Evy was dreaming. She was holding Rick in her arms, kissing him passionately. However, her handsome husband seemed to keep changing into Ardeth Bay and slowly back again as if both people were rolled into one unstable body. To make matters worse, the room was revolving. As her desire evaporated into her soggy brain, she and Rick/Ardeth finally parted. She traced his jaw with her finger. "I'll see you upstairs," she whispered to him breathlessly. Rick/Ardeth smiled and leaned in impossibly close, inhaling her scent. "You will indeed…" he whispered into her ear. She smiled softly, having a hard time keeping her eyes open, and made her wobbly way up the stairs, quite a feat in a spinning room. Suddenly she opened her eyes. "Rick?" she asked, suddenly, inexplicably worried. She sat up. Rick was sitting in the chair next to their bed. "Hey, honey," he said lovingly. "How'd you sleep?" As he spoke, she became aware of a terrible headache. "Ooh, just awful." She squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them. "I had too much to drink again, didn't I?" she asked ruefully.
Rick held up his finger and thumb and gave her a smile. "Just a little." She shook her head hopelessly. Would she never learn to tolerate alcohol? "I didn't do anything stupid, did I?" she asked half-jokingly. She watched Rick hesitate. Uh-oh, she thought. "Well…" he hedged, "aside from kissing Ardeth, no, not much." She blinked. She must have misheard. Then she remembered her dream. "Oh, dear…" she whispered, stunned. "I really did have too much to drink…" She looked down at the mussed sheets before her. "Did I… was it… were you there?" Of course he was there. He had just told her about it, hadn't he? Her husband nodded. "Yeah." Evy bit her lip. She felt horrible. "Oh, Rick…" she got out of bed and went over to hug him tightly. "I am so, so sorry," she started. "Don't be, Evy." Rick had already forgiven her. "We both know it wasn't your fault." "I love you," said Evy, meaning it more than ever at this demonstration of tolerance. "Love you too," said Rick, still holding her. Evy thought of something. "Where is Ardeth?"
Rick let go and looked at her inscrutably. "He's gone." Evy blinked. "What? Why?" Rick shrugged, still not quite willing to let the incident go as far as Ardeth was concerned. "He needed some time alone, I guess." Evy looked at him, then nodded. "I suppose I understand that. But…" she began to think of the consequences of his absence. "How will we find Ashëla without him? How will we know where to find the Book? How will we-" She was starting to get upset. "Evy," Rick interrupted her. "Evy, honey… Ardeth isn't the only one with a brain chock-full of Egyptian facts." He looked at her meaningfully. "We can figure it out." Evy stared at him, then smiled a little sheepishly. "I suppose I was being a bit silly, wasn't I…" She suddenly turned and headed for the closet. "Well, then, let's go, right away!" Rick stood up, watching her rummage through their things. "Uh, Evy? Where are we going?" She turned around, all smiles, with a hat and bag in her hands. "To the library!"
In the stuffy Cairo Library, Evy, Rick, and a barely-awake Alex were flipping through a large pile of books. The librarian had been a little annoyed that the O'Connells had removed an entire shelf of books and had spread them across the table, sorting through the useful ones. He hovered nearby now, watching with a glower as Evy talked to Rick quietly. "I thought we'd start with the villains we've already met, just to make sure that this isn't some kind of chain reaction that we started by killing something or other." She was standing behind Alex, who was sitting and sleepily turning the pages of A Child's Guide to Ancient Egypt. Rick was standing next to her, arms crossed, just a little out of his league in an area with so many books. She showed him the book she was looking at. "Now, you see, Imhotep isn't in very many books at all. I noticed this earlier, but I attributed it to the small selection of the British Museum. I would surmise, then, that Imhotep went to some lengths to remove himself from history to ensure that if and when he got a chance to regenerate, no one would know how to defeat him." "But he didn't count on us," Rick said proudly, mentally grumbling. Evy had gone into her 'librarian mode', and was showing signs of the same manner that had bewildered him when he had first met her.
"No, he didn't," Evy replied, not really listening. "That leaves us," she said, putting down the historical volume and picking up a book of myths, "with-" "Oh, not him," groaned Rick to the startled irritation of the prim librarian, "The Scorpion King?" "Exactly," Evy said with relish. She turned some pages and read for a moment. Then she frowned. "Well, this is odd," she said. "What?" Rick leaned over her shoulder. "Well, according to popular myth, it would appear that the Scorpion King was, ah- married." "Married?" said Rick unbelievingly. "That monster?" Evy nodded, intent on the book. "Mhmm," she said, "to a priestess named Merserqet. It means 'beloved of the Scorpion Goddess'." Her finger traced the cartouche in a picture next to the small-print title. "How appropriate," said Rick ironically. "Quite. It also appears that she had an unusual power given to her by her patron goddess, Serqet… by drinking the blood of any one person, she was said to be able to turn into an exact replica of that person!" Her surprise was borne of the familiarity of the description.
"I think we may have found Ashëla. Oh, look- there's an inscription below her cartouche…" Evy studied the photocopied hieroglyphics for a moment. "'When… my Lord lives out his second life, so I will live… again." She and Rick looked at each other. "Well," Rick said, raising his eyebrows. "That's a pretty clear explanation of why she's alive and kicking in the nineteen-hundreds." Evy was frowning slightly. "But Serqet is- was a benevolent goddess. Why would she allow her favored one to be so evil?" Rick shrugged and starting putting books in neater piles. "Maybe she doesn't know what Merserqet is doing," he suggested. Evy stared at him, a slow smile lighting up her face. "Rick, darling… I think you just solved our problem." She grinned and closed the book, helping Rick organize the table. "I did?" asked Rick rhetorically as his son slowly slumped over his book, asleep.
Ardeth rode his camel hard, almost to the camp of his Med-jai. He had ridden the ungainly beast nearly to exhaustion, trying hard to get home before noon. He was doing fine, he realized, looking up at the sun. It was nearly noon, and he was nearly home. He slowed the wheezing camel and rode at a statelier pace over the last dune. His expectant gaze looked over the sands and met with- nothing. He blinked. There were no Med-jai in his camp, no horses, no camels… not even any tents. He looked in disbelief at the empty, sprawling campground, devoid of any trace of his kinsmen save the stone-lined campfire, long since put out. Any footprints had been smoothed over by the desert wind. He wheeled his camel around, spurring it to gallop around. Finally, convinced that there was truly no one there, he shook his fist at the sky. "Ashëla!" he shouted hatefully. There was no doubt in his mind of the cause of this disaster. His men had been told not to move until he returned, and the only person he knew besides himself that was Ardeth Bay was his own Ashëla. He looked up at the white, hot sun. "Have you no mercy?!" he cried to Allah. Suddenly a whisper spoke to him tantalizingly.
He twisted around, neck craning to see who was speaking. There was no one around for miles. The whisper traced the air, stronger, now recognizable as a female voice speaking in Ancient Egyptian. He knew what that meant. " Ashëla," he called. "Where are my men?" The whisper grew to a clear speaking voice, and a light wind played with his hair. He put a hand on the back of his head. "I desire you to stop calling me by that detestable foreign name," Ashëla ordered imperiously in the old tongue. Ardeth felt severely handicapped, not being able to see his enemy. He felt as if she could sneak up and stab him at any moment. "My name… is not Ashëla…" she continued silkily. "I am Merserqet… and you would do well to call this goddess by her true name." The air cupped around his arm and caressed his shoulder. He jerked it away. "I know you," he replied steadily, although this revelation worried him greatly, "and you are no goddess." The voice hissed and the wind bit at him viciously, almost pushing him off of his oblivious camel. He grabbed the reins and straightened himself. "You are a parasite!" he declared, bracing himself. The wind did not come. Merserqet laughed lightly. "It matters not what you think of me," she told him in honeyed tones. "I have won… won… won…" her echo faded away as the voice and wind took their leave of Ardeth. He turned his camel and slapped it quickly, riding towards Heliopolis once more. He would have time later to discover the location of the Med-jai. At the moment, he had a more important task: warn Rick and the beautiful Evy of this new danger to the O'Connells, and indeed, the rest of the world as well.
