Heretic of the Nile

011

The first thing that struck Mereneith when she gained consciousness was how cold it was. She trembled as a slight draught tickled her arms and neck, and then she sneezed.

"Ah!" She winced when the sneeze triggered a searing pain through her entire back, reminding her of the arrow she had taken to the shoulder. The arrow that should have been protruding from her left shoulder was gone though, replaced instead by a messily-wrapped bandage made from a strip of linen, presumably courtesy of her sole companion.

"Thank the gods! You're awake!" Kha's face appeared in front of her, a mixture of anxiety and relief in his eyes. He held out a scrap of fabric and dabbed the sweat from her brow. "How are you feeling? Does it still hurt a lot?"

"What do you think?" Mereneith grumbled. She looked around at the dimly lit surroundings, her vision slowly clearing. "Where are we? How long have I been out?"

She was sitting on the ground, propped up against the stone wall of a massive, cavernous space. The only source of light came from a tiny Ak'heka crystal that Kha was holding in his hand. There were sombre statues of Osiris sitting in carved niches along the sides of the cavern's walls, and the walls themselves were writhing with inscriptions. On the far end, it looked as though there were shelves chiselled out of the stone, upon which stacks of large blocks were layered one above the other.

"Honestly, I don't know. We're underground so I have no idea how much time has passed. I think we're inside one of the burial chambers that lie beneath the temple complex."

"A burial chamber?"

Mereneith hauled herself up to her feet with much difficulty, using the wall to support her weight.

"Where are you going?" Kha asked, looking surprised.

"We have to get out of here, don't we?"

Seeing as they had already been down here for some time, Mereneith concluded that they were safe from the men who had been chasing after them. But they couldn't stay here forever, unless they wanted to become the tomb's latest inhabitants.

She walked over to the other side of the cavern, gasping when she realised what it was that populated the series of stone shelves.

Sarcophagi.

Dozens and dozens of them lined up next to each other and stacked to the high heavens, as if they were mere kitchen wares.

At the base of the shelves sat hundreds of tiny ushabti, the lifelike eyes of the sculptures staring back at her as if they could lift their lips at any moment and begin speaking.

She said a silent prayer to the souls of the deceased, bidding them Anubis's blessing and a safe journey through the afterlife.

"Servants of the royal palace, judging from the inscriptions on these shelves," Kha remarked. "I wonder how many of them were still alive when they were sealed in these sarcophagi. I hear some of the old kings were quite cruel in that way." He shuddered. "Wait, do you hear something? It sounds like someone's scratching against the stone—from the inside..."

Mereneith spun around and shot him a glare, then she slapped him across the head. "Stop it!" she chided. "Don't you know it's disrespectful to the dead to be cracking these jokes?"

Moving away from the wall of corpses, she quickly surveyed the cavern for exits.

"We came down this one," Kha offered, pointing at a narrow doorway.

"Are you sure those people aren't still waiting for us up there?"

Kha hesitated for a moment, then gestured towards two other alternatives. "I only spotted those other two while you were knocked out. It can be quite a maze in these tombs, but we'll probably find another way out if we take either one. Tomb architects usually design several entrances to make it quicker to move things in."