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into the darkness of the back of the slaughterhouse. “Bring a torch,” I called to Ebo. He and Khufu were at my side a moment later, the torch illuminating the dark corners. Merit pushed up between us, and we stood in a line, looking down upon the body of my fallen friend.
    I could not take it in all at once. Mentu’s familiar face stared up at me, his crooked-toothed smile still intact, the large ears that had provoked teasing as a young boy, the deep-set eyes that knew how to show sympathy. He was still the same Mentu, and I thought for a moment that his ka had not fled.
    Then I saw the gash. From right ear to left shoulder, his throat had been cut. His hands had been bound. His feet as well. He had been treated no better than the bull. Cut with a flint knife and left to bleed into the dust. I could do nothing but stare, and the blood seemed to drain from my own body.
    Khufu whispered beside me, in a voice hollowed by fear, “By the jackal-headed Anubis, what has happened here?” Merit wept softly beside him, fingers pressed to her lips. I wished to comfort her, but she was not my wife.
    I knelt to untie Mentu’s wrists with trembling fingers, an attempt to restore some dignity to my friend. His bloody hands must have tried to stanch the flow.
    “He has been cut,” Khufu said.
    “Yes. Clearly.”
    “No,” Khufu said and squeezed my shoulder. “His hand has been cut.”
    I stayed my hand at the bindings. Mentu’s wrists had been lashed together, but there was no mistaking the mutilation.
    The forefinger of his left hand was missing.
    “No!” It was Merit who cried out, but we all felt the impact. A person’s body must be whole to travel to the west and join the council of the gods.
    This was worse than murder.
    This was eternal damnation.
    Some men, in the midst of grief, find themselves unable to control their spirit and display a certain chaos of emotion that is unseemly. I have never struggled with this tendency. Instead, now I felt a tightening inside of me, as though the strips of linen wound tightly around a corpse were wrapping themselves about my heart, the black resin hardening. I welcomed this feeling, as it would make me impervious to pain.
    I backed away from the body. “Who would have done this? Mentu was not a man with enemies.”
    Khufu studied Mentu’s body, then focused on Merit, who wept violently now. “No. But it seems he had a good friend in my wife.”
    I searched my king’s face, unable to read the emotion there.
    Khufu turned the Great Wife away, at last, and circled her with his arms. “We will have the finest physicians attend to him,” he said in soothing tones. “They will fashion another finger, attach it well. He will be whole when the seventy days of purification are accomplished. I promise you, his ka will rest with the gods.”
    A glint on the floor a few cubits away caught my eye, and I directed Ebo to bring the torch closer. I moved toward it on wooden legs. “What is this?”
    Ebo answered. “It was found on his body. Those that found him removed it to see if he still breathed.”
    In the dust at my feet lay a golden mask, the likes of which is rarely seen outside a pharaoh’s tomb. I laid my staff on the floor and lifted the mask. It was fashioned as the face of a man, with bright blue inlaid lapis lazuli eyes and red painted lips. The craftsmanship was exquisite, the heavy Nubian gold pounded smooth and the details intricate.
    “Found on his face?” I asked.
    Ebo nodded. I turned the mask over, looking for the artist’s mark but found only a glyph for Anubis, the god of the underworld.
    I bent to reposition the mask on Mentu’s face, grateful to see that it covered much of the wound on his neck. I touched the forehead with my fingertips and closed my eyes. “I will find the one who did this to you, my friend. I will make him pay.”
    “Come,” Khufu said. “Leave him to the priests and embalmers. You have important work to attend. The project