his silver eyes. “Would you like to stay a while on your own? Maybe commune with the spirit of Hhamoun’s queen? I can wait for you outside.”
“Oh, my,” Beth breathed. “Yes, I would like that!”
Was it possible to communicate with the dead queen’s spirit? Beth suspected Herrington didn’t think so, but who knew?
While Herrington waited for her in the tunnel, she turned her torch’s cone of light around the chamber. The furniture was exquisite, much of it bearing the heads and feet of animals. One table with lifelike antelope legs supported a long black wig on a stand, its countless tiny braids still shining with golden beads. The ghost of some sweet perfume tickled her nose. Beth shivered involuntarily. She was probably the first woman to see these objects since the queen had fled. Yama weren’t as hidebound as Ohramese, but Herrington still only hired male diggers.
A soft noise, uncannily like a whisper, caused her to involuntarily yank her torch upward. Falling sand, Beth told herself, though she didn’t see any. The ceiling was the same black-veined gold marble as the door and floor. Unlike those surfaces, the ceiling was coffered, the deep, stepped squares positively covered in hieroglyphs.
What were you saying? Beth wondered, the hairs behind her neck prickling. Who were you warning to stay away? She noticed a slender rod hanging from a nearly invisible eye hook not far from her. It seemed an odd object to leave dangling from the ceiling of this perfectly appointed space.
“Pull me,” someone said right next to her ear.
Beth spun around while her heart beat like a mad creature trapped in her throat. The shadows wavered wildly, but no one was there.
“I’m imagining things,” she whispered to herself.
Pull me, the walls murmured.
Beth bit her lip and stepped closer to the hanging rod. Her hand seemed to lift of its own accord.
I really shouldn’t do this, she thought—even as she went up on tiptoe to grasp the thing.
Her fingers found polished wood with more carvings. With a prayer that her actions weren’t going to bring the place crashing down, Beth gave the rod a gentle, experimental tug.
The testing pull was enough. A section of the ceiling came down as smoothly as if it were oiled, the marble block suspended by a silvery length of pipe. One small toggle switch was embedded within the metal—at least a switch was what Beth assumed it was. She glanced back over her shoulder toward the door. She ought to call to Herrington. He would want to know this was here.
I am for you, said the same voice she had imagined she’d heard before. Let any man who breaks the sanctity of this chamber feel my eternal wrath.
Before her conscience could stop her, Beth flipped the switch.
The wall across from her, where the queen’s warning was inscribed, rolled silently open.
Her head might have been floating, she felt so lifted out of her normal self. Herrington’s interests forgotten, she moved forward like a sleepwalker. There was another chamber behind the wall: small, perfectly square, with dull black walls that absorbed her Yamish torch’s light. As she stepped inside, a humming sensation swept over her skin. Some energy was radiating outward from the dark surfaces. Whatever it was felt delicious, like a cat twining around her limbs. The roof of this room was barely a foot above her head. She reached up to stroke the ceiling, and the moment her fingertips made contact, her insides melted with pleasure. It was as if she’d been tranquilized. She didn’t even jump when the wall shut behind her.
Her mind turned off as her escape route closed. She had no other words for the phenomenon. She seemed unable to think, though images did drift dreamily through her mind.
She saw Tou within this room, but she didn’t look like a queen. She was young, maybe fifteen, and she was crawling on her hands and knees, filthy and barely clothed, having scrabbled into this hole to escape the sun. Her
MR. PINK-WHISTLE INTERFERES