Thirty-Four
P riestesses shaking sistrums , papyrus stalks heavy with white blooms, children playing in the halls of a palace—Adam was surrounded by a vanished world.
The hallway was a revelation. The three Egyptologists in their party were gasping over references to rituals or courtly activities they’d all read about in books. Adam might not have known what a Sed festival was, but he was fully capable of appreciating the paradigm-shattering importance of the artwork that surrounded him.
He just wished they weren’t exploring it with a ticking clock looming over them.
The Mustache wasn’t going to dig into a random piece of the mountain forever. Eventually, he’d figure out that he was in the wrong spot—and start looking for the right one. Adam had no illusions that the two ladies upstairs, Jemmahor and Umm Waseem, could hold off a small army of Al-Saboors. If Julian’s men realized Ellie and the other were down here, the best possible scenario was that one of the two Egyptian ladies managed to get through the fissure in time to warn them before the bad guys showed up.
That still left them all cornered in a hole in the ground with only one way out.
Past the crack in the ceiling through which they’d entered, the hallway sloped gently down, tunneling deeper into the mountain. The timeless stillness and the scent of old stone reminded Adam of another piece of lost history he’d stumbled into not so long ago—namely the caves beneath the city of Tulan.
Those tunnels had concealed secrets that had turned Adam’s world upside down—and nearly cost him and Ellie their lives.
The painted passage ended at another doorway. This one was completely covered over in plaster.
“It’s intact!” Ellie’s tone was bright with excitement. She whirled to Adam. “Don’t you see? If the plaster is unbroken, it means no one has been down here since the pharaoh’s body was laid to rest somewhere beyond this barrier. We could be looking at an untouched royal Amarna burial!”
Adam eyed the yellowed material. It still showed ridges in places from the movements of an ancient trowel. “That’s not all the same stuff. The discoloration is slightly off here in the middle. Looks to me like it’s a different compound or something put on a bit more recently.”
Neil moved in for a closer look, adjusting his spectacles. “You’re right. There’s a swath of newer plaster in the center. You can see where it overlaps some of the royal seals.”
“If a tomb was looted during antiquity, it was sometimes closed up again by the priests of the necropolis.” Sayyid frowned thoughtfully. “But the necropolis here at Amarna would have been abandoned during the reign of Ay, if not even earlier, in Tutankhamun’s time. That is a very narrow window of time for a looting and official restoration.”
“So maybe it wasn’t official,” Adam offered.
Sayyid contemplated his suggestion with a raised eyebrow. “I don’t see any seals on the newer plaster. Had it been a ritual closing, the priests would have stamped it again.”
“So was the tomb looted or not?” Constance demanded.
Adam met Ellie’s eyes. He could see the worry in them, and it struck a pang through him. He knew damned well what it felt like to stumble across a forgotten part of the past, only to find out somebody else had already come along and torn it to pieces. That was why he’d stopped putting the Mayan sites he’d found on the maps he was paid to draw.
This place—and this woman, this Neferneferuaten—were obviously important to Ellie. The notion that they might come this far only to find a bunch of rubble on the other side had to be killing her. It was killing him a little, and he hadn’t been wondering over the mysteries of the Amarna period for the last ten years.
“Somebody came down here after the burial was closed,” Neil reasoned. “But what sort of thief robs a tomb and then closes it up again nicely afterward?”
“Maybe they weren’t thieves,” Adam cut in with a spark of inspiration—and a dart of relief. “Thought we were here because someone might’ve come along and put something in this tomb—not taken things out.”
“And this is the will of Moseh,” Neil recited softly, his eyes on the broken seals, “that his legacy, the gift of Neferneferuaten, be not misused or fallen into the hands of enemies.”
“But why would Moses put his staff here?” Ellie wondered urgently. “In the tomb of an Atenist pharaoh?”
“Enough talking,” Zeinab fixed them all with a green-eyed glare. “Or have you forgotten that there are men above who mean to take this tomb’s secrets for themselves, no matter if they need to kill us all to do it? We must know what is here that is worth protecting.”
Ellie cast an aching look back at the beautiful artwork that lined the hallway. “But all of it needs to be protected!”
Adam slipped a hand over her shoulder. “Sometimes you can’t save all of it,” he said, the words rougher with feeling than he’d intended. “Sometimes you just save what you can.”
Ellie met his eyes. Her gaze softened, and Adam knew she was thinking of that other cave in the Cayo—the one where he’d fallen to his knees before a pile of shattered pots and ravaged bones.
Zeinab stepped forward with the crowbar in her hands. Neil shifted to make way for her. Only Sayyid lingered, gazing mournfully at the layered plaster on the door.
“This is not the way we should be doing this,” he said quietly.
The hardness in Zeinab’s face fell away, her eyes darkening with sympathy. “I know, ya habibi,” she replied softly. “Wallah, I wish we lived in a world where you could open this tomb with all the tenderness of a mother—but the imperialists have left us no room for that. We may only stand by to watch as they take what is ours… or fight back however we can.”
She touched his face, fingers brushing gently against the dark hair of his beard as Sayyid drew in a heavy breath.
“Let me do it,” he said.
Zeinab stepped back.
“Mr. Bates—could I use your knife?” Sayyid asked sadly.
Adam pulled the machete from the sheath at his waist, flipped it expertly in his hand, and extended the hilt to him.
Sayyid set the tip of the blade to the plaster—and then drew it down, scoring a deep line through the length of the doorway. Dust trickled over his shoes.
He offered the machete back to Adam. “You keep your blade sharp,” he commented sadly.
Adam silently took the knife back.
“The crowbar.” Sayyid held out his hand.
Constance passed it to him with uncharacteristic reverence.
He pushed the iron hook into the slender gap revealed by the scored plaster. He held it there for a moment, leaning forward and closing his eyes.
A dua for forgiveness fell from his lips, and he wrenched the iron back.
The scrape of stone echoed up the passageway. Plaster popped around the top and sides of the panel, spurting out little clouds of white powder.
Sayyid set down the crowbar and gripped the exposed edge of the door. “Mr. Bates?” he prompted.
Adam joined him and hauled back against the stone. It pivoted on another concealed hinge, opening onto a steep, narrow staircase. Lamplight spilled over the first few steps. The rest descended into darkness.
“Who should go first?” Ellie eyed the shadowy tunnel with both excitement and trepidation.
“Whoever it is, they had best watch for booby traps,” Constance piped in helpfully, rising up onto the toes of her boots to peer over Ellie’s shoulder.
“There is no such thing as booby traps,” Neil countered impatiently. “They’re a ludicrous invention of adventure novelists.”
“That’s not entirely accurate,” Ellie countered. “There are contemporary documents that indicate the First Qin Emperor of China was entombed in an enormous mausoleum threaded through with rivers of mercury and crossbows that would shoot at anyone who stepped in the wrong place.”
“But no one has ever excavated the tomb of Qin Shi Huang!” Neil complained. “That’s just propaganda to deter thieves!”
“Ancient Egyptians used curses to protect their tombs,” Sayyid offered. “Promises of untold pain and eternal suffering that would be inflicted on anyone who violated their rest.”
The rest of the group regarded him with various degrees of unease.
“But not—ah—booby traps,” he finished uncomfortably.
“I’ll go,” Neil declared irritably and stalked out onto the first stair.
The rock promptly gave way beneath his shoe, and Neil dropped like a stone.
Sayyid was a step ahead of Adam. He dove as Neil plummeted, throwing his arms around Neil’s chest and catching him just before he disappeared through the collapse.
Sayyid slid across the floor as Neil’s weight dragged him down.
Adam threw himself across Sayyid’s legs. Grasping him by the ankles, he pivoted, slamming his boots up against the stone to either side of the door.
“Fiddlesticks!” Ellie burst out.
Behind her, Zeinab took one look at the scene and raced up the hallway. Adam could hear her shouting through the fissure to the women above.
“You are heavier than you look,” Sayyid complained, his voice tight with strain.
“I’m not trying to be!” Neil called back in a panic.
He’d fallen completely through the hole in the stairs. Only Sayyid’s tenacious grip kept him from plummeting down to whatever lay below.
Hopefully not a pit full of razors, Adam thought ruefully.
“Neither of you are a piece of cake,” Adam bit out, adjusting his sliding grip on Sayyid’s feet.
“Perhaps if I just… swung my leg up here…” Neil offered helpfully.
Chips of stone from the edge of the hole broke away as he moved, pinging down into the black abyss.
“No!” Adam and Sayyid shouted simultaneously.
Zeinab skidded back to them with a coil of rope in her hands. “Apologies, habibi,” she said, and then clambered unceremoniously across Sayyid’s back.
He let out an oof of protest as she leaned over him and whipped the rope around Neil’s body.
She scrambled back, digging a knee into Adam’s thigh, and threw the other end of the rope to Ellie.
“Pull!” Zeinab ordered, and the two women hauled at their lines. Constance rushed to join them, the heels of her kid boots digging against the ground. The tension in Sayyid’s body started to shift—and suddenly everything was moving.
Neil spilled across Adam and Sayyid, the three of them tumbling into a tangled mess of limbs. Adam found himself staring up at the ceiling with somebody’s ankle propped on his shoulder.
Constance’s face appeared above him, eyes bright with excitement. “That was splendid!”
Ellie appeared beside her, lines of worry creasing her brow. “Are you all right?”
“I would be,” Neil gasped thinly in reply, “if Sayyid would take his elbow out of my diaphragm!”
“Think that might be my elbow,” Adam replied, shifting the limb in question.
Neil groaned with relief.
A sturdy hand clasped Adam’s arm, helping to lever him to his feet. He rose to face Sayyid’s wife and cocked an impressed eyebrow.
“I’ll haul Stuffy out,” Constance announced, hooking her hands under Neil’s shoulders.
He popped free and flopped over while Sayyid staggered upright.
“Was it a bottomless pit, then?” Constance asked hopefully.
“Ancient Egyptians did not build bottomless pits!” Neil’s spectacles had gone a bit sideways. He adjusted them, which resulted in them skewing wrong the other way. His brown hair was glazed with dust.
“Tell that to the one that just tried to swallow you,” Constance countered. “But how shall we get past it?”
Adam moved over to the doorway, peering down at the collapse. “Anybody got a light?”
Ellie pushed a lantern into his hand. He extended it over the opening, and the glow spilled down into a pit.
“Not bottomless,” Adam declared. “Looks about twenty-five feet deep.”
“I think I would rather not have known that,” Neil returned queasily.
Adam was feeling a little queasy himself. Twenty-five feet might not be bottomless, but it was just far enough to make his head spin.
He forced himself to stick around for another breath as he examined the interior of the hole. “It’s all just rock,” he reported. “Walls look oddly regular for a cave, though.”
He pulled back as another wave of dizziness threatened to overwhelm him. “The edge of it lines up with the left half of the stairs. Should be able to go along all right if we stick to that side.”
Adam tried not to think about how much his suggestion sounded like walking along an ancient tightrope.
“I’ll lead the way,” Constance happily offered, hopping over the gap.
?
They descended the stairs without falling into any more deadly pits. The passage was close and low enough that Adam had to duck to navigate it. There were no paintings on the walls, only roughly carved stone that seemed to grow thicker and heavier as they moved deeper into the heart of the ridge.
The steps stopped at another doorway. Instead of hinged panels like the others they had found, this one was closed off with only an ancient slab of wood.
“Not quite as elaborate as the one upstairs, is it?” Constance mused, eyeing it a little critically.
“Perhaps this stairwell was considered a less important part of the tomb,” Ellie offered.
“Or it was not finished.” Sayyid nodded at the stone lintel. “There are holes drilled there as though meant for another set of stone doors.”
“Neferneferuaten only ruled for a short time,” Neil reminded them as he stared at the dusty boards.
“Perhaps they didn’t have enough time to complete her tomb before she needed to use it,” Ellie filled in.
“Was she very old when she became the king?” Constance asked.
“No,” Neil replied. “She would not have been old at all.”
“Begs the question of what did her in,” Adam noted soberly.
He didn’t know a fraction of the Egyptian history that Ellie, Neil, and Sayyid did, but he recognized that a woman stepping into the role of king would have been fairly revolutionary—even if she hadn’t been part of some crazy new faith that her husband had imposed on the entire country. Maybe she’d died of the same plague that Neil had said killed Akhenaten… but it seemed to Adam that a lady like that would have accumulated plenty of enemies.
The thought made him a little sad.
“We should move it carefully,” Sayyid said with a tired sigh as he studied the wooden screen that blocked their way.
“I’ll help,” Neil offered.
The two Egyptologists each took a side, carefully lifting the slab and shifting it gingerly to the wall. As they moved, the glow of Zeinab’s lamp spilled into the space that lay beyond.
Light flared back from within. For a moment, those sparkling glimmers were all Adam could discern. Then his vision adjusted—and the wonders inside came into focus.
The chamber was packed. Elegant furniture crowded the space, rich with lapis blue and ruddy ocher—chairs accented with gold leaf and cabinets stuffed with gray bundles that would once have been fine linens.
Statues watched them with jewel-like glass eyes beside tables piled with urns and vases.
Though jammed full like a rummage sale, everything looked carefully arranged in tidy stacks and piles.
“Not looted,” Adam concluded, numb with awe.
“It would seem not,” Ellie replied in shock-strangled tones.
They stepped inside. Only a narrow ribbon of the floor was clear, turning from the entrance to the far corner of the room, beyond the heavy bulk of a wardrobe. Everything else was stuffed with historical objects. Jeweled scarabs and colorful faience collars winked in the lamplight from atop desiccated carpets and painted boxes. Glass bowls and crystal cups sat cheek-by-jowl with stacked leather sandals, blackened with age. Woven baskets rose in towers to the ceiling, marked with the hieroglyphs for ox bones, bread, or dates.
Adam spotted a gilded bed with a base of braided ropes. A model dahabeeyah rested atop it, the shape remarkably similar to the vessels he’d just seen docked at Luxor.
Ellie stopped short in front of a cabinet packed with rows of diminutive mummy-shaped figures, which gleamed Caribbean blue in the lamplight.
“Shabtis!” she breathed out admiringly. “And look—you can see how each of them is unique. Possibly modeled on the actual royal servants who were part of the pharaoh’s retinue.”
Adam gave the little blue figurines a closer look. The notion that each of their placid faces might represent a real person who had lived and died three thousand years ago caught his breath. And they would’ve been ordinary people—not the famous rulers who appeared all over the place. The people who carved the furniture and wove the linens that were stacked up around him. People whose names nobody was going to find in any textbooks.
“There’s so much!” Constance exclaimed behind him, gazing at the room’s treasures.
“Everything a pharaoh would need for an eternity in the Field of Reeds,” Sayyid replied reverently.
“But what are we looking for?” Constance bent over to peer around a pile of footstools. “I always imagined the Staff of Moses to look something like a shepherd’s crook.”
Her words brought Adam firmly back to earth. The contents of the room raised the stakes of a situation that had already been pretty damned tense. They weren’t discovering the tomb’s wonders in a vacuum. They were huddled here under the noses of a self-absorbed thief and a small army of mercenaries. Everything that Adam saw around him looked important, from the glittering gemstones to the humble straw of a fly-whisk. It all deserved to be saved from The Mustache and his cronies—but Adam could hardly pick it all up and haul it out of here.
They needed to focus on the most dangerous part of this puzzle—the one thing in this tomb that might have the power to unleash hell on earth in the wrong hands. After that, they would do whatever they could to keep Julian from getting inside to ravage the rest of it. Stage a distraction, maybe—though that would be a risky mission for whoever took it on.
Which would be Adam, of course. Because he’d be damned if he’d let anyone else here do it.
“The jewelry box of Mutnedjmet mentioned a was-scepter,” Ellie recalled firmly. “If that is the staff we’re looking for, it will take the form of a Set beast—something like a dog with an elongated snout and long pointed ears on top, finishing in a forked tail.”
“It could be made of anything from wood to faience or bronze,” Sayyid added, still gazing with shock at the bounty of the room.
“How big is it?” Constance pressed, peering into a quiver full of arrows.
Ellie threw a questioning look at Sayyid as she answered. “Was-scepters are usually depicted as being similar in height to the bearer’s chin. But I believe there are examples that are shorter, perhaps as little as twelve to eighteen inches in length.”
“So we’re looking for something that could be anywhere from five feet to twelve inches long and made of just about any material other than paper.” Adam cast a rueful glance around the tightly packed piles of treasures. “That sure narrows it down.”
“There is another door,” Zeinab cut in sharply.
Adam realized what had been itching at the back of his mind since they’d stepped into the room. The place was full of everything a pharaoh might need to enjoy a damned fine time in the afterlife… but was distinctly absent any sign of the woman it had all been put here for.
“No coffin,” he pointed out significantly, meeting Ellie’s gaze.
They gathered behind Zeinab at the turn of the path, and Adam found himself facing a dark rectangle cut into the wall of the chamber. The doorway opened onto a short passage that turned sharply before he could glimpse what lay beyond it.
“I suppose it might be worth seeing what is there,” Ellie offered carefully. “Before we come back and make a more systematic survey of the artifacts.”
“I agree,” Zeinab declared. She plucked up a lantern and strode forward.
Adam lingered behind, casting a wary glance back at the stairwell. He wished he could see through it to whatever was happening above ground, but the space around him remained still as the grave. Only the faces of the dead gazed back at him in a silence that felt complicit.
Find the staff, he thought grimly. Then get out and try like hell to save the rest.
Adam set his hand to the hilt of his machete and strode after the others.