Page 27 of Tomb of the Sun King

“Hard to say till we get there,” Adam replied automatically, still not looking at her. “Might be a good idea to have Mr. M question the workers and see if anyone matching Dawson or Jacobs’ description has been sniffing about. It’d give us a better notion of how to approach your brother about the whole business. I can’t say I’m at all sure he’s going to be happy to learn that a bunch of artifact thieves have an interest in his dig.”

“No,” Ellie agreed. “But that wasn’t what I meant.”

Adam finally met her gaze—only to quickly look away again. “Oh?”

Ellie repressed a sigh of exasperation. “Maybe I was asking why you kissed me last night and then apologized as though you’d just run over my cat. And why you’ve been avoiding me for most of the day.”

“I haven’t been avoiding you,” Adam countered stubbornly. “I’m right here.”

“But you can barely bring yourself to look at me!” Ellie exclaimed.

Constance turned on her donkey where she rode ahead of them, glancing back with a concerned frown.

Ellie flashed her a reassuring smile and a wave.

Constance’s eyes narrowed, shifting from her to Adam, but she finally turned back around.

“I’m just trying to do the right thing,” Adam pushed back, keeping his voice low and his eyes on the road ahead of them.

“The right thing about what?” Ellie fought to keep the exasperation from her tone.

Adam turned his head to stare down at her. “You, Ellie.”

The intensity of his look—fierce with tumultuous but unnameable feeling—took her breath.

“But what does that mean?” Ellie pressed a little unevenly.

Mr. Mahjoud’s voice cut through the evening air before Adam could respond.

“We have arrived,” the dragoman announced, drawing his donkey up short at the edge of a sprawling pit.

??

Seven

The ground infront of Ellie fell away steeply, the layers of earth peeled away to expose the roofless walls of Horemheb’s ruined funerary temple.

The paving stones of the ancient floor lay about seven feet down from where she stood. A few Egyptian workers carried buckets of debris up a steep ramp to where a cluster of women in dark blue cloaks and headscarves sifted the rubble. Younger boys hauled the processed spoil to a heap further away.

Other men set down their picks, shovels, and buckets to close out their day’s work, chatting together comfortably. It was nearly time for supper, and they would soon return to their homes in the village for the evening.

The sun had fallen in the west, and the air cooled ever-so-slightly from the burning heat of the day.

“Well?” Constance prompted as she hopped off her donkey. “Are we going down?”

Ellie instinctively glanced back at Adam. His eyes narrowed as he scanned the roofless maze of the temple like a potential battlefield.

Carefully dismounting, she followed Constance down the ramp to a narrow opening framed by a pair of pylons—thick walls filled with rubble that served as impressive gateways to sacred Egyptian sites. The two that flanked her were no longer tall, having crumbled down to waist height when their materials were scavenged by later builders for other projects at the necropolis.

Beyond the pylons lay a wide antechamber marked out by more half-tumbled walls, where a cluster of workers eyed Ellie and the others with surprise and a touch of discomfort.

“Very sorry!” one of them called over. “No tourist!”

“Wait here,” Mr. Mahjoud ordered.

He strode over to the men, engaging in a rapid and authoritative exchange of Masri. One of the workers detached himself from the group to dart back up the ramp to ground level, obviously set on some errand.

Nothing about the scene spoke of the sort of tension Ellie might expect if the excavation was under siege. But then again, why would it? Adam’s snooping had only revealed that Dawson and Jacobs thought Neil’s site might contain some clue to the location of the next arcana they hoped to acquire. They might come in with guns blazing to snatch it—or with a smile and a letter of recommendation from one of Neil’s sponsors. Ellie still hadn’t a clue who Dawson and Jacobs worked for, but she did know the pair were exceptionally well-funded and connected, which meant that the latter possibility couldn’t be ruled out. The scribble Adam had spotted in Dawson’s notebook had simply mentionedreceiving another update. Who was to say whether that update came through official channels or by way of a spy or informant on the excavation’s staff?

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