Page 190 of Tomb of the Sun King

Sayyid absorbed Neil’s plea, then set his expert hands to the box.

The front panel slid free on grooves that had remained straight and true through three thousand years of rest. Inside lay two pieces of elegant bronze, green with a rich layer of verdigris.

One was shaped with the slender head and pointed ears of the Set beast. The other formed a forked tail.

They were hollow at the ends, made to slip over a staff of wood.

“It’s…” Neil’s throat was as dry as the sands that stretched out over the world above them.

“A was-scepter,” Sayyid filled in, his voice thick with wonder. Tears gathered at the corners of his eyes. “Wallah—it is a was-scepter!”

The two bronzes in the cubit box were covered in etched rows of tiny hieroglyphs. The carved eyes of the Set beast were blankly serene.

A lingering part of Neil’s brain wanted to protest—to muster a thousand reasons why the object before him must be simply another artifact. A misplaced relic no different from the hundreds of others that surrounded him.

His gaze rose to the roughly etched graffito on the wall—to the long-eared rod in the hands of the solemn-faced figure leading his people toward the benevolent rays of the rising sun.

The excuses and pleas fell away like sand. Neil knew what he was looking at. He knew it with a feeling in his bones like music.

The Staff of Moses. The instrument of one of the world’s greatest prophets. The manifestation of holy power that had guided a people out of slavery and into history.

And Neil had known exactly where to find it.

His thoughts flew back to the moment when he had stood beside Sayyid on a sprawl of rubble-strewn ground at Saqqara. He hadfeltthe wrongness of the place already marked off by stakes and lines.

He thought of the other little leaps of intuition that had come to him like a tingling electricity in his brain. The change in the size of the sun court altar. The identity of the sculptures in the tomb where he and Constance had sheltered after escaping Julian’s boat. His haunted sense of some lone traveler approaching the boulder above that had led them to Neferneferuaten’s tomb.

Over the years before that, there had been myriad little leaps of what he had always thought of asintuition,which came to him as he turned the pages of journal articles and excavation reports.

But that’s not quite right, is it?Neil would think mildly and scribble a correction into the margins.

And finally, Akhetaten—living and breathing around him in the rattle of a sistrum and the tang of incense in the evening air.

All of it was linked by the past, whether through Neil’s presence in the places where history had happened or a vaguer tugging sense ofwrongnessas he poured through his books and papers.

“I’m a scholar,” he protested weakly. “I’m an academic. I can’t be a…”

He trailed off, utterly at a loss for the right word.

“Wali?” Sayyid offered awkwardly.

“What’s a wali?” Neil asked.

Sayyid winced, flashing him a sympathetic look. “It is more or less a saint.”

Neil absorbed this with a groan—and thought once more of his sister and their friends, dealing with who-knew-what danger out on the ridge. “But the staff is in pieces! What are we supposed to do—just add them to any stick we like?”

“Assuming it is the right size, I suppose,” Sayyid replied uneasily. He glanced around the room and picked up a long, straight rod from among a pile of walking sticks and bows. “Tamarisk. It’s more likely to have resisted decay. Here—hold it.”

Neil grasped the stick more or less because Sayyid thrust it at him.

With careful reverence, Sayyid gently lifted the headpiece from the cubit box. He turned it in his hands to line the hollow end up with the top of the tamarisk rod.

He drew in a breath, closing his eyes. “La ilâha illa Allah,” he prayed—and pressed the bronze into place.

Sayyid snatched his hands away, eyeing Neil warily. “Do you feel anything?”

“Like what?” Neil replied. “You mean—does it feel like it’s about to fall off?” He gave the staff a very careful wiggle. “Doesn’t seem loose.”

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