Twenty-Three
N eil Fairfax sat in an elegantly appointed gentleman’s study, complete with fine Turkish carpets, cozy armchairs, and piles of books—and wondered if he had ever felt quite so abjectly awful in his entire life.
He was trapped on a boat in the middle of the Nile, surrounded by casually murderous thugs. He had left his sister, his best friend, and a colleague that he had come to care about very deeply in the hands of the most intimidating and obviously violent person he had ever encountered. Now he was charged with translating a clue to one of the most important mysteries in Egyptian history so that his villainous boss could try to steal from it.
And it was all his fault.
He should have trusted Ellie when she told him that Julian Forster-Mowbray was up to no good. Instead, Neil had stubbornly insisted on living in a different world—one where the designated representative of a respected scholarly organization would never have turned out to be capable of kidnapping and murder. One where people laughed at the notion of reasonably sane gentlemen committing acts of violence in the name of chasing down an object everyone knew to be a myth.
But Neil couldn’t blame all of this on his ex-employer. His own stupid, stubborn decisions had led him to be imprisoned in a well-lit library on Julian’s graceful dahabeeyah, ill with worry over what might have happened to his sister and his friends. He was the one who had written that stupid, foolish note to Julian at Saqqara, slipping a coin to one of Sayyid’s neighbors’ children to deliver it to the excavation.
He had been so worried about his blasted job and his academic reputation. Of course, it had seemed like an entirely reasonable course of action at the time—but he’d been wrong. Julian Forster-Mowbray really had been in league with a batch of artifact-thieving villains, and Neil had led them right to the tablet—and to the people he cared about.
Memories tormented him—of Ellie, slight and freckled, popping up beside his desk to pepper him with questions about Persian etymologies. Of Adam at Cambridge, the brash American cowboy who tossed viscounts into rivers and befriended a bespectacled scholarship student as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
And what about Sayyid? The man was a brilliant Egyptologist, a deeply skilled conservator, and a natural leader. They had worked side-by-side, debating techniques and challenging each other’s scholarly conclusions for two years now. Sayyid had come to be far more than just a foreman to him, and so Neil was only a little surprised to realize that he was just as twisted up in knots about the man as he was about Adam.
He tried to find some way to quell the racing, helpless panic inside his chest. Adam was rather good in a fight, after all… but that might not hold when he had his hands tied behind his back. Ellie was extraordinarily clever… but there were only so many ways out of a sunbaked box when one was unarmed and outnumbered.
He grasped for even more desperate threads of hope.
The baddies might all succumb to sun stroke. Sayyid might turn out to have been hiding a knack for the martial arts. Perhaps Mr. Jacobs had a trick knee.
Neil thumped his head down onto the table, feeling queasy again.
He was fairly certain Mr. Jacobs did not have a trick knee.
Not that Neil could do anything to help them from where he sat, even though the room was reasonably comfortable for a prison. In addition to the Turkish carpets and the cozy armchairs, the study was furnished with a sturdy wooden work table and a window open to let in the breeze from the Nile. Beyond the rippling brown water, Neil could make out the sandstone columns of the Temple of Karnak, gilded by the afternoon sunlight.
Books were stacked on every surface. More of them spilled out of a pile of sturdy trunks. They did not appear to be very well organized, for all that there were a great many of them—archaeological treatises, Greek epics, and translations of the Book of the Dead mingled with bound copies of respectable academic journals.
Neil would normally be quite pleased to find himself in such a space—if he weren’t locked inside it wondering if the people he loved were still alive.
The only thing Neil had power over in this wretched situation lay on the table in front of him.
The clay tablet sat amid a mess of papers and books, taunting him with its tidy rows of cuneiform symbols. The object was over three thousand years old. It possibly held paradigm-shattering clues about the identity of the most mysterious pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty.
And Neil was fairly certain that he needed to smash it to pieces.
The secret of Neferneferuaten’s identity wasn’t what made the tablet so dangerous. It was the mention of a tomb at the Horizon of the Sun, Akhenaten’s ruined capital at Tell al-Amarna.
If the rest of the text contained specific clues as to where in the Amarna necropolis the tomb lay hidden, it could lead Julian Forster-Mowbray straight to the most important find in the history of Egyptology.
Neil couldn’t let that happen. The tomb of Neferneferuaten had escaped looting for the last three thousand years. The artifacts housed inside of it would offer priceless information about life in the New Kingdom and the late Eighteenth Dynasty—and reveal the true story of the fall of Akhenaten’s monotheistic experiment, a secret that had beckoned to Neil for years.
Julian would strip it bare and sell it all off to the highest bidders. All of that knowledge would be lost—permanently.
The notion was unconscionable… but was it worth dying for?
Neil was forced to ask himself the question… because if he did destroy the tablet, it would almost certainly cost him his life.
Of course, Neil couldn’t yet be certain that the tablet pointed the way to the tomb. If he destroyed it without being sure, he would lose his life—and turn a priceless three-thousand-year-old document into dust—for no good reason.
The conundrum of it twisted inside of him like a snake.
He was still wrangling painfully with the decision when the door thudded open behind him, and Professor Dawson came back into the room.
Neil thought he might have heard the man’s name before. A monograph on early Greek vase motifs came to mind, one that Neil had found both unoriginal and unconvincing. He didn’t have the foggiest notion why this lackluster academic should have been recruited into aiding Julian’s efforts. The fellow was clearly less than pleased to have Neil around, as though his presence was a personal affront to Dawson’s capabilities.
Dawson gave him an irritated look as he returned to his seat at the table. The clay tablet lay between them. On Dawson’s side, the table was covered in scribbled notes and several opened volumes on Akkadian cuneiform.
Neil had been astonished to discover that Dawson traveled with more than one volume on Akkadian cuneiform.
Neil’s half of the table was decidedly less cluttered. In fact, it held only a mostly blank page. He beheld it with a little twist of panic. He needed to at least appear to be making himself useful—or risk being tossed overboard like so much extra ballast.
Of course, he wasn’t the only one on the boat at risk of being tossed overboard. What had Constance been thinking, volunteering to go along with Julian?
Unless skipping into the arms of the enemy actually had been the more clever choice, when the alternative was perishing violently with Ellie, who might even now be lying in a ditch beside the mortal remains of Neil’s best friend and the kind-hearted, intelligent gentleman with whom he had worked closely and companionably for the last two years.
The thought made Neil want to collapse into a hysterical puddle.
At least Constance must have some notion of what she had gotten herself into. The now alarmingly grown-up danger gnome had proved herself both frighteningly clever and perfectly amenable to situations of mortal danger. Neil could still recall the sharp poke of her dagger at his kidney, evidence that she had no qualms about using violence when necessary to achieve her aims.
She was also desperately pretty.
Neil startled at that last thought, nearly dropping his pencil. Why was he thinking about how pretty Constance was? She had always been an absolute magnet for trouble, and Neil disliked trouble immensely. In fact, there was little he wanted more in the world than to wave goodbye to all the trouble that currently surrounded him and go back to the predictable, boring pattern that had been his life before Ellie dropped into his tomb.
Well—perhaps the one thing he wanted more was to know that his sister and his friends were safe.
He pictured the pale oval of Ellie’s face, stark with a look of betrayal. The flash of hurt and anger in Sayyid’s brown eyes. The sight of Adam Bates on his knees, bruised and bleeding with his hands bound behind his back.
His stomach twisted again.
“Muzzazū…” Dawson muttered, breaking into Neil’s thoughts. “Muzzazū, muzzazū… Why aren’t any of these words where they are supposed to be in the dictionary?”
The professor’s tones were laced with frustration.
“Probably because of conjugations?” Neil offered lamely.
“Conjugations!” Dawson sniffed disapprovingly, then fixed Neil with a glare. “You really ought to start making yourself more useful—in as much as one can expect from a boy barely out of Cambridge.”
“I have a doctorate!” Neil protested, momentarily feeling the loss of his mustache… though admittedly, the facial hair hadn’t done much to help him look his age.
Dawson didn’t seem to hear him. “Check some of these other books, at the very least.” He flapped a dismissive hand at the pile of tomes on the desk. “You haven’t any notion of the very delicate politics involved in all of this. Matters have been tense since our last expedition went slightly awry —due to circumstances entirely outside of our control, of course,” he added quickly. “However unjustly, we are still in something of a state of probation, as you had best remember.”
“Remember?” Neil echoed disbelievingly. “I’m… I’m locked in here with you. I haven’t the foggiest notion what you’re on about!”
“A footman, maybe?” Dawson mused, ignoring him, and then brightened. “Ah—here it is! Muzzazū. A tax collector.”
“It’s not talking about a tax collector!” Neil shot back, his patience breaking. “You’ve transcribed the bloody word wrong. That’s the symbol for ‘er,’ not ‘az.’ It’s muzzerrū. ”
Dawson blinked at him in surprise as though just realizing that Neil was actually speaking. “Hmm,” he grunted shortly, and then turned the page of his dictionary. “Ah. Muzzerrū . Means ‘enemies.’”
Neil stifled the urge to groan. Had he actually just used his half-rate knowledge of Akkadian to help the intolerable rotter translate the tablet? He shouldn’t be correcting Dawson’s transcriptions! He was supposed to be deciding whether to snatch the artifact from under Dawson’s nose and throw it out the window into the Nile… sentencing himself to certain and painful death in the process.
The queasiness threatened to return. Neil did not think he would be very good at dying. He certainly wouldn’t go about it with noble aplomb. He was far more likely to faint or melt into a sobbing puddle.
He supposed he could at least wait to see whether the threat posed by the tablet was genuine. He likely had a bit of time in which to manage that. For all his books, Dawson was an idiot when it came to ancient Semitic languages. Neil might not have Ellie’s skill, but if he had a quiet hour with a notepad and a few of Dawson’s books, he stood a solid chance of deciphering the text.
He just had to manage it without Dawson catching on. Then he could decide if the artifact was a harmless if fascinating New Kingdom relic… or something worth dying for.
Unfortunately, Neil was incapable of working through the Akkadian without writing it all down—which even a dolt like Dawson couldn’t help but notice.
He glanced over at what Dawson had so far scribbled into his notebook.
And this is the will of Moseh, that his legacy, the gift of Neferneferuaten, be not misused, or fallen into the hands of enemies…
Those words— gift of Neferneferuaten —echoed uncomfortably through Neil’s mind.
The inscription in Mutnedjmet’s jewelry box—found with a ring engraved with the name of Moseh—had claimed Neferneferuaten was the last bearer of the Was-Scepter of Khemenu.
The Bible was not at all ambiguous about the fact that Moses had been raised as an Egyptian. If an Egyptian had wished to work some great magic on the world, Neil had little doubt that a was-scepter was precisely the ritual object he would use to do it.
All of which meant that Neil was finding it increasingly plausible that the gift of Neferneferuaten might actually be the legendary staff of one of history’s most important prophets.
“Look here!” Dawson said excitedly, oblivious to Neil’s wretched state beside him. “Isn’t this the logogram for tomb?”
Neil kept his mouth closed, anticipating what must come next with a rising sense of dread.
“The tomb at… What is that word? Nab… Nab ? ?. Nab ? ?, nab ? ?…” Dawson mused, flipping through the pages of his books. “Ah! There it is— horizon. The tomb at the horizon… of… the… sun.” He turned to Neil with a superior smirk. “Don’t feel too bad about not figuring it out first. I have had several more years’ experience to bring to bear on the translation. I was tenured at St. Andrews, you know.”
Neil knew. Dawson had mentioned it four or five times since he had been locked into this room.
“Horizon of the sun…” Dawson mused thoughtfully. “It must mean somewhere in the west.”
Neil went still. Was it possible that Professor Formerly-Tenured-at-Saint-Andrews didn’t realize the connection between Horizon of the Sun and Akhenaten’s former capital city at Tell al-Amarna?
A new set of footsteps, firm and confident, sounded from outside the study door. The lock clicked, and the panel swung open to reveal the lean form and cold eyes of Mr. Jacobs.
Dawson startled in his chair, fumbling his pen. “It’s about time you showed up,” he complained. “Do you know, I had to knock and shout for one of those Al-Saboors a few minutes ago just to relieve myself? I don’t see why I have to be locked in here like I’m also a…” He trailed off, casting an awkward look over at Neil—obviously realizing he was about to spill out the word prisoner .
The professor cleared his throat. “What I mean is, someone ought to give me a key!”
Jacobs gave Dawson a tired, disdainful look. “He’d just take it off you.” He slid an assessing glance over Neil. “Maybe,” he modified flatly.
Neil felt both indignant and intimidated at the same time.
Did Jacobs’ reappearance mean that Ellie and the others had been sent on their way? Or had they managed to best the man and his fellows in a fight?
He looked for some sign that Jacobs had been on the wrong end of Adam’s fists, but couldn’t find any… perhaps because there hadn’t been any fight, and Jacobs had simply murdered all of them.
The demand to know rose into Neil’s throat—and choked there.
“What have you found?” Jacobs demanded.
Dawson went over a bit sniffy. “We are still working on the translation. This is a particularly challenging form of Middle Akkadian and requires a great deal of—”
“So far,” Jacobs cut in with exaggerated patience.
Dawson swallowed thickly. “The tablet mentions a tomb at the horizon of the sun, which clearly indicates a position to the west. Perhaps somewhere near the oasis of Siwa.”
Neil held himself very still, making every effort not to react to Dawson’s assertion.
Jacobs’ gaze snapped over to him like a hawk spotting a mouse. “Do you know anything more about it?”
The question should have been simple enough to deny, but for some reason, Neil felt exposed in the face of it. “I’m, ah… I’m afraid I don’t…”
“Ah.” Jacobs interrupted him with a smile. It was a very knowing sort of smile, and the rest of Neil’s words died in his throat. “But that’s not precisely true. Is it?”
Why did he…? How could he possibly…? Neil’s thoughts spluttered helplessly. It would be one thing if Jacobs had simply suspected he was lying, but the look in his eyes didn’t feel like suspicion.
It felt like certainty.
Beside Neil, Dawson had gone conspicuously quiet. When Neil shot him a panicked glance, the professor was eyeing him as though he were a chicken that had just been tagged for slaughter.
Neil turned his head back to face Jacobs once more—and jolted in his chair at the realization that the man had moved closer. He had done it without making a bloody sound, like some sort of ghost. Neil instinctively pressed himself against the back of his seat as though hoping he might sink through it and escape.
“Tell me,” Jacobs said evenly. “Have you any interest in the young lady upstairs?”
With a cold dart of fear, Neil realized he was referring to Constance. “She’s just…” he started, choking on the words. “I barely…”
Jacobs tilted his head. “That’s not what I asked you.”
Neil could only blink back at him, fear stealing his voice.
“It would be a shame,” Jacobs continued evenly. “If I had to hurt her to convince you to offer us your full cooperation.”
The quick, visceral emotion that snapped through Neil at Jacobs’ words surprised him.
By all rights, it should have been terror. After all, he was a scrawny, bookish academic who wanted nothing more in life than to translate hieroglyphs for hours. Facing the threats of a dangerously calm and extremely intimidating villain should have been far more than he could handle.
Instead, at Jacobs’ implied promise of violence against Constance, a snap of anger flashed through Neil like a gust of hot wind.
She might be reckless and unpredictable—a relentless danger gnome who had spent the better part of her childhood tormenting Neil in every way imaginable—but she was his danger gnome. And he would be damned if he sat back and quivered while the cold-eyed bastard in front of him threatened to use her like a sacrificial goat.
All of which led Neil to make a response that was perhaps less prudent than he might otherwise have preferred, given the circumstances.
“What sort of abject coward uses threats against an innocent woman to get what he wants?” Neil burst out, pushing up from his chair to stand toe-to-toe with Jacobs. “You won’t bloody touch her! And even if you wanted to—you can’t,” he added with a burst of angry inspiration. “Your boss has an interest in her. He won’t let you.”
Jacobs had not stepped back by so much as a breath when Neil rose—which left him very close indeed. Neil quailed a bit at the realization as the rest of his brain had a moment to catch up with what the angry part was doing.
Jacobs’ near-black eyes flashed with dark frustration.
Riling up a man like Jacobs was a terrible idea. Neil’s more prudent instincts screamed for him to sit back down—or cower abjectly under the desk—but his anger refused to give way to it. He was angry at Jacobs for threatening to hurt Constance. He was angry at Julian Forster-Mowbray for turning Neil’s comfortable existence into an entirely unwelcome adventure. He was angry at the self-important professor currently gaping at him with a look of surprised horror for… well, just being an utter prat, really.
As he faced off against Jacobs, he knew he was doing something irrevocably stupid, but he couldn’t bring himself to care the way he ought to. The words kept spilling out of him regardless.
“But if you were going to threaten to hurt innocent people to compel me to assist you, shouldn’t you be starting with my sister?” he demanded. “She’s the most obvious choice, after all. But you haven’t—which makes me wonder if perhaps she and my friends got the better of you after all!”
Frustration and rage flickered across Jacobs’ features, breaking his air of unrelenting competence. The look lasted only a moment before Jacobs pulled it back behind a veil of icy control.
“Or maybe I’ve already killed her,” he replied, continuing to stand just a few claustrophobic inches away, “along with all the rest of them.”
The words clenched around Neil’s heart like a vise.
A wave of guilt and grief threatened to overwhelm him. He fought back against it, scrambling for a lifeline—something, anything, that would keep him from falling apart.
Curious hazel eyes peering over the edge of his desk. A spray of freckles over a delighted grin. A head of chestnut hair drooping against his shoulder as his baby sister dozed off over her Cicero.
His hand reaching out to brush warm fingers over the little crease between her brows.
What are you doing?
Just rubbing the worry out.
“No,” Neil burst out wildly. “You can’t have!”
A new emotion flashed through Jacobs’ expression at Neil’s words—one that looked oddly of both surprise… and fear .
Jacobs grabbed the front of Neil’s shirt, hauling him closer as his eyes blazed with threat. “How could you possibly know—” he began.
“Hold on!” Dawson piped in, blinking with surprised excitement. “The tablet isn’t talking about Siwa. The Horizon of the Sun—that’s Akhetaten! It is quite an obscure connection to make, of course,” Dawson rattled on. “One could hardly expect it of a young fellow barely out of Cambridge. I have always said the Cantabrigian education is sadly—”
“And where is this Akhetaten?” Jacobs pressed with tired patience.
His fist remained suspended in front of Neil’s face.
“Oh! Right.” Dawson startled as if just remembering that he was sitting beside an imminent pummeling. “The ruins are at Tell al-Amarna, about two hundred and fifty miles north of here along the river.”
Jacobs lowered his hand—though he continued to fix Neil with a gaze that simmered with threat. “Do keep at it, then,” he ordered calmly.
He finally released his grip on Neil’s shirt and left, the door snapping shut behind him.
Neil heard the soft click of the lock turning and slumped back into his chair. His hands were shaking even as his mind whirled with panicked confusion.
How could you possibly know…
Know what? Neil wondered frantically. What had Jacobs thought he had known?
Dawson scribbled beside him, the light scratch of his pencil on the paper the only sound in the room. “It’s best not to lie to him.”
The quiet, awkward words snapped Neil from the maelstrom of his thoughts and back to where he was—locked in a room with an arrogant professor and three-thousand-year-old clue while a murderer stalked outside the door.
The pencil scratched a little more, then paused.
“He always knows,” Dawson added without looking up.
“But how…” Neil’s voice was tight as the fury that had fueled him crumbled, making way for an abysmal well of fear. “How is that possible?”
“I don’t know.” Dawson refused to meet Neil’s eyes. “But it’s true… and it makes him very, very dangerous.”
Neil’s gaze shifted to the closed door as though he could look through it—and the walls and deck—to wherever Jacobs currently stood.
Dawson pulled over one of his tomes. “Best get back to work.”
As Dawson’s lead scratched across the page, heavy footsteps and creaking ropes sounded from the deck above. The boat shifted, and the temple outside the window began to slide away.
The Isis was moving.
Neil hoped it wasn’t leaving his chances of surviving all this behind.