Fourteen
N eil let Adam drag him along, his pace hurried by the sound of a terrifying croak from across the canal. He lagged back once Adam released him, less than enthusiastic about joining the party gathered in Sayyid’s office.
It felt as though someone had tossed him from the comfortable perch of his ordinary life into a dark and possibly bottomless rabbit hole. Only a few hours earlier, Neil had been happily translating curses in a properly documented tomb antechamber with Sayyid. Now he was hiding in a house he hadn’t known existed, worrying about the future of both his excavation and his employment, and all over a magical staff he was fairly certain he didn’t believe in.
The thought made him want to turn right around and march back out into the night… only he was feeling utterly wrung out, and a crocodile lurked outside. One that might even now be enjoying the supper he had left behind.
The thought made him want to cry.
He forced himself to keep going. After all, what was worse—pushing forward with the lunatic plan everyone had been cheerfully discussing earlier, or being left out of it entirely to wonder what sort of madness was going to be inflicted upon him next?
That, and there was the desperately intriguing matter of the Atenist ring.
Neil had been working on his theory about the connection between the Aten cult and the rise of monotheism among the Hebrews for nearly a decade. To have finally found a piece of concrete evidence for his hypothesis was earth-shattering. If there was a chance that the hieratic inscription in the jewelry box might shed more light on Moses’ true identity, he couldn’t possibly bring himself to miss it—even if he had to swallow his thoughts on the matter of magical staffs to do it.
He followed Bates into Sayyid’s office. The space was another unsettling revelation—a cozy nest with a cluttered desk and a comfortable armchair where Neil would have happily whiled away quiet hours of research. There were shelves stuffed with books. A thickly woven carpet with just the right amount of wear covered the floor. A few scattered artifacts—items from Sayyid’s father’s personal collection—punctuated the walls and cases.
Neil could vividly imagine Sayyid holed up in here after a long day at the excavation, consolidating his notes from the dig or picking away at a bit of his linguistic work.
At the sound of Neil’s footsteps in the doorway, Mrs. Al-Ahmed flashed him a distinctly disapproving look, making it abundantly clear who she blamed for both the unexpected interruption of her evening with her husband and the fact that he’d been possibly-perhaps shot at.
Ellie stood by the bookshelves, studying the titles on the spines. Adam joined her there, and the warm look she gave him as he arrived made Neil feel both guilty and utterly dismayed at the same time.
Constance perched on the edge of the desk, shamelessly spying over Sayyid’s notes. Neil was still reeling from the discovery that the exasperating little ball of energy once hell-bent on disturbing his study habits had turned into this creature of thick eyelashes and feminine curves.
Danger gnome, he thought to himself furiously. If he could keep reminding himself of how she used to play MacBeth in the attic—complete with weapons and screaming—perhaps it might keep him from thinking about what her legs looked like under that lawn dress… where she kept her knife hidden.
He suppressed the urge to groan.
“So what’s this inscription tell us about the Moseh from the ring?” Adam leaned against the built-in bookcase with a naturally leonine grace that Neil couldn’t have imitated if he tried.
“Nothing, as it happens,” Sayyid replied a little distractedly, rubbing at the thinning hair at the top of his head.
“Nothing?” Ellie echoed with obvious dismay.
“The inscription does not mention Moseh ,” Sayyid explained.
“Who does it mention?” Neil pressed, picking up on Sayyid’s suggestive tone.
Sayyid glanced significantly at Neil and recited his response from his sheet of notes. “That the true story be known of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Living in Truth, Lord of the Two Lands, Lord of Crowns… The Most Beautiful of the Beautiful Ones of the Aten.”
Recognition burst to glorious life in Neil’s head at the sound of that final phrase.
The Most Beautiful of the Beautiful Ones of the Aten.
The words weren’t just another royal title. They were a name—one of the most intriguing names in Egyptian history.
“Neferneferuaten!” Neil blurted out.
Sayyid grinned back at him with boyish excitement. “Neferneferuaten,” he confirmed.
“Oh!” Ellie’s eyes widened with understanding.
“That’s…” Neil began, stammering with excitement. “Have you any notion… I mean, of course you do! But Sayyid… This is…”
“Utterly meaningless to the rest of us,” Constance filled in with a note of exasperation. “Really, you Egyptologists!”
“I’m sorry,” Ellie piped in, shaking herself out of her shock. “It’s only that Neferneferuaten is… well, possibly the biggest mystery of the Amarna Period, if not the entire Eighteenth Dynasty!”
She shifted her gaze to Neil as though waiting for him to take over… probably because he’d been nattering to her about Neferneferuaten for years now. In fact, the only reason he’d done his dissertation on Eighteenth Dynasty administrative units in Lower Egypt was because basing a thesis on his theories about Neferneferuaten would have been considered positively fringe.
Ellie continued talking, and Neil realized he’d been staring back at her speechless instead of picking up the opening she had been trying to hand him.
“The name Neferneferuaten appears within a royal cartouche on a few artifacts recovered from the ruins of Akhetaten—Akhenaten’s capital city at Tell al-Amarna,” Ellie pressed on helpfully.
“So this Neferneferuaten was a pharaoh,” Adam filled in.
“He must have been,” Ellie agreed, “but there’s so little evidence, we haven’t the foggiest idea who he was or how he ended up sitting on the throne. It’s an utter mystery—so much so that some scholars question whether Neferneferuaten actually existed.”
“Of course he existed!” Neil burst out, crossing over to the desk, where Constance had hopped up to sit. “One doesn’t run about making up imaginary pharaohs and putting their names in cartouches. Neferneferuaten must have ruled sometime during the three years between the death of Akhenaten and the ascension of King Tutankhamun.” He looked helplessly over Sayyid’s notes—all of which were in Arabic. “Akhenaten died suddenly and unexpectedly, and—”
“How?” Constance demanded.
Neil realized that in his hurry to see what Sayyid had found, he had ended up leaning across her lap. He snapped upright. A furious rush of blood pinked the tips of his ears.
The danger gnome blinked at him innocently.
“A plague, actually,” Neil replied awkwardly.
Her eyes widened. They really were the most remarkably rich brown.
“Like the sort that a Biblical staff might toss at you?” she pressed.
“No!” Neil protested. “Just… an entirely ordinary sort of plague. The perfectly non-magical variety. It killed a great many slaves and courtiers as well as members of the royal family, like Akhenaten’s mother and possibly one or two of his daughters—and he only had daughters,” he added pointedly. “When he got ill himself, he must have been left scrambling to appoint an heir to his throne—someone he trusted to keep his greatest achievement, the cult of the Aten, alive after he was gone.”
“Only that didn’t work out very well, because the heir he chose—Neferneferuaten—could only have survived for perhaps three years after Akhenaten’s death,” Ellie added. “After that, the boy Tutankhamun was named king.”
“Now, we know Tut was of royal blood.” Neil started to pace as he fell into the alluring rhythm of this familiar story. “He was probably descended from Akhenaten in some less obvious way—perhaps the child of a concubine or a grandson by one of his daughters. He was most likely placed on the throne by some of Akhenaten’s most powerful courtiers, who continued to serve prominently within Tut’s administration… courtiers who had absolutely no interest in maintaining Akhenaten’s monotheistic experiment,” Neil added with a note of bitterness. “They waited just long enough to make sure Tutankhamun was firmly settled in as pharaoh, and then they abandoned the capital Akhenaten had built at Amarna. The Aten temples were left to fall into ruin while support and tribute swung back to the priests of all Egypt’s other gods.”
“So these court guys were just there in the background waiting for this Neferneferuaten to get out of the way?” Adam suggested. “And then they put a kid on the throne and rule through him to put stuff back the way they wanted?”
“They might have done a bit more than wait,” Neil cut back—and hesitated. He was about to venture off the archaeological record and into the realm of speculation. Neil tried to make it a point never to speculate. He was a scholar, after all—not a spiritualist. His theories and conclusions were always based on hard data… even if he occasionally came to them by way of a tiny jolt of intuition to begin with.
“In possible support of that theory,” Sayyid said carefully, “we know that Tutankhamun must have died only shortly after reaching manhood. And the pharaoh who succeeded him was not a member of the royal line at all, but rather Ay, who had been one of Akhenaten’s leading viziers.”
“So this Ay is some big shot adviser,” Adam drawled, tapping the points out on his fingers. “The radical religious nut of a king dies. You get a couple years with this other person—the mysterious Neferneferuaten—and then Ay puts a baby king on the throne. Only the baby king mysteriously dies just when he’s getting old enough to have his own ideas about things, and Ay conveniently takes it all over for himself. That about right?”
“That is… a fairly accurate summary,” Neil admitted. “As pharaoh, Ay goes even further to dismantle the Aten cult. He actually started scraping Akhenaten’s image off of monuments and temples all over Egypt—as though Ay hoped to erase his former master from history.”
“Probably because Ay’s rise to power was supported by the high priests of the other gods,” Sayyid added, “who had been starved for income and patronage during Akhenaten’s reign. It is not an unreasonable theory, as Dr. Fairfax and I have previously discussed.”
Neil felt a little burst of warmth at his words. They had discussed it, of course—Neil rattling on about one of his favorite subjects while Sayyid interrupted him with pointed observations or challenging questions, bringing his own detailed knowledge of the period to bear. It had been an infinitely satisfying experience.
“All these other priests wanted things to go back to the good old days, then,” Adam summarized.
“Oh, almost certainly,” Sayyid agreed.
“And what about the rest of the inscription?” Mrs. Al-Ahmed prompted.
Neil startled. For a moment, he’d forgotten that Sayyid’s wife was in the room—sitting quietly in the armchair in the corner like a waiting queen disdainfully eyeing her squabbling subjects.
“You know, the one that we have all gathered to hear translated?” she added wryly.
Sayyid unerringly plucked a piece of paper from the clutter on his desk. “That the true story be known of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Living in Truth, Lord of the Two Lands, Lord of Crowns Neferneferuaten, last bearer of the Power of Khemenu,” he read, “seek behind the sun disk in the Holy of Holies of Maat-ka-re Khnemet Amun Hatshepsut.” He set the paper down. “Except that the word isn’t exactly power,” he added pointedly.
Ellie straightened in her seat, her attention on the foreman sharpening. A feeling of uncomfortable suspicion crept over Neil’s skin.
“It’s was ,” Sayyid finished significantly.
“Was?” Adam asked. “What was?”
“Not was,” Neil replied tightly as the significance of Sayyid’s words bloomed inside his skull. “ Was .”
“‘Was’ is an Egyptian word,” Ellie explained with growing excitement. “It can mean power—divine or supernatural power. Or it can refer to an object that represents that power.”
Adam met her gaze, obviously sensing the breathless promise in her voice. “And what object would that be?”
“A staff,” Neil answered hollowly as he felt the ground start to give way beneath him.
Constance gasped with delight. Ellie and Adam shared a look that was dark with import.
Mrs. Al-Ahmed’s gaze was as sharp and careful as glass.
“The was-scepter,” Sayyid elaborated. “It is a ritual object with a distinct shape modeled after the Set beast.”
“Slender nose,” Neil recited automatically. “Long ears. Forked tail.”
“You see them depicted all over Egyptian art,” Ellie added. “Was-scepters are held by gods, or pharaohs, or very high-ranking priests.”
“Where there is a was-scepter,” Sayyid noted deliberately, “there is an intimation that the bearer possesses power over the spiritual essence that shapes and animates all living things.”
“So it’s a magic wand!” Constance declared brightly.
Neil stared at her in horror.
“Er… I suppose one could frame it that way,” Ellie hedged uncomfortably.
“So we’ve got a ring that says Moses and an inscription about a magic staff.” Adam raised an eyebrow. “The rest of you thinking what I’m thinking?”
Neil felt trapped. The thrilling, comfortable academic space he had inhabited a moment before seemed to suddenly dissolve into a swamp that threatened to swallow him.
Magic. They were talking about magic.
“But the staff in the inscription is Neferneferuaten’s!” he protested. “What does Neferneferuaten have to do with Moses?”
“Do you really not know a proper clue when it’s staring you in the face?” Constance pressed with a note of exasperation. “His ring was in the same box as the inscription. Really—one would think you had never read an adventure novel in your life!”
“I haven’t!” Neil exclaimed, bewildered.
“We can’t know for certain that they are connected,” Ellie reasoned firmly. “Not yet. But that’s exactly what we need to find out.”
“The Holy of Holies of the pharaoh Hatshepsut,” Sayyid mused. “That will be her funerary temple at Deir al-Bahari in Luxor.”
“Her?” Constance brightened with interest.
“Hatshepsut was a woman,” Ellie explained. “She claimed the throne after the death of her husband and ruled for nearly twenty years.”
“Her funerary temple has been thoroughly excavated,” Sayyid informed them. “I have never heard of any mention of Neferneferuaten being found there.”
“Then they must have done a good job of hiding it,” Ellie retorted stubbornly.
“Well, then.” Adam pushed back from the bookcase, straightening. “Sounds like we’re going to Luxor.”
Neil’s growing dismay descended into panic. “ What?! ”
The word came out at a more potent volume than he had strictly intended.
“Where else would we go?” Constance retorted as though Neil were being a bit thick.
He clamped his mouth shut, momentarily speechless.
“Or…” Ellie countered grimly. “If we could know for certain that this is the only clue left behind in Mutnedjmet’s tomb, then we might simply destroy it now and be done with it.”
“ Destroy it? ” Neil burst back wildly.
Ellie met his eyes. Her hazel gaze looked hollow. “I know it sounds terrible. But you have no idea what’s at stake here.”
“If Fairfax’s theories are right, and the lady in that tomb today was Nefertiti’s sister, she would have been part of Akhenaten’s court at the same time as this Moseh,” Adam pointed out. “There’s no way to know whether some other reference to him might still be lying around in there—however long it might take an idiot like Dawson to make sense of it,” he finished wryly.
Ellie’s gaze dropped to the jewelry box. A telltale crease marked the space between her eyebrows. Years ago, Neil would’ve reached out and skimmed his thumb over it.
What are you doing?
Just rubbing the worry out.
He hadn’t done that in a very long time.
“You’re right,” Ellie finally admitted. Her expression firmed into one of determination. “The only way we can be certain the staff doesn’t fall into Dawson’s hands is to find it first ourselves.”
“That settles it, then,” Constance concluded confidently. “Luxor it is.”
Nothing about this felt settled to Neil. He looked around the room frantically for someone else who might recognize the lunacy of what they were talking about.
Adam looked worried—but also determined. Sayyid’s mouth was creased into a thoughtful frown, but he wasn’t protesting. Neil’s frantic gaze moved past him—and stopped with a startled jolt as he realized that Mrs. Al-Ahmed was staring at him. Her green eyes were narrowed as though Neil were a dubious insect squirming under a microscope.
Neil swallowed thickly, forcing out one last final desperate attempt to make them see reason. “But… but shouldn’t we at least consider…”
Everyone turned to look at him as though surprised that he was speaking.
“…Perhaps just trying to speak with Mr. Forster-Mowbray?” Neil’s words threatened to devolve into a squeak. “It is only that he has always presented himself as a respectable sort of person, and it’s possible that he simply doesn’t realize that this Dawson fellow is some sort of… nefarious…” He swallowed thickly against a throat made dry by desperation. “If… if we just tried to explain…”
They were all staring at him as though he were the lunatic in the room.
He was Dr. Neil Fairfax, the Cambridge-trained archaeologist entrusted with the excavation of Horemheb’s Saqqara tomb. He was supposed to be in charge .
The thought made Neil stiffen his spine. “If we simply explained what all this is about,” he continued more firmly, “we might clear up a very big misunderstanding and make everything a great deal simpler. Perhaps Mr. Forster-Mowbray and the Athenaeum would even grant us the funds to follow up on this… er, academic detour.”
“That won’t be necessary. We’re quite all right for cash.” Constance plunged her hand into the bosom of her dirt-streaked lawn dress and pulled out a wad of banknotes. “I brought a modest emergency fund with me, as I usually do when headed on an adventure.”
Neil realized that his jaw was hanging open. He snapped it shut.
“M-modest…” he echoed helplessly.
He forced his eyes to fix on the pile of bills. It kept them from shifting back to Constance’s nicely rounded bosom.
“Pfft. This is only part of it,” Constance said dismissively. “I’m hardly going to keep it all hidden in one place, am I?”
“But where else could you hide it?” Neil blurted out.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Constance returned with a wink.
Neil’s ears reddened again. Danger gnome , he reminded himself frantically.
“So—Luxor,” Adam cut in. “We’ll need to catch the train, but we can’t leave out of Badrashin. Dawson and his cronies will certainly look for us there.”
“The next station south is at Al-Ayyat,” Sayyid offered. “It’s a little over twenty-five kilometers. If you ride, you can be there in about four hours. But to catch the Luxor service, you would have to leave early—no later than five.” He looked at his wife. “Do you think Mr. Jabari would be willing to lend his animals for the trip at that hour?”
“He’ll be up,” Mrs. Al-Ahmed asserted confidently. “He has gout.”
Constance clapped her hands with delight. “We can disguise ourselves as a Bedouin sheikh and his harem!”
“Nobody is going to believe that you lot are Bedouin.” Mrs. Al-Ahmed looked as though she were barely resisting the urge to roll her eyes.
“What if we have camels?” Constance pressed.
Adam’s eyes lit up at the mention of dromedaries.
“No camels,” Sayyid replied with a hint of sympathy. “There are only donkeys.”
“Be tourists,” Mrs. Al-Ahmed instructed flatly. “There are enough of you about even at this time of year, like a plague of locusts.”
“Then that is what we shall do.” Ellie rose to her feet. “I’m afraid we can’t take the risk of allowing Mr. Forster-Mowbray to have any notion of where we have gone. If he’s associated with Dawson, trusting him is simply too dangerous. I’m sorry,” she added with an uncomfortable look at Neil.
“And he did order his lackeys to shoot at us,” Constance pointed out helpfully.
“He couldn’t…” Neil spluttered. “He wouldn’t possibly have…”
“I heard at least three bullets,” she asserted breezily as she tucked the cash back into her corset.
“I am not precisely certain whether I heard anything at all,” Sayyid said quickly with an uncomfortable glance at his wife.
“I do need to get a message back home,” Constance conceded. “My family are sure to be frantic otherwise. Well—they will most likely be frantic either way, but at least if I send a telegram, they will be less quick to send the police and the army after us. And something will need to be done about Mr. Mahjoud. He must still be back at Saqqara and is certain to be worried.”
“I find it kinda hard to imagine Mr. M worried,” Adam said. “Exasperated and vaguely annoyed? Sure.”
“We can send Mr. Jabari’s grandson,” Mrs. Al-Ahmed declared. “He can deliver a note to the telegram operator at the Badrashin station to send on to Cairo and then locate your dragoman to let him know that you are safe.”
In the silence that followed, Ellie cast an awkward and hopeful look at Sayyid… one that filled Neil with a sudden sense of dread.
“I know it is a tremendous imposition, Sayyid… but would you consider joining us?” Ellie asked. “I cannot promise you that the endeavor would be without risk, but your skills would make you an invaluable addition to our party.”
Neil wanted to protest. The words demanding that Sayyid refuse were on the tip of his tongue… because he very much did not want Sayyid to go. He wanted to turn the clock back five hours and return to teasing his foreman about his fear of bugs in the quiet of the antechamber—before he had learned that his best friend had all-but-ruined his sister, seen his brainless boss accused of throwing in with a cabal of thieves, and been calmly informed that the world was full of dangerous magical artifacts.
In the waiting stillness of the office, it seemed as though Sayyid’s next words would be the key to all of that—the pivot on which Neil’s entire future balanced. He desperately wanted to protest, but stayed quiet. Despite the storm that raged in his gut, Neil knew he had no right to make Sayyid’s decision for him.
Sayyid shot Neil an uncomfortable glance, and then looked at his wife. Mrs. Al-Ahmed gave her husband a small, clear nod.
“Yes,” he finally answered. “I will come.”
Neil felt the last remaining fragments of his comfortable world quietly shatter.
“Well! That settles that, then,” Constance said cheerfully.
“Five o’clock’s gonna come around early,” Adam observed tiredly.
“We should all get some sleep,” Ellie agreed.
“I will gather you blankets,” Mrs. Al-Ahmed offered. “This way.”
She led them out. Ellie and the others followed—all except Sayyid.
“Will you come as well?” Sayyid tentatively asked.
Neil realized with a horrified jolt that no one else had bothered to pose the question. The others had all simply assumed that he would join them, hauled along in their wake like a recalcitrant dog.
But what else could he do? Go back to the dig? He ached to, but even he had to admit that things weren’t simply going to fall back into their comfortable old arrangement. That, and he’d be leaving his sister and his best friend—as well as Sayyid and Constance—to stumble into who-knew-what trouble without him.
Which seemed like a wretchedly cowardly thing to do.
Nor could Neil forget that they were setting out after a possible clue to the identity of the most mysterious and intriguing pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty—one that lay at the center of Neil’s own passionate research interests. The allure of learning even some small part of the truth about Neferneferuaten—never mind any possible connection to Moses—was powerful, tugging at Neil like a fishing line even though he felt as though he were being swept out into a wind-tossed sea.
He hated it, and yet he couldn’t possibly walk away.
Sayyid was still waiting for his answer.
“I wish you hadn’t encouraged them,” Neil returned tightly.
Sayyid’s mouth thinned, his eyes flashing with a quick snap of emotion that left Neil wondering what he was trying not to say.
“Goodnight, Dr. Fairfax,” Sayyid replied—and then left Neil to the deserted office and his own uncomfortable thoughts.