Page 162 of Tomb of the Sun King

The steps stopped at another doorway. Instead of hinged panels like the others they had found, this one was closed off with only an ancient slab of wood.

“Not quite as elaborate as the one upstairs, is it?” Constance mused, eyeing it a little critically.

“Perhaps this stairwell was considered a less important part of the tomb,” Ellie offered.

“Or it was not finished.” Sayyid nodded at the stone lintel. “There are holes drilled there as though meant for another set of stone doors.”

“Neferneferuaten only ruled for a short time,” Neil reminded them as he stared at the dusty boards.

“Perhaps they didn’t have enough time to complete her tomb before she needed to use it,” Ellie filled in.

“Was she very old when she became the king?” Constance asked.

“No,” Neil replied. “She would not have been old at all.”

“Begs the question of what did her in,” Adam noted soberly.

He didn’t know a fraction of the Egyptian history that Ellie, Neil, and Sayyid did, but he recognized that a woman stepping into the role of king would have been fairly revolutionary—even if she hadn’t been part of some crazy new faith that her husband had imposed on the entire country. Maybe she’d died of the same plague that Neil had said killed Akhenaten… but it seemed to Adam that a lady like that would have accumulated plenty of enemies.

The thought made him a little sad.

“We should move it carefully,” Sayyid said with a tired sigh as he studied the wooden screen that blocked their way.

“I’ll help,” Neil offered.

The two Egyptologists each took a side, carefully lifting the slab and shifting it gingerly to the wall. As they moved, the glow of Zeinab’s lamp spilled into the space that lay beyond.

Light flared back from within. For a moment, those sparkling glimmers were all Adam could discern. Then his vision adjusted—and the wonders inside came into focus.

The chamber was packed. Elegant furniture crowded the space, rich with lapis blue and ruddy ocher—chairs accented with gold leaf and cabinets stuffed with gray bundles that would once have been fine linens.

Statues watched them with jewel-like glass eyes beside tables piled with urns and vases.

Though jammed full like a rummage sale, everything looked carefully arranged in tidy stacks and piles.

“Not looted,” Adam concluded, numb with awe.

“It would seem not,” Ellie replied in shock-strangled tones.

They stepped inside. Only a narrow ribbon of the floor was clear, turning from the entrance to the far corner of the room, beyond the heavy bulk of a wardrobe. Everything else was stuffed with historical objects. Jeweled scarabs and colorful faience collars winked in the lamplight from atop desiccated carpets and painted boxes. Glass bowls and crystal cups sat cheek-by-jowl with stacked leather sandals, blackened with age. Woven baskets rose in towers to the ceiling, marked with the hieroglyphs for ox bones, bread, or dates.

Adam spotted a gilded bed with a base of braided ropes. A model dahabeeyah rested atop it, the shape remarkably similar to the vessels he’d just seen docked at Luxor.

Ellie stopped short in front of a cabinet packed with rows of diminutive mummy-shaped figures, which gleamed Caribbean blue in the lamplight.

“Shabtis!” she breathed out admiringly. “And look—you can see how each of them is unique. Possibly modeled on the actual royal servants who were part of the pharaoh’s retinue.”

Adam gave the little blue figurines a closer look. The notion that each of their placid faces might represent a real person who had lived and died three thousand years ago caught his breath. And they would’ve been ordinary people—not the famous rulers who appeared all over the place. The people who carved the furniture and wove the linens that were stacked up around him. People whose names nobody was going to find in any textbooks.

“There’s so much!” Constance exclaimed behind him, gazing at the room’s treasures.

“Everything a pharaoh would need for an eternity in the Field of Reeds,” Sayyid replied reverently.

“But what are we looking for?” Constance bent over to peer around a pile of footstools. “I always imagined the Staff of Moses to look something like a shepherd’s crook.”

Her words brought Adam firmly back to earth. The contents of the room raised the stakes of a situation that had already been pretty damned tense. They weren’t discovering the tomb’s wonders in a vacuum. They were huddled here under the noses of a self-absorbed thief and a small army of mercenaries. Everything that Adam saw around him looked important, from the glittering gemstones to the humble straw of a fly-whisk. It all deserved to be saved from The Mustache and his cronies—but Adam could hardly pick it all up and haul it out of here.

They needed to focus on the most dangerous part of this puzzle—the one thing in this tomb that might have the power to unleash hell on earth in the wrong hands. After that, they would do whatever they could to keep Julian from getting inside to ravage the rest of it. Stage a distraction, maybe—though that would be a risky mission for whoever took it on.

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