Page 181 of Tomb of the Sun King

The Al-Saboors were scattered about the ledge. Two of them lingered nearby with rifles slung over their shoulders, while others guarded the entrance to the tomb or barked orders to the workers.

There was no sign of Mr. Jacobs.

Ellie burned with frustration. It appeared she was going to be forced to sit and watch as Julian looted possibly the most important discovery in the history of Egyptology.

“I hope you are documenting all of the objects in situ before removing them, you barbarians!” she shouted across to the tomb entrance.

“You tell ‘em, Princess,” Adam commented easily from beside her.

He had a new bruise on his cheek, and his split lip was bleeding again.

On Ellie’s other side, the row of prisoners continued with Jemmahor and Zeinab, who wore a gag and had her ankles bound. Her green eyes flashed furiously above the strip of fabric, leading Ellie to suspect that something harsher than a critique of improper archaeological procedure might cross her lips, were she free to use them.

The big, heavily muscled Al-Saboor rounded the corner. The petite and wildly kicking figure hanging across his shoulder railed out a string of colorful insults.

“Put me down, you meathead!” Constance shouted.

The big fellow unceremoniously dumped her at the end of the row of prisoners and walked away.

Constance tugged furiously against the ropes that bound her hands behind her back.

“You’ll chafe your wrists that way,” Ellie called helpfully across the line of women.

After all, she had some experience with the matter.

“And to think that I was actually entertaining accepting that prat for a suitor!” Constance kicked her heels angrily against the stones. “I will tell you one thing, Eleanora—I am modifying my qualifications for potential husbands going forward. And they are going to include not being an utter villain!” She raised her voice, shouting across the ridge. “Did you hear that, you pigeon-livered ratbag!?”

Though Julian was still down in the tomb, Ellie thought he actually might. Constance was certainly exerting sufficient volume.

After Neil had fallen through the collapsed floor of the burial chamber, the room had erupted into chaos. Zeinab had the presence of mind to use the distraction of Neil’s fall to throw a beautifully painted three-thousand-year-old wooden room divider over the open sarcophagus, which was likely the only thing that saved them all from a bout of iron poisoning. Then she had shoved her husband into the pit, clearly calculating that his chances in a mysterious hole in the ground were better than his odds of surviving if he stayed in the tomb. She likely would have gone after him herself if that big, muscled Al-Saboor hadn’t snatched her around the waist and carted her off.

Zeinab had unleashed a string of Masri imprecations that would have burned a sailor’s ears, then bit the man for his trouble—which was how she had acquired the gag and extra bindings.

Ellie had managed to throw Neil her firebird bone as Adam hocked an Eighteenth Dynasty chair at Jacobs—which was not a tactic Ellie approved of, even under the circumstances. It had been a very fine piece with ebony inlay and lion-footed legs. Thankfully, the object was of exceptionally robust construction and held up even against the hard head of the gap-toothed Al-Saboor that Jacobs had ducked behind.

Jemmahor had used the distraction to dive behind the sarcophagus, while two more Al-Saboors had tackled Adam into a pile of walking sticks.

All in all, it had been an entirely uncivilized rout.

Ellie had been waiting for Jacobs to conduct a tidy series of executions once they were all subdued. Surely, whatever had made him hesitate to shoot them back at Hatshepsut’s temple must now be outweighed by all the trouble they continued to cause him. If it had been Julian holding him back, he certainly ought to have given up on his notion of convincing Constance to marry him by now—even if the rotter did consider being the grandson of a duke more important than something as trivial as moral character.

But they hadn’t been shot. Instead, Jacobs had ordered them bound and tossed into a helpless row against the rocks, where they were forced to watch the raid on Neferneferuaten’s tomb.

At least the thieves had taken Zeinab’s warning about the dangers of the hematite seriously. For the last quarter-hour, workers had been reeling up buckets of blood-red sludge from the tomb, which they then carried to the far end of the ridge and dumped over the side. Julian was clearly working to remove the deadly powder before he searched it—or the coffin that it protected—for the arcanum.

There had still been no word of Neil or Sayyid. Ellie’s stomach twisted with worry. She had been able to see that both men had survived their fall into the pit more or less intact, but it had been very clear there would be no climbing back out without the aid of a rope. Wherever they had gone to escape the bullets, they were trapped there unless they found some other way out of those mysterious caverns.

That left only one member of their party unaccounted for. There had been no sign of Umm Waseem when they emerged from the tomb, and a whispered question to Jemmahor revealed that the older woman had already vanished when ‘that dead-eyed devil’ Jacobs ambushed her. Ellie wondered whether the older woman’s absence indicated some hope of a rescue… and what form it might take.

She was still very curious about the contents of Umm Waseem’s black canvas bag.

Their two designated Al-Saboor guards idly chatted as they smoked, clearly bored by their assignment.

“Quick!” Ellie whispered in a low hiss. “Does anyone still have a blade?”

All of them had been searched for weapons when they had been captured. For the most part, those had been sadly lacking, other than Adam’s machete. The big knife had been confiscated in a process that resulted in several more bruises—both for Adam and for the unfortunate Al-Saboor that had been tasked with relieving him of his beloved knife.

Ellie spotted the big-eared man slumped against a rock on the other side of the ledge, holding a wet cloth to his head and groaning. The fellow beside him had his arm in a sling and kept casting dirty looks over at Adam.

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