“That’s…grim,” Sam said. “Though I guess it’s no more grim than one of the popes excommunicating someone and damning them to hell forever.” He let go of the thought. “So what does that have to do with the disc?”
“As I said before, Akhenaten died, though we don’t know how or why.” Doc held the disc up in his hands, the gold gleaming in the hexlights. “Nefertiti ascended the throne as Neferneferuaten. She’d been at his side from the beginning, perhaps even helped him craft his new religion of Atenism. The art from her tomb and from Tutankhamun’s shows her and Akhenaten together, an affectionate couple with their daughters arrayed around them.”
He paused, then added wryly, “She wasn’t his only wife, just his most prominent. Tutankhamun wasn’t her son; she bore only daughters. Still, judging by the way they were depicted, she and her husband truly loved one another. And now he was dead, and she was pharaoh…and the sole arbiter of the afterlife.”
Sam shook his head. “I don’t follow you.”
“Have you ever lost anyone, Sam?”
Jake, dying after the accident with the cart. Mom, dying in the hospital.
Once a failure, always a failure.
“Yes.”
“What would you do to get them back? What lengths would you go to, if you were an all-powerful pharaoh, a goddess upon the earth, the conduit for all life and all magic in the world?”
Sam’s mouth went dry. This was starting to remind him uncomfortably of Vic, deciding who got to live, and who died so they could. “But she wasn’t. A goddess, that is. Not really.”
“Of course not. But maybe she started to believe her own propaganda.” Doc stared down at the disc in his hands. “She created, or perhaps ordered created, a grand hex, meant to reunite all the parts of her husband, body and soul. To do so in this life, since there was no afterworld inhabited only by spirits and gods, where they might someday be together once more. A great ritual, held in the light of the rising sun…I can’t imagine how many familiars it would have taken to power such a thing.”
Sam felt strangely numb. “Did it…did it work?”
To his surprise, Doc laughed. “Maybe you’ve a touch of the heretic in you as well, eh? Believing in vital essences and the like.”
“Heh.” Sam tried to match his mirth, but his heart was beating too fast. “So it failed?”
“From what I’ve seen—and it will take years to pour through everything from her tomb, so don’t take this as definitive—she never got the opportunity. Her mummy is still secure in its sarcophagus, so I can’t guess how she died, but Amarna faded with her. Tutankhamun left the city to the sands, and the gods returned to their temples, the dead to offerings made at their tombs.”
“And King Tut had less of a motive to resurrect Akhenaten.”
“Considering he’d be co-pharaoh at best in that situation, I’d say so.” Doc gently placed the disc back in its box. “At any rate, now that you know what it’s for, you might have a better time figuring out how the hex was meant to work. Though it will be a purely academic exercise, since the premise it’s based on is nonsense.”
“Yeah,” Sam said as Doc shut the box, hiding away the gleaming disc. “Nonsense.”
17
Instead of either going home or copying more hexes, Sam spent the evening poring over every symbol on the disc.
Doc had thought it all superstition—the parts of the soul, the possibility of reuniting them with the body. But he hadn’t seen what Vic did to Bobby Watts.
Something had revived Bobby’s decaying corpse. An intelligence that looked at Sam through desperate, pained eyes, even as his ruined body died again.
Vic believed he was reuniting the spirit with the body, both purified though a series of hexes. Then he meant to boil the result in mercury and distill a panacea that would cure any wound, any illness, perhaps even old age itself.
He might have been wrong—he never got the chance to test the panacea. All the notes he’d made, all the original material from the medieval lab, he destroyed to keep anyone else from replicating what he’d done.
But Sam had a good memory for hexes. He hadn’t seen all the ones Vic pieced together, and he would never be able to really replicate the ones he’d worked on, as complicated as they’d been.
As he studied the signs on the Aten Disc, though, he began to make out similarities. Familiar patterns, augmented by the symbols no longer in use. Could it be possible that Neferneferuaten had uncovered the means to return the dead to true life?
Perhaps no one else wanted Akhenaten back. The priests of the old gods would want their power returned, and maybe the common folk, the ones who would never have the pharaoh’s ear, would prefer to petition the gods directly as they always had before.
Had Neferneferuaten been hurried along to her own tomb before she had the chance to bring back her heretical husband?
His mind was still running in circles as he locked up and left for the night. Paladino drove him home, but as they pulled up in front of the house, Sam spotted a figure sitting on the front steps. In the shadows, he could only make out a plain dress and suitcase on the ground beside her.
“You expecting anyone?” Paladino asked, reaching for his holstered gun as he did so.
