eenth Dynasty tomb, Dr. Neil Fairfax put his extensive education in Egyptology and ancient history to work by holding up a piece of wood.
Playing human scaffold for a sturdily built frame covered in stretched canvas was not what Neil had imagined himself doing when he had received his doctorate from Cambridge—but somebody needed to keep it upright until the braces were constructed, and Neil’s foreman, Sayyid Al-Ahmed, was better at building things than Neil was.
Neil’s arms jarred as Sayyid hammered in another nail. “There!” the foreman declared, scrambling to his feet and dusting off his hands.
Sayyid was roughly the same height as Neil but sturdier in build. His neatly trimmed beard was normally the hue of honeyed burnt wood, but at the moment it looked more silver with dust. Instead of the tailored suit and dapper fez that he wore when out and about in Cairo, he was stripped to his waistcoat and bareheaded, his shirt smudged with dirt.
Neil almost certainly looked worse. His tweed waistcoat and bow tie might have been dapper enough when he’d risen that morning but were now amply disheveled. His light brown hair was messy. He plucked off his round gold-rimmed spectacles and gave them a rub on his handkerchief, trying to remove a day’s worth of fingerprints.
The excavation of Horemheb’s funerary chapel had been executed with painstaking attention to conservation and documentation. That included the tomb beneath it, even though the gaps in the rubble-filled doorways told Neil that he wasn’t the first one to penetrate the complex’s secrets. At least one set of thieves had beaten him to it, probably around the time that Caesar had been flirting with Cleopatra.
Neil knew better than to expect to find Horemheb himself at the end of the series of underground chambers and passages. The great general-turned-pharaoh would have been put to rest somewhere in the Valley of the Kings, where archaeologists with more experience—or posher connections—than Neil were granted permission to excavate.
That was fine with Neil. He was happy to be at Saqqara, where three thousand years of occupation offered a unique opportunity to explore the evolution of Egypt’s funerary practices.
He released the wooden frame with a sigh of relief, shaking out his arms. The canvas-covered box was sized to cover the wall of the narrow antechamber in which they stood. It would serve to protect a delicate painting there from damage as they cleared the passage to the next chamber of the tomb.
The way onward was currently blocked with rubble, save for a hole those centuries-old thieves had made in an upper corner. If Neil stood up on his toes, he could peer through it into a passage scattered with debris and distinguished by four evenly spaced columns.
Neil itched to discover what the rest of the tomb would reveal about Horemheb’s early life and the history of the late eenth Dynasty. He would get his chance after they cleared the doorway, which they would begin working on tomorrow. Right now, his stomach was telling him that it was time to call it a day.
“Can we have supper now?” Neil asked.
“One more moment,” Sayyid said, scooting the frame aside to take another look at the painting on the wall.
The mural was a very fine example of late eenth Dynasty bas relief, a find well worth protecting when so much of the artistic material above ground had been destroyed in antiquity or carried off by previous ‘explorers.’ In the relief, Horemheb made offerings to Osiris, who was wrapped in the shroud of a mummy and holding his traditional crook and flail. The god of the dead’s complexion was a rich blue. The black of Horemheb’s wig and the dark umber of his skin had survived as well.
Sayyid had spent the day before stabilizing the ancient painting by applying a light, clear adhesive to any areas where the surviving fragments of color were at risk of flaking away.
Conserving artwork was another thing Sayyid did far better than Neil.
Sayyid had learned his trade at the knees of his father Kamal, who had been possibly the most respected foreman in Egypt during his time. Before he had passed away six years earlier, Kamal had worked under some of the most influential Egyptologists of the last thirty years in digs at Giza and Luxor—managing the day-to-day operations of an excavation for men like Flinders Petrie, Mariette, and Karl Lepsius.
Neil had to admit that Sayyid’s education in Egyptology at his father’s hands had been as comprehensive as anything he might have received at Oxford or the Sorbonne—maybe even better. Neil was often humbled by Sayyid’s detailed knowledge of the latest methods for stabilizing fragile artifacts and his extensive understanding of the various dialects of the Ancient Egyptian language.
As this was Neil’s first Egyptian excavation, he had been relying heavily on Sayyid’s more extensive experience—especially as he frequently had cause to discover that the archaeological methods and ‘best practices’ that he had been taught at Cambridge fell apart in the face of real conditions at the excavation.
All in all, he felt desperately lucky that Sayyid had been available to work on the dig—even if he did keep poking fun at Neil’s mustache.
Neil’s hand rose to the facial hair in question. He had been trying to grow it out since the Eid holiday. Neil had been cursed with a face that perpetually looked younger than it actually was. With his smooth skin and round spectacles, he was regularly mistaken for a student until someone got around to introducing him as ‘doctor.’
He hoped the mustache would help… just as soon as it filled in a bit more. He rubbed awkwardly at the thin growth.
“Poking at it isn’t going to make it any better,” Sayyid noted helpfully as he added another dab of adhesive to a bit of cracked charcoal under Horemheb’s eye.
Neil self-consciously dropped his hand. “It’s still growing in.”
“I have seen better mustaches on donkey boys,” Sayyid returned cheerfully. “Perhaps instead of worrying over your not-a-mustache, you might copy down another section of those hieroglyphs.”
“I’m not worrying over my mustache,” Neil retorted. “I am waiting for you to finish up so we can eat.” His stomach punctuated the thought with an audible growl.
“I will stop soon enough—it is nearly time to pray.” Sayyid made another delicate line with his brush. “Just one more section.”
With a sigh, Neil pulled out his notebook and pencil. He moved to the part of the wall where he had left off transcribing earlier that day.
Sometimes, despite the Cambridge-certified letters after his name, Neil felt as though Sayyid were really the one in charge, and he was the assistant. He might have found that slightly mortifying—if it wasn’t far less mortifying than the thought of bungling things because he insisted on being in charge while Sayyid painfully looked on.
He knew that point of view wasn’t one that many of his fellow archaeologists would share. He’d heard the disdainful way they talked about their Egyptian excavation workers back at Cambridge. But maybe they had never had someone like Sayyid on their digs… or perhaps they were simply so sure of their own superiority, it had never occurred to them to look for talent anywhere else.
Neil had never been particularly sure of his superiority at much of anything.
He pushed his attention to the hieroglyphs, carefully copying down the next line.
“Make sure you don’t mix up the ideogram for ear with a measure of grain again,” Sayyid helpfully suggested.
Neil’s cheeks burned. “It’s a perfectly reasonable mistake. They both consist of the exact same curling line from the eye of Horus.”
“Yes, but the ear retains the vertical line, and the grain does not,” Sayyid pointed out.
“You Egyptians talk about grain far more than you talk about ears,” Neil grumbled.
“Ah yes,” Sayyid easily replied. “I’m sure that is it.”
“Sometimes I wonder why I’m even here,” Neil complained.
“To be fair, you are the one who found the tomb,” Sayyid cheerfully allowed. “If you hadn’t changed the site location, we’d still be sifting through sand thirty meters away.”
Neil supposed he could take credit for that. When he had arrived at Saqqara two years earlier to start the dig, one look at the landscape where they were meant to excavate had left him with the nagging sense that they were in the wrong place.
He’d been terrified to push his funders to move everything ninety feet to the east—but the notion of spending months churning through dirt in a spot he knew in his bones was wrong had been even more unbearable.
Not that Neil could have told anyone why the site was wrong. When asked, he had rattled off an elaborate justification based on Ancient Egyptian measurement systems and the relative ranking of known courtiers during the reign of Tutankhamun—all of which was entirely true. But none of it had actually passed through his thoughts when he had looked at the stretch of rubble-strewn desert and known, No—it’s over there.
That hadn’t been the first time some itching instinct had pushed Neil in a particular historical direction. He had come to think of those seemingly out-of-the-blue notions as the result of some unconscious mental process. It wasn’t that they came from nowhere or were mere ‘lucky guesses,’ but rather that his mind coughed up a conclusion after surreptitiously rifling through the extensive library of all the theses, excavation reports, and journal articles that Neil had consumed over his years of study.
Whatever lay behind his hunches, he had learned to trust them—and that if he didn’t, he’d be left feeling uncomfortable and dissatisfied, like a man forced into a wool coat without a shirt.
Neil’s hunch about Saqqara had proved accurate when they had uncovered the upper extent of the funerary temple pylon in the first week of digging. He’d received a hearty pat on the back from his funders, and with Sayyid’s capable help, the temple had revealed its secrets—including the passages and chambers of the subterranean tomb complex where Neil now worked to copy down more of the characters carved into the wall.
“ Person… disturb… tomb… ” he muttered aloud, working through the translation as he marked down the hieroglyphs. “ No life… enemies… me? ”
“Looks like you found a curse,” Sayyid noted.
Neil mentally translated the rest and hid a smile. “I don’t think you’re going to like it,” he replied, his tone deceptively mild.
“Oh?” Sayyid returned distractedly.
With a hint of wicked delight, Neil read the words out loud in Egyptian. “ Keper ir’ef… her tah… ”
“Not keh,” Sayyid automatically corrected him. “ Khaa. ” The syllable rasped in the back of his throat. “Like the Arabic.”
“Khuuargh,” Neil tried.
“No,” Sayyid replied.
“Carrrgh.”
“Khaa,” Sayyid replied, making the sound again. “Khaa.”
“Auuugch.”
Sayyid’s understanding of the Ancient Egyptian language was exceptional—which was saying something, since the original pronunciation of the words had been lost for over a thousand years. Scholars had been working to reconstruct it—most of them Americans or Europeans. It was a true challenge, since the Egyptian hieroglyphs that represented sounds only covered consonants, leaving out the vowels.
Sayyid’s father, Kamal, had quietly devoted himself to the task in his later years. While many academics had identified Coptic as the surviving tongue that likely came closest to resembling Ancient Egyptian, Kamal had drawn on his knowledge of several other languages in the region, including various dialects of Arabic, to inform his work. After all, it made far more sense that the phonemes of Ancient Egyptian would align with those of other languages of the Levant and North Africa than with Latin-based languages like English and French.
Kamal had been working on a lexicon, which was left unfinished when he died. Neil had never been able to examine it himself—it had been written in Arabic, of course, a language he was barely learning to speak, never mind read—but his conversations with Sayyid had convinced him that, even incomplete, the book must be an exceptional piece of scholarship.
“I could use a bit of help with this,” Neil prodded, suppressing any note of mischief from his voice.
With a sigh, Sayyid pulled his attention from the painting, shifting his gaze to Neil’s hieroglyphs.
“ Kheper ir’ef her tah ,” he read easily, making a perfect khaa in the back of his throat. “ In kheper wanam’ef sen. ”
Reaching the end of the line, Sayyid blanched.
“‘As for the person who disturbs this tomb,’” Neil translated with a hint of devilish glee. “‘The scarab is set against him on land. It is the scarab who will eat.’”
“Eat him ,” Sayyid corrected him a little queasily. “You’re forgetting the pronoun, ef.”
“Ah yes,” Neil agreed brightly. “Let me see now. That would make it… ‘It is the scarab who will eat him .’ Isn’t that colorful?”
Neil might have noticed that his foreman had a bit of a phobia of bugs.
“Scarabs are meant to be very… er, lucky,” Sayyid countered weakly.
“I don’t think they’re meant to be lucky for this fellow,” Neil countered. He read off the next line. “ It will destroy you. You will perish completely. ”
Sayyid cleared his throat. “This section looks very stable, anyway,” he concluded deliberately and turned away.
Neil suppressed a snort, moving on to the next line in the inscription. It was a tricky one, using glyph combinations that were somewhat less conventional for the period.
“Dashed Late Egyptian creeping in already,” he grumbled, half aware of the sound of footsteps hurrying down the stairs to the antechamber. With his concentration locked on the wall, he only vaguely registered that the figure that popped into view out of the corner of his eye wasn’t one of the workers from above but rather a young woman in a gray poplin skirt and waistcoat. Unruly chestnut hair escaped from under her straw boater hat and a spray of freckles danced across her nose.
Just Ellie, Neil thought automatically as he frowned at a chipped section of the text. “Hold on a minute, Peanut,” he said absently. “I need to figure out if this is a viper or a cobra.”
Behind him, Sayyid straightened, blinking with surprise as he looked from Neil to the woman in the doorway.
Ellie came closer, peering at the hieroglyphs over Neil’s shoulder. “Cobra,” she concluded. “It’s being used as the ‘f’ pronoun, for the masculine third person.”
“Pronouns again!” Neil grumbled—and then it clicked.
Ellie interrupting his work wasn’t unusual… in England.
But Neil wasn’t in England.
His eyes went wide as he whirled to face his baby stepsister, his pencil falling from his fingers. “Ellie!” he exclaimed, pulling her into a hug and then immediately pushing her back to blink at her. “But this is Egypt! You’re not supposed to be in Egypt! What are you doing here?”
“I am sorry to ambush you like this,” Ellie admitted uncomfortably as she stood right in front of him, where she absolutely should not have been. “There have been some… unexpected developments since I last wrote. I shall fill you in on all of them in just a little while, I promise, but at this precise moment I am afraid we have a slightly more urgent matter to attend to—namely whether you have uncovered any… er…” Ellie trailed off, frowning as she stared at Neil’s face. “I’m sorry. Is there something on your lip?”
“What? No!” Neil released her to rub uncomfortably at the fine growth of his nascent mustache.
“This is all very surprising,” Sayyid commented.
“Oh! I’m terribly sorry.” Ellie extended her hand. “Miss Eleanora Mallory. I’m Dr. Fairfax’s sister.”
“Sayyid Al-Ahmed,” Sayyid replied.
“But what I meant to ask is—have you come across any artifacts in your recent work here that might have referenced something… well, a little Biblical?” Ellie pressed.
“Biblical?” Neil echoed dumbly.
His impossibly present little sister took in his bewildered expression. “I suppose that’s a no, then.” She cast an assessing look at the blocked doorway to the next passage. “But you’ve only gone into part of the tomb?”
“We are working our way through one chamber at a time,” Neil retorted a little defensively. “There is a great deal of conservation work to be done along the way, and…” He paused, shaking himself as if waking once again from a dream. “But do our parents know you’re here? What about your job? How did you even get here?!”
“Not exactly. I don’t have one anymore. And on a boat,” Ellie replied in neat sequence. “Now, if we could please save the rest for later. We only have a few minutes at most before that villain and your amir reach the tomb shaft.”
“ Villain? ” Neil echoed, paling.
“Is your Peanut always this exciting?” Sayyid asked with a touch of awe.
“What? No. She’s… Well, I suppose maybe a bit…” Neil hedged thoughtfully, and then caught himself. “Hold on—what villain?”
“He is after a clue which will point to the location of an extremely important artifact—one which he cannot be allowed to find.” Ellie looked around the antechamber, her boot tapping thoughtfully on the ground. She eyed the rubble blocking the way to the passage. “Anything of importance to the Egyptians would have been placed with the interred remains of the deceased. If it were possible to find and secure it before Dawson arrived…” She turned to face him, her expression a little apologetic. “How much trouble would it be if we were to push directly through to the burial chamber?”
“What—now?” Neil blurted back, his sense of alarm rising. “But you haven’t explained anything! How are you here? Who are these villains you’re raving about? What does any of this have to do with the Bible?”
Before Ellie could answer, a second intruder hopped into Neil’s tomb, his boots clumping heavily against the floor at the foot of the stairs.
The new arrival had the broad-shouldered physique of a wrestler. He straightened, pushing back the brim of his battered fedora to reveal a sun-kissed complexion—and a pair of very familiar bright blue eyes.
“Hey, Fairfax,” Adam Bates said uneasily.
Neil stared slack-jawed at his friend… who was supposed to be living on the other side of the world. “How are you…” he began helplessly.
“It’s kind of a long story…” Adam started.
Neil whirled to Sayyid. “Do you see him?”
“The large American with the very blue eyes?” Sayyid carefully returned.
Neil put his fingers to his temples. “I am not going mad,” he determined. “But this is… this is too much! First Ellie—who’s supposed to be in London cataloging government documents, and now you—who ought to be in British Honduras surveying land grants! Is everyone I’ve ever met going to turn up in this tomb today? Either one of you would have been an utter surprise, but the sheer coincidence that the two of you show up here at the exact same time…”
Sayyid’s eyebrows lifted skeptically. Ellie and Adam exchanged an uncomfortable look.
“Right, sorry,” Neil said, catching himself. “You haven’t actually met. Ellie, this is Adam Bates, my old friend from Cambridge. Bates, this is my sister, Ellie.”
All three of them—Adam, Ellie, and Sayyid—stared at Neil as if he’d just announced that he was going to marry a badger.
“What?” Neil asked a little irritably. “What did I say?”
“Should I, uh…” Adam began awkwardly, his words addressed to Ellie.
“I suppose we had better,” Ellie agreed grimly. “If we can find a way to do it quickly.”
An odd silence followed. Adam’s gaze drifted to the ceiling of the antechamber.
“Nice crocodile lady you’ve got there,” he commented, nodding at one of the figures painted on the plaster.
“That would be the goddess Ammit,” Ellie explained thinly without looking up. “The devourer of the hearts of the dead.”
Sayyid coughed suspiciously.
At that moment, as if to prove that the day could in fact get even more mad than it already was, a third intruder burst into the antechamber.
Neil’s latest uninvited visitor wore a fashionable white lawn dress and appeared by way of sliding down the steeply inclined frame of the stairs on her neatly laced kid boots. She landed in the midst of Neil and the others with a violent grace and a puff of dust.
With a neat tug, she loosened the scarf tied under her chin and plucked off her enormous hat. Neil found himself looking down into a heart-shaped face punctuated by bottomless brown eyes and a thick mane of dark chocolate hair, which had been whipped into an elegant Gibson tuck.
It was an exceptionally pretty face, and Neil stood up a little straighter.
“Oh!” he said, self-consciously adjusting his bow tie. “I’m sorry. You’ve arrived in the middle of…” His throat tightened with nerves, and he changed tactics. “Er, that is to say, this tomb isn’t currently open to tourists, as we are still in the process of—”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to save the lecture,” the extremely attractive woman cut in authoritatively. “That professor has spotted the tomb shaft, and Mr. Mahjoud won’t be able to delay him for much longer.”
The sound of her voice sparked a bolt of recognition through Neil’s brain, memory painting itself over the womanly features before him—of a small face dwarfed by the same pair of enormous brown eyes, which shone devilishly at him as they popped up from behind his desk, nearly making him spill his tea. Of his notes on Greco-Roman trade routes being turned into paper airplanes. New marginalia appearing in his textbooks, mostly depicting battle scenes drenched in red ink.
Of the sense of sheer horror that had swept over him every time he heard a particular set of unnaturally heavy footfalls on the stairs—and knew that Ellie had invited her most terrifying friend over to play.
The danger gnome, Neil had called her.
Now the danger gnome was here. In his tomb. Looking… gorgeous.
“Connie?!” Neil burst out, the words tight with confusion.
“Hello, Stuffy.” Constance cast a considering gaze over Neil’s person. “You’re looking well.” Her assessment stopped at his mustache, and she frowned. “But have you got a bit of soot on your lip?”
Neil wondered if it might be possible for him to sink into his shoes and disappear.
“Are you certain this one is not the Peanut?” Sayyid pressed, blinking at the diminutive new arrival.
“But did you see who was with Professor Dawson?” Ellie demanded urgently. “Was Jacobs there?”
“Tall? Dark hair? Expression kinda like that crocodile lady on the ceiling?” Adam offered helpfully.
“I didn’t get a chance to look,” Constance replied. “It all happened rather quickly. Mr. Mahjoud was set on boosting me over the temple walls, and I only barely managed to get into the tomb shaft instead.”
“But why would you do that?” Neil exclaimed. “Why would you climb into the shaft?”
“To warn the rest of you,” Constance returned.
“About what?” Neil’s volume had risen again.
“The imminent arrival of the villains, of course,” Constance said as though the answer ought to have been perfectly obvious.
Neil began to feel dizzy.
“Should we go?” Adam asked.
Bizarrely, he appeared to be directing the question to Ellie.
“We would be leaving whatever is here in Dawson’s hands,” Ellie replied with a tight desperation.
“I am afraid there is most likely not much here at all—at least that would be of interest to thieves,” Sayyid informed her. “Though the entrance to this tomb complex was still intact, it is already quite clear the entirety of it was looted in antiquity. There is still plenty left of scholarly interest, of course, but anything of more obvious value would have been taken from here nearly two thousand years ago. If your Dawson is a treasure hunter, he will most likely be disappointed.”
“Dawson is after a different sort of treasure,” Ellie retorted grimly.
“Hold on!” Neil pressed his hands to his temples. “If this Dawson person you all keep going on about is some kind of tomb robber, our men will stop him. None of this is necessary!”
“Didn’t you hear me?” Constance returned. “Dawson is here with your amir! Your men aren’t going to go up against the fellow who provides the funds for their pay, are they?”
“But that doesn’t make any sense!” Neil protested wildly. “Why would my amir bring a thief to the tomb?”
“More importantly, how shall we get whatever we find past him?” Constance pressed with an unsettling excitement. “We will need to stage an ambush. Mr. Bates has his machete, and I took the precaution of securing a few knives about my person in the usual spots—”
“Knives?!” Neil echoed, blanching.
“I am more interested to learn that there are ‘usual spots,’” Sayyid added, looking both impressed and intimidated.
“We must be able to think of a better plan than a knife-fighting melee!” Ellie protested. Her look shifted, turning to one of avaricious interest. “Perhaps there is something chemically volatile down here…”
“No explosions,” Adam cut in quickly. “Or plans. If we wanna stop Dawson from getting whatever’s down here, we’re gonna have to wing it.”
“I suppose you are right.” Ellie crossed to the crumbling gap in the rubble that blocked the doorway to the next chamber. “Could I get a leg up?”
Adam… blushed .
Neil wasn’t sure he had ever seen Adam blush before.
“I mean—might I have a boost to the opening?” Ellie amended primly.
Her cheeks had turned a little pink.
“Boost. Right,” Adam returned, crossing over and forming his hands into a stirrup. “Here you go, Princess.”
Ellie set her boot into his grip and squirmed through the opening, her sturdy walking boots disappearing from his view.
Neil gaped at the place where they had been. “Did my sister just crawl into the unsurveyed portion of the tomb?”
“It would appear so,” Sayyid said from beside him, looking pale.
“Lend another lady a hand?” Constance asked cheerfully.
“Of course,” Adam agreed, launching her up behind Ellie.
“And why did Bates call my sister ‘Princess?’” Neil asked, bewildered.
Sayyid gave him a long, surprised blink. “Have you not… Did it not seem to you that…”
Neil stared at him blankly, waiting for him to elaborate.
Sayyid clamped his mouth shut.
“Either of you need a lift?” Adam called over, sounding a little tired.
“Allahumma la sahla illa maa ja’altahu sahlan,” Sayyid recited with a shake of his head. “At least I can try to make sure they do not damage the paintings.”
Without waiting for Neil, he crossed over and wriggled through the gap.
“But procedure…” Neil began helplessly. “Proper survey methods… Stabilization…”
Adam scooped a coil of rope up from the dig supplies on the floor. His eyes flashed with sympathy as he clamped a warm hand on Neil’s shoulder—and then used it to steer Neil toward the door. “Come on, Fairfax. Looks like we’re gonna raid your tomb.”