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She pointed to a smaller cluster of cuneiform. The symbols hung over the head of the tallest of the people in the group that departed under Neferneferuaten’s hand—the only figure turned to gaze back at the pharaoh. The man carried a staff, the object primitively represented by a line topped with a few jagged slashes. Even though the drawing was primitively done, sadness marked the rough lines of his features.

Ellie’s brain automatically picked out the sounds indicated by the Akkadian characters.

“Moseh,” she said, her voice tight as she stared at the figure scratched into the wall. “It saysMoseh.”

Neil paled beside her. He whirled back to the other portraits. “This… this is all of it. The whole story.” He pointed a shaking finger. “The taking into captivity. The plague. The pharaoh who freed the slaves. It’s all here—the entire bloody Exodus is on these walls!”

“Allâhu ‘akhbar,” Sayyid breathed, his eyes wide as he looked over the murals. “You mad fool—you were actually right!”

Neil lifted his hands to his head, swaying a little. “I… I think I need to sit down.”

He plopped onto the floor, bracing his forehead against his palms.

Ellie’s mind spun with the implication of the evidence before her—that the prophet of three of the world’s great faiths had found some part of his inspiration in Akhenaten’s religious revolution.

It was all right here, where it had lain in secret for three thousand years.

The impact of that made her wonder if she ought to sit down as well.

Adam’s voice cut through the spell. “I hate to break up the party, but I’m counting over seventy-five staffs in this chamber alone. And that’s just what I can see—not what’s likely buried behind all the rest of this stuff. If we wanna find this arcanum before the sun comes up and makes sneaking out of this place a whole lot more complicated, we need to narrow things down.”

Ellie raised her eyes to the dagger-carved sketch of the prophet on the wall—and the significance of those scratched lines at the top of the rod he carried in his hand clicked into place.

The angular line like an elongated snout. The two upward dashes like pointed ears.

The man in the graffito, gazing back at his royal sister, was holding a was-scepter in his hand.

??

Thirty-Six

“We need tolook for something with the head of a Set beast,” Ellie burst out urgently.

“I’ve been looking for Set beasts,” Adam replied patiently. “Haven’t seen any yet. I checked all the rods I could see for cuneiform too, just in case that mattered. There’s nothing but Egyptian.”

He cast a narrow-eyed gaze over the tightly packed mountain of artifacts. “There’s a lot more here that we can’t see, but if we start hauling through it at random, we’re going to make one hell of a mess—never mind that it might take a month.”

“Would whoever put it here really have gone to the trouble of digging out a place for it behind all this stuff and then putting it all back again?” Constance waved an expressive hand over the stacks of gilded chests and alabaster vases.

“We need to look in the sarcophagus,” Zeinab declared firmly.

The granite box took up the center of the chamber. It was longer than Adam was tall and roughly three feet wide. The lid stood at about the height of Ellie’s waist. The polished, rose-hued granite shone softly in the light of the lantern.

Ellie fought an unexpected urge to protest. Of course, she knew as a scholar that any scientific survey of the tomb would eventually include a careful emptying of the sarcophagus and the layers of coffins encased within it. Still, the notion of exposing what lay inside the box of pale red granite felt oddly sacrilegious.

She stared down at the rows of hieroglyphs carved into the surface of the stone.

Oh sole god, like whom there is no other,she read silently.You created the world according to your desire.

“Why there?” she burst out tightly. “The staff could be anywhere!”

“But whoever went to the trouble of returning it to this tomb must have known it was an object of unimaginable importance,” Neil cut in uneasily. “If he was bringing it back here to rest with Neferneferuaten, it makes sense that he would put it as close to her as he could.”

“How could he have lifted the lid?” Ellie shot back, waving a hand at the massive slab of granite that closed the sarcophagus. “It must weigh five hundred pounds!”

“You’re probably pretty close,” Adam said with an assessing gaze at the stone. “But he wouldn’t have had to lift it. He just had to slide it off one of the corners.” He frowned down at the box. “Problem is, we don’t know which corner. We’ll need to take the whole thing off.”

“It would be easy enough to push it free,” Constance offered.