Page 172 of Tomb of the Sun King

“Fairfax, are you well?” he called down urgently.

“Not… particularly…” Neil’s voice strained as his burning, painful hold on the ledge began to slip.

Everything that came next happened rather quickly.

Zeinab snapped into view beside her husband. She took in Neil’s situation with a glance.

Shouts rose from behind her, along with the crack of a gunshot.

Zeinab’s green eyes flashed down to Neil, tightening with a sudden calculation—and she shoved her husband through the hole in the wall.

Sayyid spilled onto the impossibly steep slope with a yelp. The crowbar flew from his hand, bouncing against the stones with a clear, resonant ping.

Neil had only a moment to register a snap of horrified dismay before Sayyid smacked into him, knocking him from his precipitous perch.

He flew back, feeling a strange gravity-defying lurch in his gut as he plummeted through the air.

He smacked into a lumpy mound that pulverized into dust at the impact. It felt only marginally less hard than rock. Neil coughed and wheezed as the air filled with clouds of rotted linen. He rolled over, his boots sliding for purchase through the slippery remnants of three-thousand-year-old fabrics.

His hand landed on something round and solid that rolled under his palm. On instinct, Neil tugged it from the debris.

He found himself staring at a human skull. His thumb was stuck through an eye socket.

Neil choked on a scream, dropping the skull and scrabbling back from it through the tattered mess of decayed cloth and broken furniture until he bumped into something warmer and softer.

Sayyid answered the impact with a groan as he shoved Neil off of him and sat up.

Finally staggering to his feet, Neil took in his situation. He was in a high chamber as deep and narrow as a well. The walls were unnaturally smooth save for semi-regular cuts that formed tiny, narrow ridges along their surfaces, like the one he had caught to break his fall.

And it was a good thing he had caught that hold. His neck craned back as he looked up at the light spilling through the opening to the burial chamber. It had to be at least thirty feet over his head.

Zeinab was still visible in the opening. The biggest of the Al-Saboors had snagged an arm around her waist, and the midwife kicked against him viciously, railing out a stream of Masri imprecations against his father, his donkey, and his testicles. Other voices clamored down from beyond her, the sounds violent but muffled by distance.

Zeinab was snatched away, and Ellie threw herself into the opening, shoving at some unseen assailant.

“Neil!” she shouted down. “Shake it!”

Her arm snapped out. Something flew from her hand—a small, narrow object that landed on the hard stone floor with a bright, clearting.

Ellie was yanked away, biting out ferocious protests.

Sayyid struggled to his feet beside Neil. He had recovered the crowbar, but it hung in his hand uselessly. The tool obviously wouldn’t help them climb up a thirty-foot cliff.

The next figure to move into the light of the burial chamber was Mr. Jacobs. He gazed down at them calmly from above, and Neil felt uncomfortably sure of what the implacable man must see—two soft scholars standing in a pile of rubble at the bottom of an oubliette.

Julian stepped into place beside him. His tie had gone askew, and a tuft of his blond hair puffed up at a strange angle. He looked awkward as he blinked down at Neil and Sayyid.

Jacobs turned to Julian—and as the light glazed his profile, Neil saw naked contempt flash across his features.

“What should we do about them?” Julian asked uncertainly. “Can they get out of there, do you think?”

Jacobs’ gaze moved to something at Neil’s feet. Neil glanced down and saw the skull.

His stomach lurched.

“I doubt it… but we ought to shoot them anyway,” Jacobs concluded flatly. “This lot have a bad habit of popping back up out of caves where they rightfully should have rotted.”

Julian’s eyes found Neil’s across the pit, and Neil recalled all the times he had met this man before—over drinks at Shepherd’s or a light lunch at a café around the corner. Signing a few friendly papers or passing off a progress report. Julian bidding him a cordial ‘cheerio’ before going off to practice at the gym.

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