Pyramids
Chapters - Terry Pratchett
Section: The Assassin's Examination
Teppic, prince of the ancient river kingdom of Djelibeybi, prepares for his final examination at the Assassins' Guild in Ankh-Morpork. As he navigates the rooftop assault course set by the fearsome examiner Mericet, the narrative weaves between his present ordeal and memories of arriving at the school seven years earlier, where he befriended the easygoing Chidder and the pious Arthur.
Flashbacks reveal Teppic's childhood in Djelibeybi, where his father King Teppicymon XXVII sent him abroad for education, and the high priest Dios managed every aspect of the kingdom. The exam culminates in a moral crisis: Teppic must fire a crossbow at a figure under a blanket. Unable to bring himself to kill, he fires wildly, and the bolt ricochets into the target by accident. Mericet passes him. The figure turns out to be a dummy. Teppic, Chidder and Arthur celebrate over an expensive dinner of deep-sea blowfish, then stumble drunkenly through the streets until a mysterious seagull scares off a gang of thieves on the Brass Bridge.
POV: Teppic·On page: Mericet, Chidder, Arthur, Teppicymon XXVII·Mentioned: Dios, You Bastard
Section: Death of a Pharaoh
Back in Djelibeybi, King Teppicymon XXVII rises at dawn to watch the sunrise from the palace roof. Plagued by doubts about whether he truly makes the sun rise or just takes credit for it, and haunted by the sound of the sea, he leaps from the roof believing he can fly. He falls to his death, though his divine aspect briefly takes wing before departing.
The king's ghost encounters Death, who appears not as the expected giant scarab beetle but as a familiar skeletal figure with a scythe. In his new post-mortem clarity, the king begins to question the entire pyramid burial system he accepted unthinkingly in life. Meanwhile on the Brass Bridge, the seagull carrying his father's spirit passes over Teppic, triggering a mystical episode: the river Ankh floods, bread sprouts into corn wherever Teppic walks, and he falls into a trance. The divinity of kingship has transferred to him. Chidder and Arthur carry their unconscious friend to the Guild sanatorium.
POV: Teppicymon XXVII·On page: Teppic, Death, Chidder, Arthur·Mentioned: Ptraci, Dios
Section: The Mystic Summons
Teppic awakens knowing he must return home immediately. He blackmails Chidder into lending his father's fastest smuggling vessel by reciting the family's illegal trading figures from memory gained during his mystical trance. A swift overnight voyage delivers him to the Djel delta.
Back in Djelibeybi, Dios runs the kingdom from the throne steps with the gold Face of the Sun mask propped on the seat, issuing orders as though the king were present. The ambitious priest Hoot Koomi manoeuvres for position as Dios's eventual successor. Meanwhile, the embalmers Dil and his apprentice Gern prepare the late king's body, cracking jokes and debating bandage fabrics while the king's ghost watches in dismay. The ghost of Teppicymon XXVII finds himself becoming fascinated by the daily lives of ordinary people he never noticed when alive, even as he grows increasingly horrified at the prospect of being sealed forever inside a pyramid.
POV: Teppic·On page: Teppicymon XXVII, Dios, Hoot Koomi, Dil, Gern, Chidder
Section: Return to the Old Kingdom
Teppic arrives home and is immediately swallowed by the rituals of kingship. Dios loads him down with ceremonial objects - the Flail of Mercy, the Reaping Hook of Justice, the Honeycomb of Increase, the Asp of Wisdom - until the young king can barely move. Dios informs him he must marry, suggesting his own aunt as the ideal candidate, since interfamilial marriage is tradition.
Teppic visits his father's mummy, where Dios "interprets" the dead king's wishes, conveniently translating the ghost's desperate protests against pyramid burial into enthusiastic approval. The pyramid architect Ptaclusp presents plans for a standard tomb, but Dios demands the greatest pyramid ever built - twice normal size, with black marble facing and an electrum capstone. Ptaclusp is terrified but cannot refuse. His twin sons, the accountant Ptaclusp IIa and the architect Ptaclusp IIb, argue over the cost and the cosmic engineering implications of such an enormous structure.
POV: Teppic·On page: Dios, Teppicymon XXVII, Ptaclusp, Ptaclusp IIa, Ptaclusp IIb, Dil, Gern
Section: The Burden of Kingship
Teppic struggles against the suffocating weight of tradition. He tries to be a man of the people, visiting the pyramid construction site and shaking a stonemason's hand, only to learn the horrified worker will cut off his own hand rather than live with a limb defiled by touching a god. Teppic orders the man given a pension and light work.
At court, Teppic attempts to dispense justice but Dios "interprets" every judgement to suit priestly interests, awarding disputed cattle to the gods and overruling the king's verdicts. A handmaiden named Ptraci, the late king's favourite, is brought before the throne for refusing the poison that would send her to serve in the Netherworld. Teppic says "Let her go," but Dios translates this as an order to throw her to the sacred crocodiles at dawn.
Meanwhile, the Great Pyramid's construction accelerates unnervingly. Ptaclusp IIb discovers dangerous temporal anomalies - an apple ages centuries in seconds, and time loops cause workers to encounter their own doubles. His father Ptaclusp sees opportunity rather than danger, planning to exploit the time loops to meet their impossible deadline.
POV: Teppic·On page: Dios, Ptraci, Ptaclusp, Ptaclusp IIb, Ptaclusp IIa
Section: Diplomacy and Discontent
Teppic receives the emissaries of Tsort and Ephebe for a diplomatic audience, only to discover Dios has already settled all matters of state. The king's role is reduced to sitting, smiling, and asking visitors if they enjoy being diplomats. At the subsequent court session, Dios overrides every judgement Teppic makes, "interpreting" the king's words into whatever the priests require.
Ptraci is sentenced to the crocodiles, and Teppic dares not speak further for fear of making things worse. That night, he dresses in his assassin's black and climbs down from his guarded quarters to rescue her. He breaks into her cell, dispatches the guards with sleeping darts, and leads her across the palace rooftops to hide in a mummy case in the embalming workshop. The ghost of Teppicymon XXVII watches, unable to communicate, and reveals to no one listening that Ptraci is actually Teppic's half-sister.
The Great Pyramid nears completion, but Ptaclusp IIb begs his father to cap it immediately rather than wait for a ceremony. The temporal effects are intensifying dangerously, and multiple copies of workers created by time loops are demanding separate wages.
POV: Teppic·On page: Dios, Ptraci, Teppicymon XXVII, Ptaclusp IIb, Ptaclusp IIa, Ptaclusp
Section: Rescuing Ptraci
Dios searches the palace furiously for the missing Ptraci, suspecting the masked king is involved. Teppic plays innocent during the search, watching Dios open mummy cases while the ghost of Teppicymon XXVII helpfully mentions Ptraci climbed out for a call of nature and hid elsewhere.
That night, Teppic retrieves Ptraci from the embalming workshop and leads her across the rooftops. She chatters about her training as a handmaiden, her great-grandmother who posed for the illustrations in The Shuttered Palace, and her fondness for the old king. They attempt to flee on You Bastard, the sole camel in the royal stables, but are intercepted by guards. Dios arrives and declares Teppic an assassin who has killed the king, refusing to acknowledge him.
The Great Pyramid, uncapped and dangerously overloaded with temporal energy, begins distorting space and time. Reality warps around them as the brothers Ptaclusp IIa and Ptaclusp IIb desperately haul the capstone up the scaffolding. You Bastard spits in Dios's face with mathematically calculated precision, then bolts into the night.
POV: Teppic·On page: Dios, Ptraci, Teppicymon XXVII, You Bastard, Dil, Gern, Ptaclusp IIa, Ptaclusp IIb
Section: Flight from Djelibeybi
You Bastard gallops through streets that buckle and warp as the Great Pyramid's temporal energy reaches critical levels. Teppic and Ptraci cling to the camel as reality stretches like rubber. The pyramid screams, rotates ninety degrees through an impossible dimension, and the entire kingdom of Djelibeybi vanishes from the world, folded into a crack in space the thickness of a line.
Teppic and Ptraci find themselves in the high desert between where Ephebe and Tsort now share a border. Looking back, the valley has simply gone - replaced by a hairline crack in the rock. Ptraci can briefly see the kingdom if she looks sideways at the crack, but the vision makes her dizzy.
Inside the vanished kingdom, Dil the embalmer wakes to find the pyramids dark and silent, the stars stuck to the visible body of the goddess Nept arching across the sky, and the sun being pushed by an enormous dung beetle. Everything the people of Djelibeybi ever believed is becoming physically real. Dios sits in the empty throne room, trembling, his hands mechanically performing the rituals while his mind fails to process the catastrophe.
POV: Teppic·On page: Ptraci, You Bastard, Dios, Ptaclusp IIa, Ptaclusp IIb, Dil, Gern
Section: Gods Made Manifest
Inside the trapped kingdom, the gods of Djelibeybi physically manifest - seventy-foot monstrosities fighting over who controls the sun, smashing buildings, and terrorising the population. Koomi seizes the moment to challenge Dios, rallying the priests and demanding sacrifices. But Dios, shattered though he is, proves impossible to overthrow directly. His terrifying certainty is simply too strong.
Priests who express doubt about the gods' divinity are thrown into the river to the crocodiles. Koomi manipulates the other priests, building support for the ancient practice of sacrificing the high priest to intercede with the gods. Dios, exhausted and aching, begins to waver.
Meanwhile, the dead king Teppicymon XXVII feels his body reanimating in its casket. The belief of the people is making everything they ever believed literally true - including the idea that mummified kings live again. He breaks free, retrieves his organs from their jars, and with Dil and Gern sets out with sledgehammers to free the other ancestors from their pyramids.
POV: Teppicymon XXVII·On page: Dios, Hoot Koomi, Dil, Gern, Ptaclusp, Ptaclusp IIb
Section: Philosophers and Geometry
Outside the vanished kingdom, Teppic and Ptraci ride You Bastard across the desert to Ephebe, where they encounter the philosophers Xeno and Ibid shooting arrows at tortoises to test logical paradoxes. The philosophers explain that with Djelibeybi gone, Ephebe and Tsort now share a border, making war inevitable.
At a symposium of Ephebe's greatest minds, Teppic meets the geometrician Pthagonal, who drunkenly explains what has happened: the Great Pyramid, too large and uncapped, has rotated all four dimensions by ninety degrees, trapping the kingdom in a fold of space-time where width has become time. The kingdom is recycling its own past, which is why nothing ever changed there.
Ptraci begins to bloom outside the kingdom's stifling traditions, showing unexpected intelligence and force of personality. She and Teppic discuss their futures as Ephebe and Tsort mobilise for war, both sides building wooden horses in preparation for a siege they've been itching to refight for thousands of years.
POV: Teppic·On page: Ptraci, You Bastard, Xeno, Ibid, Pthagonal·Mentioned: Chidder
Section: Return and Reckoning
Teppic encounters Chidder in Ephebe's harbour, now a wealthy merchant captain. Chidder offers Teppic a future in commerce, but after a night aboard the Unnamed, Teppic dreams of his ancestor Khuft - the founder of Djelibeybi, who turns out to have been a camel-selling con artist fleeing persecution, not a heroic patriarch. Khuft reveals the kingdom appeared from nowhere when his camels somehow called it into existence.
Teppic dives off the ship and rides You Bastard back across the desert. The camel calculates its way through the dimensional crack and into the trapped kingdom, passing through the domain of the Sphinx, whose famous riddle Teppic dismantles through pedantic logical analysis. Inside the kingdom, Teppicymon XXVII leads an army of liberated ancestors through the necropolis, freeing mummies from their tombs with sledgehammers. They discover Khuft's pyramid is already open - the founder has been coming and going for seven thousand years. An inscription inside holds the secret of the pyramids.
The ancestors march on the Great Pyramid, where Koomi and the priests confront them. Dios, forced to choose between the gods he created and the order he has maintained for millennia, freezes the ancestors with his staff's power. But Teppic is already climbing the pyramid's black marble face.
POV: Teppic, Teppicymon XXVII·On page: Chidder, Ptraci, You Bastard, Dios, Hoot Koomi, Dil, Gern, Ptaclusp, Ptaclusp IIb, Khuft
Section: A New Kingdom
Teppic scales the Great Pyramid as the gods close in, but runs out of knives partway up. The ancestors break free from Dios's spell and swarm up the pyramid in a human ladder, passing Teppic from hand to hand until he reaches the summit. Using his last knife blade as an improvised capstone, he triggers the pyramid's flare at the moment of sunset. The Great Pyramid explodes in a cataclysm of light and sound, scattering building-sized marble blocks across the necropolis and destroying most of the other pyramids.
The kingdom snaps back into the real world. Ptraci arrives aboard Chidder's ship, delivered rolled up in a carpet. Teppic discovers she is his half-sister and therefore of royal blood. He abdicates, naming her queen. Ptraci immediately begins modernising: she orders plumbing installed, commissions Ptaclusp to build bridges instead of pyramids, permits both the Tsortean and Ephebian armies to cross the kingdom simultaneously so they end up on opposite sides, and tells Koomi to shut up when he objects.
The ancestors dissolve peacefully in the river delta, finally meeting Death properly. Dios vanishes in the pyramid's explosion but wakes in the mud of the pristine, pre-civilisation Djel valley - transported back seven thousand years to encounter Khuft arriving with his camels. Unable to resist, he picks up his staff and goes forth to guide the newcomers, beginning the whole cycle again. Teppic rides You Bastard out of the kingdom into an open future, ignoring Ptraci's royal command to stay.
POV: Teppic·On page: Ptraci, Chidder, You Bastard, Dios, Hoot Koomi, Teppicymon XXVII, Dil, Gern, Ptaclusp, Ptaclusp IIb, Ptaclusp IIa, Death