A/N: Ack! Why did I post part four so late at night? I got, like four reviews. Ugh. And it was a good
chapter, too...Well, part five, then. Here 'tis. Thoughts between *'s. WHY can't I use italics? WHY?
Also, to my Fa A Bhialainn Ann fans ~ I am suffering from SEVERE writers' block on that, so I will try
as hard as is humanly possible to get the next part posted, but I'm afraid it may be a bit. I've started
on it, but it's all bizzarrely and annoyingly fluffy...Ugh...I'm trying, though...
Curse Breakers
Chapter Five: Curiosity Killed The...Cat?
by Veralidaine
Almost instantly all of the warm summer air that had surrounded Bill outside the cave left as he stepped
through the stone doorway. The tomb was very, very dark, and very, very dank as well. Even in Egypt, in
the summer, in the middle of the DESERT, this tomb still had echoing dripping noises, and the painted
walls and stone floor were quite damp and somewhat slimy to the touch.
Sarah, though, seemed positively fascinated. She ran her fingers over the slimy walls, reading glyphs by
the light of her wand, muttering under her breath and looking ecstatic. Bill noticed, rather
unintentionally, that her face lit up brighter than the wand when she finally understood something she'd
been working on. She'd grin to herself, repeat whatever it was once under her breath, and move on to the
next set of pictures.
"So," Diana said softly, voice echoing nonetheless off of the stone walls of the narrow passage. "How do
we get some light in here?"
"Well, this is just the entrance, right?" Bill muttered, wiping a drip off of his face, and wondering
vaguely where all of the water was coming from. "The main chamber can't be far...We'll figure out a way
to light it when we get there."
Diana nodded, continuing cautiously down the passage, her wand lit and held before her, lighting a small
area around her. Bill turned to Sarah. "Anything interesting in the glyphs?"
She shook her head. "It's amazing...History of the pharoah buried here...He was part of one of the
goddess's cults, but I can't make out which one. The water's smeared it." She raised her wand to the
glyph she'd been talking about. He could make out a few squiggly lines in the paint, but even the
carvings in the stone around it had been worn away by water.
"Wonder why there's so much water in here?" Bill muttered, pulling her away from the glyphs and towards
the bouncing light ahead that was Sarah.
"The only time I ever heard of water in one of the tombs was when they put it in jars for the pharoahs'
afterlife. But this is the middle of Egypt in August. And the cave's dripping wet."
Bill shrugged. "Dunno..."
Diana was standing at another stone door, moving her wand along the edges and looking curious. "'Nother
door we have to get through. This guy was persistent."
Sarah dutifully stepped forward and started reading hieroglyphs. "Uhm...Okay..." she said after a moment
of quiet reading. "Uhm...Awai, Kesi Senef..."
"And that means?" Diana asked this time, as the door slid open, echoing much louder than any of them had
expected.
"Er...'Robbers, bow down to blood.' Just roughly, though. Gimme a sec'..."
"Lovely," Diana muttered, raising her eyebrows. "These ancient Egyptians were happy, cheery people,
weren't they?"
Bill snorted. "Yeah, really..."
"Well," Diana said, turning swiftly towards the blackness of the room beyond the door, her feet making
grating sounds on the wet stone floor. "Shall we, then?"
"Sure," Bill muttered, starting to follow her.
"Gawd, it SMELLS in here..." Diana said loudly. "I wonder what--"
"WAIT!!!" Sarah's voice echoed frantically throughout the cave from behind them.
Bill turned abruptly. "What--?"
But a second later he knew. Diana shrieked, a very un-Diana-ish thing to do, and leapt back through the
door as if persued by something large with fangs. Which, Bill remembered in the back of his mind, she
might well have been. Instead, about four relatively large snakes slithered out behind her, hissing in a
nasty sort of manner.
Everyone backed up immediately. Diana, panting, had backed up against the slimy walls, looking utterly
annoyed. "WHY do snakes live here? It's been sealed off for thousands of years!"
"They can get through pretty narrow openings, you know," Bill muttered, watching as one of the snakes
lifted half of itself up and a hood opened around its head. *Wonderful. Cobras* He pulled out his wand
and started zapping the ones closest to him with a freezing charm.
"No, no, no..." Sarah muttered. "This particular pharoah was a member of Uto's cult."
There was a pause. "And that explains...?" Diana muttered, eyes on the snakes Bill hadn't yet taken care
of.
Sarah sighed exasperatedly, as if this was common knowledge to everyone and they were overlooking a very
obvious fact. "Uto was the goddess pictured as a snake. She was the symbol of the red crown of lower
Egypt, and was generally nice enough. However...There was a certain sorceresses who lived after her
time that certainly was not, even if she took that name. If this pharoah lived during her time, then
there might be an issue with her curses protecting his tomb."
Bill froze the last of the snakes and pushed his hair, which had started to come out of its ponytail,
out of his face. "Right. Well. We'll just have to watch it, then..."
They turned back to the main tomb, and Sarah walked inside first, using her wand to light the way. "Ugh,
what DIED in here?"
"And do we really want to know," Diana muttered. "How do we light this place?"
"Well," Sarah said from somewhere in the pitch-blackness to their right. "Usually they had some manner
of tricks to do that, like mirrors set up to reflect light off of each other around the room, but if
this one was Uto's work, then I suppose it's magic." There was a pause, then, "OW!"
"What?" Bill said, somewhat nervously.
"Heh...I've found a mirror. Just a sec'..." There was a moment of silence, then some brief muttering on
Sarah's part, and suddenly a ball of fire appeared, eerily illuminating her face. It moved slowly over--
Bill supposed it was at the tip of Sarah's wand--and appeared to become doubled. A mirror.
Setting the fireball in front of it, she muttered again and it became brighter, and Sarah grabbed the
mirror's sides and turned it. The beam of light reflected onto another mirror, which suddenly lit up the
room dimly, with the reflected light beams of hundreds of round mirrors, placed strategically around the
chamber. And the chamber itself was certainly something to look at.
Gold items of every sort glittered dimly around the walls, while huge marble statues of Anubis and
Bahstet, as well as Uto, surrounded the doorways and guarded various tables sporting jewel-encrusted
crowns, rings, necklaces, chest-plates, and hairpieces. However, this wasn't what caught Bill's
attention. The center of the room was lower than the rest; it stair-stepped down to a sort of pit in the
floor, about five feet below. At the center was a writhing mass of snakes, at least a thousand--perhaps
more. And jutting out from the ever-moving tangle of venomous reptiles was something that looked
remarkably and disturbingly like a human arm. Or at least, what was left of one.
"Holy Sh--"
"Shut it, Diana." Bill moved very carefully around the edge of the pit, wondering how on earth none of
them had fallen into it in the darkness.
Sarah had gone totally white and was backed up against the wall, looking ill. "I--felt my foot go over
the edge, but before I fell I managed to get back up. I thought it was an uneven spot in the floor."
Bill nodded. "Let's just...Grab some of the treasure and get out. We don't want any of those buggers to
climb up and make a snack of us."
Diana nodded and started very cautiously picking up gold, checking before putting it in her bag that
it didn't happen to be concealing any venomous snakes. Sarah had been drawn to a rather huge book with
black binding. It was at least a foot thick, and the cover was emblazoned with huge gold hieroglyphic
designs.
"Is it worth anything?" Bill asked. "We should leave it, otherwise..."
"Oh, it is," Sarah said, eyes shining. For the moment she appeared to have forgotten that they were so
far from the ground and in an ancient tomb filled with venomous snakes and a corpse. "This is an ancient
spellbook. It's worth a fortune. It belongs in a museum, though."
"Right," Bill muttered. "We'll take it with us, then. It'll be a job to carry down, but if we're careful
we can do it."
Diana joined them, still glancing occasionally at the snakes. "I've gotten the jewelry. There are a few
statues that will take a lot of energy to use a levitation charm on, but we really ought to. I've never
seen so much gold in my life."
"We're also taking this spellbook," Bill said, nodding towards Sarah, who had managed to lift the book
into her arms, though it appeared to be quite a job. "Sarah says it's worth quite a bit."
Diana nodded. "Right. Go get some statues and we'll start carrying stuff out."
Bill set to work. He managed to finally drag the best of the statues over to the doorway by conjuring a
thick rope harness for them, and Diana returned from the front of the cave to help him along the rest
of the way. As the cave entrance came into view, he saw that it was now totally dark outside, and that
even the moon was absent. Sarah, who had her wand lit again, showed them how she'd lowered the book
down the cliffside with a rope she'd conjured. While Diana did the same with the bags of jewelry, Sarah
shuffled over to where Bill was still dragging the statues and grabbed a hold as well.
"Thanks," Bill grunted, pulling on the ropes.
"Sure," she panted back. "How're we going to get these down the cliffside?"
Bill sighed. "Well, it takes a lot of energy around here to get this sort of thing down by levitation,
and the rope will break if we try to lower it that way, so I'm not quite sure."
"But we could get it down to the bottom by levitation, we'd just be drained afterwards?"
"Well, yes," Bill said, stopping his pulling for a moment. "We wouldn't be able to Apparate back tonight
--we'd be too magically drained. I suppose we could try it and see if we had enough energy left
afterwards to Apparate, but I doubt it...We could get splinched or something..."
"Well, would we have enough energy to set up those tents Diana keeps in her backpack?" Sarah asked,
smiling. "We could stay the night and Apparate with all this stuff tomorrow morning."
Bill shrugged. "I dunno...We could always just go for tonight and come back tomorrow for this stuff."
"But then someone could take it!" Sarah said. "And we shouldn't put it back in the tomb...It gives me a
funny feeling." She shrugged. "Why not camp out, Bill?"
"Like someone couldn't just take the statues anyway while we're sleeping?" Bill asked.
"Couldn't we drag them into the tents? I mean, wizard tents are bigger than they seem, Bill." She smiled
lopsidedly again. "Come on...Camping can be fun..."
Bill was about to suggest that this job wasn't necessarily SUPPOSED to be fun, but it was a logical
enough solution, and the idea of NOT going back to see Abran again was enticing, so he nodded. "Oh,
all right."
She grinned and grabbed the rope again. "Good. Now let's levitate this sucker down to the ground, shall
we?"
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
One hectic, the three of them were seated at the foot of the cliff, around a roaring fire, next to a
rather lopsided tent. Diana was toasting a marshmallow and occasionally turning and looking behind her--
Bill supposed she was still jumpy after the snakes.
Sarah, on the other hand, was completely engrossed in the spellbook. She was silently moving her finger
along the writings, muttering to herself, looking just as fascinated as she had in the tomb. After about
an hour, Diana stood up, stretching her wiry arms above her head and letting out a loud yawn. "Think I'm
gonna get some sleep, guys. Levitating those stupid statues down here tired me out. Not to mention the
whole business with the snakes." She removed the now blackened marshmallow from her stick and crammed it
in her mouth.
"Yeah, well...We'll make sure no cobras visit you in the night, okay?" Bill said sarcastically. Diana
shot him a sarcastic glare and ducked under the tent flap. After a few minutes of shuffling noises from
inside, everything was still again, save for the occasional popping noises issuing from the fire. Bill
turned to Sarah, who was still preoccupied with the spellbook. "So are you going to talk to me at all,
or are you just far too busy?"
She looked up at him, seemingly just noticing him. "Oh, sorry! I was just..." She glanced back down at
the pages. Scooting over next to him, she pointed at one section. "Look."
He followed her finger to a picture of a green snake, crudely drawn, but somehow realistic, just the
same. "Is that the sorceress you were talking about?"
She nodded, eyes reflecting the fire. "Uto. I think this was her spellbook."
"Well then we really shouldn't be messing with it, should we?" Bill muttered. "You said she wasn't the
nicest evil sorceress around here at the time."
Sarah shrugged. "She can't come back and claim it, Bill. She's dead. Even witches and wizards die, you
know."
"Well, yes, but if she was REALLY evil, like You-Know-Who, she might have immortality or something."
"Well she's not been spotted for nearly four thousand years, now, has she?" Sarah muttered. "No, she
doesn't have immortality. Even if they could have figured out the proper spells for that sort of thing
back in that time period, they wouldn't have wanted it here. They believed in the afterlife, so being
immortal was a waste of time."
He shrugged. "Yeah, but be careful, just the same."
She nodded. "I'm not THAT stupid, Bill." She flipped through a few pages. "Look...Here's something..."
"What?"
"Her history..." Sarah murmured, once again sitting just so the fire reflected eerily in her eyes. "It's
the entire story of her life. Recorded right here. D'you know how valuable that is?"
"Well, what's it say?"
She looked through it. "Emm...She was born to a magic family, and was familiar with the royalty. She
lived near the palace. Uh...She was the pharoah's official sorceress, and did spells and stuff for him.
Then, she was put to death for something...It doesn't say..." She looked up. "That's just a brief
summary, of course. I think they recorded it in the back of this just for the records. They must have
thought that she was powerful, if they kept her spellbook in the pharoah's tomb even after she was dead.
I s'pose they thought it would help protect him or something. Still...Doesn't make much sense, does it?"
"No..." Bill muttered. "What's this?"
There was a small carving on the inside cover of several pictures, one of which was the snake. Sarah
bent over it, brow furrowed. "Keded en neb rehew nedj kem seref Uto. Sedjem o seki."
The fire visibly flickered out. What had been a roaring, pleasant fire not ten seconds earlier was now
reduced to embers, and a chilly wind ruffled their hair. "What did you just say?" Bill muttered.
Sarah swallowed roughly. "'Slaughter to all men who save black-blooded Uto. Obey or perish.'"
"What do you suppose just happened?"
Sarah shivered visibly, pulling her jacket closed around her. "I'm not sure, but I don't like it."
"Well, what d'you think that meant, though? Do you think you raised her or something?"
She shrugged. "I doubt it. There'd be more of a bang, don't you think?"
"I suppose..."
And, about a mile away, a perfectly-organized desk was suddenly overturned, contents violently strewn
about the room, and Isis Abran screamed loudly.
A/N: Muahahahaha! A cliffhanger!
I looked up the words for this, too. Aren't I the clever one. I do my research...
So, I was on www.harrypotterfans.net, and they had some chat transcripts, and I found a lot of cool
stuff on it, even if it does totally contradict my other story...Oh, well...J. K. Rowling DID say all
this, so it's not just rumors...
First off, Hermione's birthday is September 19th. Lily's maiden name was Evans, and she was...A
Gryffindor. *sigh* Oh, well, I was speculating...James was a chaser on the Gryffindor team, NOT a seeker
like we all assumed. Harry's middle name is James (good going Hermione L. Granger--she knew that). Also,
Dumbledore is 150 years old, while McGonagall is 70. Wizards have a longer life expectancy, apparently.
Sorry, but I just found all this interesting. Oh, and J. K. says she likes Monty Python! Yay! Me, too!
'Kay, I'm done rambling now. Please review! Thanks!
~Veralidaine
chapter, too...Well, part five, then. Here 'tis. Thoughts between *'s. WHY can't I use italics? WHY?
Also, to my Fa A Bhialainn Ann fans ~ I am suffering from SEVERE writers' block on that, so I will try
as hard as is humanly possible to get the next part posted, but I'm afraid it may be a bit. I've started
on it, but it's all bizzarrely and annoyingly fluffy...Ugh...I'm trying, though...
Curse Breakers
Chapter Five: Curiosity Killed The...Cat?
by Veralidaine
Almost instantly all of the warm summer air that had surrounded Bill outside the cave left as he stepped
through the stone doorway. The tomb was very, very dark, and very, very dank as well. Even in Egypt, in
the summer, in the middle of the DESERT, this tomb still had echoing dripping noises, and the painted
walls and stone floor were quite damp and somewhat slimy to the touch.
Sarah, though, seemed positively fascinated. She ran her fingers over the slimy walls, reading glyphs by
the light of her wand, muttering under her breath and looking ecstatic. Bill noticed, rather
unintentionally, that her face lit up brighter than the wand when she finally understood something she'd
been working on. She'd grin to herself, repeat whatever it was once under her breath, and move on to the
next set of pictures.
"So," Diana said softly, voice echoing nonetheless off of the stone walls of the narrow passage. "How do
we get some light in here?"
"Well, this is just the entrance, right?" Bill muttered, wiping a drip off of his face, and wondering
vaguely where all of the water was coming from. "The main chamber can't be far...We'll figure out a way
to light it when we get there."
Diana nodded, continuing cautiously down the passage, her wand lit and held before her, lighting a small
area around her. Bill turned to Sarah. "Anything interesting in the glyphs?"
She shook her head. "It's amazing...History of the pharoah buried here...He was part of one of the
goddess's cults, but I can't make out which one. The water's smeared it." She raised her wand to the
glyph she'd been talking about. He could make out a few squiggly lines in the paint, but even the
carvings in the stone around it had been worn away by water.
"Wonder why there's so much water in here?" Bill muttered, pulling her away from the glyphs and towards
the bouncing light ahead that was Sarah.
"The only time I ever heard of water in one of the tombs was when they put it in jars for the pharoahs'
afterlife. But this is the middle of Egypt in August. And the cave's dripping wet."
Bill shrugged. "Dunno..."
Diana was standing at another stone door, moving her wand along the edges and looking curious. "'Nother
door we have to get through. This guy was persistent."
Sarah dutifully stepped forward and started reading hieroglyphs. "Uhm...Okay..." she said after a moment
of quiet reading. "Uhm...Awai, Kesi Senef..."
"And that means?" Diana asked this time, as the door slid open, echoing much louder than any of them had
expected.
"Er...'Robbers, bow down to blood.' Just roughly, though. Gimme a sec'..."
"Lovely," Diana muttered, raising her eyebrows. "These ancient Egyptians were happy, cheery people,
weren't they?"
Bill snorted. "Yeah, really..."
"Well," Diana said, turning swiftly towards the blackness of the room beyond the door, her feet making
grating sounds on the wet stone floor. "Shall we, then?"
"Sure," Bill muttered, starting to follow her.
"Gawd, it SMELLS in here..." Diana said loudly. "I wonder what--"
"WAIT!!!" Sarah's voice echoed frantically throughout the cave from behind them.
Bill turned abruptly. "What--?"
But a second later he knew. Diana shrieked, a very un-Diana-ish thing to do, and leapt back through the
door as if persued by something large with fangs. Which, Bill remembered in the back of his mind, she
might well have been. Instead, about four relatively large snakes slithered out behind her, hissing in a
nasty sort of manner.
Everyone backed up immediately. Diana, panting, had backed up against the slimy walls, looking utterly
annoyed. "WHY do snakes live here? It's been sealed off for thousands of years!"
"They can get through pretty narrow openings, you know," Bill muttered, watching as one of the snakes
lifted half of itself up and a hood opened around its head. *Wonderful. Cobras* He pulled out his wand
and started zapping the ones closest to him with a freezing charm.
"No, no, no..." Sarah muttered. "This particular pharoah was a member of Uto's cult."
There was a pause. "And that explains...?" Diana muttered, eyes on the snakes Bill hadn't yet taken care
of.
Sarah sighed exasperatedly, as if this was common knowledge to everyone and they were overlooking a very
obvious fact. "Uto was the goddess pictured as a snake. She was the symbol of the red crown of lower
Egypt, and was generally nice enough. However...There was a certain sorceresses who lived after her
time that certainly was not, even if she took that name. If this pharoah lived during her time, then
there might be an issue with her curses protecting his tomb."
Bill froze the last of the snakes and pushed his hair, which had started to come out of its ponytail,
out of his face. "Right. Well. We'll just have to watch it, then..."
They turned back to the main tomb, and Sarah walked inside first, using her wand to light the way. "Ugh,
what DIED in here?"
"And do we really want to know," Diana muttered. "How do we light this place?"
"Well," Sarah said from somewhere in the pitch-blackness to their right. "Usually they had some manner
of tricks to do that, like mirrors set up to reflect light off of each other around the room, but if
this one was Uto's work, then I suppose it's magic." There was a pause, then, "OW!"
"What?" Bill said, somewhat nervously.
"Heh...I've found a mirror. Just a sec'..." There was a moment of silence, then some brief muttering on
Sarah's part, and suddenly a ball of fire appeared, eerily illuminating her face. It moved slowly over--
Bill supposed it was at the tip of Sarah's wand--and appeared to become doubled. A mirror.
Setting the fireball in front of it, she muttered again and it became brighter, and Sarah grabbed the
mirror's sides and turned it. The beam of light reflected onto another mirror, which suddenly lit up the
room dimly, with the reflected light beams of hundreds of round mirrors, placed strategically around the
chamber. And the chamber itself was certainly something to look at.
Gold items of every sort glittered dimly around the walls, while huge marble statues of Anubis and
Bahstet, as well as Uto, surrounded the doorways and guarded various tables sporting jewel-encrusted
crowns, rings, necklaces, chest-plates, and hairpieces. However, this wasn't what caught Bill's
attention. The center of the room was lower than the rest; it stair-stepped down to a sort of pit in the
floor, about five feet below. At the center was a writhing mass of snakes, at least a thousand--perhaps
more. And jutting out from the ever-moving tangle of venomous reptiles was something that looked
remarkably and disturbingly like a human arm. Or at least, what was left of one.
"Holy Sh--"
"Shut it, Diana." Bill moved very carefully around the edge of the pit, wondering how on earth none of
them had fallen into it in the darkness.
Sarah had gone totally white and was backed up against the wall, looking ill. "I--felt my foot go over
the edge, but before I fell I managed to get back up. I thought it was an uneven spot in the floor."
Bill nodded. "Let's just...Grab some of the treasure and get out. We don't want any of those buggers to
climb up and make a snack of us."
Diana nodded and started very cautiously picking up gold, checking before putting it in her bag that
it didn't happen to be concealing any venomous snakes. Sarah had been drawn to a rather huge book with
black binding. It was at least a foot thick, and the cover was emblazoned with huge gold hieroglyphic
designs.
"Is it worth anything?" Bill asked. "We should leave it, otherwise..."
"Oh, it is," Sarah said, eyes shining. For the moment she appeared to have forgotten that they were so
far from the ground and in an ancient tomb filled with venomous snakes and a corpse. "This is an ancient
spellbook. It's worth a fortune. It belongs in a museum, though."
"Right," Bill muttered. "We'll take it with us, then. It'll be a job to carry down, but if we're careful
we can do it."
Diana joined them, still glancing occasionally at the snakes. "I've gotten the jewelry. There are a few
statues that will take a lot of energy to use a levitation charm on, but we really ought to. I've never
seen so much gold in my life."
"We're also taking this spellbook," Bill said, nodding towards Sarah, who had managed to lift the book
into her arms, though it appeared to be quite a job. "Sarah says it's worth quite a bit."
Diana nodded. "Right. Go get some statues and we'll start carrying stuff out."
Bill set to work. He managed to finally drag the best of the statues over to the doorway by conjuring a
thick rope harness for them, and Diana returned from the front of the cave to help him along the rest
of the way. As the cave entrance came into view, he saw that it was now totally dark outside, and that
even the moon was absent. Sarah, who had her wand lit again, showed them how she'd lowered the book
down the cliffside with a rope she'd conjured. While Diana did the same with the bags of jewelry, Sarah
shuffled over to where Bill was still dragging the statues and grabbed a hold as well.
"Thanks," Bill grunted, pulling on the ropes.
"Sure," she panted back. "How're we going to get these down the cliffside?"
Bill sighed. "Well, it takes a lot of energy around here to get this sort of thing down by levitation,
and the rope will break if we try to lower it that way, so I'm not quite sure."
"But we could get it down to the bottom by levitation, we'd just be drained afterwards?"
"Well, yes," Bill said, stopping his pulling for a moment. "We wouldn't be able to Apparate back tonight
--we'd be too magically drained. I suppose we could try it and see if we had enough energy left
afterwards to Apparate, but I doubt it...We could get splinched or something..."
"Well, would we have enough energy to set up those tents Diana keeps in her backpack?" Sarah asked,
smiling. "We could stay the night and Apparate with all this stuff tomorrow morning."
Bill shrugged. "I dunno...We could always just go for tonight and come back tomorrow for this stuff."
"But then someone could take it!" Sarah said. "And we shouldn't put it back in the tomb...It gives me a
funny feeling." She shrugged. "Why not camp out, Bill?"
"Like someone couldn't just take the statues anyway while we're sleeping?" Bill asked.
"Couldn't we drag them into the tents? I mean, wizard tents are bigger than they seem, Bill." She smiled
lopsidedly again. "Come on...Camping can be fun..."
Bill was about to suggest that this job wasn't necessarily SUPPOSED to be fun, but it was a logical
enough solution, and the idea of NOT going back to see Abran again was enticing, so he nodded. "Oh,
all right."
She grinned and grabbed the rope again. "Good. Now let's levitate this sucker down to the ground, shall
we?"
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
One hectic, the three of them were seated at the foot of the cliff, around a roaring fire, next to a
rather lopsided tent. Diana was toasting a marshmallow and occasionally turning and looking behind her--
Bill supposed she was still jumpy after the snakes.
Sarah, on the other hand, was completely engrossed in the spellbook. She was silently moving her finger
along the writings, muttering to herself, looking just as fascinated as she had in the tomb. After about
an hour, Diana stood up, stretching her wiry arms above her head and letting out a loud yawn. "Think I'm
gonna get some sleep, guys. Levitating those stupid statues down here tired me out. Not to mention the
whole business with the snakes." She removed the now blackened marshmallow from her stick and crammed it
in her mouth.
"Yeah, well...We'll make sure no cobras visit you in the night, okay?" Bill said sarcastically. Diana
shot him a sarcastic glare and ducked under the tent flap. After a few minutes of shuffling noises from
inside, everything was still again, save for the occasional popping noises issuing from the fire. Bill
turned to Sarah, who was still preoccupied with the spellbook. "So are you going to talk to me at all,
or are you just far too busy?"
She looked up at him, seemingly just noticing him. "Oh, sorry! I was just..." She glanced back down at
the pages. Scooting over next to him, she pointed at one section. "Look."
He followed her finger to a picture of a green snake, crudely drawn, but somehow realistic, just the
same. "Is that the sorceress you were talking about?"
She nodded, eyes reflecting the fire. "Uto. I think this was her spellbook."
"Well then we really shouldn't be messing with it, should we?" Bill muttered. "You said she wasn't the
nicest evil sorceress around here at the time."
Sarah shrugged. "She can't come back and claim it, Bill. She's dead. Even witches and wizards die, you
know."
"Well, yes, but if she was REALLY evil, like You-Know-Who, she might have immortality or something."
"Well she's not been spotted for nearly four thousand years, now, has she?" Sarah muttered. "No, she
doesn't have immortality. Even if they could have figured out the proper spells for that sort of thing
back in that time period, they wouldn't have wanted it here. They believed in the afterlife, so being
immortal was a waste of time."
He shrugged. "Yeah, but be careful, just the same."
She nodded. "I'm not THAT stupid, Bill." She flipped through a few pages. "Look...Here's something..."
"What?"
"Her history..." Sarah murmured, once again sitting just so the fire reflected eerily in her eyes. "It's
the entire story of her life. Recorded right here. D'you know how valuable that is?"
"Well, what's it say?"
She looked through it. "Emm...She was born to a magic family, and was familiar with the royalty. She
lived near the palace. Uh...She was the pharoah's official sorceress, and did spells and stuff for him.
Then, she was put to death for something...It doesn't say..." She looked up. "That's just a brief
summary, of course. I think they recorded it in the back of this just for the records. They must have
thought that she was powerful, if they kept her spellbook in the pharoah's tomb even after she was dead.
I s'pose they thought it would help protect him or something. Still...Doesn't make much sense, does it?"
"No..." Bill muttered. "What's this?"
There was a small carving on the inside cover of several pictures, one of which was the snake. Sarah
bent over it, brow furrowed. "Keded en neb rehew nedj kem seref Uto. Sedjem o seki."
The fire visibly flickered out. What had been a roaring, pleasant fire not ten seconds earlier was now
reduced to embers, and a chilly wind ruffled their hair. "What did you just say?" Bill muttered.
Sarah swallowed roughly. "'Slaughter to all men who save black-blooded Uto. Obey or perish.'"
"What do you suppose just happened?"
Sarah shivered visibly, pulling her jacket closed around her. "I'm not sure, but I don't like it."
"Well, what d'you think that meant, though? Do you think you raised her or something?"
She shrugged. "I doubt it. There'd be more of a bang, don't you think?"
"I suppose..."
And, about a mile away, a perfectly-organized desk was suddenly overturned, contents violently strewn
about the room, and Isis Abran screamed loudly.
A/N: Muahahahaha! A cliffhanger!
I looked up the words for this, too. Aren't I the clever one. I do my research...
So, I was on www.harrypotterfans.net, and they had some chat transcripts, and I found a lot of cool
stuff on it, even if it does totally contradict my other story...Oh, well...J. K. Rowling DID say all
this, so it's not just rumors...
First off, Hermione's birthday is September 19th. Lily's maiden name was Evans, and she was...A
Gryffindor. *sigh* Oh, well, I was speculating...James was a chaser on the Gryffindor team, NOT a seeker
like we all assumed. Harry's middle name is James (good going Hermione L. Granger--she knew that). Also,
Dumbledore is 150 years old, while McGonagall is 70. Wizards have a longer life expectancy, apparently.
Sorry, but I just found all this interesting. Oh, and J. K. says she likes Monty Python! Yay! Me, too!
'Kay, I'm done rambling now. Please review! Thanks!
~Veralidaine