Eddie had returned to the cabin to keep watch while she read; now he came back in. ‘What?’
‘These tell me everything about the zodiac - except what I need to know. The hieroglyphs tell you how to reach the Pyramid of Osiris, if you already have certain other facts. Osir’s people worked out the position of Mercury, which was one clue - but we don’t know the others.’
‘What’re the clues?’
‘A place called the silver canyon, which we have no idea how to find, and the second eye of Osiris. And we don’t even know where the first one is, never mind the second.’ She walked round the zodiac, hoping it would give her a literal new angle on its secrets. No flashes of insight came to her. ‘What am I missing?’ she wondered aloud.
‘If it’s Egyptian stuff, Macy might know.’ Eddie reached into his tuxedo jacket. ‘Did you see her?’
‘Yeah, I told her to wait for us.’
‘Hope she found a hotel - that tinfoil dress won’t keep her too warm . . . oh, bollocks.’ He had wrapped the passports and his phone in a plastic bag to protect them from the seawater, but the seal hadn’t been as secure as he’d hoped. The passports were damp but would be salvageable if given time to dry; the phone, on the other hand, released a sad little dribble of water from its casing. ‘Hope you’ve still got your phone.’
‘Yeah, but it’s with my things two decks down. I don’t want to go wandering round the ship unless I have to - especially now we’ve got its owner tied up in the john. If anyone gets suspicious, this’ll be the first place they come.’
‘Guess you’ll have to suss it out without Macy, then.’
Nina fruitlessly re-checked the notes for any clue she had missed, then turned her attention to a shelf of reference books about ancient Egypt, searching the indexes for any mentions of the silver canyon or the eye of Osiris. The former had none; the latter several, but only in the context of Egyptian symbology, nothing tied to a specific real-world location.
‘I don’t get it,’ she sighed after some time, returning to the zodiac. ‘Where’s it telling us to go? It’s got to be connected to the stars somehow - we’ve got the constellations, the Milky Way, planets - how do they all tie together? I mean, the pyramid’s marked right there, complete with directions, so what’s the starting point?’
Eddie shrugged. ‘Dunno - all I know about Egypt is what I saw in The Mummy.’
‘Which was hardly an impeccable source.’
‘Maybe not. I’ll tell you something, though - that’s not the Milky Way on there.’
She looked at the light blue line. ‘It’s not?’
‘No, it’s the wrong shape. I know what the Milky Way looks like, and that ain’t it.’
‘Okay, so if it’s not the Milky Way, what is it? What else would they put on a star map?’
An idea occurred to Eddie. ‘It’s not a star map,’ he said, going to the mirror. ‘There’re stars on it, but they’re not what it’s all about.’ He stared at the reflection, a knowing smile spreading across his face. ‘Take a look.’
He took an atlas from the shelf and flipped through it as Nina peered at the reflected zodiac. ‘What am I supposed to be seeing?’ she asked.
‘This.’ Eddie held the atlas open at a particular map: Egypt. He ran a finger down the page, tracing the course of a river from north to south. ‘Remind you of anything?’
She looked at the map, then the reflection in the mirror, the map again . . . ‘It’s the same shape,’ she realised. ‘Oh my God, it’s the Nile!’
‘Put the thing on the ceiling, and it matches the shape of the Nile if you sort of project it upwards,’ he said, nodding. ‘Make it into a normal map, though, and it gets flipped over.’
Nina hurried back to the zodiac, sweeping the notes aside so she could see the river’s path. ‘So this is the Nile delta at the north, which means the other end . . . Eddie, bring the map over here.’
‘You didn’t say the magic word,’ he said, but brought the atlas to her anyway, comparing it to the painted line. Even taking the mirroring effect into account, there were differences. ‘The delta’s not the same - there’re more rivers on the old map.’
‘The Nile used to have more mouths; some of them silted up,’ Nina told him distractedly, fixing on something much further upstream. ‘Look, look at this! This big bend in the river, where it goes round the Valley of the Kings . . .’ She tapped excitedly on the Lexan. ‘This Osiris figure, the one that wasn’t on the Dendera zodiac - look where its eye is!’
Eddie mentally flipped the zodiac to match the map. The figure’s head corresponded to a point west of the river, near a kink in its otherwise northward course. ‘So what’s there now? Some place called . . . Al Balyana.’
‘That’s not all that’s there.’ She practically skipped back to the table, dress swirling, to pick up a coffee-table book full of lush photography. ‘It used to be one of the most important places in Egypt.’ The appropriate page found, she rushed back to show him. ‘Abydos. The city of Osiris!’
The photographs showed several large ruined structures. ‘Looks like they need to get the builders in,’ Eddie joked.
‘After we get in,’ said Nina, scanning through the text. ‘There must be something pointing the way to this “silver canyon” - once we find it, we’re only seven miles from the pyramid.’
‘Find what?’
‘The second eye of Osiris. I think it’s a double clue - there’s the eye of the second Osiris here on the zodiac, which tells you to go to Abydos . . . but the hieroglyphics said the second eye “sees the way” to the canyon. The one on the zodiac’s just a dot; it doesn’t see anything. My guess is that somewhere in Abydos there’s the actual symbol of the Eye of Osiris, and the direction it faces is where we’re meant to go. I’ve got no idea where in Abydos, though - Macy might know.’
‘Then we’d better get off this boat and find her.’ Eddie eyed the zodiac.
Nina knew the look. ‘No. Absolutely not.’
‘Absolutely not what?’
‘You are not smashing the zodiac!’
‘It’ll stop Osir’s lot from finding the pyramid.’
‘They already have all the clues, they just weren’t smart enough to figure them out. If we leave it intact, it can be returned to Egypt.’
‘Only if Imhotep back there gets arrested,’ he said, jabbing a thumb at the bathroom.
‘If we beat him to the pyramid, we can expose him for what he’s done.’
‘One flap of that dressing gown and he’d have exposed himself, all right.’
‘Oh, give it a rest,’ Nina huffed. She tugged the grips from her hair and shook out the twist, fashioning it back into a ponytail. ‘I still need to get my things.’
He drew the revolver. ‘I’ll check that your boyfriend’s still praying to the great god Armitage Shanks, then we’ll go.’
Osir was still where they had left him. Eddie poked the gun into the furious Egyptian’s back, then made sure he was firmly tied to the waste pipe. ‘Okay,’ he said, returning to the bedroom, ‘let’s—’
Someone knocked on the cabin door.
Eddie whipped up the gun. ‘Shit!’ Nina whispered, frozen beside him. ‘What do we do?’
‘Shh!’ In the bathroom, Osir made muffled grunts; Eddie rushed back and kicked him. ‘You shuddup an’ all!’
‘Khalid!’ said an impatient voice from outside. Shaban. ‘Khalid, I know you’re in there. Let me in.’ The locked door’s handle rattled.
Nina stared at it - then dived on to the bed, the mattress springs creaking loudly. Before Eddie could ask what she was doing, she gasped and moaned in simulated ecstasy. ‘Oh . . . oh . . . oh, God, yes, come on, yes, harder, oh!’