Thirty-Six
“W e need to look for something with the head of a Set beast,” Ellie burst out urgently.
“I’ve been looking for Set beasts,” Adam replied patiently. “Haven’t seen any yet. I checked all the rods I could see for cuneiform too, just in case that mattered. There’s nothing but Egyptian.”
He cast a narrow-eyed gaze over the tightly packed mountain of artifacts. “There’s a lot more here that we can’t see, but if we start hauling through it at random, we’re going to make one hell of a mess—never mind that it might take a month.”
“Would whoever put it here really have gone to the trouble of digging out a place for it behind all this stuff and then putting it all back again?” Constance waved an expressive hand over the stacks of gilded chests and alabaster vases.
“We need to look in the sarcophagus,” Zeinab declared firmly.
The granite box took up the center of the chamber. It was longer than Adam was tall and roughly three feet wide. The lid stood at about the height of Ellie’s waist. The polished, rose-hued granite shone softly in the light of the lantern.
Ellie fought an unexpected urge to protest. Of course, she knew as a scholar that any scientific survey of the tomb would eventually include a careful emptying of the sarcophagus and the layers of coffins encased within it. Still, the notion of exposing what lay inside the box of pale red granite felt oddly sacrilegious.
She stared down at the rows of hieroglyphs carved into the surface of the stone.
Oh sole god, like whom there is no other, she read silently. You created the world according to your desire.
“Why there?” she burst out tightly. “The staff could be anywhere!”
“But whoever went to the trouble of returning it to this tomb must have known it was an object of unimaginable importance,” Neil cut in uneasily. “If he was bringing it back here to rest with Neferneferuaten, it makes sense that he would put it as close to her as he could.”
“How could he have lifted the lid?” Ellie shot back, waving a hand at the massive slab of granite that closed the sarcophagus. “It must weigh five hundred pounds!”
“You’re probably pretty close,” Adam said with an assessing gaze at the stone. “But he wouldn’t have had to lift it. He just had to slide it off one of the corners.” He frowned down at the box. “Problem is, we don’t know which corner. We’ll need to take the whole thing off.”
“It would be easy enough to push it free,” Constance offered.
“But it might break when it hits the floor!” Neil protested.
“We would be best lowering it down,” Sayyid admitted uncomfortably.
Neil closed his eyes with a wince, clearly torn. “It’s solid granite.”
“Five hundred pounds,” Adam repeated. “There’s six of us. That’s less than a hundred pounds apiece.”
“How often do you run around lifting a hundred pounds!?” Neil demanded.
“I mean, I lift me all the time,” Adam countered. “And I’m pretty close to two hundred.”
“You take your two hundred, then,” Zeinab ordered as she grabbed the fluted edge of the lid. “And the rest of us will split the difference.”
They circled the sarcophagus, each taking hold of the rosy granite slab that covered it. Ellie joined them with a wrench of guilt. The stone was cool under her hands.
Sayyid picked up the crowbar from Zeinab’s bundle of gear. With an expression of solemn resignation, he wedged it carefully under the lid. “On my count. One… two…”
Ellie lifted along with the others, her shoulders already protesting at the weight.
Beside her, Zeinab crouched down to put her shoulder to the fluted edge. Ellie did the same, and the granite unsteadily rose.
“Tip it our way!” Adam barked.
“Our way!?” Neil echoed from beside him in obvious panic.
Ellie slid a little closer to Zeinab and shoved up on her end of the stone. The enormous slab tilted. She was facing away from the lower end and could only hear the commotion that followed.
“Sweet… holy…” came Adam’s groaning voice.
“I’m going to lose my fingers!” Neil cried.
“Get the corner down—No, the other corner!”
“I am lowering the other corner!”
“Sure as hell doesn’t feel like it!”
Ellie heard a firm tap of stone on stone, and the weight against her back released.
“Slide it down—no, the other way!” Adam ordered.
She turned to see him sandwiched between Sayyid and Neil as they worked the rest of the long edge of the lid down onto the floor of the burial chamber, leaning it against the side of the sarcophagus… which now lay open.
Ellie stared down at a golden coffin. The gilded image of the pharaoh gripped a crook and flail in its hands, accented by pieces of rich blue lapis and sunset-hued quartz. It was crowned with a striped nemes headdress and uraeus cobra.
A face was carved into the fine-grained wood. Ellie recognized the noble visage from the walls brought to full, three-dimensional life. The pharaoh’s lips were softly open as though about to draw a breath. Her wide-set almond eyes gleamed softly with an inlay of ivory and onyx that showed from under delicate golden lids.
The entire splendid construction stood out in stark glory against a background of the fine, blood-red sand that filled the rest of the sarcophagus.
“She’s lovely!” Constance exclaimed wonderingly.
“She is,” Ellie agreed reverently.
Sayyid rose from the far side of the coffin, red faced and still huffing—and then raised his arms in a desperate warning. “Wallah—stop moving! All of you! Stay exactly where you are! Do not even breathe if you can help it!”
“What’s wrong?” Zeinab held herself in a tense, ready stillness.
“That powder,” Sayyid rasped urgently. He barely dared to nod toward the interior of the sarcophagus.
“The sand?” Constance pressed.
“It is not sand,” Sayyid replied, sweat beading on his brow. “It is powdered hematite!”
Zeinab’s eyes flashed with fear.
“Hematite?” Ellie frowned down at the substance even as she kept her body frozen. The red powder filled the box right up to the level of the top of the gilded coffin. “What’s wrong with hematite?”
“Nothing when you are using it in a stabilized form as a pigment for artwork,” Sayyid replied with careful, terrified patience. “But when inhaled in sufficient quantity, it brings on vomiting and convulsions.”
“Metal poisoning,” Zeinab filled in sharply, staring at the powder as though it were a cobra flaring for a strike.
“Hell,” Adam breathed, the lines of his mouth firming with recognition.
Zeinab’s eyes flashed to the rest of them, grim and urgent. “It will kill us all, if enough of it is aerosolized.”
“But how do you know it’s hematite?” Neil’s tone was pleadingly skeptical.
A mix of emotions flickered across Sayyid’s features—a quick sadness and hurt followed by a flare of anger. They were gone a moment later, forced back under a wall of careful self-control. “A tomb outside Qena was entered by a group of looters six years ago. They described finding the floor covered thickly in a fine red powder.” He paused. “Within two years, all of them were dead.”
“I never heard of that,” Neil protested.
“Why would you have heard of it?” Sayyid retorted.
Neil flinched at the sharpness of his tone.
“How do you know of it?” Ellie pressed more carefully.
Sayyid drew in a breath as though forcibly controlling his racing emotions. “Their relatives came to me for help. They knew I had experience with tombs and hoped that I would know of a cure.”
“But there is no cure for metal fever,” Zeinab cut in sharply. “The body can only clear it on its own… or not, if the exposure is too great.”
“Saw the end result once in some miners out of Colombia.” Adam’s gaze locked with Ellie’s across the sarcophagus, dark with worry. “It wasn’t nice.”
Ellie held herself perfectly still as she studied the fine red dust. It filled the sarcophagus in soft waves, a crimson sea framing the golden figure of the pharaoh. “What if we masked ourselves?”
“The effectiveness of a mask would depend on the material and how fine the particles are,” Zeinab replied.
“Hell of a risk if you got it wrong,” Adam noted flatly.
“Then how do we open the coffin?” Neil pressed.
The obvious answer rose into her mind. Maybe we shouldn’t.
“We would have to stabilize the powder so that it did not come into the air when disturbed,” Sayyid said. “Perhaps with an oil—adding it slowly so that it turned the hematite to paste. Something that would not dry and allow it to stir back up again.” He frowned thoughtfully. “You might minimize the damage the oil causes to the coffin by inserting panels around it—but of course, you would have to do so with the utmost care.”
“We’ve got a little oil in the lamps,” Adam pointed out. “But not much. And we’d be left in the dark if we used it.”
Beside Adam, Neil was no longer looking at the coffin and its nest of deadly powder. His eyes had wandered to something beyond Ellie’s shoulder with an air of puzzled distraction.
Ellie glanced back, seeing only the model solar barque with its delicate oars and sails and the cuneiform graffito, which they had already examined.
“Neil,” she began. “What are you—”
Her words cut off as she turned back around—and watched Julian Forster-Mowbray step into the carved doorway of the burial chamber.
“But this is absolutely splendid!” he happily observed with a greedy look around the room. “Look at all this treasure!”
Adam turned with slow menace, the machete sliding into his hand. Zeinab’s posture was one of still, dangerous readiness.
Constance rolled her eyes. “It’s not treasure, you dolt! It’s history!”
“Why can’t it be both?” Julian protested, looking a little hurt.
He had changed into a khaki sporting suit like a gentleman heading out for a spot of game hunting—save for the oddity of the old leather scabbard he wore around his hips. A bone hilt protruded from the sheath, the material gently yellowed with age.
Julian cheerfully surveyed Neferneferuaten’s grave goods as though he had turned up to shop at an exceptionally good rummage sale. His thugs filed into the room behind him. Ellie counted five Al-Saboors, variously armed with knives and—most worryingly—a pair of rifles.
“How are you even here?” Constance demanded impatiently.
“One of the Al-Saboors climbed the ridge to—er, answer the call of nature—and spotted your rope,” he replied. “Though he rather took his time getting the word back to us.”
He cast an irritated look back at the cluster of menacing cousins as though trying and failing to pick out which of them had been responsible for the lack of alacrity.
The men glanced at each other in confusion. The one with the big ears shrugged, then quickly stepped aside as a shadowy figure approached the doorway.
Jacobs entered the room, his hand twisted into the back of Jemmahor’s cloak.
He shoved the apprentice midwife to her knees and swung up her stolen Enfield, pressing the barrel to the back of her neck as the young woman’s dark eyes flashed with frustrated fury.
Julian grimaced awkwardly. “Look—I am sorry it’s come down to this. The whole situation seems to have gotten entirely out of hand, but I’m sure we can settle things like reasonable people.”
“Reasonable people don’t generally point guns at each other,” Adam noted in a deceptively lazy tone. The blade of his machete gleamed in the lamplight as he held it ready at his thigh.
“This is just a precaution!” Julian protested with a wave at Jemmahor, who glared at him like an angry cat. He whirled to Constance. “This has all been a wretched misunderstanding. I don’t know what these people told you, but I’m not the villain here! We’re all on the same side!”
“We are not on the same side,” Zeinab spat back, her green eyes flashing with quiet rage.
“Well, maybe not you ,” Julian amended. “But the rest of you are civilized people. That’s all we’re doing here—protecting civilization!”
Ellie took in the pleading expression on Julian’s face—framed as it was by the skeptical, bored, or greedy expressions of his hired mercenaries—and realized that the fool actually believed what he was saying.
A familiar voice rose in self-important tones from behind the clustered thugs. “Excuse me! Coming through! Let the expert through, please!”
Dawson shuffled into the room, squeezing past the bulk of an enormous, thickly muscled Al-Saboor. “Please refrain from touching anything—this must all be left to the professionals,” he ordered. “A little-known pharaoh and the entirety of his grave goods is a find of unprecedented importance!”
Ellie’s patience burnt out like a fuse. “Not ‘his.’” She jabbed a finger toward the gilded woman in the sarcophagus. “ Hers! ”
“Ha ha ha!” Dawson laughed. “What a silly notion.”
“We can split the rest of it. Fifty-fifty.” Julian cast another greedy look at the glittering funerary hoard. “Or sixty-forty, maybe—just so long as we get what we came here for. Where is the staff?”
“Haven’t found it yet.” Adam’s tone was casual—but a ready tension quietly infused his frame.
“Search them,” Jacobs flatly suggested. A thin thread of impatience wove through the words.
“Well, I… I suppose that would be a sensible precaution,” Julian admitted.
Zeinab lifted her hands. “No one move! If the powder in this sarcophagus is disturbed, everyone here will die in a mess of vomit and convulsions!”
Julian stiffened with surprise. “What’s that?!” He cast a bewildered glance at Dawson. “Is she serious?”
“There is no such thing as booby traps,” Dawson authoritatively retorted.
“Right,” Julian concluded with a weary sigh. “Best get on with it, then.”
Jacobs’ eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “Best not.”
Ellie’s pulse skipped. Nothing in Jacobs’ expression had changed. He still held the rifle to the back of Jemmahor’s neck as she knelt on the ground before him, her hands clenched into fists.
Julian looked back at Jacobs with obvious surprise. “Why?”
Jacobs’ gaze shifted over to Ellie. “Call it a feeling.”
At his words, a chill slipped over her skin.
“Though perhaps if you shoot a few of them, the rest will fall into line. And there isn’t much movement needed for that.” Jacobs’ eyes remained locked on Ellie as a low buzz of fear rose in her ears. “Start with the Egyptians. There’s less likely to be much bother about them.”
Adam’s stillness took on a new, ready edge. Ellie could feel the silent fury simmering off of him—along with a sense of dangerous calculation.
Julian’s gaze ping-ponged between Jacobs and Constance. “Surely we can come to some sort of compromise without resorting to shooting anyone,” he offered hopefully.
Ellie wondered whether all of their fates actually rested on Julian Foster-Mowbray’s lack of spine.
Constance’s foot shifted back as she slipped into one of her jiu jitsu poses. With a look of mingled terror and determination, Sayyid’s eyes dropped to the iron crowbar that rested against the sarcophagus beside him.
Adam glanced incongruously at a nearby leopard-footed Eighteenth Dynasty chair.
Neil inched away from the sarcophagus, backing toward a cabinet stuffed with bolts of ancient linen that stood before the jagged crack in the chamber wall.
Ellie studied the fracture more closely. It actually started on the ceiling of the chamber—a thin black line that zigzagged across the stone, thickening as it descended the wall until it disappeared behind the cabinet.
She recalled the way the stairs had given out during their descent through the tomb. Unease itched at the back of her mind.
The Al-Saboors cast their leader questioning looks, their weapons held loosely in their hands. The elder Al-Saboor shrugged.
“Amir?” he prompted uneasily.
“I am thinking!” Julian protested.
Jacobs’ lip curled with contempt.
Ellie glanced down. A thin, dark line snaked out from between her brother’s boots as he lifted them to take another step.
The itch in her mind coalesced into certainty.
“Neil, no! ” she called out.
He set down his foot, and the ground collapsed beneath him.
The wall fell with it. Bundles of linen and delicate palm-leaf fans crashed into chairs and a mummified crocodile, all of it spilling through the black hole that had just opened in the floor of the tomb. Neil teetered at the edge of the precipice, waving his arms wildly for balance.
“Not again!” he groaned—and tipped backward into darkness.