“We came here topreservean artifact from men who would exploit it. We came for knowledge, not gold. I believe my motives are pure,” she insisted.
She placed her empty hand onto the empty pan, submitting to the god’s unspoken judgment. The scales tilted immediately, her empty hand pushing the heavy stone pan upward. A hidden door opened at the base of the statue, revealing a final, short passageway.
The corridor ended at a door bare of cartouche or sigil, its face as blank and unmoving as the Sphinx. They stood before it, their bodies trembling from the sheer weight of anticipation and fatigue.
“We’re there,” Max whispered, his hand going to the stone. “The last door.”
“Wait,” Eden said. “Look closely.”
She pointed to a circular bronze plate recessed in the center, unmarked save for ten tiny indentations at its edge. The riddle was not written on the door but inscribed on the ceiling above.
“I am a line drawn between two points. I am a measure of a pyramid’s height. I am the eye of the horizon. I am a key to a door you cannot see.”
Eden’s mind flashed back to the stars that had guided her to the labyrinth’s entrance. “It’s the constellation. Orion, the hunter, whom the Egyptians called Sah. The ten indentations correspond to the ten brightest stars of the constellation.”
“But they’re not marked!” Max protested, shining the lamp on the plate. “How do we know the pattern?”
“We don’t,” Eden admitted, her heart sinking. “It’s a pattern of light, not stone. We need something to match the stars.”
Max, his eyes narrowed, was already rummaging through his pack. He pulled out the small, brass calibration weights from his sextant case—ten perfect, identical discs of polished metal. “They used this configuration to navigate the desert, didn’t they? It’s a key based on navigation.”
Working together, Eden positioned the weights according to the precise stellar map she had drawn at the oasis, and Max, using his steady hand, settled them into the shallow indentations. The moment the final one was in place, the bronze plate shifted, and the stone door groaned, then slid inward, revealing a small, stark final chamber.
No murals, no treasures, no gilded sarcophagi. Only a low basalt altar at the center, and on it, the artifact she had come so far to find.
Even before the light struck it, Eden knew. She knew by the shape, the proportions, the perfection of its form. A scarab, the size of her hand, carved not from gold but the purest black obsidian, so smooth it seemed to swallow the lantern’s light. She’d never seen anything like it.
Max stayed by the doorway, posture rigid. “Well?” His voice was hoarse. “Is it what you came for?”
She didn’t answer at once. She lifted the Scarab. The underside was blank; only the wings were detailed: two panels laced with the finest lines of something pale and ghostly.
“This is older than anything I’ve ever seen,” she whispered, reverence thick in her voice. “It’s not the Eighteenth Dynasty. It’s not even the Old Kingdom. It’s... something else.”
He stepped closer. “You want to tell me why there’s no inscription? Not even a curse?”
She turned the Scarab until the lantern’s flame struck its surface. The black drank in the glow, and the phosphorescent lines on the wings began to pulse with a soft, internal light.
Max stepped back, instinctive caution in every line of his body. “That’s... odd.”
“It’s responding to the light. Max, help me.” She looked up, helpless with excitement. “The torch. Hold it steady, there—no, tilt it up. Like the midday sun.”
When the white heat struck the artifact, a beam of blue-white lines leapt from the scarab’s wings, weaving into a complex lattice on the altar stone. The projection wasn’t a map of the pyramid. It was cosmological—the Duat itself, rendered with mind-boggling precision. Along the central axis, twelve distinct portals unfurled like petals.
“I thought it was a myth,” she said, voice shaking. “The Blueprint of the Underworld. This is a navigation chart for resurrection.”
Max frowned, his jaw set. “Are you talking about a resurrection ritual? Bringing the dead back to life?”
“Imagine if the British Museum got this,” she whispered, bitterness thick in her voice. “They’d tear it to pieces. File off the obsidian for samples. Publish a pamphlet calling it a hoax.” She ran her hand over the altar. The obsidian scarab fit the depression perfectly; it was meant to stay.
“We can’t take it,” she said at last, certain. “It was meant to be here. The whole complex is built around this room. This wasn’t meant for me, or for anyone who sits in London.”
Max exhaled, shoulders relaxing as a look of relief flitted across his face. “So what now?”
“We document,” she said finally, mouth set. “We record every line, every glyph. We leave the artifact, but we take the knowledge.” She gently placed the Scarab back in its depression on the altar.
“Hold the light steady. I want a copy of the main projection first.”
Eden pulled out her notebook and began sketching frantically. But before she’d hardly started, a low, sickening grumble started deep in the bedrock.
