CHAPTER 1

Embabeh, Cairo. 1926.

The city of Cairo never slept.

Long after the red sun dropped into the vast Egyptian deserts in the west, the citizens remained awake, their work continuing and keeping the night bustling and alive.

In the northern neighbourhood of Embabeh, one resident of the area had just completed the trip home after a long day's work.

And there was nothing she desired more than to go to sleep.

"Home, sweet home." Pyrrah sighed, closing her front door behind her.

The Egyptian air was thin and humid, and she was exhausted; her bed— oh, her sweet, comfortable bed— was calling to her from the other room. She hadn't sat down for seventeen hours.

But, as she noticed upon stepping indoors, her flat was an atrocious mess. If she didn't clean it now, it would never get cleaned, because she would undoubtedly come home tomorrow in the exact same mood.

"Oh, why is your house such a mess, Perry?" she asked herself, kneeling down and picking up items of litter from the floor. "Oh, I don't know, maybe it's because your boss is an arrogant, slothful, drunken nitwit!"

She scowled as she scooped up a crumpled pile of clothes from the sofa.

"Who does he think he is?" she snapped at herself, dropping her garbage into the kitchen bin and dumping the clothes she had collected in a basket. "Respected archaeologist, my arse."

The kitchen was no better; unwashed dishes, towers of which had been steadily growing over the past week, were turning the room into some sort of crowded realm of porcelain dishware.

"Perry, go into town and find me a bottle of Jack Daniel's! Perry, write me a letter to Leonard Woolley! Perry, go to the Birqash market and haggle until you get a cheap price on some camels!"

She walked around, mimicking the instructions that her boss had given her throughout the day.

Jonathan Carnahan, harmless as he may have seemed, was one hell of an employer.

An aspiring Egyptologist looking to pursue her dreams, Pyrrah Ananka thought she had struck gold when the man had hired her to be his personal assistant.

When she took the job, she assumed she would be working for an adventurous, hard-working, passionate archeologist who lived up to his reputation, someone in the ranks of Augustus Pitt-Rivers, Mortimer Wheeler and John Lloyd Stevens.

Sure, Jonathan was fun, good for a laugh and rather nonchalant about any mistakes she made. He was often too drunk to care if she was an hour late delivering his new suit, or had forgotten to give him the telephone number of the flapper he'd met the night before.

But, where he wasn't as strict or domineering as other superiors (when he was drunk, at least) came precisely the problem.

Jonathan was incredibly lazy. His dream life consisted of gambling, drinking, and sleeping around.

In order to make this life possible, he needed Pyrrah to live the 'not-so-fun' parts of it on his behalf.

That meant doing everything between shining his shoes and breaking up with the ritzy girls in gladrags the morning after after he'd slept with them.

She yawned as she began to wash the dishes.

Perry was so busy helping Jonathan Carnahan to survive his own life that she barely had time to live hers at all.

Just as the thoughts of her oh-so-comfortable bed began to creep back into her mind, there came a knock at the door.

She looked out the window: it was dark now, nearing midnight, and she couldn't fathom who could possibly want her at this time. Unless—

"Jonathan?"

"Shhhh!"

Jonathan Carnahan, of all people, stumbled into her flat and hastily shut the door behind him, pressing his ear against it as if to listen to the noises in the corridor beyond.

"Mr. Carnahan, what are you doing here?" she asked him, feeling incredibly confused and wondering whether or not she should be worried.

"Hiding!" he said, his voice an urgent whisper.

She crossed her arms.

"Hiding from wh—"

"SHHHHHH!"

She lowered her voice to a whisper, also.

"...Hiding from who, exactly?"

He turned to face her.

His hair was a mess, his cream suit was dirty and creased, and his eyes were bloodshot.

Definitely drunk, she thought, as he swayed on the spot.

"The... The men who were f-fighting me," he slurred.

She shook her head at him pitifully and began to lead him to her couch.

"Oh, Jonathan, sit down," she said.

He obliged, like a child, and sunk into the sofa cushions as she knelt in front of him.

"Tell me what happened." she said.

He took a long, deep breath, and ran a hand through his hair tiredly. He smelled of bourbon and dirt and perfume.

"I was at the Sultan's Casbah." he admitted.

She shut her eyes.

"Haven't we talked about the Sultan's Casbah?" she asked him, condescendingly. "About it's seedy conditions and nasty clientele, and how you always end up in trouble after you go there?"

He stuck his bottom lip out and nodded, sulking like a toddler.

At this point, she felt like his mother, but she often did throughout her working week.

"Yes, but I was having a good time until that scraggly old sap accused me of stealing from him." he spat. "As if I'd fall for it! It's not like I'm buttoned up the back, you know!"

She wasn't quite sure what the term 'buttoned up the back' meant, but she decided not to ask.

Jonathan was English, born and raised in London, and while she was accustomed to British accents and language (since the country was under patronage of the United Kingdom and there were so many British troops stationed there), some of the terms he came up with were a bit strange to her.

Pyrrah Ananka was an Egyptian woman, born and raised.

Her father had been a Saudi Arabian man who fled the country when the Ottoman Empire seized it; in 1916, when Perry was ten, her father had died fighting in the pan-Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire.

Her mother was a beautiful Egyptian woman from Alexandria who had died when Perry was thirteen.

Pyrrah had inherited the best of both their good genes— bronze Egyptian skin, eyes that were deep and dark like obsidians, and hair as black as the night sky.

She supposed she had siblings out there, somewhere, but she had fended entirely for herself since her mother died, becoming a family of one.

Besides— now that she was well on her way to becoming an archaeologist, she didn't need family.

In fact, Jonathan was the closest thing to a relative she had.

Right now, she felt like she was babying him.

"Why would he accuse you of stealing from him?" she asked the drunken man.

He grinned at her, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a small, octagonal box with hieroglyphics covering its sides.

"Because I did."

Her eyes went wide.

"Jonathan! What did you do?!"

He laughed to himself, and leaned forward to examine the item in his hands.

"Took it. Punched him. He got arrested. Came here."

She groaned, while he beamed at the little iron box.

"Wait," she said, leaning forward to examine it as well. "This says... This has things written on it... Its hieroglyphics talk about the dead, and... keeping the desert silent—"

Jonathan suddenly snatched it away from her.

"It's mine." he said, clutching it to his chest possessively.

She tilted her head at him.

"Mr. Carnahan, can't I at least read it?"

"No."

She raised an eyebrow, and pointed at it.

"That might be something special there, something worth a lot of money."

He looked intrigued, but didn't give the box up.

"I'm not letting you see it."

"Why? It's not like you're taking me on a bloody dig any time soon, is it? I may as well have a read."

"No."

"Jonathan!"

"No! No means no!"

She huffed in frustration, and crossed her arms.

"Fine. I'll just have to take it."

Then, without giving him a warning, she snatched for it.

Jonathan leaped away from her, but she vaulted onto the couch and crawled on top of him.

"Give it to me!" she yelled.

He clawed at the cushions, pulling himself away from his assistant and stretching his arms out to keep it as far away from her as possible.

"No! It's mine!"

He used his free arm to hold her off, but she continued struggling to get to the box.

"No it's not!" she snapped. "You STOLE it!"

"Exactly! You'll just want me to give it back, and I don't want to give it back!"

"No I won't! I just want to— WOAH—"

Her pleading was interrupted when Jonathan sat up abruptly, sending her toppling backwards over the edge of the couch. She landed with a thud, feet in the air.

"Miss. Ananka, I am not g-giving you my newest finding, no matter how much you beg, because that would mean you would be all, 'give it back', 'this says something ominous', 'can I keep it', 'can we go on a dig', blah blah... blah... bl..."

She got to her feet and found that Jonathan had passed out on the couch.

"Jonathan?" she asked. "Mr. Carnahan?"

He began to snore.

Perry sighed, and watched him sleep.

The box was in his palm, so she quietly took it and began to read the hieroglyphs.

"Oh, Jonathan," she whispered to herself. "What on earth have you found?"