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“I haven’t yet made a proper study of it,” Ellie replied distantly, still focused on the text. “I only have a handful of words memorized, along with the phonetic characters. I do have a good number of the logograms, though.”
“You know Akkadian.” Neil’s tone sounded as though he ought to add a slightly overwroughtand why not?
“Tomb… horizon… sun…” Ellie read out carefully, and then brightened. “Tomb at the Horizon of the Sun.”
“Whose tomb?” Neil pressed more urgently, peering over her shoulder.
“That part is in syllabic characters,” Ellie replied. “Let me see… that’sNe,thenPer. Then those two repeat again, and we haveYu… Ha… Ten.” She paused, cheerfully reading it back. “Ne per ne per yu ha ten.”
The sound of the syllables ringing through the courtyard in her own voice made her go still.
“But there’s no ‘f’ phoneme in Akkadian.” She suddenly felt breathless. Her hand flashed out, clamping onto her brother’s arm and giving it a shake. “There’s no ‘f,’ Neil!”
She thrust the tablet at him, beginning to pace as the words spilled out.
“Of course, we can’t know for certain what the original Egyptian pronunciation would have been,” she rattled on. “But if an Akkadian writer had used the ‘p’ sign in place of the ‘f’ phoneme from the Egyptian language, then that would make the true name…”
“Neferneferuaten,” Neil blurted, blinking at her in shock. He dropped his eyes wonderingly to the tablet. “It’s talking about the tomb of Neferneferuaten.”
“There has never been any hint of where Neferneferuaten was buried!” Ellie reminded him excitedly. “You told me yourself that the absence of artifacts with his name in private and museum collections strongly indicates that wherever he was entombed, the site was never looted—at least not within recent memory.”
Neil looked helplessly down at the tablet. “Are you saying this might tell us where to find the tomb of Neferneferuaten?”
Their eyes met in a look of startled shared significance, and Ellie pressed herself to Neil’s side, peering down at the text once more.
“That’skingagain,” she read, her finger hovering over the cuneiform lines. “And there’sdivine. That makes itNeferneferuaten, Beloved of the Divine King,” she declared triumphantly—and then frowned. “But that’s odd.”
“What is?”
“Belovedis right here.?ibtu.” Ellie pointed to the cluster of lines and wedges. “Buttuis the feminine ending.”
Neil stared at her in shock, even as Ellie’s own mind spun with the wild significance of what she had just translated.
“The feminine ending?” he echoed. “But that would imply that…”
The shocking, paradigm-shattering epiphany pouring through her mind was abruptly halted by the sound of a smooth, dangerously familiar voice from behind her.
“How terribly interesting,” Mr. Jacobs said.
??
Nineteen
Overall, Adam figuredthe day was going pretty well.
His conversation with Ellie the night before had grabbed his heart and wrung it out like an old dishcloth… but there’d been something almost like relief in that. He’d actually slept after he went back up to his room—more soundly than he had in a long time, even though he’d woke up halfway through the night with thoughts of patio tables and Ellie’s flushed cheeks in his head.
Adam had dealt with that in another way his father wouldn’t have approved of, then crashed like a fallen tree.
He still had no idea how he and Ellie were going to find their way through the muddled morass of his morals and her principles, but he simply felt lessscaredof it now than he had before. It wasn’t just George Bates’s voice he was hearing in his brain. Now Ellie’s was right there with it. And where George Bates’s voice made Adam feel like an irredeemable ass, Ellie’s made him feel as big as one of those statues they’d passed on the way here.
I don’t need to see that other Adam Bates—that one your father would’ve made you into—to know that I would never have chosen him over this one that’s standing right in front of me.
The memory warmed Adam up from the inside like a torch. Maybe he’d even keep feeling that way—so long as he kept from screwing things up.
He was mostly trailing behind Constance and Sayyid as they searched the temple for Ellie’s sun disk. Sayyid knew the layout of the place and took the lead. Adam had heard him mention that he’d been here before with his dad, who sounded like he’d been as much of an archaeologist as any of the guys who’d taught Adam’s classes back at Cambridge.
Adam just kept his eyes peeled for big orange circles. He actually spotted a good few of them—sun disks with falcon wings sprouting out from the sides of them and sun disks on gods’ heads—but they were carved onto columns or faces of solid rock, not something with abehindwhere someone might’ve hidden a clue.
