6. The Number Wizard

Dust clouds fell from the ceiling. A soft rattling. The boulders at both ends of the passage slowly moved towards each other, as if they were magnets. The fennecs ran to the other side and pushed against the stone—stopping it soon proved impossible.

Both stones crept towards one another, faster and faster.

“Untie us!” Jaco yelled. “We can’t run like this.”

Halek stood frozen and breathed rapidly. He looked behind him, but his friends uselessly scratched at the constricting stone and already gave up hope.

His claw cut the rope in two.

Jaco wriggled loose and let both Halek and Gidi onto his back. Why is he doing that, Gidi asked herself. He’s the enemy!

“Think, think, think. What does the riddle say? What am I? What are we looking for? Where is it on the wall?”

“How should I know! He must be hidden.”

“Hidden. That’s it! He is hidden.”

“Oh. Clever. Um—how does that help us?”

“Look at the words—Rara riddle me this. You think every riddle starts like that, but that’s not entirely true.” Jaco pressed his snout against the drawings. “This riddle is addressed to Ra. It speaks to him directly! The maker must have been one of his children.”

“Oh. As if they used to play hide-and-seek with Ra? We’re looking for one of his children?”

Everyone was packed together in the middle of the passage, like an animal pyramid. Jaco looked up.

“Do you remember the symbol at the start of the passage?”

“The eye? The eye of—”

“Horus, exactly. Son of Ra. And what could he do that we can’t?”

“Fly!”

Gidi grabbed the torch in her mouth and flung it upward. The endless dust clouds made it difficult to keep looking.

So Halek jumped and stuck to the ceiling like a spider. He too scoured the stone for a revealing drawing. The other fennecs merely watched, frozen, as the large boulders crept ever closer. They had to tuck in their tails to save space. The sound of stones grinding over stones was unbearably loud, like nails scratching a chalkboard.

The boulder pushed against Jaco’s hind legs.

“There! Behind that square, a falcon head peeks out!”

Jaco grabbed the torch, flipped it around, and pushed the wooden end against the square.

A hatch flew open.

They fell into dark depths, yelping loudly. Everyone landed on a sloped stone that transported them like a slide. The stench of old books and dusty attics crept up Jaco’s nostrils. A light burned at the end of the slide, and the lower they went, the warmer it became.

Their spiraling ride ended in a small square room. Everyone ran into a different safe corner as soon as they felt steady ground under their paws.

The temperature was pleasant. In the middle stood a rectangular stone table, with a burning fire on top. On both sides of the table, notches in the wall held objects. Jars, pans, spoons, chains, bracelets made of pearls and desertglass, and even an amulet in the shape of a flame.

Across from them stood a wooden door, barely taller than Gidi. Of course all these things had the wrong shadow, which disoriented Jaco.

He had barely landed or he was grabbed by three fennecs. The same happened to Gidi—and even Halek was held down by three of his own friends.

“You nearly sent us to our deaths!”

“Have you gone mad? Me, Gidi, and your leader are the only reason you’re still alive.”

“He is not our leader. He’s gone soft. Weak. He trusts you too much. Like he wants to be best friends! And where will our food come from, then? Where’s the power that was promised to us? We don’t need a worthless leader dumber than us.”

“We. Who’s dumber than we are.”

“Shut your mouth!”

He slapped Jaco across the face. The fennecs wrapped the rope around the hind legs of all three prisoners and pulled painfully tight. They pushed the trio with backs against the wall. Objects fell and shattered on their heads, but Halek stayed silent.

“Look at what we’ve become. Our proud pack—six measly fennec foxes.”

I count nine, Gidi thought. She didn’t even dare look at the foxes. Her ears that normally stood upright, lay flat and still against her cheeks.

“We’ll move on. We’ll easily find the second part of the legend by ourselves. You all, on the other hand, can starve here. There is no worse death—we know.”

They ate the last crumbs from Jaco’s bag and flung it aside. All nine foxes busted the door open and squeezed through the narrow opening at the same time.

“You realize I’ll only become best friends with these two faster now?” Halek yelled. The Shadowshifters slammed the door shut. The shadows in the room returned to normal, mostly.

“Let’s hope we took the wrong passage,” Jaco mumbled. “And they now fall into an abyss.”

“I’m afraid,” said Gidi, “this is the right passage.”

“How are you sure?”

“You said the eye of Horus was a memory aid for math. My parents taught me you should always calculate with perfect fractions. In other words, the numerator, the number on top, should always be one. When I asked why, they said it had always been that way, that the gods had decided it. The only word that didn’t show a perfect fraction was three-quarters. That’s a three over four.”

“You’re amazing!”

Jaco kissed her forehead. Her ears spontaneously perked up. She recalled her parents again, the lessons she so often had. But where are they now? I miss mom.

“You’re not mad I lost your parchment roll?”

“Shadowshifters are always angry and look what’s become of them. Everyone in Floria thinks of themselves and the Companions can’t keep the animals together anymore. That’s exactly why we have to stick together.”

“So I can do whatever I want?” Gidi chuckled.

“Whoa, whoa, no, certainly not. But sometimes you end up in a situation where even the best choice is bad. I was falsely accused of kidnapping and bank robbery, but I couldn’t help it. So the best solution was to let myself get banished to this place to search for treasure.”

“Oh. So I actually helped out?”

“Yes! Sort of! We now have the chance to stop the Shadowshifters once and for all.”

Only now Halek turned around and shook his head. “Who do you think you are? That you have the right to wipe out an entire animal species? I should have killed you and left this cursed pyramid!”

His drooling mouth revealed he still considered this.

Jaco believed none of it and just grinned at Gidi. “What do we call this?”

“A learning experience!” she called back.

Halek wanted to be threatening, but had to laugh anyway.

“If we fight we’ll all starve here. I’m not insane. You’re insane, Jaco. But I can’t seem to dislike you.”

He got up, but quickly sank down against the wall again.

“We just wanted to survive. We were banished too, you know, just because one of our kind poisoned somebody important. This whole desert is as dead as can be. If you don’t eat others, you get eaten yourself. I understand you, Jaco, why—”

Jaco nodded quickly and changed the subject.

“Can you reach my bag?”

Halek slid towards the bag, as far as he could, and whipped his tail to the ground. The black tip just barely touched the torn open flap.

“I can touch it, but no more than that.”

“Doesn’t matter, because that means with your tail you can reach that amulet, above you.”

Halek looked up. Some points of the fiery amulet stuck out from a notch. He spun his tail like a propeller, and knocked the amulet loose on the third swing.

Jaco caught it between his teeth. The blunt points of the ancient amulet made it difficult, but he cut himself loose. He jumped to his bag and grabbed his dagger to cut Gidi and Halek free in one swoop.

He rammed the door, but only injured himself. Gidi also took a run-up and headbutted the wood with her head, her small antlers pointed forward, but the door remained shut.

“They barricaded the door, probably with large rocks.”

“Now what?”

Jaco saw the abundance of round objects in the room and his ears perked up.

“Now we’re going to scare those Shadowshifters into puddings.”