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“Want us?” Constance sang out boldly, making a little come-hither flap of her hand. “Come and get us!”

Julian raised his blade.

Jacobs aimed the gun at Constance’s head.

“Bugger,” Neil said—and hocked the tablet across the salon with an uncharacteristically neat snap of his wrist.

The hunk of clay flew at Jacobs’ head, forcing him to flinch back. He recovered quickly, swinging the pistol around again—but Neil had already hooked his arm around Constance’s waist.

He clasped her to him as he threw himself at the rail… and launched both of them into the Nile.

??

Twenty-Seven

The water thatclosed over Neil’s head was colder than it had any right to be. It moved fast, whipping him into a twisting current that threatened to pull Constance from his arms.

No,he thought with furious desperation, clutching at her dress to catch her even as his lungs began to scream.

Constance writhed in his grip. She caught his wrist and hauled Neil powerfully toward the surface. He kicked after her, pulling wildly with his free hand.

They burst through the water. Neil gasped for air, spluttering as he blinked at a sloshing world of blurry darkness. It took him a moment to realize that his spectacles were still on his face, though being repeatedly drenched with water, they were more or less impossible to see through.

Neil yanked the glasses off and shoved them into the pocket of his trousers, nearly submerging himself again in the process. Constance grabbed at him, her face a pale oval against the tumultuous darkness.

The current had already carried theIsisahead of them. Cries of angry frustration echoed over the river from the boat. Even without his spectacles, Neil could see the rough form of the decks and the cold, shimmering glow of Julian Forster-Mowbray’s impossible sword.

The flames illuminated a lithe, dangerous shape that joined his former employer in the stern. Neil vaguely recognized it as Jacobs before it raised a hand, pointing the pistol at them from across the water.

“Get down, you idiot!” Constance snapped—and shoved him into the Nile.

Neil was swallowed by a chilling blackness, his body rushed by powerful surges that tossed him around like a cork as Constance held on to him, her fist twisted solidly into his shirt.

They surfaced again a moment later, shoved up by another pulse of the river. TheIsishad moved further away. Neil picked out snippets of Julian’s furious orders to drop sails and turn around.

The reis hollered back—something about cliffs, current, and not losing my boat to some idiot ingilyzy.

The boat was not the only thing moving. The Nile carried Neil and Constance along the looming cliffs at an alarming speed.

Another wave sloshed over his head. He came up from it spluttering.

“This way!” Constance ordered.

She tugged at him and began to swim, arrowing capably through the water. Neil hauled himself after her, grateful that he had already abandoned his coat when he had thrown them to their possible doom.

They were moving closer to the cliffs, which rushed past Neil even faster now that they were nearer by. The sheer face of stone was painted a subtle silver by the light of the crescent moon, save for a few places where his poor eyesight detected dark abscesses in the surface of the rock.

He flinched against the assault of another wave and realized that the black spots were actually a pockmarking of rectangles that were certainly not natural in origin. Geography and years of research clicked together in his brain.

“Hold on!” he called out with a spark of scholarly interest. “Isn’t this Gebel Tukh?”

“Shut up and keep swimming!” Constance retorted.

The current shoved them into the base of the cliffs. Constance caught hold of a low ledge and snatched at Neil’s waistcoat as the river threatened to push him past her. She scrambled up, then hauled him from the water. The pair of them spilled onto the narrow surface of the rock.

The ledge was worn smooth by centuries of the cycle of the inundation. The surface slipped under Neil’s dripping body as he lay there entangled with Constance, gasping like a beached fish.

His mind reeled with the utter madness of what he had just done—jumping off a boat in the middle of the night next to an eighty-foot cliff. Dodging bullets. Tossing a three-thousand-year-old tablet of inestimable historical importance across a salon.