The Shadow Prince, page 1
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2021 by David Anthony Durham
Jacket art copyright © 2021 by Eric Wilkerson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
TU BOOKS, an imprint of LEE & LOW BOOKS Inc.,
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Edited by Elise McMullen-Ciotti
Book design by Sheila Smallwood
Chapter opener art copyright © by Olga Che
Egyptian Symbols by Good Studio
First Edition
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Durham, David Anthony, 1969- author.
Title: The shadow prince / David Anthony Durham.
Description: First edition. | New York : Tu Books, 2021. | Audience: Ages 8-13 | Audience: Grades 4-6 | Summary: “In this middle grade solarpunk novel set in an alternate Egyptian universe, twelve-year-old Ash must compete and survive to become the shadow-and protector-of the prince”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021012982 | ISBN 9781643794280 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781643794297 (epub)
Subjects: CYAC: Fantasy. | Magic—Fiction. | Gods, Egyptian—Fiction. | Egypt—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.D869 Sh 2021 | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021012982
To the generous readers who read early drafts of this novel. Thank you. Your support kept me going. This book wouldn’t exist without you.
Contents
Days Before
1: Once a Canal Rat …
2: … Always a Canal Rat
3: Disbelief
4: Complicated Circumstances
5: A Gathering of Demons
6: A Village Spectacle
7: A Tale to Tell
8: The Contract
9: Above the World
10: A Dastardly Arrangement
The Testing
Day One
11: A Peculiar Way to Celebrate a Birthday
12: Demon, You May Feed Now
13: An Unconventional Fighting Technique
14: Lucky with Knives
15: A Short Calligraphy Lecture
16: The Spell
17: A Promise and a Threat
The Testing
Day Two
18: The Little Whelps
19: And Today’s God or Goddess Is …
20: The Corridor of Cages
21: Tough Luck
22: The Problem with Cages
23: A Stinger or Two
24: Banquet
25: A Question of Fear
The Testing
Day Three
26: Call Me Cranky
27: That’s What a Snout’s About
28: The Headwaters
29: Drowning on Dry Land
30: Good Little Fishy
31: Sink or Swim
32: In the Drink
33: And My Savior Is …
34: Speechless Once Again
35: Games Played in a Skiff
36: Memphis at Sunset
The Testing
Day Four
37: The Vulture Queen
38: A Factory Job
39: Into the Cauldron
40: Keep Your Diapers On!
41: A Quick Plan
42: The Fallen Girl
43: Strike a Pose
44: No Bouncy Balls!
45: Servants of the Prince
46: A Tale of Two Boys
The Testing
Day Five
47: The Ruins of Katara-Nesur
48: Collaborative Spell Casting
49: Betrayal
50: A Few Styluses Too Many
51: Something Horrible
52: New Tricks, Old Tricks … What Tricks?
53: A Short Attempt at Negotiation
54: Battle in the Skies
55: My Spell-Self
The Day After
56: Waking from Darkness
57: A Close Call
58: Seizing the Moment
59: Times of Change
60: The Demon’s Revenge
61: Bouncy Balls
62: Out of the Shadows and into the Light
Glossary of the Gods in The Shadow Prince
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Days Before
1 Once a Canal Rat …
I saw Merk and his friends before they saw me.
My first instinct was to jump behind something and hide, but I was out in the open now on a flat expanse beside the village, with nothing but sunbaked ground and a few tiny shrubs around me.
My second thought was to drop to the ground and play dead. Not the best plan, though. If they saw me, it would be way too embarrassing. I probably could have leaped back down into the canal next to me, but I’d just been in the canal for ages cleaning out debris.
It was one of my jobs—an important one, as my mentor, Yazen, liked to remind me. The village depended on the crops for food, and the crops depended on water to grow. Since we lived in the desert, water wasn’t easy to come by. It took a system of canals powered by sunmills to bring it in. Sunmills were a lot like windmills, except the blades of the turbines were covered in suncloth, a thin, sparkling fabric that captured the magic of the sun and transformed it into energy. During the day when the sun was up and shining, we used the sun’s power. Then at night, when the south wind blew across the desert, we used the wind for its power. The spinning mills turned the paddles down in the canal, and the paddles circulated water all the way from the River Nile out to our crops. Unfortunately, stuff loved to jam the paddles. That’s why I spent way too many afternoons down in the water, digging through canal mud with a little shovel and, just as often, with my bare hands.
When I saw Merk, I’d just climbed out of the canal, dirty, sweaty, and tired, ringing the water out of my linen kilt I wasn’t going back in unless I had to. Problem was that I absolutely did not want to talk to Merk. I tried to pretend I was invisible, hoping that somehow Merk and his friends wouldn’t notice me. Fat chance. Over the years Yazen had taught me lots of weird skills. Too bad the ability to turn invisible wasn’t one of them.
I could blend in pretty well in our village. I was just another soon-to-be twelve-year-old: medium height, skinny and bare-chested. Like all the people I knew, I was dark brown from head to toe, warmed by the sun pretty much every day of my life. My only unique quality was that my bare feet looked a few sizes smaller than they should.
The three boys were headed right toward me.
I checked my hair for debris. It was lumpy and curly in just the right way to trap bits of leaves, twigs and chicken feathers. I wasn’t the least bit invisible.
Merk was showing off his new sunboard. Like all solar-powered devices, sunboards ran on the energy of the sun. Across the top of the board was a sparkling surface, similar to suncloth but bonded to a thin sliver of palm wood. Its edges were smooth, all the angles perfect. Merk hovered, balancing on the slim platform. He circled with the board, dipping his right foot down to the ground to swipe himself forward. They said all solar-powered devices worked because Lord Ra, one of Egypt’s most powerful gods, joined with the sun each day and shone his magic down onto Egypt. Maybe so. I wouldn’t know since I’d never seen any of the gods. They were only stories to me. Incredible stories. Maybe too incredible to believe, even though I wanted to.
Every now and then Merk tried to do a trick, flipping the board up or spinning, but each time he fell off. With my sense of balance, I knew I’d be pretty good at it. But I knew better than to even ask. Merk didn’t share. Being the son of the richest merchant in the village, he got all the neat stuff. I don’t suppose his father was as rich as royalty or the people who lived in the larger cities, but around here he was top of the heap. Merk loved reminding everyone of that.
“Hey, Dowser!” Merk shouted as they approached me. “Is that a canal rat?”
Dowser slapped his bare belly. Like me and pretty much all the other boys and men I knew, he wore a simple kilt, but otherwise went bare-chested most of the year. “Yeah,” he said, “a canal rat.” It’s kind of a lame contribution, but that’s Dowser for you. He’s not much of a thinker.
Merk’s other buddy, Setka, never said anything. Instead, he just laughed in a way that made his thin shoulders bounce up and down.
“Oh, no,” Merk went on, squinting at me, “it’s something worse. It’s the son of the recluse.”
He was wrong again, but I wasn’t going to point it out. The “recluse” was my mentor, Yazen. I wasn’t his son. Merk knew that, but he enjoyed pretending that he didn’t. Truth was, I was an orphan. I didn’t even know who my parents were. Sometimes I had vague memories of them, but I might’ve just been making them up. For as long as I could remember, I couldn’t help wondering who they were, what they were like, why they’d left me. I wondered if I’d ever see them again. I wondered if they were alive out there somewhere, and I wondered if they ever thought of me.
I did a lot of wondering.
Not that it did me any good. The only parent-like person I knew was Yazen. And it’s true, he was … peculiar.
“Hi, Merk,” I said, wiping the sweat from my forehead. The sun was fierce, as it always was in Egypt. “That your new sunboard?”
It was a stupid question. Of course it was his new sunboard. But like it or not, I lived in this village with Merk. I probably would my whole life—no matter the crazy things Yazen claimed were destined to happen to me. Best to stay on good terms.
“You bet it is,” Merk said. He pressed his foot down on the back of the board, lifting up on the front and spinning. It looked impressive, but about halfway around he lost his balance and fell. Dusting himself off, he said, “Pretty nice, huh? Jealous much?”
I had to admit it. The board was pretty nice, and I was jealous. Much. The way it hung in the air, bobbing. It made me want to leap on to it and show these guys how it was done. Not that I knew how it was done. I’d never been on a sunboard in my life. Such things weren’t part of my so-called training. Still, I wished …
“It’s a great board, Merk,” I said. “Wish I had one.”
“Your old man could never afford it,” Merk said.
“No way he could,” Dowser said.
“Next year,” Merk continued, “my dad’s buying me a solar chariot. Can you believe that?”
Not really. I’d never even seen a solar chariot. They had to be seriously expensive, though. What Merk would do with a solar chariot was beyond me. Ride around the village showing off? Probably. “That’s cool, Merk,” I said.
For a moment he squinted at me, deciding whether he wanted to take that as an insult. I smiled and lifted my eyebrows, sort of a visual way of saying, I said that was cool, Merk. He accepted it. He hopped up on his board again, kicked it into motion, carving a few nice turns. He almost ran over Setka, who responded with that shoulder-shaking laugh of his.
Merk tried another trick. I could see what he wanted to do was make his board twirl as he leaped off of it and then be able to land back onto it when it was flat. That’s what he wanted to do. What he actually did was jump off the board, flail around in the air, and then miss it as he crashed down to earth. The board skittered away and hovered, looking a little depressed.
Dowser didn’t have anything to say. Neither did Setka’s shoulders.
And that’s when I made my mistake. I opened my mouth that I should’ve kept closed and said …
2 . . . Always a Canal Rat
“Don’t worry. You’ll get the hang of it.”
Some people might think that was a nice thing to say, but not Merk. He’s an expert at taking things the wrong way. He glared at me. “Who says I don’t already have the hang of it?”
I was tempted to point out that he had just landed on his butt, and that I didn’t think that was the trick he’d intended to make. Instead, I just pulled a Setka. I grinned and raised my shoulders.
“You always think you can do things better than everyone else, don’t you?” Merk asked. “You and your mysterious ‘training.’ All the important stuff old Yazen claims to be teaching you. As if you’re better than the rest of us. You’re not, and that old man is just crazy.”
“He’s crazy all right,” Dowser agreed.
“Look, Merk,” I began, “I didn’t mean—”
“Let’s see you do better!” he said. He snatched up his board and thrust it at me. “Do some tricks, canal rat.” I tried to refuse, but he leaned in, face menacing. “Now!” He jabbed me with the edge of the board until I accepted it.
I could see only one way to salvage the situation. Get on the board. Try to do some trick. Fail. Make Merk happy. It shouldn’t have been that hard. There was only one problem.
Since before I could remember, Yazen had put me through an intense training program. It was mostly done behind the high walls of the compound we lived in. Advanced fighting techniques. Weapons work. Stretching. Palm tree climbing, rope walking, and wall scaling. I could stand balanced on a tightrope and juggle throwing knives. Truth was, I had skills. No one in the village knew the extent of it, but Yazen had, on occasion, let on that some great, noble destiny awaited me. He said he was preparing me for it. He claimed that on my twelfth birthday my future would be revealed, a future that involved demon hunting and all sorts of amazing, important things.
Sounds good, huh?
The problem was that my twelfth birthday was two days away. No sign of anything changing. Nope, just digging in the muck and dealing with the local bullies. That, apparently, was my destiny. Personally, I agreed with Merk. Yazen—as much as I loved him—was a little out of his mind.
The reason my training was a problem with Merk’s sunboard was that my instincts and balance were too finely tuned. The moment I stood on that board I felt at home on it. I loved it. I was floating on air! I dipped one leg down and felt the board slip forward. Nice. I did it again. Smooth. Next thing I knew, I was carving ribbons in the air, leaning into turns, spinning and dipping. I sped away down along the canal, snapped out a quick turn, and headed back, zipping from side to side as I carved a squiggly line back to where I’d started. To finish it off, I leaped, catching the board with my toe and spinning it beneath me. I came back down on it perfectly, and then slammed the back end to stop my forward momentum.
I totally forgot that my plan had been to fall. I looked up to see Merk’s reactions.
Whack! Merk punched me square in the nose, with enough force to send me sliding down the bank toward the canal. I snapped to my feet, wiping blood from my nose. For a red-hot moment, I wanted to dash up the bank and tear into Merk. I’d fight all of them. I’d win, too. A lot of Yazen’s training involved me learning to fight multiple opponents. I could see just how I’d place a swift kick to Merk’s groin, jab an elbow into Dowser’s gut, and chop down on both of Setka’s laughing shoulder blades. I could’ve done it so fast they wouldn’t have known what hit them. Only …
I couldn’t. It was the one thing that Yazen had forbidden me to ever do. I couldn’t use my training out in the village.
Up on the bank, Merk jumped on top of his board. “I’ll take this back now. You’re lucky I don’t give you the pounding you deserve. You’re not worth breaking a sweat over, loser.”
“Yeah, loser,” Dowser said.
Setka started kicking sand at me, splattering me with it.
“Next time,” Merk said, “don’t touch my stuff.” He turned and boarded away, the others jogging to keep pace with him.
I just stood there, fists clenched, dripping with muck, watching them go and feeling angry. Seriously angry. I washed the blood from my nose with a handful of water from the canal. At least it wasn’t hurt bad. I’d been punched and kicked before by a stronger, more skillful fighter than Merk, that was for sure. Still, it all made me so mad. And I wasn’t just mad at Merk. I was mad at Yazen for the strange life we led, one built on secrets and hours spent training each day to fight battles I was never going to have to fight. At the same time, he refused to let me fight the ones that faced me every day.
Trudging back toward the village I was reminded that this place—a nothing town at the edge of the desert—was the only place I’d ever known. It was just a small cluster of buildings and huts, a grain warehouse, pens for our scraggly goats, and a few thin palm trees. I lived with simple villagers who I’d known my entire life. Around our village, there was nothing but a flat expanse of desert all the way out to the horizon. Despite anything Yazen said, I was sure this was going to be the only life I’d ever know. The big twelfth birthday revelation? I just couldn’t believe it.
Thinking about it with my nose still aching made me even madder. That’s why I kicked open our compound’s gate. And it’s why I slammed it shut so loudly that Yazen would be sure to hear it.
I stood there glaring at the small collection of huts and training equipment we called home. It was laughable. Yazen was so convinced that I had to be prepared to fight demons that he had built pretend ones for me to battle. They were made out of wood and bound together with reed ropes. He used pulleys and gears to move them around as I sparred. There was one shaped like the crocodile-lion-hippo demon, Ammut. Another one was supposed to be a giant scorpion. There was also a cloak Yazen wore when he pretended to be one of the Wailing Goddesses; the cloak hung on a rack along with the long knives the goddesses wielded.
