Sita cried out, shutting her eyes against the sudden brightness.
When she opened them again, the women and the torch were gone. The chamber beyond was aglow with firelight. The room was large, and half a dozen burning braziers lined its stone walls.
“Hello?” Sita called, her pulse racing.
Where had the sisters gone? Was she dreaming?
She touched the tunnel wall, felt its solidity beneath her fingers.
No. This is real.
There, in the middle of the illuminated chamber, she saw a magnificent sarcophagus carved of red granite, with the recumbent form of a woman on its lid.
Sita’s breath caught in her throat.Queen Anet’s tomb. This is it!
She took a few tentative steps inside. The floor was littered with stone shards, many of them vibrant with color. The wall on the left had been reduced to rubble, as if someone had taken a hammer to it. Sita bent to pick up a large piece, squinting at the painted fragment.
It was a rendering of a lamb, its head raised heavenward, its mouth open, a bloody wound staining its wool red.
The lamb, a voice in her mind whispered.
Sita dropped the fragment. It clattered on the ground.
Shaken, she turned to the back wall. The paintings there were undamaged and featured engravings that were finer than others she’d seen in the temple. The central image was another scene of Queen Anet and her king—but this was no family portrait. In it, the queen, dressed as a priestess, knelt before Setnakht and offered him two symbols enclosed in a shen ring, indicating the gift was both protected and eternal. The first symbol was a rolled scroll, tied at the middle, and the second was the symbol of a seated god with the head of an ibis.
“The Book of Thoth,” Sita murmured. She’d never heard of it.
Queen Anet gave the book to Setnakht. I wonder what was in it…
Sita turned back to the sarcophagus. The carved-stone woman lay with her arms crossed over her chest, a beatific expression on her face. Images of Nepthys were engraved along the lower half of her body, while lotus blossoms and a large winged scarab decorated her arms and chest.
Sita wondered again about Queen Anet’s grave goods. The chamber contained no baskets, chests, or artifacts of any kind—save one. A long twisted piece of driftwood lay along the sarcophagus as if the stone woman was holding it.
That must be the queen’s staff pictured in the paintings, Sita realized. Except if this was Queen Anet’s staff, it was missing an important element. Two, in fact.
I wonder what happened to them?
The silence was broken by a fearsome hiss. The sound was very loud and very close.
Sita froze. She scanned the room, seeking its source.
Then she saw them—two cobras, slithering toward her from either side of the sarcophagus. One was a deep wine color with a black band across its throat, and the other was entirely black. They moved toward her in silent, sinuous harmony, each one asthick as her arm and four times as long.
Sita watched them, transfixed. She knew she should back away, but she couldn’t move. The snakes raised up their heads until a full third of their bodies had lifted off the ground, and their hoods spread wide.
She broke into a cold sweat as the red cobra slithered before her, so close she could see the firelight reflected in its eyes. It tasted the air with its forked tongue.
Flick.
Flick.
Sita stared, afraid to look away.
She blinked, and the cobra lunged, though it was so fast she swore she’d imagined it.
She felt a tingle at her wrist. Without moving her head, she glanced down at her bare arm. Two puncture wounds, small and clean, dotted her skin.
Nebet’s constant warning filled Sita’s mind.The serpent’s kiss is as quick as lightning—and just as deadly.
