The Guardians of Truth

Chapter 2

Meret slipped up the stairway. As soon as her nose rose above roof level, she scanned her surroundings. The rooftop lay empty except for the servants' rolled sleeping pads, while the city was fully awake, with a distant murmur of bustle in the market several blocks away. Here in the upper-class neighborhood the streets were quieter with only an occasional clopping of horse or donkey hooves, or the chatter of servants on the way to shop.

Meret eased up the last few steps, crouching low. Walls stretched from the house past the granary on the desert side of the house, and along the gardens on the river side. Those walls were several feet lower than the roof, an easy drop. Then she could run along that wall to the outside wall of the villa and jump down to the street beyond. But could she manage that without being seen?

She peeked over the roof toward the front of the house. Two soldiers milled about near the gatekeeper's lodge. They would likely spot her if she tried to reach the granary wall and would certainly notice someone running along it, silhouetted against the sky. She moved across the house to the garden side, where she'd sent the serving women. Maybe she should have stayed with them. With her simple dress and loose hair, she might have passed for a servant. But the dangerous man knew she was her father's daughter. Besides, a servant should not be carrying a valuable scroll.

If she had a basket, she could hide the scroll in there and pretend she was a servant or poor woman on her way to the market. But the baskets were all inside the house, and she didn't dare return for one.

She huffed out a breath. She was making too many mistakes, not thinking ahead. Her father had always warned her that her impetuous nature would get her in trouble. What a time for him to prove himself correct.

Maybe she could disguise the Book of Spells as something else? Something dull and ordinary that would attract no attention. But what?

Voices rose behind her – coming up the stairwell? Forget planning, she had to act. Meret darted to the opposite edge of the roof with a quick glance to each side. A man was in the cattle yard but not looking her way. She put one hand down on the edge of the roof and vaulted to the wall an arm's-length below, then immediately jumped down to the ground in the garden.

The hand she had used hurt. Somehow she'd been clutching her comb this entire time without noticing. She stabbed it into the thick hair at the back of her head, out of the way, as she ducked close to a jujube tree.

Anxious female voices came from the far side of the garden, in the corner where the outside walls met. No doubt the women had instinctively moved as far from the house and its invaders as possible. Meret was in the opposite corner of the garden, against the house. Trees screened her from the formal pool at the garden's center, and from the opening toward the gatekeeper's lodge and the front entranceway. She had a moment to think, so she scanned her surroundings for anything that might help her escape.

The fruits growing near her were too small to hide the scroll. They did remind her that she'd had no breakfast. Her tight gut did not really want food, but when would she get the chance to eat again? She picked a handful of the jujube dates, a little under-ripe but edible, and chewed them quickly as she thought.

Now for the scroll. She could not hide it under her clothes, because it would show through the thin linen. She did not have a basket, jar, or even a loaf of bread to hide it inside. If only she could use one of the magic spells and vanish to some distant place! But of course she could not read the hieroglyphics. She would need a scribe to decipher the words, and even then the spells likely called for strange ingredients she would not have on hand. She had little personal experience with magic spells, but she knew they were complicated and prone to go wrong if the rules were not followed precisely.