“More traps?” Shushu asked. The Egyptian guard had been silent for most of their march, but the threat of death clearly focused his attention, and he, too, had apparently guessed the reason for their many time-consuming pauses along the way.
Hannah nodded, then began walking down the passageway on the left. Everyone hurried to catch up.
The passage they followed continued on for perhaps twenty paces, then bent right before turning left again. Ahead, a heavy wooden door loomed in the dark, crossed over with thick iron. For a few seconds they all stared at it, as if surprised to find such a structure in the old passageway. Caesarion could see even from a few paces away that the door was tightly sealed in the frame, with thick bulges of tar pressed into its gaps. He wondered if it was so well sealed that it cut off the air beyond it. Would they open it and enter the Ark chamber breathing the same air as those of its guardians who placed it there so long ago?
To his surprise, Hannah approached not the door, but the wall that he presumed was the western side of the corridor. Reaching out beneath her lantern, she began to run her fingers across the stone, gently rubbing it until, a few silent moments later, she appeared to find what she was looking for and leaned forward, pursing her lips to blow. A fan of dust puffed out of a hidden crack, and she alternatively brushed it back and blew at the seam.
After a minute, Jacob gasped. “There,” Hannah said. “I think this is it.”
Caesarion saw that she’d revealed a sliver of stone that pulled away. Beneath it was an indentation in the rock that appeared as if it could be used for a handle for a hidden door. “You’ve never been here before?”
Her gaze flicked up to meet his, excitement dancing in her eyes. “No. My mother was the last to enter. But she told me the secrets before she died. And this seems to be about the right place for Schedia, don’t you think?” she asked.
Caesarion didn’t know what she meant, but he nodded just the same. Hannah’s dark eyes found his and her smile seemed to widen. Amused. Perhaps impressed. It was, he thought, the most remarkable thing he’d ever seen.
“Pullo,” Hannah asked, turning in his direction, “would you mind helping here?”
The big man grinned, seemingly glad to be doing something he knew how to do. Handing his lantern to one of the other men, he stepped up to the rock handle that she had exposed and gripped it. After Hannah gave him an encouraging nod, he began to pull.
Pullo strained, gritting his teeth. His thick arms bulged, the veins wrapped round them standing out like tightening ropes. His jaw clenched, and sweat appeared among the thinning gray hairs atop his forehead.
At last, the hidden door began to pull outward. It came slowly at first, groaning as stone rubbed on stone, but then it opened faster as momentum shifted in Pullo’s favor. Little tendrils of dust misted down from its edges, scattering on the floor.
Hannah held a lantern through as soon as there was room. “It goes on,” she said, barely able to contain her thrill. “I see steps.”
Pullo pulled the door open far enough that even he could get through, then stopped. He was panting, his arms looking loose and tired, but he was smiling proudly. Caesarion patted him on the back. “Well done, my friend,” he said.
“Thank you, sir,” said Pullo. Then he retrieved his own lantern and motioned for Caesarion to follow Hannah and Jacob through the door. Only when everyone was through did the big man pull the door shut behind them. It swung more easily now.
The passage beyond was, as Hannah had seen, very short, quickly encountering a flight of stone stairs that reached up into the darkness. They crept up the steps almost reverently.
“There are no seams,” Pullo whispered. “No tool marks. Nothing.”
Caesarion looked around. The walls, the ceiling, even the floor—everything was perfectly smooth, yet it appeared to be natural, without signs of the workings of men.
“The power of the Shard,” Jacob said in wonderment. “The Ark controls earth above all other things, just as the Trident controls water. This was built by its power. We must be very close.”
As he spoke, they reached the end of the stairs, their lantern lights pushing back the darkness of a chamber that appeared to be a perfect, featureless cube, perhaps a dozen paces on a side. In the middle of it, set high upon a three-tiered dais and glinting the light of their feeble oil lamps back to them in shimmers, stood the Ark.
Caesarion had read the stories of the Ark, but whatever his expectations were upon actually seeing it, they were surpassed by the reality before him. The Ark sat broad to them, its acacia-wood sides—angled ever-so-slightly inward from the base to the gold-trimmed top—gleamed as if freshly polished, covered over with ornate twists of metallic vines and leaves. At the center of the side facing them was the very same symbol that was upon the pendants of the guardians: a triangle, pointed downward like a flipped pyramid, set atop a perfect circle cut through by a horizontal line across its bottom third. On each end of its top sat two small statues, one wrought of silver and the other of what appeared to be the same clean gold: elegant beings that knelt facing each other, heads bowed in reverence, the wings sprung from their backs stretched out, feathered tips straining to touch over what appeared to be a black disk beneath them. To Caesarion’s eyes they appeared Egyptian in design, embodiments of the goddess Maat. From where he stood their closer wings were lowered, the back ones raised, as if they meant to frame something in the empty space above the Ark—as if, he thought on reflection, they were offering a seat between them.
Hannah, Jacob, and the other guardians instinctively knelt. Caesarion followed suit, and he saw out of the corner of his eye that even Pullo did the same. Bowing his head, Jacob began to chant in a language Caesarion did not know, his voice smooth and strong in devotion. The rest of the guardians joined in his song, a building pulse of ancient and worshipful humility whose power Caesarion could recognize even if he didn’t know the words behind it. He closed his eyes and let the chant flow through him like a low hum in his chest. A small, absent part of him noted how right it all felt at this moment, as if it tapped into some vestigial part of his own being that had always been there even though he’d known it not, while the greater part of him just swam away on the rising tide of the sound, unthinking of anything but this moment of prayer and the vast, unfathomable power of the One God.
Only when the last note was done did he open his eyes and see that Shushu had not bowed with the rest of them. He’d instead walked forward and mounted the three steps of the dais, moving around the Ark to stand behind it, facing them, his hands reaching out as if he might embrace the twin beings on its top.
Caesarion shouted at him to stop, but it was too late. Smiling, Shushu gripped the Ark and closed his eyes.
For a moment nothing happened. The guardians remained kneeling, though Caesarion could see that Hannah and Jacob were looking up, watching the Egyptian. Pullo stood as if he might run forward and pull the guard down off the dais, but then he stopped and stared as Shushu began to tremble and shake. His eyes opened, wide in shock, and his face suddenly twisted in voiceless agony. Trickles of red appeared at the corners of his mouth.
Caesarion felt something like a cold wind pulling toward the Ark, and it roused him at last to shake himself from his own paralysis and stand, thinking he might pull Shushu’s hands away. Yet even as he stood there was a muted but terrible popping that reminded him, with sickening revulsion, of the sound of a ripe grape being crushed between fingers. The Egyptian’s eyes rolled, bulged, and darkened toward black. He vomited a rush of bright blood. Then, before Caesarion could take a step, Shushu was flung back off the Ark with a resounding boom that Caesarion felt in his chest. The Egyptian flew through the air in a blur, striking the far wall of the stone chamber with the sound of shattering twigs before collapsing to the floor in a boneless heap.