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They had reached the second level of the temple, where a big plaza was framed by tumbled columns. They’d surveyed the open square of ground pretty quickly, and Sayyid led them to a small enclosed chapel hidden on the north side.

As Adam stepped into it, his nose was filled with the scent of dry stone and dust. Then his eyes adjusted, and he reeled at the beautifully preserved paintings that completely covered the walls and ceiling.

“Hell,” he commented eloquently.

“Now this is intriguing!” Sayyid’s tone quickened with excitement. “These hieroglyphs here are part of the King as Sun Priest text, which celebrates the pharaoh’s role as the heir and servant of the sun god—which perhaps demonstrates an early movement toward the conception of the Aten as a sole creator of the universe.”

“I don’t see any suns.” Constance frowned.

“Oh—that’s this fellow, right here.” Sayyid looked a little embarrassed. “In this depiction, the sun is being represented by the form of the god Ra.”

As Sayyid rattled on, something tickled at the back of Adam’s awareness. It was just a whisper of warning instinct… but he’d had that instinct before, and doing what it told him had saved his hide more times than he could count.

By the time he actually heard the soft scrape of a boot on stone, he was already turning.

He met the first intruder with a fist, taking the guy in the ribs.

With a twist and a grunt, he tossed him into the chapel, where he rolled to collapse at Constance's feet.

Adam had only enough time to register that the groaning villain was Scarface, one of the Al-Saboor cousins from the tomb at Saqqara, before a guy who looked almost identical to him, save for the scar, barreled into the room with a cudgel in his hand.

Adam welcomed the newer Al-Saboor with a friendly kick to the shin. He went down too, yelping out a string of Masri imprecations as he clutched his leg.

“Oh no, you don’t!” Adam heard Constance reprimand behind him. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Ellie’s petite friend catch Scarface as he tried to scramble to his feet. With a tidy maneuver, she twisted his arm behind his back at a painful angle and forced him to the floor. She pinned him there with a fashionable kid boot between his shoulder blades as Sayyid gaped at her.

Two more Al-Saboors burst into the chapel.

Adam treated the guy he’d just kicked to a further punch in the gut, leaving him wheezing.

The next one came at Adam with a right hook. Adam caught it in an echo of Constance’s pivot a moment before with Scarface. With a powerful twist, he wrenched the thug’s arm behind his back—and felt his shoulder pop.

The man collapsed against the wall, holding his limp arm and railing at Adam. He spoke in Masri, but that hardly mattered. Adam knew what it sounded like when he was being cursed out.

He still hadn’t taken out his machete. It was close-quarters fighting in the chapel, with Constance and Sayyid right behind him—Sayyid pressed back against the walls like he was trying to disappear through them, and Constance still pinning Scarface to the floor, even as she eyed Adam’s attackers with a dangerous determination.

The knife would make quicker work of the Al-Saboors—but some of them would probably end up dead.

Adam didn’t much like killing if he didn’t have to.

The next fool to come running into the tomb sported the Al-Saboor pointed chin and prominent nose with the added charm of a missing front tooth. He held a sword in his hands and screamed out a battle cry.

Adam whirled to the man whose right arm he had just dislocated. He grabbed him by the front of his galabeya and threw him at his gap-toothed cousin.

Lefty went down, tangling up with the guy Adam had hobbled earlier, who was just staggering to his feet. Hobbles toppled like a bowling pin, and Gaps fell over the pair of them, the sword clattering from his hand.

All in all, things were going swell—until the next two Al-Saboors burst into the chapel with rifles in their hands.

They leveled both of the guns at Adam, who recognized bad odds when he saw them. He raised his hands over his head.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Constance’s face firm into lines of furious determination as she reached for something under her skirt.

Knives,Adam recalled dimly, remembering how she had threatened Neil back in the tomb.

“Don’t,” he ordered sharply.

Constance didn’t look happy about it—but she listened.

The thugs with the rifles parted to make way for someone else who shared the family features but on a frankly enormous scale. His thick shoulders pulled at the seams of his robe, hands like ham hocks clenched at his sides.