Page 152 of Tomb of the Sun King

Not there, he had thought automatically. An irresistible tug had pulled at him from thirty meters to the southwest, where he could picture pylons and painted walls rising from the sand.There.

There,something whispered at him again as he gazed out over the still, moonlight-washed landscape. It felt like a flicker of movement—the soft slap of sandaled feet on sun-dry stone. Skin brushed with dust. Exhaustion mingling with purpose.

Neil followed it without quite realizing that he was moving.

“Where are you going?” Ellie demanded behind him.

“I just…” Neil trailed off distractedly—and then kept walking.

Sayyid’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. He cast Ellie a questioning look, and she frowned, but the pair fell into step behind Neil as he picked his way across the hollow.

He stopped in front of a large, flat boulder that hung suspended over the ground, the opening beneath it taking the form of a thin black gap. The shiny carapace of the scarab glittered against the surface of the rock. The bug wiggled its antennae at his approach before skittering over the stone and disappearing beneath it.

“Neil?” Ellie asked in a low and fairly urgent whisper. “What are we doing here?”

The sound of her voice pulled Neil out of a fog. He realized where he had come to stand—just below the natural wall that separated the hollow from Julian Forster-Mowbray’s dig site. He was close enough that he could see where the yellow glare of Julian’s lanterns painted the top of the stones. Individual voices emerged from the murmuring clamor of activity—Dawson’s peevish complaints distinguishing themselves from the laughter of a pair of Al-Saboors.

Neil startled, coming back to himself sharply. This was thelastplace he wanted to be. Should anyone from Julian’s excavation wander uphill, he would be immediately visible to them, spotlit like a bug under a looming shoe.

“I… I don’t…” He trailed off as something about the boulder beside him tugged irresistibly at the back of his mind—then blurted out the rest, both embarrassed by the words and utterly certain that they were true. “There’s something here.”

Sayyid’s gaze was quietly thoughtful.

Ellie raised a skeptical eyebrow. “There’s no rubble here that could conceal a tomb entrance.”

She was right. Constructing a tomb was a massive undertaking. Any entrance would have needed to be large and accessible enough for transporting hundreds of tons of spoil carved from the core of the mountain, never mind the myriad grave goods that would accompany a royal burial.

His mind still rang quietly with the sound of sandaled footsteps.

With a burst of irrational determination, Neil crawled beneath the boulder.

The ground sloped softly downward, forming a little cave just high enough for Neil to move from wriggling on his stomach to a crouch. The space was black as pitch.

“Does anyone have a light?” he asked awkwardly, whispering back at the pale line of the gap he had crawled through.

He heard rustling cloth and quick, soft footsteps. A moment later, Ellie’s hand thrust into the opening, holding one of Zeinab’s shuttered lanterns. She lowered her face down to peer in at him.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

Neil’s first instinct was to brush her off, but the careful concern in her tone held him back. He realized what she must be seeing—her rational, cautious brother crouching in a claustrophobic hole for no apparent reason.

Washe fine?

“I just… want to take a look,” he returned awkwardly.

He carefully slid open the shutter on the lamp.

Golden light flooded the space around him, revealing the jagged underbelly of the boulder… and a small army of shining black scarabs.

“Oh bugger,” Neil bit out, then threw himself down as the insects took flight, whizzing furiously around the tight space.

They shot around him in a hissing storm… and then spilled into a dark, ragged crack in the ground nearby.

“What was that?” Sayyid demanded nervously from outside.

“Er… nothing?” Neil offered back unconvincingly.

He crawled to his knees, moving over to the edge of the fissure. The dark opening zigzagged across the stone like a bolt of black lightning, widening to perhaps eighteen inches before thinning to a jagged line.

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