by Rick Riordan
At each of the four compass points, a ceramic statue stood on a pedestal. The statues were half-size humans wearing kilts and sandals, with glossy black wedge-shaped haircuts and black eyeliner around their eyes.
[Carter says the eyeliner stuff is called kohl, as if it matters.]
At any rate, one statue held a stylus and scroll. Another held a box. Another held a short, hooked staff. The last was empty-handed.
“Sadie.” Carter pointed to the center of the room. Sitting on a long stone table was Dad’s workbag.
Carter started down the stairs, but I grabbed his arm. “Hang on. What about traps?”
He frowned. “Traps?”
“Didn’t Egyptian tombs have traps?”
“Well...sometimes. But this isn’t a tomb. Besides, more often they had curses, like the burning curse, the donkey curse—”
“Oh, lovely. That sounds so much better.”
He trotted down the steps, which made me feel quite ridiculous, as I’m usually the one to forge ahead. But I supposed if someone had to get cursed with a burning skin rash or attacked by a magical donkey, it was better Carter than me.
We made it to the middle of the room with no excitement. Carter opened the bag. Still no traps or curses. He brought out the strange box Dad had used in the British Museum.
It was made of wood, and about the right size to hold a loaf of French bread. The lid was decorated much like the library, with gods and monsters and sideways-walking people.
“How did the Egyptians move like that?” I wondered. “All sideways with their arms and legs out. It seems quite silly.”
Carter gave me one of his God, you’re stupid looks. “They didn’t walk like that in real life, Sadie.”
“Well, why are they painted like that, then?”
“They thought paintings were like magic. If you painted yourself, you had to show all your arms and legs. Otherwise, in the afterlife you might be reborn without all your pieces.”
“Then why the sideways faces? They never look straight at you. Doesn’t that mean they’ll lose the other side of their face?”
Carter hesitated. “I think they were afraid the picture would be too human if it was looking right at you. It might try to become you.”
“So is there anything they weren’t afraid of?”
“Little sisters,” Carter said. “If they talked too much, the Egyptians threw them to the crocodiles.”
He had me for a second. I wasn’t used to him displaying a sense of humor. Then I punched him. “Just open the bloody box.”
The first thing he pulled out was a lump of white gunk.
“Wax,” Carter pronounced.
“Fascinating.” I picked up a wooden stylus and a palette with small indentations in its surface for ink, then a few glass jars of the ink itself—black, red, and gold. “And a prehistoric painting set.”
Carter pulled out several lengths of brown twine, a small ebony cat statue, and a thick roll of paper. No, not paper. Papyrus. I remembered Dad explaining how the Egyptians made it from a river plant because they never invented paper. The stuff was so thick and rough, it made me wonder if the poor Egyptians had had to use toilet papyrus. If so, no wonder they walked sideways.
Finally I pulled out a wax figurine.
“Ew,” I said.
He was a tiny man, crudely fashioned, as if the maker had been in a hurry. His arms were crossed over his chest, his mouth was open, and his legs were cut off at the knees. A lock of human hair was wrapped round his waist.
Muffin jumped on the table and sniffed the little man. She seemed to think him quite interesting.
“There’s nothing here,” Carter said.
“What do you want?” I asked. “We’ve got wax, some toilet papyrus, an ugly statue—”
“Something to explain what happened to Dad. How do we get him back? Who was that fiery man he summoned?”
I held up the wax man. “You heard him, warty little troll. Tell us what you know.”
I was just messing about. But the wax man became soft and warm like flesh. He said, “I answer the call.”
I screamed and dropped him on his tiny head. Well, can you blame me?
“Ow!” he said.
Muffin came over to have a sniff, and the little man started cursing in another language, possibly Ancient Egyptian. When that didn’t work, he screeched in English: “Go away! I’m not a mouse!”
I scooped up Muffin and put her on the floor.
Carter’s face had gone as soft and waxy as the little man’s. “What are you?” he asked.
“I’m a shabti, of course!” The figurine rubbed his dented head. He still looked quite lumpish, only now he was a living lump. “Master calls me Doughboy, though I find the name insulting. You may call me Supreme-Force-Who-Crushes-His-Enemies!”
“All right, Doughboy,” I said.
He scowled at me, I think, though it was hard to tell with his mashed-up face.
“You weren’t supposed to trigger me! Only the master does that.”
“The master, meaning Dad,” I guessed. “Er, Julius Kane?”
“That’s him,” Doughboy grumbled. “Are we done yet? Have I fulfilled my service?”
Carter stared at me blankly, but I thought I was beginning to understand.
“So, Doughboy,” I told the lump. “You were triggered when I picked you up and gave you a direct order: Tell us what you know. Is that correct?”
Doughboy crossed his stubby arms. “You’re just toying with me now. Of course that’s correct. Only the master is supposed to be able to trigger me, by the way. I don’t know how you did it, but he’ll blast you to pieces when he finds out.”
Carter cleared his throat. “Doughboy, the master is our dad, and he’s missing. He’s been magically sent away somehow and we need your help—”
“Master is gone?” Doughboy smiled so widely, I thought his wax face would split open. “Free at last! See you, suckers!”
He lunged for the end of the table but forgot he had no feet. He landed on his face, then began crawling toward the edge, dragging himself with his hands. “Free! Free!”
He fell off the table and onto the floor with a thud, but that didn’t seem to discourage him. “Free! Free!”
He made it another centimeter or two before I picked him up and threw him in Dad’s magic box. Doughboy tried to get out, but the box was just tall enough that he couldn’t reach the rim. I wondered if it had been designed that way.
“Trapped!” he wailed. “Trapped!”
“Oh, shut up,” I told him. “I’m the mistress now. And you’ll answer my questions.”
Carter raised his eyebrow. “How come you get to be in charge?”
“Because I was smart enough to activate him.”
“You were just joking around!”
I ignored my brother, which is one of my many talents. “Now, Doughboy, first off, what’s a shabti?”
“Will you let me out of the box if I tell you?”
“You have to tell me,” I pointed out. “And no, I won’t.”
He sighed. “Shabti means answerer, as even the stupidest slave could tell you.”
Carter snapped his fingers. “I remember now! The Egyptians made models out of wax or clay—servants to do every kind of job they could imagine in the afterlife. They were supposed to come to life when their master called, so the deceased person could, like, kick back and relax and let the shabti do all his work for eternity.”
“First,” Doughboy snipped, “that is typical of humans! Lazing around while we do all the work. Second, afterlife work is only one function of shabti. We are also used by magicians for a great number of things in this life, because magicians would be total incompetents without us. Third, if you know so much, why are you asking me?”
“Why did Dad cut off your legs,” I wondered, “and leave you with a mouth?”
“I—” Doughboy clapped his little hands over his mouth. “Oh, very funny. Threaten the wax statue. Big bully! He cut my
legs off so I wouldn’t run away or come to life in perfect form and try to kill him, naturally. Magicians are very mean. They maim statues to control them. They are afraid of us!”
“Would you come to life and try to kill him, had he made you perfectly?”
“Probably,” Doughboy admitted. “Are we done?”
“Not by half,” I said. “What happened to our dad?”
Doughboy shrugged. “How should I know? But I see his wand and staff aren’t in the box.”
“No,” Carter said. “The staff—the thing that turned into a snake—it got incinerated. And the wand...is that the boomerang thing?”
“The boomerang thing?” Doughboy said. “Gods of Eternal Egypt, you’re dense. Of course that’s his wand.”
“It got shattered,” I said.
“Tell me how,” Doughboy demanded.
Carter told him the story. I wasn’t sure that was the best idea, but I supposed a ten-centimeter-tall statue couldn’t do us that much harm.
“This is wonderful!” Doughboy cried.
“Why?” I asked. “Is Dad still alive?”
“No!” Doughboy said. “He’s almost certainly dead. The five gods of the Demon Days released? Wonderful! And anyone who duels with the Red Lord—”
“Wait,” I said. “I order you to tell me what happened.”
“Ha!” Doughboy said. “I only have to tell you what I know. Making educated guesses is a completely different task. I declare my service fulfilled!”
With that, he turned back to lifeless wax.
“Wait!” I picked him up again and shook him. “Tell me your educated guesses!”
Nothing happened.
“Maybe he’s got a timer,” Carter said. “Like only once a day. Or maybe you broke him.”
“Carter, make a helpful suggestion! What do we do now?”
He looked at the four ceramic statues on their pedestals. “Maybe—”
“Other shabti?”
“Worth a shot.”
If the statues were answerers, they weren’t very good at it. We tried holding them while giving them orders, though they were quite heavy. We tried pointing at them and shouting. We tried asking nicely. They gave us no answers at all.
I grew so frustrated I wanted to ha-di them into a million pieces, but I was still so hungry and tired, I had the feeling that spell would not be good for my health.
Finally we decided to check the cubbyholes round the walls. The plastic cylinders were the kind you might find at a drive-through bank—the kind that shoot up and down the pneumatic tubes. Inside each case was a papyrus scroll. Some looked new. Some looked thousands of years old. Each canister was labeled in hieroglyphs and (fortunately) in English.
“The Book of the Heavenly Cow,” Carter read on one. “What kind of name is that? What’ve you got, The Heavenly Badger?”
“No,” I said. “The Book of Slaying Apophis.”
Muffin meowed in the corner. When I looked over, her tail was puffed up.
“What’s wrong with her?” I asked.
“Apophis was a giant snake monster,” Carter muttered. “He was bad news.”
Muffin turned and raced up the stairs, back into the Great Room. Cats. No accounting for them.
Carter opened another scroll. “Sadie, look at this.”
He’d found a papyrus that was quite long, and most of the text on it seemed to be lines of hieroglyphs.
“Can you read any of this?” Carter asked.
I frowned at the writing, and the odd thing was, I couldn’t read it—except for one line at the top. “Only that bit where the title should be. It says...Blood of the Great House. What does that mean?”
“Great house,” Carter mused. “What do the words sound like in Egyptian?”
“Per-roh. Oh, it’s pharaoh, isn’t it? But I thought a pharaoh was a king?”
“It is,” Carter said. “The word literally means ‘great house,’ like the king’s mansion. Sort of like referring to the president as ‘the White House.’ So here it probably means more like Blood of the Pharaohs, all of them, the whole lineage of all the dynasties, not just one guy.”
“So why do I care about the pharaohs’ blood, and why can’t I read any of the rest?”
Carter stared at the lines. Suddenly his eyes widened. “They’re names. Look, they’re all written inside cartouches.”
“Excuse me?” I asked, because cartouche sounded like a rather rude word, and I pride myself on knowing those.
“The circles,” Carter explained. “They symbolize magic ropes. They’re supposed to protect the holder of the name from evil magic.” He eyed me. “And possibly also from other magicians reading their names.”
“Oh, you’re mental,” I said. But I looked at the lines, and saw what he meant. All the other words were protected by cartouches, and I couldn’t make sense of them.
“Sadie,” Carter said, his voice urgent. He pointed to a cartouche at the very end of the list—the last entry in what looked to be a catalogue of thousands.
Inside the circle were two simple symbols, a basket and a wave.
“KN,” Carter announced. “I know this one. It’s our name, KANE.”
“Missing a few letters, isn’t it?”
Carter shook his head. “Egyptians usually didn’t write vowels. Only consonants. You have to figure out the vowel sounds from context.”
“They really were nutters. So that could be KON or IKON or KNEE or AKNE.”
“It could be,” Carter agreed. “But it’s our name, Kane. I asked Dad to write it for me in hieroglyphs once, and that’s how he did it. But why are we in this list? And what is ‘blood of the pharaohs’?”
That icy tingle started on the back of my neck. I remembered what Amos had said, about both sides of our family being very ancient. Carter’s eyes met mine, and judging from his expression, he was having the same thought.
“There’s no way,” I protested.
“Must be some kind of joke,” he agreed. “Nobody keeps family records that far back.”
I swallowed, my throat suddenly very dry. So many odd things had happened to us in the last day, but it was only when I saw our name in that book that I finally began to believe all this mad Egyptian stuff was real. Gods, magicians, monsters...and our family was tied into it.
Ever since breakfast, when it occurred to me that Dad had been trying to bring Mum back from the dead, a horrible emotion had been trying to take hold of me. And it wasn’t dread. Yes, the whole idea was creepy, much creepier than the shrine my grandparents kept in the hall cupboard to my dead mother. And yes, I told you I try not to live in the past and nothing could change the fact that my mum was gone. But I’m a liar. The truth was, I’d had one dream ever since I was six: to see my mum again. To actually get to know her, talk to her, go shopping, do anything. Just be with her once so I could have a better memory to hold on to. The feeling I was trying to shake was hope. I knew I was setting myself up for colossal hurt. But if it really were possible to bring her back, then I would’ve blown up any number of Rosetta Stones to make it happen.
“Let’s keep looking,” I said.
After a few more minutes, I found a picture of some of animal-headed gods, five in a row, with a starry woman figure arching over them protectively like an umbrella. Dad had released five gods. Hmm.
“Carter,” I called. “What’s this, then?”
He came to have a look and his eyes lit up.
“That’s it!” he announced. “These five...and up here, their mother, Nut.”
I laughed. “A goddess named Nut? Is her last name Case?”
“Very funny,” Carter said. “She was the goddess of the sky.”
He pointed to the painted ceiling—the lady with the blue star-spangled skin, same as in the scroll.
“So what about her?” I asked.
Carter knit his eyebrows. “Something about the Demon Days. It had to do with the birth of these five gods, but it’s been a long time since Dad told me the story.
This whole scroll is written in hieratic, I think. That’s like hieroglyph cursive. Can you read it?”
I shook my head. Apparently, my particular brand of insanity only applied to regular hieroglyphs.
“I wish I could find the story in English,” Carter said.
Just then there was a cracking noise behind us. The empty-handed clay statue hopped off his pedestal and marched towards us. Carter and I scrambled to get out of his way, but he walked straight past us, grabbed a cylinder from its cubbyhole and brought it to Carter.
“It’s a retrieval shabti,” I said. “A clay librarian!”
Carter swallowed nervously and took the cylinder. “Um...thanks.”
The statue marched back to his pedestal, jumped on, and hardened again into regular clay.
“I wonder...” I faced the shabti. “Sandwich and chips, please!”
Sadly, none of the statues jumped down to serve me. Perhaps food wasn’t allowed in the library.
Carter uncapped the cylinder and unrolled the papyrus. He sighed with relief. “This version is in English.”
As he scanned the text, his frown got deeper.
“You don’t look happy,” I noticed.
“Because I remember the story now. The five gods...if Dad really released them, it isn’t good news.”
“Hang on,” I said. “Start from the beginning.”
Carter took a shaky breath. “Okay. So the sky goddess, Nut, was married to the earth god, Geb.”
“That would be this chap on the floor?” I tapped my foot on the big green man with the river and hills and forests all over his body.
“Right,” Carter said. “Anyway, Geb and Nut wanted to have kids, but the king of the gods, Ra—he was the sun god—heard this bad prophecy that a child of Nut—”
“Child of Nut,” I snickered. “Sorry, go on.”
“—a child of Geb and Nut would one day replace Ra as king. So when Ra learned that Nut was pregnant, Ra freaked out. He forbade Nut to give birth to her children on any day or night of the year.”
I crossed my arms. “So what, she had to stay pregnant forever? That’s awfully mean.”
Carter shook his head. “Nut figured out a way. She set up a game of dice with the moon god, Khons. Every time Khons lost, he had to give Nut some of his moonlight. He lost so many times, Nut won enough moonlight to create five new days and tag them on to the end of the year.”