Page 169 of Tomb of the Sun King

“The sand?” Constance pressed.

“It isnotsand,” Sayyid replied, sweat beading on his brow. “It is powdered hematite!”

Zeinab’s eyes flashed with fear.

“Hematite?” Ellie frowned down at the substance even as she kept her body frozen. The red powder filled the box right up to the level of the top of the gilded coffin. “What’s wrong with hematite?”

“Nothing when you are using it in a stabilized form as a pigment for artwork,” Sayyid replied with careful, terrified patience. “But when inhaled in sufficient quantity, it brings on vomiting and convulsions.”

“Metal poisoning,” Zeinab filled in sharply, staring at the powder as though it were a cobra flaring for a strike.

“Hell,” Adam breathed, the lines of his mouth firming with recognition.

Zeinab’s eyes flashed to the rest of them, grim and urgent. “It will kill us all, if enough of it is aerosolized.”

“But how do you know it’s hematite?” Neil’s tone was pleadingly skeptical.

A mix of emotions flickered across Sayyid’s features—a quick sadness and hurt followed by a flare of anger. They were gone a moment later, forced back under a wall of careful self-control. “A tomb outside Qena was entered by a group of looters six years ago. They described finding the floor covered thickly in a fine red powder.” He paused. “Within two years, all of them were dead.”

“I never heard of that,” Neil protested.

“Why would you have heard of it?” Sayyid retorted.

Neil flinched at the sharpness of his tone.

“How doyouknow of it?” Ellie pressed more carefully.

Sayyid drew in a breath as though forcibly controlling his racing emotions. “Their relatives came to me for help. They knew I had experience with tombs and hoped that I would know of a cure.”

“But there is no cure for metal fever,” Zeinab cut in sharply. “The body can only clear it on its own… or not, if the exposure is too great.”

“Saw the end result once in some miners out of Colombia.” Adam’s gaze locked with Ellie’s across the sarcophagus, dark with worry. “It wasn’t nice.”

Ellie held herself perfectly still as she studied the fine red dust. It filled the sarcophagus in soft waves, a crimson sea framing the golden figure of the pharaoh. “What if we masked ourselves?”

“The effectiveness of a mask would depend on the material and how fine the particles are,” Zeinab replied.

“Hell of a risk if you got it wrong,” Adam noted flatly.

“Then how do we open the coffin?” Neil pressed.

The obvious answer rose into her mind.Maybe we shouldn’t.

“We would have to stabilize the powder so that it did not come into the air when disturbed,” Sayyid said. “Perhaps with an oil—adding it slowly so that it turned the hematite to paste. Something that would not dry and allow it to stir back up again.” He frowned thoughtfully. “You might minimize the damage the oil causes to the coffin by inserting panels around it—but of course, you would have to do so with the utmost care.”

“We’ve got a little oil in the lamps,” Adam pointed out. “But not much. And we’d be left in the dark if we used it.”

Beside Adam, Neil was no longer looking at the coffin and its nest of deadly powder. His eyes had wandered to something beyond Ellie’s shoulder with an air of puzzled distraction.

Ellie glanced back, seeing only the model solar barque with its delicate oars and sails and the cuneiform graffito, which they had already examined.

“Neil,” she began. “What are you—”

Her words cut off as she turned back around—and watched Julian Forster-Mowbray step into the carved doorway of the burial chamber.

“But this is absolutely splendid!” he happily observed with a greedy look around the room. “Look at all this treasure!”

Adam turned with slow menace, the machete sliding into his hand. Zeinab’s posture was one of still, dangerous readiness.

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