Free Maria Hudgins - Lacy Glass 01 - Scorpion House by Maria Hudgins Page A

red. The yellows were more of a chamois than pure yellow.
    “But I digress. Lacy, you and Graham are to tell us what the substrate is and what the paints are made of. Did they use egg as a binder? Have the original colors changed?”
    Graham shot Lacy a small grin and an ambiguous thumbs-up.
    Lacy was so absorbed by the colors on the walls that when they came to a set of steps she tumbled completely down them, landing on her left shoulder in the burial chamber. Roxanne rushed over and knelt beside her. Susan laughed. Lacy insisted she was okay even though her shoulder hurt quite a bit.
    This room, roughly twenty feet square, had a barrel-vaulted ceiling covered with figures and hieroglyphs. It smelled of must and chemical solvent. The yellows in this room gleamed like gold. Orangey-reds popped out as if they’d been painted yesterday. The figure of a green-faced man wearing a tall crown dominated one wall. On either side of the green man were large brown eyes, heavily outlined in black and with strange, curved black lines extending downward.
    Roxanne pointed to this figure. “I realize that, except for Susan, the rest of you know very little about Egyptian mythology, and there’s no reason you need to for the work you are doing. But this is Osiris, the god of the underworld. He’s always colored green, because he’s dead.”
    “I don’t get it,” Lacy said, rotating her shoulder in its socket.
    “You don’t have to.” Roxanne barked it out, as if Lacy’s comment was an unwelcome interruption. She pointed to one of the huge brown eyes. “This is an Eye of Horus, or wedjat eye, and it’s a protective symbol. You’ll see them in lots of places. At the far end of the chamber, we have Anubis, the jackal-headed god of embalming.”
    This chamber was littered with pots of all sizes and strange wooden items lying helter-skelter among the pots. A stack of pink cloth. Several bowls. Along one wall, a brightly painted coffin.
    “This coffin is our pride and joy, but we can’t move it until Kathleen completes her task of stabilizing the wood. I’m afraid that termites have done their nasty work to the point that, if we lifted it, it would crumble. We’ve already had a peek inside and we know there’s no mummy. It appears to be filled with linen and embalming materials. The most interesting question is, ‘Who was it made for?’ The cartouche bearing the name of the intended inhabitant has been chiseled off, but the face on top is obviously female.”
    Lacy, still sitting on the floor, picked at some of the litter around her. She spotted what she knew were paint flakes mixed in with the sand and silt. “Excuse me, Roxanne. Is it okay for us to pick up and test anything we find on the floor?”
    “Ah, yes. Glad you mentioned it. Yes.” Roxanne grabbed Graham’s arm for his attention. “There’s a good bit of plaster, paint flakes,
et cetera,
on the floor. Since there’s no way we can know where it fell from or how to stick it back up, you can take anything you find that’s of interest to you. If some of your tests are destructive, and I know some are, you may use this material as you see fit. But please, please, don’t chip anything off the walls.”
    “Of course we wouldn’t,” Graham said.
    “There’s also the tailings pile,” Roxanne added. “Outside the tomb, you’ll find a pile of dirt where the workmen screen the loose material they haul out in buckets. We take everything of interest back to Whiz Bang and anything that’s left is yours to do with as you want.”
    Lacy amassed a small collection of colored chips in her left hand and looked around for something to put them in. Failing that, she stuck them in her shorts pocket.
    Shelley stood over the stack of neatly folded pink cloth that lay on one end of the coffin. “What about this linen, Roxanne? What am I allowed to do with it?”
    “Oh, dear. You’re not supposed to destroy or cut it, but we’ve found so much linen. There’s a lot more