“I will try.”
“Good. Let me lie down, Sheritra. Give me that pillow. Thank you. First accept that Tbubui killed Penbuy by magic and she is killing me. Penbuy she murdered because Father would have listened to any evidence he brought back from Koptos. He was respected, and Father knew his intelligence. Even if Penbuy’s story had sounded insane it would have planted a seed of doubt in Father’s mind. As for me …” He lifted one shoulder in a frail shrug. “I am already thoroughly discredited in Father’s eyes. I think she is simply tasting power and finding it sweet. She knows I would never harm her. She does not need to get rid of me, she merely wants to. If there is another motive I cannot find it.”
He fell silent. Sheritra saw sweat break out on his forehead and knew that he had stopped talking in order to marshal his strength. She waited while he wiped his face on her bunched sheets. His next words took her by surprise.
“Sheritra,” he began, “what do Tbubui’s servants remind you of? Think carefully.”
Dark, totally silent, immediately obedient—she shook her head, puzzled. “They are strange,” she replied, “but they don’t remind me of anything.”
“Well perhaps you have not been in as many tombs as I have with Father,” Hori said grimly. “Aren’t they like shawabtis, Sheritra?”
Shawabtis, she thought. The wooden slaves buried with the nobility to be brought to life at the magic word of their owner. Dumb bearers of wine and food, obedient weavers of linen and makers of bread, dark, unerring hands to fasten a necklace, smooth kohl around tired eyes, dip the fine henna brush into the pot so delicately, so exactly, and always with the blank, expressionless faces of the wood from which they were carved. Sheritra’s scalp prickled. “Shawabtis?” she said. “Ridiculous, Hori!”
“Is it? Well never mind. Consider this.” He pulled a small pouch from his belt and with trembling fingers forced it open. The earring lay on his sticky palm, glowing faintly in the dim light. “Take it. Weigh it in your hand. Feel it. Imagine the one you lifted out of Tbubui’s jewel chest. You had your doubts, didn’t you, Sheritra? A copy of something so ancient can be a clever approximation if it is made by a master craftsman, but there will be tiny clues to its true age. The gold perhaps not so clearly striated in purple or so mellow with use, the stone with that freshly set look to it, the rear stopper unsullied by years of being pressed against human skin. Your first reaction to it was the fear that it was the original. Well you were right. Tbubui had one. She lost the other crawling out of the tunnel.”
Sheritra had been turning the earring over in her fingers. Now she pushed it back at him. “Stop it, Hori,” she cried out. “You are frightening me!”
“Good!” he said briskly. “Now I will frighten you some more. I will try to be coherent, to put all this in its proper order. Have you water here?”
Without comment she leaned over and poured some for him. He drank rapidly, then fumbled the poppy flask to his lips and took a long swallow.
“You will kill yourself with that,” she remonstrated, then realized what she had said. He wiped his mouth with the back of one hand and gave her a glance.
“Already my body is becoming inured to it,” he said. “I need more and more to keep the pain under control, but I do not think I will need it much longer.” She opened her mouth to protest but he forestalled her. “No lies, Little Sun. Let me proceed. I have much to say and little strength with which to say it.”
She subsided and watched him, her heart aching. Shadows lay sombrely over half his face and tinged the rest with melancholy. He is right, she thought suddenly. He is going to die. Panic shot through her, but her voice was quiet. “Go on, dearest.”
“Father woke them by stealing the Scroll, theirs by right, and babbling the spell in ignorant foolishness,” he began. “The lids of the coffins were missing in the inner chamber, remember? I would wager that they ordered open coffins in the hope that at some time someone would break into the tomb, find the Scroll sewn to the hand of a servant, and be intrigued enough to read it aloud, without knowing, of course, that Nenefer-ka-Ptah and the Princess Ahura, their real names, were lying behind a false wall in the same burial place. They struggle into Memphis and look for somewhere to hide, perhaps to recover. Sheritra?”
She answered his concern with a forced smile. Something in her was answering his arguments with a terrified but sure affirmative, yet there was Harmin, her own, her love, and she dared not believe for fear her life should tumble into ruin. It seemed to her that the room was becoming colder and she shrugged the sheet higher on her shoulders, trying to hear Hori’s words without engaging her imagination. She did not want to see in her mind those ancient, desiccated bodies tottering about the inner chamber in the Stygian blackness, gaining suppleness and strength, pushing their stiff limbs along the tunnel.