Thirty-Seven
N eil plummeted down a near-vertical face of rock at a speed only slightly short of a free-fall.
Artifacts tumbled around him. He smashed into an Eighteenth Dynasty table, bursting it into splinters. He scrabbled for some sort of foothold, his boots kicking out against nothing but sheer stone that scraped his back through his waistcoat.
Neil had just enough time to wonder if he would die instantly when he hit the ground or only mortally injure himself—and then one of his flailing hands snagged a grip. He jerked to a painful stop against a ridge of rock no wider than his fingertips, his arm wrenching against his shoulder.
Muscle screamed. His fingers were raw. He very much did not want to look down. Instead, he turned his face up to where a ragged opening glowed with lamplight from the burial chamber.
It looked uncomfortably far away.
Sayyid rushed into the center of the gap with an expression of quick, potent worry, holding the crowbar in his hand.
“Fairfax, are you well?” he called down urgently.
“Not… particularly…” Neil’s voice strained as his burning, painful hold on the ledge began to slip.
Everything that came next happened rather quickly.
Zeinab snapped into view beside her husband. She took in Neil’s situation with a glance.
Shouts rose from behind her, along with the crack of a gunshot.
Zeinab’s green eyes flashed down to Neil, tightening with a sudden calculation—and she shoved her husband through the hole in the wall.
Sayyid spilled onto the impossibly steep slope with a yelp. The crowbar flew from his hand, bouncing against the stones with a clear, resonant ping.
Neil had only a moment to register a snap of horrified dismay before Sayyid smacked into him, knocking him from his precipitous perch.
He flew back, feeling a strange gravity-defying lurch in his gut as he plummeted through the air.
He smacked into a lumpy mound that pulverized into dust at the impact. It felt only marginally less hard than rock. Neil coughed and wheezed as the air filled with clouds of rotted linen. He rolled over, his boots sliding for purchase through the slippery remnants of three-thousand-year-old fabrics.
His hand landed on something round and solid that rolled under his palm. On instinct, Neil tugged it from the debris.
He found himself staring at a human skull. His thumb was stuck through an eye socket.
Neil choked on a scream, dropping the skull and scrabbling back from it through the tattered mess of decayed cloth and broken furniture until he bumped into something warmer and softer.
Sayyid answered the impact with a groan as he shoved Neil off of him and sat up.
Finally staggering to his feet, Neil took in his situation. He was in a high chamber as deep and narrow as a well. The walls were unnaturally smooth save for semi-regular cuts that formed tiny, narrow ridges along their surfaces, like the one he had caught to break his fall.
And it was a good thing he had caught that hold. His neck craned back as he looked up at the light spilling through the opening to the burial chamber. It had to be at least thirty feet over his head.
Zeinab was still visible in the opening. The biggest of the Al-Saboors had snagged an arm around her waist, and the midwife kicked against him viciously, railing out a stream of Masri imprecations against his father, his donkey, and his testicles. Other voices clamored down from beyond her, the sounds violent but muffled by distance.
Zeinab was snatched away, and Ellie threw herself into the opening, shoving at some unseen assailant.
“Neil!” she shouted down. “Shake it!”
Her arm snapped out. Something flew from her hand—a small, narrow object that landed on the hard stone floor with a bright, clear ting .
Ellie was yanked away, biting out ferocious protests.
Sayyid struggled to his feet beside Neil. He had recovered the crowbar, but it hung in his hand uselessly. The tool obviously wouldn’t help them climb up a thirty-foot cliff.
The next figure to move into the light of the burial chamber was Mr. Jacobs. He gazed down at them calmly from above, and Neil felt uncomfortably sure of what the implacable man must see—two soft scholars standing in a pile of rubble at the bottom of an oubliette.
Julian stepped into place beside him. His tie had gone askew, and a tuft of his blond hair puffed up at a strange angle. He looked awkward as he blinked down at Neil and Sayyid.
Jacobs turned to Julian—and as the light glazed his profile, Neil saw naked contempt flash across his features.
“What should we do about them?” Julian asked uncertainly. “Can they get out of there, do you think?”
Jacobs’ gaze moved to something at Neil’s feet. Neil glanced down and saw the skull.
His stomach lurched.
“I doubt it… but we ought to shoot them anyway,” Jacobs concluded flatly. “This lot have a bad habit of popping back up out of caves where they rightfully should have rotted.”
Julian’s eyes found Neil’s across the pit, and Neil recalled all the times he had met this man before—over drinks at Shepherd’s or a light lunch at a café around the corner. Signing a few friendly papers or passing off a progress report. Julian bidding him a cordial ‘cheerio’ before going off to practice at the gym.
“Fine,” Julian replied tightly.
His former employer walked away, and time turned to water around Neil.
His pulse slowed. He watched Jacobs issue a calm order to someone just out of view. Heard Ellie’s distant, ferocious shout mingling with an angry protest from Constance.
A big-eared Al Saboor took Jacobs’ place in the ragged tear of light. He raised his rifle.
“Move, you idiot!” Sayyid shouted, barreling into Neil from the side.
Neil bolted as bullets cracked off the stones behind him. The toe of his boot snapped against something on the floor—a narrow object that spun over the stone before it came to rest ahead of him with another soft ping!
On a quick, desperate instinct, Neil snatched it from the ground as he flew by.
A bullet chinked against the wall where his head had been a moment before. Chips of debris sprayed over the back of his neck.
Sayyid grabbed the sleeve of Neil’s shirt and yanked him through a dark, square opening in the wall.
Neil was swallowed by darkness as the world around him dropped into a starless midnight as thick as ink. He stumbled to a stop, terrified of taking the wrong step and plummeting into another endless hole in the ground.
“Sayyid?” Neil was slightly humiliated to find that his voice vaguely resembled that of a bleating sheep.
“Quiet!” Sayyid hissed from nearby.
Neil oriented himself to the sound, which had come from behind him. A ghost of illumination faintly limned the edges of a rectangular doorway—and the lines of Sayyid’s face as he pressed himself to the wall to peer back the way they had come.
In the silence, Neil picked out the sound of distant, angry voices.
“Are they coming after us?” he asked in a careful whisper.
“That Jacobs fellow wants to,” Sayyid reported back, low and tense. “But I think Mr. Forster-Mowbray is refusing.”
“Why?” Neil demanded—even though it came as a relief.
Sayyid glanced back at him. Neil could just make out the frustration and contempt that briefly tightened his features. “Because he’s quite certain we haven’t any way out of here.”
Neil recalled the impossible height of the sheer rock face that led to the burial chamber, where a horde of villains waited for them.
The surrounding darkness began to feel thicker and closer.
“Let’s not wait around to see who wins,” Sayyid determined. “Come on.”
He stalked past Neil, brushing roughly against his shoulder as he moved ahead into the darkness.
“But how?” Neil burst out in panic.
He heard Sayyid’s footsteps stop, accompanied by a heavy sigh. “Keep your hand to the wall and test where you step before you put your foot down.”
Sayyid’s voice was thin with irritation. Neil’s shoulders slumped. In the excitement of discovering the tomb, he had nearly forgotten how angry Sayyid was at him. He wondered whether he should apologize, but when he tried to form the words, everything he thought of felt inadequate.
Instead, he picked his way along in Sayyid’s wake. His fingers trailed over the oddly flat surface of the wall. He tried not to choke on his own abysmal fear with every step he took.
Now that they had moved away from the oubliette, the darkness had become complete. Neil couldn’t even see his hand when he held it up in front of his eyes. He felt as though the world around him had ceased to exist, leaving behind only a dull, echoing, dust-scented oblivion that he would wander through for eternity.
The thought threatened to throw him into an even deeper state of panic. Neil kept reaching up with his free hand to adjust his spectacles as though that would make some kind of difference—which seemed very close to insanity.
The frames were bent, making them sit slightly crooked on his nose, but otherwise they had survived his fall into the pit… probably because he had landed on the back of his head.
It still smarted, as did most of the rest of him, from his aching shoulder to his scraped fingers.
The darkness loomed thicker, closing in more tightly around him. He fought back against the claustrophobic terror, forcing himself to attend to his other senses.
Sayyid’s boots scraped softly against the ground ahead of him, which was remarkably flat for an uncharted cave system. The air was dry and smelled of stone.
It helped—but only a little.
“It’s too bad we didn’t think to fall through that hole with a light,” Neil joked weakly.
Sayyid stopped ahead of him—though Neil only knew it by the scuff of his boot.
“What did your sister throw at you?” Sayyid pressed.
“Peanut?” Neil had to think, confused by the abrupt change in subject.
His hand went to his pocket, and he pulled out the object he’d picked up from the floor of the cave. He felt a length of smooth metal, warm from the heat of his body, and a round screw top. “I think it’s that cigar tube of hers. The one where she keeps the…”
His voice trailed off as he finally put it together.
“Firebird bone?” Sayyid filled in dryly.
“But that’s just a load of superstitious…” Neil stopped, catching himself with a wince.
He could hardly call Ellie’s bone superstitious nonsense when he’d seen Julian Forster-Mowbray swing around a flaming sword.
Suppressing a sigh, he unscrewed the lid. He tipped the tube carefully, and the bone slid into his hand.
The world around him remained dark and uncomfortably silent.
“But what do I do with it?” Neil startled at the echo that rang back at him. It spoke of being surrounded by a vast, low, empty space.
“In the tunnel at Saqqara, your sister tried some sort of motion with her hand,” Sayyid recalled.
Shake it! Ellie had shouted down at him from above.
Neil swallowed the feeling of being unutterably foolish—reminding himself that no one could actually see him—and gave the bone a quick little shake.
A soft, sputtering blue flashed against the darkness, momentarily illuminating Sayyid’s face a few steps away before it vanished.
The blackness that closed back in around Neil felt even thicker.
“I must have done it wrong,” he said, panic lacing his words.
“How hard did you try?”
“I don’t know!” Neil protested wildly. “A mild shake?”
“As though you were rolling dice in a cup or preparing a soda canister?” Sayyid pressed.
“More like the dice?” Neil hedged awkwardly.
“So give it a right shake, then!” Sayyid snapped.
His mouth twisting against the utter lunacy of what he was doing, Neil gave the bone a right bloody shaking.
A wild, impossible light blazed to life in his hand.
The glare was somehow both pale and hot, a fiery white-gold like a burning star. Neil’s eyes watered against the abrupt intensity of it, forcing him to squint as he thrust the bone out in front of him.
“Wallah! Can’t you turn it down?” Sayyid threw up an arm to shield his eyes.
“It’s a bone! It doesn’t have a bloody wick!” Neil flapped an urgent hand at Sayyid. “Give me one of your socks!”
“ My socks?” Sayyid shot back. “What do you want one of my socks for?”
“Oh, dash it anyway!” Neil cursed.
He shoved the bone at Sayyid, who accepted it with fumbling hands, nearly dropping his crowbar. Hopping on one foot, Neil pried off one of his boots and then yanked his sock free.
With a wincing squint, he snatched the bone from Sayyid’s hand and dropped it into the tube of argyle knit, which was looking significantly worse for wear after being dunked in the Nile and trudged halfway across Egypt.
Through the muddy filter, the light softened from the glare of a comet to the moderate glow of a paraffin lamp. With the change, Neil’s watering eyes could finally adjust—and see what the illumination revealed of his surroundings.
He stood at the edge of a broad, low cavern supported by countless pillars roughly hewed from the stone. It sprawled far beyond where the light of the sock-encased firebird bone could reach—a cool, silent, and uncannily still cathedral carved from the earth.
The hairs on the back of Neil’s neck rose at the sight.
“I knew it!” Sayyid cried out, shattering the quiet. “I knew there was a quarry! The road in the wadi made me suspect it, and then when I saw the regularity in the shape of the walls where we fell—”
“This is a quarry?” Neil cut in, still reeling with astonishment at the sight of the bone-lit underground fairy kingdom.
“A cave quarry,” Sayyid clarified. “Cut right into the mountain rather than dug out. Old Kingdom, based on the size of the blocks they were cutting. Just look at the ridges in this wall—these weren’t talatat stones.” His gaze roamed over the rest of the cavern. “It appears to be fine-grade limestone, mostly—though I should not be surprised to find traces of alabaster. It is clearly an extensive works. Comparable to Tura, at the very least. Of course, it begs the question of whether the builders of Nefertiti’s tomb knew of the quarry and used its proximity deliberately, or whether…”
Sayyid stopped, catching himself. His jaw tensed as though he had just recalled that he was supposed to be angry at Neil—not rattling on to him about the development of stone-cutting techniques as though they were still working comfortably side-by-side in Saqqara.
Neil felt a sharp pang—but he could hardly blame Sayyid for it. He cleared his throat awkwardly. “Would you mind taking the bone while I put my boot back on?”
Sayyid startled uncomfortably. “Oh! Of course.”
He accepted the sock with a distinct lack of enthusiasm, eyeing it with disdain. Neil could hardly blame him for that, either. It was hardly in a fine fettle. He wasn’t all that excited about wearing it on his foot, never mind carrying it around in his hand.
Neil tugged his boot back on. The leather stuck against his bare, clammy skin. He hoped he wouldn’t end up with blisters.
The light flickered, growing weak. Both Neil and Sayyid looked at it with alarm.
“I think it needs to be shaken again,” Neil guessed urgently.
Sayyid let out a sigh of resignation. With a grimace, he took hold of the bone through the sock and gave it a vigorous jiggle.
The bone flared up, casting its pale glow over the silent, marching columns of stone.
Sayyid thrust the sock back at him, then surreptitiously scrubbed his hand off on his waistcoat.
Neil’s companion looked a mess. His beard was lightened with a layer of dust, while the collar of his shirt was smudged with dirt. He had lost his fez in the fall, leaving his head bare.
Not that Neil would be looking much better. His glasses were bent, and his sockless foot stuck a bit against the leather of his boot. The buttons of his waistcoat had torn off in the fall, leaving it hanging open over his battered shirt.
“What now?” he asked.
“We need to find the way out.” Sayyid gazed through the maze of pillars.
“ Is there a way out?” Neil pressed nervously.
“There must have been,” Sayyid returned. “How else could the quarrymen have taken out all this stone?”
“That was five thousand years ago . Archaeologists and looters have been scouring these hills for a century now, and nobody’s ever reported finding a way into something like this!” Neil waved a wild hand around the vast space before them.
“That does not mean it isn’t there,” Sayyid insisted stubbornly.
He set off without looking back to see if Neil would follow. Neil did follow, of course. The notion of being left behind in that silent, eerie cavern frankly terrified him, even if he was the one holding the light.
They moved through the lines of pillars, the blocky towers of stone pale in the muffled glow of the firebird bone. The quarry felt as mummified as the bones of a pharaoh. Neil suspected that if he stopped to conduct a proper survey, he would quickly stumble across frozen remnants of the lives that had passed through this space before—an ancient length of rope, a lost sandal, the point of a tarnished copper chisel. In this stable underground environment, those objects would likely look much as they had the moment some quarryman had dropped them thousands of years before.
He was looking for signs of any such artifacts when the pillars abruptly stopped.
Where the next row should have been, Neil faced a wall. It was not the smooth, even-cut stone that had framed every other side of the quarry. This was a ragged, tumbling avalanche of crushed boulders—the debris of an ancient, long-forgotten collapse.
Neil regarded it in the flickering light of the firebird bone with a growing sense of horror.
“This is it, isn’t it?” he choked out. “This is the entrance to the quarry.”
Sayyid stared at the barrier, looking pale. “I think… that it is very possibly the entrance to the quarry,” he agreed weakly.
A subtle fear had been stalking Neil since they fell into the dark. In the face of the piled stones before him, it tightened, gaining focus. “But is there a way through it?”
Sayyid glanced from the collapse to the dimming sock in Neil’s hands. His expression was grim. “I know how we might find out.”
“How?”
“Let the light go out.” Sayyid met his eyes uneasily.
The notion of plunging back into that utter, complete darkness filled Neil with dread—but Sayyid was right. If they eliminated their light and gave their eyes time to adjust, they might pick out any cracks or openings to the moonlit night outside.
Swallowing thickly, Neil turned from Sayyid to face the blockage. The firebird bone flickered, sputtering like a guttering candle—and then snuffed out.
Midnight, thick and oppressive, closed around him. Neil forced himself not to panic as he steeled his eyes at the pile of boulders… and waited… and waited.
The darkness remained complete, an impenetrable wall that wrapped him up like a blanket.
“Do you see anything?” Neil asked hopefully. His voice sounded like it came from somewhere else, disembodied in the dark.
“No,” Sayyid replied tightly after a moment.
Neil closed his eyes. It made not the least bit of difference. He could feel the vast, dry expanse of the cavern lurking behind him with a weighty, patient silence.
“Perhaps we should bring back the light,” Sayyid finally suggested, the words small.
Neil absorbed them with a chill, then vigorously shook the bone. Light boomed to life behind the argyle of his sock. It spilled across the impenetrable barrier of rubble that lay before him, and he felt dizzy.
“Maybe there’s…” He stopped, his throat dry. “Perhaps there’s another…”
Sayyid wasn’t listening. He frowned down at something on the ground near his boots. It was the base of another pillar—one that Neil could see lying in pieces beside the squarish, stubby protrusion from the ground.
There were more of them, marching along in parallel to the thick-packed boulders of the collapse—tumbled columns of stone resting by their truncated stumps.
“Did those all fall down?” he asked.
“They did not fall down. They were removed.” Sayyid looked along the length of the butchered row. “They were all removed. Someone did this deliberately to compromise the structural integrity of the quarry.”
“You mean they wanted it to cave in?” Neil demanded, aghast. “But how would they have even known how many to take?”
“I very much doubt that they did,” Sayyid returned. “I imagine they simply kept going until it fell.”
“But then how would whoever had done it esc—” Neil cut himself off as his throat closed with horror. “There were bones—in the room where we fell. There was a… a skull… on the floor…”
He desperately looked to Sayyid, hoping that he would find some hint of reassurance in his expression— something that belied the terrible conclusion Neil was rapidly coming to.
He didn’t.
“We’re going to die in here,” Neil blurted out. “We’re going to die in here and dry up like old sandals. Aren’t we?”
Sayyid met his desperate gaze… and then slowly looked away.
It was all the answer Neil needed.