Rick Riordan - The Red Pyramid

“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.