“What happens when the pyramid is completed?” Ryan asked Fasa at one point.
“There will be a great ceremony and celebration. Pharaoh will drink in the sekhem energy drawn down from Osiris by the pyramid.”
“I mean, what will you and the others do? Don’t you want to be free?”
Fasa thought it over, frowned and shook his head. “I wouldn’t like that. Who would take care of me? How would I get food? I like to eat. Don’t you?”
Ryan considered the query rhetorical, so he didn’t bother with a response.
The sun didn’t begin its decline until well after seven o’clock—at least, J.B. estimated that was the time, since their chrons had been confiscated with the rest of their belongings.
Overseers shouted back and forth across the pyramid, and like automatons, the laborers stopped working and lined up at the stair. As before, they marched down, two men across. In some ways, the descent was more difficult than the ascent, because the shadows had thickened. One misstep could result in a bone-breaking fall.
Deep twilight darkened the sky when Ryan and J.B. set their sandaled feet on solid ground again. They heaved audible and simultaneous sighs of relief and marched back into the walled compound, toward the dormitory.
Shukeli stood by the door and when he saw them, he beckoned for them to step out of formation. The fat man snapped to J.B., “Not you, just One-eye here.”
J.B. hesitated, but when Ryan nodded to him, he stepped back into line and was swept out of sight by the column of marching men.
Ryan regarded Shukeli solemnly. “Payback plan or what?”
A flush of anger colored Shukeli’s chins and sagging jowls. “Someone wants to see you. Come with me.”
He turned and walked along the side of the barracks, not bothering to check if Ryan was following him or not. Ryan caught up with him before he turned the corner, senses on full alert, muscles tensing and tightening.
Rather than the ambush he expected, he saw a large pavilion erected in an open lot. Banners fluttered from poles driven into the ground near the entrance.
“In there,” Shukeli growled. “The royal architect’s office.”
“Why does the royal architect want to see me?”
Shukeli lifted a sloping shoulder in a shrug, as if the matter were of little importance or interest to him. “How do I know? I was told to fetch you. I fetched you. Do what you want from here on out.”
With a surprising quickness for one so bulky, Shukeli turned smartly on his toes and stalked away in the direction they had come.
Ryan studied the pavilion suspiciously, seeing no sign of movement in or around it. A single light burned from within. He strode purposefully forward, thrusting aside the door flap.
A brass lamp suspended from a support pole cast the interior with a wavery yellow illumination. Directly beneath the lamp, seated at a paper-covered table was the hard, bronze figure of Akhnaton. He looked up as Ryan entered, and even at a distance, his crimson eyes shone like baleful flames.
He wore a simple brown leather belted jerkin that bore a disk worked in gold thread upon the breast. His head was bare, and he was completely alone.
Ryan cursed his split second of hesitation, then he crossed the dozen feet separating him from the giant man of bronze. “You’re the royal architect?”
“Among my other functions,” Akhnaton replied in his thrumming, controlled voice. “Would you consider this our second or third meeting, Cawdor?”
Ryan didn’t rise to the bait. His stomach muscles fluttered in adrenaline-inspired spasms. He tried to meet the man’s crimson gaze, unblinking and unflinching. “What do you want?”
Akhnaton leaned back in his camp chair, looking him up and down appraisingly. “No need to be afraid, Cawdor. If I wanted you dead, vultures would be feasting on your liver by now.”
“I’m not afraid of you, Hell Eyes.”
A rueful smile touched the man’s lips. “I haven’t been called that in many, many years. And then, not to my face.”
“I asked you a question—what do you want?”
Akhnaton gestured expansively. “I have everything I want. An empire. A dynasty.”