Fifteen
M orning sunlight spilled over the scattered villages that punctuated the green ribbon of fertile land outside the windows of the train. Ellie watched them pass from her seat in another first-class compartment, paid for with bills from the pile of money in Constance’s corset.
Their departure early that morning had been uneventful. There had been no sign of pursuit as they trotted along the paths through the fields on the backs of Sayyid’s neighbor’s donkeys. Ellie felt confident that they had slipped away from Professor Dawson and his hired guns—and yet she knew better than to let her guard down. Jacobs had been conspicuously missing from the group that attacked them at Mutnedjmet’s tomb, but it would be a mistake to assume that meant he was no longer a threat.
With nothing outside the window to distract her, Ellie cast an uncomfortable look over the rest of her traveling party.
Sayyid sat nearest to the door. He was dressed in a tailored gray suit with a bright red fez crowning his head, which made him look very much the part of a refined Egyptian effendi as he browsed an Arabic newspaper. He was there because Ellie had asked him to come—but did he truly understand the risks of their journey? The scarred and bearded Al-Saboor cousins that they had encountered in Horemheb’s tomb had been bad enough, but they were nothing compared to the terrifying competence of Mr. Jacobs.
Ellie thought of the intense, unreadable look in Mrs. Al-Ahmed’s eyes as she stood on the path outside the house and watched Sayyid ride away with them that morning. She felt an uncomfortable twist of guilt.
Constance sat beside Ellie and was practically bouncing with excitement in her seat. Yesterday, they had set out from Cairo on a straightforward mission to beg Ellie’s brother to withhold a little information from his employers. Since then, they had been shot at, nearly buried alive, and were now headed halfway across the length of Egypt in pursuit of a clue from a three-thousand-year-old inscription.
None of that had deterred Constance in the slightest. Ellie wondered whether even a run-in with Jacobs would make Constance truly understand the risks she was taking.
At least Adam fully comprehended what he was getting into… but he came with a host of his own complications. Even with the others sharing the close confines of their compartment, Ellie could feel her pulse skip at the easy way his legs sprawled across the floor as he crossed his arms over the broad expanse of his chest. Every quiet minute where she found herself near him, her brain snapped back to the vivid, tantalizing memory of what his hands felt like on her skin.
He was still acting unusually quiet, his mouth creased into a thoughtful frown when he didn’t think anyone was looking at him. Ellie knew she needed to find a way to talk to him about whatever was making him act so strange—but she found herself uneasy about where that conversation might lead.
Finally, there was Neil. He sat between Adam and Sayyid on the opposite bench like a prisoner in the middle of an unwelcome transfer, his shoulders slumped in his uncharacteristically rumpled tweed suit.
For a moment that morning, Ellie had actually wondered whether her brother had reached his limit and simply deserted them. Ellie noticed that he’d vanished right around the time they were all loading onto the donkeys that Sayyid had borrowed from his gouty neighbor. For a beat, her heart had sunk in her chest, weighed down with the knowledge that she must have pushed her brother too far.
Then he had rounded the corner, hurrying back toward the house along the path. When Adam asked him where he’d been, Neil had flushed and bit out something about needing a walk.
Ellie couldn’t blame him for wanting space. Neil hadn’t asked for any of this and clearly wasn’t happy about having it forced on him. Even the tantalizing possibility of solving some part of the mystery of Neferneferuaten wasn’t enough to overcome his obvious frustration and dismay.
The only bright note was that Neil had done away with that embarrassing excuse for a mustache. He really ought to have known better than to even attempt it. After all, the man was nearly thirty. Surely he should have realized by now that he was fundamentally impaired when it came to the cultivation of facial hair.
“Ellie, you are missing another batch of pyramids.” Constance poked her in the arm.
Ellie forced herself out of her guilty reverie. Outside the window, another cluster of dusty, weathered lumps of stone drifted past them, punctuated by a fringe of date palms.
“Dahshur,” Ellie concluded distantly, recognizing their forms from books she had read in the past.
The pyramids of Dahshur were of immense scholarly importance… but Ellie struggled to muster interest. She was simply too bogged down by worry and uncertainty.
“Well, then,” Constance offered brightly. “Who wants to play charades?”
?
It was well into the afternoon when the call Ellie had been waiting for finally sounded from the corridor outside their compartment.
“Al-uqsur!” the conductor announced. “Luxor! Le dernier arrêt!”
Luxor.
Ellie snapped out of her tired fog. Past a slow turn in the tracks, she could make out the modern town, a mix of low mud-brick houses and tall, finer buildings framed by palms and leafy trees that clustered along the broad, glittering length of the Nile. Closer by, the sand-blasted columns of an ancient temple rose from the sand.
Ellie recognized those columns. They were possibly the most important columns in the Egyptian archaeological landscape.
She leapt from her seat to press herself to the window. “That’s Karnak! There’s Hatshepsut’s obelisk! And the Avenue of the Sphinxes!”
She was too far away. Ellie gripped the sill and stuck her head out of the opening. Wind tugged at her hair, peppering her skin with tiny grains of sand.
“I think I can see the Temple of Mut!” she shouted, the stiff breeze trying to steal her voice.
A pair of small but sturdy hands gripped the back of her waistcoat and gave it a firm yank. Ellie popped back into the carriage, half falling into her seat.
“You will see it better when you get there,” Constance said. “Which will happen faster if you refrain from tumbling out the window.”
“It is only one of the most important ritual sites in all of Egypt,” Ellie grumbled in her defense, smoothing out the folds of her skirt.
Sayyid flashed her an understanding smile. Neil frowned down at a newspaper—one that he had been holding for the better part of an hour without turning a page.
Ellie shifted her gaze to Adam. It locked there, captured by the intense, admiring heat she saw in his eyes. Warmth pinked her cheeks, and Adam cleared his throat and looked away awkwardly.
Her heart beating just a little faster, she restrained herself to only slightly craning her neck as Karnak drifted past them.
?
A few minutes later, the train slowed for the approach to Luxor station. On the platform, Ellie found herself submerged in a crowd of travelers. Voices in Masri, Greek, Armenian, and Turkish clamored through the air, echoing off the high ceiling of the obviously modern building, which was accented by garishly painted faux-Egyptian columns like some dreamy French architect’s tribute to an ancient palace.
Their party was immediately swarmed by local fellows in a mix of galabeyas and second-hand suits shouting about hotels and carriages.
Sayyid slipped into the lead. With a careful look, he picked an older gentleman out from the buzzing crowd. After peppering him with quick, determined questions, Sayyid authoritatively waved the others away.
In the chaos, Ellie idly glanced over the bustling lines of passengers both embarking and disembarking from the steaming train. Something caught her eye through the shifting mass of bodies—a flash of pale skin, dark eyes, and coal-black hair around the merest glimpse of cold, aquiline, terrifyingly familiar features.
Her skin chilled despite the dry Egyptian heat as a name blazed across her mind like an alarm.
Jacobs.
“Adam!” she gasped, her hand instinctively flashing out to grip his arm.
“What is it?” he asked, suddenly serious.
“I…” she began—but she had blinked, and the crowd had moved. In the place where she thought she had seen Jacobs was only a light-skinned Turkish gentleman in a dark suit, glaring as he shooed away a ragged boy angling for baksheesh.
She supposed something about the lean, sharp lines of the man’s face somewhat recalled those of Mr. Jacobs.
Adam was still waiting for her to answer.
“It’s nothing,” Ellie concluded. “Sorry. Just my imagination running away with me.”
Adam frowned down at her, then directed a sharp blue gaze out over the crowd, a protective hand still resting against her lower back.
“This way,” Sayyid called over. He waved them toward the exit, where the guide he had been talking to waited for them.
With a final uneasy look over the busy station, Ellie let Adam guide her away.
They were loaded into a worn carriage for what turned out to be a very short drive to where fine limestone buildings and leafy trees parted to reveal a glimpse of the river. Just before the water, the driver turned them onto a straight driveway that led through an elegant garden accented by exceptionally tall palms.
Their conveyance stopped at a fine two-story structure fronted by a shady veranda. Painted letters on the wall just below the roof line read Luxor Hotel . The building looked well-kept and freshly painted. A pale-skinned gentleman in a cream suit hurried through the entrance to greet them.
With a tired sigh, Neil crossed over to accept the man’s enthusiastic handshake.
“Dr. Fairfax is already acquainted with Mr. Oliver, the manager,” Sayyid explained beside her. “He’ll make the arrangements.”
“Can Neil do that?” Ellie prompted with a flash of worry at the thought of her brother’s non-existent negotiation skills.
Sayyid did a reasonable job of turning his chuckle into a polite cough. “This is a Cooks’ hotel, and they have a special rate for Egyptologists,” he replied. “So he cannot muck it up too badly.”
While her brother chatted awkwardly with the hotel manager, Ellie took a moment to soak up the fact that she was actually standing in the city that lay at the heart of the Ancient Egyptian world. Luxor sat on the ruins of Thebes, the capital city of many of Egypt’s greatest dynasties and home to some of its most important temples. To the west sprawled the steep canyons riddled with the tombs of the noble dead.
She couldn’t see a great deal of that from where she stood, as the hotel’s garden was framed by a plastered wall roughly her own height, but her surroundings were far from unpleasant. Bushy, flowering shrubs and a lovely fountain filled the space between the enormous palm trees—but Ellie’s appreciation of the landscaping came to an abrupt halt at a pair of basalt sculptures that framed the walkway to the hotel door.
The statues were a matched pair that took the form of a noble woman seated on a square throne—only instead of a human face, she had the head of a lioness topped by the round disk of the full moon.
Or at least, one iteration of her did. The other moon-disk crown had broken off.
Ellie stiffened with recognition. She knew who that lion-headed woman was—Sekhmet, the Ancient Egyptian goddess of war and healing.
She gripped Sayyid’s arm. “Please tell me those are reproductions!”
Sayyid’s gaze shifted nervously to the statues. “Er… I am afraid they may have been removed from the ruins at Karnak.”
“ Removed?! ” Ellie echoed, her voice squeaking with outrage. “You mean they were taken from their original context so that they could serve as garden furniture for a tourists’ hotel?”
Adam strolled over to join them. “Wanna steal them back?”
“They must weigh over a thousand pounds,” Constance noted. It was not so much an objection as a statement of fact. Her thoughtful gaze at the sculptures indicated that she was seriously considering Adam’s suggestion.
“It’s not that hard to move a thousand pounds,” Adam pushed back. “It’s all about leverage.”
“They would only find them at the temple and bring them back here.” Sayyid sounded resigned.
“Then perhaps we should position them outside the manager’s bedroom window,” Ellie suggested darkly, “so that he thinks they are cursed and determined to haunt him.”
Sayyid stared at her with surprise.
“I say—that’s a properly Gothic idea!” Constance remarked admiringly.
Adam’s blue gaze dropped to her, his mouth quirking with approval.
Neil finally freed himself from the manager and came to join them. “Mr. Oliver is arranging rooms for us.”
“Does he have someone he could send to the shops?” Constance brushed off her dress, which was looking decidedly less pristine than it had the previous morning.
“I… didn’t think to ask,” Neil admitted, flushing.
“Of course you didn’t.” Constance gave him a sympathetic pat on the arm. “I’ll make a little list and pass it to the concierge. Shall we, then?”
She marched into the hotel like a general in a dingy lawn dress, head high. Ellie trailed along in her wake with a reluctant look at the sculptures.
There would be time to settle the matter of the misappropriated Sekhmets later. First, she had a mystery to solve—and a staff to save.
?
From the open window of her upper-floor room, Ellie could see past the hotel gardens to the Nile. The broad river gleamed with hints of gold as sunset painted the sky in vibrant streaks of pink and purple. On its banks stood another famous temple of Luxor, this one devoted to the worship of the divine kings of Upper and Lower Egypt. The mosque that rose from the center of the ruins was hundreds of years old but still in use. Ellie could hear the call of the muezzin from its minaret as the time for another of the daily prayers approached.
Past the line of fertile green on the far side of the river, she picked out the hazy shapes of half-crumbled walls and scattered columns that marked out more of the ruins of ancient Thebes. Beyond them were the steep cliffs of the range that held the famous tombs of the Valley of the Kings, the ragged stones quickly falling into rich purple shadow.
It still felt unreal to Ellie that tomorrow, she would cross that river to search those ruins for a secret that might have remained concealed for three thousand years.
The peace and wonder of the moment was broken by the sound of a door being thrown open.
“Goodness, did I need that bath!” Constance declared as she strode into the room.
She kicked the door shut behind her with a bang.
Ellie’s petite friend tossed her towel over the back of the room’s only armchair with a practiced motion. She collapsed into the seat, lifting and then flopping the thick black waves of her hair over the cloth, where they dripped onto the carpet.
“Shouldn’t you wrap your hair?” Ellie asked.
“What do you think I am—a savage? Have you any idea what would happen to these curls if I tried that? In this heat? No.” Constance leaned back, wriggling her rear a bit to settle more comfortably into the chair as she closed her eyes. “I am going to air dry, slowly, as God intended me to do. I just wish I had a magazine.” She opened her eyes, looking to Ellie hopefully. “Are there any magazines?”
“Just a Bible,” Ellie informed her, plucking the book in question from the table beside her. “Shall I bring it over?”
Constance considered the question, torn between obvious distaste and boredom. “No,” she concluded with a sigh.
Ellie had enjoyed the luxury of a wash herself a little earlier. She was now dressed in a comfortable galabeya and loose trousers that one of the chambermaids had delivered to the room—items from the shopping list Constance had scribbled out for the hotel manager, Mr. Oliver. Ellie’s own things were being laundered. They had thoroughly required it after being worn for two straight days that included a tomb raid, a crawl through a collapsing tunnel, and a ten-hour train ride.
Her skin was still damp from her bath. The soft breeze that tossed the pale, light curtains by the window felt deliciously cool.
Ellie turned her eyes back to the distant ruins across the river. “We need to make our arrangements to get to Hatshepsut’s temple.”
“Already done,” Constance replied with a breezy wave of her hand, still leaning back against her towel.
“Already done?” Ellie echoed in surprise.
“We are leaving at ten o’clock. Mr. Oliver is seeing to it,” Constance explained. “It’s the sort of thing he does all the time.”
The Luxor Hotel was owned by the Thomas Cook company, which also ran tourist steamboats and luxury dahabeeyahs up and down the Nile. They had built the establishment as a spot where their passengers could overnight while exploring the many famous sites of Thebes. It made perfect sense that the manager would know how to book the boats, animals, and guides needed to make an expedition to the ruins.
The fact that their own excursion had less to do with sightseeing and more to do with preventing the theft of an extremely dangerous arcanum likely made little difference in purely practical terms. With the matter of tomorrow’s mission more or less settled, Ellie turned her attention once more to the wonders that lay just outside her window.
“It really is quite splendid, isn’t it?” Constance prompted comfortably from her chair. The dripping of her hair had slowed a bit.
“I don’t think I really believed I’d ever see it,” Ellie admitted quietly, her eyes still on the shadowy cliffs.
“Whyever not?” Constance frowned. “It isn’t as though it’s on the other side of the world. And your brother lives here.”
“Neil never extended an invitation,” Ellie returned.
“Stuffy is even more of a curmudgeon than I remember.” Constance swung her legs happily. Her feet didn’t quite reach the floor. “I had to give him a solid poke in the kidney with one of my knives just to get him into that tunnel! What did he think was going to happen if he kept standing around—that the baddies would give him a handshake and apologize for the interruption? One would think he had never had an actual adventure before!”
“I am fairly certain he hasn’t,” Ellie admitted.
“Well, if we are really going to chase down a mysterious pharaoh and uncover the location of the long-lost Staff of Moses, he is going to need to lighten up,” Constance concluded firmly.
The lazy kicking of her legs stilled. Her expression became unsettlingly contemplative.
Ellie pulled her gaze from the window and gave her friend a wary look. “What are you thinking about?”
“Oh—only that it has just occurred to me that I might know a way to help with that.”
“And what might that be?”
“Taking him for a lover, of course,” Constance replied distractedly.
Ellie dropped the Bible. “You… what?! ”
“It’s as much a surprise to me as it is to you, I can assure you,” Constance confessed brightly. “I have certainly never thought of your brother in that way before, and he isn’t at all the type I was imagining for myself, as you know. I was really more in mind for a mysterious desert prince or perhaps the master of a den of dangerous thieves. But Neil is already here, and I needn’t get myself kidnapped or don trousers and run away from home to find him.”
Ellie tried to protest—though she hadn’t the foggiest notion of what to say. Only a soft, strangled noise managed to escape from her throat.
“I think I half expected that when I saw him again, he’d still be that scrawny stick-in-the-mud who was always shouting at me to stop sprinkling confetti between his bedsheets—but he has actually turned out rather well,” Constance continued, oblivious. “He’s quite attractive in a vaguely helpless sort of way—especially since he has done away with that wretched attempt at a mustache. He’s always been clever, and those spectacles have a certain charm. And you might not believe this, Ellie, but I have discovered that he’s actually quite fit under all that tweed! Who would have ever thought?”
“His… tweed… ” Ellie began. Horror trapped the words in her throat.
“Most importantly, he is not in the market for a fortune,” Constance added. “I couldn’t possibly choose a lover who has actual ambitions of trying to marry me. That would be a disaster! But with Neil, I am certain that he would prefer our affair remain incognito. After all, it would hardly reflect well on his career prospects as an academic if he gained a reputation for seducing heiresses!”
Ellie was feeling dizzy. She grabbed the side of the window frame for support.
Constance’s eyes narrowed, glinting with an even more frightening spark of interest. “I suspect he might even be a bit wild once you peel off all those scholarly pretensions.”
“No!” Ellie finally croaked out, shaking her head. “You can’t possibly… Neil isn’t… There’s no wild under his… his tweed! His anything !”
Constance folded her hands comfortably on the curve of her belly, her feet swinging happily as she gazed up at the ceiling. “Really, the more I think about it, the more he seems like the perfect candidate.”
“Please…” Ellie forced herself to breathe. “Please tell me that you aren’t serious.”
“Of course not!” Constance retorted.
Ellie let out a low, desperate sigh of relief.
“I am merely considering the idea,” Constance went on, casually obliterating Ellie’s moment of calm. “After all, I have it on good authority that scholarly men make for far more attentive and generous lovers than athletic types.”
Ellie vividly recalled the sensation of strong, calloused hands gliding up the skin of her thighs.
“I… do not think that is necessarily true,” she picked out awkwardly.
“It would be good for both of us,” Constance declared authoritatively. “I would be able to engage in a bit of much-needed oat-sowing before my inevitable marriage, and Stuffy could loosen up a bit. Maybe learn how to go along with things instead of always looking as though he’s about to faint.” Constance flashed Ellie a measuring glance. “You know—a bit like how you’re looking right now.”
Ellie coughed, her throat suddenly dry.
Constance sprang upright. She went to the pitcher on the nightstand and poured a glass of water.
“I understand that we are engaged in an urgent enterprise.” Constance pushed the cup into Ellie’s hand. “But once that’s all settled, I’m sure I can find an opportunity to turn my wiles on him.”
Ellie choked on the water.
“Well, you can hardly imagine that Neil’s going to take the initiative, can you?” Constance replied as though Ellie’s gasping were a question. “He’s hardly the type for that . I mean, he nearly had a fit back in London over that incident with the taxidermy mermaid and the museum, and that was only a bit of fun!”
Constance’s damp, glossy waves fell in abundance around her shoulders. Her Egyptian garments hugged her generously curved figure in all the right places. Her big brown eyes were framed by a rich, thick fringe of lashes, while her skin was the warm, flawless gold of a desert evening.
If Constance set her mind on getting Neil into her bed, she’d pursue it with the fearless tenacity of a terrier… and Neil wouldn’t stand a chance.
Trying to talk Constance out of the notion using cool logic and rationality wasn’t going to work. In fact, in Ellie’s experience, it would only serve to make Constance even more determined.
If Ellie had any hope of preventing Constance from enacting her horrifying scheme, she would have to take a different approach. Swallowing her shock and mortification, she crossed to the vanity, plucked up a brush, and yanked it through a length of her hair.
“If that’s all,” she said, keeping her tone forcefully casual, “do let me know when you’ve made up your mind about it.”
Constance gave her a deeply skeptical look through the mirror. “You are going to give yourself a terrible frizz. And is that all you really have to say about it?”
“What else would I have to say?” Ellie slapped the brush back down on the table. Plucking the Bible up from the floor, she dropped onto her bed with it, holding it up like a shield. “You’re both intelligent people,” she concluded from behind the safety of the pages. “I’m sure you’ll sort it out.”
Constance gave her a suspicious look as Ellie pointedly fixed her attention on Leviticus.
“Well, then,” Constance finally replied. “If that’s the case, I shall.”
“Shall what?” Ellie demanded as she fumblingly turned the page.
Constance’s smile curved like a scimitar. “Let you know if I decide to seduce your brother,” she replied dangerously.