Wings of the Dead

Chapter 9: Ancient Tomb Ciphers (1)

Chapter 4: Ancient Tomb Ciphers (1) On their second day in Cairo, Chihiro invited Johnny and Andrew to tour the surrounding ancient sites and the main hall of the Cairo Museum. After dinner, they stopped at the Cairo Hotel for a cup of milk tea before returning to their hotel to pack their bags. Around seven in the evening, they boarded their respective cars and drove south along the highway leading directly to Middle Egypt, heading for the Valley of the Kings. Three hours later, Chihiro’s Porsche Panamera and Johnny’s Mercedes SLR were speeding along the highway west of the Nile in Middle Egypt; the Valley of the Kings coordinates on the satellite map were no longer far off. To the right of the highway lay the pitch-black, desolate Western Desert, where the occasional stray dog could be seen wandering in the dim light. To the left lay a cliff that plunged abruptly downward, and the silent, vast Luxor Mountains stretching for miles. Chihiro gazed out the window; the starry sky resembled a silver sea, with the Milky Way flowing gently into the vast, empty horizon, radiant as a myth. Tonight she wore a fresh, petite Commedes Garcons winter casual outfit. Although she wasn’t particularly fond of Rei Kawakubo’s design for this piece—the skirt was too pale and the pants a bit too tight—she wasn’t wearing it to impress anyone anyway. She sat behind the driver, with Johnny—dressed in a Nike Le Bron tracksuit—beside her. As agreed, he’d brought five bodyguards: two sitting in front of him and Chihiro, and three with Andrew, driving his car behind the Porsche. Chihiro had arranged it this way to keep a closer eye on Johnny and his men, just in case they tried anything underhanded along the way. Now it seemed unnecessary. Johnny’s bodyguards were all rowdy young men, and he himself was completely absorbed in putting together a jigsaw puzzle, with no time for anything else. Perhaps Johnny was using this to ease his nerves, Chihiro thought. This wasn’t a trip to the Tokyo suburbs to view cherry blossoms; it was a challenge against Tutankhamun’s curse. But she absolutely couldn’t back down; she wasn’t doing this for some boring corporate interest—only she knew the real reason. Still, there was no point in getting nervous now, she told herself. Maybe Johnny’s idea wasn’t so bad after all. “You’ve been at this for forty minutes, handsome,” Chihiro said, resting her chin in her hand as she glanced at the puzzle. “Want some help?” “Help?" Let me tell you, knot puzzles from the time of Alexander the Great are among the earliest puzzle games. Do you know who invented them? In a sense, the French invented them." Johnny said proudly, "The French have been playing puzzle games for three times as long as Japan has existed. And you, a Japanese person, are actually offering to help a Frenchman with a jigsaw puzzle?" Chihiro couldn’t be bothered to banter with him and asked casually, "“This design is really ugly. What is it?” “‘The Resurrection of Osiris’—that’s the legend you mentioned. Osiris was dismembered by his brother and thrown into the Nile, then pieced back together and resurrected by his wife, Isis. The auction house made a puzzle based on that legend. What a sick idea.” Johnny fiddled with the two puzzle pieces in his hand. “Only two pieces left. These two birds look almost identical. “Put it here? No! Here? Yeah, right here.” “No, here’s where it goes.” Chihiro pointed to another empty space. “Japanese people always think they’re so smart. Let’s just look at the original picture and see who’s really the smart one.” Johnny rummaged through his pockets, then cursed, “Damn it, I left the original picture at the hotel.” Chihiro refused to speak to him any further and turned her head to look out the car window. It seemed Johnny wasn’t playing with the puzzle pieces out of nervousness. The Americans’ passion for crossword puzzles and the French’s obsession with jigsaw puzzles had always baffled her, just as much as the fact that the average age of Chinese people addicted to online games was as high as 32. After driving for nearly four hours along the dimly lit highway, the two cars descended a three-kilometer slope with a 60-degree incline, arriving at the ruins of the Valley of the Kings—where night crows were cawing—around 12:10 a. m. Parking the cars by the roadside, the group walked down the dirt embankment beside the highway. The sandy ground beneath their feet was surprisingly level, a result of the previous archaeological team’s work. Not far away, a small two-story concrete house housed the tomb keepers assigned by the government. Andrew showed them the pass issued by the Egyptian government, then led the group forward. He flashed his powerful flashlight ahead, and in the darkness it pierced, a massive terraced ridge loomed imposingly. The steep rock face was dotted with caves—those were the entrances excavated by the archaeological team, leading to more than thirty pharaonic burial chambers. “We’re almost there.” Andrew took off his backpack, pulled out a handgun, and handed it to Chihiro. “We don’t know what’s waiting inside. Take this.” “No need to give it to me—I’ve got this.” Johnny quickly brandished his Mini-Uzi (Note: a compact submachine gun, only slightly larger than a handgun). Just then, a piercing wolf’s howl suddenly echoed from the distance, lingering in the night sky for a long moment before fading away. The surrounding silence grew so thick it sent a chill down their spines. Johnny’s hair stood on end, and his gesture of displaying the submachine gun froze in mid-air. “In ancient Egyptian belief, the howl of a jackal is the call of Anubis, the god of the dead.” Andrew chambered a round in his shotgun and looked up at the pitch-black entrance to the tomb on the mountainside. “Might just be another scorching night.”