17.03.2015
Walt Stone
After Sadie and Carter's huge breakfast argument, the day seemed to continue like normal. Aside from the fact that Carter's head was clearly far away from teaching.
"Okay, guys. Today we'll try some combat simulations. We'll start simple."
The class was called 'Whatever Works'. Here's how it worked: Carter gave us a task, we did it, we went for ice cream.
The training room took up most of the second floor. It was about the size of a basketball court, which is what we used it for in the evenings. It had a hardwood floor, statues of gods lining the walls, and a vaulted ceiling decorated with scenes of Kemet's daily life. On the baseline walls, we'd stuck falcon-headed statues of Ra perpendicular to the floor, ten feet up, and hollowed out their sun-disk crowns so we could use them as basketball hoops. Probably blasphemous-but hey, if Ra didn't have a sense of humor, that was his problem.
Today it was just four of us – me, Julian, Felix and Alyssa – so Carter sent us to the four corners of the room. A shabti was placed in front of each of us.
On Carter's command, the shabtu grew into full-size Egyptian warriors armed with swords and shields. They weren't as realistic as most of the statues in the mansion. Their skin looked like glazed ceramic, they moved slower than real humans, and some of the proportions were way off.
"Felix?" Carter called. "No penguins."
"Aw, c'mon!"
Felix's favorite animal was the penguin. Penguins were the only thing he talked about and he always found a way to incorporate them in his spells. He even asked me once if I knew anything about an Egyptian penguin god. However, I was pretty sure constantly teleporting penguins to Brooklyn counted as animal cruelty, no matter how cute Felix was about it.
Carter yelled "Begin!" and the shabtu attacked.
A lot of things happened at once and, all of a sudden, I was the only one with a warrior in front of me. Let's rewind quickly:
Julian, a 12 year old follower of Horus, went straight into battle. He encased his fist in golden energy and punched the shabti. It flew backward into a wall, cracking to pieces. One down.
Alyssa had been studying the path of Geb, the earth god. Nobody at Brooklyn House was an expert in earth magic, but Alyssa rarely needed help. She'd grown up in a family of potters in North Carolina, and had been working with clay since she was a little girl.
She dodged the shabti's clumsy swing and touched it on the back. A hieroglyph glowed against its clay armor. Nothing seemed to happen to the warrior, but when it turned to strike, Alyssa just stood there. The shabti missed her completely. Its blade hit the floor, and the warrior stumbled. It attacked again, swinging half a dozen times, but its blade never got close to Alyssa. Finally, the warrior turned in confusion and staggered to the corner of the room, where it banged its head against the wall and shuddered to a stop.
Alyssa grinned. "Sa-per," she explained. "Hieroglyph for Miss."
Meanwhile, Felix found a non-penguin solution. The kid woke up that day and chose violence. He grabbed a basketball from the bench, waited for the shabti to take a step, then bounced the ball off its head. His timing was perfect. The shabti lost its balance and fell over, its sword arm cracking off. Felix walked over and stomped on the shabti until it broke to pieces.
He looked at Carter with satisfaction. "You didn't say we had to use magic."
"Fair enough."
Like I said, that left me. In moments like this, I wished I had a path. It would have been nice to have a go-to technique when fighting. I looked at my assortment of amulets.
There were the camels, though they would be pretty useless. I had a snake I could send to wrap around the shabti, but the idea of summoning a snake felt off.
As the shabti approached, I retreated.
"C'mon, Walt," Julian called. "Kill it already."
"You've got this," Alyssa said.
The amulets probably weren't the way to go. What about my rings? I was about to reach for one when I stumbled over the shards of Felix's broken shabti. Before I could realize what was really happening, I slipped and fell hard.
The shabti rushed forward, slashing down with its sword.
I was going to die and it wasn't even going to be from the stupid curse!
A smart decision would have been to roll out of the way or summon a shield. Instead, my hand instinctively rose to block the strike.
The enchanted ceramic blade was almost as sharp as real metal. It glistened in the sunlight.
My eyes closed, ready for pain that didn't come. I opened my eyes.
A web of cracks moved up the blade. Gray light wrapped itself around the entire warrior, and the shabti crumbled into a pile of dust.
It must have been magic, but magic came with pain. And I felt fine?
I turned my hand this way and that, not a scratch.
"That was cool!" Felix said. "What amulet was that?"
I glanced at Carter, hoping he'd read the confusion on my face. He was the teacher, after all, shouldn't he have an explanation?
Before either of us could say anything, the floor shook.
Alyssa yelped. "Guys!"
She pointed to the statue of Ra jutting out from the wall, ten feet above us. It was crumpling.
At first, I panicked that whatever I'd done to the shabti had spread across the mansion. But the Ra statue wasn't turning to dust. It was breaking apart, falling to the floor in pieces.
The pieces looked weird, not quite like stone. My blood turned to ice. The statue was turning into scarab shells.
The dead form of one of Ra's representations. On the list of bad omens, this should have been at the top.
The last of the statue crumbled away, and the pile of dung beetle husks began to move. A massive cobra with three heads emerged. It unfurled a pair of hawklike wings and bore its green eyes in Carter.
All of us bore our eyes in Carter. Like I said, he was the teacher. He was the leader. He was the most knowledgeable. He stumbled back so quickly, he ran into Alyssa.
"Carter?" Felix asked uneasily. "Is this part of the lesson?"
"Carter." Julian drew his sword. "Do we attack?"
Alyssa raised her hands. I moved in front of Felix. The last thing I was about to do, was let the baby of the group get hurt. The serpent coiled to strike, crushing dead beetle shells under its body. Its wings spread so wide, they could've wrapped around us all.
We waited for a signal from Carter, who looked paralysed. I was contemplating attacking anyway when he yelled "Kill it!"
At the same time, the serpent opened its mouths, blasting out three columns of flames.
Carter raised a blue shield of magic to deflect the fire. Julian chucked his sword like a throwing-ax. Alyssa gestured with her hand and three stone statues leaped off their pedestals, flying at the serpent. I fired a bolt of gray light from my wand. Why was all of my magic gray today?
Felix took off his left shoe and lobbed it at the monster.
Right about then, it sucked to be the serpent. Julian's sword sliced off one of its heads. Felix's shoe bounced off another. The blast from my wand turned the third to dust. Then Alyssa's statues slammed into it, smashing the monster under a ton of stone.
What was left of the serpent's body dissolved into sand.
No one dared speak as Carter reached down and picked up one of the scarab shells.
"Carter, that was part of the lesson, right?" Felix asked. "Tell me that was part of the lesson."
No answer. Carter just stared at the shell in his hand as if it had personally offended him.
"Carter?" Felix looked like he was about to cry.
"Yes, just a test," Carter said. But he looked at me and we came to a silent agreement: We need to talk about this later. "Class dismissed."