Knight Quest

“Not until you have found each and every one. But first, you will have to get out of this…” Anubis clicked his fingers. A life-sized pottery statue of the goddess Isis, whom Isis was named after, appeared before him.

Isis felt herself being sucked into the statue, along with Cleo. “What are you doing to me?” she yelled.

“You can only escape if somebody breaks the statue,” Anubis said. “So you’ll have plenty of time to think about whether trying to trick the trickster god himself was a good idea!”

The walls of the statue closed around Isis, trapping her and Cleo inside. The sound of Anubis’s evil laughter would be the last sound they would hear for a long, long time…

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“I’m going to have such fun going through your things when you’re at school,” Isis said, rubbing her ragged hands together. “Your computer. Your football-sticker book. Your Star Wars figures.”

Tom dropped his school bag on the floor. “NO WAY!”

Mum put her hand on his forehead. “Are you feeling all right, dear? I only asked you if you had your lunch box. There’s no need to have a fit.”

Tom glanced over at the stairs, where the mummified figure of Princess Isis Amun-Ra was sitting. Her cat, Cleo, also wrapped in bandages, was curled up on her lap, invisible to everyone except Tom. Isis’s crumbly old wrappings had left ancient white dust all over the carpet.

“Have fun at school!” she said. Waving stiffly, she picked up Cleo and started to shuffle off to his room.

It wasn’t fair! No one else in Tom’s class was beginning the new term knowing that the mummies of an Ancient Egyptian princess and her pet cat were at their home, snooping around and generally causing havoc. Mum and Dad couldn’t see Isis and Cleo, so if the mummies made a mess, Tom knew he would get the blame.

“I’ll just fetch your P.E. kit,” Mum said, disappearing into the kitchen.

Tom rounded on Isis. “Listen! You mustn’t touch anything while I’m out. We don’t know when Anubis will send us on our next mission. So…” He scratched his shock of blond curls as he searched for the right words, “… just keep out of trouble.”

Isis leaned over the banister. “Don’t get all bossy with me. You’re the whole reason I’m here. It was you who smashed my statue at your dad’s museum. You set me free again. Remember?”

Tom threw his hands in the air. “Yes, but aren’t you forgetting the bit where I risked my neck travelling back in time to help you find your first amulet? It was you who tried to trick Anubis by keeping one of the amulets for yourself, but now I’m the one who’s been roped into babysitting a dead princess and her cat!”

Isis made a huffing noise and tossed her head back with a crack. “There are still five amulets left to find. And until Anubis sends us on our next challenge, I might as well enjoy myself. So if you won’t entertain me, I’ll make my own fun.” She poked herself in the chest and accidentally put her finger right through her crusty ribs.

Cleo mewed in agreement and pawed at the banister spindles.

There was no way Tom was going to let Isis rummage through his belongings. There was only one thing for it.

“Look, just get in the car, will you?” Tom groaned. “You’ll have to come to school with me.”

Tom sat at his desk and looked down at Cleo, who was curled up asleep underneath his chair.

“Fun holiday?” Tom’s classmate Jodie asked him.

“Oh, it was out of this world,” Tom said, smiling. “Literally.”

But he stopped smiling pretty quickly when he saw what Isis was doing. She was wandering round the room, fiddling with everything. She looked over at Tom.

“This is much more fun than being cooped up in your boring house,” she shouted above the noise of the chattering children.

Tom looked around. Nobody seemed to have noticed the fact that the globe had started spinning on its own, or that the cold tap had just turned itself on and off. But how long would that last?

He got out of his seat and went to the front of the room, pretending that he needed to sharpen his pencil. “Can’t you just sit quietly somewhere and stop messing with things?” he whispered to Isis over the noise of the pencil sharpener.

When Tom returned to his seat, Isis sat down on the windowsill, crossed her bony, bandaged legs and started to leaf through the pages of a book. This time, the teacher, Mr Braintree, noticed.

“Shut that window, James!” Mr Braintree shouted to the boy sitting closest to Isis.

James looked at the window and screwed up his face. “But it is shut, sir.”

The teacher pushed his glasses up his nose and frowned. “There must be a draft. I’ll have to report it to the caretaker. I can’t have books flapping around. It’s very distracting.”

For a full five minutes, Isis sat still. Tom started to relax, but then Mr Braintree began to take the register.

Isis jumped off the windowsill, shuffled stiffly to the front of the class and stood behind Mr Braintree.

Oh no! What is she going to do now? Tom wondered.

When he noticed Isis drawing a rude cartoon of Anubis on the whiteboard, he faked a coughing fit to distract her.

Isis shuffled over to him and thumped him on the back.

In between coughs, Tom hissed, “Look, Isis, if you don’t stop messing around, I won’t help you find the next amulet. And then you’ll never get into the Afterlife.”

Isis sat down at an empty desk with a deep sigh. She folded her arms and managed to keep still for the rest of the lesson.

Finally, the bell for morning break went. Tom pushed Cleo and Isis into the playground as quickly as possible.

“Aren’t you coming to play footy?” Tom’s friends Rav and Danny asked.

“Not today, guys,” Tom said, herding Isis and Cleo towards a quiet spot behind the art block. When they reached the secluded triangle of trees, he breathed a sigh of relief and sat down on the grass.

“At last! A break from your nonsense!” he said to Isis.

But Isis had already begun to climb one of the trees. She pulled herself onto a thick bough and sat with her legs dangling just above Tom’s head.

“Oh, come on,” she laughed, wiggling her mouldy toes. “I was just having fun. Don’t be such a spoilsport.”

Tom tugged at some clover in the grass. “I wonder where we’ll go next time. Do you think Anubis will come back soon?”

“He’d better get a move on,” Isis said. “Princesses don’t like being kept waiting.”

“He’s a god. You shouldn’t be so impatient,” Tom said.

But he had scarcely finished speaking when the playground beneath them started to tremble.

Tom scrambled to his feet. “Oh, you’re kidding!” he cried. “Not here!”

Tom looked round to find the source of the rumbling. Sure enough, a huge doggy snout pushed through the leaves just above Isis’s head.

Isis yelped as she was shoved off the bough by the giant, jackal-headed god. She landed with a thump on the ground next to Tom.