Page 189 of Tomb of the Sun King

He realized he was still holding the scimitar. He set it down awkwardly beside the sarcophagus.

“I can see the seam of the coffin lid.” Neil tentatively bent down closer to the covered hematite for a better look. “Should we open it?”

He was uncomfortable with the suggestion. Part of Neil itched for the chance to examine the mortal remains of a woman he had studied for most of his life… and yet something about it felt surprisingly wrong.

It was not a feeling he had ever had when examining a mummy, which he had done a half-dozen times before. Perhaps that was because this mummy wasn’t just an anonymous find or a priest or courtier with little more than a name attached to it. This was Neferneferuaten, who had been Nefertiti—a woman who had played a critical role in a religious revolution, who had ruled with her husband through one of the most profoundly transformative periods of Egyptian history. Neil felt like heknewher… and the idea of disturbing the eternal rest of someone who was quite a bit more to him than a name made him feel desperately uncomfortable.

“I don’t know,” Sayyid retorted with a pointed look. “Should we?”

A flush came into the tips of Neil’s ears. He knew what Sayyid was asking him—but it was impossible.

“This is ridiculous,” he said aloud, trying to let the sound of the words comfort him. “I don’t know where to find the Staff of Moses. I haven’t known where to find any of these things! They’ve all been informed, scholarly hypotheses, each of which I’ve investigated in a perfectly rational, orderly manner.”

“That is not what you did when you found Horemheb’s tomb,” Sayyid countered stubbornly.

“Of course it is!” Neil protested wildly. “My brain just has… a bit of a knack for putting those hypotheses together without me needing to sit down and spell out every little step. There’s nothing supernatural about that. It’s… neurology,” he finished awkwardly.

Sayyid looked both impatient and unimpressed. “Well, then, what does yourneurologytell you about where the staff has been hidden?”

Neil automatically looked over at the solar barque.

The model boat was roughly two feet in length, executed in exquisite detail with a shaded canopy and a cluster of little plaster sailors. But it was what lay beneath it that tugged at his attention like a fishhook, just as it had in the moments before Julian Forster-Mowbray had entered the tomb.

The object was a simple, slender whitewashed wooden box.

He tore his gaze from it quickly—only to find Sayyid staring at him.

“It’s nothing!” Neil protested. “It’s just… I only…”

Sayyid’s mouth firmed into a determined line. He grasped Neil by the shoulders, spun him, and marched him over to the model boat.

Neil faced the whitewashed box as though it were crocodile-headed Ammit rising up to devour him.

“It’s a cubit box,” he blurted uncomfortably, recognizing the little cluster of hieroglyphs stamped on its surface. “It doesn’t make any sense that the staff would be in cubit box. A cubit rod has absolutely no relevance to the Atenist faith or early Judaism. And anyway, it’s too small. The staff wouldn’t fit. Well—I mean, itcouldfit, if it isn’t as big as we think it is, but then the Hebrew terms used to refer to it would be…”

Neil trailed off as Sayyid continued to stare at him.

“That’s all very sensible,” Sayyid replied calmly. “Except that the cubit rod is on the floor.”

He pointed to the distinct, blocky shape of the Egyptian ruler, which was leaning against a bundle of reed arrows.

Neil closed his eyes as dismay and a mild, gut-clenching terror washed over him.

“But the solar barque must be extremely fragile,” he pleaded, starting to sweat. “We couldn’t possibly risk moving it.”

“I can move it.” Sayyid picked up a piece of scrap wood that Julian’s men had dropped on the floor of the tomb. He set it parallel to the cubit box. “Hold this.”

Out of sheer habit, Neil obeyed. After all, he’d been following Sayyid’s orders when it came to matters of conservation for two years now.

Sayyid expertly eyed the three-thousand-year-old boat, slipped delicate fingers under either end of it, and shifted it onto Neil’s board. He set it down carefully on the floor nearby, then rose to fix Neil with a waiting, implacable look.

The cubit box lay before them.

“I don’t want to open it,” Neil confessed tightly. “I don’t…” He drew in a breath, feeling dizzy.

Somewhere on the mountain above them, his sister was in danger. His best friend. Sayyid’s wife. And a woman who had grown from a nerve-wracking hellion into someone he found he cared very much for.

“You do it,” Neil blurted helplessly. “You’re… better with wooden pieces than I am.”

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