Logan stared at the double crown in Stone's hands. What was it Jennifer had said, during her final crossings? That which brings life to the dead ... and death to the living.

How could she possibly have known about that?

He cleared his throat. Something had just occurred to him--something he almost did not want to mention.

Stone glanced toward him, his hands still grasping the double crown. "Jeremy?"

Logan shrugged. "I can't help but wonder. If this device was an invention of Narmer's, for the pharaoh to use as a trial run for what he'd experience after the death of the physical body, a way of preparing himself for the next world ..." He stopped. All eyes were on him.

"Given the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians," he went on. "About the nature of the soul, I mean ... might they not have believed that such a device could release the soul, the life force, from the body--and in so doing, achieve instant immortality?"

The silence that followed this was interrupted by a harsh squawk. One of the security guards plucked a radio from his belt; spoke into it for a moment; listened to the reply, awash in static. Then he held the radio out toward Stone.

"Dr. Stone?" he said. "A message from the surface. They say it's important."

51.

Cory Landau sat in the Operations Center, feet up on one of the consoles, swigging from a twenty-four-ounce plastic bottle of Jolt Wild Grape. He'd recently finished reading The House on the Borderland and was now well and truly freaked out. His shift wouldn't end for another four hours; he'd brought nothing else to read; and the still, tomblike atmosphere of Operations was getting on his nerves. As a distraction, he'd begun running through video feeds from various locations around the Station, but things were depressingly quiet. There was a lot of activity at the Staging Area, but it consisted mostly of people monitoring various consoles or standing around the Maw. As for the tomb itself, the cameras had been turned off in chamber two--apparently at Porter Stone's request--so there was nothing to see down there, either. A few minutes earlier, there had been some excitement around the archaeology labs in Red, but that seemed to have settled down as well. Basically, the entire Station felt as if it was in a holding pattern, awaiting word from the party that had recently entered chamber three of the tomb.

He took another deep swig, sighed, twirled his Zapata mustache, and cycled through a fresh set of video feeds as if channel-surfing a television. He did not notice Jennifer Rush silently enter the Operations Center. He did not notice as she slowly approached a bank of consoles, then hesitated several moments, seemingly studying them. He did not notice when she lifted a red plastic protective shield on one of the consoles, then snapped the toggle switch beneath it from the on to the off position. He grew aware of her presence only when she turned from the console and, walking away, stumbled into a rack of diagnostic equipment, knocking some loose cabling to the floor.

"Whoa!" Landau said as he wheeled around, Jolt sloshing over his hand. Then he smiled as he recognized Jennifer, the doctor's wife. She was, he'd already discovered, a real babe, but standoffish, with a reserve that had always completely intimidated him. Oddly enough, she was dressed in a hospital gown, but Landau didn't mind--it was, he noticed, quite revealing.

"Hi, there," he said. "Your husband's down with the expedition team, isn't he? You here to watch the return of the conquering heroes? I've got the best seats in the house." And he gestured at an empty chair not far from his, overlooking the central bank of monitors.

Jennifer Rush didn't answer. Instead, she walked toward him, then past him, and then out the far door. She was cradling something in one of her hands.

At first, Landau a.s.sumed she was preoccupied, or just plain rude--he'd rarely seen her talk to anybody--rarely seen her, period. Then he'd noticed her opaque, cloudy eyes; her strange, shambling, almost robotic gait, as if the act of walking itself was a novelty.

As her form disappeared down the corridor, he nodded knowingly to himself. "Plastered," he murmured. Not that he blamed her--being stuck out here at the a.s.s end of nowhere was enough to start anybody drinking.

Jennifer Rush continued on slowly, a little unsteadily, past a series of conference rooms, until she stood before the barrier that gave onto the pontoon-supported access tube leading to Maroon. She turned and opened the final door before the barrier, a heavy hatch with a label that read POWER SUBSTATION--WHITE.

The interior was cramped, a forest of thick tubing and small, blinking lights. Along the far wall were rows of dials and gauges, and a technician stood before them, peering curiously at a few, while making notations on a clipboard. At the sound of the hatch opening, he turned. The light was dim, but the technician recognized the woman standing in the hatchway.

"Oh. h.e.l.lo, Mrs. Rush," he said. "Can I help you with something?"

Instead of answering, Jennifer Rush took a step inside. The faint lighting made her features indistinct.

"I'll be with you in a jiffy," the technician said. "Just let me finish inspecting these controls. It's my duty shift in Methane Processing, and a few seconds ago I started to get some weird error messages." He turned back to the gauges. "Almost as if the safety protocols had been disengaged. But that's impossible, you'd have to deliberately--"

Hearing another sound behind him, he turned back once again. Immediately, the smile on his face vanished, his expression turning to surprise and concern. Jennifer Rush had placed the items she was carrying on the floor, knelt over a bank of heavy valves, and was--once again, movements slow and awkward, but deliberate--turning one of them.

"Hey!" the technician said. "You can't do that--you're opening the emergency relief valve!"

Dropping his clipboard, he hurried over. Jennifer Rush did not protest when he gently propelled her to one side.

"You don't want to be doing that," he said, grasping the valve and preparing to close it again. "Open this, and we'd start venting concentrated methane throughout the crawl s.p.a.ce beneath this wing. It would only be a matter of minutes until--"

An explosive impact against the base of his neck--a sudden wave of pain--and then a concussive burst of light that filled his field of vision before giving way to oblivion.

Jennifer Rush watched as the technician crumpled to the metal floor of the substation. Then she dropped the wrench she'd picked up, bent over the relief valve, and once again began to slowly open it wide, turning, turning, turning....

52.

Logan watched as Porter Stone handed the radio back to the guard. The conversation had been brief; Stone himself had said fewer than a half-dozen words. As he'd listened to the voice on the radio, his face had initially gone deathly pale. But now--as he looked at each of the expedition members in turn--his face went dark, almost purple. His pupils retreated to mere glittering pinpoints. His gaze fastened at last on Tina Romero.

Suddenly, he stepped forward. "b.i.t.c.h!" he snapped, throwing one hand back in preparation for striking her. Immediately, Dr. Rush and Valentino rushed forward, restraining him.

"Idiot!" he cried, struggling to free himself. Romero took an instinctual step back.

Logan looked on in shock. It was as if all the setbacks and vicissitudes of this expedition--capped just now by the discovery that Narmer's crown was, in fact, completely unexpected and bizarre--had caused the normally dispa.s.sionate Stone to snap, to lash out in frustration and anger.

"Incompetent!" Stone shouted at the Egyptologist. "Thanks to you, all my effort, all my money--wasted! And now, there's no time.... No time!"

Logan came forward. "Dr. Stone, calm down," he said. "Just what exactly has happened?"

With an effort, Stone mastered himself. He freed himself from Rush and Valentino, who nevertheless stayed close.

"I'll tell you what's happened," he said, his breathing loud and ragged. "That was Amanda Richards on the horn. She was repairing the damage to Narmer's mummy--when she learned it wasn't Narmer, after all."

There was a moment of shocked silence.

"What do you mean--not Narmer?" Dr. Rush asked.

"That mummy was a woman. All this time, we've been working the wrong d.a.m.ned tomb." He looked back at Romero. "No wonder nothing's as it should be. You've led us to the wrong spot--a subsidiary tomb, for his queen, or--or a concubine! My G.o.d!" His hands balled into fists, and he seemed about to lash out once again. Rush and Valentino moved in still closer.

"Just a minute," Logan said. "There can't be any mistake. The seals, the inscriptions, the treasure--even the curse--everything indicates the resting place of a pharaoh. This has to be Narmer's tomb."

For a moment, n.o.body spoke. Stone struggled to get his breathing under control. "If this is Narmer's tomb," he said, "then where the h.e.l.l's his mummy?"

"Wait a minute," said Logan. "Just hold on a minute. Don't be so hasty--let's think this through." He turned to Tina Romero. "Haven't you said, all along, that there have been things in this tomb that didn't add up--that didn't make sense?"

She nodded. "Little things, mostly. I ascribed them to the fact this was the tomb of the first pharaoh; it was only natural that we'd find the unexpected. The later tradition hadn't yet been fully established."

"Excuses," Stone said. "Mere excuses, nothing more. You're just trying to explain away your stupidity."

Ignoring this, Romero turned toward Logan. "It first started when you mentioned that skull to me. The one you examined, the skull of one of Narmer's priests, ritually killed to protect the secrecy and sanct.i.ty of Narmer's tomb. Do you remember telling me that one of the eye sockets--the left--had scratches?"

Logan nodded.

"And that was just the first sign that something was amiss. The rest of the signs are right here, among us. The serekhs we found in the tomb's royal seals--the glyphs are Narmer's, but they aren't quite right. They have unusual features, like the feminine ending of niswt-biti. Then there are those inscriptions in chamber one, with the ritual sequences reversed, the gender wrong. And the glyphs on this chest, here, with the head of the catfish, Narmer's symbol, scratched out."

"You said it had been altered," Logan added. "Defaced."

"What are you getting at?" Stone growled.

"That mark in the eye socket of the priest's skull," Romero said. "I'd a.s.sumed it was just decay, damage over time. But the fact is, that was the ritual way a priest or priestess of a queen would be killed--a knife through the eye into the brain. That way, symbolically, the queen would not be viewed in death. At the tomb burial of a king, the priests were killed by a knife blow to the base of a skull, severing the spinal column."

"So this is the tomb of Narmer's queen," Stone said. "Niethotep. That's my whole d.a.m.n point! It's the wrong tomb!"

"No, no, you don't understand," Romero replied, a new urgency in her voice. "The evidence is conflicting. Everything about this tomb implies it was built for Narmer, following his royal instructions--except for those particular rituals that would be carried out after death. That's where the evidence becomes self-contradictory. The royal seals with the feminine flourishes. The final, ritualistic inscriptions--recall how I said they looked rude? And the mummy itself--I only got the briefest of chances to study it, but I noticed that the cut over the mouth was imprecise, incomplete."

"As if the actual burial ritual was rushed," Logan said.

A faint rumble, almost below the level of audibility, echoed through the chamber. The guards and several of the roustabouts glanced uneasily around at the supporting structure. But the sound appeared to have come from the surface, down to them via the Umbilicus, and after a moment the debate resumed.

"You're not making sense," Stone told her. "All this is hypothetical. Inconclusive."

"I'm not so sure," Logan said. He spoke slowly, thinking through what Tina Romero was saying. "You need to look at all this from another angle. If the crown we found here in chamber three could be used to simulate, practice death--in effect, to render a pharaoh immortal, ensure his divinity ... wouldn't a queen desire that as much as a king? Especially a queen as powerful, as headstrong, as Niethotep was?"

There was a silence.

"You're saying ..." Stone began. "You're saying that Niethotep, Narmer's queen--took Narmer's place in the tomb?"

"It's the only thing that makes sense," Romero said. "Nothing else explains the conflicting evidence I've laid out for you."

"And it may also help explain why future generations misinterpreted Narmer's symbols and practices," Logan added. "It wasn't Narmer in the tomb, he wasn't buried in the proper manner. The wife would have subst.i.tuted herself--and seemingly hastily, even prematurely."

"Then what happened to Narmer?" Dr. Rush asked.

"Who knows?" Romero replied. "Poison. A dagger to the throat, late at night in the conjugal bed. Perhaps killed with his concubines. You know the legends of Niethotep, of how strong-willed, bloodthirsty, and selfish she was. This would have been just her game. Can't you picture it? She may have even waited him out, let him die a natural death. Then she would have accompanied his body here, with their twin sets of retinues, to be present at the rituals of his interment--and then, by a prearranged plan, her guards overpowered his ... and now his skeleton is lying in the muck of the Sudd, entangled with all the others, and her mummy took his rightful place."

Stone stared at the Egyptologist. The anger, the ferocity, had slowly left his face. "But if you're right about the--the crown," he said, "then only one person could be allowed to use it. If you were Narmer, once you had pa.s.sed over into the netherworld, you wouldn't want another to take your place, to compromise your life force, your immortality. The crown would be linked to the soul of the person who wielded it."

"Which is exactly what Niethotep must have done," said Romero. "She tricked Narmer, had him killed, used the crown in his place. And then, believing herself immortal, she had herself buried in his tomb, which was hastily converted--the seals, the inscriptions--into her own."

"Is that even possible?" Logan asked. "Isn't a pharaoh's tomb designed to be the resting place for a specific monarch, and only that monarch?"

"That's just the problem," Romero said. "We need much more time to examine the evidence. Maybe she thought the gamble--eternal life as a supreme deity--was worth the risk."

"But why the haste?" Stone asked. "With Narmer out of the way, she could have taken all the time she wanted."

Romero thought for a moment. "I can think of several reasons. Maybe Narmer's main priests, with their private army, were still on the way to the tomb--and they wouldn't have taken kindly to what they found. She had to retrofit the tomb as best she could, seal it up before they arrived. Another possibility is that she and her retinue were unfamiliar with the operation of the battery--the double crown. They may have been ... overzealous."

"What was supposed to be a near-death experience turned into a deadly one," Logan said.

Romero nodded. "If that was the case--the queen dying unexpectedly--they would have had to rush to get her mummified and entombed. Even to the point of cutting corners in the death rituals. As we've seen in some of the carvings here--the carvings that deal with those specific rituals."

"And if the queen had herself entombed without sufficient preparation?" Rush asked. "Sufficient rites?"

"Impossible to say. I mentioned the imperfect cut in the mummy's mouth. That's an important part of the Egyptian funerary magic: the Opening of the Mouth ceremony. It allows the ba to leave the dead body, reunite with the ka in the next life. It frees the mouth to accept food and drink so the soul can receive nourishment--in essence, survive--in the afterlife."

"Go on," said Stone.

"If such an important ritual as the Opening of the Mouth was rushed, it implies great urgency involved in the final stages of her entombment. Who knows what other critical steps for the journey of Niethotep's soul into the next world might have been abbreviated--or even skipped?"

"This Opening of the Mouth ceremony," Logan said. "If the queen's soul could not receive nourishment in the next world--what would happen?"

Romero thought a minute. "From the ancient texts, I would guess that her vital spark--the soul that leaves the body after death--would be trapped here."

Rush shook his head. "If she really committed this atrocity--killed her husband or at the very least usurped his place in the next world--I'd think at least a part of her ka would want to remain here. To guard the crown, safeguard her immortality, make sure n.o.body did to her what she did to Narmer."

"The curse," Romero murmured.

Her soul would be trapped here.... To guard the crown; to make sure n.o.body did to her what she did to Narmer ... All of a sudden, a terrible thought struck Logan.

"Oh, my G.o.d," he said aloud.

Suddenly, there was another rumble from above, stronger than before. The papyrus sheets on the table trembled, as if from a gust of wind.

"What the h.e.l.l is that?" Stone asked.

Valentino turned to two of the roustabouts. "Kowinsky. Dugan. Go out to the platform, see what's going on."

As the two headed back through the tomb, Logan took Rush aside. "We've been forgetting something," he said in a low voice, out of earshot of the others.

The doctor looked at him. "What? What is it?"

"Remember our earlier talk? Where we speculated that Jennifer was brain-dead for so long--that she went over for so protracted a period--that she might have, in essence, lost her soul? Your phrase, not mine."

The doctor frowned, nodded.

"I told you that I believe it possible for the life force of one who has already pa.s.sed on to take residence in a living being--if that being's own life force, own soul, has been compromised. But that in all doc.u.mented cases, the dead person's spirit can only take possession of someone of the same s.e.x."

"I remember," Dr. Rush said. "That's how we knew Narmer, or some shade of Narmer's, could not be speaking through--could not be within--Jennifer."

"Exactly. But if it isn't Narmer's life force that's here at this site ... if, rather, it's the life force of a woman ..."

"Queen Niethotep." Slowly, Rush raised a hand to his mouth. "Oh, Jesus ..."

At that moment, the two roustabouts, Kowinsky and Dugan, came running back. Both had their radios out.

"There's an emergency topside," Kowinksy said. "The emergency relief valves of the high-pressure methane system have been opened."