The Orphan (7 page)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“G
ET BACK HERE
,
you idiot!”
cried a guttural voice.

I felt something grip my shoulder. My body lurched backward. I landed in a tangle of limbs.

The strange dream images in my brain gave way to a rush of panic. I shook off the grip of enchantment.

“Get her far away!” another voice cried out.

I knew who that voice belonged to. A royal guard. They had found me, and one of them had me in his clutches. “Help!” I cried out, struggling to free myself.

“I am helping you!” the voice replied.

Numa.
The prison guard.

He pulled me to my feet. I tried to spin around, to face him head-on, but he kept me turned away, both of us looking toward Sippar. The other guard was silhouetted in the moonlight. He was trying to run toward us but not moving. His eyes were wide with fear, his mouth open in a silent rictus.

His feet slowly left the ground. First his toes disappeared and then his calves. His body was being swallowed in blackness. As it engulfed his face, he let out a scream that seemed to stab me like a cold sword.

“No-o-o-o!” shouted Numa.

We staggered backward and fell. Numa struggled to his feet and grabbed me again. The noise was softening now. As quickly as it had rushed in, Sippar was receding.

“By the great Marduk . . .” Numa said, his voice parched and fearful. “We—we must go. Now.”

In the dim light we could both see a black heap on the ground. I pulled out of Numa's grip. My body shook as if a giant hand had just twanged me like a harp string. “I—I don't think we're in danger now.”

Both of us crept closer until we could make out the shape on the ground—a human figure, constructed completely of charred dust and fragments of bone and cloth.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

N
UMA'S FACE WAS
hollow and scared, but he never­theless pulled me roughly through the woods in the direction of the city. “The prisoner and the santur player—where are they?”

“Sippar,” I lied. “Sippar swallowed them up, too.”

Numa grunted. “It serves them right. It would have served you right, too. Now hurry. These woods are dangerous.”

I nearly tripped over a root as we stumbled out of the forest and onto a road, where an ox-drawn cart was waiting. “Why didn't you let me go, then?” I asked.

Numa hoisted me into the cart. “You do not ask a royal guard questions, street rat!”

I kicked him in the knee and turned to run. But I felt something grab my ankle and I fell to the ground. My face scraped against the soil as my body was dragged back toward the cart. Numa had me at the end of a length of rope.

“Do not underestimate my skills,” he said, quickly lifting me into the cart and tying me to the slatted walls with bonds of strong fabric. “I will tell you why I did not let you go—because I will delight in knowing that you face a worse fate than Sippar. The king wants to see you. Alive.”

As the cart bounced back toward the palace in the darkness, I kicked and twisted, trying to free myself. But the knots were stronger than I was, and I finally gave in to exhaustion.

I had almost died. Numa, of all people, had saved me from oblivion. But now, as the spire of Etemenanki loomed closer, I wished he had let me go.

He was right. Death would be better than the king.

 

I spent the night on a cold dirt floor in the palace dungeon, awakened constantly by the chittering of rodents. I wondered if this was the room where they had kept Nico. The thought of him suffering here made me glad he had escaped into the care of the rebels. I could die here happy, knowing I'd saved him.

In my brief moments of sleep, I dreamed of Sippar. The charred remains of the guard haunted me. I wondered if he had seen the same strange omens I had.

What was that place, anyway
?

I knew one thing for sure—I would never, ever tempt that kind of closeness to Sippar again. And if I were to be separated from Nico and Frada for the rest of our lives, I prayed they would keep their distance, too.

But something had drawn me toward it. A vision of some strange world on the other side of the black death curtain. As if it had wanted me.

Was something really there? Was there another way to get through the blackness—a safer way?

Nonsense,
I thought to myself as I finally fell asleep.

 

Early the next morning I was marched down the stairs by three royal guards. All of them had bruises and black eyes, and one of them walked with a pronounced limp. “Rough night?” I asked.

My only answer was a poke in the back, but I kept my balance.

I was shoved down a grand hallway with a stone floor and a magnificently tiled wall. The guards pushed me through an archway and threw me before the king, who sat on a luxurious throne atop a raised platform. A waif of a slave was on the ground before him, massaging his swollen, deformed foot.

Unlike my last presentation before the king, this time I had not been washed or prepared. My beautiful white tunic was torn and soiled with mud and grass. Bruises had already formed on my arms and legs, my braids were tangled, and I had lost my new sandals. Still, the king let out a high, tinny laugh when I appeared, like a child who'd just been offered a present.

He stroked his long beard, curling the end of it around one finger.

“Well, what does the street rat have to say for itself?” he asked.

I said nothing.

“You are guilty of high treason,” the king said, licking his lips. “The death of many of my guards is on your pretty little head, not to mention the escape of several prisoners. And of course the loss into Sippar of your santur player and the street boy we captured in order to lure you to the palace—what was its name?”

“Nico was
his
name.” I kept a stony face, but inside I felt victorious. The prisoners had escaped. Which meant that at least some of them were heading into the woods with the rebels. To join Nico and Frada.

My mission had succeeded.

“My king,” I continued, “if I am to be put to death, let it be quick. I am ready.”

The king threw his head back and laughed as if I had tickled him with a giant feather. “Kill you and still the voice sweeter than all the flowers on Mother's Mountain? I think not. No, you have so much to offer me still.”

He kicked away the slave girl and motioned to his disfigured foot.

“Take her place,” he said to me. “Massage my foot.”

I recoiled. “The thought of it makes me want to vomit. I would no sooner touch your wretched flesh than dine on pig manure. And the only singing you will hear from me will be this chant:
Down with the tyrant king
!”

Nabu-na'id sank back in his throne. “You know, I've been chatting with dear old Serug the Hunchback lately. He doesn't say much, but he knows quite a bit—for example, the location of the place where you have been living, dear Daria. That wine shop whose libations have been poisoning some of my own courtiers. A shop that is run by a decrepit old woman who, by rights, I could have beheaded.”

“Zakiti has done nothing wrong!” I blurted out.

“Ah, I see. And would you say that about dear Arwa also? She comes from an
awilum
family and teaches the children of many other nobles. I don't imagine she was involved in your plot, was she?” The king sighed deeply, absently digging his finger into his nose, then wiping the results of his excavation onto the shoulder of a nearby slave.

“What are you going to do to them, you disgusting beast?” I demanded.

“Normally I'd have them executed just for being associated with you,” the king replied, “but I believe they have their uses in this kingdom, and I am at heart a man of mercy. If you disobey me, if you fail to smile at me, if you call me by anything other than ‘my king,' they are the ones who will suffer.” He thrust his foot forward again. I could see his pea-sized, rotted toes wriggling through his sandal. “Come now, you have a job to do. You will make an excellent slave.”

I sank to my knees and placed a hand on the king's foot. He let out a sigh.

Closing my eyes, I thought of Zakiti and Arwa. Of Nico, Frada, Shirath, and the freed prisoners. Of the rebels gathering in the forest. Of the world of Sippar, hover­ing mysteriously on the edges of Babylon. Of loyalty and mystery.

And family. Always family.

Nabu-na'id would not rule forever. Babylon would have another future. One in which the old values, the real values, were restored. I felt a smile warming my face.

“Ah, there we go . . .” the king murmured.

I was awash in happiness, and it mattered not what the king thought, or what I was doing. I began to sing. My voice took flight in the song that had helped Frada through her sickness, the song that people in the woods may have been singing at that moment, to give them strength.

“‘Hope is a seed . . .'” I began.

The king sat up sharply. “What? Wait. That is the rebel song, is it not?”

“‘Love is a garden . . .'” I continued, louder, my voice filling the chamber, my hands working the soothing salve into the skin of the king's foot.

“Stop that!” the king shouted. But his relief from pain was at war with his shock and anger, and he sank back into his throne with a satisfied snort. “Someone stop . . . that . . . girl . . .”

As my song soared, I could see the goggle-eyed Bel-Shar-Usur running in from an outer chamber. But the king's mouth was moving soundlessly, his eyes closed. No one interrupted the king when he was in this state. No one knew quite what to do.

So I kept singing. I sang as if my life depended on it.

It always had, and it always would.

Excerpt from
Seven Wonders Book 3: The Tomb of Shadows

READ A SNEAK PEEK OF BOOK THREE

 

 

CHAPTER ONE

T
HE
V
ALLEY OF
K
INGS

F
OR A DEAD
person, my mom looked amazing.

She had a few more gray hairs and wrinkles, which happens after six years, I guess. But her eyes and smile were exactly the same. Even in a cell phone image, those are the things you notice first.

“Jack?” said Aly Black, who was sitting next to me in the backseat of a rented car. “Are you okay?”

“Fine,” I said. Which, honestly, was the biggest lie of my life. “I mean, for someone who's just discovered his mother faked her own death six years ago.”

From the other side of the car, Cass Williams slid his Coke-bottle glasses down his nose and gave me a pitying glance. Like the rest of us, he was in disguise. “Maybe she wasn't faking,” he said. “Maybe she survived. And had amnesia. Till now.”

“Survived a fall into a crevasse in Antarctica?” I said.

I shut the phone. I had been looking at that photo nonstop since we escaped the Massa headquarters near the pyramids in Giza. I showed it to everyone back in the Karai Institute, including Professor Bhegad, but I couldn't stay there. Not while she was here. Now we were returning to Egypt on a search to find her.

The car zipped down the Cairo–Alexandria highway in total silence. I wanted to be happy that Mom was alive. I wanted not to care that she had actually been off with a cult. But I wasn't and I did. Life had changed for me at age seven into a Before and After. Before was great. After was Dad on business trips all the time, me at home with one lame babysitter after the other, kids talking behind my back. I can count on one finger the number of times I went to a parent-teacher conference with an actual parent.

So I wasn't woo-hooing the fact that Mom had been hangin' out in a pyramid all this time with the Kings of Nasty. The people who stole our friend Marco and brainwashed him. The people who destroyed an entire civilization. The Slimeballs Whose Names Should Not Be Mentioned but I'll Do It Anyway. The Massa.

I turned back to the window, where the hot, gray-tan buildings of Giza raced by.

“Almost there,” Torquin grunted. As he took the exit off the ring road, the right tires lifted off the ground and the left tires screeched. Aly and Cass slid into my side, and I nearly dropped the phone. “Ohhhh . . .” groaned Cass.

“Um, Torquin?” Aly called out. “That left pedal? It's a brake.”

Torquin was nodding his head, pleased with the maneuver. “Very smooth suspension. Very expensive car.”

“Very nauseated passenger,” Cass mumbled.

Torquin was the only person who could make a Lincoln Town Car feel like a ride with the Flintstones. He is also the only person I know who is over seven feet tall and who never wears shoes.

“Are you okay, Cass?” Aly asked. “Are you going to barf?”

“Don't say that,” Cass said. “Just hearing the word
barf
makes me want to barf.”

“But you just said barf,” Aly pointed out.

“Gluurb,”
went Cass.

I rolled down a window.

“I'm fine,” Cass said, taking deep, gulping breaths. “Just . . . f-f-fine.”

Torquin slowed way down. I felt Aly's hand touching mine. “You're nervous. Don't be. I'm glad we're doing this. You were right to convince Professor Bhegad to let us, Jack.”

Her voice was soft and gentle. She wore a gauzy, orangey dress with a head covering, and contact lenses that turned her blue eyes brown. I hated these disguises, especially mine, which included a dumb baseball cap that had a ponytail sewn into the back. But after escaping the Massa a couple of days earlier and creating a big scene in town, we couldn't risk being recognized. “I'm not Jack McKinley,” I said. “I'm
Faisal
.”

Aly smiled. “We'll get through this, Faisal. We've been through worse.”

Worse? Maybe she meant being whisked away from our homes to an island in the middle of nowhere. Or learning we'd inherited a gene that would give us superpowers but kill us by age fourteen. Or being told that the only way to save our lives would be to find seven magic Atlantean orbs hidden in the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World—six of which don't exist anymore. Or battling an ancient griffin, or being betrayed by our friend Marco, or watching a parallel world be destroyed.

I don't know if any of them qualified as worse than what we were about to do.