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He’d need to talk to his friend about that before too long. His sister, too. It seemed he had a bit more groveling still left to do.
The rest of their party was miraculously intact. Jemmahor lingered near the edge of the drop into the canyon. She picked up an extra rock from the ground and ceremoniously hurled it in the direction the villains had fled. “Thawra hatta’l-nasr, imperialist scoundrels!” she shouted happily.
Zeinab stood at Sayyid’s side. Her face was smudged with dirt and blood, though she had managed to retain her headscarf. She smiled at her husband, then casually brushed something from his shoulder.
Sayyid closed his eyes, looking pained. “Please do not tell me what that was. I do not want to know.”
He still held the was-scepter in his hand. Ellie reached out to examine the verdigris-dulled bronze with reverent fingers.
“You found it.” She looked from Sayyid to Neil. “You found the Staff of Moses.”
Sayyid unhesitatingly handed it to her. She took the tamarisk rod carefully, then yanked a hand back, shaking it out. “Ow! It stings! Why does it sting?”
“I have absolutely no idea!” Sayyid returned with an edge of wild laughter.
With a curious grimace, Ellie brushed her fingers gently over the lines of hieroglyphs that covered the ancient bronze.
“Oh God who has no equal,” she read, turning the tamarisk rod to follow the line of characters. “Who knows a man by the words in his heart, and who makes the deed rise up against the doer.”
A strange, powerful warmth burst through Neil as he watched her—his little sister, ragged and bruised but utterly unbowed, holding the Staff of Moses in her capable hands as she read the words inscribed on it in a language the world had tried very hard not to let her learn.
His sister the scholar—the warrior—whose determination to do what was right had brought all of them to this place and this moment, despite the most overwhelming odds.
He slowly came to recognize the feeling blooming up inside of him. He was wildly, desperately proud of her.
He was less proud of himself, but instead of making him miserable, as it had before, Neil found himself oddly…determined.
If he had not done things quite right in the past, then he simply needed to do better—now and for the rest of his life.
“Is that from the Hymn to the Aten?” Constance wondered.
“It’s a prayer to Thoth,” Ellie corrected. “But it sounds as though it could be, doesn’t it?”
“Or a prayer to God,” Zeinab offered solemnly.
“Bu??û!” a voice called from the top of the ridge.
Neil picked out the stout, sturdy figure of Umm Waseem framed against the night sky.
Bu??û was a simple word. Neil automatically translated it.Look!
Zeinab slipped from Sayyid’s side. She crossed to the drop into the canyon, gazing out in the direction where Umm Waseem pointed.
Neil and the others joined her there, Ellie still carrying the staff.
The view opened out across the royal wadi to the broad, moonlit Amarna plain. Halfway to the pale, tumbled columns of the ruined city, an odd, dark shadow hovered over the ground like a shifting, slow-moving cloud.
He stood too far away to make out any details… but Neil found himself oddly certain that he was looking at a swarm of insects harrying a cluster of quickly retreating figures.
“I suppose it’s a good thing those bugs aren’t actually carnivorous,” he said a little weakly.
“Why is that?” Ellie asked, her eyes on the fleeing mercenaries.
“That’s the precise translation of Sayyid’s curse,” Neil replied. “‘In kheper wanam’ek san.’ It is the scarab who will eat you.”
Sayyid swallowed thickly beside him, looking a little queasy.
“What do they eat, then?” Constance asked, curious.
