A road-builder. Pa-Seb-Neb was a river trader's son who understood the Nile better than any Maahes before him, and who looked at the closing roads around Thebes and saw a simple problem: if the Pride could not go through the empire, it must go around it.
Using the old Compact of the River from the last chapter, he went south to the Nubian watchers and asked for something no Maahes had asked in centuries: a path. Over the next twenty years, he and his Nubian partners built a chain of hidden waystations, wells and storehouses stretching from Thebes into the kingdom of Kush, as far as the old temple town of Kawa. No army knew it existed. Only the Pride could use it.
It was called the Southern Road, and it did two things. It reopened the supply of resin, so that Pa-Seb-Neb himself held the mantle for 64 years, nearly double the tenure of his predecessors. And it gave the Pride, for the first time in the age, somewhere to go.
What he left behind: the Southern Road, which every later Maahes of the chapter would travel.
