Kasaya scooped his spear and shield from the sand. “Shall we go after it, sir?” He stared at the temple, apparently seeing nothing. Each word he spoke was more uncertain than the one before.
“I didn’t see anything,” Ani said.
His grandfather scratched his neck. “I don’t know if I did or not. These old eyes sometimes play tricks on me.”
Bak stared at the ruin, its broken stones and fallen columns vague shadows in the sparse moonlight. By shouting so loud, Hori had unwittingly warned whoever was there-and he was fairly certain someone was there. He was equally sure the man would not be caught-not this night, at any rate. If his light had been seen in the valley as often as the workmen claimed, the man knew every square cubit far better than he.
That deficiency must be corrected.
Chapter Eleven
Bak stood at the south end of the upper colonnade, looking down into the new chapel of the lady Hathor that would one day replace the old. The rocks on which Dedu’s body had been found were gone, used as fill beneath the foundation.
Though the day was new and the lord Khepre had barely risen above the eastern horizon, a gang of workmen toiled in the spot where they must have been piled, shoving a paving stone into position, grunting and groaning at the effort.
Sweat glistened on their faces and hard-muscled bodies. The day promised to be as hot as the day before.
At the back of what would one day be a columned court, other men were lengthening a sand and debris ramp and making it higher, taking care that the grade was not too steep. They were building a retaining wall to either side of the door into the sanctuary, which was being dug into the steep slope behind the temple. From inside the small cavern Bak could hear the thud of mallets on chisels and the bark of the stone breaking free, the clatter of flying chips and the workmen talking among themselves.
His gaze shifted southward, across the sandy waste on which the workmen’s huts stood. There lay the memorial temple of Nebhepetre Montuhotep, providing a picturesque if ruinous background for the small, mean dwellings. There he had glimpsed the tiny, flickering light the workmen had so often reported as the malign spirit. Had the man who pretended to be the spirit known Bak had remained at Djeser Djeseru and walked through the old temple, thinking to lure him to his death in the dark? Or had he come on a secret errand, unaware that he and his men had not gone home for the night?
When Bak had accompanied his father’s housekeeper to the valley as a child, she had told him many tales of ancient kings, including a long-held belief that Nebhepetre Montuhotep lay buried beneath his temple. Later he had heard that the entrance shaft of the king’s tomb had been tunneled into by thieves, who had been forced to cut short their effort to reach the burial chamber when the ceiling collapsed.
Pashed had verified the tale, adding that the mayor of western Waset had ordered that the shaft remain open, hoping to discourage further excavation by demonstrating how futile the first had been.
Surely the malign spirit was not trying to reach the king’s tomb. Certainly not over a period of three or four years.
More likely, he was hoping to find tombs of royal women or children. The jewelry in the honey jar had been that of a queen. Would not one success result in a thirst for more?
Bak had been sorely tempted to give chase the previous evening. He regretted his failure to act, but knew in his heart he had made a wise decision. He could tell by the way the workmen failed to meet his eye, however, that they thought less of him because he had not. A conclusion he must reverse.
“Everyone liked Dedu,” Imen said. “Why would anyone slay him?”
Bak heaved a long and impatient sigh. “His life was taken much like Montu’s: he was struck on the back of the head.
He was probably thrown onto the mound of rocks after his death, and the stone used as a weapon was thrown after him.
An uninspired attempt to make his death look like an accident.”
“Huh!” Imen said with a frown.
A dozen or more guards stood or knelt around them in the long, early morning shadow of the rough stone hut used by the men who patrolled the construction site. To a man, they looked uncomfortable with the reminder that one of their own had been slain. Dedu’s death had occurred long enough ago that they had set aside their anxiety; now Bak had brought it back. What had happened to Dedu could as easily happen to any of them, whether caused by an ethereal being or a man.
A scrawny guard with knotty muscles, who had been drawing circles in the sand with the butt of his spear, glanced up from his artwork. “The malign spirit. Had to be.”
“Dedu saw it once, you know,” an older, lanky man said.
His fellow guards turned as one to look at him, surprised at news they had apparently never before heard.
“So’ve a lot of other people,” Imen grinned, “and they’ve not been slain.”
A few of the men around them nodded, trying to convince themselves they were safe. The rest looked less certain.
Bak leaned back against the rough stone and smiled en-couragement. The lanky man seemed eager to talk. Better to let him believe the malign spirit was something other than a man than to deflect his thoughts in the hope of convincing him otherwise. “Did he see more than merely a light from afar?”
“I recall his very words. He said: ‘I practically bumped into the thing in the dark. It was kneeling in a deep shadow behind one of those big lion-like statues of our sovereign.
Took off like a hare when it saw me.’ ”
Yes, Bak thought. As must have happened with Montu, Dedu saw the malign spirit and it slew him, but why run away that night and come back later? Why give Dedu a chance to tell others what he had seen? “Did he say what it looked like?”
“I asked him, and all he did was laugh. I decided the story was a joke, a tall tale made up so he could have a good laugh at my expense.”
“Did he give any of the rest of you a similar account?”
A man with a black mole on his nose nodded, the rest shook their heads.
“Dedu talked with no qualms before going to his sleeping pallet,” explained the man with the mole. “When he awoke, I guess he had second thoughts. He denied the tale, agreeing with Mose that he’d been jesting.” He paused, scratched his stubbly chin. “I’d wager he was afraid.”
“I’d be,” a stocky youth said. “Wouldn’t you?”
Afraid of what? Bak wondered. The malign spirit or a man he recognized? “How long after he saw the spirit was he slain?”
The lanky man grew somber. “That’s the queer part. He fell to his death the next night. I knew then he’d told the truth. I figured the malign spirit hadn’t liked him spreading the tale and had struck him down to silence him through eternity.”
“So you repeated the story to no one?”
“Better safe than dead,” said the man with the mole.
Which explained why Ineni had not heard the tale.
“Huni’s dead, isn’t he?” The artist, a tough-looking man of medium height and middle years, spat out the words almost in a whisper so no one in the half-finished court outside the solar chapel would hear. “Do you wish the same fate to befall me?”
“You just said he didn’t tell you anything.” Bak did not bother to hide his annoyance, but he, too, spoke softly. “You can’t have it both ways. Either he confided in you or he didn’t.”
“He was a good friend. As close to me as a brother. He’d not want me to die because of what he told me.”
