Heshtat looked across the empty treasure vault, sighing quietly. The valuables may be gone but he was certain their guardians remained, so it wouldn’t do to let his frustration unveil him.

  He dropped from the small tunnel he had squeezed himself through, feet light on the stone slabs making up the smooth floor of the tomb. Pausing his movement, he watched the six ushabti dolls lining the walls to either side.

  They were slightly taller than a man, broad in the shoulder and tapered at the waist in an exaggerated approximation of a muscular warrior. Golems of enlivened clay and ensorcelled bronze, they had no need of organs. Only the tools of violence remained.

  With their arms crossed over their sculpted chests, the bronze sheen of their carved bodies reflected the flickering flame of his torch and they looked somehow more alive than in the bright light of day. Shadows danced over their surfaces and stretched across the sheer stone walls behind them. There was something disturbing on a primal level about being deep underground in an ancient tomb, no matter how many of them littered the land of Amansi.

  It seemed that this particular one had already been plundered, though Heshtat had been assured the item he sought was still hidden within despite what first appearances may suggest. He took a few careful steps, his soft-soled sandals slipping across the stone with barely a whisper.

  Still the shadows danced, but the stylised face masks of the ushabti dolls made no move. For perhaps the thousandth time, he wished for a healed soul. It would have been so easy to direct a flicker of essence to the right aspect, and he would instantly know if he were dealing with simple ornamentation or true guardians.

  But either way, they hadn’t done their job, for the treasure vault was empty. Heshtat closed his eyes, muttered a somewhat sincere prayer to Osirion, and stepped past the first line of dolls with his head held high. Were he to meet the Lord Of The Dead this day, he’d do so with dignity, at least.

  The golems did not reanimate, but he held in his sigh of relief. “It’s always when you let your guard down that they get you,” he recalled Old Seti saying with fondness. There were some people that you could safely ignore when they waxed poetic about the world; the former head of the great Pharaoh’s Tomb Guard was not one of them.

  Heshtat darted forwards another dozen steps, quiet as a desert mouse on the open sands and just as eager to get back to safety, and then the light of his torch unveiled the bodies. Three men sprawled out before him, their blood long since dried and crusted to the stone beneath.

  Grave robbers, he suspected, by the ragged state of their robes and the lack of real weaponry. One of them clutched a sickle in hand still, but he could see no other weapons. They wouldn’t be the first desperate farm-hands to turn to dungeon-delving in Idib—it was becoming more and more common of late, unfortunately—but to do so without real gear? Heshtat doubted any of them had even awakened a single aspect. Foolish indeed. Not that he was one to talk, with his soul cracked to its foundations and leaking what little essence he could gather in a continuous drain.

  Still, Heshtat had to consider himself better off than the poor men before him. Two were missing their heads entirely, and the one body that still boasted a head had its entire chest cavity ripped open. He wasn’t entirely sure who out of the three of them had come out worst. The head or the heart; an age-old quandary.

  The thought came and went without mirth, for Heshtat recognised the marks on the bodies, and knew who—what—had been responsible. He lacked the ability to sense essence and sniff out magic the conventional way, but in light of the eviscerated corpses before him, it didn’t take a high priest to know that those ushabti dolls he had passed moments prior were not merely decorative.

  One of the headless treasure hunters had something caught in a gnarled and unnaturally splayed hand. Annoyingly. He would much rather have retreated while the guardians of this tomb remained unaware of his presence, but now that he had seen the damned thing, he couldn’t exactly back out. He’d never been a great liar, and the man that Heshtat worked for was very good at sniffing out lies. All who had awakened the Heart aspect were.

  Beyond the dark patches of dried blood, he spotted a glint of gold. He soon found the source; golden goblets, silver brooches, jewelled headdresses, and other sundry items that certain disreputable citizens would kill for in the underground markets of Idib. They were strewn across the floor in piles, almost as if three men, arms laden with treasure, had very suddenly fallen following heavy impacts to their backs.

  Slipping past the small hoard of valuables and moving carefully towards the back of the room, he confirmed the lack of exit and marked the distances he’d need to navigate. Then he grabbed the gem clutched by the headless corpse and spun, hurling the palm-sized crystal towards the other end of the room.

  Before he could so much as blink, the ushabti dolls were surrounding him. He flinched and let out a strangled curse, but their faces were still bronze masks of calm. They had moved across the room in an instant, and their arms were no longer crossed over their chests. Now they were gripping weapons or reaching out to him with barbed claws at the end of unnaturally long fingers. The contrast between the placid and regal features of their death masks and the evident violence of their stances was terrifying, and Heshtat tried to slow his breathing even as his heart did its best to beat out of his own chest.

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  They had only moved in the moment that he had held the treasure, but even a few breaths was enough for them to cross the room. He’d need to remember to buy Maatkare a drink for the tip. Heshtat had done enough odd jobs in the last decade to know a few things, but the many tombs of Amansi held endless secrets, and sometimes one needed to consult a professional.

  This little trick had kept him alive, but there was a bitter part of him that cursed his weakness. There had been a time when he would have met these guardians head on, khopesh in hand, and the result would have been as inevitable as the Nikean floods. Although… those weren’t quite so inevitable now as they had once been, if the grain merchants were to be believed. Perhaps there was a lesson there.

  Sighing once more, he slipped between the inanimate forms of the hulking humanoid golems and scrambled up to the alcove where he had entered the treasury from a few minutes ago. He sheathed his blade in the iron ring on his belt and leaned back down to snag the crystal from the floor, pulling himself back into the slim tunnel and scurrying away to the surface.

  No shrieks followed him, no hisses or bellows, but he imagined he could feel the rage of the guardians chasing him up the tunnel, even as their large forms prevented them from doing so physically.

  Just as the shaft steepened near its end and Heshtat was forced to bridge his feet against either side to inch his way up, he heard a scratching. It started slow but picked up pace quickly, and then the scratching was turning into a scrabble, and the scrabble into a tumble of stone as magically hardened claws rent apart the softer stone of the tomb far below.

  He frowned and sped up, reaching over the lip of the ventilation shaft that had been added when the tomb was first built to allow mortal servants and warriors to accompany whatever lord was buried here in their journey through the Otherworld. He hoped they had done better in their sacred duty than he had so long ago.

  Heshtat emerged into a grand hallway, large pillars lining the long room, much like the ushabti dolls had in the treasury below. Each pillar was inlaid with beautiful carvings; the varied gods of the endless pantheon, funerary scripts, artistic depictions of the life of the deceased, and even heartfelt messages from friends and family to help the soul take inspiration and strength for its journey to the afterlife.

  Heshtat had no time to appreciate the art of the setting, though he had spent a few minutes on the way in wandering from carving to carving. One never knew what useful information they could glean from such writings, after all – it wouldn’t do to walk into a cursed tomb without realising.

  Now, he rushed through the long entrance hallway, leaping over the pressure plate he had noticed earlier, innocently disguised in the middle of a beautiful mosaic inlaid in the stone. He turned as a crash echoed through the massive room and saw with horror the bronze mask of an ushabti doll, no longer calm and serene but instead animated by his holding of the crystal.

  Its face held a rictus grin of feral joy, like a dog in the midst of savaging a hare; all snarling teeth and vicious glee. The animated golem smashed through a wall of stone as if it was made of papyrus and splayed its clawed fingers wide as it saw him. He knew without looking that he would have no chance of making it to the entrance as he was – it was only thirty feet away, but these golems were animated by the channelled essence of an acolyte at the least, and they would cross the intervening distance far quicker than he could ever hope to.

  Instead, he leapt forwards, towards the creature, and slapped a hand down on the pressure plate before diving back once more. He didn’t wait around to see the result but instead sprinted to the entrance.

  The pressure plate had done its job, if his ears were to be believed, and the sounds of magically hardened clay and bronze shattering in the face of a giant axe swinging from the ceiling echoed around the hallway. Or at least, there was a whirring followed by loud crashes and clangs, and no clawed fingers pierced his flesh in the next few moments, so he assumed that his mental picture was accurate.

  He made it to the entrance and dove out of the hallway, rolling hard over stones and grazing his elbow before coming to his feet to face the tomb behind him. This was the true test. If the animated golems followed him into the desert sun, it was over. He was not the man he once was, and no amount of skill with a blade could overcome the gulf in power between magical constructs created by those with a direct channel to the divine, and Heshtat himself, with his unawakened soul cracked to its foundations.

  Sweat cooled on his skin and his chest rose and fell, as much due to the excitement and tension as the physical exertion, but after a few more moments, he relaxed. The traps meant to deter intruders—both living and dead—may have taken out one or two of the animated guardians, but the others would have caught up and shredded him to pieces by now if they were able to leave the bounds of the tomb.

  He took out the softly glowing blue crystal and held it up to the sun. It pulsed rhythmically, and he felt the gentle promise of power wafting from it in waves. Even he could still feel essence when it was so close and concentrated, and this simple gem contained enough to heal his soul and even help push him to awaken one of his slumbering aspects. With the right help, of course.

  Heshtat sighed and pocketed it again in a pouch on his belt, turning away from the tomb and picking up the sled he had left propped against the tomb’s outer wall. The climb out here from Idib had been brutal in the harsh sun, but the return journey was almost entirely downhill, and with the fine sand of the Endless Desert forming overlapping dunes until it reached the floodplains of the Nikea far below, he would at least have some fun before he had to hand over the natural treasure to the man he worked for.

  Gruelling work, the looming threat of death, a brief moment of joy, and then a pitiful wage; these would be his rewards for the job he’d spent the week planning and executing. As it had been every damned week for a decade now. It was halfway through the tenday cycle, though, so Mama Ramose would be baking the honey cakes he so loved. With any luck, a fresh batch would be ready just as he made it to the outskirts of Idib.

  All in all, things were looking about as good as they could get.