The two men slapped hands in victory and laughed. Then they frowned down upon the corpse at their feet.

“Now what?” said Pankh.

Renifer stepped forward, startling her father and her beloved, who whirled to see who was there. Father gripped a bloody dagger and Pankh tightened his fist around his own knife.

They had forgotten she existed at all, let alone that she was witness to this carnage. For one terrible moment, she thought herself in danger from the two men she loved most.

She saw now a rectangular opening in the chapel floor. Three paving stones had been lifted aside to reveal a great black shaft: the entrance to Hetepheres' tomb. It should be entirely filled with rubble—thirty feet down, all sand and rock. If the shaft was empty, then the queen's tomb had been emptied by robbers. No doubt the space below contained little of value now. The three dead policemen had walked in on the robbery.

And now her thoughts spun all too fast. Renifer felt as if she were drowning in the Nile. Mud-brown water silted up her heart. “You are tomb robbers,” whispered Renifer. “It was you they caught.”

Her father shrugged. “I have always been a tomb robber, my daughter. And your uncle with me. And Pankh.”

“No! It cannot be! Father, I cannot believe it of you!”

Her father snorted. “You know perfectly well we live beyond the means of any controller of the Nile. You are the one yearning for gold. You and your mother insist on necklaces here and bracelets there. You are the ones for whom five servants are not enough; no, you must have fifteen,” he snapped.

She thought of the chests of gold at home, all those jewels fit for a queen. The Sekhmet fit for a Pharaoh. Indeed. To a Pharaoh and a queen had they once belonged.

“I regret you are here, my love,” said Pankh, “but since you are, you will participate.”

In murder? thought Renifer. Never. She stared in loathing at their blood-flecked chests and arms.

“So far we are safe,” said Pankh. “Easy lies will get us out of this. We say we are the ones who caught robbers in the act. Regrettably, they escaped, having first murdered three brave and true protectors of the queen's chapel.”

Pankh and Pen-Meru laughed.

They had slain three loyal men of Pharaoh's and found it funny? Renifer felt as if she had been thrown into a sewage ditch. She could never be cleansed of the evil her father had done.

“I think, Pankh, we should say that you and I captured the actual robbers,” said Pen-Meru. “They are being tortured even now, and dispatched to the Land in the West.”

“What if He asks to see the prisoners?” said Pankh. Pen-Meru shrugged. “We stake out a few peasants.” Renifer was appalled. “You would execute innocent men, pretending they robbed this tomb? But this is Egypt! Such things do not happen here.”