“Brilliant.” Sadie looked at Jaz. “What did you mean, ‘We’ll figure it out’?”
Jaz flapped her mouth like a fish trying to breathe.
Walt answered for her: “You know. The Book of Ra. We’ll figure it out.”
“Yes!” Jaz said. “The Book of Ra.”
I could tell they were lying, but I figured it was none of my business if they liked each other. We didn’t have time for drama.
“Okay,” I said before Sadie could demand a better explanation. “Let’s start the fun.”
The window swung open easily. No magic explosions. No alarms. I breathed a sigh of relief and stepped into the Egyptian wing, wondering if maybe we had a shot at pulling this off, after all.
The Egyptian artifacts brought back all kinds of memories. Until last year, I’d spent most of my life traveling around the world with my dad as he went from museum to museum, lecturing on Ancient Egypt. That
was before I knew he was a magician—before he unleashed a bunch of gods, and our lives got complicated.
Now I couldn’t look at Egyptian artwork without feeling a personal connection. I shuddered when we passed a statue of Horus—the falcon-headed god who’d inhabited my body last Christmas. We walked by a sarcophagus, and I remembered how the evil god Set had imprisoned our father in a golden coffin at the British Museum. Everywhere there were pictures of Osiris, the blue-skinned god of the dead, and I thought about how Dad had sacrificed himself to become Osiris’s new host. Right now, somewhere in the magic realm of the Duat, our dad was the king of the underworld. I can’t even describe how weird it felt seeing a five-thousand-year-old painting of some blue Egyptian god and thinking, “Yep, that’s my dad.”
All the artifacts seemed like family mementos: a wand just like Sadie’s; a picture of the serpent leopards that had once attacked us; a page from the Book of the Dead showing demons we’d met in person. Then there were the shabti, magical figurines that were supposed to come to life when summoned. A few months ago, I’d fallen for a girl named Zia Rashid, who’d turned out to be a shabti.
Falling in love for the first time had been hard enough. But when the girl you like turns out to be ceramic and cracks to pieces before your eyes—well, it gives “breaking your heart” a new meaning.
We made our way through the first room, passing under a big Egyptian-style zodiac mural on the ceiling. I could hear the celebration going on in the grand ballroom down the hallway to our right. Music and laughter echoed through the building.
In the second Egyptian room, we stopped in front of a stone frieze the size of a garage door. Chiseled into the rock was a picture of a monster trampling some humans.
“Is that a griffin?” Jaz asked.
I nodded. “The Egyptian version, yeah.”
The animal had a lion’s body and the head of a falcon, but its wings weren’t like most griffin pictures you see. Instead of bird wings, the monster’s wings ran across the top of its back—long, horizontal, and bristly like a pair of upside-down steel brushes. If the monster could’ve flown with those things at all, I figured they must’ve moved like a butterfly’s wings. The frieze had once been painted. I could make out flecks of red and gold on the creature’s hide; but even without color, the griffin looked eerily lifelike. Its beady eyes seemed to follow me.
“Griffins were protectors,” I said, remembering something my dad had once told me. “They guarded treasures and stuff.”
“Fab,” Sadie said. “So you mean they attacked…oh, thieves, for instance, breaking into museums and stealing artifacts?”
“It’s just a frieze,” I said. But I doubt that made anyone feel better. Egyptian magic was all about turning words and pictures into reality.
“There.” Walt pointed across the room. “That’s it, right?”
We made a wide arc around the griffin and walked over to a statue in the center of the room.
The god stood about eight feet tall. He was carved from black stone and dressed in typical Egyptian style: bare-chested, with a kilt and sandals. He had the face of a ram and horns that had partially broken off over the centuries. On his head was a Frisbee-shaped crown—a sun disk, braided with serpents. In front of him stood a much smaller human figure. The god was holding his hands over the little dude’s head, as though giving him a blessing.
Sadie squinted at the hieroglyphic inscription. Ever since she’d hosted the spirit of Isis, goddess of magic, Sadie had had an uncanny ability to read hieroglyphs.
“KNM,” she read. “That’d be pronounced Khnum, I suppose. Rhymes with ka-boom?”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “This is the statue we need. Horus told me it holds the secret to finding the Book of Ra.”
Unfortunately, Horus hadn’t been very specific. Now that we’d found the statue, I had absolutely no idea how it was supposed to help us. I scanned the hieroglyphs, hoping for a clue.
“Who’s the little guy in front?” Walt asked. “A child?”
Jaz snapped her fingers. “No, I remember this! Khnum made humans on a potter’s wheel. That’s what he’s doing here, I bet—forming a human out of clay.”
She looked at me for confirmation. The truth was, I’d forgotten that story myself. Sadie and I were supposed to be the teachers, but Jaz often remembered more details than I did.