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A scrape and a muttered curse from behind her marked Adam’s arrival. He spilled through the opening, landed on the floor, and sprawled out his arms as he stared up at the ceiling.

“Maybe it’ll be better on the way up,” he offered without much confidence.

“I’m sure that it will,” Ellie assured him awkwardly. “But now, we’d best get moving. We haven’t any time to waste.”

Adam staggered to his feet, bracing himself with a hand to the wall for a moment before he straightened.

“Guess it’s time to find your brother,” he concluded wearily.

??

Eight

Dusty and sweatingin the depths of an Eighteenth Dynasty tomb, Dr. Neil Fairfax put his extensive education in Egyptology and ancient history to work by holding up a piece of wood.

Playing human scaffold for a sturdily built frame covered in stretched canvas was not what Neil had imagined himself doing when he had received his doctorate from Cambridge—but somebody needed to keep it upright until the braces were constructed, and Neil’s foreman, Sayyid Al-Ahmed, was better at building things than Neil was.

Neil’s arms jarred as Sayyid hammered in another nail. “There!” the foreman declared, scrambling to his feet and dusting off his hands.

Sayyid was roughly the same height as Neil but sturdier in build. His neatly trimmed beard was normally the hue of honeyed burnt wood, but at the moment it looked more silver with dust. Instead of the tailored suit and dapper fez that he wore when out and about in Cairo, he was stripped to his waistcoat and bareheaded, his shirt smudged with dirt.

Neil almost certainly looked worse. His tweed waistcoat and bow tie might have been dapper enough when he’d risen that morning but were now amply disheveled. His light brown hair was messy. He plucked off his round gold-rimmed spectacles and gave them a rub on his handkerchief, trying to remove a day’s worth of fingerprints.

The excavation of Horemheb’s funerary chapel had been executed with painstaking attention to conservation and documentation. That included the tomb beneath it, even though the gaps in the rubble-filled doorways told Neil that he wasn’t the first one to penetrate the complex’s secrets. At least one set of thieves had beaten him to it, probably around the time that Caesar had been flirting with Cleopatra.

Neil knew better than to expect to find Horemheb himself at the end of the series of underground chambers and passages. The great general-turned-pharaoh would have been put to rest somewhere in the Valley of the Kings, where archaeologists with more experience—or posher connections—than Neil were granted permission to excavate.

That was fine with Neil. He was happy to be at Saqqara, where three thousand years of occupation offered a unique opportunity to explore the evolution of Egypt’s funerary practices.

He released the wooden frame with a sigh of relief, shaking out his arms. The canvas-covered box was sized to cover the wall of the narrow antechamber in which they stood. It would serve to protect a delicate painting there from damage as they cleared the passage to the next chamber of the tomb.

The way onward was currently blocked with rubble, save for a hole those centuries-old thieves had made in an upper corner. If Neil stood up on his toes, he could peer through it into a passage scattered with debris and distinguished by four evenly spaced columns.

Neil itched to discover what the rest of the tomb would reveal about Horemheb’s early life and the history of the late Eighteenth Dynasty. He would get his chance after they cleared the doorway, which they would begin working on tomorrow. Right now, his stomach was telling him that it was time to call it a day.

“Can we have supper now?” Neil asked.

“One more moment,” Sayyid said, scooting the frame aside to take another look at the painting on the wall.

The mural was a very fine example of late Eighteenth Dynasty bas relief, a find well worth protecting when so much of the artistic material above ground had been destroyed in antiquity or carried off by previous ‘explorers.’ In the relief, Horemheb made offerings to Osiris, who was wrapped in the shroud of a mummy and holding his traditional crook and flail. The god of the dead’s complexion was a rich blue. The black of Horemheb’s wig and the dark umber of his skin had survived as well.

Sayyid had spent the day before stabilizing the ancient painting by applying a light, clear adhesive to any areas where the surviving fragments of color were at risk of flaking away.

Conserving artwork was another thing Sayyid did far better than Neil.

Sayyid had learned his trade at the knees of his father Kamal, who had been possibly the most respected foreman in Egypt during his time. Before he had passed away six years earlier, Kamal had worked under some of the most influential Egyptologists of the last thirty years in digs at Giza and Luxor—managing the day-to-day operations of an excavation for men like Flinders Petrie, Mariette, and Karl Lepsius.

Neil had to admit that Sayyid’s education in Egyptology at his father’s hands had been as comprehensive as anything he might have received at Oxford or the Sorbonne—maybe even better. Neil was often humbled by Sayyid’s detailed knowledge of the latest methods for stabilizing fragile artifacts and his extensive understanding of the various dialects of the Ancient Egyptian language.

As this was Neil’s first Egyptian excavation, he had been relying heavily on Sayyid’s more extensive experience—especially as he frequently had cause to discover that the archaeological methods and ‘best practices’ that he had been taught at Cambridge fell apart in the face of real conditions at the excavation.

All in all, he felt desperately lucky that Sayyid had been available to work on the dig—even if he did keep poking fun at Neil’s mustache.

Neil’s hand rose to the facial hair in question. He had been trying to grow it out since the Eid holiday. Neil had been cursed with a face that perpetually looked younger than it actually was. With his smooth skin and round spectacles, he was regularly mistaken for a student until someone got around to introducing him as ‘doctor.’

He hoped the mustache would help… just as soon as it filled in a bit more. He rubbed awkwardly at the thin growth.

“Poking at it isn’t going to make it any better,” Sayyid noted helpfully as he added another dab of adhesive to a bit of cracked charcoal under Horemheb’s eye.