Page 2 of Tomb of the Sun King

“I… I won’t. I promise,” Kaleb vowed uneasily. “But where will I find this woman of whom you speak?”

“More… than a woman…” the old man wheezed. “So much more…”

Wind softly billowed the sides of the tent, making the flame of the oil lamp flicker. Shadows danced across the cloth like ghosts arranging themselves into a tableau—a noble figure in a high blue crown. A grieving wife. A frightened child.

The figure on the pallet seemed to sink, his spark of life guttering like a spent candle.

“Master?” Kaleb prompted as imminent grief and the fear of unfulfilled promises twisted inside his chest.

The gray cat darted away as the dying man drew in a hoarse, hollow breath and gave Kaleb’s wrist another squeeze.

“I will tell you,” declared the leader and deliverer of Kaleb’s people. “I will tell you all of it.”

?

An hour later, the storm had passed. Kaleb stepped from the tent to see the early light of dawn streak through the sky, painting the plains of distant Ammon in streaks of gold.

He carried a cloth-wrapped bundle in his arms, holding it like something achingly fragile—or terribly dangerous.

His heart heavy with grief and purpose, Kaleb set off for Egypt.

??

One

Mid-afternoon

Thursday, June 9, 1898

Cairo, Egypt

The forecourt ofthe grand, modern Cairo railway station bustled with carriages, donkeys, street vendors, and the odd rattling, backfiring motorcar. The air rang with a mix of languages—English, French, Greek, and Masri, the Egyptian dialect of Arabic.

Ellie Mallory hovered at the edge of the chaos, squinting over a sea of black headscarves, bright red fezzes, and the occasional bowler hat for any sign of the ride that should be waiting for her.

The air was hot. Golden sun shone down on her from a hazily cloudless sky. She adjusted the brim of her straw boater hat to shield her eyes, grateful that she was dressed sensibly in a white blouse and practical tan waistcoat over her olive-hued summer skirt.

A stray cat lounged in the shade by her worn leather boots, as did a small brown valise. The bag was the same one that Ellie had carried with her when she had made a precipitous departure from London two months before. It was mostly stuffed with exactly the same rushed and somewhat random collection of belongings.

Between dodging nefarious antiquities thieves, discovering a lost civilization in the unexplored wilds of British Honduras, and then fleeing the colony after she’d inadvertently dropped said civilization into a sinkhole, she hadn’t exactly found the time to update her traveling gear.

It had been a rather busy few weeks.

The circumstances that had brought her from British Honduras to Cairo were…unanticipated, to say the least, but Ellie still thrilled at the notion that the ancient, storied earth of Egypt lay beneath her boots. Towering date palms lined the canal that lay between the railroad station and the city’s weathered medieval walls. From her current vantage, Ellie had an excellent view of the famous gate of Bab El Had. Its round, crenelated towers and arrow-slit windows dated back to the time of the Crusades. Beyond it rose the tightly clustered rooftops of Cairo proper, pierced by the elegant needles of the minarets from which the city’s muezzins issued the five daily calls to prayer.

Within the city, Ellie would find the famous mosque and university of Al-Azhar, home to one of the oldest libraries in the world. On the far side of the Nile stood the pyramids of Giza along with the current home of the Egyptian Museum, which was stuffed with the most fascinating and important artifacts of the Ancient Egyptian civilization.

The City of the Dead. The palaces of the Fatamid caliphs. Ellie inwardly buzzed with the desire to explore it all, filling in the gaps in her knowledge of both Medieval Islamic culture and the ancient world.

And she would, she promised herself… just as soon as she stopped a pair of dastardly villains—the sweaty, self-important Professor Dawson and his menacing handler, Mr. Jacobs.

Ellie knew that both Dawson and Jacobs had survived the somewhatexplosiveconclusion of her adventures in British Honduras. She had seen them picking their way along a precarious mountainside as she and Adam made their escape from the cataclysm.

Thanks to Adam’s snooping when they were Jacobs’ captives, Ellie also knew where the two ne’er-do-wells had planned to go next—to Egypt, to seek yet another historic object with legendary powers… one that sounded even more dangerous than the dark force that she had encountered in the caves beneath the lost city of Tulan.

The impact of that encounter, and of her other experiences in British Honduras, continued to linger. Ordinary mirrors now made her feel uneasy—though she recognized that to be an entirely irrational response, as they were innocuous and useful pieces of household furnishing that would under no circumstances begin to whisper haunting and dangerous things to her. Though her bruises had faded, her guilt about the fate of the legendary civilization that she had discovered and then destroyed was still strong enough to tighten her throat.

Then there were her memories of thatotherTulan—the living, breathing city that she had never seen, but which still somehow lurked inside of her brain as though impossibly planted there in the matter of an instant.

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