"Tanya Huff - Victoria Nelson - 03 - Blood Lines" - читать интересную книгу автора (Huff Tanya)

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Scanned by Highroller.
Proofed more or less by Highroller.
Made prettier by MollyKate's/Cinnamon's style sheet.


Chapter One

He had been almost aware for some time. Nothingness had shattered when they removed him from the
chamber long concealed behind the centuries empty tomb of a forgotten priest. The final layer of the
binding spell had been written on the rock wall smashed to gain access and, with that gone, the spell
itself had begun to fray.

Every movement frayed it further. The surrounding ka, more souls than had been near him in millennia,
called him to feed. Slowly, he reached for memory.

Then, just as he brushed against self and had only to reach out and grasp it and draw home the key to his
freedom, the movement stopped and the lives went away. But the nothingness didn't quite return.

And that was the worst of all.

Sixteenth Dynasty, thought Dr. Rax running his finger lightly along the upper surface of the plain,
unadorned rectangle of black basalt. Strange, when the rest of the collection was Eighteenth. He could
now, however, understand why the British were willing to let the artifact go; although it was a splendid
example of its type, it was neither going to bring new visitors flocking to the galleries nor was it likely to
shed much light on the past.

Besides, thanks to the acquisitiveness of aristocracy with more money than brains, Great Britain has all
the Egyptian antiquities it can hope to use. Dr. Rax was careful not to let that thought show on his face,
as a member of said aristocracy, albeit of a more recent vintage, fidgeted at his shoulder.

Too well bred to actually ask, the fourteenth Baron Montclair leaned forward, hands shoved into the
pockets of his crested blazer.

Dr. Rax, unsure if the younger man was looking worried or merely vacant, attempted to ignore him. And
I thought Monty Python created the concept of the upper-class twit, he mused as he continued his
inspection. How foolish of me.

Unlike most sarcophagi, the artifact Dr. Rax examined had no lid but rather a sliding stone panel in one
narrow end. Briefly, he wondered why that feature alone hadn't been enough to interest the British
museums. As far as he knew the design survived on only one other sarcophagus, an alabaster beauty
found by Zakaria Goneim in the unfinished step pyramid of Sekhem-khet.


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