Page 144 of Tomb of the Sun King

“You are not using my scalpels,” Zeinab said flatly without looking back at them.

With a sigh, Sayyid pulled a little folding penknife from his pocket.

The rest of their party—namely the extremely persistent dog and their two remarkably handsome Bedouin guides—had hung back with the camels, which Ellie could hear grunting contentedly in the near distance.

“Thanks,” Adam said, accepting the penknife.

He held out his hand for the bone, a waiting expression on his face. Ellie drew it back protectively.

“You don’t know Glagolitic.” She gave him a thoughtful look. “Do you?”

“Not a word,” Adam replied. “You can draw it for me. I mean, it’s basically a picture, right?”

“Oh, very well,” Ellie conceded, handing him the bone.

She flattened a little well of sand that lay between them and used her index finger to shape the lines of the Glagolitic Slovo.

“It starts with this equilateral triangle, and then the circle is inscribed on top,” she explained—remembering to keep her voice low at another warning glare from Zeinab. “But the tip of the triangle should pierce the bottom of the circle. And make sure it’s in exactly the same place as the old one!” she added, leaning over Adam’s shoulder like a worried mother hen.

He paused, cocking an eyebrow at her. “I got it.”

Ellie made no further protest, even as her throat tightened with worry. Trying to carve an ancient Slavic rune into the delicately rounded surface of a centuries-old bird bone by moonlight was madness. She wouldn’t have dared chance it—except she imagined that an arcanum that could spontaneously erupt with a substantial burst of fiery light might prove useful in whatever dangers the rest of the night held in store.

She bit her lip to keep from offering more helpful advice to Adam and tried not to twitch with nervousness.

He whistled a quiet tune as he set the tip of the penknife to the bone in a manner that struck Ellie as dangerously confident. Rather than hover and anticipate disaster, she turned her attention to Sayyid.

He looked exhausted. Sayyid was much like Ellie’s brother in temperament, far better suited to a comfortable routine of hard work and intellectual stimulation than a life of uncertainty and danger.

Those traits would have made Neil and Sayyid natural friends, and indeed, Ellie had sensed an easy, affectionate rapport between the two men when she had first popped into the tomb at Saqqara. She liked to think of Neil being friends with someone like Sayyid—someone clever and good-hearted who shared Neil’s intellectual interests and wasn’t afraid to challenge him when he acted like a stick-in-the-mud.

She had watched that relationship grow more strained as Neil had stubbornly clung to the crumbling remnants of his old life. Nor had she missed the look of shocked betrayal on Sayyid’s face when he had learned about Neil’s note to Julian Forster-Mowbray back at Hatshepsut’s temple. Ellie wondered how heavily that breach of trust weighed on Sayyid alongside his worries about his wife’s revolutionary activities and the substantial risks of their current mission.

Rubble crashed down into the canyon as Julian’s workmen emptied their buckets. The sound of picks echoed out through the still night air that blanketed the ridge.

“Can’t be easy finding out your wife is a secret revolutionary,” Adam said quietly, noticing the direction of her attention. “Why do you think she didn’t tell him?”

“I think she was trying to protect him,” Ellie murmured back. “That she knew he would be terribly worried about it, but she was going to do it anyway.”

“That’s a big part of yourself to hide from the person you love,” Adam noted.

Ellie soaked up the way the pale moonlight silvered the line of his jaw. She had never hidden her principles from Adam… but she hadn’t realized how they would run up against his own.

The chaos of Julian’s ambush and their race to the wadi hadn’t left them any time to address the questions about their future that still hung over them. They felt like a knife that threatened to drive them apart.

Adam held out the firebird bone. “One Slovo.”

Ellie took the arcanum from him and studied the newly carved Glagolitic character. She tried to remember if it had looked the same before. “What if I was wrong?” she asked in an uncomfortable whisper.

“You weren’t,” Adam assured her confidently.

“But I thought you didn’t know Old Church Slavonic,” Ellie protested. “How can you be sure?”

Adam met her gaze with a look that warmed her bones. “I’m sure.”

His assurance—and that heated look—both settled her and sent an electric hum of awareness buzzing through her veins.

“I suppose I will simply have to test it,” Ellie conceded. “Though perhaps not when we are hiding from a batch of mercenaries.”

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