Luke Talbot was born in Suffolk, England, in 1979 and moved to the south of France when he was eleven. He spent his early years exploring the mountains and ruins of the Languedoc and became obsessed with the ancient Romans and their architecture.

Returning to the United Kingdom to study archaeology at Southampton University, he graduated with honours and moved on to technology, achieving a Master’s in Information Systems from Portsmouth University in 2002.

Since 2003 he has worked in telecommunications and he currently lives in Southampton, England, with his Spanish wife, two children and their goldfish, Pancho IV.

Copyright © 2013 Luke Talbot

First published in the UK in 2013. This edition published in the UK in 2014 by Perseo Books Limited.

All rights reserved.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places and incidents are creations of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual or other fictional events, locales, organisations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Cover art by Tiago da Silva, www.tiagodasilva.com

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-0-9576019-1-8 (B Format Paperback)

ISBN 978-0-9576019-2-5 (eBook)

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc.

Typeset in Adobe Garamond and Adobe Trajan Pro Regular

To my wife, Sonia, for taking my dreams and making them real.

It was an unsatisfying knock, hesitant, the hard wood swallowing the dull thud almost instantly and making him wonder if it could possibly have been heard from within. He tried again harder, more assuredly. Too much, he flinched as the noise echoed down the corridor behind them.

“Enter!” a wheezy voice snapped from beyond the small, heavy door.

He looked sideways at his partner, by an inch the taller of the two and holding a leather satchel against his chest, before lifting the latch and pushing inwards. The door groaned on its hinges like an old man turning in his sleep.

They ducked into the room, a mess of papyri and clay-dust. The walls were covered in shelves stacked high with documents, and a vast workbench made of stone and wood filled almost all the remaining space. The dry, musty smell of scribe’s ink hung in the air.

Perched on a stool at the far end of the workbench, holding a simple reed quill, was the source of the voice: a small, leathery man, his wispy remnants of hair held back by a colourful band of cloth across his forehead. He quickly hid his work under a flat, polished piece of wood, and gave them both an irritated look. “Oh, it’s you again,” he said dismissively.

They looked at each other and then back at the scribe. The one with the satchel opened it and pulled out a large clay tablet. “We bring news from Shuwardata of Keilah,” he said, walking forwards and placing the tablet next to the old man.

The scribe looked at the clumsy document and sighed. The simple indentations in the clay were like the random impacts of rain in sand compared to the graceful hieroglyphs to which he had devoted his life. Even his shorthand was more elaborate. Tapping the nib on the side of his ink-palette, he placed his quill in a slot on the workbench and glanced over the end of his nose at the cuneiform tablet.

“More requests for money, soldiers, and a dozen other things,” he said, clucking his tongue. He pulled the tablet off the desk and walked slowly towards a shelf at the far end of the room. “And I know what the king would like me to do with your news,” he said as he tried to find the perfect place to file it. “Whine, moan, never happy when we’re around and when we’re not just complaints that they need help. Thank the Aten this doesn’t need to go on much longer,” he muttered under his breath.

The man with the satchel leaned over the workbench to look at the papyrus the scribe had been working on, its top half still protruding from under the piece of wood. The scribe spun round. “And spies, indeed!” he threw the tablet on top of a large pile of similar rectangles of hardened clay and dashed back to cover his work, waving the two messengers away with his hands.

Ignoring his gesticulations, the man who had knocked on the door stepped forwards.

“We have travelled for many days to bring this news to your king,” he said. “We will not simply turn on our heels and go back. We demand an audience with Akhenaten.”

The scribe looked at them both and sneered.

“No, you don’t. Nobody demands that. I am not just Suten Anu, the royal scribe,” he breathed in deeply, seeming to grow taller by several inches. “I am the royal architect. I am working on the commission of my king and queen. That commission has significance beyond these four walls, beyond the royal city of Akhetaten, beyond this great kingdom of Egypt and yes indeed, beyond even that of your beloved Shuwardata of Keilah.

“And yet even I do not demand to see them. You arrived without fanfare, but nonetheless they know that you are here. If your presence was desired or even required, they would already have sent for you by now.”

They shifted uneasily on their feet at this statement from the diminutive scribe, royal architect, who then softened and gave them an insincere smile.

“Mahu!” he shouted unexpectedly at the top of his voice. The messengers looked towards the door.

“But of course,” he continued sympathetically, the wheeze returning to his voice, “I am sure you will be welcome to stay and enjoy the evening’s festivities!”

At that moment Mahu, chief of police, burst in with two foot soldiers and after a short scuffle the door closed behind them, leaving the scribe alone with his work.

He uncovered his papyrus and looked at it uneasily, his shoulders sinking as the adrenalin in him died. There it was: his treason, his betrayal in black and red ink as clear as obsidian and blood on sand. But it had to be that way. He couldn’t let this secret, this terrifying truth, be buried in the desert for all eternity.

Carefully, he rolled the papyrus up and slotted it into a wooden tube, which he then capped with canvas bound with twine. When his tasks in Akhetaten were complete, he would travel south, away from this crumbling kingdom. He didn’t yet know what to do with his treacherous document, but instinct had taken him this far and would lead the way again, he was sure.

The next morning, just before the sun rose above the hills to the East and enveloped the regal capital of Akhetaten with its warm embrace, the scribe greeted Queen Nefertiti on a cliff-top a mile to the north of the city. The king, Akhenaten, was already too weak to make such trips and she had now, albeit unofficially, assumed almost full control.

In her absence from the palace, the king usually busied himself playing as best he could with his son, the disobedient and contrary Tutankhaten. The child was not Nefertiti’s, and even though he was barely four years old she could sense where his defiant nature would ultimately lead. Akhenaten would not last much longer, and on her own she didn’t know for how long she could retain control of the already fragmenting kingdoms of Egypt.