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He scratched another mark on it with the pencil.
Dawson made a strangled sound of outrage.
“You aren’t even following the line on the parchment,” he protested.
“Yeah, well. They were a little short on modern survey methods in the seventeenth century,” Adam returned without bothering to look up. “It’s safe to say the line’s an approximation.”
“Surely an approximation is better than making it up off the top of one’s head!”
Adam straightened.
“You wanna try?” He held out his pencil.
The professor hesitated, clearly torn between his desire to be too self-important to take the bait and his need to prove himself superior to Adam.
The latter won.
Dawson snatched the pencil and took Adam’s place at the table as Adam stepped back to make way for him. Dawson thanked him with a glare.
The professor began to scribble onto a piece of notepaper. Adam took the opportunity to glance over at Staines. The guard suppressed a yawn, and then peered out the flap of the tent as though jealous of the men out there sweating through the work of unloading the barges.
Adam drifted closer to Dawson’s desk and took a moment to eye the professor’s things. The surface was cluttered with more books and papers. His eye caught on a slender wooden case carved with words in a language Adam didn’t recognize. After making sure no one was looking, he lifted the lid.
He’d been hoping for a letter opener he might pocket—hardly as useful as a machete, of course, but better than nothing. Instead, he found a small, slender bone resting on a lining of moth-eaten velvet.
Adam frowned down at it. The bone was maybe six inches long. It looked like a wing bone from something roughly the size of a turkey.
What the hell did Dawson have a wing bone in a special case for?
Adam carefully closed the lid of the bone box and turned his attention to the rest of what lay on the desk. A battered, leatherbound notebook looked promising. Adam opened it to a random page.
Dawson’s handwriting was abominable, but Adam still managed to make out bits of it.
Prospects under consideration, location unknown:
Armor of Örvar-Oddr
Babr-e Bayan of Rostam
Ring of Gyges
It sounded like a load of nonsense except for that last bit. TheRing of Gygeswas vaguely familiar. Adam’s brain coughed up something about a Greek myth of a guy who turned himself invisible and caused all kinds of trouble.
He flipped to another page and kept reading.
Received another update from the Unas South Cemetery excavation at Saqqara. Site evidence indicates identification with Horemheb’s tomb may be correct. If confirmed, will require immediate investigation to explore possible connection to the Staff of Moses…
Adam blinked. He’d definitely heard of the Staff of Moses—what with all the plagues of locusts and parting the Red Sea.
Dawson had some weird interests, but none of what Adam had seen so far had a damned thing to do with British Honduras.
He took another careful look at his guard and involuntary captor. Neither Staines nor Dawson were bothering to pay him the least bit of attention.
Adam flipped neatly to the last page in the book with any of Dawson’s abominable scribble on it. He squinted as he tried to translate it. Dawson’s handwriting had grown worse once he got out into the Cayo. The professor must find it harder to hold a pencil when he was sweating.
Adam repressed a chuckle.
A few words made themselves discernible from the mess—Popol Vuh… annals… gifts of prophecy…
