The Scorpions of Zahir Read online

  ALSO BY CHRISTINE BRODIEN-JONES

  The Owl Keeper

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2012 by Christine L. Jones

  Jacket art and interior illustrations copyright © 2012 by Kelly Murphy

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Brodien-Jones, Chris.

  The scorpions of Zahir / Christine Brodien-Jones. —1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Eleven-year-old Zagora Pym, who possesses an otherworldly stone, travels to the Moroccan desert with her archaeologist father and astronomy-obsessed brother on a quest to save the ancient city of Zahir.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89749-8

  [1. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 2. Deserts—Fiction.

  3. Morocco—Fiction. 4. Fantasy.] I. Title.

  PZ7.B786114Sc 2012

  [Fic]—dc23

  2011026332

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment

  and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  In memory of Dr. James R. Randall

  founder of Pym-Randall Press and head of the

  creative writing program at Emerson College

  who inspired countless young authors.

  Mentor, teacher and dear friend.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  The Oryx Stone and the Scorpion

  Night Train to Marrakech

  “Welcome to Marrakech” in English and Arabic

  The Casbah of Marrakech

  Dinner at the Café Meknes

  Escaping Marrakech

  The High Atlas

  Welcome to Maison Tuareg

  Scorpion Dreams

  The Golden Light of the Desert

  The Unearthly Glow of Nar Azrak

  The Meeting of the Oryx

  Trader, Mapmaker, Hunter of Antiquities

  Sentinels of the Stone

  Through the Unknown Portal

  A Place of Strange and Frightening Beauty

  Captives in the Palace of Xuloc

  The Prophecy of the Glyphs

  Take Back the Oryx Stone

  The Seven Archways

  The Circle of Four

  The Tower of the Enigmas

  One Year Later…

  About the Author

  An enormous “Thank you!” to all who have helped me along the way:

  My agent, Stephen Fraser, of the Jennifer DeChiara Literary Agency, for your enthusiasm and steadfast support—as always, you are an inspiration! My editors, Krista Vitola and Krista Marino, for your unwavering belief in Zagora and her story, your fantastic editing and your keen insights and tough questions. The staff at Delacorte Press, especially publisher Beverly Horowitz, copy editor Jennifer Black and book designer Jinna Shin. Artist Kelly Murphy, whose extraordinary cover and illustrations perfectly capture the adventure, humor and mystery of Scorpions.

  The members of my writing group, who critiqued endless drafts and cheered me on: Laurie Jacobs, Donna McArdle, Pat Lowery Collins, Lenice Strohmeier, Christopher Doyle, Patricia Bridgman and Valerie McCaffrey. Also my literary confidante, Heather Wilks-Jones, and my first young reader, Isabella Giordano.

  A special thanks to Peter, who introduced me to Morocco during our honeymoon, and to our sons, Ian and Derek, intrepid travelers and companions on our return journey in 1998. Finally, merci to Abdul, Mohammed, Ali and the others who welcomed us to Maison Tuareg in Agdz, Morocco, and arranged for our trek into the Sahara, setting fire to my imagination all those years ago.…

  The light was beautiful over the walled city of Zahir. Goatherders walked under an immense blue sky; scimitar oryxes grazed in lush oases. Camel caravans and traders on horseback followed a wide road lined with stately columns, leading to the city. High above Zahir rose the Tower of the Enigmas, where guards in silk cloaks sat on their camels, swords pointing skyward.

  All of them—men, women, children, camels, goats—moved past the red stone walls that wound through the city like the spines of dragons. Sunlight spilled over terraces and squares and obelisks, and over the confusing maze of streets. At the heart of Zahir was a palace of ocher and dusty pink, built by the mystic poet Xuloc, leader of the Azimuth. Its gardens teemed with peacocks, lemon trees and flocks of multicolored parrots. Turquoise fish swam in the fountains while Azimuth elders strolled along its paths, reading ancient texts.

  Through an archway of brilliant colors, within a courtyard bound by high mud walls, stood a small pyramid of unearthly blue stones, infused with light from the planet Nar Azrak. Embedded at the top of the pyramid was a luminous stone no bigger than a robin’s egg. And if you observed the stone in a certain light, you could see the image of a gazelle-like creature with long, curved horns—the sacred oryx—that was carved into it.

  One autumn night, late in the seventeenth century, a lone figure, undetected by palace guards, crept in and scaled the blue stone pyramid. Using a chisel and hammer, the stranger loosened the Oryx Stone, prying it away, and ran off with it into the desert.

  Days later, a scorpion the size of a large lizard, its tail hideous and coiled, scuttled across the palace courtyard. More scorpions appeared, each larger and more frightening than the last. Pincers clacking, they crawled into the dark corners and tight crevices of Zahir, poised to strike. Within a month the scimitar oryxes vanished without a trace, leaving the oases empty.

  Alarmed, the Azimuth elders convened, fearful that the theft of the Oryx Stone had thrown the balance of nature into chaos. The stone had channeled the power of Nar Azrak, creating a protective barrier around Zahir, keeping away the scorpions. But now the stone was gone, and in despair, the Azimuth left their beloved city, fleeing across the desert.

  Month by month, the scorpions tunneled through the sand, hollowing out a colony beneath Zahir. At night they raced over the dunes, shrieking like wild dogs, under the light of Nar Azrak.

  Ever vigilant, the Azimuth elders turned to the night sky, studying the constellations, watching Nar Azrak veer off course. They ruminated and pondered, recalling the ancient glyphs and foretellings, the prophetic drawings of Xuloc. Centuries passed and they grew increasingly frightened: their astronomers all agreed that Nar Azrak was moving directly toward Zahir, having been set on its earthbound path the night the Oryx Stone disappeared.

  Zagora Pym sat with a beat-up leather-bound book open on her lap, dreaming about Zahir. She’d found the book the day before when her father was lecturing at the university and she was snooping around his study. It was at the bottom of his desk, in a drawer crammed with pencils, graphs and navigational charts. On the first page were spidery letters that read Excavating Zahir: The Journal of Edgar Q. Yegen, Intrepid Explorer.

  She perched on the edge of her bed, slowly turning the pages, which threatened to fall apart at the slightest touch. Zagora was eleven and a bit rough around the edges, with perpetually s
craped elbows, a face with sharp angles and a gap between her teeth, and she wore the gaze of a constant dreamer. She knew that while she might not be a ravishing bandit princess or a girl genius with an off-the-charts IQ, she had adventure in her heart, and to her that’s what mattered most.

  Most of the journal’s pages looked chewed up—she guessed by desert beetles—and many were damaged or missing. But that didn’t stop Zagora from reading the pages that were left. And although the ink had faded, she could see that the paragraphs had been composed by a precise and scholarly hand, in the language of a particular time.

  The book started off with the paragraph:

  I begin this journal on a blustery March day in Boston, Massachusetts, sitting in my study overlooking Marlborough Street, in the year 1937. In two months’ time a freighter will leave Boston Harbor for the port of Tangier, Morocco—and I will be on it. This expedition will be the culmination often years of exhaustive research, which began the moment I discovered the infamous Oryx Stone.

  Zagora had never read anything so thrilling in her life. Her archaeologist father often talked about his adventures in Zahir, including his role in the failed expedition to excavate the buried city. But the entries in this book went all the way back to 1937!

  In Edgar Yegen’s journal there were accounts of moonless black nights in the desert, open-air markets and the bleak Atlas Mountains. She studied his sketches of mud-walled houses, patterned archways, an underground tomb. It was easy to imagine the sun, the insects, the heat and dust of the Sahara. She read about the road to Zahir, with its stone columns, snaking through yellow sands. What excited her most, though, were the entries about a mysterious object called the Oryx Stone.

  She stopped flipping the pages of the book right where Edgar Yegen first described the strange stone, and read the entry again.

  While roaming the casbah in search of a comfortable pair of slippers, I happened upon a makeshift stall containing the kinds of trinkets one encounters in these bustling markets. Tipping my hat to the proprietor, I was about to walk away when a flash of blue caught my eye. Amid the tangle of evil-eye charms, worry beads and ankle bracelets was the most extraordinary necklace I had ever seen: strung on a ribbon of leather was a blue stone the size of a robin’s egg with the tiny figure of an oryx—an animal considered sacred by the ancient tribe of the Azimuth—etched into the center. I held the stone in my hand and my blood quickened. I intuited that this was indeed a long-lost treasure: the infamous Oryx Stone, stolen centuries ago from the legendary city of Zahir.

  The description of the Oryx Stone matched that of an object she’d found in her attic years earlier. While searching for an explorer’s headlamp to wear in the cellar on a newt-catching expedition, she had opened a steamer trunk and discovered, under a stack of archaeology magazines, a tattered drawstring pouch.

  Tucked inside the pouch was a luminous stone the same ice blue as her eyes. Similar to a small egg in shape and size, the stone was polished smooth and threaded on a worn leather string. If she turned the stone a certain way in the light, she could see the image of an oryx, her favorite desert animal, which had been cut into the surface of the stone.

  Ever since that day, late at night, when her dad and brother were asleep, she would creep up to the attic and pull out the stone, mesmerized by its ethereal light. She’d spent hours up there, exploring foreign lands, inventing stories of far-off places, dangerous bandits, magical oryxes and lost desert opals. Riding imaginary camels, she made journeys in her goggles, pith helmet and crocodile boots, which came to a frightening point at the toe. And always, always, she wore the glowing blue stone.

  There was a knock at the front door and Zagora guiltily closed the journal, tucking it under her bed. She planned to return it to her father’s desk before he discovered it was missing, though it was likely he’d forgotten he even had it. Her dad was absentminded that way.

  Bounding downstairs and out to the front porch, she found a huge envelope stuffed in their mailbox. Her father was always getting weird-sized parcels sent from all over the world. This envelope had a weary look, as if it had been traveling for years and years, space-warping to their house from another century.

  “Dad, package!” she shouted, bursting into her father’s study, where he sat playing Desert Biome Madness on his computer.

  Charles W. Pym, PhD, DSc, a tall, introspective, first-class archaeologist (in Zagora’s opinion) and translator of rare glyphs, was now in the later stages of his career. Zagora bragged to her friends that her father tracked down snow leopards in the Gobi, dynamited a buried fortress in Mali and almost died of thirst while measuring wind patterns in Egypt. His career had been a series of worst-case scenarios, she explained, using his phrase. She didn’t know the specifics, but she liked the way the words sounded.

  Dr. Pym spun around in his ergonomic bungee chair and Zagora ceremoniously handed him the envelope. It was stamped with the words Royaume du Maroc, which she knew meant “Kingdom of Morocco.” The handwriting was messy and the stamps were desert themed, with whimsical pictures of lizards, camels, hyenas and insects that she was dying to collect.

  “Can I keep the stamps?” she asked eagerly. “They’re really cool.” Ever since she was seven, when her dad had brought home a book called Flora and Fauna of the Sahara, she’d immersed herself in facts about deserts of the world.

  Her father held up the brown envelope tied with string. “What’s this, eh?” He squinted at the return address. “Who could be sending me a package from Morocco?”

  “Maybe they want you to set up a desert expedition,” suggested Zagora. It was always an event when her dad landed a job, especially in some exotic location.

  She watched his face carefully as he scrutinized the old-fashioned script through his drugstore reading glasses, the lines around his eyes deepening.

  “Good grief.” He gave a puzzled frown as he tore open the envelope. “Hmmm. I don’t recognize the sender’s address—”

  Paper crackled and dust flew as the contents spilled out. Zagora caught a sheet of paper as it drifted to the floor; covered with black pencil scribbles, it smelled faintly of limes and spices. She found herself looking at a map; it was gritty and smudged, like something a first grader would draw. Turning the paper this way and that, she tried to decipher the primitive symbols.

  “This letter has been forwarded to me by a woman named Olivia Romanesçu,” her father said slowly, looking up with a quizzical expression. “She lives in Morocco. In Marrakech, to be precise. Hmm, very unusual handwriting—”

  “Do you think she’s an explorer, like Freya Stark?” interrupted Zagora.

  Her fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Bixby, had told her class about Freya Stark: self-reliant, ingenious and plucky, she’d been one of the first Western women to travel through the Arabian deserts. Freya was currently number one on Zagora’s Ten Most Admired Heroines list.

  “Good heavens, this Olivia is a cousin of an old friend of mine, Pitblade Yegen,” said her father, running a hand through his silvery hair. She could see he was making a huge effort to stay calm. “I’ve never told you about Pitblade, have I?”

  Pitblade Yegen? thought Zagora, suddenly curious. He must be related to Edgar Yegen, the man who wrote the journal!

  Her father paused for a moment, then shook his head. “Pitblade and I met years ago at college and became close friends. He’d grown up on the island of Malta and always struck me as a mysterious figure with a checkered past—insanely brilliant, fluent in at least seven languages. Remember the failed expedition in Morocco I’ve often talked about? Pitblade organized that dig: he was on a mad search for the Pyramid of Xuloc and wanted me to translate some glyphs.”

  Zagora could see her dad now, with his geophysical compass, GPS, hydration backpack and snakeproof gaiters, marching into the Sahara to translate some dusty old glyphs. The Pyramid of Xuloc sounded familiar. Hadn’t Edgar Yegen been looking for a pyramid, too?

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me about Pitblade
Yegen?” she asked, though she knew her father tended to be quiet and secretive, distracted and overly absorbed in his work. Just the week before, her brother, Duncan, had seen an article in the League of Archaeologists Review about an award their father had received for his discovery of petroglyphs inside a necropolis in a Tunisian erg. Yet he hadn’t even mentioned it to Zagora or Duncan.

  Her father gave a tremulous sigh. “Things went badly in the desert. A few weeks after we started excavating, Pitblade chartered a plane to survey Zahir from the air. The plane crashed in the desert and that was the end of it all: the authorities closed down the site.” His face seemed to crumple a bit. “Pitblade’s body was never found.”

  “That’s terrible, Dad!” said Zagora, thinking how sad he must have been to lose his friend. The Zahir expedition, she knew, had taken place almost twelve years earlier. That meant Pitblade Yegen had been missing in the desert since before she was even born.

  “Pitblade had given me some things for safekeeping,” her father continued, “including a journal that belonged to his grandfather, who was also an archaeologist.”

  The journal had been written by Pitblade’s grandfather! Fortunately Zagora’s dad didn’t notice her face turning bright pink.

  “Pitblade also gave me an artifact that he had from Zahir. He always joked that it gave him some kind of mysterious superpowers—but that was Pitblade for you.”

  Zagora froze. An artifact from Zahir? Was her dad talking about the blue stone in the attic—the Oryx Stone? Then it must be magic after all! What kind of superpowers had it given Pitblade? she wondered. Her next thought was, why hadn’t it given her any superpowers?

  As her father read on, Zagora saw his face light up with delight and astonishment.

  “This is unbelievable! Olivia Romanesçu says in her letter that Pitblade is alive, and he’s somewhere in the desert near Zahir!” He rubbed his forehead and she sensed he was trying to rein in his emotions. Obviously this startling news had thrown him for a loop. “He managed to contact Olivia and he gave her my address, asking her to forward this letter and map.”