Thirty-Eight
N eil fought the urge to collapse into hysterics, unsure whether it would emerge as laughter or sobs. Instead, a heavy sense of guilt settled into place in his chest.
He dropped down to one of the shattered stone stumps, putting his head in his hands. “This is… this is all because of me. I should have listened to Ellie from the start. You told me that she was right about those…” He paused, at a loss for the word, and waved awkwardly at the sock-enclosed firebird bone.
“Arcana,” Sayyid filled in without looking at him.
Arcana—from the Latin arcanus, Neil thought automatically. Most likely derived from the Latin word arca —a chest or box.
For the things that were secreted away. A shared root with the word ark .
Ark. Arcane. Arcana.
He wondered if he was losing his mind. He forced his thoughts back to the present—and to the dusty, tired man who had been trapped in this inescapable cavern with him.
“I know you’re upset with me,” Neil admitted quietly. “You have every right to be. I was an idiot to write that note to Mr. Forster-Mowbray. If I’d simply left well enough alone…”
Sayyid stared at him incredulously. “ That is why you think I am upset with you?”
“Isn’t it?” Neil flushed with bewilderment.
Sayyid clamped his mouth firmly shut. He stalked along the shadowy line of the pillars.
Neil hurried after him. “If it’s something else I’ve done, please tell me! I can’t possibly make it right if I don’t know what it is!”
Sayyid whirled back to him, throwing up his hands. “Has it not occurred to you that perhaps you can’t make it right?”
The blood drained from Neil’s face. “Of course it has. My little sister is up there, along with one of my oldest friends. And Constance, who I… that I…” He couldn’t quite find the right words, struggling onward without them. “Your wife and her apprentice and that frankly intimidating old lady! None of them are safe! And whatever those villains do to them is on my conscience, because I’m the one who told them where to find us—like an utter, bloody fool!”
“Why did you tell them?” Sayyid took a quick, angry step closer. “Why?”
“I don’t know. I…” Neil caught himself with a wince. He owed Sayyid more than that. “Because I didn’t want it to be true. I wanted it to be some mad flight of fancy that Ellie had dreamed up. I wanted everything to go back to the way it was when you and I were stabilizing artwork and sorting out finds. Arguing about the semantic changes from Middle to Late Egyptian—even though you were always right about those,” he added in a grumble.
He closed his eyes, washed by a powerful sense of hurt and loss. “I liked things the way they were. I didn’t want them to change. Didn’t you?”
The anger in Sayyid’s face drained away, leaving him drawn. “It isn’t that simple.”
Neil barked out a hysterical laugh, running a hand through his already wild hair. “Of course it isn’t—since the representative of the British Athenaeum has turned out to be a murderous artifact thief!”
“You really don’t get it, do you?” Sayyid burst out. “None of that was ever real! The Athenaeum, the semantics… the two of us working together like we were—”
His words choked off, swallowed by the thick, waiting silence that surrounded them. The silence lingered, pressing down on Neil as the rows of frozen pillars marched away at his back.
“Like we were what?” Neil tentatively prompted, his chest tight.
Sayyid answered him with a glare. “I’ve been an utter fool,” he concluded and marched away through the hollow quarry.
“What? Why?” Neil stumbled after him.
Sayyid halted so abruptly, Neil almost crashed into him. “And you don’t even know!” he exclaimed with a note of hysteria. “You still have absolutely no idea!”
“Then tell me!” Neil shot back, fear and frustration sharpening his voice.
“I suppose I must,” Sayyid retorted. “It is not as though you would ever figure it out for yourself!”
The words stung like the crack of a whip.
Sayyid dropped his head, exhaustion slumping his shoulders. He put his fingers to the bridge of his nose and drew in a long, uneven breath.
The air of the quarry went even more still. The firebird bone flickered again, threatening to plunge them once more into that abysmal darkness. Neil forced himself to give the bone another energetic shake, even as his cheeks flushed with shame.
When Sayyid finally looked at him, his face was drawn into lines of tired sadness. “Before you, I was just a foreman. Sometimes all I could do was staff the dig—ensure that everyone arrived on schedule, oversee dismissals, and administer pay. On other excavations, I might do more—run the washing stations. Set procedures for sifting spoil. Stabilize artifacts before their removal and transport. Whatever the archaeologist in charge didn’t want to be bothered with.”
His expression tightened. “I know how to document finds. Record texts and artwork. Analyze stratigraphy and context. To the other men I have worked for, those skills were a convenience—like finding a dog who already knows how to fetch your slippers.”
Sayyid’s voice snapped with an old bitterness. “My father was not a pasha. I could never have gone to one of your universities. But even if I had, it would not have mattered—because I am not an Englishman. I am an Egyptian, and Egyptians are not archaeologists—no matter that it is our history the world is digging up. Our language on the walls. Our ancestors in the sarcophagi. I could only—ever—be the help. ” He flung the words out like stones. “The best I could hope to do was correct the foolish, stubborn errors of my ‘betters’ without letting on that I knew more than they did—which would see me fired from my position for forgetting my place . Then you come along.”
He jabbed an accusing finger at Neil, who flinched back from it.
“You, who are so fresh-faced at all of this that it is laughable—but you don’t even pretend to know what you are doing!” Sayyid burst out. “You just throw yourself onto my mercy, asking me a thousand questions—‘Sayyid, what about suffix pronouns? Which adhesive do I use to stabilize plaster? Where should we site the spoil heap?’ And before I know what is happening, I am working alongside you as though I was your…”
He stopped short, choking on what would have come next.
So Neil said it for him.
“Partner,” he filled in quietly.
Sayyid dropped onto one of the broken pillars, putting his head in his hands. “But I am not your partner!” he bit out, his voice uneven. “Perhaps you actually listen to me when we get into an argument. You might even admit that you’re wrong and then laugh about it like it means nothing for me to have corrected you. You stand back and let me lead on excavation procedure and conservation—but you are still the Englishman. You are the one with the university education, and the letters after your name, and the concession that grants you permission to excavate.” He looked up, his eyes glistening. “My father had a university degree and letters after his name. But it did not matter, because he was still an Egyptian. And that killed him. Slowly, quietly… a little bit day after day until there was nothing left of the great man—only an old shadow who faded away.”
Sayyid looked down at his hands—brown and strong, worn with callouses and capable of enormous delicacy. A tear slipped down his cheek, disappearing into the dark curls of his beard. “I thought it would be easier if I simply kept myself from expecting anything more… but you ruined that.”
Neil’s heart wrenched with a pain that felt like falling—like the lurch of finally realizing just how much of a fool he had been.
How could he not have seen it? He had been perfectly well aware of both Sayyid’s brilliance and the enormous gulf between their stations—and their opportunities. Why hadn’t he realized ?
Because he hadn’t been paying attention… just as he’d failed with Ellie. Only with Ellie, at least Neil had recognized that she did dream of more—even if he guiltily relegated it to the realm of the impossible.
He had never stopped to imagine what Sayyid might have dreamed of, even after working side-by-side with him for two years. He had been too swept up in the joy of putting his skills and knowledge into practice alongside someone whose intellect so perfectly matched and challenged his own.
“I wanted to pretend it didn’t matter,” he said softly, feeling the ache of regret like a hollow space inside of him. “It was easier to pretend it didn’t matter—because I was happy. Working with you like that made me happy.”
Neil drew in a breath and made himself confess the rest of it.
“Thinking of you as my friend made me happy.” He lifted his gaze to Sayyid across the dry, still distance that separated them. “Was I just lying to myself?”
Sayyid stared down at his hands. “No,” he replied hoarsely.
Neil blinked. There were tears in his eyes. He pushed one away with the back of his hand, his throat tight. “Well, this is embarrassing.”
He had been aiming to sound reasonable and collected but didn’t entirely succeed. The tears kept coming, and a deeper fear twisted inside his chest until the truth finally spilled from his lips. “ How can I fix it? ”
Sayyid finally looked up at him. “Join the revolution?” he suggested with a shadow of his old wry humor.
Neil coughed out a laugh. “You’ve been listening to your wife.”
A sad twist of a smile crossed Sayyid’s face. “Not enough, apparently.”
The silence that followed whispered from between the endless rows of marching columns. Neil remembered that they were going to die here—he and Sayyid both—while the people they loved faced who-knew-what dangers on the mountain above. Dangers that Neil had brought down on them with his own foolish choices.
Frantic worry and guilt-laden helplessness rose inside of him until he thought he would choke, and Neil pushed to his feet.
“We have to help them! There must be something we can do!” He threw his hand out over the softly glittering stumps of limestone. “Couldn’t we take out more of the pillars? Bring the whole mountain down?”
“How are we supposed to do that? With a crowbar?” Sayyid held up the tool in question, which didn’t look like it stood much of a chance against the thick, sturdy columns of stone.
“There must be another way!” Neil pressed desperately.
Sayyid made a cross retort. “Well, let me know when you think of—”
He cut off as he leapt to his feet with a yelp, stumbling away from the column he’d been sitting on.
“What is it?” Neil demanded. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Sayyid replied in strangled tones, making a distinguished effort to straighten his waistcoat. “Just thought I imagined… Yeeeearrggh!”
He danced, hopping from foot to foot in a wild panic, then kicked out his leg.
Something flew from the cuff of his trousers, landing with a little click against the fallen stone column.
Sayyid went still. “Was that a beetle?”
Neil stepped over to investigate.
The fat, glittering form of a black scarab lay on its back in the shadow of the toppled pillar, skinny legs wriggling in the air.
“Er… yes?” Neil offered awkwardly.
Sayyid closed his eyes, shuddering. “It was on my trousers. On. My. Trousers.”
The scarab rocked, then flipped itself. Legs once more on the ground, it skittered off into the shadows beyond the glare of the firebird bone.
Something tickled at the back of Neil’s mind as he stared after it. “Beetles,” he said absently. “Down here. In the quarry.”
“I sincerely hope not,” Sayyid replied fervently, twisting to get a look at the back of his legs.
The pieces suddenly clicked into place. Neil took hold of Sayyid’s shoulders and gave them a shake. “Beetles in the quarry!” he repeated urgently.
“Why?!” Sayyid wailed.
The question was rhetorical rather than a direct inquiry, but Neil answered it nonetheless. “Because they went under the door—the door that Bates said must open into the middle of the mountain! ” He gave Sayyid another shake. “The beetles went under the door, Sayyid! And now they are here in the quarry!”
Sayyid’s eyes widened. “They built the tomb into the quarry. That’s why no one ever found it. They built the tomb into the quarry and then collapsed the entrance!” He gave out a wild laugh. “Those clever devils!”
“Which means that somewhere down here, we will find the other side of the entrance to the tomb!” Neil added.
Sayyid’s expression firmed with determination. “Yes.”
He slipped from Neil’s grasp and hurried into the columns, walking with quick purpose. Neil scurried after him.
“If we can get into the tomb, we can climb back out through the fissure and try to help the others,” Neil reasoned, a little breathless at trying to keep up with Sayyid’s quick pace. “We might still be able to do something! But… where are we going?”
Sayyid pointed into the gloom beyond the illuminated columns. “Over there. That is where the entrance must be.”
“How do you know?” Neil demanded, bewildered.
Sayyid arched an eyebrow, shifting his arm to the right. “Because we fell into the quarry over there, from the burial chamber. The tunnel from the treasury turned ninety degrees to the left, then up the stairs and around another thirty-degree left before the painted hall.”
He traced out the route with his finger as though drawing it onto the impenetrable darkness that surrounded them. “Haven’t you been paying attention?” he finished impatiently.
Neil stared at Sayyid as a tumult of emotion roiled inside of his chest—then threw his arms around him. “Thank you,” he said, giving Sayyid a fervent squeeze before awkwardly releasing him.
Sayyid stared at him with surprise.
Neil hurried onward, calling back to Sayyid as he went. “If we’re quick enough, we might still reach the others in time to make a difference!”
“We would make far more of a difference if we found that staff,” Sayyid grumbled. “But it would be like looking for your needle in a haystack.”
“Not really,” Neil replied automatically.
Sayyid stopped short. “Not really? What do you mean by that, precisely?”
Neil frowned at his urgent tone. “Oh! Only that I had a bit of an idea where it might be. Not that I know anything for certain,” he protested at the intent look in Sayyid’s eyes. “It was just a little notion that popped into my head right before Mr. Forster-Mowbray came in. It’s probably nothing. It wouldn’t really have made any sense, anyway.”
Sayyid did not look convinced by Neil’s disclaimers. He crossed his arms, planting himself firmly in their path forward. “You do realize that your notions about the past have an uncanny habit of turning out to be correct?”
“What?” Neil gave an awkward laugh. “Don’t be silly.”
“I am not being silly.” Sayyid’s eyes narrowed. “How did you find the tablet in Hatshepsut’s temple?”
“I didn’t find it!” Neil protested. “Ellie did!”
Sayyid rolled his eyes. “And how did Ellie find it?”
“Well, she spotted one of the little hands of the Aten on the surface of the sun chapel altar, after I…”
Neil’s voice trailed off.
“After you what?” Sayyid prompted.
“After I… might have had the notion that the altar had been rebuilt and expanded in antiquity,” Neil finished weakly.
“And did you see something on the altar to make you think of that?” Sayyid pressed. “Or did that notion just pop into your brain as well?”
Neil didn’t answer him.
“I watched you find the location of Horemheb’s funerary chapel by looking at an empty stretch of desert.” Sayyid jabbed a finger up at the mountain over their heads. “Less than an hour ago, I saw you locate the way into Neferneferuaten’s tomb by crawling under a boulder that looked like ten others scattered across the ridge.”
“That wasn’t…” Neil started, spluttering. “You can’t possibly be suggesting… You’re making it sound like…”
Sayyid raised an eyebrow.
“This isn’t magic! ” Neil burst out. “It’s scholarship! And maybe a bit of… lucky guessing!”
“You were not guessing at Saqqara when you relocated our entire excavation plan thirty meters to the southeast without having found so much as a single pot shard to support the change,” Sayyid returned stubbornly.
“I am not magical!” Neil shouted.
The words resounded hauntingly through the pillared darkness of the quarry… and Neil remembered the moment he had stepped into Akhetaten and watched the city come alive around him as though he had fallen through a hole in time.
Magical, the quarry echoed back at him. Magical.
“I suppose we’ll find out,” Sayyid declared relentlessly and dragged Neil onward.