Forty-Two
H olding up a flaming sword, Neil watched the impossible swarm settle like dust after a sandstorm. Most of the insects hissed and buzzed after Julian’s fleeing party. A few stray scarabs remained, clinging to the rocks or marching along in contended lines.
He looked at his hand and realized it still clung to the bone hilt of Dyrnwyn. Neil dropped it as though it might bite him, and the flames of the sword snuffed like a spent candle.
Constance punched him in the arm hard enough that he nearly staggered. “That was rather well done, you!” she declared approvingly.
Her hair had wrenched loose of its pins and spilled in an abundant, disarrayed mess around her shoulders. One of the sleeves of her white lawn dress was half torn away. Somehow, it made her look more like the unruly child he had known years before—and yet simultaneously achingly lovely.
Not that the loveliness mattered, he told himself. She was his sister’s friend.
Maybe his friend, too.
Neil might very reasonably have simply asked her that sort of question— are we friends now, too? Something else came out of his mouth instead.
“You attacked a man who had a flaming sword.”
“It was only Julian,” Constance retorted dismissively.
“You… I…” Neil’s voice was strangled. He closed his eyes, then forced himself to open them again. “Thank you.”
Constance flashed him a look of cat-like satisfaction. “You’re welcome, Stuffy.”
Sayyid stood a few steps away, still holding the was-scepter. His collar was askew and the shoulder of his waistcoat was torn. His expression was blank with shock and terror.
Neil threw his arms around him. “Thank you, too,” he said, his voice muffled by Sayyid’s shoulder.
After a moment’s hesitation, Sayyid hugged him back. “That was awful. Could you not have thought of any curses besides the one with beetles? I will be having nightmares about that experience for months.”
Neil laughed, feeling slightly hysterical. He pushed back from the embrace to check on the rest of the people he cared about.
Ellie launched herself into Neil with the impact of a small rhinoceros. “Are you all right?” She shoved back to get a better look at him. “Were you hurt in the fall? Or during your fight with Julian? And how did you get out of that hole in the ground?”
“I am bruised in possibly every place that a person can become bruised, and I never want to do anything remotely like this ever again,” Neil quickly told her. “But… I’m fine.”
Adam came up behind her. He looked like hell. He was also staring at Neil’s sister like a man who knew that he’d nearly just lost the most important thing in the world to him.
The sight of it tugged at Neil’s heart in a way that took his breath.
There was nothing thoughtless or irresponsible about that look. The emotion flooding through Adam’s eyes had another name—one that Neil couldn’t possibly fault him for. Not in a million years.
He’d need to talk to his friend about that before too long. His sister, too. It seemed he had a bit more groveling still left to do.
The rest of their party was miraculously intact. Jemmahor lingered near the edge of the drop into the canyon. She picked up an extra rock from the ground and ceremoniously hurled it in the direction the villains had fled. “Thawra hatta’l-na?r, imperialist scoundrels!” she shouted happily.
Zeinab stood at Sayyid’s side. Her face was smudged with dirt and blood, though she had managed to retain her headscarf. She smiled at her husband, then casually brushed something from his shoulder.
Sayyid closed his eyes, looking pained. “Please do not tell me what that was. I do not want to know.”
He still held the was-scepter in his hand. Ellie reached out to examine the verdigris-dulled bronze with reverent fingers.
“You found it.” She looked from Sayyid to Neil. “You found the Staff of Moses.”
Sayyid unhesitatingly handed it to her. She took the tamarisk rod carefully, then yanked a hand back, shaking it out. “Ow! It stings! Why does it sting?”
“I have absolutely no idea!” Sayyid returned with an edge of wild laughter.
With a curious grimace, Ellie brushed her fingers gently over the lines of hieroglyphs that covered the ancient bronze.
“Oh God who has no equal,” she read, turning the tamarisk rod to follow the line of characters. “Who knows a man by the words in his heart, and who makes the deed rise up against the doer.”
A strange, powerful warmth burst through Neil as he watched her—his little sister, ragged and bruised but utterly unbowed, holding the Staff of Moses in her capable hands as she read the words inscribed on it in a language the world had tried very hard not to let her learn.
His sister the scholar—the warrior—whose determination to do what was right had brought all of them to this place and this moment, despite the most overwhelming odds.
He slowly came to recognize the feeling blooming up inside of him. He was wildly, desperately proud of her.
He was less proud of himself, but instead of making him miserable, as it had before, Neil found himself oddly… determined .
If he had not done things quite right in the past, then he simply needed to do better—now and for the rest of his life.
“Is that from the Hymn to the Aten?” Constance wondered.
“It’s a prayer to Thoth,” Ellie corrected. “But it sounds as though it could be, doesn’t it?”
“Or a prayer to God,” Zeinab offered solemnly.
“Bu ?? ?!” a voice called from the top of the ridge.
Neil picked out the stout, sturdy figure of Umm Waseem framed against the night sky.
Bu ?? ? was a simple word. Neil automatically translated it. Look!
Zeinab slipped from Sayyid’s side. She crossed to the drop into the canyon, gazing out in the direction where Umm Waseem pointed.
Neil and the others joined her there, Ellie still carrying the staff.
The view opened out across the royal wadi to the broad, moonlit Amarna plain. Halfway to the pale, tumbled columns of the ruined city, an odd, dark shadow hovered over the ground like a shifting, slow-moving cloud.
He stood too far away to make out any details… but Neil found himself oddly certain that he was looking at a swarm of insects harrying a cluster of quickly retreating figures.
“I suppose it’s a good thing those bugs aren’t actually carnivorous,” he said a little weakly.
“Why is that?” Ellie asked, her eyes on the fleeing mercenaries.
“That’s the precise translation of Sayyid’s curse,” Neil replied. “‘In kheper wanam’ek san.’ It is the scarab who will eat you.”
Sayyid swallowed thickly beside him, looking a little queasy.
“What do they eat, then?” Constance asked, curious.
“They’re dung beetles,” Adam replied. “So they eat… er, what you’d more or less expect.”
Ellie repressed a laugh. It came out as a snort.
“One would think that lot might have qualified.” Jemmahor punctuated the remark with a rude gesture at the fleeing party of villains. “Well! At least Umm Waseem did not have to blow the ridge down on us!”
“What?!” Neil exclaimed, his stomach lurching.
“Don’t worry,” Jemmahor assured him. “It was only a last resort.” She paused, frowning thoughtfully. “Though I suppose we did come rather close to that, didn’t we?”
Neil vividly imagined several thousand tons of exploded rock cascading down the mountain to crush them. He thought he might be ill.
Umm Waseem hopped down from the rocks nearby, moving with a nimbleness that defied her advanced age. Her black canvas bag was slung over her shoulder. Neil regarded her with a deep and extremely wary respect.
Ellie gave the was-scepter a final longing look and held it out to Sayyid. “Here.”
Sayyid blanched. “Absolutely not. I will be quite happy never to touch that thing again, thank you.”
“Is that it, then?” Neil asked hopefully.
“Not entirely.” Constance shoved a long, heavy bundle at him, wrapped up in a piece of canvas.
Neil fumbled it as he caught it, and a bit of the fabric fell away, revealing a hilt of gold-wrapped bone.
“Dyrnwn?!” He immediately tried to shove it back at her. “Why are you giving this to me?”
“You won it in a fair battle,” Constance replied as though the matter should have been obvious.
“I did not!” Neil protested. “Mr. Forster-Mowbray just dropped it when you knocked him over! That’s not winning anything! And anyway, I haven’t the foggiest notion of how to use it! Bates should have it!” He jabbed a finger at his broad-shouldered friend.
“I’m good with my knife,” Adam replied comfortably.
“Sayyid?” Neil pleaded hopefully.
“Absolutely not,” Sayyid returned stoutly.
Neil’s ire rose at the utter lack of support he was receiving. “Well, then I don’t see why we can’t leave it right here on the mountain.”
“Isn’t it an object of enormous historical importance?” Constance reminded him with an innocent blink of her exceptional eyelashes. “One of the Thirteen Treasures of Britain or some such thing?”
Ellie fixed Neil with an outraged glare. “You want to leave one of the Thirteen Treasures of Britain on a mountain?!”
“What else am I supposed to do with it?” Neil burst out.
“Bring it back to England and give it to an institution of public learning, perhaps?” Ellie returned impatiently. “It’s one of our own this time—you can do that.”
“Except if he does, Julian’s high-and-mighty forebearers will probably just show up to claim it again,” Adam reasoned.
“Well, then, I suppose Neil will just have to hold on to it for a while,” Ellie conceded.
“I don’t want to hold on to it!” Neil shouted. “It bursts into flames!”
“Only when you take it by the hilt,” Constance returned comfortably. “Why do you think I wrapped it up for you?”
“And most likely when one is engaged in battle,” Ellie mused.
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Constance pushed back. “It’s not like Julian could have been in many battles before now.”
“Be kinda handy if you could just use it to spark up a campfire,” Adam offered. “Or get your cigar going.”
Neil stared at all of them, his jaw hanging open with shock and dismay.
Adam clamped a sympathetic hand onto his shoulder. “I’ll find you a bit of rope so you can tie it on.”
“There is still the matter of the tomb that must be settled.” Zeinab studied their ragged party. “Mr. Forster-Mowbray knows where it is. He will come back for it, even if the staff is no longer there. Neferneferuaten’s treasures would be worth a fortune to him back in England.”
“Does that mean Umm Waseem should set off her charges?” Ellie suggested. “I will admit, I was hoping to see a bit more of her skills in action. Perhaps I might quiz her afterward on the relative merits of different fuse materials, if one of you is willing to translate. I have been curious about…”
The horror Neil felt at her words must have shown on his face, because Ellie trailed off as she glanced at him.
“Maybe save the fireworks tutorial for later,” Adam suggested mildly as he tossed a length of rope at Neil, who caught it only by reflex, still juggling the canvas bundle of the sword.
Sayyid gaped at her. “You might collapse the entire tomb! The whole quarry could cave in! There would be nothing left of it!”
“I suppose you are right.” Ellie sighed a little reluctantly.
“But what else can we do?” Neil pressed.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Constance replied.
The rest of the party looked at her blankly.
“You people really haven’t the foggiest notion of how these things work, do you?” Constance protested with a note of indulgent exasperation. “We have to curse the tomb!”
“Curse the tomb?” Sayyid echoed uneasily.
“But how are we supposed to do that?” Neil burst out.
Something about the look in Constance’s eyes made him feel distinctly nervous.
“With the Staff of Moses, of course,” she replied with a dangerously sweet smile.