The children’s heads snapped back and forth between the witches like they were watching a tennis match. Oliver and Celia were stunned by their father’s sudden collapse.
“We’re in trouble, Ollie,” Celia said.
“Big trouble,” Oliver answered.
“We should have made mashed potatoes,” the leader said. “Then the children would have eaten it!”
“Kids love yak butter stew!”
“I’ve had to eat your cooking for over two hundred years. It’s enough for me to think about poisoning myself!”
“Why don’t you do us all the favor then?!”
“Why don’t you make me?!”
“Why don’t I!” The leader stood with her fists clenched, staring down the other witch. The others started shouting, trying to break up the fight.
“Is he dead?” Celia whispered while the witches shouted at each other, honking like a gaggle of geese.
“I don’t know,” said Oliver.
Their father twitched and the witches stopped their argument and turned toward the children in unison, grinning through their pointed teeth. They didn’t look like a gaggle of geese anymore. They looked like a group of sharks, which was, appropriately, called a shiver.
“So,” the leader said. “We will use the children.”
Celia and Oliver gulped and grabbed hands. Celia tried to step in front of her brother. She was, after all, older by three minutes and forty-two seconds. She had a duty to protect him.
“Use us for what?” Oliver said defiantly. He didn’t want the witches to think he was hiding behind his sister.
“You see, young ones, your father is not dead,” the leader explained. “Our poison works more slowly, and much more painfully. He is being held in a between-place, between life and death. In five days, when the poison has completed its work, all his good karma, all his life force, and all his dreams will pass to us.” The witches licked their lips at the thought. “That is how we survive; it is how we have survived for hundreds of years.”
“Of course,” another witch said, “it does not have to be this way for your father.”
“We had wanted to poison you,” the woman in the headband said, as if that was supposed to make the twins feel better. “And then your father would have done anything to get the antidote. He would have found anything.” She smiled widely and nodded to make her point.
“The Lost Tablets,” Oliver said.
“You want us to get the Lost Tablets for you,” Celia said, “and in exchange, you’ll give our father the antidote?”
“That’s right, child,” a witch said. “The tablets will give us control of all the world’s knowledge. That’s worth quite a lot to trade. No more scrounging in this valley for hikers and pilgrims to poison with yak butter stew. We’ll poison priests and kings with cakes and caviar!”
“You must bring us the Lost Tablets before five days are over,” the leader said, “or it will be too late.”
“How are we supposed to find them?” Oliver asked. “Our father was the explorer. We don’t even like going to the park! We don’t even like gym class!”
“That is our deal, take or leave it.”
“I guess we don’t have a choice,” Celia said, and Oliver agreed. Their father had wagered their freedom with Sir Edmund and now they had made a deal with the witches.
“The ants go marching two by two,” sang the witch who only knew song lyrics. “Hurrah! Hurrah!”
The others laughed and a heavy mist fell around them. A quick wind blew the mist away, and when it cleared, all the witches were gone, along with their huts and the satellite dish, and the logs with the blankets. Even the fire was gone.
“Ummm, Celia,” Oliver said.
“Yeah?”
“They took Dad too.” He pointed to the empty space where their father’s body had been. They stood shivering, not knowing what to do or what to say, or where to go, when the trees rustled. They heard branches cracking.
“What now?” Oliver groaned as he and Celia drew closer together. Whatever came out of the forest, they would face it together. The brush burst open and they squeezed each other’s hands tighter, preparing for the worst.
“So,” Lama Norbu said as he stepped out of the darkness, his bright smile lighting up the night. He looked around at the empty campsite and furrowed his brow. “What did I miss?”
18
WE NOTICE WHAT THE NOTE’S NOT
THE TWINS EXPLAINED to Lama Norbu what had happened.
“This is very unfortunate,” he said. “I fear we will not have very much success finding the tablets without your father’s expertise.”
“Our father was poisoned and kidnapped!” Celia yelled. “They’re going to steal his soul. I think that’s a bit more serious than these silly tablets!”
“These tablets are not silly!” Lama Norbu shouted, and he suddenly didn’t sound like Lama Norbu at all. The twins startled, but the monk quickly regained his composure, smiled and spoke softly. “I am sorry for shouting. I, too, am grieving for your father, and this is why we must find the Lost Tablets. They are the only way to save him from the witches . . . that is what I meant.”
“Oh,” said Celia, still not really convinced Lama Norbu cared at all about her father.
“Well,” Oliver said, “would this help?” He ran over to the bushes where the hut with the satellite dish had been and pulled out the little canvas backpack. He reached in and found everything still in it. He took out the page with his mother’s writing on it.
“Oh, my, yes!” Lama Norbu exclaimed. “You clever, clever boy!” He hugged Oliver tightly. Oliver stayed stiff as a board. “Good thinking, Oliver. Wonderful!”
Celia just crossed her arms, annoyed that the monk had yelled at her and was now piling praise on her brother’s head. She was the one who put the note in the backpack. She was the one who thought to bring the backpack in the first place.
Younger brothers get all the attention, she thought angrily.
“Mom’s writing is hard to read,” Oliver said, holding up the note. His sister came up next to him to help. “She wrote really weirdly.”
“ ‘NOvember fourth,’ ”Celia read. “ ‘liTtle time left; they Are close Behind me, LETting me Search for the Missing pages until they strike. i’m clOser now than i’Ve ImaginEd. No one thought the great lIbrary miGHT be in SHANGRI-LA. only the SHAMANS’ EYES can tell the way from here.’ ”
Oliver thought for a moment. “Why’d she write all weird? And how would the shamans’ eyes tell the way? Don’t people tell things with their mouths?”
“It’s not important right now. Look at the front!” Lama Norbu said impatiently. Oliver glanced at his sister. The monk was acting very un-monk-like, with his shouting and his impatience. Monks on TV didn’t act like this at all.
“The Greek writing?” Oliver flipped the paper over and they all looked at the strange symbols and writings.
“Does that mean anything to you?” Lama Norbu asked.
“Nope,” Celia said.
“That means ‘big books, big evil,’ ” Oliver said, pointing at the Greek writing. “Dad said so at the Ceremony of Discovery.”
“That’s the writing that was under that key symbol in the tunnel at the Explorers Club. It was ancient Greek,” said Celia. “Can you read it?”
Lama Norbu scratched his chin and stared at the note, shaking his head.
“Can you read it?” Celia asked again.
“Of course I can!” Lama Norbu snapped at her and snatched the note from Oliver’s hands. “Go to sleep now. I must study this privately.”
“But our dad only has five days,” Celia objected. “We can’t just go to sleep. We have to figure this out. He could die!”
“I will do the thinking,” Lama Norbu said. “Children need their sleep.”
“Where are we supposed to sleep?” Oliver asked. “There’s nothing here.”
“The hidden lands always provide.” Lama Norbu pointed at the bushes and
trees around the clearing. “We will build our own shelter.”
It was the most exhausting work of their lives, pulling giant waxy leaves from trees and weaving them between sticks and branches. After hours and hours, the twins had built themselves a lean-to and built the monk one too. He spent the whole time looking at their mother’s note and muttering to himself.
It turned out that watching hours of Sell My House! and Decorate My House! and Build Me a New House! and Hey, That’s a Really Ugly House! and all those other house shows that came on Saturday afternoons when cartoons were over had helped them. Celia even put some decorative touches in their lean-to, like colorful flowers on the walls.
“To make the energy better,” she explained. She’d heard that on Decorate My House! If anyone could use good energy, it was Oliver and Celia. They hadn’t slept in ages. They were both happy to put on the change of clothes Celia had made them pack. Even in the creepy jungle of the gorge, it felt good to wear pajamas.
Lama Norbu was sound asleep in minutes and snoring loud enough to wake the entire forest. Neither Oliver nor Celia could sleep, even though they were really tired.
“I’m thinking about Mom’s note,” Celia said.
“Yeah,” replied Oliver. “Can you believe we might be closer to finding her than Dad ever got?”
“Oliver,” Celia sighed. “I know you miss her, but she got us into real trouble here.” She looked over at her younger-by-three-minutes-and-forty-two-seconds brother, whose glassy eyes gazed back at her in the darkness. “We aren’t going to find these tablets.”
“But she wrote that note!” Oliver objected. “She left it as a clue and she might still be somewhere, if we can just—”
“Oliver,” Celia interrupted. “Mom’s note is a trick. That page isn’t from any ancient tablets.”
“What? How do you know? How can you possibly know that? You don’t know that!”
“You know how Mom and Dad used to tell us the stories about the expedition to the North Pole? About how when the two explorers tried to prove they’d been there, they made fake journals so that people would believe they’d done things they hadn’t done?”
“Yeah?” Oliver didn’t know where his sister was going with this.
“Well, this paper is a fake, just like those journals.”
“How do you know that? Why would Mom fake this? Why would she say it’s from these Lost Tablets when it isn’t?”
“It has something to do with her funny writing,” Celia said. “We have to read it again.”
“But Lama Norbu has it.”
“I don’t trust him,” Celia said. “He doesn’t read Greek.”
“So?” Oliver said. “You don’t read Greek.”
“But I didn’t lie about it. He said he could read that page, but it was obvious he couldn’t.”
“Choden Thordup couldn’t read Greek either,” Oliver remembered. “Dad always said that real explorers know how to read ancient Greek.”
“See?” Celia said. “Something’s fishy.”
“Hold on,” Oliver said. He thought a moment and then, without another word, slipped out of their shelter and snuck over to where the monk was sleeping. The tall monk held the paper on his chest and snored as loud as a yeti’s roar. Oliver pulled the paper from the Lama Norbu’s hands and scurried back with it to their lean-to. He felt a bit like a superspy.
“Did you see that?” Oliver asked, breathless. “I got it right out from under him. Did you see?”
“Just read it,” Celia said.
Oliver started reading the note in the dim light.
NOvember fourth, liTtle time left; they Are close Behind me LETtting me Search for the Missing pages, until they strike. i’m closer now than i’Ve ImaginEd. No one thought the great library miGHT be in SHANGRILA. only the SHAMANS’ EYES can tell the way from here.
“See how the letters are capitalized all weird?” Celia pointed. “It’s a code. All the capital letters spell something out.”
“How did Dad not notice this?” Oliver wondered.
“The same way you didn’t notice when you first looked at the note. He wanted to find her again so badly that he lost his senses a little bit.”
“So what’s it say?”
Celia used a stick in the dirt to scratch the capital letters in the ground.
“No tablets, movie night, Shangri-La, shamans’ eyes,” she read.
“No tablets,” Oliver gasped. “But if we don’t find the tablets, Dad’ll die and we’ll lose the bet with Sir Edmund and we’ll be his slaves.”
Celia knew that her brother was right. There was no way to win in this situation.
“What would Agent Zero do?” she asked.
Celia knew just how to get Oliver to feel better. If Agent Zero could deal with assassination attempts, murderous double agents and high school algebra, then Oliver could surely pull himself together and focus too. It was for their father, after all. And for cable television. But really, he thought, looking at his sister, it was for her. It was for what was left of their family.
“Agent Zero would stay calm and figure out how to save Dad,” he said. “But how can we do that, if there are no tablets?”
“The rest of the note, maybe?” Celia said. “Movie night, Shangri-La, shamans’ eyes?”
“It doesn’t mean anything to me,” said Oliver. “Maybe she still wants to find Shangri-La and watch a movie there?”
They studied the sketches their mother had drawn. The pictures were a little scary. There were fanged demon things, and there were little arrows going from what looked like yaks to monsters to these two dancing skeletons that were shooting fire out of their eyes. The fire shot from their eyes right into a picture of a waterfall.
“These pictures look like a storyboard,” Oliver said.
Celia’s eyes brightened. “Like the one Mom gave us. Escape from the Mummy King.”
“So if this is a storyboard,” Oliver asked, “what’s it telling us? What’s supposed to happen?”
“That’s a waterfall, so I think Mom’s telling us to go to that waterfall.”
“What’s with those crazy skeleton things?”
“Maybe they’re the shamans we’re looking for. Maybe they’ll tell us what’s going on?”
“Maybe someone should tell me what’s going on!” Lama Norbu said, pulling open their lean-to and towering over the twins.
“We couldn’t sleep!” Celia said quickly. “So we, um—”
“We borrowed the note,” Oliver said. “We didn’t want to disturb you . . . we thought we could help.”
“I see,” Lama Norbu said suspiciously. “And did you determine anything?”
“Um, well,” Oliver said.
“We should go to the waterfall,” Celia answered. “That’ll point the way to the tablets.”
“Good.” Lama Norbu snatched the note back from Celia. “Now go to sleep. We’ll leave at first light.”
Oliver and Celia looked nervously at each other, but didn’t say a word in case the monk was still listening. The only thing they knew for sure at this point was that nothing was as it seemed.
19
WE DESCEND INDECENTLY
THEY LEFT THEIR MAKESHIFT camp as the sun came up, after a breakfast of fruit and nuts that Lama Norbu had scrounged from the forest. Oliver smelled the food before eating it to make sure it wasn’t poisoned. Celia, who knew from soap operas that good poison couldn’t be smelled or tasted, watched Lama Norbu eat first.
Mist still hung heavy over the forest. Birds chirped their morning songs, and monkeys called to each other. The twins stumbled down a narrow path behind Lama Norbu. Celia let Oliver carry the backpack because she was tired. They heard a roar nearby and froze where they stood. Lama Norbu swung his gun from his back and they stood in place for a few minutes, listening to the forest.
“Is that the yeti?” Oliver whispered to his sister.
“Shhhhh,” she said.
They waited, but when nothing burst from the mist to
attack them, they continued on their way. Some of the bushes and trees had mysterious ribbons tied to them. Others had what looked like hubcaps hanging from their branches.
“Prayer wheels,” explained Lama Norbu. “Pilgrims journeying from the valley to the sacred mountains above us will leave these wheels and banners along their path to mark their progress and to bless others who pass this way.”
They continued on under the flapping banners and spinning wheels for another hour. The day started to get hotter and stickier. The cold air from the mountains pressed down on the hot air in the valley, coating the forest in a heavy mist that made everything feel like a dream. Shadows moved in the mist and the flapping banners sounded like the whispering of ghosts. This was not a friendly forest. The twins felt like they were being watched.
Suddenly, as they passed through the haze, the path simply ended in front of them. They stood at the edge of a cliff that went straight down to the river at the bottom of the canyon. They could hear the roaring of the Hidden Falls below.
“Where do we go from here?” Celia wondered.
“We must cross the gorge,” Lama Norbu said. “I hope you do not fear heights.”
He pointed to a thin wire that stretched from one side of the gorge to the other high above the rapids. The other side was at least the length of a football field away.
“I wasn’t afraid of heights before,” Celia said. “Though I might be now.”
Oliver didn’t say anything because he could feel his stomach in his throat. The memory of falling out of the airplane was still fresh. Oliver couldn’t help but notice that the wire was about as thick as the kind of wire used to hook up cable television. It looked about as sturdy too.
What would Agent Zero do? Oliver thought to himself, and then he remembered that Corey Brandt, the actor in Agent Zero, had a stunt double. Agent Zero would probably hang out in his trailer drinking Fanta while someone else took all the risks. Some unlucky kid like Oliver.
Lama Norbu pulled out a few scraps of cloth from his robes and handed them to the twins.
“Wrap these around your palms so the wire doesn’t cut into your hands. Then we’ll wrap our legs around it, grab on, and scoot across, like you’re crawling upside down.”
We Are Not Eaten by Yaks Page 10
