stone and cement, tilted the steles so that everywhere we went I heard not just our footsteps but eternal scritchings and sighings and gasps. My nerves felt stretched hair-thin.
And it wasn’t just that: there was the heat, which continued to feel like some huge animal stalking us. The wind brought no relief, drying the sweat that formed in my hairline and on my neck in seconds, but drying it like a hairdryer, well over body temperature. We drank our water as sparingly as we could, every mouthful tasting as exaggeratedly sweet as Gatorade, but my throat felt full of mucus, my tongue swelling. How soon could you die of dehydration here? Or would we go from heatstroke first?
Scritch, scritch, scratch, behind us. I spun, shovel up; still nothing. The wind plastered itself to me like a plate of red-hot iron molded to the shape of my body. We stopped to rest in a patch of shade, a few degrees cooler. Johnny’s chest was squeaking like a bad fan belt.
“I outgrew it,” she finally said, answering, I figured, the look on my face. “I did. I swear. Years and years ago. I didn’t think I needed an inhaler.”
“Take it easy, take it slow,” I said. “I don’t need to tell you this. Stop and rest.”
“I can’t. We don’t have time. I’m going in circles trying to find clues as to where the king’s burial chamber is, and how to get in, and they all refer to each other on purpose, like a riddle...”
“Drink some water.”
“And half the words are missing, either buried or just worn away, and what if what I need is just under the sand? Do we dig? What if something collapses on us? What if I write down something wrong? What if—”
“Johnny! Drink your water. I brought the salt, have some salt.”
Instead of putting it in her water bottle, she poured some out into her dirty palm and darted her tongue into the little pile, like a snake testing the air.
“Weirdo,” I said. “Everything you do is weird. But everything feels kind of…”
“I feel it too. The salt might help.”
“I thought you got it for like, dehydration or whatever.”
“That too.” The bags under her eyes had gone from simply dark to actually black, like she’d been struck hard on the bridge of the nose and blackened both eyes. What were the spells taking out of her?
“What if a lot of things,” I said. “Just keep doing what you’re doing. We’ll get everything we need in time.”
“Yeah.” Her head was bobbing with exhaustion, not really nodding, the scarf slipping over her ears. “Yeah. We will. Yeah. Gotta.”
“Fix your scarf and let’s go.”
We copied from broken tablets and scribbled brick, ran black crayons over papers to take rubbings from the walls. They didn’t, to me, look as if they could be assembled to a coherent whole, but Johnny assured me that wasn’t what they were for. “They do form a picture,” she said. “Taken together, not separately. They did that on purpose—the sorceress and her assistants.”
“What was her name?”
“Nuphel-Don, I think would be the closest rendition. But she also went by Ben’nest Soth Nothnal, a transliteration of the Old Language, and also Brac-gha Nothnal. Those weren’t different titles and they didn’t refer to different people, as far as I can tell; she just kept using different names. I wish I knew why.”
“Would it help us?”
“Don’t think so. Knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Anyway, she loved the king—no, not like that—and didn’t want anyone to find his tomb. But she acknowledges—here, at the bottom of this stele—that one day there might be need, and so she has given us, the future, the tools to do it. I trust her.”
“Why?”
“Because she fought Them too.” She sighed, weighing a palm-sized piece of red clay in her hand, the writing still sharp and crisp, something we’d had to tug free from beneath a round stone written, she’d said, with terrifying warnings. “This says the entrance to the tomb’s labyrinth is underneath the statue of Nanna, but it’s locked for eternity. Another one—that one there, with the blue paint—says the statue was destroyed in the realm of Alalngar. So that doesn’t help us, unless we can find the old base—they often built a new statue on the same base as the old one, because this area is so poor in good stone. And that tablet says the statue of Nanna was located next to the shrine of En-Lil, so maybe it would be easier to find