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“I’m sorry,” Ellie piped in, shaking herself out of her shock. “It’s only that Neferneferuaten is… well, possibly the biggest mystery of the Amarna Period, if not the entire Eighteenth Dynasty!”

She shifted her gaze to Neil as though waiting for him to take over… probably because he’d been nattering to her about Neferneferuaten for years now. In fact, the only reason he’d done his dissertation on Eighteenth Dynasty administrative units in Lower Egypt was because basing a thesis on his theories about Neferneferuaten would have been considered positively fringe.

Ellie continued talking, and Neil realized he’d been staring back at her speechless instead of picking up the opening she had been trying to hand him.

“The name Neferneferuaten appears within a royal cartouche on a few artifacts recovered from the ruins of Akhetaten—Akhenaten’s capital city at Tell al-Amarna,” Ellie pressed on helpfully.

“So this Neferneferuaten was a pharaoh,” Adam filled in.

“He must have been,” Ellie agreed, “but there’s so little evidence, we haven’t the foggiest idea who he was or how he ended up sitting on the throne. It’s an utter mystery—so much so that some scholars question whether Neferneferuaten actually existed.”

“Of course he existed!” Neil burst out, crossing over to the desk, where Constance had hopped up to sit. “One doesn’t run about making up imaginary pharaohs and putting their names in cartouches. Neferneferuaten must have ruled sometime during the three years between the death of Akhenaten and the ascension of King Tutankhamun.” He looked helplessly over Sayyid’s notes—all of which were in Arabic. “Akhenaten died suddenly and unexpectedly, and—”

“How?” Constance demanded.

Neil realized that in his hurry to see what Sayyid had found, he had ended up leaning across her lap. He snapped upright. A furious rush of blood pinked the tips of his ears.

The danger gnome blinked at him innocently.

“A plague, actually,” Neil replied awkwardly.

Her eyes widened. They really were the most remarkably rich brown.

“Like the sort that a Biblical staff might toss at you?” she pressed.

“No!” Neil protested. “Just… an entirely ordinary sort of plague. The perfectly non-magical variety. It killed a great many slaves and courtiers as well as members of the royal family, like Akhenaten’s mother and possibly one or two of his daughters—and he only had daughters,” he added pointedly. “When he got ill himself, he must have been left scrambling to appoint an heir to his throne—someone he trusted to keep his greatest achievement, the cult of the Aten, alive after he was gone.”

“Only that didn’t work out very well, because the heir he chose—Neferneferuaten—could only have survived for perhaps three years after Akhenaten’s death,” Ellie added. “After that, the boy Tutankhamun was named king.”

“Now, we know Tut was of royal blood.” Neil started to pace as he fell into the alluring rhythm of this familiar story. “He was probably descended from Akhenaten in some less obvious way—perhaps the child of a concubine or a grandson by one of his daughters. He was most likely placed on the throne by some of Akhenaten’s most powerful courtiers, who continued to serve prominently within Tut’s administration… courtiers who had absolutelynointerest in maintaining Akhenaten’s monotheistic experiment,” Neil added with a note of bitterness. “They waited just long enough to make sure Tutankhamun was firmly settled in as pharaoh, and then they abandoned the capital Akhenaten had built at Amarna. The Aten temples were left to fall into ruin while support and tribute swung back to the priests of all Egypt’s other gods.”

“So these court guys were just there in the background waiting for this Neferneferuaten to get out of the way?” Adam suggested. “And then they put a kid on the throne and rule through him to put stuff back the way they wanted?”

“They might have done a bit more than wait,” Neil cut back—and hesitated. He was about to venture off the archaeological record and into the realm of speculation. Neil tried to make it a point never to speculate. He was a scholar, after all—not a spiritualist. His theories and conclusions were always based on hard data… even if he occasionally came to them by way of a tiny jolt of intuition to begin with.

“In possible support of that theory,” Sayyid said carefully, “we know that Tutankhamun must have died only shortly after reaching manhood. And the pharaoh who succeeded him was not a member of the royal line at all, but rather Ay, who had been one of Akhenaten’s leading viziers.”

“So this Ay is some big shot adviser,” Adam drawled, tapping the points out on his fingers. “The radical religious nut of a king dies. You get a couple years with this other person—the mysterious Neferneferuaten—and then Ay puts a baby king on the throne. Only the baby king mysteriously dies just when he’s getting old enough to have his own ideas about things, and Ay conveniently takes it all over for himself. That about right?”

“That is… a fairly accurate summary,” Neil admitted. “As pharaoh, Ay goes even further to dismantle the Aten cult. He actually started scraping Akhenaten’s image off of monuments and temples all over Egypt—as though Ay hoped to erase his former master from history.”

“Probably because Ay’s rise to power was supported by the high priests of the other gods,” Sayyid added, “who had been starved for income and patronage during Akhenaten’s reign. It is not an unreasonable theory, as Dr. Fairfax and I have previously discussed.”

Neil felt a little burst of warmth at his words. Theyhaddiscussed it, of course—Neil rattling on about one of his favorite subjects while Sayyid interrupted him with pointed observations or challenging questions, bringing his own detailed knowledge of the period to bear. It had been an infinitely satisfying experience.

“All these other priests wanted things to go back to the good old days, then,” Adam summarized.

“Oh, almost certainly,” Sayyid agreed.

“And what about the rest of the inscription?” Mrs. Al-Ahmed prompted.

Neil startled. For a moment, he’d forgotten that Sayyid’s wife was in the room—sitting quietly in the armchair in the corner like a waiting queen disdainfully eyeing her squabbling subjects.

“You know, the one that we have all gathered to hear translated?” she added wryly.

Sayyid unerringly plucked a piece of paper from the clutter on his desk. “That the true story be known of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Living in Truth, Lord of the Two Lands, Lord of Crowns Neferneferuaten, last bearer of the Power of Khemenu,” he read, “seek behind the sun disk in the Holy of Holies of Maat-ka-re Khnemet Amun Hatshepsut.” He set the paper down. “Except that the word isn’t exactly power,” he added pointedly.

Ellie straightened in her seat, her attention on the foreman sharpening. A feeling of uncomfortable suspicion crept over Neil’s skin.