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“Open,” Ellie ordered.
With a sigh, Adam obeyed.
“Does Zeinab have a plan?” Ellie asked.
His lip twisted wryly. “What makes you think Zeinab’s the one with the plan? Why couldn’t I have a plan?”
“You never make plans.”
“That’s notentirelytrue,” Adam protested.
“Do you have a plan now?” she prompted dryly.
Adam turned a sharp gaze over to the lights and noise of the dig—though he made no move to go back to the cliff. “Odds aren’t great. We could try coming down at them from above, but height’s not that much of an advantage when all you’ve got for weapons are a bunch of knives and one beat-to-hell Enfield.”
He nodded to their single rifle, which Jemmahor had packed with her after stealing it from one of the Al-Saboors in Hatshepsut’s temple.
“Could we stage a distraction?” Ellie suggested. “Draw some of them away?”
“Maybe,” Adam allowed. “But then we’d be splitting our forces—and we don’t have that many of them to begin with.”
“He will have a weakness,” Zeinab cut in, her gaze still locked on the canyon. “And I will find it.”
“Woman’s got ears like a cat,” Adam grumbled. He nodded at Ellie’s hand. “How’s your project going?”
Ellie had been working to assess the damage to her firebird arcanum. The bone was carved in Glagolitic, a script invented by St. Cyril in the ninth century to transliterate the ancient Slavic tongue. Ellie’s knowledge of it was limited, as she had studied it only briefly before hurrying on to a deeper dive into Old French. Now she wished she hadn’t been in such a rush to readLa Chanson de Roland.
She held the bone out in front of her, trying to catch more of the pale moonlight that washed over the ridge. “It’s this first character that was chipped. I can see that it’s something including a single circle. That means it must be either the Izey, the Omega, or—no, no. That character was hardly ever used. The Fert, perhaps? Or the Slovo… Blast it, that’s still too many possibilities.”
“Izey and Fert,” Adam echoed. “I think I played cards with those guys once.”
Ellie shot him a dry look, and he grinned at her.
She returned her attention to the bone and decided to read the possibilities aloud, hoping one of them might ring a bell. “Ivetu,” she muttered. “Fvetu. Svetu.”
“Bless you,” Adam offered.
“Don’t make me poke your ribs again,” Ellie threatened darkly. “Svetu… Isn’t that a bit like svetá, the Sanskrit word for white? White, bright…” She perked up. “Light!Svet is the root of the cognates for light in the Slavic languages. It must be the Slovo!” Ellie flapped an impatient hand at Adam. “Give me your machete.”
“What do you want my machete for?” Adam asked.
“I need to fix the inscription.”
“You’re gonna try to etch that tiny bird bone with my eighteen-inch knife?” Adam pressed skeptically.
“I need something sharp!” Ellie protested.
“That’s a whole lot of sharp for one little bone.”
Zeinab hissed at them warningly from where she crouched at the edge of their hiding place.
Sorry, Ellie mouthed back with a wince.
“Anybody else here got a knife?” Adam asked in a whisper.
Umm Waseem, who reclined against her black canvas bag with her hands folded comfortably on her round belly, revealed a wickedly curved fish gutter.
Jemmahor lifted her stolen rifle. She gave an apologetic shrug.
