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PROLOGUE

Nightfall

Seventh Day of the Month of Blossoming

1248 BCE

Near Mt. Nebo, Land of Moab

THE NIGHT WINDtasted of rain and smelled of the resinous fragrance of cypress flowers. It blew through the scrubby grass beyond the taut black fabric of the tent, hinting at the promise of a rare spring storm.

In the dim lamplight, Kaleb sat beside the pallet where his master lay dying. A scrawny gray cat with black spots dozed at the wheezing old man’s feet.

The solid, powerful figure that Kaleb remembered was diminished, withered to stick-like proportions by age and illness. His face and head were clean-shaved, a habit Kaleb’s master had brought with him from the land of his youth. He had never broken it, even though the people of Kaleb’s tribe grew beards and had therefore found it strange.

Much about Kaleb’s master was strange. He spoke foreign tongues with easy fluency and stamped clay with clusters of lines and wedges that could be read by men in far-away lands. The old man had taught Kaleb the secret of that frozen language so that he, too, could stamp the clay when his master’s hands became too unsteady for the work.

The messages were sent to the emissaries of kings as Kaleb’s master searched for a land where his people could set up their tents without fear of the raids that might turn them into slaves once again.

Kaleb did not remember that time of subjugation, but he had heard the stories of how his forebears sweated and died as they cut limestone talatat bricks for the new city of a tall, long-faced pharaoh whose eyes glittered with the passion of a heretic.

The dying man before him had lived through those dark days. He had delivered Kaleb’s people from them by the grace of another pharaoh, one with a gentler heart… and with the help of the object of miraculous power that now leaned against the pole of the tent.

Kaleb’s eyes drifted past the pallet to rest on that blessed object. The oddly shaped staff was just visible in the dim lamplight as it leaned beside the rest of the old man’s few belongings.

A simple bone comb rested on top of a neatly folded robe and a spare set of sandals. Stranger things lay within the woven reed baskets nearby—a golden amulet in the shape of a kohl-lined eye, an elaborate jeweled dagger, and a statue of a woman of astonishing grace and beauty, carved from the finest alabaster.

They were things from another world—one very far from the woven goat-hair tents and quietly grazing sheep of Kaleb’s people.

“You must take it.”

His master’s words rasped in his throat like sand across the rocks of the desert. The cat on the pallet lifted its head, blinking lazy green eyes.

“Master?” Kaleb startled, feeling an uncertain pang of guilt at the thought that the old man might have seen him looking at his possessions.

“The staff,” his master breathed with obvious effort.

As always, he used the wordmattahinstead ofmish’enah—the term one might more likely apply to a walking stick. But then, the weapon of gleaming wood and tarnished bronze that seemed to gaze at Kaleb from the corner of the tent was clearly something more than a mere walking stick.

Kaleb had heard stories of its wonders—how it had called down bread from the sky when the people of his tribe were weak with hunger and punished Egypt with rains of frogs and storms of locusts.

They said that it had drowned an army in an impossible sweep of the sea. Turned daylight into a darkness that might never have ended.

“It is too dangerous,” the old man rasped. “It must be hidden.”

“But where am I to hide it?” Kaleb burst out as his chest tightened with fear.

His master’s head fell back against the pallet, weak with exhaustion. “Bring it back to her.”

“To whom?” Kaleb demanded.

The old man’s face tightened with pain—and the memory of an old rage. “They took her name,” he bit out harshly, though each word cost him dearly. “They tried to erase her from the memory of the world.”

A hand rose from the bed and clamped around Kaleb’s wrist, gripping him with a palpable echo of the immense power the man had once possessed.

“Do not let them,” Kaleb’s master croaked.

Breath whistled painfully in his chest. The silence of the tent settled around Kaleb like a yoke across his shoulders.