Candice Cushing and the Lost Tomb of Cleopatra Page 23

  “Hey, Easy,” Candice called.

  Nevada stopped. “Yeah?”

  “Do you have a plan to kill me?”

  Nevada sat down on the base of the pyramid. “Yeah. ‘Firm shove.’”

  “Firm shove?”

  “I don’t like to overthink things.”

  “That’s become painfully obvious.”

  Nevada started climbing again. Candice walked around the pyramid, almost lost in its symmetry, its size, the sheer reality of it. Smoke whispered off the flames, stinging the air up to the apex of the dome, where it pooled like water at the bottom of a dish. Finally, she came to an opening, a corridor with flame lining the walls, cutting into the darkness within in two streaking ropes.

  Candice walked inside. Her footsteps echoed on the volcanic rock, a frozen mire of dried lava. The pyramid’s walls and ceiling were made of the same black stone, almost absorbing the light, until it felt like Candice was walking on nothing, through nothing.

  It was too much to have been built by the crew of a single ship, Candice told herself. That must’ve been who the directions were meant for. A whole fleet could’ve followed after the solar barge, bringing the workmen and supplies to build this tomb. That could’ve been where the crew went—home on another ship that hadn’t been wrecked.

  Hopefully.

  She followed the flames to a large round chamber where the fire circled the room, revealing five doors on the opposite wall, each marked with hieroglyphs. Candice considered them for a moment before going to the first door on the left. There wasn’t a doorknob, obviously, but when she pushed on the door, it gave inward.

  “Simple enough,” Candice muttered, and gave it a shove.

  The door collapsed away from her and then instantly rebounded, carried back at her by a stream of molten lava spilling out of the passageway. Candice backpedaled furiously, tripping over her own feet, falling on her ass. She kicked and scrambled away, scratching her elbows all to hell, shocked at how viscous the red-hot liquid was, how it seemed to chase her. It lunged at her and she rolled out of the way, feeling its heat scorching her skin as the lava finally stopped pursuing her. It was headed down the incline of the room, and in the center of the floor, a tile gave way, allowing the river of lava to pour down a stone drain.

  She couldn’t believe it. A bloody death-trap!

  Candice backed herself up to the corridor she’d come through, putting as much distance as possible between herself and the flood of lava. She could still feel its oppressive heat filling the room, covering her skin with a suffocating sweat. The door she’d unmoored, having been carried along the lava like a raft, lay beside the drain, steam rising off of it.

  “Nevada!” she called back the way she’d come. “I could use some help over here!”

  No answer. Candice examined the room again. She could guess the game. After the First Dynasty, the ancient Egyptians saw foreigners as ravenous animals, so they would trap their tomb to let in only people who knew about Egyptian culture. And they would have needed to let people in for the ‘opening of the mouth’ ceremony, so at least one of the doors had to be real. But which one?

  She looked at the writing on the doors again. It was random gibberish—nothing like ‘open me and don’t die.’ Candice closed her eyes and pounded her head with her fists. Think, think . Something was pinging at her memory, scratching at the inside of her skull, trying to get out. Five. Why five doors? Why not two, three, four? It would’ve been less work. So why five?

  “The fivefold titular,” she said aloud. The pharaohs of Egypt had five names, one for each aspect of their kingship. She scanned the doors again. There. The second from the right was a serekh—the Horus name. “The great Lady of perfection, excellent in counsel,” she read. That was Cleopatra.

  Skirting the very edge of the room, Candice made her way around the wall. Doing so put the fiery oil at her back. It was cool compared to the blazing lava, but still uncomfortably warm, sending fresh gales of sweat pouring down her body. The incline of the room seemed as steep as a cliff now, pulling at her feet, trying to suck her down into the lava that had pooled at the center. She skipped over the first door she reached and came to the second. Staying to the right of it, she reached over and pushed. It was no good. She couldn’t get enough leverage from here to move the door.

  Breathing harsh and fast, Candice stepped away from the wall and positioned herself in front of the door. She was right about this, right? She had to be right. If Nevada were here—if Nevada were here, she would just be asking Candice what door they should open, so really, what difference did it make? She was cutting out the middleman, that was all.

  Whatever Nevada was doing, it had better be one hell of a Plan B.

  Candice pushed against the door, trying to be ready to throw herself back at a moment’s notice, but the door’s weight demanded she push harder. Commit more of her weight to it. Until she was totally off her backheel, pushing with all her might until the door finally gave—

  It fell with a resounding thud to the floor of a corridor, leading deeper into the pyramid.

  “Blimey O’Riley,” Candice swore, falling to her knees and gulping in air.

  She didn’t know how long she would’ve stayed there if a trickle of sweat hadn’t stung her eyes. She wiped her brow and got up, figuring that whatever lay ahead of her, it had to at least be cooler.

  “Oh, come off it!” Candice cried a minute later.

  The corridor had brought her to another slanted room. Five doors. This would have to be the Nebty name. Only she couldn’t remember Cleopatra’s Nebty name.

  “This is it,” she moaned. “This is the moment all those teachers talk about where I can’t just look something up on my phone.”

  She closed her eyes and tried to think. Process of elimination. The Nebty name always began with the hieroglyphs of a... bird and a snake between two baskets. She looked at the doors. Only one had those. Candice forced herself to walk up to it.

  “I paid too goddamn much for a college education to be wrong about this,” she said, and shoved her shoulder against the door.

  It gave. Another corridor, and the heat of the lava was a distant memory on her back as she walked down it to another slanted room. This one would have to be the Golden Horus name, and that she knew.

  “The great one, sacred image of her father,” Candice said as she walked to the hieroglyphs without a serekh or cartouche. But when she reached out to push the door, she found herself paralyzed, her hands shaking so hard they threw off the sweat in her palms. Three more times. She’d have to do this three more times. How could she throw herself in the path of death even one more time and trust that she wouldn’t get hit?

  She would’ve given anything to have Nevada there with her. Or Usama. Someone. Maybe in front of someone else, she’d be embarrassed to be so frightened. She knew what to do, she could remember the rest of the names, but God , if she was wrong…

  Suddenly dizzy, she reached out to steady herself on the wall and felt the cold rock under her hand—porous volcanic rock, vomited up from deep within the Earth. In a million years, it would be sand.

  “And only a fool would try to sort sand into this row or that,” Candice said.

  She went to the door.

  “My name is Candice Cushing,” she said. “I come from Sudan, from the Hadendoa and the Dinka. From Meroe and Kush and Nubia. From the blood of Amanirenas. I’m a daughter of… heroes and villains, fools and wise men, liars and truth tellers. And I’m just me.”

  She pushed at the door. It fell on empty space.

  So did the next two.

  Candice ran her tongue through her dry mouth. She couldn’t feel the bump on the roof of her mouth anymore.

  The tomb was… impossible. Simply impossible. Statues standing at guard, hieroglyphics lining the walls, burial goods from bronze work to exquisitely carved chairs. All of it arranged exactly as it must’ve when the burial was carried out, not a single artifact out of place, not a tile of faie
nce missing. There was dust, there was decay, but otherwise, the two thousand years that had passed might as well have been minutes.

  And in the center of it all, gleaming despite the layer of fine dust that covered it, a gold-plated sarcophagus. The final resting place of Cleopatra VII Thea Philopator. Only its hands weren’t crossed as was tradition, weren’t holding a crook and a flail. Instead, they were cupped at her belly, holding a skull.

  It was made of crystal. A single piece of quartz crystal. Cut against the grain, which should’ve been impossible. Candice strained her eyes, but she couldn’t see any tool marks, any sanding. And the design was exactly the same as the famous Mitchell-Hedges skull, which was supposed to be Mesoamerican. But there was no historical contact between South America and Egypt.

  Yet there it was. An artifact over five thousand miles from where it should’ve been. And she had just found it in a tomb that’d been sealed for two millennia.

  “What the hell are you?” she whispered.

  The skull glowed white-hot.

  Chapter 9

  Nevada sidestepped the lava flow

  running through the first room. Candice must’ve gone through the other door. Her footsteps tracked down the corridor in grains of dust. “I leave her alone for five minutes and there’s a volcanic eruption,” Nevada muttered. “Typical. Candice! Hey! Candice Cushing!”

  She found her through the next door. Candice was walking up the corridor, clutching something wrapped in Nevada’s jacket.

  “You got it?” Nevada asked.

  “Yeah,” Candice said. “It was the, ah, skull made out of pure crystal, right?”

  “That’s the one.” Nevada took her arm. “C’mon. You can go over this place with a fine-toothed magnifying glass later. We’re getting the hell out of here.”

  “Crystal skulls are a pre-Columbian artifact,” Candice said, sounding frazzled. “Hell, they’re not even supposed to be real; they’re a hoax. What’s one doing in the middle of the Sahara?”

  “What would one be doing in Siberia, or Alaska, or half the places I’ve been to?” Nevada asked wearily. “Come on!”

  Candice went along with her. “You’ve found more of these?”

  “Eleven more.”

  “All over the world?”

  “Japan, Hawaii, Indonesia—real world tour.”

  “And you didn’t tell me?”

  Nevada stopped. “You didn’t ask. Now do you have any other questions, or can we go?”

  Candice took a deep breath. “Do you know Cleopatra’s fivefold titulary?”

  “Sure. The great Lady of perfection, excellent in counsel—”

  “Piss off.”

  Nevada was confused. “Doesn’t everyone know the fivefold titulary?”

  Candice grabbed her and kissed her until Nevada felt like her lips would never be the same again. “I said piss off.”

  Nevada kept silent.

  The sun was chiseling its way into the horizon when Nevada came out of the lava tube. There was a golden hue over everything, including the commandos who surrounded her on all sides. They had multiplied—she could easily count twenty. A nice little killbox.

  Usama was under the canopy. The old man was actually asleep, stretched between two director chairs. It almost made Nevada laugh; she could imagine him calling it a night while Singh and all his men were pacing, smoking, taut with tension.

  “The boys wanted some air,” Singh said by way of explanation. “It is a long flight back to civilization. How was the tomb?”

  “Dead,” Nevada replied. She looked at Gore, sticking to Singh’s side like a faithful hound. He had the usual soldier boy paraphernalia—thigh holster, Ka-Bar knife, grenades dangling from his chest—but he also had a pack of cigarettes rolled up in his shirt sleeve. Nevada gestured to it. “You mind?”

  Gore gave her one and lit it for her. Nevada thanked him and took a drag while Singh waited patiently. She guessed he did trust her to deliver. Didn’t seem to have any worry she had come up empty.

  “We found the skull,” she said. “It’s safe. You make the payment, you get it.”

  Singh chuckled. “What difference does it make? Why don’t you give it to me and then I pay you?”

  “Singh, I respect you too much for a movie quote right now. So please—display me the cash.”

  Singh took a tablet from his jacket. Like anything involving vast sums of money, the whole thing had the feel of a religious ritual. He punched in the needed commands, then handed the tablet off to Nevada. She took her time verifying that the transfer had gone through; three separate call-and-response protocols from her Bitcoin account to convince her that this was really her money now, not some dummy server. The sheer tension of the situation made Nevada want to bark out a laugh; it had the feel of a Craigslist deal, only with eight-digit payouts.

  Finally, she handed the tablet back to Singh. “Pull the rope up. Candice is tied to it. She has the skull on her.”

  Gore was already gesturing to his men, who ran to haul the rope up.

  Singh hummed pleasantly. “Pleasure doing business with you.”

  Nevada dropped the cigarette to the ground and crushed it under her heel; as if there were anything here it was in danger of burning. “Yeah, maybe I’ll use you as a reference sometime. Say, any chance we could get a ride to the airport?”

  Singh barely seemed to hear her, fixating on the lava tube as more and more rope came up from it. “Sure. Take one of the jeeps. Take both of them.” And then, like a man coming out of a fever, he looked at her. “I hope things work out with your boy. I really do.”

  Nevada said nothing.

  Candice came out of the hole, helped so much by the commandos that she was almost crowd-surfing. Singh went up to her, hands held out like he was holding a bag open on Halloween. “I’ll take that—”

  Candice almost reflexively jerked the skull away from him, but Nevada fixed her with a look. “Give it to him, Candice. It’s fine.”

  She held it out. Singh snatched it from her. Nevada let out a sigh at his hastiness and looked to Gore, who had stayed in place beside her. “Keys?”

  He dropped them in her hand. “Good work, soldier.”

  “I’m not a soldier anymore. By the way, tell your boss: next time he wants to cut a side deal with the Khamsin… I don’t know. Make up something very threatening for me.” She cupped her hands around her mouth. “Usama! Naptime’s over! We’re leaving!”

  He toppled out of his makeshift bed. Nevada winced. She turned to Candice to ask her if she needed to take a piss or anything before they hit the road, but Candice was in another world. Staring after the crystal skull with the same fervor Singh had holding it in his hands.

  “Where’d it come from?” she asked.

  Nevada raised her voice: “Candice.” She started walking to her. “We are leaving!”

  “Where’d what come from?” Singh replied innocently, as oblivious to Nevada as Candice seemed to be.

  “Don’t give me that,” Candice said. “The crystal skulls were improbable enough when they were confined to South America, and now they’re spread around the world? That’s impossible.”

  Nevada grabbed Candice by the arm. “Have you never heard the expression ‘take the money and run’?” she whispered through gritted teeth. “This is the run part!” She pulled Candice away, looking bemusedly at Singh. “She gets this way sometimes. Low blood sugar. I’m just gonna find her a Mars bar. She’ll be good as gold.”

  “You’re not the least bit curious?” Candice whispered to her.

  “Rich guy, lots of money, top secret—I assume it’s a sex thing and leave it at that.”

  “That’s willful ignorance,” Candice told her.

  “No, my ignorance is more instinctual. I went to public school.” Candice was still resisting being pulled away. Nevada gave her a hard tug. “I swear to God, Candice, I will carry you out of here!”

  “You really don’t want to know?” Candice insisted.

  Nev
ada looked over at Singh. His men were gathering around him. Either preparing to get on the helicopter or…

  “I really don’t,” Nevada replied. “He’s a rich collector; now he’s got a complete set. And if you could explain any of this crap, it wouldn’t be worth anything.”

  “So that’s it then? This was all just the whim of an avid nightlight collector?”

  “Rich nightlight collector,” Nevada said, before realizing Singh was walking closer to them.

  “What’d she say?” he asked. His men were following behind him like sharks smelling fresh blood.

  “Who knows?” Nevada retorted. “British slang, right? Makes me glad we declared independence.”

  “She said ‘nightlight.’” Singh stopped walking, his gaze fixed on Candice. “Why would you call it a nightlight?”

  Nevada forced a laugh. “That’s actually British slang for like an ounce of marijuana—”

  “He wasn’t talking to you,” Gore said, appearing behind Nevada. She couldn’t back up if she wanted to. “Why are you talking to him?”

  Before she could say anything, Singh repeated his question to Candice: “Why’d you call it a nightlight?”

  “Because it glowed,” Candice said.

  Nevada pinched her sinuses between her fingers.

  “It glowed?” Singh repeated. He took a step closer to Candice. “Do you know how many millions of dollars I’ve spent on these things? How many scientists I’ve paid to examine each square inch? Do you know how many people I would kill—” He broke out in sudden laughter, tears forming in his eyes. “Do it again. Make it glow again.”

  Nevada stepped between Singh and Candice, painfully aware of Gore’s hand dropping to his holstered sidearm, his men pressing in on all sides. “She was seeing things. It was dark, she was scared, and it’s a fucking skull. Now, we’re going—”

  “Go,” Singh said to her, wiping his eyes. “Candice stays.”

  “Singh,” Nevada said slowly, “you’re not being real cool right now...”

  Candice started to back up, but looked behind her to see Gore glowering at her, his hand squeezing black oil onto the gun it was wrapped around. She pressed close to Nevada. “I want to stay with Easy,” she said.