“You mean Angie? Angie with the ponytail? She was your favorite!”
Alex nodded. “My mom’s, too.” He stabbed the crinkly page with his finger. “And that’s my mom’s handwriting.”
“So wait,” said Luke. “Was your babysitter here or not?”
Alex shook his head absently. He was staring at the last column, after the scrawled — and faked — signature. Reason for visit: “Leaving valley.”
“Look at the date,” said Ren, but Alex already had.
His mom was gone. As sure as Angela Felini had moved to Alexandria, Virginia, Maggie Bauer had been stopped at the checkpoint on the way out of the valley seven days earlier, signed a fake name — and disappeared. He stared at the familiar handwriting. How many notes had he seen it on? How many birthday cards?
“At least we know for sure,” said Ren, patting him on the shoulder. “She was here. Now we need to know if she left anything behind.”
Alex knew she meant the Spells, and he knew she was right. But he was caught up on new question: Why that name? Was it just the first one she’d thought of … or a message?
They called Todtman from just outside a little riverside teahouse as soon as they got off the boat. The call went straight to voice mail.
“We’re in Luxor,” said Alex. “Call us today, please.” He paused as two men walked by, one walking into the teahouse, the other walking out. “We found something, and … something found us. It’s important. Call us back. Okay, um, bye.”
“Why didn’t he answer?” said Ren.
“It’s still early,” said Alex. “He’ll call back.”
They headed toward the main drag of the city. The remote desert ridge had seemed to offer protection from The Order, but now they were back out in the open, and Alex felt exposed and vulnerable. And almost immediately, they caught sight of some commotion. A small crowd had gathered near the entrance to the Temple of Luxor.
Alex’s mouth was full of one of the rubbery buttered rolls they’d bought at the tea place, so he looked at the others and raised his eyebrows.
“Let’s check it out,” said Ren, who’d eaten her roll like a vacuum cleaner.
As they drew closer, they saw a crane lowering a massive stone block onto an oversized flatbed truck.
“They’re taking the stones right from the dromos,” said Alex, his tone distant with disbelief.
“From the what?” said Luke.
Alex pointed to the monument-lined path that led from Luxor Temple to Karnak. “Those,” said Alex, “are some seriously sacred stones.”
Alex’s jaw dropped as the crane plucked another massive block free and hoisted it toward the back of the truck. A ram-headed sphinx statue that had ridden high atop the stone for thousands of years now sat forlornly on the ground, bearing silent witness. The crowd jeered and pushed forward. One of the city’s biggest tourist attractions was being dismantled before their eyes.
And that’s when Alex saw the guards. Half a dozen men took a step toward the crowd, which instantly shrank back. Alex had originally mistaken them for workers, but that was before he saw the pistols in their hands. The men were wearing matching khaki uniforms, but there were no insignias. They weren’t army or police.
So where are the police? Alex searched the crowd and found Ren one step ahead of him. “Why don’t you stop them?” she was saying to a pair of police officers standing, arms folded, at the edge of the crowd.
Alex rushed over. The first officer just shook his head, not understanding, but the second spoke English well. “The papers seem to be in order,” he said. “From the government …”
From the way he said “seem to be,” Alex knew he didn’t believe it. And from the grim expressions on their faces, he knew that neither of them much liked it.
Puhh-WHUMMMPP!
Alex swung around as the massive stone block was lowered onto the back of the truck. There were already four others on there, and the huge vehicle’s entire frame seemed to bend and slump under the weight.
On the other side of the crane, yelling something at its operator, was a woman whose crisp suit hung loosely on her almost skeletal frame.
Peshwar.
“Ren! Luke!” he yelped, and motioned them quickly back into the crowd.
“Peshwar’s here,” he said.
“So The Order’s doing this?” Ren asked nervously. Alex could see her turning the pieces over in her head. “Why does The Order need a bunch of huge rocks?”
The big truck started up and the crowd jeered again as two plumes of black smoke belched from its exhaust pipes.
“Not rocks,” said Alex. “Sacred stones.” But he still didn’t know why they’d want them. He turned to watch as the truck pulled away, loaded with the blocks, heavy and strong. Did the ancient stones hold some power?
A few men tried to get in front of the truck as it pulled away. A warning shot was fired in the air. There were angry shouts, but in the end, the men moved and the crowd dispersed. The friends disappeared with it, slipping onto a side street.
“I feel sticky,” said Ren.
“Are you sure this stuff is medicine and not toothpaste?” said Luke. He pulled the tube they’d just purchased out of his pack and squinted at the label, as if narrowing his eyes would somehow transform the Arabic alphabet.
“Pretty sure?” said Ren, flapping her guidebook and its glossary of Arabic terms in his general direction.
“I think it’s working,” said Alex. “My neck feels a little better.”
“Yeah,” said Luke, looking down at the angry red skin on his upper arm. “At least my bicep won’t get any cavities.”
They stayed close to the buildings and did their best to keep out of sight. The lioness was in the city, but there was no way they were leaving until they’d found clues to the Death Walker’s identity, and a copy of the Book of the Dead. They headed down a street called Corniche el-Nile toward their first destination, Luxor’s famous Mummification Museum.
“Wait, I’ve got to call home,” said Luke as they passed a quiet stretch of small, seemingly deserted buildings. “It’s been days.” He pulled out his phone and disappeared around the corner of one of the buildings.
He came back a few minutes later looking pale, which was impressive considering his sunburn. Alex gave him a What’s up? look. Luke looked down and avoided his eyes. “I’m in serious trouble,” he said.
Alex got the point. He knew it was a tenuous web of excuses and cover stories that allowed them to be here at all. Luke’s parents thought he was still at a sports camp in London — at least they had — and Ren’s parents thought she was still on a summer internship at the British Museum — at least he hoped.
“I should call, too,” Ren said.
Alex thought it could wait, but he didn’t say so. He knew Ren was homesick. The other two waited as she disappeared into the alleyway-turned-phone booth. She returned a few minutes later, looking like her call had gone better than Luke’s — or Alex’s still unreturned call to Todtman. She flipped her guidebook open for one last look at the map. “We’re just a few blocks away now,” she said.
A minute later, they walked down a flight of broad white stairs to enter the museum. Of course it’s underground, thought Alex.
The mummy museum was operating with a skeleton crew.
As near as Ren could tell it was just two guys. The younger one took their money at the door.
“Here are your tickets,” he said in a thick French accent. “Merci.”
Once he was out of earshot, they got down to business. “We’re looking for the Book, but also missing mummies,” whispered Alex.
“Why are we looking for mummies in town when there’s a valley full of tombs out there?” said Luke, his tone somewhere between annoyed and defeated.
“The Valley of the Kings has been heavily excavated,” whispered Alex. “The important mummies were really coveted. A lot of them are in museums here. If we can find out which ones have gone walking, it might give us a clue to
the Death Walker’s identity. We need to know who he was in life so we know which spell will work on him now.”
Luke knew that part already but barely managed half a nod. Ren could tell he was still upset. She walked a little closer. “Is it your parents?” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Kind of.”
“Bummer,” she said, taking out her pen. Her own hadn’t caught on yet. They were still watching the British Broadcasting Corporation news every night, as if they might catch sight of her — and it had been nice to talk to them.
They searched the sleepy museum.
The Frenchman shadowed them discretely for the first few rooms. He faded away after he saw that they were on their best museum behavior.
In the next room, they caught their first glimpse of the Book of the Dead.
“Here’s some of it,” said Alex, lifting his chin toward the mummy in front of him.
“Where?” said Ren.
“On the wrappings.”
She looked closely. The ink was faded and the linen had gone brown with age, but now she saw it: neat rows of hieroglyphic symbols leading to tiny paintings. She recognized the depiction of the weighing of the heart ceremony by now: There was the scale with a heart on one side and a feather on the other. The god Thoth stood by to record the result: Would the heart be weighed down by guilt and be destroyed forever?
Thoth had the head of an ibis. For this guy’s sake, she thought, looking over at the mummy, I hope that ibis is more reliable than mine. She didn’t understand why her amulet was failing her so often. She tried so hard every time she used it …
“I hope you don’t expect us to cart this dude out of here,” she whispered to Alex.
“No,” he said. “It’s just a few spells anyway. And we still don’t know which one we need.”
Ren nodded. In London, they’d used a spell of protection against grave robbers to banish a Walker who’d been a notorious tomb raider. The right missing mummy could tell them who this Death Walker was — and what spell to use against him. They had more luck with that search. Three of the museum’s mummy exhibits were hidden under solemn tents of black cloth, as if camping out in the afterlife.
“Do you think they’re gone?” said Ren. “Or they’re just moving around under there?” They’d seen two mummies moving at the Met: a little girl twisting in her open coffin, and the Stung Man, climbing out of his.
“Dunno,” said Alex, but that was before he took hold of his amulet.
His eyes turned black, windows onto a world that made Ren shiver, and she looked away.
“Gone,” he said, the white and brown returning to his eyes as he released the scarab. “All three.”
Is one of these missing mummies the Death Walker? Ren walked around and wrote down the info on each in her ever-present notebook. The information plaque by the first one said:
KHAEMKHEMWY, NOBLEMAN, DIED CIRCA 2217 BC
The second one was a priest:
AKHENOTRA, ROYAL PRIEST IN THE COURT OF THE PHARAOH AKHENATEN, DIED CIRCA 1319 BC
“This one’s young!” she said, when she came to the third plaque. “Died around 100 BC.”
Luke pulled his eyes up off the floor and scanned the plaque. “Wealthy desert trader,” he said. “Bet that dude rocked some robes.”
Ren remembered the Walker’s appearance as he approached them across the sandy terrain. She wrote down the name, Thetan-Ankh, and underlined it twice.
They took one more look around the small museum, but all the other mummies still seemed to be present — and dead. They were nearly back where they started before she saw it: another weighing of the heart ceremony. But the heart in this painting was so tiny that it was more like the weighing of a flea.
Alex turned to look where Ren was pointing and his eyes opened wide. “Is that the whole thing?” he said, eyeing the two flattened scrolls. Each was mounted on a board no more than two feet wide.
Ren was already leaning in to read the information plaque under the glass case. “The Book of the Dead of Hebsany,” it read. “Hebsany was a wealthy scribe who gained fame for his skill as a draughtsman and copyist. Given his profession, it is likely that he prepared his own Book of the Dead. It remains the smallest complete copy ever found.”
“Complete!” Ren jumped back — and bumped into Alex, who was reading over her shoulder. “Watch it!” she said.
He put one finger up to his lips and shushed her. “It’s perfect,” he whispered, and right away she knew he meant to take it.
“How?” she mouthed.
Alex nodded down toward his amulet. “If I can get the case open without setting off any alarms, I can just stack the boards and put them in my pack …”
Ren and Luke both instinctively glanced across the room. The entrance was just through the door, and they could hear the muffled conversation of the two museum workers.
Ren thought about it. “I can handle the guards,” she said. “Just be careful — and hurry.”
Then she turned sharply on the heel of her boot and strode out into the entrance room. “Bonjour!” she said brightly. “Mon nom est Ren!”
Her French wasn’t the greatest, she knew, but what better reason to practice? She just hoped she didn’t end up completing the lesson in jail.
There was a loud plonk from the next room. The Frenchman shot his petit inquisiteur a sharp look and strode past her. She fired questions at his back: “Comment allez-vous? Oú sont les toilettes?”
As he was about to round the corner into the room, Alex and Luke came marching out. “Oh, there you are, Ren!” said Alex. She wondered if anyone else noticed the thin layer of sweat on his forehead. “We were looking for you. Well, time to go!”
“Thanks, dudes,” said Luke as the three friends filed out the front door. “Sweet museum.”
The two men gave them small waves and slightly baffled looks. Ren was halfway up the stairs to the street when she heard the door fly open behind them. The friends broke into a run as the men shouted for them to stop.
Losing two museum workers on the tricky side streets of the old city wasn’t that big a challenge. For kids used to battling the undead, the merely out of shape proved easy. The friends headed straight for the ferry, and from there to a taxi to the Valley of the Kings.
They rode fast and with the windows down, the warm wind whipping through the boxy car. Alex’s thoughts were just as turbulent, and he sat in the front seat just to be a few feet closer to their destination. He remembered the hot buzz of his amulet in the tomb, the carefully printed name from his past. It seemed like everyone and everything was trying to tell him something. He needed to know what!
He checked his phone one last time before they lost service. Nothing. Why hadn’t Todtman called? Even the silence seemed telling. He pictured the old scholar, alone in the vipers’ nest Cairo had become. The last bar vanished from his phone, and it felt like a door slamming between them.
The friends climbed out of the cab a hundred yards from the mouth of the valley, but the heat coming from it still hit Alex’s face as if he’d opened the oven to check on a frozen pizza. Rather than getting an inch closer, the taxi backed up to turn around.
Once the friends were alone in the unforgiving desert, the weight of their mission hit them. They were quiet for a few long moments. They could die out here, and no one would know. “We’ll have to wait till sunset to head into the valley to look for the Spells and destroy the Walker,” said Alex at last. He looked up at the sun as Ren looked down at her watch. “Let’s head back to camp and see if we can figure out which spell we need. Maybe we can use your amulet.”
Ren looked at him like he was dense. “What?” he said. “It’s a good idea.”
Luke started heading up the slope for the long walk back to camp, and Ren turned and followed him. The sun was just beginning to set by the time they arrived. Alex had been worried that they might find the place ransacked. But he’d never expected this.
The most famous eighteen-year-old king
in human history — dead some 3,300 years — sat in the saggy-bottomed nylon camp chair idly petting a mummy cat.
Luke raised his hands and looked at the sky: What next?
Ren eyed Pai, her loyalty suddenly in question.
Tut began to speak. It took Alex a few seconds to get his hand around his amulet, and he only caught the last few words: “no need to bow.”
Alex hadn’t planned on it, but it did raise the question: What exactly do you say to the earthly incarnation of a long-dead boy king?
“We, uh, we were at your place yesterday,” he ventured.
Tut looked at him. With his sculpted features, he looked like a well-tanned boy band member, albeit one in robes and a funny hat. “That dump?” said Tut.
“Are you kidding?” said Alex. “It was full of the most famous treasure in the world!”
“There’s no treasure there now,” said Tut. “Just a few rooms and some sloppy paintings. Have you even seen Ramses’s tomb? Magnificent!”
“Yours was done in a hurry, wasn’t it?” said Alex.
Tut shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Yes,” he admitted. “Everyone was in a terrible rush after the murder.”
“You really were murdered?” said Ren. Alex looked over and saw her grasping her amulet.
“I was betrayed,” said Tut.
“But why?” said Ren. “You seem like such a …” She paused, fumbling for the rest of the sentence. “… good king?”
“She means a handsome king,” said Alex.
Ren glared at him, but Tut took the exchange in stride. “I was both,” he said. “But I made enemies.”
“The sun cult that you abolished?” said Alex. “The one started by your father, Akhenaten.”
“Yes,” said Tut, wincing slightly at the memory. “Dad got a little … carried away with that. Banned the old gods, worshipped the sun — my whole childhood I was sunburned from praying to the thing. So, yes, I changed that right away. Brought back the old gods — and paid for it.”
“What language are you all speaking, Goofball-ese?” said Luke, taking a seat in the sand.
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