Bak dropped the blossom into the pool, earning a scowl from Taharet. “I’ve no further questions, mistress, at least not at the moment. Perhaps later my quest will take me down a different path and I’ll have a need to make additional inquiries.”
She rose gracefully to her feet, formed a gracious but not especially sincere smile. “I’ll have a servant see you to the door.”
“Before I go,” he said, his smile matching hers, “I must speak with your sister.”
She paused, raised an eyebrow. “Oh, didn’t I tell you?
She’s ill, unable to talk with anyone.”
“When will she be well enough to see me?”
“I’m not a physician, Lieutenant. How can I predict the course of an illness?”
Walking away from the dwelling, thoroughly annoyed,
Bak thought over his interview with the woman. Her atti tude, once warm and friendly, had changed completely.
Why? he wondered. Did she feel his investigation threatened her husband and therefore her comfortable existence?
Meret’s illness, he felt sure, was a lie. Had Taharet decided to hold him and her sister apart, fearing they might grow fond of each other?
“I’m sorry, sir, but they’ve all gone.” The haggard-looking woman stood with one thrust-out hip straddled by a naked child about two years of age. The boy, his thumb in his mouth, stared wide-eyed at Bak.
“Do you have any idea where they went?” Bak stepped out of the house where the scribe Tati and the four workmen had dwelt and toiled for Woserhet. He had found the build ing empty of furnishings and life.
“They came without a word, and that’s the way they left.”
Bak muttered an oath. Why had he not sent Kasaya back another time? He needed to speak with the man, needed to look through the auditor’s records. “Did the scribe leave with the others?”
She snorted. “Do you think they’d make a move without him?”
“My Medjay came three days ago, searching for him.
When he didn’t find him, he left a message that I wanted to see him.” Bitterness tinged Bak’s voice. “Now I find he’s been here all along.”
“No, sir. He’s been gone.” She grabbed the child by its bare bottom and heaved it higher on her hip. “I hadn’t seen him for several days, then he returned this morning and in less than an hour they’d all moved out.”
Why such a hasty departure? Bak wondered. Was Tati afraid for his life for some reason? Were they all frightened?
Or had they merely been given another assignment? Where had Woserhet’s files been taken?
“They’re not here, sir.”
Bak frowned at the mat covering the door of the house where Ashayet dwelt with her children. “Have they gone for an hour or a day?”
The girl, roughly eight years of age, the tallest of the six children barring Bak’s path, kept her expression grave. He guessed she was an older sister, caretaker of her smaller sib lings. “Mistress Ashayet’s husband, Woserhet, has been slain, sir. He’s in the house of death. As he’ll be there for some time, she thought to go away, to stay with her mother and father until she must place him in his eternal resting place.”
Recalling the modest way in which Woserhet had dwelt,
Bak doubted the widow had sufficient wealth to have his body preserved in the most elaborate and lengthy manner.
What little she had, she must use to care for her children.
“When does she plan to return?”
“Not for a long time, sir.”
“They’ll be gone for at least a week,” said a small boy in a chirpy voice.
“Shush!” the girl commanded. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about, sir. They went to Abu. They’ll be gone close to two months.”
A voyage to Abu? An extended stay? “Woserhet will re main in the house of death that long?”
“Oh, yes, sir.” A bright, excited smile lit up the girl’s face.
“A priest named Ptahmes came and he spoke for no less a man than the chief priest Hapuseneb. He told mistress
Ashayet how highly regarded her husband had been and said the lord Amon himself would see that he received the best of care in the house of death. He’ll also be given a resting place befitting his upstanding character.”
Bak whistled. The smaller children nudged each other and giggled, delighted their sister had impressed him so.
“If the chief priest can take the time to provide Woserhet with more in death than he had in life, why can’t he spare a half hour or so to tell us of the auditor’s mission?”
Bak had to smile at Hori’s disgruntled expression. “I sus pect Ptahmes took upon himself the task of rewarding
Woserhet without a word from Hapuseneb. Which tells me that, though he might not know what Woserhet was doing, he had no doubt of the auditor’s importance to the chief priest and the lord Amon.”
The young scribe laid the last fragment of charred scroll on top of all the others, carried them into the shade beneath the pavilion, placed them on top of the rolled scrolls in the basket, and weighted them down with a rock. “What a waste of time this task was! I didn’t find a thing that would lead us to Woserhet’s slayer.”
“I doubt your search was all in vain.” Bak told him of the auditor’s visit to Tjeny and his request to see Pentu’s files.
“Evidently Woserhet wasn’t interested in any of the gover nor’s records except those that list the items he sent as offer ings to the lord Amon. Which leads me to believe he was tracking objects from their point of origin to the god’s store houses and maybe on until they were consumed or shipped elsewhere or reverted back to the priests or the people for or dinary use.”
“We can’t very well follow in his footsteps.” With a clat ter, Kasaya dropped a handful of baked clay shards and chips onto a pile of similar fragments for which he had no use. “We’ve no authority to inspect all the governors’ rec ords, and even if we had, we’d have to travel the length of the river from the Great Green Sea to Abu. To visit so many provinces would take several months.”
Bak knelt to examine Kasaya’s handiwork. The Medjay had glued together only the shoulders of the broken storage jars, where the contents of each had been written. The odd shaped remnants were lined up like soldiers two abreast at the edge of the shadow cast by the pavilion. “Have you learned anything at all from these vessels?”
The Medjay, who could not read, looked to Hori to an swer.
“We went to the room where Woserhet was slain. From the empty spaces on the shelves, we concluded that fourteen jars had been removed.” Hori plopped down before the re constructions. “Kasaya has pieced twenty-one back together and he’s found enough shards with symbols on them for at least two more.”
“Twenty-three all told.” The young Medjay eyed the jars with more satisfaction than the potters who created them must have felt.
“Leaving nine jars that came from storehouses containing grain, hides, and metal ingots,” Bak said.
“No, sir.” Kasaya sat down beside the scribe. “When we separated out the jars listing bulk items, we came up with two extra jars, two too many for the available space in the room where Woserhet was found.”
“These two.” Hori pointed to two vessels’ shoulders, both painstakingly reconstructed using a multitude of small frag ments. Riddled with holes, left empty when the pieces could not be found, they both were lopsided and bulged in places.
“The labels are hard to read because so many symbols are missing, but we both think they came from somewhere else, another storehouse that contained valuables probably.”
Bak knelt beside him, gingerly lifted one of the two re constructions, and compared it to several others. “What gave you that idea?”
“These two were much more badly damaged. I think someone removed the documents and threw them on the fire.” Hori pointed toward the charred scrolls in the basket.
“When the jars were empty, he flung them down, breaking them, and stomped on the fragments.”
“I found a lot of crushed pieces on the floor close to where