Kady yelled from a distance. “Jake! Where are you?”
Jake feared hollering back, afraid it would distract the hunter from his deadly battle with the raptor. Only yards away, human and beast circled, mixing feints and attacks, parries and blows.
Then the hunter made a misstep. He danced back, and his heel hit a loose rock—the same one Jake had tripped on earlier. Losing his poised balance, he fell hard onto his backside. The butt of his spear jarred deep into the loose sand of the dune.
The raptor lunged, jaws wide.
Jake slid down the slope and screamed with all his might.
The raptor’s attack faltered. The hunter retreated, abandoning his spear. Jaws snapped after the escaping prey and caught the hunter’s cloak. With a toss of its head, the raptor dragged its prize closer. The beast bared the hooked claw it used for gutting prey.
Jake couldn’t reach the trapped hunter in time, but he spotted something orange-red in the sand. One of the firebombs. It must have slipped from an ambusher’s sack. He dove for it, snatched the bomb, shoulder rolled, and flung the gourd as he came up.
It struck near the tail of the raptor, shooting a blast of fire.
The monster screeched, bolting straight up in the air. The cloak ripped out of the raptor’s jaws, and the hunter was flung away. The beast landed, neck stretched low, hissing in fury. Its tail smoked. Flames still flickered up from the sand.
The raptor looked around—then backed away a step, then another. It must have realized it had been abandoned by its pack. Hurt and spooked, it flung its muscular tail, swung around, and raced across the sand. Reaching the top of the dune, it bounded over the ridge and vanished.
Jake turned to the hunter, who was still dazed from hitting the sand so hard. He crossed to help the guy up, but the hunter sprang to his feet on his own.
“You fool!” he shouted.
Jake stopped in his tracks, shocked. The words felt like a slap in the face. He stared over at those goggled eyes.
“How dare you interrupt a royal hunt?”
Royal hunt?
Jake bristled at the hunter’s attitude. He had just saved this guy’s life. A sharp edge entered his voice. “I was only trying to—”
“Silence! Who gave you permission to speak?”
About this time, the other hunters returned. They flowed over the ridge and surrounded Jake. Several dropped to a knee, facing the small hunter. They bowed their foreheads to their fists. The posture was vaguely familiar to Jake, but his brain was too frazzled.
The small hunter raised an arm to encompass half of the party. “Run down this one’s companions. Shackle them.”
“But we didn’t do anything!” Jake blurted out.
The hunter took a pose of amused disdain. He eyed Jake up and down. “From your strange appearance and garb, you are all clearly escaped slaves from some outlying village. So perhaps this hunt has not been a total waste after all. Your lives now belong to me.”
Jake took a threatening step forward, but a pair of spears crossed before him, blocking him.
“Put him in shackles! The rest of the hunt is ruined for the day.”
Jake was driven to his knees.
The leader reached up and tore off his leather hood and goggles, revealing his face for the first time. Black hair came tumbling down. Violet eyes stared haughtily down at Jake. Lips smirked at his surprise. The leader was much younger than Jake had thought. No older than Jake himself. But that wasn’t the biggest shock.
“You’re … you’re a girl!”
Under straight bangs, her eyes were elaborately painted. Blue and crimson lines—possibly tattoos—extended from the outer corner of each eye to her hairline. Jake had seen paintings of such facial decorations.
On the walls of Egyptian tombs.
“I am more than a girl,” she said. “I am the daughter of the Glory of Ra, he who walks the world like a giant: the pharaoh Neferhotep, the glorious ruler of all of Deshret.”
A grandiose wave of her arm encompassed the entire world, along with the sun, moon, and stars. And she clearly believed it.
“You should be proud.” She swung away with a sweep of her shredded cloak. “You are now slave to Princess Nefertiti.”
9
MAKE THAT PRINCESS
OF THE SANDS
The mushroom-shaped pinnacle was even farther away than Jake had thought. In the desert, distances proved to be deceptive. He and the others were marched slowly, their ankles bound in rough bronze shackles. Their hands were weighted down in front of them by cuffs.
While they were being chained, the princess had momentarily been attracted to their magnetite wristbands. “What pretty slave bracelets …”
Nefertiti had examined them all, and had even tried removing Kady’s. Jake’s sister looked ready to slap off the girl’s tattoos.
Of course, the bands couldn’t be removed.
The princess gave up with a shrug. “We can always cut them off,” she decided.
Jake feared she wasn’t talking about the bands but about their hands.
As they were marched toward the towering rock, Kady wore a sour expression. “How come whenever we land here, we end up prisoners?”
Jake didn’t bother answering as he shuffled in his shackles. He had more important questions in his head. Where exactly are we? And why did we end up here instead of in Calypsos?
He guessed it had to do with the door they used to get here. Last time, the gold Mayan pyramid at the British Museum had dropped them into the shadow of the great Temple of Kukulkan in the valley of Calypsos. This time they’d been transported from an Egyptian tomb exhibit to the middle of a desert.
He stared over at the arrogant princess. According to Jake’s history books, Nefertiti had been a queen of Egypt during the Eighteenth Dynasty. Though not of noble birth, she was so beautiful that the pharaoh married her. Over time, she grew to be one of the most powerful women in Egyptian history. Then at the age of thirty, she suddenly vanished. Archaeologists had been puzzling over this mystery for ages. Had she died? Had she fallen out of favor with the pharaoh? Where had she gone?
Jake believed here was the answer. Queen Nefertiti and some of her people must have been transported to Pangaea, like all the other Lost Tribes. But these people hadn’t landed near the valley of Calypsos. They had ended up in this desert. He studied his captors. They must be the direct descendants of that lost group. Perhaps Princess Nefertiti was even from the queen’s own bloodline.
As they crossed the desert, Nefertiti turned her attention to Bach’uuk. She fingered his brow, pinched his ear, and pulled on his hair, as if he were some prized pig she was judging.