But Zahara was moving too fast. Fuelled by supernatural mummy magic, she powered through the barn door and was halfway across the floor when the first wave of attack cats rampaged forth! Or, rather …
Ambled forth …
Pilot and the twins waited in breathless anticipation for the melee of mayhem. But all that really happened was that Boober, Flapjack and Pigwidgeon poked their heads out of their cages; Bubble and Squeak, Calico Pete and Montgomery J. Butterball jumped down and instantly started to bathe themselves; Kittums Fat Fat yawned mightily and went back to sleep without even stretching; and several of the others just stayed in their cages, meowing and waiting to be fed and ear-scratched.
“Go forth!” Cheryl urged.
“Attack!” Pilot ordered.
“Fulfill your mystic destiny!” Tweed exhorted.
Zahara faltered to a stop, hesitating. Her eyes grew wide as she spotted the (less enthusiastic than hoped for, sure) gang of fuzzy foot soldiers, and for a moment, Pilot and the twins thought their plan just might work anyway. Surely the mummy princess would turn and take to her gold-sandalled heels, fleeing in terror when confronted with so many guardians of the underworld.
Well, not exactly...
As Artie and the trio watched, Zahara-Safiya stood frozen, her gaze fixed on the cats. A long, tense moment passed, and then Mr. Sniffers—a big grey-and-white tom with a feather duster of a tail—padded over to the Princess.
He stared up at her with big golden eyes … then flopped to the ground and rolled over, exposing his fluffy white underbelly in the hopes of getting a tummy rub.
Zahara turned her blazing gaze on the hapless puffball, and Cheryl gasped, thinking that, in all likelihood, they had just managed to put Mr. Sniffers in mortal peril. But the mummy princess’s huge dark eyes suddenly welled with big shiny tears and her lower lip quivered. She uttered a single ancient Egyptian word that somehow managed to sound almost exactly like “Kitty!” as she dropped to her knees and scooped Sniffers up into a smothering bear hug, burying her face in his tummy fur.
The sound of purring filled the barn.
11
DRIVIN’ MOBILE
“Well. That was unexpected.” Cheryl crossed her arms and tilted her head, regarding the Princess, who seemed suddenly oblivious to the presence of any living creature beyond the wriggling, rumbling armload of cat.
Tweed nodded contemplatively. “There was less savagery and mayhem than I was hoping for,” she said.
“Should we just get the heck outta here while she’s distracted?” Pilot murmured to Cheryl and Tweed, after climbing down the ladder from the loft.
“Uh, Princessh …?” Artie shuffled a few steps toward her. “Um … shouldn’t we be getting a jump on the whole enshlavement thing?”
Zahara continued to ignore them all, petting Mr. Sniffers with such enthusiasm that clumps of fur drifted through the air all around her, hanging in a thin haze. In the far corner of the barn, the Bottoms crocs had ceased to pose any kind of threat—to humans, anyway—as they chased Bubble and Squeak in circles.
“Is it me,” Cheryl whispered to her companions, “or does she seem a whole lot less, well, evil all of a sudden?”
“And a whole lot more sad,” Tweed pointed out.
Cheryl and Pilot saw that Zahara was crying, the tears smudging through the heavy black lines of kohl that circled her eyes. For a long moment, her gaze drifted around the barn, as if she was seeing things that weren’t there. Memories perhaps. Her hand stilled on Mr. Sniffers’s belly and he pawed at her fingers. She blinked and smiled down at the creature, but her lower lip began to tremble and she started to cry again.
Pilot and the twins looked over at Artie, who lifted his shoulders in a shrug. He took a step forward and crouched down in front of her, his stubby little reptile tail swishing nervously.
“Hey,” he said. “Uh. You okay there, Zee?”
The Princess lifted her chin and said something in a tone that, while she might have been striving for imperious, just came off as watery.
Artie listened for a few moments and then said, “Oh. Well shure. I undershtand. I had a beloved gerbil once myshelf, you know …”
“What’s she saying, Art-Bart?” Pilot asked.
Artie shrugged again. “Um. Well. She shaid she misshes her cat.”
As he said it, Zahara nodded and started to cry even harder. Through the tears she spoke, rapidly and breathlessly, and Artie’s scaly forehead knotted above his glasses as he concentrated on listening to what she said so that he could interpret. Pilot and the twins stood waiting, trying not to fidget, wondering what on earth the undead princess was going on about. At the end of her monologue, she gulped down a sob and waited, one hand ceaselessly rubbing a furry grey cat ear, the other gesturing to Artie that he should commence his translation.
“What?” Cheryl leaned forward.
“What did she say?” Tweed urged.
“Well, shpeaking as Head Henchman, here …”
Artie turned to the others and they were surprised to see that, whatever the Princess had relayed to him, he was actually kind of frothing in outrage.
“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 e
ither.
“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.”
How to Curse in Hieroglyphics Page 11
