He tore his gaze from the doors, and offered Ra his best court bow.
“Thank you for permitting us to take passage on your boat, Ra,” he said. “It was an interesting trip.”
“A bit too interesting,” Ra said. “I shall certainly make some stern inquiries after my usual companions.”
He bent to pat Mozelle.
“I would ask you to come with me, little one,” he said, “but I know you will not leave your friends.”
Granting them a regal yet friendly inclination of his head, Ra walked a few steps upstream, then boarded a boat covered stem to stern with delicate gold leaf that glowed like the first pale rays of the rising sun.
As they watched, Ra’s hawk head began to transform, growing more compact and ovoid, but the light was very bright now, too bright for Neville to see clearly. In Neville’s last glimpse of Ra, the hawk-headed man had become a scarab beetle, and the beetle somehow was both passenger upon the boat, and walking behind it, pushing the vessel’s glowing roundness up through the darkness and into the sky.
Neville shook his head, drawing himself back from that vision, for he thought he might stare after the boat of the sun forever, longing besieging his heart as he imagined its celestial voyage. When he looked around, all of his companions except for Mrs. Syms were coming to themselves, longing and wonder naked on their faces. Mrs. Syms merely looked a trace impatient.
“Well,” she said, “the temple is here. Are we going to tour it, or not?”
“By all means, Mrs. Syms,” Neville said, squaring his shoulders, and stepping forward to open the door. “Let me and Stephen go first. Who knows what might be inside?”
Jenny half expected the door to open before Uncle Neville touched it, creaking open like the portal to a crypt in one of the stories in Stephen’s Poe collection, but the door did no such thing. Indeed, it took both of the men working together to shove it ajar, yet once it was set in motion, the door moved smoothly and soundlessly, like any ordinary portal into any fine house.
But this isn’t any ordinary portal, nor this any ordinary house,
Jenny thought, fighting the impulse to draw one of her revolvers. The weight of the gun might be comforting, but she expected that bullets would prove as useless here as they had against Apophis.
Mozelle rubbed against her ankles, twining around them so that Jenny had to scoop her up or stumble. Once lifted, Mozelle settled herself quite contentedly onto the level platform of Jenny’s forearm, sitting upright, like a statue of Bastet.
And what are you, kitten?
Jenny thought, glancing down at the fragile ball of tawny fur.
You’re so tiny your eyes are still blue and your tail’s just a little stick covered with fur, but I saw you when you attacked Apophis, and then you were grander than the grandest lion.
Mozelle did not answer, even here in this place where words from a cat might have seemed perfectly normal. She only buzzed a warm, vibrating purr that seemed as innocent as Mrs. Syms’s pleasure in this newest “tour.”
“Uncle Neville, should we get our gear off the boat?” Jenny asked, when her uncle would have stepped into the temple.
Neville Hawthorne quirked half a smile. “I think we may be beyond anything that gear can do for us, but it does seem imprudent to leave it . . .”
Eddie was starting back to board the vessel when a deep voice spoke from beyond the open door.
“Come. There is no need for such here. If you are vindicated, then your soul bird will fly free to where offerings from the upper world await. Come hither without delay.”
Jenny opened her mouth, but no words came forth, only a quiet moan.
Eddie only looked at Neville, “Your call, Neville.”
“By all means, let us obey our host,” Neville replied, a trace too breezily for real confidence. “After all, when in Rome . . .”
“Or rather,” Stephen agreed, forcing a laugh, “when in Egypt. Miss Benet?”
He made a sweeping gesture, as if offering to escort her onto a dance floor. Jenny smiled, and set her free hand lightly on the crook of Stephen’s arm. Uncle Neville followed suit, offering his own protection to Lady Cheshire. Mrs. Syms accepted Eddie’s arm. Rashid, Mischief shrilling anxiously from his shoulder, brought up the rear.
The doors were easily wide enough to admit their little party, even two abreast. They crossed the threshold into a beautiful anteroom accented by an oval pool. Delicate lilies in hues of translucent yellow, pink, and blue floated in the crystalline waters, and tiny fish darted, living flakes of gold and silver beneath the surface.
The walls were adorned with scenes familiar from many tombs, but here, as they had seen elsewhere in the complex, there was a subtle difference from any other depictions of pharaohs living or dead. Once again, the artists’ emphasis was as much on Neferankhotep’s just use of his great power as on the luxury and grandeur to which that power entitled him.
There was no doubt that their destination was a pair of doors on the other side of the pool, so they walked toward these, keeping stately measure, and taking in the elegance of the chamber as if they were indeed, as Mrs. Syms commented, visiting “the most ideal museum we have seen so far.”
“Why,” Jenny said, walking around one edge of the pool, and studying a mural depicting Neferankhotep holding court, “doesn’t this comfort me?”
“Because,” Stephen replied with such immediacy that Jenny knew he had been considering the same matter, “we’re human, and the perfection of divine justice is frightening. We want justice to see things
our
way—even when we know deep down inside that our sense of justice is corrupted by our desires, rather than our adherence to perfection.”
“And Neferankhotep,” Neville added, “seems to have managed divine judgment when still alive and human—I mean, even Jesus lost his temper and despaired and liked to enjoy himself with his friends. Neferankhotep is just too perfect.”
“Or rather,” Lady Cheshire said, surprising Jenny, for unless speech had been absolutely necessary, Audrey Cheshire had been morosely silent since the death of Captain Brentworth, “Neferankhotep is as perfect as we would like to believe ourselves capable of being—and since he began his life as human as we are, his perfection is a reprimand.”
As if an advertisement for what awaited them on the other side, the inner door was adorned with an elaborate painting of the judgment of the soul. An enormous scale dominated the scene, its two pans suspended from a center bar, both holding nothing but air, and so in perfect balance. Jenny had seen the twins of this scale in market places in Alexandria, Cairo, and all the way up the Nile. Its utter mundanity made the beings gathered around it also seem strangely mundane.
Thoth, his tiny ibis head mounted on broad shoulders, should have looked funny, but he did not. There was a scholarly dignity to how he held his stylus, poised in the act of taking some note or consulting some record.
Near one empty pan of the scale crouched the monster Ammit, the merging of crocodile jaws, lion forequarters, and hippopotamus hindquarters not looking at all humorous or peculiar in this context, but rather watchful and terrible.
Anubis, his jackal head making Jenny shiver with remembered terror, knelt near the scales, looking less like a god than like a workman checking his tools and feeling satisfied with their readiness.
In the background of the painting were many other figures. Osiris/Neferankhotep supervised the preparations with detached dignity. Maat, her wings outstretched in deliberate echo of the scales, stood near them, apparently waiting to take her place in one of the empty pans. Dozens of smaller figures, some distorted and horrid, also waited, their gazes fixed on the scales in dreadful anticipation.
“The Forty-Two Judges,” Stephen said softly. “Some texts imply that they can be bribed or threatened—if one has magic enough—but I doubt that such tactics will work in Neferankhotep’s court.”
“No, probably not,” Jenny replied. “I wonder . . .”
She forgot what she had been about to ask, forgot for a moment where they were, for the scene before them was coming alive. In the foreground, Thoth and Anubis completed their preparation. The Forty-Two Judges gossiped among themselves, the hissing of their voices making a muted background to the creaking of the scale pans as Anubis tested their motion, and the scratching of Thoth’s pen as he finished his notes.
The painted eyes of Neferankhotep were the last things to gain brightness and depth, and as they did so they met Jenny’s own eyes—and she knew, impossibly, that his gaze simultaneously met that of each other individual in the anteroom.
“I am Neferankhotep,” the mummy-wrapped king said, his tone polite and formal. Then he grinned, white teeth against the green of his skin. “I believe you have been looking for me.”
He laughed, and the Forty-Two Judges laughed with him, their voices mingling the cries of birds and the baying of hounds with all ranges of human mirth.
“Here I am,” Neferankhotep concluded, “and before me you will be judged.”
“Games,” Neville replied bluntly when he recovered from his initial shock, “are only amusing when you’re not one of the playing pieces. We came here seeking not you, but your tomb. I believe it is only fair that you remember this.”
“Remember that you are tomb robbers?” Neferankhotep said. “I had tried to remember otherwise.”
“Not tomb robbers,” Neville said firmly, “students of history and archeology.”
“There is a difference?”
“As we see it, there is.” Neville hesitated, then pushed ahead. “Great Neferankhotep, in life you earned a reputation for devotion to justice that was not without human kindness. We find ourselves—against all sane expectation—standing before you for judgment. Well, I ask you, sir, is playing about in this fashion reasonable or in keeping with your reputation?”
Neferankhotep’s expression became mildly amused. Neville couldn’t help but think how peculiar it was to see living moods on features that still bore more than a slight resemblance to the stylized conventions of Egyptian art.
But no more peculiar,
Neville’s inner demon taunted him,
than any of the rest of this.
“You say,” Neferankhotep replied, his voice smooth and soothing, “that you had no expectation that you would be brought to judgment. Surely you saw the messages written on the walls in the Valley of Dust. Surely the Protectors warned you what awaited.”
Neville blinked.
“Well, yes, but we didn’t think those warnings were serious. Old temples are full of curses and the like, and despite the stories the superstitious tell, I’ve never much believed in the power of dead pharaohs to curse from beyond the grave.”
“Yet you believed the tales of my life and burial sufficiently to let them guide you here,” Neferankhotep persisted. “How do you resolve this discrepancy?”
“I don’t,” Neville said firmly. “The one was a possibility—the basis for scientific investigation. The rest of this is an impossibility. I’m more interested in knowing what your intentions are toward myself and my companions.”
Neville knew he was being so blunt as to verge on rudeness, knew, even, that he was counting on the reputation for justice of a man with whom he didn’t really believe he was speaking. His approach seemed the only way short of groveling to handle this situation, but some part of him kept expecting a renewed burst of laughter followed by the removal of elaborate costumes to reveal the Bedouin sheik and his minions
It didn’t happen. Neferankhotep paused, clearly considering Neville’s words. The only sound was that of breathing from far more than Neville’s six companions—an eerie sound that made the back of his neck prickle.
“You have come here,” Neferankhotep said at last, “all but one sound in mind, and all rather battered in body. Some degree of acceptance of your situation must be the end result of this journey.”
“Nonsense,” Neville replied. “I could argue that those of us who remain sane do so only because we don’t believe. Mrs. Syms . . .”
“Yes, Sir Neville?”
“Nothing, ma’am.”
“Oh . . .”
“The lady in question,” Neville continued, choosing his words more carefully, for he had no desire to jolt her into awareness of their situation, “could be said to be the only one who has believed what she has seen, and that believing has made her mad. However, that is neither here nor there.”
“Sanity is not a question?” Neferankhotep asked.