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“Let’s try the other bit,” Sayyid prompted nervously.

Neil turned the rod, presenting him with the bottom end.

Sayyid delicately lifted the forked tail from the box. He carefully lined it up with the other end of the tamarisk stick, then pushed it on with a neat twist of his wrist.

A quick pain buzzed through Neil’s palms, stinging like a hive of bees.

“Ow!” he shouted, bouncing the staff in his hands. “It bit me!”

“What do you mean, it bit you?” Sayyid took a hurried step back.

“I don’t know!” Neil juggled the wood, torn between his protesting nerves and his terror of dropping the instrument of God on the floor.

“Is it still biting you?” Sayyid pressed.

Neil forced himself to hold the thing long enough to find out. “It’s more a… highly unpleasant tingle.”

“Well, you should be able to manage that,” Sayyid concluded. “How does it work?”

“How should I know?” Neil protested, still wincing at the subtle sting against his palms.

Sayyid cocked an eloquent eyebrow.

“What?!” Neil quailed. “You can’t seriously expect that I’ll just…magicthe answer out of it!”

“You magicked learning where it was hidden,” Sayyid returned easily.

“That’s different!”

“See?” Sayyid shot back triumphantly. “You are admitting it was magic!”

“I haven’t admitted anything!” Neil burst out.

“Hmph,” Sayyid countered skeptically. “Well, the carving on Mutnedjmet’s jewelry box referred to it as the Was-Scepter of Khemenu,” he continued blithely. “Khemenu was the center of the cult of Thoth. I am sure that means it must be blessed by one of the god’s priests before it can work.”

“Of course it doesn’t,” Neil retorted crossly.

Sayyid’s lip curled into a smirk, and Neil clamped a hand over his mouth.

“Perhaps it has something to do with language, then,” Sayyid suggested cannily. “As Thoth was the scribe of the old Egyptian gods.”

A sense of rightness hummed in the back of Neil’s mind. It felt like moving his hand closer to the top of a stove with his eyes closed.

“Maybe?” he returned weakly.

Sayyid’s brown eyes flashed with satisfaction. “But it would not be just any language. In the Book of the Dead, the incantations used to protect and guide the deceased through the afterlife are described as being gifted to priests by the gods themselves.”

“Like… spells?” Neil rallied himself with a burst of desperate rebellion. “What are you getting at—that we’re supposed to wave the staff around while we say the magic words?”

The sense of heat—ofrightness—flared through his brain like an igniting match, and Neil’s jaw dropped with dismay.

Sayyid clamped a sympathetic hand down on his shoulder. “It cannot be that bad to be a wali. I am sure we can sort it out later, after we save our people.”

He glanced from his iron crowbar to the discarded scimitar by the sarcophagus. With a grimace of distaste, Sayyid picked up the sword—and promptly hurried through the exit.

Neil panicked.

The staff’s power hummed through his arms, burning across his chest like a warning. Neil sensed its potential. The truth of it whispered through the same part of his mind that had made the cubit box itch at his awareness like a bite he couldn’t scratch. Heknewin a space beyond doubt that the staff in his hands was capable of both miracles and nightmares—that the potential for both hummed inside of it, buzzing like a horde of insects hidden just beneath the earth.