The Red Pyramid Part 9

"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. "G.o.ds 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 G.o.ds 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."

m.u.f.fin 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."

m.u.f.fin 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 t.i.tle 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. "n.o.body 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. G.o.ds, 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 G.o.ds, five in a row, with a starry woman figure arching over them protectively like an umbrella. Dad had released five G.o.ds. 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 G.o.ddess named Nut? Is her last name Case?"

"Very funny," Carter said. "She was the G.o.ddess 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 G.o.ds, 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 G.o.ds...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 G.o.ddess, Nut, was married to the earth G.o.d, 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 G.o.ds, Ra-he was the sun G.o.d-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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.ds," 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."