Independent Study

"I thought you said," Horst whispered, his hand trembling so badly that he nearly dropped the electric torch, "that you needed help for your thesis."

"This is for my thesis," Johannes replied tersely. "Hand me the crowbar."

"You were kicked out of the university three months ago, Johannes. You don't have a thesis." Horst caught the noise of something that sounded a bit like a footstep in the distance; he cocked his head, trying to listen more closely.

"Do you really think that honest scientific inquiry is going to be stopped by petty administrative nonsense like that? The crowbar, please. We don't have much time." Since this was probably the least ridiculous thing Johannes had demanded of him tonight, Horst didn't see the point in continuing to argue. He held out the crowbar; Johannes snatched it and went to work on the sarcophagus in front of him. Tiny bits of turquoise inlay and bits of solid gold chasing showered to the floor as Johannes levered open the lid. In addition to angering his professors, his deans, and several entire orders of holy men, Johannes seemed hell-bent on earning the undying enmity of museum curators and collectors everywhere.

"We're in the British Museum vaults. It's past midnight. You're vandalizing a seven thousand year old work of art," Horst said, a note of pleading in his voice. Johannes ignored him and finally succeeded in removing the lid, which slid off with a distressingly solid thunk. Inside was a body that looked ancient, and smelled like it. "The police are going to find us, and they are going to put us in jail. Forever."

"They won't. They can't," Johannes said.

"Well, that's very sweet of you, Johannes, but it's not really your decision, is it?" Horst said, but there was a hard edge to his brother's voice that he didn't like one bit. Johannes peered over the side of the sarcophagus with an expression of genuine joy -- the kind of look Horst remembered Johannes getting when they were children and they happened to wander past a bookseller's with a decent window display. Seeing it directed towards the mouldering, bandaged corpse of a centuries-dead tyrant was the sort of thing that made you stop and wonder just where everything had gone so dreadfully wrong.

Horst had had a lot of those moments over the night.

"Princess Asenat," Johannes breathed. "Rumored to have been buried alive for her crimes against the gods."

"I don't see what's so interesting about--" Horst began, but Johannes held up one gloved hand.

"What's interesting is that she was unearthed alive, too. And it took sixteen silver bullets to put her down. Say what you will about the methods of our archeological forerunners, Horst, but they really knew how to come prepared to a tomb-robbing." Johannes leaned so far into the sarcophagus that he was almost inside it, and eagerly snatched the electric torch from Horst's hand, leaving him in the dark. There was an echo in the hallway again; Horst jumped, and crouched down behind Johannes, his heart pounding. Johannes, for his part, seemed calmer down here, in the midst of a break-in, than he had ever been. "Look here. Bullet holes. We're onto something."

"We? Johannes, you've lost it," Horst said. Johannes withdrew himself from the sarcophagus and whirled around, shining the torch directly in Horst's face. Horst winced and held up his hand to block the light.

"If you're so certain," Johannes began, his eyes narrowing behind his spectacles, "then why are you here?"

Horst didn't know how to answer that in any way that Johannes -- this Johannes, the one who spent more time with corpses than people and who had been the first person since the Middle Ages to be expelled from a university for "witchcraft" and "crimes against man and God" -- would accept or even understand.

"Somebody's got to be," Horst said. Johannes made a noise of annoyance, adjusted his gloves, and turned his attention back to the venerable Princess Asenat.