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Which would be Adam, of course. Because he’d be damned if he’d let anyone else here do it.

“The jewelry box of Mutnedjmet mentioned a was-scepter,” Ellie recalled firmly. “If that is the staff we’re looking for, it will take the form of a Set beast—something like a dog with an elongated snout and long pointed ears on top, finishing in a forked tail.”

“It could be made of anything from wood to faience or bronze,” Sayyid added, still gazing with shock at the bounty of the room.

“How big is it?” Constance pressed, peering into a quiver full of arrows.

Ellie threw a questioning look at Sayyid as she answered. “Was-scepters are usually depicted as being similar in height to the bearer’s chin. But I believe there are examples that are shorter, perhaps as little as twelve to eighteen inches in length.”

“So we’re looking for something that could be anywhere from five feet to twelve inches long and made of just about any material other than paper.” Adam cast a rueful glance around the tightly packed piles of treasures. “That sure narrows it down.”

“There is another door,” Zeinab cut in sharply.

Adam realized what had been itching at the back of his mind since they’d stepped into the room. The place was full of everything a pharaoh might need to enjoy a damned fine time in the afterlife… but was distinctly absent any sign of the woman it had all been put here for.

“No coffin,” he pointed out significantly, meeting Ellie’s gaze.

They gathered behind Zeinab at the turn of the path, and Adam found himself facing a dark rectangle cut into the wall of the chamber. The doorway opened onto a short passage that turned sharply before he could glimpse what lay beyond it.

“I suppose it might be worth seeing what is there,” Ellie offered carefully. “Before we come back and make a more systematic survey of the artifacts.”

“I agree,” Zeinab declared. She plucked up a lantern and strode forward.

Adam lingered behind, casting a wary glance back at the stairwell. He wished he could see through it to whatever was happening above ground, but the space around him remained still as the grave. Only the faces of the dead gazed back at him in a silence that felt complicit.

Find the staff, he thought grimly. Then get out and try like hell to save the rest.

Adam set his hand to the hilt of his machete and strode after the others.

??

Thirty-Five

Ellie felt likeshe was walking through a dream. The halls and chambers around her whispered with the story of the woman who had become king.

She had read about Nefertiti before, of course. What self-respecting lady scholar of ancient history wouldn’t have paid special attention to a queen who was depicted on near equal footing with her husband, present at his side through everything from worship to war? Now she was faced with irrefutable evidence that the same woman had also ruled Egypt in her own right, guiding an empire with benevolence under the blessings of a compassionate sun.

A discovery like that destroyed paradigms and revolutionized entire schools of thought. To find the tomb at all would have been life-changing. To discover it untouched, with all its treasures left exactly where ancient hands had set them three thousand years ago, was nothing short of awe-inspiring.

Neil was a numb presence beside her, blinking with shock behind his spectacles. Sayyid had looked close to tears in the hallway above, where Ellie herself had been fighting the urge to break down into helpless, joyful laughter. Even Constance was caught up in the spell of the tomb, gazing with wide-eyed wonder and childlike excitement at each new secret it revealed.

Zeinab kept a grim set to her mouth, the lines of her body tense as a cat deciding whether to pounce or flee.

Adam, too, seemed more subdued rather than swept up in the excitement of the discovery. The wary glances he kept casting back the way they had come were a sobering reminder of their circumstances. Ellie couldn’t afford to stop and translate every line of hieroglyphs or carefully catalog each packed hoard of funerary objects. They had stumbled into this revolutionary discovery more or less under a gun, and she was deeply uncertain how much of it they would be able to save before this was all over.

Those worries crowded against the awe flooding her mind as Ellie turned the corner of the narrow corridor and found herself at the threshold of the final chamber.

Like the room before, the space was packed with grave goods. Gold shone at her from every corner of the massed artifacts that were piled halfway up the walls, chests and statues mingling with shining piles of jewels.

In the center of it all lay the sarcophagus.

Neferneferuaten’s resting place was a box of rare red granite, polished to a subtle sheen. The sides were carved with the many-handed disk of the Aten while winged goddesses stood sentinel on each corner, their arms held out in a gesture of protection.

The mortal remains of the larger-than-life figure who had decorated the paintings above lay inside—and stopped Ellie short. She was struck by the painful sense that this entire complex had been meant to remain inviolate, waiting for the moment when Neferneferuaten would answer the call of her god and join him in eternity.

The pharaoh-queen wasn’t a figure in a textbook anymore. She was a being of real flesh, blood, and feeling, who now lay in dusty silence amid the ancient relics of her life.

Ellie forced herself to examine the rest of the burial chamber. Between what was here and the inventory back in the treasure room, the tomb contained an absolute trove of priceless information about royal life in the late Eighteenth Dynasty. A full team of archaeologists could spend a lifetime cataloging, stabilizing, and analyzing it all.