The small group gathered at Lord Meren's country house to celebrate his homecoming is soon to become yet smaller. Beautiful Anhai, Meren's cousin-in-law, falls victim to murder--an act of violence as inscrutable as the sphinx. True, she had myriad lovers and a scorpion tongue, but why was her body arranged so meticulously, as if for sleep? The most dreadful possibility is that the crime has to do with Lord Meren's awesome undercover mission for the pharaoh, for which his feast of rejoicing is in part a cover. This mission cannot, must not, fail. Ruthlessly stripping bare the deepest secrets of the nest of cobras who are his nearest relatives, Meren finds the thread that leads to the truth and the unmasking of a shocking crime in the court of the living god....