The Egyptian Job

As the drooping sun started to sink into the horizon, the sand shifted from golden blonde to earthy dark, the distant crags and rocky rises turned nearly the color of watermelon, and Lara was **** to tuck her sunhat down closer to her eyes. Walking toward the setting sun in a wavering pattern across the dunes, the pathway she was leaving in the sand probably looked like an artifact of a madwoman. Wavering lines that often came close to crossing but never did, like a sort of imprecise plaid. Random breaks and lurches like she was trying to avoid attracting the worm. It wasn’t even so precise that she was discernibly combing, though every once in a while, a pinpoint divot was dug into the sand near her path.

Lara took another dozen or so steps, stabbed her walking stick into the ground, and leaned on it. She twisted it and furrowed it in, waiting for any serious kind of resistance. Instead, it drove grittily into the sand until it became too packed to penetrate. Finally, she sighed and flopped down, letting her walking stick fall beside her and pulling her PDA from her khaki shorts.

“Hello, mum?” Winston’s voice sounded a little tinny on the other end. They weren’t even that far away from each other, geographically. She was just out in the middle of nowhere.

“I’ve told you not to call me that,” Lara responded sharply. “I’m not your mother, I’m not your teacher, and I’m not the Queen.”

“You are my boss, mum,” Winston replied dryly. “You didn’t call just to hear my voice, did you?”

“You joke, but I’m not entirely sure.” Lara sat up. “I’ll most likely be headed home soon, thought I’d call and give you some warning.”

“Some warning, mum?” Winston asked reedily.

“To hide all of the evidence of the tremendous party you must have thrown in my absence.” Lara paused for a moment, then stood up. There was a decent little hillside where she could pitch her tent. “I know I said I’d be gone a while, but I’m really not sure I can stand much more time here.”

“You lack your father’s fortitude for the desert,” Winston teased. “Though I’m not sure even most of the people who live there would share it.”

“I’ve spent several days following an only half-credible lead based on borders that were outdated during the fall of West Rome.” Lara trudged up the hill. “In the meantime, my clothes have become so lousy with grit that I’d do just about anything to get these shorts off of me.”

“I’m sure many men would feel the same way.“ Winston sounded like he was in the middle of something.

“I don’t make a habit of seeking out casual hookups in certain countries. Call it one part cultural respect, three parts caution.” Lara tossed her pack down at the top of the hill and leaned back against a rock. “I didn’t catch you about to go to bed, did I?”

“No mum, even turning in as early as I do, Egypt time still puts you two hours ahead.” Winston still sounded busy. “Though, should you need anything in a few hours, you may be out of luck.”

“I’ll be sure to call you if I find a scorpion in my tent.” Lara sighed.

Winston let the sigh sit for a few seconds, and Lara closed her eyes and took in a slow breath of the stiff, hot air. For a moment, it sounded like they were both considering saying something genuinely sappy. Then Winston’s perpetual stiff upper lip won out.

“Look on the bright side, mum,” Winston cleared his throat. “I’d have to assume your tan is looking marvelous.”

“Oh, never better.” Lara folded her hands in her lap. “And several parts of me have been sanded so smooth that I’m positively radiant. Chafed beyond description, but radiant.”

“Silver linings, then.” Winston agreed without agreeing. “Let nobody say the trip was for nothing.”

“Just mostly nothing,” Lara fidgeted with her fingers nervously. “You know how I feel about unfinished business.”

“I believe you expressed similar sentiments toward telemarketers and the French, mum.” Winston tried to sound cheery. “But this would hardly be the first time you’ve been lured somewhere on shaky claims.”

“Oh yes,” Lara groaned. “I get emails about practically every stone that gets turned over in the Valley of Kings. Some of them even have things under them.”

“This is still the same case, then?” Winston asked. “I rarely get the whole story when you’re on the way out.”

“That would be the one.” Lara eyed her pack, where a pair of conspicuously-shaped lumps bulged against the material. “Two mystical objects found in fairly close proximity, said to do magic when put together. The first I found ten years ago, the second five, the third rumored to be in Egypt, and here I am still searching. I’ve even gone past my usual cutoff point, I normally say anything past ten years I’m unlikely to find.”

“Are you sure you properly checked the room with the other two?” Winston managed to sound completely placid.

“Very funny,” Lara replied just as dryly.

“And you’re sure this isn’t one of those artifacts that summons nasty beastlies when you put it together?” Winston shrugged it off. “It seems like a lot of them do that.”

“Most of them do that.” Lara corrected. “But Min is the god of the harvest and fertility - male fertility, that is - so I’m not sure why his artifact would summon something ghastly. That said, if it does something amazing when I put it together, that’s in my interest. If it summons monsters, that’s in my business.”

“You have your father’s determination,” Winston sounded like he wasn’t happy about that fact.

“And right now, I also have his blisters.” Lara winced slightly as she moved to stand up again. “And I can’t imagine a night in my tent is going to help that.”

“You’re not going back to the hotel, mum?” Winston asked. “I thought the tent was only for if you had to.”

“I refuse to leave half-cocked,” Lara grimaced. “I’m going to set up out here for tonight, run myself ragged giving this the proper elbow grease and seeing-too, then I’ll sleep off the debt on the flight back.”

“You’re being terribly unkind to yourself, mum,” Winston didn’t try to stop her, just suggested gently.

“I think, to an extent,” Lara swallowed heavily and sighed, “This feels like the last time I’m going to follow one of these leads. This is the best one I’ve had in years. If I’m going to give up this trail, I may as well say I did what I could.”

“As you say, mum,” Winston’s voice didn’t change. She couldn’t tell if he stoically approved of her idea to stop chasing this particular wild goose, or if he was utterly stoically certain that she’d be back. “Beats sleeping in the desert, I suppose.”

“Getting dragged across concrete might beat sleeping in the desert,” Lara groaned and looked at her pack. She was still going to want to set up her tent at some point, even if she didn’t catch a single wink in it. “Goodnight, Winston.”

“Goodnight, mum,” Winston responded sharply, then added more softly, “Here’s to better luck in the future, near and far.”

“Thank you,” Lara made a gesture like she was toasting and cut off the connection.

It took about twenty seconds after closing the line and slipping the PDA back into her pocket for Lara to no longer be able to stand the vast silence of the desert around her. The wind was still, the sky was clear and darkening. She could already feel that first bitter chill to the air that suggested the brutal heat was going to turn into a far more brutal cold. Regardless if she tried to sleep through it or to work through it, it was going to be an awful, long night.

Regardless, she got to work because somebody had to. She didn’t exactly have the spirits to hum while she worked, but she did at least occasionally grumble. First she rolled out a thermal sheet that would make for the base of her tent, then she grabbed the pegs and started to drive them into the holes in each corner. Which is when she heard the clack.

Lara grimaced and dug out a divot with her hand where she’d been trying to push the stake, but the rock just seemed to keep growing and growing. The smart thing to do would have been to shift the blanket’s position slightly, but perhaps out of bitter stubbornness, she kept digging and digging. She was fully content to take out her frustrations on some stone that had spent millions of years making the trek down from some mountain or up from some sea - by tossing it down a hill and potentially undoing several thousand years of rock progress. But the more she uncovered, the more she realized she wasn’t even going to get that small victory. It was perfectly flat up top, but the more she dug, the more the rock seemed to grow outward.

Then, at a certain point, she blinked. The divots on it weren’t random. She’d been staring so hard and so angrily at the forest she’d missed the trees.

Or, moreover, she’d missed a mixture of hieroglyphics, both ones she recognized and ones she didn’t. The former weren’t too special, she was probably the most literate person in them to not have a degree. The latter were very special. Very, very, very special. She whipped her PDA back out so fast she nearly dropped it.

“Winston, I need a translation,” She didn’t wait for him to say anything before barking down his ear.

“By the urgency in your voice, I’d assume some truth to the age-old adage about the best method of finding something being to stop looking for it?” He responded casually.

“Don’t be glib, I have a combination I’m sending you.” Lara snapped a picture of some of the hieroglyphs. She hit send, then watched the upload bar start to fill very slowly. “Or will send you, when the bloody connection out here allows.”

“I’ll stay on the line, mum,” Winston said, though Lara could hear him moving to another room - likely to find a dictionary, “What parts of it do you recognize?”

“I recognize true and gods,” Lara started to dig with her hands again for a moment before catching herself and grabbing the folding shovel from her pack. “And considering how large and flat what they’re written on is, I’d say I’ve either found a warning or a promise.”

“So often, it’s both,” Winston muttered on the other end.

Lara dug frantically, though she kept stopping every few seconds to look over at the PDA. Her upload was creeping along slowly enough that she managed to find one of the corners of the stone before it was finished. Then she traced that line both ways with her shovel until she’d marked out an edge roughly rectangular, twice as tall as it was wide and wide enough that she couldn’t have wrapped her arms around it. She did her absolute best to widen the trench around the edges, then shove the dirt as quickly as possible into the gap. Around the same time she fully uncovered the face of it. For as large as it was, there actually weren’t nearly as many hieroglyphs on it as she might have thought. It had been more than a little lucky for her to start by uncovering the part she did. If she had set her stake further down, or started digging in a different direction, she might have assumed it was just a really big rock and given up.

“I’ve just gotten it now.” Winston mumbled, clearly checking the picture rapidly against his book. “Hold on, my eyes aren’t quite so fast as-”

“Couldn’t you send it to Alister or Zip for machine translation?” Lara asked, both impatient and slightly out of breath.

“One problem with that, mum,” Winston’s voice suddenly seemed annoyingly slow. She was on a borderline high from this. “It seems like an old kingdom inscription that has been added onto. The newer glyphs are mostly the names of gods; likely a list they updated as they went along. From what I understand, our machine translator doesn’t have a full dialogue of old kingdom hieroglyphs, and even the ones it has - you know how the machines are with names and things that don’t only translate one way.”

“Give it to the machine anyway,” Lara huffed and went back to digging, this time trying to clear about an inch around each side. “There are really only three to four names I’m looking for. An exact translation can wait.”

“Alright,” Winston sighed, she could still hear him flipping through the book. “Oh, I’ve found at least one of the characters. The first two words of the topmost inscription are… True.. Valley.”

“True Valley, and Gods is also in there,” Lara could feel her heartbeat picking up. It was taking everything in her power not to bark excitedly and urge him to go faster. “It’s the middle ones that I really need translations of. If, instead of ‘of the’, they mean something like ‘in the shadow of’, I’m going to lose my mind.”

“I don’t want to burst your bubble, but that seems like an awful number of characters for ‘of the’.” Winston questioned.

“Ancient Egyptian - even the late period - was both an efficient and inefficient language.” Lara let herself prattle as she dug. “Phonetically, you read most of them as nothing but consonants, like you have your mouth full. Min, for example - the one with the flail and the stiffy - you would read as Mn or Mnw.”

“I believe the gentleman in question is about midway down the slab,” Winston replied casually.

Lara did a double-take and immediately craned to look over the slab. She had missed him initially, but there he indeed was. His usual distinct mix of color was lost to time, but she could make out everything from the tall headdress to the flail to… well… the aforementioned erection. There was a desire to kick herself for missing him, but considering she was only getting more amped up, it was hard to feel anything remotely negative.

“It’s pretty remarkable to see him that far down the list,” Lara tried to keep a steady rhythm to her digging and keep talking. “You know what that means?”

“They feared upsetting at least seven other gods more?” Winston mused.

“Assuming it is chronological, and most evidence points to that, it means he was a fairly late addition.” Lara explained with excitement. “And Min’s origins go back to the predynastic period. This might very well be ancient even beyond what we’re used to seeing in Egypt.”

Lara kept scooping, more frantically now, at one side of the slab. It went down a few inches before a seam, which either meant it was the top of some pretty massive segmented thing, or more likely…

“While I can certainly appreciate the magnitude of the discovery for archeology,” Winston sounded doubtful, “I don’t suspect it would have you in such a tizzy to find a large, previously undiscovered slab.”

Lara kept digging and down the one side until, finally, her shovel hit more stone. She quickly scraped out a small patch until she had revealed what looked like a paved path, and with the slab resting on top of a raised lip, with only the one slight seam. Grabbing her PDA, she took another picture, this time a side-view of the now-exposed uprising, and sent it.

“Right, but when is a door not a door?” She asked merrily before she started digging out the rest of the area surrounding the slab.

“When it is a jar?” Winston asked in confusion, then a moment later the image finished sending, “Or a slab.”

“If there’s nothing underneath it and I’m just descrating history, I’ll be sorely disappointed.” Lara’s hands and back were starting to ache, but she couldn’t stop now.

“To say nothing of UNESCO.” Winston audibly set his book down. “How exactly do you intend to move a thing of such size?”

“The same way they built Stonehenge, same way they built most everything.” Lara started rooting in her pack. “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum to put it on, and I shall move the world.”

“Should you fail to find either, please do try not to damage it.” Winston sounded exasperated.

Lara ignored his comments as she circled around the slab, looking for any point where time and sand had been meaner to the seam than the rest. There were a couple of pebble-sized wears, one or two larger that were closer to the center, but Lara settled on one of the smaller ones about two-thirds of the way down the seam. She took her hammer and one of the tent pegs, then - with a quick prayer of apology to whoever was concerned - started to knock the peg into the divot. She wasn’t pounding, she was making slow and steady strikes so as not to break the peg.

“Why does it sound like you’ve ignored me and immediately started damaging the historical site?” Winston could be heard wincing on the other end of the line.

“I’m doing my best not to damage the slab in any way,” Lara muttered under her breath, watching small clouds of dust leak out from under the peg. “However, the stone structure it stands on will need to take… a bit of damage.”

“I’ll trust you to use your best discretion,” Winston sounded like he didn’t trust her at all.

“On the topic of my discretion, you’re probably safe to turn in.” Lara wiped her forehead. Despite the increasing chill, squatting in one place for too long was starting to take its toll.

“I’ll keep the phone on my nightstand, then?” He almost sounded glad to not have to listen to her chiseling a historical relic. “Do try to find whatever it is under that slab within the next hour or two, I shouldn’t be too fast asleep by then.”

“Hopefully, I’ll be so dwarfed by wonders underneath that I don’t even think to call you until tomorrow.” Lara shot back sarcastically, then added a slightly apologetic. “Goodnight, Winston.”

He disconnected the line and let her back to work. For the next several minutes, she tick-tick-ticked away at the problem in front of her slowly. It took a tremendous amount of patience to keep the pace she was, but she’d learned the hard way more than once what results pounding away with improper tools could get you. Eventually, she had worked enough of a hole that she tried jamming her prybar in and shifting the slab. No dice. The thing probably weighed close to a tonne.

Instead, Lara went back to steadily tapping until the tent peg slid through to the other side. Fortunately the chimney wasn’t thick brick, and fortunately it was also old and well-dried sandstone. Brittle enough that she probably could have rubbed her thumb against the bricks and gotten through eventually. She tied a rope around the peg and moved to the other side of the slab, found the point roughly across from the first, and started again with a new peg. By the time she was done - and could look through from one side to the other - she was looking out at a field of starry sky. She was shivering just a bit, but still far too excited to cool down.

Taking one of the thin poles of her tent and looping it into a rope, she tried passing the stick through both holes. She failed a few times, another part of this she was used to. There was just no good way to do this. No multitool they made for grave robbing, tomb raiding, cave exploring, and monster fighting. When she got the rope through, she tied a slip knot over the top of the slab, then clambered up onto the dune she’d helped create. Tying a pair of cow hitches about an arm’s length apart on her prybar, she drove one end down into the sand and heaved with all her might.

The slab moved about a centimeter. It was nothing, but it felt like the best nothing of her life.

By the time it had moved enough to reveal even a finger-width look down into the darkness below, she had worked up a serious sweat and wanted very badly to quit. But looking down into the inky blackness below kept her from stopping. She resisted the urge to shine a light down and look, it would be too easy to spoil any good surprise or dissuade herself from any poor one. With a bit of leverage now, it was easier going. She could use her pry bar on the stone - though that dislodged part of the chimney more readily than it did the slab. Even that was ultimately helpful, if bad for UNESCO.

There was some barmy American bastard who had tried to rebuild Stonehenge once using nothing but his years of construction experience and what he had lying around. The trick was, with the big stones, if you had the right leverage on them, they moved like nothing. She hadn’t had the right leverage on them before, and she only barely had it now, but she was increasingly able to work grit under the slab and wet the stone around it. It started to more audibly grind as it moved, it started to teeter more, but most of all it just plain started to move more.

Then, with a mixture of groaning, grating, and crumbling; the remaining bits of the chimney collapsed under the weight of the slab and topped it outward into the trench Lara had dug around it. A couple wayward bricks toppled inward and knocked into the depths below, the slab cracked audibly in a way that made her wince. The ground shook for a moment, but then all was still. It didn’t collapse under her feet, it didn’t form a great vortex of sand and angry divinity, and she didn’t suddenly feel more cursed than before. Lara breathed a sigh of relief. She **** herself to pause just long enough to check the slab where it lay. The crack had missed the names of any gods by a matter of millimeters. A sigh of relief pushed out of her lips without her meaning to. She was in the clear. If anybody asked, it had been like that when she got here.

She tied her personal rope to where the first was still wrapped around the slab, then gave it a few enthusiastic yanks and jerks to be sure. Nothing soured a fresh discovery faster than realizing one of your knots (or your point of placement) were bad the hard way. When she felt reasonably comfortable with them, she grabbed her pocket light and shone it down. The door had been placed almost perfectly in the center of a space between rows of sarcophagi and tombs. As she eased herself into the hole and down into the dark below, she tried her best to keep from going too fast.

As she went, the room seemed to balloon on outward and outward into the vast underground dark. It was sheltered from the chill above - and from the sand - likely by magic. A dry, airy stillness of stagnant air with only the slightest draft coming from her entrance above. It seemed to be the antechamber at the center of a great underground grid, a stone vault arching up to a point where the dim light of the stars shone down. Great walls like a cathedral rising from the stones of the floor. All a dull yellow-brown like beach sand, glittering with little bits of crushed crystalline. And about the walls were statues. Some massive, some meager. Some still proud and tall, some broken beyond recognition. Some whose names had been lost to time, some she could recognize at a glance. To her dismay, it seemed like any gold was long since gone. Anubis was missing his flail. Ra’s sun disk was a gritty brown stone. But the closer to the ground she got, the more she realized how much dust coated the whole of the room.

Dust meant one of a few things. It was fibrous, it couldn’t come from sand and stone. It meant hair, or skin, or pollen, or wet soil. As she set foot on the ground, a ring of torches around the cavernous room all came to life at the same moment, making her heart skip a beat. Either this place was built on a series of carefully-maintained illusions, or it was teeming with life. No matter which it was, she wasn’t alone.

The coffins and sarcophagi extended out down the halls in the four cardinal directions as far as the light allowed her to see. The further away they got, the nicer. A lot of temples were sanctified with sacrifices. She wondered if the ladder hadn’t simply been pulled up when the worst of the work was done, leaving whatever priests and workers down there inside to file into their coffins and accept their economy-class passage to the underworld.

Lara glanced around the room almost frantically, running her hand along one of the sarcophagi as she looked at the various godly statues. To say she was like a kid in a candy store wouldn’t have been accurate, since most of the candy boxes don’t also have a chance to kill you painfully. That said, her heart was still thudding in her ears, her hands were still shaking.

When she looked down at the trail her hand had left in the dust on one of the less-nice coffins, she realized in horror that even they were decorated with golden filigree, just sparingly and under a thick coat of dust. Her heart skipped a beat. That meant anything in the room - Ra’s disc, Horus’s pschent - could all be solid gold. And the statues of the more well-known gods were over ten feet tall. Some of them twice that. Not only was this one of the most important finds in the history of archeology, there was a chance it would be the most lucrative.

Steadying herself, Lara **** a deep breath through her nose. She could let herself get distracted, go for whatever god suited her fancy, or she could focus in on the one she was here for (wherever he was) and be an adult about this.