Thirty-One
E llie hid in the lee of a boulder at the top of the ridge, looking down into the steep, ragged cut of the wadi where Julian Forster-Mowbray was searching for Neferneferuaten’s tomb.
Her caravan had arrived just after sunset, finding their way to this particular gorge by following the echoing clamor of hammers and calling voices—sounds which had traveled with remarkable clarity through the still, clear air of the desert.
Night had fully fallen. Stars pricked out in a wild array from the black velvet of the sky overhead. The other members of Ellie’s party were scattered around her. Zeinab lay on her belly at the edge of the cliff, gazing down at the ledge where Julian was digging. The area was brashly illuminated by a ring of paraffin lanterns.
“I count a dozen,” she murmured. With her black abaya and headscarf, she looked like a patch of deeper shadow against the stones.
“Thirteen,” Adam corrected flatly from where he crouched beside her, watching the ledge with hawk-like focus.
Julian’s site sat about halfway down the opposite wall of the canyon. It buzzed with activity, the air ringing with the impact of picks on stones. Besides the thugs from the sun chapel, he had brought along others that Ellie assumed must be part of the crew of his boat. They served as workers, digging out rubble and carting it off to dump into the canyon.
Even if the men below had numbered only twelve, it would still have been too many. With only the three Egyptian ladies, Adam, and Sayyid, Ellie’s side was vastly outnumbered.
Not that it mattered. If it looked like Julian was close to finding the entrance to Neferneferuaten’s tomb, they would have to intercede anyway—regardless of what it cost them.
For now, Zeinab simply watched, exchanging the occasional low observation with Jemmahor as the two women quietly schemed.
Somewhere behind their perch, the flat, dark expanse of the Amarna plain lay sleeping. Ellie had caught only a glimpse of it when they had approached the wadi that evening, just enough to pick up the general impression of rubble strewn across packed earth beside the flat ribbon of the Nile. She would have given her right foot for a chance to trek down and explore the ruins of ancient Akhetaten.
So far, there had been no sign of Constance or Neil. That most likely meant that Julian had left them back on the boat—unless they had already escaped… or been ruthlessly murdered.
Ellie refused to let her thoughts linger on that last possibility. Adam had been right back at the Coptic convent. Julian had a use for both Constance and Neil—at least until he could be certain he’d found the tomb.
Adam pushed back from his place beside Zeinab at the edge of the ridge. He staggered over to Ellie and slid down against the boulder beside her. His long legs sprawled out in front of him as he closed his eyes.
“Didn’t think I was looking that far down,” he commented a little queasily.
“Zeinab will keep watch,” Ellie assured him sympathetically. “And you’ll probably feel better if you open your eyes again.”
“I think I’m half afraid if I do, the world will still be spinning.” Adam cracked an eye, peering over at where Sayyid sat opposite them, worriedly watching his wife. “Still a little jerky,” he concluded, closing it again.
Ellie poked him lightly in the ribs.
“Those are still bruised, you know,” Adam remarked.
“Open,” Ellie ordered.
With a sigh, Adam obeyed.
“Does Zeinab have a plan?” Ellie asked.
His lip twisted wryly. “What makes you think Zeinab’s the one with the plan? Why couldn’t I have a plan?”
“You never make plans.”
“That’s not entirely true,” Adam protested.
“Do you have a plan now?” she prompted dryly.
Adam turned a sharp gaze over to the lights and noise of the dig—though he made no move to go back to the cliff. “Odds aren’t great. We could try coming down at them from above, but height’s not that much of an advantage when all you’ve got for weapons are a bunch of knives and one beat-to-hell Enfield.”
He nodded to their single rifle, which Jemmahor had packed with her after stealing it from one of the Al-Saboors in Hatshepsut’s temple.
“Could we stage a distraction?” Ellie suggested. “Draw some of them away?”
“Maybe,” Adam allowed. “But then we’d be splitting our forces—and we don’t have that many of them to begin with.”
“He will have a weakness,” Zeinab cut in, her gaze still locked on the canyon. “And I will find it.”
“Woman’s got ears like a cat,” Adam grumbled. He nodded at Ellie’s hand. “How’s your project going?”
Ellie had been working to assess the damage to her firebird arcanum. The bone was carved in Glagolitic, a script invented by St. Cyril in the ninth century to transliterate the ancient Slavic tongue. Ellie’s knowledge of it was limited, as she had studied it only briefly before hurrying on to a deeper dive into Old French. Now she wished she hadn’t been in such a rush to read La Chanson de Roland .
She held the bone out in front of her, trying to catch more of the pale moonlight that washed over the ridge. “It’s this first character that was chipped. I can see that it’s something including a single circle. That means it must be either the Izey, the Omega, or—no, no. That character was hardly ever used. The Fert, perhaps? Or the Slovo… Blast it, that’s still too many possibilities.”
“Izey and Fert,” Adam echoed. “I think I played cards with those guys once.”
Ellie shot him a dry look, and he grinned at her.
She returned her attention to the bone and decided to read the possibilities aloud, hoping one of them might ring a bell. “Ivět?,” she muttered. “Fvět?. Svět?.”
“Bless you,” Adam offered.
“Don’t make me poke your ribs again,” Ellie threatened darkly. “Svět?… Isn’t that a bit like ?vetá, the Sanskrit word for white? White, bright…” She perked up. “ Light! Svet is the root of the cognates for light in the Slavic languages. It must be the Slovo!” Ellie flapped an impatient hand at Adam. “Give me your machete.”
“What do you want my machete for?” Adam asked.
“I need to fix the inscription.”
“You’re gonna try to etch that tiny bird bone with my eighteen-inch knife?” Adam pressed skeptically.
“I need something sharp!” Ellie protested.
“That’s a whole lot of sharp for one little bone.”
Zeinab hissed at them warningly from where she crouched at the edge of their hiding place.
Sorry , Ellie mouthed back with a wince.
“Anybody else here got a knife?” Adam asked in a whisper.
Umm Waseem, who reclined against her black canvas bag with her hands folded comfortably on her round belly, revealed a wickedly curved fish gutter.
Jemmahor lifted her stolen rifle. She gave an apologetic shrug.
“You are not using my scalpels,” Zeinab said flatly without looking back at them.
With a sigh, Sayyid pulled a little folding penknife from his pocket.
The rest of their party—namely the extremely persistent dog and their two remarkably handsome Bedouin guides—had hung back with the camels, which Ellie could hear grunting contentedly in the near distance.
“Thanks,” Adam said, accepting the penknife.
He held out his hand for the bone, a waiting expression on his face. Ellie drew it back protectively.
“You don’t know Glagolitic.” She gave him a thoughtful look. “Do you?”
“Not a word,” Adam replied. “You can draw it for me. I mean, it’s basically a picture, right?”
“Oh, very well,” Ellie conceded, handing him the bone.
She flattened a little well of sand that lay between them and used her index finger to shape the lines of the Glagolitic Slovo.
“It starts with this equilateral triangle, and then the circle is inscribed on top,” she explained—remembering to keep her voice low at another warning glare from Zeinab. “But the tip of the triangle should pierce the bottom of the circle. And make sure it’s in exactly the same place as the old one!” she added, leaning over Adam’s shoulder like a worried mother hen.
He paused, cocking an eyebrow at her. “I got it.”
Ellie made no further protest, even as her throat tightened with worry. Trying to carve an ancient Slavic rune into the delicately rounded surface of a centuries-old bird bone by moonlight was madness. She wouldn’t have dared chance it—except she imagined that an arcanum that could spontaneously erupt with a substantial burst of fiery light might prove useful in whatever dangers the rest of the night held in store.
She bit her lip to keep from offering more helpful advice to Adam and tried not to twitch with nervousness.
He whistled a quiet tune as he set the tip of the penknife to the bone in a manner that struck Ellie as dangerously confident. Rather than hover and anticipate disaster, she turned her attention to Sayyid.
He looked exhausted. Sayyid was much like Ellie’s brother in temperament, far better suited to a comfortable routine of hard work and intellectual stimulation than a life of uncertainty and danger.
Those traits would have made Neil and Sayyid natural friends, and indeed, Ellie had sensed an easy, affectionate rapport between the two men when she had first popped into the tomb at Saqqara. She liked to think of Neil being friends with someone like Sayyid—someone clever and good-hearted who shared Neil’s intellectual interests and wasn’t afraid to challenge him when he acted like a stick-in-the-mud.
She had watched that relationship grow more strained as Neil had stubbornly clung to the crumbling remnants of his old life. Nor had she missed the look of shocked betrayal on Sayyid’s face when he had learned about Neil’s note to Julian Forster-Mowbray back at Hatshepsut’s temple. Ellie wondered how heavily that breach of trust weighed on Sayyid alongside his worries about his wife’s revolutionary activities and the substantial risks of their current mission.
Rubble crashed down into the canyon as Julian’s workmen emptied their buckets. The sound of picks echoed out through the still night air that blanketed the ridge.
“Can’t be easy finding out your wife is a secret revolutionary,” Adam said quietly, noticing the direction of her attention. “Why do you think she didn’t tell him?”
“I think she was trying to protect him,” Ellie murmured back. “That she knew he would be terribly worried about it, but she was going to do it anyway.”
“That’s a big part of yourself to hide from the person you love,” Adam noted.
Ellie soaked up the way the pale moonlight silvered the line of his jaw. She had never hidden her principles from Adam… but she hadn’t realized how they would run up against his own.
The chaos of Julian’s ambush and their race to the wadi hadn’t left them any time to address the questions about their future that still hung over them. They felt like a knife that threatened to drive them apart.
Adam held out the firebird bone. “One Slovo.”
Ellie took the arcanum from him and studied the newly carved Glagolitic character. She tried to remember if it had looked the same before. “What if I was wrong?” she asked in an uncomfortable whisper.
“You weren’t,” Adam assured her confidently.
“But I thought you didn’t know Old Church Slavonic,” Ellie protested. “How can you be sure?”
Adam met her gaze with a look that warmed her bones. “I’m sure.”
His assurance—and that heated look—both settled her and sent an electric hum of awareness buzzing through her veins.
“I suppose I will simply have to test it,” Ellie conceded. “Though perhaps not when we are hiding from a batch of mercenaries.”
She slipped the arcanum back into the cigar tube, returning it to her pocket—and then reached out to take hold of Adam’s hand.
He flashed her a look of surprise but allowed her to turn his palm until it caught the pale light washing down from the crescent moon. She traced her finger gently along the straight red line that marred his palm.
She could remember the sound of his blood softly splattering against the stones and the quick, panicked fear that had tightened her chest at how easily it might have been so much worse .
“I’m afraid this is going to leave a scar,” Ellie observed quietly.
“I’ll add it to the collection,” Adam returned with a note of wry humor.
She let her thumb graze over his work-roughened skin. “It cut right through your life line—if one were to give any credence to that sort of superstitious nonsense,” she added curtly.
“That sounds about right,” Adam replied easily.
Ellie frowned. “It does?”
“Changed my life, didn’t it?”
“What—getting your hand sliced open?” she countered crossly.
His other hand rose to her chin, gently turning her face up to look at him. His gaze was steady through the gloom. “Finding you, Princess.”
The words shivered through her—and then Ellie startled at the scuff of leather on stone from behind.
Adam surged to his feet with a deceptive ease, his hand going to the hilt of his machete. Ellie more awkwardly whirled to see an absurdly good-looking Bedouin slip around the corner with the silent grace of a desert fox—prodding a pair of shadowy captives ahead of him with the point of his scimitar.
“Spies,” Mustafa said in richly accented tones that flowed from his lips like water. “English.”
The cloud passed, and moonlight spilled once more over the ridge—revealing the faces of Mustafa’s prisoners.
“Neil!?” Ellie gasped.
“Peanut?” her brother blurted back, blinking with surprise through the round frames of his spectacles.
He let out an oomph as Ellie crashed into him, squeezing him around the ribs.
“You’re all right!” she exclaimed, breathless with the relief that washed over her.
His arms came around her and tightened. His cheek pressed against her hair.
“I’m all right,” he assured her quietly.
“And you, too,” Ellie added, releasing her brother and reaching for Constance.
“Don’t tell me you were worried!” Constance scolded, squeezing her back. “Stuffy and I had the situation fully under control the entire time.”
Neil’s face blanched. “I wouldn’t say that’s quite…”
He bit back the rest as Constance shot him a warning look.
Adam joined them.
“Bates,” Neil said awkwardly, facing him.
“Fairfax,” Adam replied—and then yanked him into a hug. “Damned good to see you in one piece.”
“Rather glad of that myself,” Neil confessed tightly. “It’s very good to see you as well—all of you.” He cast a meaningful look at Sayyid, who had come to his feet beside them, and his face fell into lines of pained dismay. “I owe you all the most abject—”
“Yes, yes.” Constance cut him off with a wave of her hand. “There will be plenty of time for groveling later. I want to know how the three of you managed to escape Julian’s thugs in Hatshepsut’s temple!”
“The three of us had very little to do with it,” Ellie admitted frankly. “We were rescued by Mrs. Al-Ahmed and her band of lady revolutionaries.”
Neil’s face blanked with surprise. He cast a startled look at Constance. “Revolutionaries?” he echoed numbly.
Zeinab rose with a fluid shift of shadowy black cloth and regarded Neil through narrowed eyes. Jemmahor gave him a cheerful wave, the rifle balanced across her knees.
Umm Waseem looked to be napping again.
“Told you,” Constance commented smugly.
“But however did the pair of you escape the boat?” Ellie pressed.
“It was simple enough, really,” Constance replied. “I waited until dark, picked the lock, hauled Neil out—and lost both of my knives evading our pursuers,” she added grumpily. “Then Neil tossed the pair of us into the Nile.”
Ellie turned wide eyes on her brother. “You jumped out of a boat into the Nile? In the middle of the night?”
“It was awful.” Neil paled at the memory.
“We sheltered in an ancient cliff tomb, and the next morning I purchased a felucca at an extortionate price from a local farmer so that we could follow Julian and his villainous cohort here,” Constance finished. “We were captured by your extremely handsome Bedouin accomplice, and there you have it.”
Adam made a choked sound from behind her. He either had sand in his throat, or had made an only moderately successful attempt not to burst out laughing and thereby reveal their position to the excavators below.
“Who is that fellow, anyway?” Constance pressed with canny interest as she cast an appreciative look over at Mustafa. “Is he a desert prince here to aid our cause?”
The dashing Bedouin had stepped aside as soon as it was clear that his captives were friends rather than enemies. He stood on a ledge that fell away to the ragged, wadi-crossed landscape of the plateau, his noble figure swept with pale moonlight.
“He is here to watch the camels with his cousin,” Ellie replied a little reluctantly.
“Camels, is it?” Constance tore her gaze from the gorgeous Bedouin with obvious effort. “So what is the plan for stopping Julian and his henchmen? Are we well stocked with firearms?”
“I have this,” Jemmahor offered, waggling her rifle.
“That’s a bolt-action Enfield,” Adam elaborated. “It’s almost as nice as a Winchester repeater, but it doesn’t help much if you don’t have any rounds for it.”
“I have rounds,” Jemmahor retorted.
“You’ve got two,” Adam corrected her. “I checked the magazine.”
Jemmahor pouted.
“I used to have a Winchester repeater,” Adam added in a deceptively casual tone.
“Where is it now?” Jemmahor asked hopefully.
Adam flashed Ellie a smirk. “Ellie dropped a cave on it.”
“We don’t need firearms.” Ellie tried to suppress an embarrassed flush. “We have… er, the element of surprise.”
“Hmm,” Constance mused, clearly unimpressed.
“Either of you happen to know why The Mustache picked this spot to dig?” Adam jerked a thumb back at the lights and noise of Julian’s excavation. “Because it’d be real nice to find out he’s doing it all on some posh whim.”
“Neil threw the map at him,” Constance replied.
Neil groaned, setting his face in his hands.
“Why were you throwing maps at people?” Ellie demanded.
“It was on the tablet,” Neil reported through his fingers.
Ellie gaped at Neil. “You threw a three-thousand-year-old document of immeasurable historical importance at Mr. Forster-Mowbray?”
“No!” Neil protested. His shoulders slumped. “I threw it at Mr. Jacobs.”
“It was actually quite well done,” Constance offered helpfully. “That villain had just produced a firearm and was about to riddle us with bullets, only Neil launched the tablet at him and then knocked both of us over the railing into the river.”
She flashed Neil a conciliatory smile.
“Might’ve been well done, but it left the damned thing in Fusty Mothball’s hands,” Adam pointed out.
Neil straightened with effort, forcing himself to wade in. “There were measurements in the final line of the Akkadian. Something about eight hundred and fifteen cubits past the entrance to this wadi.”
“Guess that’s where they’re digging.” Adam cast a grim look back at the glow of the excavation.
“Which cubits?” Sayyid cut in.
The others turned to him in surprise. Sayyid had been oddly quiet throughout the reunion. Ellie could still see an edge of anger in his eyes as he looked at Neil.
“Of course!” Neil bit out the words like a curse. “How could I have missed that?”
“Explain,” Zeinab ordered sharply.
“In the Ancient Egyptian measurement system, there are two types of cubits,” Sayyid elaborated. “There is the small cubit, the meh nedjes—that works out to approximately forty-five centimeters in length. And then there is the meh nisut—the royal cubit. That is a bit longer, at five-two centimeters.”
“Well—more or less,” Neil hedged as if he couldn’t quite help himself. “The cubit rod that Lepsius found in the tomb of Maya came in at exactly fifty-two-point-three centimeters. But then Maspero found a cubit rod box at Lisht that indicated a measurement of closer to fifty-two-point-nine, so you see it isn’t entirely clear that the standard remained consistent between the Old Kingdom and—”
Zeinab interrupted him. “Which cubit would Mr. Forster-Mowbray use?”
“Not Mr. Foster-Mowbray,” Ellie modified. “It would be Professor Dawson who did the calculations.”
Sayyid frowned thoughtfully. “If he was classically trained, he will most likely know the cubit through the Roman system of measurement—which aligns with the Egyptian meh nedjes. The small cubit.”
Ellie felt a buzz of excitement. “But it was the royal cubit that served the standard unit of measurement in Ancient Egypt, wasn’t it?”
“It’s what was used to lay out the dimensions of the pyramids at Saqqara and Giza,” Neil confirmed quickly.
“So Dawson’s unit is off by seven centimeters!” Ellie concluded.
“Seven centimeters?” Constance echoed, unimpressed.
“Seven centimeters times eight hundred and fifty,” Adam clarified. “Which works out to about a hundred and ninety feet.” He met Ellie’s eyes significantly. “Hundred and ninety feet can make a hell of a difference.”
Ellie glanced back at the glow and racket of Julian’s dig. “They’re in the wrong place!”
“Should we simply let him be, then?” Jemmahor suggested.
“We cannot be sure that he would give up if he does not find what he is looking for in the first place he digs,” Zeinab declared firmly. “And it is possible that your professor might realize his mistake.”
“I… can’t rule that out,” Neil admitted uneasily. “He’s not entirely ignorant of Egyptology. Just excessively sure of himself.”
“That’s one way of putting it,” Adam added dryly.
Zeinab looked down at her sandals as her mind worked furiously. When she raised her head again, her eyes spoke of a decision. “I would like to know whether there is anything at the true location for him to find.”
“Right.” Adam sighed resignedly. “Hell. Fairfax, grab the back of my shirt.”
“Your shirt?” Neil hurried after Adam as he moved across the ridge. “Why?”
“In case I pass out,” Adam replied, stepping up to the edge of the cliff.
Zeinab joined him there, moving like a wisp of shadow.
Adam studied the opposite wall of the canyon. “Hundred and ninety feet’s gonna take you right… about… there.”
He pointed across the gap to a spot that looked like a bowl scooped out of the face of the ridge. The geological feature was framed on three sides by a crown of ragged stone and blocked from Julian’s dig site by a narrow outcrop.
“How can you be sure that is the spot?” Zeinab demanded
Adam met her gaze evenly. “I’m a surveyor. This is what I do.” His expression shifted, his mouth tightening greenly. “And now I’m gonna lie down for a second.”
He staggered back from the drop and collapsed onto the ground.
Zeinab shot Ellie a questioning look.
“He’s… not overfond of heights,” Ellie explained.
Zeinab studied the spot Adam had indicated. Her brow wrinkled with concentration. “It is possible we might examine the area without being seen—if we are very careful and very quiet.”
Ellie felt a thrill of danger at the idea. Things would quickly go bad if they were discovered… but if any truth lay behind the text on the tablet, then an exploration of that ledge might reveal the true location of Neferneferuaten’s tomb—and perhaps solve the mystery of the lost pharaoh’s connection to the man the world knew as Moses.
“We’ll need to cross about a quarter mile down and then backtrack,” Adam commented from behind them, where he continued to lie flat on his back on the stones. “That’s the only way to make sure those sentries don’t spot us.”
“Is there no chance that extremely attractive Bedouin and his cousin might join us?” Constance asked hopefully.
Ellie wasn’t sure whether she was more eager for the assistance—or the view.
“No,” Zeinab replied flatly.
She trudged off toward the hollow behind their perch, where Ellie could hear the occasional grunt and bray from the herd.
Ellie gave her brother a more thorough examination. Neil’s waistcoat was missing a button, and his soft brown hair was in a state of disarray. “How are you, really?”
Neil hesitated before he replied. “Your Mr. Jacobs is terrifying.”
“Yes.” Ellie’s skin chilled with the memory of her past encounters with the man.
“That professor, Dawson… he claimed that Jacobs always knows when someone is lying.” Neil met Ellie’s gaze with a wide-eyed trepidation. “And I… I think I actually believe him. Is that mad?”
Ellie found herself washed over with memories—of Jacob’s icy confidence in the hotel in Belize Town. His tired, resigned certainty in the wilderness of the Cayo. The uncanny, impossible feeling that he simply knew .
Ellie forced the answer out. “No. I don’t think you are.”
“How is that possible?” Neil demanded. “To always know? I mean, I can see where a fellow might have a particular sense for the thing, which when looked at from a certain angle—”
“But it’s more than that,” Ellie cut in quietly.
Neil shook his head. “I don’t understand any of this.”
“Don’t have to.” Adam hauled himself back to his feet.
“Then what am I supposed to do?” Neil pushed back helplessly.
Adam clamped a hand on his shoulder, giving it a squeeze. “Stop the bad guys. Stay alive.”
Zeinab returned in a swirl of black cloth, the ropes, lantern, and crowbar slung over her shoulder.
“If you are here to be useful,” she declared authoritatively, “then come.”
Without waiting for answers, she set out across the cliffs, a scrap of fluttering shadow slipping through the darkness.
Sayyid stared after her, his face drawn with worry. He glanced back at the rest of them, his eyes drifting from Constance and Adam to Ellie.
They stopped at Neil, and for a moment his gaze hardened, flashing with something that Ellie was startled to realize she recognized.
It looked like hurt.
He stalked after his wife without another word.
Neil hadn’t noticed, lost in his own uneasy thoughts. “Is it possible to be both excited and abjectly terrified at the same time?”
“We might very well be on the verge of discovering the final resting place of one of the most important women in Egyptian history,” Ellie replied. “And we are doing it under the noses of your villainous ex-employer, a batch of mercenaries, and an unflinchingly ruthless killer who can detect lies.”
“So pretty much just your average day,” Adam concluded.
“What are you all waiting for? Christmas?” Constance hissed as she hurried past them.
Neil cast a forlorn look up at the stars. “I miss books,” he moaned and trudged after her.
Jemmahor hopped over the rocks like a long-legged gazelle. Umm Waseem swung her ubiquitous satchel over her shoulder and trundled after her.
Adam lingered at Ellie’s side. The two of them stood alone together under a cobalt sky sparkling with a thousand stars. The wind that danced over her skin smelled of dust and time.
“I won’t try to talk you out of coming along,” Adam commented quietly. “I’m aware that would go over about as well as a sack of bricks. Even though there’s a good chance this whole business could end with all of us being shot.” Heat mingled with worry in his gaze. “But I’d appreciate it if you’d do whatever you could to stay alive for the rest of the night.”
“I will if you will,” Ellie replied softly.
The shadow of a smile tugged at his lip. It fell away as he glanced out across the canyon. “You really think the Staff of Moses is over there?”
“I think if there is even a chance,” she replied deliberately, “then it is worth any cost to protect it.”
Adam’s calloused thumb smoothed gently over the curve of her cheek. “Suppose we’d better be getting on, then.”
Ellie gazed up at him, memorizing the familiar lines of his face in the slender moonlight. “I supposed we had.”
They set out across the ridge.