HONESTLY, CARTER IS SO THICK sometimes I can’t believe we’re related.
I mean when someone says I forbid it, that’s a good sign it’s worth doing. I made for the library straightaway.
“Hold on!” Carter cried. “You can’t just—”
“Brother dear,” I said, “did your soul leave your body again while Amos was talking, or did you actually hear him? Egyptian gods real. Red Lord bad. Red Lord’s birthday: very soon, very bad. House of Life: fussy old magicians who hate our family because Dad was a bit of a rebel, whom by the way you could take a lesson from. Which leaves us—just us—with Dad missing, an evil god about to destroy the world, and an uncle who just jumped off the building—and I can’t actually blame him.” I took a breath. [Yes, Carter, I do have to breathe occasionally.] “Am I missing anything? Oh, yes, I also have a brother who is supposedly quite powerful from an ancient bloodline, blah, blah, et cetera, but is too afraid to visit a library. Now, coming or not?”
Carter blinked as if I’d just hit him, which I suppose I had in a way. “I just…” He faltered. “I just think we should be careful.”
I realized the poor boy was quite scared, which I couldn’t hold against him, but it did startle me. Carter was my big brother, after all—older, more sophisticated, the one who traveled the world with Dad. Big brothers are the ones who are supposed to pull their punches. Little sisters—well, we should be able to hit as hard as we like, shouldn’t we? But I realized that possibly, just possibly, I’d been a bit harsh with him.
“Look,” I said. “We need to help Dad, yes? There’s got to be some powerful stuff in that library, otherwise Amos wouldn’t keep it locked up. You do want to help Dad?”
Carter shifted uncomfortably. “Yeah…of course.”
Well, that was one problem sorted, so we headed for the library. But as soon as Khufu saw what we were up to, he scrambled off the sofa with his basketball and jumped in front of the library doors. Who knew baboons were so speedy? He barked at us, and I have to say baboons have enormous fangs. And they’re not any prettier when they’ve been chewing up exotic pink birds.
Carter tried to reason with him. “Khufu, we’re not going to steal anything. We just want—”
“Agh!” Khufu dribbled his basketball angrily.
“Carter,” I said, “you’re not helping. Look here, Khufu. I have…ta-da!” I held up a little yellow box of cereal I’d taken from the buffet table. “Cheerios! Ends with an -o. Yumsies!”
“Aghhh!” Khufu grunted, more excited now than angry.
“Want it?” I coaxed. “Just take it to the couch and pretend you didn’t see us, yes?”
I threw the cereal towards the couch, and the baboon lunged after it. He grabbed the box in midair and was so excited, he ran straight up the wall and sat on the fireplace mantel, where he began gingerly picking out Cheerios and eating them one at a time.
Carter looked at me with grudging admiration. “How did you—” “Some of us think ahead. Now, let’s open these doors.”
That was not so easily done. They were made of thick wood laced with giant steel chains and padlocked. Complete overkill.
Carter stepped forward. He tried to raise the doors by lifting his hand, which had been quite impressive the night before, only now accomplished nothing.
He shook the chains the old-fashioned way, then yanked on the padlocks. “No good,” he said.
Ice needles tingled on the back of my neck. It was almost as if someone
—or something—was whispering an idea in my head. “What was that word Amos used at breakfast with the saucer?”
“For ‘join’?” Carter said. “Hi-nehm or something.” “No, the other one, for ‘destroy’.”
“Uh, ha-di. But you’d need to know magic and the hieroglyphics, wouldn’t you? And even then—”
I raised my hand toward the door. I pointed with two fingers and my thumb—an odd gesture I’d never made before, like a make-believe gun except with the thumb parallel to the ground.
“Ha-di!”
Bright gold hieroglyphs burned against the largest padlock.
And the doors exploded. Carter hit the floor as chains shattered and splinters flew all over the Great Room. When the dust cleared, Carter got up, covered in wood shavings. I seemed to be fine. Muffin circled my feet, mewing contentedly, as if this were all very normal.
Carter stared at me. “How exactly—”
“Don’t know,” I admitted. “But the library’s open.”
“Think you overdid it a little? We’re going to be in so much trouble—”
us.”
“We’ll just figure out a way to zap the door back, won’t we?”
“No more zapping, please,” Carter said. “That explosion could’ve killed
“Oh, do you think if you tried that spell on a person—” “No!” He stepped back nervously.
I felt gratified that I could make him squirm, but I tried not to smile.
“Let’s just explore the library, shall we?”
The truth was, I couldn’t have ha-di-ed anyone. As soon as I stepped forward, I felt so faint that I almost collapsed.
Carter caught me as I stumbled. “You okay?”
“Fine,” I managed, though I didn’t feel fine. “I’m tired”—my stomach rumbled—“and famished.”
“You just ate a huge breakfast.”
It was true, but I felt as if I hadn’t had food in weeks. “Never mind,” I told him. “I’ll manage.”
Carter studied me skeptically. “Those hieroglyphs you created were golden. Dad and Amos both used blue. Why?”
“Maybe everyone has his own color,” I suggested. “Maybe you’ll get hot pink.”
“Very funny.”
“Come on, pink wizard,” I said. “Inside we go.”
The library was so amazing, I almost forgot my dizziness. It was bigger than I’d imagined, a round chamber sunk deep into solid rock, like a giant well. This didn’t make sense, as the mansion was sitting on top of a warehouse, but then again nothing else about the place was exactly normal.
From the platform where we stood, a staircase descended three stories to the bottom floor. The walls, floor, and domed ceiling were all decorated with multicolored pictures of people, gods, and monsters. I’d seen such illustrations in Dad’s books (yes, all right, sometimes when I was in the Piccadilly bookshop I’d wander into the Egypt section and sneak a look at Dad’s books, just to feel some connection to him, not because I wanted to read them) but the pictures in the books had always been faded and smudged. These in the library looked newly painted, making the entire room a work of art.
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
A blue starry sky glittered on the ceiling, but it wasn’t a solid field of blue. Rather, the sky was painted in a strange swirling pattern. I realized it was shaped like a woman. She lay curled on her side—her body, arms, and legs dark blue and dotted with stars. Below, the library floor was done in a similar way, the green-and-brown earth shaped into a man’s body, dotted with forests and hills and cities. A river snaked across his chest.
The library had no books. Not even bookshelves. Instead, the walls were honeycombed with round cubbyholes, each one holding a sort of plastic cylinder.
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!”
face.
“All right, Doughboy,” I said.
He scowled at me, I think, though it was hard to tell with his mashed-up
“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.”
“Oh, please,” I said. “First, how can you gamble moonlight? And if you did, how could you make extra days out of it?”
“It’s a story!” Carter protested. “Anyway, the Egyptian calendar had three hundred and sixty days in the year, just like the three hundred and sixty degrees in a circle. Nut created five days and added them to the end of the year—days that were not part of the regular year.”
“The Demon Days,” I guessed. “So the myth explains why a year has three hundred and sixty-five days. And I suppose she had her children—”
“During those five days,” Carter agreed. “One kid per day.”
“Again, how do you have five children in a row, each on a different day?”
“They’re gods,” Carter said. “They can do stuff like that.” “Makes as much sense as the name Nut. But please, go on.”
“So when Ra found out, he was furious, but it was too late. The children were already born. Their names were Osiris—”
“The one Dad was after.”
“Then Horus, Set, Isis, and, um…” Carter consulted his scroll. “Nephthys. I always forget that one.”
“And the fiery man in the museum said, you have released all five.”
“Exactly. What if they were imprisoned together and Dad didn’t realize it? They were born together, so maybe they had to be summoned back into the world together. The thing is, one of these guys, Set, was a really bad dude. Like, the villain of Egyptian mythology. The god of evil and chaos and desert storms.”
I shivered. “Did he perhaps have something to do with fire?”
Carter pointed to one of the figures in the picture. The god had an animal head, but I couldn’t quite make out which sort of animal: Dog? Anteater? Evil bunny rabbit? Whichever it was, his hair and his clothes were bright red.
“The Red Lord,” I said.
“Sadie, there’s more,” Carter said. “Those five days—the Demon Days
—were bad luck in Ancient Egypt. You had to be careful, wear good luck charms, and not do anything important or dangerous on those days. And in the British Museum, Dad told Set: They’ll stop you before the Demon Days are over.”
“Surely you don’t think he meant us,” I said. “We’re supposed to stop this Set character?”
Carter nodded. “And if the last five days of our calendar year still count as the Egyptian Demon Days—they’d start on December 27, the day after tomorrow.”
The shabti seemed to be staring at me expectantly, but I had not the slightest idea what to do. Demon Days and evil bunny gods—if I heard one more impossible thing, my head would explode.
And the worst of it? The little insistent voice in the back of my head saying: It’s not impossible. To save Dad, we must defeat Set.
As if that had been on my to-do list for Christmas hols. See Dad—check. Develop strange powers—check. Defeat an evil god of chaos—check. The whole idea was mad!
Suddenly there was a loud crash, as if something had broken in the Great Room. Khufu began barking in alarm.
Carter and I locked eyes. Then we ran for the stairs.
