slightly? I bounded down to just above the shadow and held the medallion up to the sun. Light shone through the tiny perforated holes, making a star pattern of Draconis on the sandstone.
‘There!’ Astiza pointed. A faint tracery of holes, or rather chisel points, near the base of the stone, mimicking the constellation pattern on the medallion. And beneath it, the joint between our stone and the one below was slightly wider than the usual. I crouched and blew the dust away from this tiniest of cracks. There was the subtlest of Masonic signs chiselled into the stone as well.
I could hear Arabs shouting to each other as they started to climb. ‘Gage, give it up!’ Silano called. ‘You’re too late!’
I could feel a shallow breath of wind, air coming from some hollowness on the other side. ‘It’s here,’ I whispered. I slammed the stone with my palm. ‘Move, damn you!’
Then I recalled what others had named the medallion since I’d won it. A key. I tried sliding the disc into the crack but it was slightly convex and its swell wouldn’t fit.
I looked back down. Now Silano and Bin Sadr were climbing as well.
So I reversed the pendant, easing in the linked arms. They stuck, I jiggled, they moved in farther…
Suddenly there was a click. As if pulled by a string, the medallion arms jerked deeper into the stone, the disc breaking off and bouncing down the blocks toward Silano. There was the creak and groan of stone upon stone. The men below us were shouting.
The stone had suddenly become weightless, lifted a fraction of an inch off the rock below. I pushed, and now it rotated in and up as if it were made of down, revealing a dark shaft that sloped downward at the same precarious angle of the descending corridor I’d explored with Napoleon. A ten-thousand-pound block of stone had become a feather. The key had disappeared into the rock as if swallowed.
We’d found the secret. Where was Astiza?
‘Ethan!’
I whirled. She’d climbed down the precipitous slope to nab the disc. Silano’s hand had closed on her cloak. She wrenched free, leaving him holding cloth, and scrambled back upward. I pulled out Ash’s sword and leapt down to help. Silano pulled out a new rapier of his own, eyes gleaming.
‘Shoot him!’ Bin Sadr shouted.
‘No. This time he has no trick with his rifle. He’s mine.’
I decided to forego finesse for brute desperation. Even as his blade whickered through the air toward my torso, I yelled like a Viking and cleaved down as if I were chopping wood. I was a course higher than him, giving me a two-foot height advantage, and was so quick he was forced to parry instead of thrust. Steel rang on steel and his blade bent under my blow, not breaking but twisting against his wrist. It was still sore, I gambled, from when my rifle exploded. He turned to save his grip but the move cost him his balance. Cursing, he lurched and collided with some of the other brigands. The lot of them went spilling down, clutching at the rock to arrest their bumpy fall. I threw the sword like a spear, hoping to stick Bin Sadr, but he ducked and another villain took the point instead, howling as he tumbled.
Now Bin Sadr charged up at me, a deadly point jutting from the end of his snake-headed staff. He thrust. I dodged, but not quite quick enough. The blade, sharp as a razor, shallowly sliced my shoulder. Before he could twist to cut deeper, a stone hit him in the face. Astiza, her hair wild as a Medusa, was hurling down broken pieces of pyramid.
Bin Sadr was sore too, wielding the staff with one arm because of his bullet wound, and I sensed a chance to truly unsettle him. I grabbed the snake shaft, hauling upward, even as he desperately pulled it back, blinking against Astiza’s bombardment of rocks. I relaxed my grip for a moment and he tilted dangerously backward, unbalanced. Then I jerked again and he lost the staff entirely and fell, bouncing down several courses of stones. His face was bloody, his precious staff mine. For the first time I saw a flicker of fear.
‘Give it back!’
‘It’s firewood, bastard.’
Astiza and I retreated to the hole we’d made, our only refuge, and crawled inside. Bracing ourselves against the walls of the shaft so we wouldn’t slide, we reached up and pulled at the entrance stone. Bin Sadr was scrambling up toward us like a madman, howling with rage. The block came down as easily as it had risen, but as it swung it retrieved its own weight, gaining momentum, and it slammed shut in the villain’s face with a boom like a great boulder. In an instant we were plunged into darkness.
We could hear faint howls of frustration as the Arabs pounded on the stone door from the outside. Then Silano called out, in rage and determination, ‘Gunpowder!’
We might not have much time.
It was black as a bowel until Astiza struck something on the sides of the shaft and I saw the glint of sparks. She lit the candle she’d taken from Napoleon’s table. So dark was it that the shaft seemed to flare from this feeble light. I blinked, breathing hard, trying to collect myself for the next step. There was an alcove next to the entrance, I saw, and in it, jutting up to and connected by a hinged arm to the stone door we’d come through, was a shaft of glittering gold. The shaft was a stunning thing, at least two inches thick, the gold probably sheathing some base material from corrosion or rot. It seemed to be a mechanism to take up the weight of the stone door, moving up and down like a piston. There was a socket where it connected, and a long well that it descended through. I had no idea how it worked.
I tried tugging the door. It was wedged like a cork, once more impossibly heavy. Retreat seemed impossible. We were temporarily safe and permanently trapped. Then I noticed a detail I hadn’t observed before. Ranked along the shaft wall, like a stand of arms, were dry brushwood torches, mummified by desiccation.
Someone wanted us to find our way to the bottom.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Once more the shaft seemed designed for the gliding of souls rather than the clambering of men. We half- slid, half-jammed our way down its slope. Why were there no steps? Had some kind of carts or sleds once ascended or descended here? Had the builders never expected to come this way? Or had these shafts been built for creatures or transport that we couldn’t imagine? In the first thirty metres we passed three voids in the shaft’s ceiling. When I lifted my torch I could see blocks of dark granite, suspended above. What were these ceiling pockets for?
We continued our descent. At length the man-made blocks gave way to walls of slick limestone, still perfectly straight and dressed. We’d passed beneath the pyramid proper and entered the bedrock of the limestone plateau it was built on. Down we went, deeper into the earth’s bowels, far below the descending passage I’d explored with Jomard and Napoleon. The passage began to twist. A hint of air left a curl of torch smoke behind us. The smell was dusty rock.
Suddenly the passageway levelled to a tunnel so low we had to crawl on hands and knees. Then it opened up. When we stood and lifted the torch, we found ourselves in a limestone cavern. A worn channel showed where water had once run. High above were the stumps of stalactites. While the ceiling was made by nature, the walls had been chiselled smooth and covered with hieroglyphics and inscribed drawings. Once again, we couldn’t read a word. The carvings were of squat, snarling creatures that obstructed twisting passageways filled with tongues of fire and drowning pools.
‘The underworld,’ Astiza whispered.
Standing like reassuring and protective sentinels along the wall were statues of gods and pharaohs, the faces proud, the eyes serene, the lips thick, the muscles powerful. Carved cobras marked the doorways. A line of baboons made a crown moulding near the stone roof. A statue of ibis-headed Thoth stood near the far doorway, his beak poised like the reed pen he held, his left hand holding a scale to weigh the human heart.
‘My god, what is this place?’ I murmured.
Astiza was tight to my side. It was cool in the cave, and she shivered in her diaphanous rags. ‘I think this is the real tomb. Not that bare room in the pyramid you described to me. The legends of Herodotus, that the true burial chamber is under the pyramid, may be true.’
I put my arm around her. ‘Then why build a whole mountain atop it?’
‘To hide it, to mark it, to seal, to mislead,’ she theorised. ‘This was a way to keep the tomb forever hidden, or
