Twenty-Six
N ight had fallen . Dawson was snoring… and Neil worked furiously to complete the translation of the clay tablet.
The Isis was sailing for Tell al-Amarna. By Neil’s admittedly inexpert estimation, they would reach the site of Akhenaten’s ruined capital by the following evening.
Of more immediate concern was the steady progress Dawson had been making with the Akkadian text. The professor owed his success more to the stack of books he had brought along with him to Egypt rather than any innate ability on Dawson’s part—of which there was very little, as far as Neil could tell.
At least Neil hadn’t actually needed to help him. Muttering the odd agreement and nodding along seemed to be sufficient evidence of his cooperation, at least so far as Dawson was concerned.
But it would not take Dawson much longer to reach the end of the tablet. Neil had to get there first. He had to know what was truly at stake—and then decide what to do about it.
When Dawson’s head dropped back, his jaw falling open as the pen slipped from his fingers, Neil had seized his chance, frantically putting his wretched grasp of the ancient language work to try to decipher the final lines.
So far, he had found three more instances of feminine verb endings—all of which Dawson had unsurprisingly overlooked. They clearly indicated that Neferneferuaten had been none other than Akhenaten’s queen, Nefertiti. It was a revelation that would throw the scholarly world into an uproar, but it made perfect sense to Neil when he stopped to think about it. He had been studying Akhenaten for years, after all, and had seen the manner in which his relationship with Nefertiti was depicted in the art of the period. She stood side-by-side with the pharaoh as his partner in faith, life, and authority. Why wouldn’t he have left her his crown, in the absence of a male heir with a legitimate claim on the succession?
He was actually feeling a bit chagrined that the idea had never occurred to him before. He was sure Ellie would have a thing or two to say about that.
Not that he had much time to dwell on it now. He scanned the remaining text on the tablet, painfully conscious of Dawson’s precarious napping position in the chair beside him.
If the snoring professor fell over, he’d certainly wake up, and Neil’s opportunity to get ahead on the translation would be lost.
He wished Ellie were here. Based on how easily she had picked out some of the words and logograms during her brief examination of the cuneiform at Hatshepsut’s temple, she would have made short work of the rest of the translation with the added help of Dawson’s library. Neil was reduced to scrambling through pages as he racked his brain for the few bits and pieces of the language that he had picked up over the years.
Neil pushed up his spectacles to pinch the bridge of his nose, fighting through his panic for an ounce of clarity.
As he let his glasses fall back into place, the text turned from a mushy blur to tidy clarity before him—and a symbol leapt out from among the tightly packed lines and wedges.
Neil stared down at it with a sense of vague recognition and rising unease. He snatched up one of the volumes on the table from beneath Dawson’s disorganized notes and flipped through the pages hurriedly, already half terrified of what he would find.
There it was— was the Akkadian symbol for the cubit, one of the fundamental units of measurement used in both the Egyptian and Ancient Semitic worlds.
Units for measuring distance .
Neil ignored the rest of the text, setting frantically to work on the words around the cubit logogram.
The meaning—and its dire implications—spilled out across his hurriedly scribbled page.
Valley to the east… 120 rods… South branch… 815 cubits.
He stared down at the tablet, feeling ill. No—not a tablet, he corrected himself with a rising sense of horror. The clay slab wasn’t just a clue to the location of Neferneferuaten’s lost tomb.
It was a bloody map .
Beside him, Dawson’s snores hitched. The professor stirred, smacking his lips… and tilted as his balance in the chair shifted.
On a panicked impulse, Neil reached out and caught him.
He braced the dozing professor as Dawson’s breathing settled, becoming regular again.
Neil’s spectacles had fallen down his nose. He wanted to push them back into place, but his hands were both occupied with holding up a lightly snoring twit. Instead, he tried wildly to think through his options.
There weren’t many of them.
Ellie had pushed them all into this adventure with stories of magical artifacts and dire consequences—none of which Neil could bring himself to truly credit. As much as he respected his sister’s intelligence, basing his decisions on fairy tales about spooky mirrors and plague-bringing staffs was simply a bridge too far.
But he didn’t need a magic staff to recognize the vital importance of Neferneferuaten’s tomb. It was the key to the greatest mystery of the Eighteenth Dynasty—a priceless and irreplaceable trove of knowledge that would be utterly lost if Neil allowed it to fall into Julian Forster-Mowbray’s hands.
Add to that the possibility that the tomb might hold some connection to the true identity of the prophet Moses and the real story behind the Exodus… and Neil’s decision became painfully clear.
He couldn’t let Julian have the tablet.
He would have to destroy the text and pay the price for foiling Julian’s plans… which was certain to be death.
Neil wondered how he would do it. A firing squad, perhaps? Or would he be shoved off the boat into a swarm of hungry crocodiles?
Of course, Julian wouldn’t be the one pulling the trigger—or enticing the crocodiles. It would be that man Jacobs who did the dirty work.
The thought of Jacobs reminded Neil of Dawson’s words earlier that evening.
It’s best not to lie to him.
A few hours earlier, Neil would have scoffed at that sort of assertion… but he had seen the cool certainty in Jacobs’ eyes when he had tried to deny any further knowledge about the translation of the tablet.
Jacobs hadn’t just guessed that Neil was lying. He had been sure.
He always knows.
As the phrase echoed through Neil’s brain, it triggered an even more dire realization.
If Neil destroyed the tablet, Jacobs wouldn’t just kill him. He’d first ask what Neil knew about the tablet’s contents… and Neil would be unable to lie to him.
Already, the coordinates from the translation were burned into his brain, whether Neil liked it or not. He couldn’t erase the knowledge from his mind. Jacobs would cheerfully beat him—or worse—until Neil finally coughed it out.
Which he would, he admitted with a sinking sense of dread. Because he was a boring, lily-livered academic, not a stoic hero out of some adventure novel.
If he truly wanted to stop his former supervisor from ravaging the tomb of Neferneferuaten and all the precious knowledge it contained, Neil had to destroy every reference to those cubits and rods… even the ones in his own head.
Neil wasn’t going to have to wait for Jacobs to subject him to a painful demise. He had to do the job himself.
The panic of the realization nearly made him drop the professor that he was still frantically bracing with both hands.
Neil fought the urge to laugh hysterically, biting his lip. It came out as a groan instead.
How was he to do it? He was locked in a study on a boat. There was no convenient sword to fall on—or even so much as a dagger. It was too much to hope that there might be a convenient dose of cyanide lying around.
All he had was a pen, the nib still warped from when Ellie had used it to pry up the stones of Hatshepsut’s sun altar.
Could he kill himself with a bent pen?
Neil pictured the various places he might try to stab himself and fought back a wave of queasiness.
He was still reeling from all of it when he heard the doorknob turn.
He startled, losing his grip on Dawson’s side. The professor began to fall, and Neil caught at him again, his spectacles dropping to the floor in the process. With a burst of desperate inspiration, he set his shoe to the leg of Dawson’s chair and shoved, spinning the seat a quarter-turn. The maneuver put Dawson’s lean in the direction of the table, where Neil lowered him—as gently as he could while fighting the urge to shriek like a schoolgirl.
“Pleased to accept…” the professor mumbled sleepily, “…great honor, Your Majesty…”
To Neil’s immense relief, Dawson settled, his cheek puddling against a Sumerian lexicon as he fell back into a soft, gurgling snore.
Whoever was at the door had come up against the lock, but a rather ominous scratching sound now rose from the wooden panel.
Neil fought a rising panic. What should he do—smash the tablet before they came in or stab himself with the pen? He wouldn’t have time to do both, and failure on either front would leave Julian with the keys to find the tomb.
Only one other course of action remained to him—he must try to disable whoever was coming into the room, which would hopefully leave him time to do away with both the tablet and his pathetic self before anyone else arrived.
He felt frantically around the blurry objects on the table for something that might serve as a weapon. His hands closed around the girth of a thick, heavy tome. Was it the bound Transactions of the Royal Historical Society or The Hittites and Their Language ?
It didn’t matter. The lock clicked, and Neil was out of time.
He scurried to the space behind the door, raising the book over his head and preparing to strike at whatever threat stepped inside… which he wouldn’t be able to see very well, as he’d neglected to retrieve his spectacles.
He contemplated going back to fumble for them under the table, but before he could act on it, the door swung carefully, quietly inward.
Hefting the book, Neil drew in a shaky breath—and swung wildly at the figure that slipped into view in front of him.
He only had time to notice that the intruder was smaller than he had anticipated before it grabbed him, twisted like a snake, and tossed him onto the floor.
Neil landed with a wind-stealing impact, sprawled across the Turkish carpet with the book in his hand and something firm and shapely straddling his chest.
A blurry face hovered over him, light brown in hue and framed by a halo of dark hair.
“Were you really trying to brain me with the American Journal of Philology ?” the face hissed irritably in a voice Neil recognized.
“Connie?!” he blurted out. “But how on earth did you—”
“Oh, that was my jiu jitsu,” Constance said cheerfully. “I have been practicing that maneuver for some time, so I’m chuffed I finally had a chance to put it to practical—”
She cut off as Dawson’s snores hitched. The fuzzy shape of the professor raised its head from the table.
Neil froze. Constance went still as well… with her thighs braced around his torso, Neil realized with a dawning sense of both heat and dismay.
Danger gnome, he thought furiously as his body threatened to respond. Stolen socks. Scorched textbooks. Just a menacing… curvy… chest-straddling…
He choked back a groan, and Dawson’s head drifted back to the desk with a mutter about commencement addresses.
Constance’s hand clamped around Neil’s arm, and she levered him upright, demonstrating a strength Neil never would have expected a woman of her stature to possess.
“Well?” she prompted in a harsh whisper once he was on his feet. “We haven’t got all evening.”
“Tablet,” Neil blurted in reply, blinking at her blurry form as he waved vaguely in the direction of the table.
Constance quickly studied the surface. She snatched up the tablet, shoving it into Neil’s arms—then bent down and plucked something from the floor.
She pushed it toward his face. Neil instinctively flinched back until the familiar weight of a pair of wire frames slipped over his ears.
The room came into focus in a sprawl of papers across the desk, a sleeping professor—and Constance’s irritated glare, framed by thick black locks that were making an admirable effort to escape from their pins.
“You’re… I’m…” Neil stammered, blinking down at her. “We’re… Why…?”
“It’s a bloody rescue, you nitwit!” Constance hissed.
Then she planted a leg on the table, whipped up the froth of her white gown, and exposed the smooth, muscular curve of her calf.
Neil’s mind went blank of everything but leg— until Constance slipped a dagger from her garter.
He fumbled the tablet, nearly dropping it to the floor.
“Stay behind me and keep quiet,” Constance ordered, grabbing him by the sleeve and hauling him through the door into the dark, silent hallway. “There’s a rowboat tied to the landing platform at the stern. We’ll use that—unless you can swim?”
“We did summer occasionally at the lake, and I went for the odd… Hold on—why would we need to swim?” Neil demanded in a tight hush.
“It would be a stealthier means of escape than the launch.” She made the conclusion sound as though it were the most reasonable thing in the world.
“You want us to throw ourselves into the Nile?” Neil protested, barely remembering to keep his panicked voice low. “What about crocodiles?”
“We can deal with the problem of crocodiles if it arises,” Constance replied with a dismissive wave.
“How does one simply deal with crocodiles ?” Neil burst back incredulously.
“You are talking too much!” she hissed in reply.
She grabbed his arm, dragging him down the hallway. The opening to the landing was a rectangle of softer darkness against the thick gloom.
A figure stepped into the middle of the space—an Al-Saboor with his right arm wrapped in a sling, a cigarette glowing from between the fingers of his left.
He stared at them with surprise. Neil stared back.
Another Al-Saboor popped into the opening beside him, his face framed by a pair of enormous ears.
“El aganeb beyehrabo!” he called out sharply.
The words rang out like bells through the silence of the boat. Neil’s Arabic was far from excellent, but he was fairly certain the words meant something along the lines of that scrawny Englishman is getting away .
“Drat,” Constance cursed—and let her knife fly.
The big-eared mercenary and his companion stumbled back onto the platform to avoid the blade.
With the pair out of view, Constance shoved Neil through the nearest doorway.
He found himself nose-to-nose with the contents of a linen closet, and only just managed to turn around before Constance slammed into him and shut the door.
The space between the shelves and the threshold was tight. Neil was sandwiched between piles of sheets and the lush frame of the danger gnome.
The darkness was absolute. Constance’s soft curls tickled at his nose, and her breath puffed against the thin fabric of his shirt. The rhythm of her exhalations was perfectly regular, as though racing through a boat packed with violent thugs was the sort of thing she did every day.
Neil tried to figure out where to put his hands. The only sensible option seemed to be holding them over his head—which felt patently ridiculous.
Not that it made any difference to his anatomy. He was feeling pathetically turned-on. How could he be turned on by Ellie’s unruly schoolmate, of all people?
Though she wasn’t Ellie’s schoolmate anymore. She was an intimidatingly gorgeous force of nature who had just thrown a dagger at a pair of dangerous criminals.
The force of nature began to wriggle.
“What are you doing?” Neil breathed desperately, certain that his involuntary state was about to become humiliatingly apparent.
“Trying to access my other blade,” she retorted in a hiss.
“Where is it?” Neil recalled the intimate location of her first dagger and felt a jolt of alarm.
“In a special sheath sewn into my corset,” she replied.
Cloth rustled in a terrifying manner from somewhere around the level of Neil’s abdomen.
“Why would you put a knife in your corset?” His voice was strangled, and he was beginning to sweat.
“For emergency situations, of course,” Constance retorted. “Ah!”
A sliver of light through the narrow gap in the frame of the door glinted against her blade. Voices sounded from outside, calling to each other in frustrated Masri.
They passed, and Constance silently yanked Neil back out into the hall.
She glanced at the landing, but Neil could hear some of the Al-Saboors shuffling out there, obviously on guard. Constance hauled him toward the bow instead, only to pivot sharply at the sound of angry voices from the forward deck and shove Neil into a narrow stairwell.
They hurried up, twisting around a sharp turn and emerging into the broad, open-air salon that occupied the upper deck of the boat.
The space was softly illuminated by scattered lanterns hung from the pillars of the canopy, their wicks lowered to a glimmer. The golden glow mingled with the silvery moonlight to paint the mahogany dining table and the well-appointed bar.
Beyond the rail, sand-blasted cliffs soared up against the eastern side of the river, looming over them in fantastical pillars and billowing shapes. They were tall enough that their upper reaches were out of view behind the canopy of the salon.
Neil glanced down at the bow. The crew were awake, making a careful adjustment to the sails as the reis shouted orders. The Isis was moving at a quick clip, white-capped foam roiling to either side of the boat as it rushed along with the current of the narrow, fast-moving river.
“This way.” Constance tugged Neil hurriedly across the night-haunted stillness of the salon.
They stopped at the low railing that bordered the back of the deck. It hung over the landing platform at a height of perhaps twelve feet, though all Neil could see from his current angle was the frothing chop of the river and the lightly bobbing rowboat.
“Take off your coat,” Constance ordered in a whisper.
“Why?” Neil asked even as he shrugged out of the garment and handed it to her.
“We’ll use it to climb down, take out those two Al-Saboors, and steal the boat,” Constance replied, crouching down to tie the tweed sleeve around a banister.
“Take out two Al-Saboors?” Neil returned in a hiss, ducking down a bit as he heard the voices of the pair of thugs rise in another exchange below.
“Connie?” a new voice called out from across the salon.
Julian Forster-Mowbray stood at the top of the stairs, his profile gilded by one of the low-burning lanterns. His expression shifted from confusion to dismay as his gaze moved to Neil. “But what are you doing here? With him ?”
Constance straightened as she faced him. “I am sorry, Julian. But needs must.”
“Needs must what?” Julian pressed back. “I thought we had an understanding! ”
Constance rolled her eyes. “I was using an established method of interrogation!” she retorted. “It’s nothing personal. Just a classic case of espionage.”
“Espionage?” Neil echoed with skeptical surprise.
“Be quiet, Stuffy!” Constance retorted crossly.
Julian’s expression hardened. “I see,” he said tightly. “Then I suppose I am sorry as well.”
He reached down to snatch something from the coffee table nearby. Neil vaguely recognized the leather bundle as a belt and scabbard.
“If you’ll forgive us, we’d prefer not to overstay our welcome.” Constance held out her dagger in one hand. With the other, she shoved Neil back until the low railing bumped against his thighs.
Holding the tablet to his chest, Neil looked down over the back of the boat.
The Al-Saboor below him—a third who had joined the original pair—flashed him a gap-toothed grin and waggled his sword in a friendly wave.
Neil jolted back upright, his heart leaping into his throat as the railing pressed into the back of his legs.
“Connie, please be reasonable,” Julian pleaded. “I’m sure we can talk this through! We’re going to be married!”
“When did I ever give you the impression that I was going to marry you?” Constance retorted with a note of exasperation.
“But why wouldn’t you?” Julian returned, obviously bewildered. “My grandfather was a duke!”
“Nobody cares!” Constance shot back.
Julian’s expression hardened, and he set his hand to the bone-white hilt protruding from his scabbard. “I’m afraid I can’t let you make off with my tablet.”
“I’m not asking for your permission,” Constance asserted stoutly.
She shifted into a posture of dangerous readiness that reminded Neil of his recent encounter with the floor, and he realized this was very likely going to end in a fight—one that he was utterly unqualified to take part in.
Then the official representative of the British Athenaeum for Egyptological studies pulled out his weapon—and Neil’s world tipped upside-down.
In the space of a breath, his scholarly brain automatically registered that the sword his former employer now held in his hand was an excellent example of Anglo Saxon iron twist welding.
His scholarly brain stopped registering things as the sword burst alight with a whirl of blue flame.
Constance raised her dagger. Julian stepped forward. The flickering glow of his patently supernatural weapon danced over the gleaming surface of the bar and drew Neil’s eyes up to something that loomed in the rafters above him.
He found himself staring up into the leering yellow grin of a ten-foot-long crocodile.
When he lowered his gaze again, it halted on the even more terrifying sight of Mr. Jacobs.
He stood at the top of the stairs, a gloom-shadowed presence behind Julian’s shoulder. He did not look cross or even particularly determined. His expression was rather one of tired exasperation as he took in the scene—and pulled a pistol from the flap of his coat.
Clasping the cuneiform tablet to his chest, Neil felt his options wink out, one after the other, until only a single possible course of action remained.
He hated absolutely everything about it.
“Want us?” Constance sang out boldly, making a little come-hither flap of her hand. “Come and get us!”
Julian raised his blade.
Jacobs aimed the gun at Constance’s head.
“Bugger,” Neil said—and hocked the tablet across the salon with an uncharacteristically neat snap of his wrist.
The hunk of clay flew at Jacobs’ head, forcing him to flinch back. He recovered quickly, swinging the pistol around again—but Neil had already hooked his arm around Constance’s waist.
He clasped her to him as he threw himself at the rail… and launched both of them into the Nile.