Lord of the Silent - Elizabeth Peters [83]
Jamil choked. Water spilled down his chin. He wiped it with his sleeve and looked guilty. Sensing that he was trying to think of an acceptable lie, Nefret said, “There is no reason why you should not have spoken of it, Jamil. We did not forbid you to do so.”
“Ah.” The boy’s handsome, sulky face brightened. “I told my father, yes, of course. You did not forbid—”
“It was talked about at the house when two of my uncles and five of my cousins were there,” Jumana broke in. “No doubt they talked of it in the coffee shop later, and Jamil too. He is always at the coffee shop. If you wonder who could have known of your plans, the answer is: the whole of Luxor. But none of them would face the Brother of Demons.”
She was so much quicker than Jamil. For the first time Ramses spoke to her as he would have spoken to an equal. “I thought the same. Does that mean these men were strangers?”
“That, or they had found something so important they were willing to take the risk. It was not such a great risk, perhaps. They did get away.”
“So they did,” Ramses agreed ruefully. “Shall we see what they were doing?”
It was a bit of a scramble up the slope of loose talus to the wide cleft in the rock. Sunken and deeply shadowed, the tomb entrance had been closed by an iron door. It stood open. Piles of fresh debris, presumably from Carter’s recent excavations, surrounded it.
“Foundation deposits,” Ramses said, indicating several pits. “Carter must have cleared them out. Jumana, why don’t you stay—”
“I am your scribe,” Jumana said, brandishing her notepad and pencil.
“Yes, of course. Take my hand, then. It’s rather rough going.”
Nefret motioned Jamil to follow them. This was a far cry from the popular tombs of the East Valley, with their electric lights and accessible chambers. The long entrance passage sloped steeply and was broken by several flights of steps. The tomb had lain open for years before the Department of Antiquities installed the iron door, long enough for a considerable amount of windblown sand and water-driven rubble to accumulate. Rock fragments and bits of plaster from the walls added to the debris. Emerson would not have approved of Carter’s methods; he had left a lot of stuff underfoot. The daylight faded as they descended, their torches the only illumination. The well at the end of the passage had been bridged with planks. They crossed it and stopped, at Ramses’s low-voiced order. His voice echoed in a rather unpleasant manner, and the beams of the torches were lost in the enclosing darkness. The air was hot and dry.
“Carter cleared the well,” Ramses said. “He couldn’t have done much more, he was only here for a few weeks.” He moved the light slowly around the room, which had two pillars and the opening of a flight of stone-cut steps that led down. The floor was inches deep with debris, an unholy mixture of broken stone, bits of wood, and unidentifiable fragments of other kinds. Except . . .
Before she could get a better look, Ramses turned the light up. The ceiling was moving.
Jamil let out a howl, and Nefret said irritably, “It’s only bats. Keep quiet, they are attracted by voices.”
Jumana hadn’t uttered a sound but she had edged closer to Ramses. Maybe she knew bats would approach a taller target first. Ramses handed her his torch. “Go back up and wait for us outside,” he said.
“I am not afraid of bats,” Jumana said.
“Nor I,” Jamil said. “I stepped on a sharp stone, that was why I cried out. It was not fear.”
“Do as I say,” Ramses snapped. “We won’t be long.”
The two retreated, bickering in low voices.
Nefret moved closer to her husband. Carefully though she stepped, things crunched under her feet. “You should have let her stay. Jamil was the one who was making all the noise.”
“I wanted them both out of here.”
“Why?”
“Several reasons. First and most important . . .” One arm went round her waist. The other hand took firm hold of the torch, and she was laughing as she raised her face for his kiss.
“That makes twenty-two,” he said, after