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The disk of the sun slipped below the line of the horizon as they reached the edge of the ruins. A mile of rocky desert lay between them and the entrance to the Royal Wadi—the steep, bone-dry canyon that split the high face of the ridge like the jagged cut of a knife.
The eastern sky, which lay over the ridge ahead of them, dropped into a rich violet-blue. The moon had just slipped above the hills, a pale sliver that offered fair illumination through the still, clear air.
“We’ll need to be quiet from here,” Constance said. “They might have left someone behind to watch the entrance to the wadi, and we can’t know how sound might carry against the cliffs. If there’s anything you need to say, best say it now.”
Constance likely meant for Neil to share his questions or thoughts about their plans, but something else spilled out of his lips in a desperate torrent.
“If I don’t make it out of there, I want you to tell Ellie and Bates that I’m sorry,” he burst out. “I… also want to beg you to stay here and let me go on without you, but I know you wouldn’t do it, and I know how utterly ludicrous it would be for me to even try, as you are far more capable of handling whatever we might encounter in there than I am. I am not at all sure what use I can possibly be in all this, and I’m very afraid that is going to get me or someone I care about killed.”
The storm of words petered out. Neil drew in a long, unsteady breath, then carefully let it back out again.
Constance’s gaze flashed with sympathy.
“What do we do when we find Julian and the others?” Neil asked more calmly.
Constance tipped up her chin, eyeing the wadi with determination. “Whatever we must.”
A realization swept through Neil in the wake of her declaration.
“I used to think you were mad, you know,” he blurted, and then caught himself. “Or reckless, at least. Utterly blind to all the things that could go wrong. But that isn’t it at all.”
Constance startled, her eyes wide and just a little vulnerable.
“You’re too clever not to know what we’re walking into,” Neil went on. “You know perfectly well how dangerous it’s going to be. You’re just…choosingto be courageous, over and over again, even when the whole world rises up against you. Aren’t you?”
Constance had gone very still. The silvered moonlight painted her features. Neil could see the ghostly echo of the girl he’d known in the angle of her chin and the line of her nose—but changed, merged into the elegant form of the woman who stood before him.
“I don’t know how to be like that.” Neil looked away from her, the weight of her liquid gaze becoming too much to bear. “But I admire it—a very great deal.”
A hand slipped into his own—slender but strong, holding him with a tender determination.
“Thank you,” Constance said quietly.
“For what?” Neil replied with a choking laugh.
In answer, she gave his hand a squeeze.
They stood together in silence as they faced the looming shadow of the ridge and the shadowy gap of the wadi.
“Are you ready?” Constance finally asked.
The answer rose through the rock under Neil’s boots, putting steel into his spine.
“Yes,” he said and stepped forward.
?
Millions of years ago, ancient waterways had come together in the hills above Amarna to empty into the larger river that carved out the plain. Those waters had dried up long before Akhenaten had set the first stone of his capital city into place, leaving behind only the dry, silent gorges they had rent in the earth.
Steep cliffs rose to either side of the entrance to the ancient canyon that the heretic pharaoh had chosen for his royal cemetery. Moonlit rock formations towered over Neil in fantastical shapes that reminded him of hulking sphinxes or hungry crocodiles.
The wadi was broader up close than it had looked from a distance. Constance kept to the edge where the shadows ran deeper. Neil joined her there, even though the footing felt more treacherous. He kept his steps light, painfully conscious of every scrape or rattle of shifting stones against the exquisite silence.
His brain screamed with the possibility that at any moment, a cry of alarm and a blast of gunfire would see both him and Constance perish in a spray of blood on arid stone.
He tried not to think about it too much.
It took them nearly an hour to reach the branching canyon mentioned in the tablet inscription. As it came into view, the breeze that tugged at Neil’s hair began to ring with the sound of metal clanging on stone.
