‘Don’t say “probably” and then walk right into it!’ Nina yelled as he returned with the heavy hammer. ‘And what are you planning to do, throw it a foot farther along each time? There’s no way to guarantee you’ll hit the trigger - and unless you’ve got some mad boomerang skills I don’t know about, you can’t get it round that corner either.’
‘Okay, so what do you suggest?’ he demanded. ‘We can’t just walk into the bloody thing and think light thoughts so we don’t set it off.’
‘We don’t walk,’ said Macy, looking more closely at the hieroglyphs. ‘I think we’re supposed to run. This text here’s another warning that horrible death awaits, yadda yadda, but it finishes with something like “hurry to Osiris”. Or “hasten”, maybe. “Hasten to Osiris.” ’
‘They left a clue?’ Nina said, surprised. ‘None of the other arits had them.’
‘It’s only a few extra characters.’ Macy pointed them out at the bottom of a block of text. ‘Everything else is the same as we’ve been seeing all the way down. Easy to miss. There might have been others, but we just didn’t notice them.’
‘So we’re meant to peg it down the corridor, then?’ Eddie said, illuminating the passage again. ‘Bit of a risk - we don’t know what’s round that corner.’
‘The Cutter-off of Heads, probably.’
‘Yeah, that’s reassuring.’ He returned the mallet to his pack, steeling himself. ‘All right. So we have to run like an Egyptian.’ He looked at Nina. ‘Ready?’
‘Let’s do it,’ she said.
‘If I get chopped into Oxo cubes I’m going to kick your arse in the afterlife. Macy?’ Macy nodded at him. ‘Okay. Three, two, one . . . go!’
They ran across the threshold.
The blades remained stationary.
Nina’s light swept along one side of the passage, Eddie’s the other, as they ran with Macy just behind. Ten feet along, twenty, their clattering footsteps echoing. Thirty, the corner coming up fast—
A dusty crunch as a block shifted beneath Nina’s foot.
Her heart clenched with fear - but there was still no movement from the walls.
There was a sound behind them, though. A hollow clonking, some mechanism turning and repeatedly knocking metal against metal.
Counting down.
‘Definitely run,’ Eddie gasped, slowing at the corner to let the women get ahead of him. Torch raised, he glanced back—
Kshang!
Ranks of rusty blades shot out from the slots at the entrance, some swinging forward and others back to dice anyone unlucky enough to be caught between them. Corrosion and time had taken their toll, some swords snapping or wrenching themselves from their hinges to clash against the opposite wall - but the result was still as lethal as its creators had intended.
And it was getting closer.
‘Shiiiiit!’ Eddie burst back into a sprint after Nina and Macy as more blades sprang out one after the other, a wave of death chasing them down the tunnel. ‘Runrunrun!’
Nina didn’t need to see what was happening to be spurred on; the rapidly approaching sound was terrifying enough. In her torch beam she saw what she at first thought was the end of the passage - before realising the ornate columns marked the entrance to the next arit.
The Cutter-off of Heads.
Out of the frying pan—
The advancing blades reached the corner, rounded it, continued after the running trio without pause. Gaining.
Nina saw something on the walls beyond the columns. More slots - but only one on each side, at about neck height.
And they were running straight at them.
She didn’t even have time to shout a warning to Eddie and Macy - they were almost at the columns, and the iron wave was upon them—
She swept up her arms to grab the surprised pair round their shoulders - and yanked her feet off the floor. The extra weight made Macy trip, Nina in turn dragging Eddie down as they tumbled through the next entrance - just as two large spinning discs burst from the walls ahead of them, swinging back and barely clearing their heads as they fell.
‘Son of a bitch!’ Nina spluttered, scrambling out from under the whirling serrated blades. ‘They weren’t kidding about the name!’
Eddie waited for the two discs to grind to a halt before rising and returning to the entrance, experimentally pushing one of the swords. He expected resistance, but it moved freely, if noisily, on its rusted hinge; the force of its release after six millennia had broken the mechanism. ‘Least we’ll be able to get back out.’
‘We made it,’ Macy said, panting. ‘We got through - that was the last trap!’ She hesitated. ‘Right?’
‘If the hieroglyphics were telling the truth, then yeah,’ Nina assured her. Even so, she still stood with a degree of caution. Ahead was another bend, the passage angling downwards.
She looked round the corner. Steps led down a short distance to another set of columns.
But these were not the kind that marked each arit. These were something altogether different.
And magnificent.
‘Oh, you’ve got to see this,’ she said softly, barely breathing despite her recent exertion.
Macy gasped at the sight, and even Eddie was impressed. ‘Pretty flash.’
The columns were carved in the form of an Egyptian god, mirror-images facing each other. But they were not any of the figures that had watched their descent into the heart of the pyramid. This was another, a man in a tall headdress, bearing a crook in one hand and a flail in the other. His body was encased in tight bindings, like those of a mummy, but his face was exposed, skin an oxidised copper-green. Both figures were liberally adorned with gold and silver leaf.
Osiris.
Between the twin statues was the entrance to a dark chamber. Nina raised her flashlight. More gold and silver glinted within, treasures stacked round the walls, but her gaze was fixed on what lay at the centre of the large room: a bulky, rounded-off object, its skin pure silver.
A sarcophagus.
Nina slowly advanced, checking the two figures for any sign of some last, sneaky trap. There was none. They had reached their goal, the final chamber.
‘We found it,’ she said, looking at Eddie and Macy in wonderment. ‘We found the tomb of Osiris.’
25
They entered the chamber, a match to the Osireion in dimensions and form, torch beams flashing over the artefacts and treasures inside. They ranged from the astounding to the prosaic - gleaming statues of pure gold beside simple wooden chairs; a full-sized boat bearing a silver and gold mask of Osiris upon its prow against which had been propped bundles of spears. It was a find to exceed even the tomb of Tutankhamun. The famed pharaoh had been a relatively unimportant ruler of the New Kingdom, less than three and a half thousand years ago, but Osiris was a myth given flesh, a foundation stone of Egyptian civilisation dating back almost twice as far.
And they were the first to reach him.
Nina examined the sarcophagus. The lid was a larger than life representation of the man within. The sculpted silver face gazed serenely at the ceiling, kohl-lined eyes wide.
‘The craftsmanship’s absolutely incredible,’ she whispered. ‘All of this is.’ She gestured at the objects surrounding them. ‘I never imagined the pre-dynastic Egyptians were this advanced.’
‘It’s just like Atlantis,’ said Macy. ‘They were really advanced for their time too, but nobody knew about them. Until you found them.’