The Eye of Horus by Carol Thurston

female mummies have turned up with their left arms folded for all of them to be royal. Some randy old pharaoh probably granted the privilege to his favorites and the practice caught on.”
    “You mean the king had an annual honors list, like Queen Elizabeth, where he named his favorite bedmates?” Phil asked, momentarily breaking the growing tension.
    Cleo didn’t think it was funny. “I was only suggesting how the practice might have gotten started.”
    Max cast a sideways glance at Kate. To accept somethingby inference without eliminating other possibilities didn’t sit any better with him than it did with her, especially if Max was right about Tashat’s age. That one discrepancy alone put everything else they thought they knew about her in question.
    “Tips of the fingers on the right hand are wrapped in something with a high radiodensity,” Max observed, as a different image appeared.
    “Oils and gums pretty much destroyed everything except Tutankhamen’s face, fingers, and toes,” Cleo said by way of explanation, “which were protected by gold-foil stalls and that solid gold mask.”
    “Hey, Max, what do you make of this?” Phil pointed to a faint gray line. “Watch the next one. See, there it is again. And again.”
    “Looks like something flat between the layers of bandaging. I’ll try collating the images later, but let’s get the distance in from the surface so I can focus down on it when I do the standard radiography.” He looked at Kate. “Can’t promise we’ll get anything, but we might as well try. See if there’s any writing on it.”
    “The ink would need to have an appreciably higher radio-density than what it’s written on to show up,” Phil warned.
    “Iron oxide for red, carbon for black since they used soot,” Kate told him.
    By then they were well into the rib cage, and no one said another word until Phil breathed a soft, “Uh-oh!”
    “Yeah, a couple of the ribs are impacted,” Max confirmed. Keeping his eyes on the monitor, he translated for Cleo. “That’s where one fragment of bone has been driven into anoth—wait up, Phil. Freeze it.” He paused. “Now improve the contrast if you can, then move in on this area, right here.” He put his finger to the monitor and with his other hand pulled a pair of half glasses from his shirt pocket. “Age is a factor in how fast a bone mends, but even in children it’s rare to see any callus in less than two weeks.”
    He motioned for Kate without shifting his eyes. “See here? And here? That’s primary callus. How long would you say, Phil?”
    “Three weeks max. One of those ribs could have punctured a lung or torn the liver, maybe even the spleen, but that’s not a conclusive cause of death.”
    “Just the opposite if she stayed alive long enough to form callus.” Max turned to Kate. “Don’t you agree?”
    She nodded, overwhelmed by an unutterable sadness. That meant Tashat had died a slow, painful death, probably by suffocation, or massive infection.
    “It’s still more than likely that most of the other damage occurred postmortem,” Max reminded her before turning back to the monitor. “Okay, Phil, let’s move on.”
    The images changed again and again, keeping time to some relentless beat set by the computer, a machine with a slice of silicon for a heart. And no soul.
    “From here on we’re into Phil’s area of expertise,” Max said, inviting his colleague to take over the commentary.
    “Well, to begin, we’ve got a fracture of the posterior lip of the right hip socket, which could result in dislocation and scatter minute granules of bone into the joint, probably what caused the shadow on that old X ray.” He pointed to a yellow spot on the monitor. “This is the pubic symphysis, where the bones meet to form the pelvis. And this indentation here tells us she had at least one child. She’s also past eighteen.”
    Kate felt like a voyeur watching Tashat’s most intimate secrets revealed one millimeter at