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She felt a little pang of remorse. “I’ll quite ruin it.”

“I don’t have anything else!” Neil protested.

With a sigh, Ellie plucked the pen from his hand. She jabbed the nib into the seam under the slab at the edge of the altar.

“You can’t just go taking apart pieces of sun altars!” Neil protested.

At Ellie’s rueful look, he flushed.

“What I mean to say is, it would be shockingly irresponsible to simply…” Neil trailed off awkwardly. “There are proper procedures for this sort of thing and… Obviously, someone ought to be informed before we…”

As she continued to wait, his shoulders slumped.

Ellie went back to work with the pen, twisting and wrenching it.

Neil groaned beside her. She wasn’t sure if he was more upset that she was attempting to take apart an important Eighteenth Dynasty monument or that she was utterly destroying his nib.

The block wriggled up a bit, and Ellie worked the pen further into the gap. She left it there and scrambled up onto the top of the altar, taking hold of the edge of the stone. She waved impatiently at the pen, which still stuck out from underneath the slab. “Lend me a hand, would you?”

With a reluctant groan, Neil levered at the pen as Ellie worked to get a better grip. There was a good bit of muttering and complaining—and the limestone block came free.

The piece was about eleven inches square and perhaps one and a half inches thick. Ellie hauled it out and shoved it aside.

She stuck her head over the opening to peer in. Neil did the same, pressing in beside her.

“Rubble,” he concluded.

The jumbled fill was packed into the space between the facing stones and the old altar, which Ellie could pick out here and there beneath.

“But there’s a strut at the edge of the stones, just as I predicted,” Ellie noted. “And we can pull up the proper slab now.”

With a sigh, Neil climbed up to join her, and the pair of them made quick work of yanking out the stone where Ellie had painted the sun disk.

The altar was looking properly ravaged now. Ellie felt a spark of guilt at the sight.

“Well, then?” Neil pressed in to peer at the new space they had opened.

“I don’t know!” Ellie retorted crossly. “I can’t see anything with your head blocking my light!”

“I’m not blocking the light any more than you are!” Neil retorted.

Ellie shoved back on her brother’s shoulders, then shifted her own position. Sunlight spilled down into the dark mouth left by the displaced stone.

The space was not filled with rubble. Instead, it formed a little hollow framed by the struts that supported the limestone, with the surface of the old altar serving as the floor.

Nor was it empty. Ellie reached into it and carefully lifted out a thin slab of baked clay. The object was perhaps six inches square, and its surface was covered in close-packed, stick-like characters.

“That’s a tablet.” Neil’s voice was numb with surprise.

“Stamped with cuneiform.” Ellie traced a delicate finger over the intricate arrangements of triangular-headed wedges and lines.

“A piece of diplomatic correspondence, perhaps?” Neil pressed closer to peer down at it. “Akkadian was the lingua franca during the New Kingdom period for communication between Egypt and other empires.” He grimaced a little ruefully. “I might have a go at translating it if I had my library along, but I’m afraid I’m hopeless if I’m working off the top of my—.”

“King,” Ellie read, pointing to one of the symbols on the tablet’s surface.

She shifted her finger over as Neil stared at her. “Grave,” she translated, and then stilled. “Though that could also be read astomb.”

“You know Akkadian?” Neil asked weakly.