The Stone Warriors

by Michael Northrop

  “But what if —” began Ren.

  Alex cut her off: “Don’t mind my little sister,” he called up to the driver. And then, more softly: “You probably can’t see her over the seat, anyway.”

  Ren gave him a good-natured punch in the arm. Good-natured — but not exactly soft.

  In an hour and a half, they were on a small plane. Three and a half hours and fourteen tiny bags of free pretzels later, they touched down at a small, regional airport thirty-five miles outside of Cairo. Todtman met them as they were headed for customs, which was, of course, against all the rules.

  “How did you get past security?” said Alex. He tried to keep his tone as businesslike as Todtman’s, but he couldn’t help smiling at the sight of the old German alive and well, with his froglike bulging eyes and trademark black suit. “Did you bribe them or hypnotize them with your amulet?” He glanced at the jewel-eyed falcon at Todtman’s neck.

  “Why can’t it be both?” Todtman whispered with a sly smile of his own.

  The customs official waved them through, not even pretending to look at their passports. The trio exited into the brightly lit expanse of the terminal.

  “We must hurry,” said Todtman, the rubber tip of his jet-black walking stick plunking the tile and his eyes sweeping the terminal. “We are not safe here.”

  “In this airport?” said Ren, looking around warily.

  “In Egypt,” said Todtman.

  Driving a large, beat-up rental car, Todtman took off from the airport with only slightly less velocity than the jets roaring by above. Stuck in the backseat, Alex fastened his seat belt tightly. Ren had called shotgun before it had even occurred to him, claiming the front seat with a triumphant chirp: “Revenge of the ‘little sister.’ ”

  Todtman shifted to coax more power out of the big engine, but the gears caught and the car lurched alarmingly. “Sorry,” he said. “There were no German cars available.”

  A turn came up, and Todtman took it. Another one appeared, and he took that one, too. Soon, there was more traffic, and the low smudge of a small city appeared on the horizon. Todtman downshifted, slowed. Alex relaxed. They’d slipped free from the airport into the teeming mix of a country of nearly ninety million.

  They skirted around the little city, avoiding narrow streets and slow traffic, and stuck to a wide road surrounded by surprisingly green country. A battered old tractor appeared up ahead, and Todtman switched lanes and left it in the dust.

  “Why’d you pick us up out here in the boondocks?” asked Ren.

  “Cairo is too dangerous,” said Todtman. “The spirits have driven too many to madness; the authorities are overwhelmed — and The Order does as it pleases.”

  Alex peered out the back window, remembering the chaos he’d witnessed in Cairo: the shouts and sirens, the people haunted by voices in their heads, the woman who ran headlong through a shop window, the police huddled together for their own protection, The Order thugs carrying their guns openly … “So it’s even worse now?” he said, trying to imagine it.

  “Much worse,” said Todtman. He caught Alex’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “I barely escaped with my life — or my soul.” He fell silent for a few moments, as if fighting back a painful memory.

  Alex broke eye contact. He felt like he was riding in the back of a police car: guilty. Cairo was lost, all of Egypt was unsafe, the madness spread farther every day … and he was the cause of it all.

  “So it’s more important than ever that we find my mom and the Lost Spells,” he said, trying to keep things on track. “Have you found out any more about where she might be?”

  Todtman shook his head. “Nothing.”

  “So which way are we headed, then?” Alex demanded. He looked out the tinted window and saw a green field. Two skinny black cows stood grazing on ankle-high grass, while acres of deeper green leaves stretched out behind them. They were in the Nile delta, north of Cairo, a land of dark, fertile soil.

  “That is what we must determine,” Todtman answered. “Our next destination, the next step.”

  “We know Alex’s mom was in the Valley of the Kings,” offered Ren. “But that was more than a week ago.”

  “And now The Order will know she was there, too,” said Alex glumly. “Because Luke was spying for them the whole time.”

  Alex had been betrayed by his cousin and abandoned by his mom. It was a powerful one-two punch, and once again he felt the impact. He shook his head hard, trying to refocus. “Yeah, she’ll be far away from the Valley by now,” he concluded.

  Todtman nodded and then added: “The thing that makes finding your mother so hard is …” He paused. Alex leaned forward in anticipation of some difficult admission, some new truth about his mom. But when it came, the truth was more about Todtman. “She is smarter than I am. She always was — just a little.”

  Despite the clouds hanging over his thoughts, a small smile slipped onto Alex’s face.

  “That’s okay,” said Ren. “She’s smarter than Alex, too.”

  The smile slipped right back off.

  They zoomed by more fields, the stalks of golden wheat on one small farm giving way to a grove of short, squat banana trees on the next. Shallow irrigation ditches divided the landscape. Todtman downshifted as they slipped onto a side road, kicking up a dusty plume behind them. “We will need to think carefully, to figure out what Maggie is trying to do,” he said. “We must think back over everything we’ve found — see if there are any clues we missed.”

  Alex hesitated, but there was one thing he’d kept circling back to. “I don’t know if it means anything,” he began, “but the name my mom signed in the logbook when she left the Valley of the Kings, Angela Felini …”

  Ren leaned across the front seat toward Todtman. “Angie was his old babysitter,” she said, in that teacher’s pet way she sometimes fell into.

  “Yeah,” said Alex. “It’s just … after she stopped working for us she moved to Alexandria. I mean, Alexandria, Virginia, but still. Do you think that my mom signed that name as, like, a message? To me? To us? Because I know there’s an Alexandria, Egypt, too.”

  “Hmmmm,” said Todtman. “It seems possible. If she anticipated us following her …”

  “Well, she is smarter than us,” said Alex. He wanted desperately to believe it: that even if his mom had deserted him, she hadn’t forgotten him. If she’d left him a clue, it could mean that she was still looking out for him. That she wasn’t completely abandoning him.

  “She talked about Alexandria sometimes,” he added hopefully.

  “Yeah, because she went to school there,” said Ren.

  Had she really? Alex tried to remember. When he thought of his mom in school, he thought of Columbia, in New York City. That was the sweatshirt she wore, the campus they visited for alumni events sometimes. He knew she’d gotten her PhD in Egypt, though. He tried to remember exactly where, but Ren was still one step ahead of him.

  “There’s a degree on the wall of your place,” she said. “By the bookshelf.”

  “Oh yeah,” said Alex. He had a vague memory of a framed sheet of old vellum on the wall of the little apartment where he’d grown up. He’d seen it so many times that he’d almost stopped seeing it. He tried to remember the big words at the top. It was a degree, had to be, the writing in Arabic and English. He closed his eyes … Alexandria University.

  “You’re right,” he said, looking up toward the front seat, but the little grin on Ren’s face told him she already knew that. Leave it to Ren to notice all the degrees on the wall, he thought. Still, it was a little awkward for his best friend to remember something about his mom that he hadn’t. “You’re not really my sister, you know,” he added.

  Ren opened her mouth to reply, but Todtman cut in.

  “Yes, that’s right,” he said, his froggy face bending upward in a smile of his own. “I knew she finished her dissertation in Egypt. But I assumed it was in Cairo. Alexandria University is an old school, and a good one.”

&
nbsp; “That’s why she still talks about Alexandria,” said Alex. “It was the first place she lived in Egypt.”

  “Yes,” said Todtman, “her roots in this country are in Alexandria. And if I’m not mistaken, yours, too, Alex.”

  “What do you mean?” he said. She definitely hadn’t told him that.

  “What is your name?”

  “It’s Alex — oh!” He slumped down in his seat, his head reeling from the implications. Alex … Alexandria. “Wasn’t Alexandria named after Alexander the Great?” he said.

  Todtman nodded, and Ren snorted, clearly unconvinced of her best friend’s Greatness. Alex didn’t notice. He was staring down at his own legs. His own Egyptian legs.

  “That university is her oldest and deepest connection to this country,” said Todtman, taking the next left with the car, pointing them back toward the main road. “So that is where the trail points us.”

  A buzzing line of fast-moving cars appeared up ahead. A highway. Alex scanned a tall blue sign near the entrance. Various destinations were listed in Arabic and English in reflective white paint. His eyes ran to the third line:

  ALEXANDRIA 153 KILOMETERS

  “Look, Alex,” said Ren, turning around in her seat to face him. “You’re going home!”

  Ren glanced to her side and saw Todtman’s eyes staring straight at the road ahead, his hands precisely at ten and two o’clock on the steering wheel. She looked into the mirror and saw Alex lost in thought in the backseat.

  They had their destination, but the clue leading them there felt like a long shot. She wanted to know if they were headed in the right direction — or off on another Egyptian goose chase. Slowly, silently, she peeled her hand from the cool vinyl of the car seat and reached up for her amulet.

  She’d never done this before. She’d never asked the ibis for answers without being forced to — without a Death Walker looming or Todtman insisting. But maybe she could try now, she thought. Maybe if she just kept it to herself, she wouldn’t feel the same pressure to get it exactly right.

  Ren took a deep, nervous breath. She exhaled softly and whispered two words: “Extra credit.” They were powerful words for the girl known as “Plus Ten Ren” back in school. She had always had a bad habit of putting too much pressure on herself on tests and assignments, and sometimes it cost her. But she gobbled up every bit of available extra credit, work that could only help, never hurt. And back in the Valley of the Kings, that approach — viewing her amulet’s mysterious offerings as a bonus — had helped her get a handle on its magic, as well.

  As her hand closed around it, she once again asked for a little extra. She felt the smooth stone against her palm and, a split second later, a sudden jolt of energy. Her eyes closed and her mind filled with images:

  A baby with fat, tan cheeks and wide brown eyes, staring out at a massive container ship gliding slowly across smooth, dark water …

  A young woman’s hand, reaching down to pick up a stack of thick books, a rubber band around her wrist — a rubber band just like Alex’s mom used to wear sometimes …

  Her eyes opened.

  “What did you see?” said Todtman.

  She looked over at him, blinking twice to refocus her eyes back in the here and now. “Is Alexandria on the coast?” she asked.

  “Yes, the Mediterranean,” said Todtman. “It has been Egypt’s main port for centuries.”

  “What are you two talking about?” chirped Alex from the backseat.

  “Nothing,” said Ren, catching his eyes in the mirror. His cheeks weren’t quite so chubby anymore, but she was pretty sure his was the face she’d seen. And that must have been his mom’s arms, picking up her schoolbooks. And if all that was true, then that seaside city was Alexandria.

  “Is there something we should know?” said Todtman, eyeing her ibis.

  Ren shook her head. “No, we’re good,” she said. “Just keep driving.”

  Their destination no longer felt like such a long shot to her, but there were still a lot of ifs and maybes in those images. And the only thing she hated more than being unsure was being wrong. She’d used her amulet voluntarily, and it hadn’t been so bad. But it had tricked her before — and she knew there were much tougher tests ahead.

  They drove through the evening and approached Alexandria in the dead of night. Alex felt a little spike of hope as he saw the modest skyline take murky shape in the moonlight. Maybe his mom’s past really was the key to her present. It made sense. In a vast, foreign country, wouldn’t she stick to the places she knew? He hoped they’d find another clue — or better yet, his mom herself.

  But Alex was worried, too. The closer they got, the more the questions dogged him: Why was she running? Why didn’t she contact him? A scary thought popped into his head, fully formed: She’s given me life twice now — is she angry about what it has cost? He shook his head hard to clear it. He felt frustrated and guilty and lost as his thoughts slid by darkly, like the view outside the car windows. I need to make this right. It’s up to me. This time his head stayed as still as stone.

  Alexandria was a city of millions, and the houses on the outskirts quickly gave way to bigger buildings: apartments, offices, stores. But most of them were dark now, lumbering shadows slipping silently by. Only streetlights and sparse headlights lit their way.

  “I have an old colleague that we can stay with,” said Todtman. “We’ll be safe there while we follow your mom’s trail.”

  Alex leaned forward to assess their surroundings. The neighborhood had changed again. The big blocky buildings had given way to smaller, sleeker ones. Shiny metal edges and wide glass windows caught the headlights as they passed, the subtle flourishes of expensive modern architecture. “Uh, these are really fancy houses,” said Alex.

  “This is like the Upper East Side of Alexandria,” said Ren, and Alex laughed despite himself.

  “How do you say Park Avenue in Arabic?” he said.

  Ren chortled. “Is this guy rich?” she asked Todtman, leaning forward for a better look.

  “This woman,” said Todtman. “And very.”

  Todtman pulled into a driveway and stopped at a metal gate. He lowered his window and said something into a speaker in rapid, hushed Arabic. A few moments later, the gate slid back with a smooth mechanical hum.

  There was a conspicuously expensive car in the driveway in front of them, and the gate slid shut behind them with a firm, precise SHUUNK. Alex looked up at the ultramodern cube of a house. A ring of outside lights had come on, and a few of the inside ones were now visible behind large squares of blue-tinted glass on the second floor. “What does this lady do, exactly?” he said.

  “She is” — Todtman pursed his lips, considering his word choice — “a collector … Yes, a bit of a scholar, certainly, but only in a private capacity. Mostly she … collects.”

  Alex didn’t like all those pauses one bit. He knew that private collections of Egyptian artifacts were put together on the black market as often as at the auction house. “And how do you know her, again?”

  Todtman flashed him half a smile, but in the dim light of the car’s interior, Alex couldn’t tell if it meant “trust me” or “you don’t want to know.” He looked up at the house again and saw a shadow glide silently across one window.

  The door clicked open as they approached it, and Alex gawped at the little fish-eyed camera lens as they passed. They entered the hushed, half-lit entryway and were met by a large, imposing man — who imposed himself immediately.

  “Wait here,” he said gruffly, but his expression changed when he saw Todtman’s face. “Oh, hey, Doc. Just a minute.”

  Alex sized up the man — extra-large — and guessed he was a live-in security guard.

  “It’s all right, Bubbi,” called a woman’s voice from somewhere in the shadowy house. “I’m in the study, Doctor!”

  The big man stepped aside, and Alex wondered if his bodyguard buddies knew he was called Bubbi. Todtman led the way up a flight of stairs and into a broa
d and brightly lit room. A woman approached them dressed in business attire despite the hour: tapered tan slacks and a crisp white blouse. She was about his mom’s age, he figured, and carried herself in a similarly professional manner.

  She greeted Todtman warmly and then turned to Alex and Ren.

  “My name is Safa,” she said. “You are welcome in my home.”

  Alex felt tense. He didn’t know anything about this woman, and here they were boxing themselves up inside a walled compound with her. He’d planned to say something polite but measured, like “Hello” or “Thanks for letting us crash.” Instead, he found himself gawking wordlessly at the room around him. Ancient stone relief carvings lined the walls; a life-sized statue stood in a lit alcove.

  “Are these all Hatshepsut?” he blurted finally.

  Safa’s measured expression broke into a warm smile. “Yes, the world’s finest private collection,” she said, the pride unmistakable in her voice.

  Alex took another quick look at the array of ancient artwork, all showing Egypt’s first female pharaoh. “Wow. Wasn’t most of her stuff destroyed?” he said. The Met had an entire room of carvings of Hatshepsut, but those pieces had been reconstructed.

  “I see the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” said Safa. “But look closer.”

  Alex took a few steps toward the statue, and now he saw it. The same light lines in the stone that the ones at the Met had, the subtle scars of expert reconstruction. And what he had initially thought was a heavy shadow on one side of the face was, in fact, all that was left of the face. One side had been chipped away, and there was a patch of rough gray stone where the left eye and cheek should have been. Her chin ended not in the symbolic beard of a pharaoh, but in chisel marks.

  “This one is all in one piece,” said Ren, pointing to an elegant relief along the wall that showed the sleek, regal figure of Hatshepsut standing on one side of a bearded pharaoh as the falcon-headed sun god, Amun-Re, stood on the other.