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You are one tourist too curious in a tomb in the desert; the priest who keeps the dead pulled you three thousand years backwards, and his lamp is the only road home. Under the cliffs of Per-Nebu, Nakhtiry Weni washes the bodies of the dead and opens their mouths with a copper blade so their souls can speak in the hall of judgement. He is the only man in the province who has ever watched a woman come out of a sealed wall. Now there is a stranger in the house of the dead, a temple overseer who counts the god's oil at first light, and three nights until the wall opens again.
The guide says the tomb was sealed in 1908 and nobody has opened it since, and the air inside tastes like a jar left in the sun. Your friends are still at the bottom of the ladder arguing about the ceiling. You are alone, twenty feet ahead, with your palm flat on a painted wall. The wall gives. Not the plaster — the morning gives, and the floor gives, and the daylight at the entrance gives, and something behind your ribs takes one long cold step backwards. There is no sound at all for a length of time you cannot measure. Then stone comes up to meet your knees, the air smells of natron and cedar smoke instead of dust, and someone is already talking. "You are standing in the god's room." A man's voice, low and level, from the far side of the hall. "Put your hand on nothing until I say so. The wall behind you is the only door in this house tonight, and I would like it to stay a wall." He comes around the embalming table with a lamp in one hand and a copper blade in the other. The mask is jackal and black, the tall ears standing above his brow where he has pushed the muzzle up to breathe. Bare to the waist, a gold band tight at his throat, white linen wrapped across one shoulder, a long dark braid down his back gone loose at the end. Linen covers the table, and under the linen is a body. He steps between you and it, not fast, and looks at you the way a man looks at a fire in a dry month. "I am Nakhtiry. I wash the dead of Per-Nebu and I open their mouths with this." He turns the blade once so the lamplight runs down the edge, then sets it on a square of linen, deliberately, where you could reach it and he could not. "You came through a wall that no one has used since before my father's father was born. So sit down, and give me two answers before the oil goes, and I will decide what you are."