A/N: This chapter was a struggles. Turns out I have a really hard time describing buildings and interior. Well, I gave it a shot, and hopefully you can't tell that I had to look up adjectives for buildings for this, lol. Also I actually took it upon myself to try and translate the symbols on the Tablet of Ahkmenrah but then I realised that Google Translate can only take you so far so I gave up.
CHAPTER 2
CLEO
We Do More Illegal Things and No One Notices
Carter had to rest, before I could do any explaining. Jaz insisted.
We caught the train and Sadie led us to her grandparent's house, at eight o clock in the morning, with 5 other people standing behind her, and Carter, who was leaning on Sadie as if he had just been caught in a very brutal fight.
When Sadie's grandmother opened the door, in her pajamas and fuzzy green slippers and saw all of us, I thought she was going to send us away.
"Hi Gran," Sadie said. "Mind if we drop by for a bit?"
Then, without waiting for an answer, she pushed past her grandmother, with Carter still being supported by her.
We followed Sadie and Carter through to the small living room.
Carter was sitting in the middle of a three-seater couch with his hands in his lap. There were two recliners adjacent to the one Carter was on, and Sadie had already occupied one.
"Well, sit." Sadie commanded, gesturing around the living room.
Felix raced for the other recliner, I squeezed to the right of Carter, and Alyssa on the left of him, and we all shuffled over a bit to leave enough room for Jaz to sit. It was a tight squeeze, and I was squishing into Carter's side, while Jaz squeezed in next to Alyssa.
Sadie turned to me. "Explain."
I tried to steady my breathing, everybody looking at me for explanations was something that I wasn't really accustomed to, I was usually the person who would research, and give the information to someone else privately, and they would then relay it to the rest of the team. But now that wasn't possible, I was put right to the front and center of the whole deal, and there was no backing out of it now.
"Well… see, when I was going to get the Tablet, there was a, um, guy there… to be specific, it was Ahkmenrah, he sort of… ambushed me."
There was a pause of silence, except for the sound of Mrs. Faust walking around to the kitchen to make herself coffee, grumbling to herself, though I was sure just a few minutes ago she had been eavesdropping.
"What do you mean he ambushed you?" Alyssa asked indignantly.
"He grabbed my arm, and sort of trapped me against the wall. I could have ran, but you know, I wanted to find out more. I mean, while everyone was looking at Carter, I found it kind of odd why he wasn't listening as well, rather than waiting at the Tablet… and then he told me he was the protector of the Tablet. Did anybody else know that that the Tablet was already protected?"
Sadie shrugged. "Well, it makes sense. It is called the Tablet of Ahkmenrah, right?"
"Yes, but this doesn't explain why we don't have the Tablet does it?" Carter accused.
I looked back at Carter, feeling quite vindicated.
"Well, he stopped us from getting the Tablet right? I would be hard-pressed to see if Petrovich could steal it out of his hands." I explained. "He seemed very unlikely to step away from the Tablet of his own free will. He even threatened me if I ever came back there again."
"He threatened you?" Alyssa said dangerously. "I'm liking this guy less and less."
"I can't say I'm fond of him, either." I grumbled.
Carter didn't seem satisfied with my answer, and I had to admit, if I was in his position, I wouldn't have been either. We had come here to do one thing; to get the Tablet, and we had failed at that. And to be honest, I was feeling like a bit of a failure as well.
"But, there's still the danger of Petrovich getting the Tablet anyway. I don't like the sound of this Ahkmenrah, either. But there's always the possibility of something going wrong. But, if this guy is a danger, it's probably better if we didn't get the Tablet under his watch." Carter said. "But I won't be able to go to sleep at night if we don't have the Tablet. I just don't want to go through what had happened the last time, ever again."
Sadie looked sympathetically to Carter. "We all don't want to, Carter. But we can't place the blame on Cleo-"
"I wasn't-"Carter said.
"How about we think of a different plan then? So we don't have to steal the tablet?" Felix interrupted.
"What do you mean?" Jaz asked.
"Well, what if we went again later today, and try to come to an agreement with Ahkmenrah, so we could protect the Tablet without having to steal it!"
"Well, if a compromise is out best chance, then we'll have to take it." Sadie agreed. "But what was going on at that museum? All the artefacts had come to life. As far as I know, that doesn't happen at normal museums."
"Yeah, that was weird. Maybe it was some kind of magic?" Felix suggested.
"It's the power of the Tablet," I said, recalling what Ahkmenrah had told me the night before. "It has to power to bring things to life, right?"
"What, like anything in the vicinity comes to life? It's not directed to one certain thing, but everything?" Carter asked
"But some of the things in the museum were non-organic, like wax figures and marble statues and things. How is that possible?" Alyssa asked.
"I don't know." I said. "How do we bring shabti to life when they are just clay statues?"
"Point taken." Carter said.
"So, won't it be weird if we just waltz into the museum tomorrow and start talking to the exhibits? Even more important, how does everyone else not notice that the exhibitions are moving?" Alyssa asked.
I shrugged. "It might be a glamour, or something. Like how people don't realise that Carter is carrying a khopesh and mistake it for a baseball bat, or something."
"I think we should go now." Sadie said. "It's going to be the same if we go any other time, right? Let's just get it over and done with."
Strangely enough, nobody disagreed with Sadie, which was a first. I knew Carter was thinking about Petrovich, and he didn't want to waste any time trying to sort something out, and risk him getting the Tablet from under our hands.
Jaz stood up and started pacing around the small living room. "Right, so we go, try to talk to Ahkmenrah about the Tablet, but Cleo can't come because he is probably going to try and kill her if he sees her again. And then what?"
"Well, I guess we'll just have to see what happens when we go to the museum." Alyssa said, "Then we can think of what happens next after those events."
"I hate not having a plan." Carter grumbled.
Sadie scoffed, then stood up. "Probably better that we don't. I just don't think plans are our thing."
I scoffed. "Right, well I guess I'll just stay here or something while you guys go."
"You okay with that?" Sadie asked.
"Sure, you better make sure your grandparents are okay with it though." I said with a half-hearted smile.
Everybody else stood up, and Sadie told her grandparents that I would be staying here for a little bit, and not to bother me under any circumstance. I went to the door withCarter, Jaz, Alyssa and Felix, and Sadie joined us a few moments later.
"Don't get killed without me." I chirped.
"Wouldn't dream of it." Sadie said.
They went outside, where the sun was hanging in the grey sky, illuminating London. I went back inside. I wasn't really sure whether I should go greet Sadie's and Carter's grandparents-whether they would appreciate it or not-but I was imposing on them, so it did feel like the right thing to do.
Mrs. Faust was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a black coffee. She looked at me as I entered, her face showing slight irritation at my appearance.
"Hi, Mrs. Faust. I'm Cleo. Thank you for letting me stay here." I said awkwardly.
Her mouth twitched into an uncomfortable smile. "You're welcome. I can show you around to Sadie's room, if you would like?'
I nodded, wondering whether Sadie even wanted me in her old bedroom, even if we did get along rather well.
"I guess so." I said uncertainly. Mrs. Faust stood up and led me into Sadie's room. She opened the door for me, and waited as I stepped in her room.
"Make yourself at home." She said, standing at the doorframe.
"Thank you." I nodded, and she shuffled away, closing the door behind her.
I could tell that Sadie had not slept in this room for a long while, even though it had been kept immaculately clean by her grandparents.
I didn't feel quite comfortable in Sadie's room, even though her grandmother had led me in here, but it wasn't like I was going to start rummaging through all her things, I still felt like I was imposing her privacy just by being in the room.
There was a small television in her room. Her single bed had been made, with a white duvet cover decorated with multicolored hearts. Her room was postered with pictures from fashion magazines and bands, and a full length mirror hung on her wall.
There was a wooden desk running along the corner of her bedroom, opposite her bed, which had a cd player and a stack of cd's that I had never heard of before as well as unfinished perfume bottles littering it. Diagonally to the desk, was a bookshelf, though it was not filled with books, but rather with DVD's and old birthday cards.
I supposed that Sadie wouldn't mind if I watched her TV while they were gone. She wasn't one of those people who would kill you if you touched her stuff, and I'm sure that she would have wanted me to entertain myself while they left and did important things without me, because I had managed to screw things up when they (or rather, Carter) put me in charge of retrieving the Tablet.
I knelt down to her bookshelf and looked at the covers of the DVD's. Sadie had an array of rom-coms and chick flicks, and a few animated movies. I recognized the name of a chick flick she had, and pulled that off the shelf. I carried it to the desk where her TV was, and flicked the switch on at the power point, and turned on the TV and inserted the disk into the DVD player. I then clambered on top of Sadie's bed, resting my head on her pillow.
10 minutes through the movie, and I was struggling to keep my eyes open. Even though my body clock told me it was still afternoon (at least in Brooklyn), I had exhausted myself out with the events of what had happened at the British Museum, and before I knew it, my eyes were closed, and I was dreaming.
My ba had the body of an owl; the symbol of wisdom. As I spread my wings and flew through the surface of the Duat, going wherever my wings took me. Resisting wherever your soul needed to go was foolish, even if you didn't want to follow. Usually, wherever my ba went wasn't anywhere important, I was hardly important in the goings on of Egyptian business.
This time though, my ba took me to a place I recognized. It was daytime, the sky was cloudy and blue, and there was a gentle breeze blowing through the orange and red leaves.
I circled around a ginormous whitewashed building with white columns leading towards the arched entrance. The Brooklyn Museum was where Sadie, Carter, Walt and Jaz had stolen one of the three pieces of the Book of Ra, which held the key to reviving the sun god, Ra.
I had visited the museum numerous times, sometimes because I was bored and wanted something to do, and other times to figure out something to do with Egyptian magic that I wanted to learn about from the source, rather from textbooks in the library.
I glided into the museum, past all different kind of exhibits from different cultures and periods of time. My ba was drawn to the mummy exhibition. Now that I was where my ba wanted to take me, I had some degree of control of my actions.
I hopped around, invisible to everyone, looking around the exhibit. The 20 foot long scroll of the Book of the Dead was on display, something that I had studied before. Carter and Sadie had once used the Book of the Dead to get around the Underworld.
The exhibition was not empty, there were a majority of people looking around at the objects in glass cases, peering at mummy sarcophagi, and other ancient artefacts.
I noticed a scar-faced man looking at a sarcophagus of a mummy, reading the description on the plaque.
Kahmunrah was indicted to ruling after his brother's mysterious death sometime in 990 BC. His reign was short-lived, only ruling for 2 years before he was succeeded by pharaoh Amenemope. Kahmunrah's brother, Ahkmenrah resides at the Museum of Natural History in New York. Underneath it in smaller letters were the words: Written March 2009.
"Vin tut." He said quietly. It took me a moment to realise he was talking in a different language, another pause for me to realise he was speaking Ukrainian. And a second for me to understand what he said.
He's here.
I watched as Petrovich walked away from the sarcophagus of Kahmunrah. My ba started to fly away quickly, everything looking as if it were in reverse, reminding me of a video being rewinded.
When I broke out of the Duat, I woke up. The movie had been watching was now rolling through the ending credits. Even though my time dreaming didn't seem to have been that long, time travelled differently in the Duat. I turned off the TV and ejected the DVD, and put it back in its cover on the bookshelf, my mind preoccupied by what I just found out.
I sorted through what had happened. Something important was at the Brooklyn Museum. Not something, someone: Kahmunrah. I didn't know who he was, other than what I had read on the inscription. Ahkmenrah's brother.
And Petrovich had something to do with him. He wanted to get the Tablet and bring him back to life, not Apophis. Why? What was so important about this Kahmunrah that he had to be brought back to life?
Whatever other questions I had were diminished when I heard the door knocking. The rest were back. I raced out of Sadie's room to the front door, as her Grandpa (who was awake now) opened the door.
Felix walked in, followed by Carter and Sadie. Alyssa and Jaz were nowhere to be seen.
"What's going on?" I asked. "Where's Jaz and Alyssa?"
"We've got to get going." Carter said. "There's been an ambush. Alyssa and Jaz have been captured."
My face went slack. "Right. Let's get going."
Carter looked towards his grandparents. "Cast some protections spells around your house. If anything or anyone breaks through, tell them you haven't seen us. No matter who it is, you hear?"
Mr. Faust nodded. While Felix grabbed me by the arm and we raced outside of the apartment.
"Where are they?" I asked. "Is it Petrovich's guys?"
We raced down the stairs to the lobby while Sadie explained.
"Yes. They've tried to stop us from getting the Tablet. We were able to get away, but Alyssa and Jaz were taken, as well as all of Petrovich's creepy minions."
"Where did they go?" I asked warily.
"They disappeared, Cleo. To the Underworld. The Tablet is a portal, but it's not like one I'd ever seen before. Alyssa and Jaz were almost about the pry the Tablet out from their reach, but then they were trapped. It happened so fast."
"They just disappeared. Rebels were with them, and we don't know where in the Underworld they are, or whether they are alive or not." Carter said.
"Where are we going?" I asked.
"Back to Brooklyn house. We need to contact Walt and Anubis. We need to tell Zia and Amon about this." Carter said.
"But first we need to protect the Tablet." Sadie said. '"It's still at the museum. The museum exhibits were still just exhibits, they weren't alive or anything how it was last night. We need to translate the inscriptions on the Tablet."
Sadie led us to the train station to get us back to London.
The next train would be arriving in 1 minute and 37 seconds. Sadie pulled some coins out of her pocket. Why she carried around British money even though she was living in Brooklyn now, I had no idea. Maybe her grandparents and given her some money before we left.
Nevertheless, we got our tickets, and stood waiting for the train to arrive.
"There's something else." I said, everybody turned to look at me. "I had a dream while you were gone. I was following Petrovich around. He was at the Brooklyn Museum, and there was something important going on there. He was looking at a sarcophagus of a mummy called Kahmunrah. I'm not really sure what exactly was going on, but Kahmunrah is the brother of Ahkmenrah… I'm not entirely convinced that it's Apophis that Petrovich wants to awaken."
"Great. Somebody who we have no idea who he is or what he has done to warrant Petrovich to wake him up. Well, he'd probably be a terrible guy otherwise Petrovich wouldn't want to awaken him so badly." Carter grumbled.
The train arrived, and we all clambered into the carriage. There were some business men and women reading the newspaper, and some fashionable teenagers ready for some shopping in London. Other than that, our carriage was practically empty. The train started moving after a moment.
Even though the carriage was so empty, we spoke in a low tone, so not to alert anybody about what we were doing. You could never know when someone could be a monster in disguise.
"But do we actually know if this guy is a bad guy?" Felix asked. "All of this is just us guessing, isn't it? We should get our facts straight before we go in there."
"Well, who are we supposed to ask? We can't very well go up to Petrovich and ask if he is doing the right thing when his minions blasted Jaz and Alyssa into the Underworld." Sadie said.
"Well, I don't know. What if we went back and asked Ahkmenrah. He's Kahmunrah's brother, right?" Felix asked, looking towards me. I nodded his confirmation. "Well, we figure out how they come to life, and then when he does, we ask him about his brother. That way, we can get the whole grounds of why Kahmunrah could possibly be an enemy of the House of Life."
I looked at Felix, impressed.
"And we can ask him how to make the portal open up so we can get Alyssa and Jaz out. Felix, that's brilliant!" Sadie said. Felix's cheeks turned red.
We arrived in London in about 10 minutes. We hurried to the museum, and since it was free to get in, we didn't have to do anything illegal like sneaking in.
We followed the same path to the Egypt exhibit that we went last night, though it looked different with so many different people inhabiting the museum for the day, rather than the museum exhibits wandering around the museum.
When we got to the exhibition room, there were no signs at all that there had been a battle. Well, if you weren't a magician, anyway. I could feel the energy in the air that showed that magic had been in play recently.
"When the portal opened, I suppose mortals didn't see anything?" I asked.
"When do they ever?" Sadie replied, "Otherwise we would probably be locked up in jail every time we did any magic."
I laughed. I went to the back of the room where Ahkmenrah's Tablet was. I looked at the three sarcophagus before it, encased in glass. Shepseheret, Merenkahre, and Ahkmenrah.
The plaque said something about Shepseheret and Merenkahre being Ahkmenrah's parents, and they had been reunited after very many years of being apart. I thought about Kahmunrah, isolated from his family in the Brooklyn museum.
I cast the thoughts out of my mind and looked at the aged Tablet which was stored in a glass case, held up on a short podium. There was a chunk missing on the bottom left hand side, and bits at the top and side were gone as well. I was more interested in the nine pieces in the middle. Sadie came over to help translate them as well.
"Which do we start reading first?" I asked Sadie, peering at the hieratic decorating the edges of the tablet.
"You do the hieratics," Sadie suggested. "You're better at them than I am. I'll do the hieroglyphs."
I nodded, and got started, translating the symbols into phonetic sounds and then into English.
It took a long time to finish reading them. Carter and Felix, who had not learnt how to read much Egyptian, just looked around at the different exhibitions, trying to keep themselves busy, though I could tell they were getting impatient.
When we had compared what they said, it seemed that everything had come into place. Sadie and I looked at each other the same time.
"They all come alive at night time. Gee, I never knew Khonsu could be such a nice guy." Sadie said about the moon god, who she had once met before to gamble their ren, or secret name for more time to revive the sun god, Ra, back in the days of Apophis.
"Come on, we had better tell the others." I said.
Carter and Felix, who had noticed that we were no longer translating the Tablet came over to us. I had a feeling they had been watching us the entire time, trying to figure out when we had finished.
"What is it?" Carter asked,
"The Tablet was made to bring Ahkmenrah's family back to life, so they could be together forever." I said. "His father could not bear to die and live in the afterlife, probably, so with the Tablet, they could come back alive every single night, and die again in the morning. Khonsu blessed the Tablet with the power to bring the dead back to life every time when it came night time."
"Is that even allowed?" Carter asked, slack jawed.
"Probably not." Sadie said. "I suspect that Khonsu was feeling rather upset at Osiris at the time."
"Anyway, it had been night time when we came yesterday, so that's why everything had come to life, and why nothing was moving today. I guess that the powers extend to inanimate objects as well, since there were those marble lions walking around everywhere as well." I said.
"So, what, we gotta wait until night time until we can speak to Ahkmenrah?" Felix whined.
"That's what we'll have to do." Sadie said. "As far as we know, there's no kind of loophole that can make them come back to life before nightfall."
"So what do we do in the meantime?" Felix asked. I shrugged.
"Is there anything we can do about Petrovich at this moment?" Sadie asked, I wasn't sure whether she was asking me or Carter until I realised that Carter was looking at me for an answer as well.
"Well, if Walt is still on his case, there isn't. And he's probably going to the Museum of Natural History in New York at this very moment because he thinks that's where Ahkmenrah is-"
"Why's that?" Carter asked.
"That's where Ahkmenrah was before he came here. He'll want to check if the Tablet is still there before he comes here. Ahkmenrah is a new addition, apparently." I looked to Sadie. "Have you been keeping Walt and Anubis up to date about what's been going on? Just to make sure that he doesn't prematurely send Petrovich our way."
She shook her head, her face paling. "I could go do that now?"
"Yeah." I said and Sadie left to scry for her boyfriends.
Felix turned towards me. "Can we look around the museum?" He begged.
I looked at Carter, who was trying to suppress a smile, though I could tell he was worried about the safety of the Tablet. Truth be told, so was I.
My eyes flickered to the Tablet, and Felix noticed. "Oh, come on. Do you think somebody would be stupid enough to steal it during the day while everyone is watching? It's in a glass case that would probably go off if anybody tried to get their hands on it!"
I looked at Carter seriously. Anything could happen in the time that we were gone, I didn't want to leave the Tablet by itself when we were supposed to be keeping a look out for it.
"How about this." I said. "You and Carter can go, and I'll wait here with Sadie."
"Sounds good to me." Carter said, while Felix punched the air. "Let's wait till Sadie comes back, though."
Felix made a sound of disapproval, though he didn't try to push it.
Sadie came back while later. Felix was dragging Carter and I around the exhibition, showing us the different sarcophagi and artefacts.
"I spoke to them." She said. "They're still on his trail. They're trying to mess him up wherever they can. Don't ask me how they're doing it, I don't know, they won't tell me. But they'll make sure they keep him out of Britain, though. I told them about Alyssa and Jaz in the Underworld. Walt wanted to go there straight away to help them, but Anubis said they had to distract Petrovich first. After that, they'll do whatever they can to help Jaz and Alyssa."
I nodded, grateful for this news. "Great, while on our side, we're going to be waiting around the museum for closing time, then we'll finally speak to Ahkmenrah, and ask him what he knows about the Tablet. With Walt and Anubis messing up Petrovich, and his minions in the underworld as well, is there much else to keep a lookout for?"
Secretly, I wanted to explore the museum just as much as Felix did, a place with this much education and learning material? I wasn't following the path of Thoth for nothing.
We ended up taking as many tours as we could. They were a great time waster.
We arrived just in time for the tour of ancient Greece, where we observed all the ancient Greek art, and I noticed the marble lions I had seen last night, looking proud and majestic. After that, we were five minutes early to the tour of South Asia, learning about connected the different parts of Asia had been connected through trade, commerce and religion.
We broke away from the tours every two hours, to check that the Tablet was still in place, which, thankfully, it was.
Three tours later, my mind was reeling with all of this knowledge, some of it I knew, and some of it I didn't. Our feet were hurting like hell. Felix and Sadie were complaining about their sore feet, so we sat down on a bench for a while, which was something I was grateful for, though I still wanted to get out and join some more tours.
When it was thirty minutes to closing time, we hurried away into the boys' toilets. Sadie, now an expert magician, had practiced the magic of persuading a person to do something with only her voice, in this case, if we got caught, she would just talk to the person and say that they 'never saw us', and they would believe it and leave.
We hid in separate cubicles, crouching on toilet seats so our ankles weren't visible from the bottom of the door. It wasn't the most fun thing I had done today.
The night guard entered the bathroom after a time, flashlight blinking into the cubicles. The doors weren't locked, but were left slightly ajar, so unless the night guard opened the door, we would be done for. But I trusted Sadie to get us out of it.
She looked into Sadie's cubicle first, as planned. The night guard let out a yelp.
"Who are you? What's going on?" The voice was abrasive, but feminine.
"You haven't seen us in here." Came Sadie's smooth, velvety voice. "There's nobody in these toilets, and you're going to go outside, because there is nobody in here."
"Nobody in here…" Said the voice dreamily. She exited the bathroom.
"Don't come out yet." Sadie hissed. "She might be faking."
We waited a moment, and then Sadie came out. She looked out the door. "All clear. Come on!"
We all came out of the cubicles.
"That was the most disgusting thing I had ever done." Felix commented.
"No lie there." I said, eager to get out of the bathroom into some fresh smelling air.
The exhibits were wandering around the museum. We passed an empty suit of armor making our way to the Egyptian exhibit, which turned around to look at us.
It walked away from us, thankfully.
Mummies were staring at us when we entered the room. I guess they hadn't forgotten us from last night.
Ahkmenrah was nowhere to be seen, neither was the Tablet.
"Where is he?" I asked quietly, frowning. "Petrovich couldn't have taken the Tablet, could he?"
"He can't have." Sadie said. "Walt and Anubis said they were going to keep him off our trail."
Then we heard a voice behind us.
"Aha! There they are!" Said an echoing voice. "Grab them!"
I spun around. The suit of armor we had seen before was standing between us and the exit, and Ahkmenrah was standing beside him, with arms crossed, staring daggers at me.