Is this truly you? Shirin felt sick. Not the friend, the gentle lover I thought you were?
The Khazar woman was no stranger to violence-she had killed, to protect herself-but this casual willingness to maim, or kill, turned her blood cold. I should turn away, and leave all of this behind-Persians and Romans alike… But she did not and continued to watch from the darkness.
"Kleopatra, seventh of that name." Sheshet's lips compressed and she began to radiate an encompassing sense of delighted satisfaction. "I knew immediately, as soon as I read the beginning of the invocation. Half-Greek, half-Egyptian, with the truncated spelling favored by the Ptolemies. Yes, the notorious, beloved Queen of the Two Lands broke into old Nemathapi's tomb and took away this device you're searching for. I've heard she liked trinkets. The older, the better."
Thyatis blinked. "But the Persians had already found his tomb… they were looking for hers?"
Sheshet nodded. Thyatis returned the knife to a sheath strapped to the inside of her arm. A tense knot swelled in her stomach. "Do you know…"
"…where Kleopatra's tomb is?" The curator shook her head slowly. "One of the great mysteries of Egypt, archer. Many men have looked, but no one has ever found her resting place."
"What about him?" Thyatis nodded towards Hecataeus' office. "What did he tell the Persians?"
"Him?" Sheshet whistled derisively. "He couldn't tell them anything. He can read the old languages, but he spends his time looking for naughty stories or poetry to pass off as his own, not for anything useful!"
"Good…" Thyatis produced another coin. "If the Persians come back, we were never here. Agreed?"
"Of course." Sheshet accepted the coin. "Three volumes in one day-the end of a long drought for me."
"Thank you," Thyatis said in a heartfelt tone. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Nicholas standing in the hallway, looking for her. "Good day, Mistress Sheshet."
"Good day." The Egyptian woman watched, curls clouding her face again, as Thyatis strode away down the corridor. "Good riddance," she whispered, rubbing her eyelid where the point of the knife had left a small indentation in her skin. "Stupid barbarian!"
Then she considered the heavy gold in her hand and a perplexed expression flitted across her face. "That Persian didn't pay me so much before… but he might now!" Cheerful at the thought of more books of her own, the little librarian slipped off into the shadows between the pillars.
"We'll need camels," Nicholas said in a soft voice, as they walked casually down a long, granite ramp leading onto one of the triumphal avenues bisecting the city. "Workers, shovels, picks, levers. Maybe a sled if it's too heavy to carry on a single camel."
"The poet had something?" Thyatis kept a pace behind and to one side, as a proper wife should. At the same time, she was ghoulishly amused; the position gave her a clear strike at the man's neck simply by lifting her arm.
"A fragment of a traveler's account-a lonely tomb in the desert, revealed by a passing sandstorm. The sealed door bore the stamp of the Ptolemies-and all the other tombs are accounted for-all save one… the last one."
"The notoriously famous Kleopatra," Thyatis said, pretending mild surprise. "How romantic. You think the account is real? Hecataeus didn't strike me as being reliable…"
"He isn't." Nicholas grinned over his shoulder at her. "He's careless. Someone else had gotten to him first, asking the same questions. Guess who?"
"The Persians," Thyatis replied, feeling her neck prickle. She kept walking, listening with half her attention to Nicholas. Someone watching us? The feeling was very strong. Someone I know? It was an effort to keep from turning abruptly and staring. The avenue was crowded, with shrill chanting peddlers standing on the elevated bases of obelisks marching down the center of the thoroughfare. Wagons rumbled past, dogs barked furiously in the alleys, merchants were shouting from the storefronts. Every scrap of pavement was covered with rugs laden with trinkets, little statues, gewgaws, "real rubies from Serica," pens of chickens and goats. Thyatis let her eyes lose focus, her breathing slow to match her pace.
"The Persians," Nicholas continued with grim humor, barely audible above the din. "They braced him about Nemathapi before, but he couldn't help. This time they brought some scratchings from a tomb they found down in Saqqara. Now they were looking for Kleopatra's treasure, thinking something 'like a wheel' would be hidden there. Well, he had no idea where the tomb might be and he told them so. They weren't pleased, but went on to the next antiquarian on their list."
A familiar silhouette darting through the crowd drew her attention and Thyatis blinked, focusing, and saw the little librarian moving swiftly through traffic on the other side of the boulevard. The little woman dodged behind a phalanx of chanting monks wreathed in incense from swinging censers and carrying a bored-looking calico cat on a golden pillow. Thyatis squinted, rising up on tiptoe, but Sheshet had vanished behind a moving wall of silk umbrellas. When the procession passed, there was no sign of the little Egyptian.
Off to buy those books already, Thyatis thought, shaking her head in amusement. The feeling of being watched lingered.
"Fortunately for us, the poet had a nose for profit," Nicholas continued, unaware of Thyatis bobbing up and down behind him like a giraffe in a tall stand of acanthus. "He started to apply himself, rummaging through the books and histories. Wanted to find the tomb himself, I'd wager, though he only had a hazy idea of what might be hidden there. I'd swear from the way he acted it was the first time he'd ever found anything in that mausoleum! He showed me the account-crabbed on the back of a lading document." The Latin patted his belt and Thyatis heard stiff paper rustle.
"How much did Hecataeus want for his fabulous discovery?"
Nicholas glanced sideways at the woman, a smirk dancing on his thin lips. "Not much," he said.
"What do you mean?" Thyatis picked up her pace. "How much did you give him to keep his mouth shut?"
Nicholas laughed sharply and the Roman woman raised an eyebrow at the ugly sound.
"He gave me his back," he said softly, "and I paid him in steel-five inches tempered-right at the base of the skull."
Thyatis felt a peculiar sense of dislocation, as if she walked beside the Latin soldier and also looked down upon him from a height. She felt dizzy for a moment, then the sensation passed. "What did you do with the body?" her mouth asked automatically.
"Wrapped in a robe and out the window into the garden behind a hedge." The corners of Nicholas' eyes crinkled up as if he laughed, or smiled, but nothing humorous shone in his face. "Anyone who happens to see him will think he's asleep. At least, until he starts to smell."
"We'll have the money for your camels and workers, then." The queer double vision passed and Thyatis felt herself whole and chilled by the man's careless, offhand murder. His action reminded her too much of her own threat to the little librarian and she felt a little ill. Her thoughts spun for a moment, then settled. The poet can't have found the real sepulcher. Can he? The prospect seemed remote. "Good. How far away is the tomb?"
"Not far," Nicholas said, sounding eager. "The merchant was traveling on the western shore of Lake Mareotis, on his way to the coast with a string of camels. When the storm had passed, he walked for a day northeast to reach the village of Taposiris, which is only a day's ride west of the city. But we can reach the area faster by crossing the lake with a barge."