How to Curse in Hieroglyphics (16 page)

“I have to shay,” he continued, flecks of outragey froth flying from his toothy snout like a lawn sprinkler with a leak, “that there hash been a grave injushtish perpetrated! Sheveral, in fact!”

Pilot and the twins waited impatiently as Artie shlurped his way through an explanation. It turned out that the nefarious Princess Zahara wasn't exactly all that evil after all.

“She'sh no villain.” Artie waved his arms. “She'sh a victim! And it'sh up to ush to help her!”

According to what she'd told him, Zahara-Safiya
wasn't
, in fact, the power-hungry, spoiled royal brat that Dudley had portrayed her as. She'd never tried to cast a curse on her family when the Pharaoh ousted her as his heir in favour of her stepbrother. Quite the opposite. She was a devoted daughter who was—or so she thought— being trained for a career as a temple priestess. But the truth was much darker. The temple priests were in fact trying to corrupt her, binding her with evil spells to the dark gods, Set and Anubis. When they were done, she'd be a kind of ticking time bomb of spells that they could then “detonate” at their discretion and use against her father.

When Zahara discovered that she was being used as a weapon to topple the Pharaoh, she was appalled and threatened to rat the temple priests out. That was when they put a whammy on her. The priests were too afraid to silence her in the “traditional” way—killing her might well have caused their spells to rebound on them—so, instead, they faked her death and made up a story about how she had succumbed to a bout of Nile fever while the Pharaoh and his queen were away on a tour of the Lower Provinces. The Pharaoh returned to find his daughter, her body already wrapped in bandages, laid to rest in a gilded casket. The Pharaoh never suspected that Zahara was still alive, suspended in a cursed death sleep. As per Egyptian custom, he had her buried with all her worldly goods in a tomb he'd been preparing for himself.

And there she remained.

For centuries.

Right up until an unscrupulous treasure hunter (and that was really the only polite way to say “tomb raider”) stumbled upon her resting place, deep in the lonely desert outside of Thebes. A scroll was found next to her in the casket, left there by the evil priests. The tomb raider was well versed in hieroglyphics—a very useful skill in his profession—and once he'd deciphered the scroll's message, he was able to read the details of the curse that had been cast upon the Princess. He learned that the magic amulet around the mummy's neck, together with the scarab jewel on the sarcophagus, were the keys, both to keeping her alive in her death sleep and to keeping the dark magic she'd been burdened with under control. Just in case the temple priests ever got the chance to revive the Princess—and their villainous plans.

Eventually, the tomb raider—an old desert rat who had bought and sold priceless antiquities for the price of a crate of rum bottles for most of his life—fell on hard times. And he started to think, maybe a curse had fallen on
him
, for having kept this particular mummy in his possession. So, when he stumbled upon a disgraced ex-officer of the British Army in a seedy café in a decidedly dodgy part of Cairo, he agreed to sell him the entire contents of the Princess's tomb. And from those shady origins, the ex-officer turned himself into an “adventurer” called Colonel Winchester P. Q. Dudley.

Dudley went on to buy up troves of “rare artifacts” from other tomb raiders, and decommissioned carnival rides from junk dealers, and he built his shabby little touring empire, eventually turning a tidy profit off his truckloads of ill-gotten booty.

All of which wouldn't have been
nearly
so horrifying if the main attraction, Zahara-Safiya, hadn't actually been still excruciatingly aware of what was going on around her. Dudley had known all along that the Princess wasn't a shambling shell but a young girl, spell-enthralled. Still, he had used Zahara like a puppet, controlling her with the Eye of Horus amulet, making her perform her moaning, glowing-eyed, cursed mummy routine for the gawking masses against her will.

She'd been nothing but a slave for years, living in a kind of nightmare limbo, with a dim awareness of her surroundings but unable to communicate. She had been lonely, imprisoned within her gilded coffin, friendless, except for the rare occasions when Delmer would talk to her as he packed up the displays. Zahara said that he seemed to feel pangs of guilt for her situation. Not that he ever tried to help her out of it. But then, to Delmer, as to everyone else, she was probably just a mindless bundle of rags and bones anyway. He probably never realized that he was talking to someone who was
listening
.

But she was. She had. She'd heard every word he'd said, down through the years. And eventually, even though he spoke a different language, she'd managed
to piece together what had happened. How she'd been betrayed. Enslaved.

And it made her angry.

“Well of course it did!” Cheryl exclaimed in indignation. “You tell her she has every right to be as mad as heck, Shrimpcake!”

Tweed nodded in vigorous agreement. “I don't believe in punning,” she said, frowning fiercely, “but you're right, Artie, this is a grave injustice.”

“I knew that the Colonel was rotten to the core.” Pilot smacked one fist into his palm. “Listen here, Art-Bart. You tell the Princess that we'll do anything we can to help her outta this jam.”

Artie didn't have to tell her. She might not have been able to speak English, but after so many years of listening to it being spoken all around her, Zahara understood Pilot well enough to leap to her feet (sending Mr. Sniffers tumbling to the barn floor with an aggrieved
Meew
!) and throw her arms around Pilot's neck in gratitude. Both Tweed and Cheryl found it hilarious to see the normally unflappable Yeager Armbruster blush crimson to the roots of his hair.

“Uh, yeah,” Artie snorted. “I think she'd like that.”

It turned out that what Zahara-Safiya
really
wanted was to fulfill the final destiny she'd been denied for so long. She wanted to join her family, all of whom had, of course, long since crossed over into the paradise of Aaru, the Egyptian afterlife. She could do that,
she relayed through Artie, by using the magic that the temple priests—and Colonel Dudley—had used to keep her bound and trapped on the mortal plane. During her time as a temple acolyte, she'd learned enough magic from the
Egyptian Book of the Dead
to know that she could reverse the spells and open a portal to Aaru.

“Ookay …” Cheryl rolled an eye at Tweed. “That sounds particularly dangerous …”

“I'll shay.” Artie nodded in agreement. “Conshidering we have to get shome kinda fanshy amulet thingy to do it.”

“And where do we get that?”

Artie asked the Princess.

“Ah,” he said. “That Dudley dude wearsh it around hish neck.”

“The Eye of Horus,” Tweed said in her best, most ominous gothic tones. “Of
course
.”

“Of course?” Pilot blinked. “What ‘of course'?”

“That'sh right,” Artie said, listening to the Princess and ignoring Pilot's skepticism. “The creepy old Colonel hash been controlling Zee here with that fanshy necklace and the shcarab beetle jewel on her coffin-thingy. Now that the jewel bug is bushted, thanksh to yoursh truly”— he proudly flexed the muscles of his throwing arm—”she thinksh maybe she can open a doorway to her afterlife. But only if we can help her get that Eye of Horush back.”

“How are we gonna do that?” Pilot asked.

“We'll figure it out. It's what we do,” Cheryl said, with iron determination. “Just look how well our Army of Kitty-powered Darkness plan worked out!”

It was true that the plan had, after a fashion, worked out. With a few minor hiccups. As they all stood there, Cheryl became aware of a sharp, stinging sensation coming from the teeth marks on her ankle. It was a source of acute professional embarrassment knowing she'd let her supersitter guard down like that and been bitten. And she really didn't want to ask, but she had to make sure.

“Um. Hey, Artie?” Her freckles disappeared as her cheeks turned pink. “Seeing as how we don't want anything to compromise the mission … uh … can you ask the Princess if we're gonna turn into croc-critters too?”

Cheryl pointed to the bite marks on her ankle.

Tweed, equally reluctantly, did likewise.

Artie chortled in gleefully grim amusement.

“Well, well …” he said, crossing his arms over his chest and adopting an air of superiority, “the mighty monshter huntersh got themshelvsh bit, eh? Well, well, well …”

“Smugness is an unattractive quality, Artie Bartleby,” Tweed said sourly, frowning and tucking her bitten leg behind her non-bitten one.

Cheryl rolled her eyes and sighed. “Just ask, will you?”

Chuckling, Artie looked over at the Princess and shrugged a shoulder. “How about it?” he asked.

He listened carefully as she answered. “She saysh no,” he informed the girls finally. “Minion shtatus can only be conveyed by a magic incantation shpoken by the Princessh hershelf. And head-honcho minion shtatus you only get with thish here nifty hat!” He pointed proudly to the glowing headband he wore. Then he shrugged again and waved at the twins' puncture marks. “Shtill … you should probably put shome butter on that. Or shomething.”

Relieved that they would both remain human for the duration of the adventure (if not maybe just a
teeny
bit secretly disappointed—it would have made for a great plot twist, after all), Cheryl and Tweed hunkered down around the workbench to strategize ways to retrieve the Eye of Horus so they could send the Princess on her way to eternal, longed-for paradise.

“Okay,” Cheryl said, drawing random marks on a scrap piece of notebook paper. “So. All we have to do is figure out how to sneak back into the carnival, distract the evil villain, steal the amulet and open up the mystical portal. Piece of pumpkin pie.”

“And we're gonna have to do it tonight,” Pilot reminded her. “Remember what the Colonel said? They're packing up first thing in the morning and heading out. We've got to move fast.”

“There'sh one more complication,” Artie said, stepping over to the table.

He proceeded to inform Pilot and the twins that the reason the ancient Egyptians buried their dead, particularly their pharaohs, out in the desert was so that when the portal to the afterlife opened up for them, the
living
wouldn't get sucked into it along with the
dead
.

“What would happen if they did?”

Apparently, the Princess wasn't really sure. To her knowledge, it had never happened. But that was probably because it wasn't something good. And they certainly didn't want to be the first ones to find out. So. They needed a people-free zone.

“What kind of radius are we talking here?” Cheryl had visions of all those bomb blasts from B-movie pictures that spread out in circles for miles.

“Dunno.” Artie shrugged.

Unfortunately, Zahara didn't seem to know either.

“Well, it can't be
that
huge,” Cheryl reasoned. “It's just a doorway, right?”

Zahara spoke to Artie again, with hand gestures and motions that suggested she was throwing something. Artie translated that she seemed to think an area the distance of a hard-flung spear, in a circumference all around the portal, would be sufficient.

“Okay,” Cheryl said. “Anybody know how far that would be, exactly?”

Pilot frowned, mimicking the Princess's throwing gesture. He was the athletic type, and the girls knew that he liked to toss a football around in the summer.

“I know real athletes could throw a javelin maybe eighty or ninety yards. A regular person—or a soldier back in Zahara's day—could maybe throw fifty or sixty …” He shrugged. “Let's say half the length of a football field. Maybe a little more.”

“Make that a circle all around, and that's a pretty big chunk of land,” Tweed said, her eyebrows knit in concentration. “And we're still not sure. Even if the portal only affects an area as little as twenty or thirty yards wide, we can't risk opening it anywhere around here. There's still too many Wiggins folks wandering about tonight on account of the carnival. Kids like the Bottoms boys running around. They buried those kings and queens out in the middle of
deserts
. I want to help the Princess just as much as you guys do. We just have to be sure no one else is put in danger. After all, we know what it's like to have people you care about disappear and never come back. Don't we, guys?”

The girls exchanged a glance with Pilot. For a moment, Tweed blinked rapidly and Cheryl bit her lip to keep it from quivering. Pilot's brow creased in a frown beneath the brim of his hat. If anyone knew what that was like, it was them, all right. And they sure wouldn't wish it on anyone else.

Cheryl nodded decisively. “Tweed's right,” she said.
“We can't risk having the Princess opening that portal unless we're sure she's far enough away from people.”

In the distance, they heard the muted
Ka-Blaaam!!
of the World-O-Wonders's Human Cannonball as the stuntman once again soared up, up and over the tops of the carnival tents in an arc toward a great big catcher's net at the other end of the midway.

Pilot suddenly got a faraway expression on his face.

“Hey …” he said. “What if I fly her somewhere that's close, but ain't got a soul nearby?”

Tweed and Cheryl looked at him.

“I was thinking about Flat Top Plateau. Y'know, in the foothills—”

“We
know
where Flat Top is,” Tweed reminded him quietly.

Flat Top was where the twins had been found, alone, after “The Incident.” And Pilot was right. No one ever went there.

Cheryl shifted her shoulders. “Thought you said your flyer had the sniffles or something,” she muttered, not entirely comfortable with the idea of Pilot taking his plane out
there
.