After another quarter hour of hiking, Jake stumbled out of the darkness into a bright early evening. The sun had set, but the skies to the west were still rosy.
“Jake!”
He turned to see Marika rushing toward him. Pindor and Bach’uuk followed her. He backed away, fearful of how the wisling would respond. It uncurled from his neck, hissing, then shot straight up. Jake craned, searching for the creature; but it was gone, lost in the dark. He touched his throat, feeling oddly naked—and oddly disappointed.
Then friends crashed into him.
“You made it out alive!” Pindor shouted.
Jake kept staring up. “Did you see …?” He made a wiggling motion with his arm, shooting it up in the air.
“What?” Marika asked.
Bach’uuk gave him a worried look, as if Jake had lost his mind.
Jake sagged. Maybe he had. Besides, they’d never believe him.
His friends hugged him and drew him around a spit of rock to where the others had gathered. Jake noted two things immediately. The party seated in the sand was far smaller. Many had not escaped the Crackles alive. Jake noted a particular absence. Skymaster Horus, always stately and tall, was nowhere in sight. Politor stood a step away, his head hung in grief.
All this death to bring me here.
Too heavyhearted to speak, Jake faced the second sight that caught his gaze. How could it not? It demanded his attention.
Fifty yards ahead, the desert ended. A massive dark storm rose like a swirling wall of sand, stretching up toward the stars that were just beginning to twinkle. Sand spit from the maelstrom, stinging Jake’s cheeks and eyes. As he watched, lightning crackled silently across the storm’s surface in violent, spectacular displays.
Jake knew that sandstorms occasionally sparked with static electricity, but never on this scale. How could they even consider entering that savage storm? It was pure madness.
He turned away and watched Politor fall to his knees, covering his face, grieving. There was his answer. Lives had already been lost. He could not balk now.
Still, he suddenly felt hopeless.
“You all might want to see this,” Shaduf called behind him. “Since it’s about the bunch of you.”
Jake was happy to turn away from the storm. Shaduf and Nefertiti stood before a sheer cliff, the same spit of rock he’d rounded a moment ago. The old man held a torch up toward the stone’s surface.
Curious, Jake and his friends joined Nefertiti and her uncle. Lit by the torch, a few lines of hieroglyphics that were carved into the stone glowed. Unadorned and without paint, they looked crude and hastily written. Still, there was a simple artistry that Jake found appealing, deeply so. For some reason, his eyes welled with tears.
Feeling stupid, he wiped them away, but he could not escape a feeling of profound loss. The grief hit him unexpectedly. He shook his head. A part of him still struggled to cope with Kady’s death. He had bottled it away, plugged it with the thought of killing that murderous witch—but it was still there.
Shaduf held up his torch. “Here is written the Prophecy of Lupi Pini.”
Jake stepped forward. He kept hearing about this prophecy and wanted a closer look. Shaduf’s torchlight reflected off a prominent cartouche carved at the top.
Such ringed sets of hieroglyphics were used by the Egyptians to highlight special names: pharaohs, queens, and gods. In this case, the cartouche enclosed the name of the one who had written this prophecy.
Running his torch along the writing below the cartouche, Shaduf translated. “The prophecy states: ‘There shall come from Calypsos another group of wanderers. When that day rises, the great storm will blow its last, and new worlds will open for all the peoples of Deshret.’”
Shaduf faced them, his eyes glistening. “That is why so many good people shed their blood, not only for freedom, but for the hope of a new world.”
Seeing the shine in the old man’s eyes, Jake felt ashamed for his momentary lapse in faith. These people had been waiting for so long. He could not fail them.
“But who wrote that?” Marika asked. “How do we even know it’s talking about us?”
“Maybe it was just some crazy scribbling,” Pindor agreed.
Bach’uuk looked to Jake for an answer, some final judgment before they risked entering the storm because of the words of a dead fortune-teller.
But what do I know about any of this?
Jake stared at the cartouche. In his mind’s eye, he translated the hieroglyphic letters, eight in all, written in two lines.
He shook his head. It was just as Shaduf had stated. It was the Prophecy of Lupi Pini. It meant nothing to him. He began to turn away when he noticed that the hieroglyphic figures—the lion, the quail, the reeds—were all facing left. That nagged him for some reason. He turned back to study the cartouche more closely, scratching his head. The direction in which hieroglyphs face often indicate the way in which they should be read. But even that changed over time. In the New Kingdom of Egypt, hieroglyphs were read from top to bottom; but in the Old Kingdom, it was the reverse.
If this prophecy had been carved centuries ago, maybe the name was supposed to be read the opposite way: bottom to top. He flipped the words in his head.
Jake mumbled the name aloud, his voice trembling, “Pini Lupi.”
Marika wrinkled her brow, sensing his growing distress. “What?”
His breathing became heavier, as if the air had been sucked out of his lungs. “It’s been read wrong all this time,” he said, and faced the others. “The ancient Egyptian alphabet didn’t have letters for E and O. So modern writers would often replace those letters with the hieroglyphs for I and U.”
“I don’t understand,” Pindor said. “What does that mean?”
It meant everything.
In his head, Jake scratched out the wrong letters and scrawled in the right ones: turning Is into Es and the single U back into an O.
Once done, he whispered the true name of the prophet who had carved these words. “Pene Lope.”
He now understood why seeing the hieroglyphics had struck him so deeply, so emotionally. It had nothing to do with Kady. For as long as he could remember, he had poured over his mother’s old field notebooks filled with drawing, sketches, and illustrations. Deep inside, a part of him must have recognized her familiar style, her strokes, the way she drew. It took his brain longer to catch up.
“Penelope,” Jake stammered. “That’s my mother’s name. She wrote this message.”
Unable to face their stunned expressions, Jake turned to the storm. True night had fallen over the desert. In the dark, the spats of lightning blinded like a camera’s flash, crackling and coursing throughout the storm.