Pyramids by Terry Pratchett (Discworld 7)

Djelibeybi really was a small self-centered kingdom. Even its plagues were half-hearted. All self-respecting river kingdoms have vast supernatural plagues, but the best the Old Kingdom had been able to achieve in the last hundred years was the Plague of the Frog*.

*It was quite a big frog, however, and got into the air ducts and kept everyone awake for weeks.

The seventh Discworld book is another book that doesn't neatly belong to any of the arcs, although it shares some similarities with the later Small Gods. It focuses on the ancient but tiny kingdom of Djelibeybi (jelly baby); its traditions, rulers, gods, and most especially as one can infer from the title of the book, its pyramids.

Djelibeybi is ancient but poor. It's been made this way mostly by its habit of burying all its rulers in pyramids and filling those pyramids up with things they need in the afterlife. It's tiny today as it's had to sell pieces of itself to at least attempt to pay for this debt. Every night, the necropolis glows with the light of all those pyramids flaring with energy, creating a haunting yet beautiful sight. We quickly meet Teppicymon XXVIII, also known as Pteppic (Teppic), the heir to throne of this kingdom who was sent to learn a trade to help with this debt problem. He is training as an assassin at the guild in Ankh-Morpork, getting ready for his final exam as we are introduced to the young prince. I have to point out here that Sir Terry goes into some painstaking detail about this test, but it doesn't get tedious or as long-winded as some authors do in such cases.

Of course, the assassin's guild is not a school you want to fail at, as one may guess. Teppic meets up with two of his fellow student assassin graduates, but their colleagues are not so fortunate. While they're out celebrating, his father, the king Teppicymon XXVII, dies, and the portion of him that is genuinely divine, since the citizens of Djelibeybi believe the king to be a god, transfers to Teppic. He must then return to rule, and his time outside the kingdom gives him some very unique viewpoints on things.

A quick side note here. One thing I've always found so fascinating about Discworld's deities is that belief creates them, not the other way around. Sir Terry will cover this in greater detail in Small Gods, but it's very important to this novel as well.

Teppic is not a very enthusiastic king, although once he is the ruler, he attempts to do his best, which isn't always a great idea as his people see him as a god, something we saw evidence of after his father died and he was in Ankh-Morpork. The main clash here is between him and Dios, the high priest. Dios is so set in his ways that it's downright scary and is a huge part of why the kingdom is like it is. This conflict between the young king with his cosmopolitan ideas and the old high priest who is such a stickler for tradition comes to a head over both the pyramid they end up building for his father, and when Ptraci, the former king's favorite handmaiden, refuses to take the poison that she was supposed to volunteer to imbibe so she could join the king in the afterlife, is given a sentence by Dios 'interpreting' Teppic's judgement, and he decides to rescue her.

The rescue happens just as the kingdom is suddenly dealing with the issues of the new pyramid, which is the largest ever made and was creating strange effects even though it isn't even finished yet. Teppic, Ptraci, and their camel 'You bastard' find themselves in neighboring Ephebe, but Djelibeybi is now gone from the Disc. This means the peace between Tsort and Ephebe, which the old kingdom helped promote as it was a buffer state between those nations, is going to be broken, since they are suddenly adjacent and war must follow. It also is not exactly great for the kingdom itself, as all, and when I say all, I mean all, of their gods are suddenly visible and causing havoc, mummies walk the land, and Dios is at a loss for how to handle all this madness, since Dios does not handle change well at all.

With the help of an old friend from Ankh-Morpork, and even older ancestors, Teppic has to solve the problem of the pyramids and his nation of birth being in such a hot mess. But first he has to find out how one actually gets back to it, when it's gone off and disappeared. This is an unusual situation indeed, even for Discworld, and any fans and anyone reading these reviews is well aware that unusual situations and the Disc are very close friends.

This book has a lot to say about traditions and how people can become slaves to rituals, even though the meaning of those rituals has been lost to time, and how people can be their own worst enemies by blind obedience to such things. For example, when Teppic is rescuing Ptraci, he moves to release other prisoners as well. The first prisoner he attempts to set free is aghast at the idea of disobeying the orders of their god-king and yells for the guards, refusing Teppic's rescue attempt. This idea that people will go down dark, even self-destructive paths instead of thinking for themselves is something we see all too often in the real world as well.

Sir Terry's attention to characters with a lesser role is so good here. We feel a genuine connection to Dil and Gern the embalmers (mostly thanks to the king's ghost watching their work on his body), Ptaclusp the architect and his twin sons Ptaclusp IIA and IIB, the philosophers of Ephebe, and even the soldiers of both Ephebe and Tsort when they are facing imminent war when Djelibeybi is missing from the Disc. This level of detail, without being monotonous, is so very rare, and one of many reasons Sir Terry is my favorite author. The character growth here is great too, especially for Ptraci. She begins as a handmaiden that while not completely subservient, shows tendencies to that effect early on, but she grows so much as a character, and she's amazing near the end of the book.

I also loved that when they were talking with the philosophers of Ephebe, that Pthagonal, their version of Pythagoras, was very upset that pi wasn't a nice round number, or at least a decimal that didn't go on forever like it does. Since I use geometry and trigonometry as part of my job, I can especially appreciate this kind of humor.

This one is another novel that's a bit of a throwback in a way, although not as much as Sourcery was, but has more of a message behind the story as well. It's not quite as good as Mort, but it's still a lot of fun. I had to split my ratings even finer to create some nuance between books like these.

3 and a five-eighths (3.625) great pyramids out of 4.

Some fun quotes:

Broadly, therefore, the three even now lurching across the deserted planks of the Brass Bridge were dead drunk assassins and the men behind them were bent on inserting the significant comma.

"His name is in the cartouche below", said Dios primly. "What?" "The small oval, sire." Said Dios. Teppic peered closely at the dense hieroglyphics. "Thin eagle, eye, wiggly line, man with a stick, bird sitting down, wiggly line", he read. Dios winced.

He was wrong. Nature abhors dimensional abnormalities, and seals them neatly away so they don't upset people. Nature, in fact, abhors a lot of things, including vacuums, ships called the Marie Celeste, and the chuck keys from electric drills.

Morella is a Gen Xer who likes strange things a bit too much.

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