Pyramids

Pyramids (Discworld, 7) Terry Pratchett. HarperCollins (ISBN: 9780063393332) 2025, first published 1989.

Summary: Prince Teppic, having completed Assassins training, returns to be Pharoah of Djelibeybi, ordering the building of a huge pyramid.

Rather than cool his heels in Djelibeybi (pronounced like Jelly Baby), Prince Teppic goes to Ankh-Morpork to enroll in assassins training in the Assassins Guild. It’s a seven-year course few survived but if he did, he could bring a lucrative income into an impoverished kingdom that spent all its money on pyramids to house it’s dead kings. It was a practice that had drained the kingdom of money and, as readers will learn, of other things as well. Once it was a great kingdom. But now it is a narrow buffer along a river valley, serving as a buffer between two rival nations.

Just as he survives and passes his final exam, Teppic senses his father, the Pharoah had died. Indeed that is the case. On returning, Teppic suddenly finds himself a Pharoah and a god, responsible for the sunrise each day. New to all this, he is advised by the venerable high priest, Dios. However, he soon discovers that Dios really runs the show, when Dios twists all his novel ideas into the established traditions.

Nowhere is this more true than in the burial of his father. He has to be entombed in a pyramid. Teppic happens to know this is not what his father would have wanted (as the old king’s spirit tries to make known). In frustration, Teppic finally orders them to build the biggest pyramid ever, double the usual size.

Little does he realize the forces he has unleashed. Pyramids are objects of power. The others flared every night. No one has ever tried to build one this big. When Ptaclusp and his sons, the pyramid builders try to do this, they discover that workers and money and materials are the least of their problems as strange forces build up to a cataclysm.

But before that happens, Teppic, Ptraci, the old king’s handmaiden, and a camel with hidden powers, escape. Looking back, they see the kingdom vanish into a mere crack in the ground. Suddenly, nothing stands between the rival kingdoms which prepare to go to war.

Meanwhile, Djelibeybi still exists, just in another dimension. But all kind of craziness has ensued, beyond even Dios’ powers, which in fact are considerable. The dead kings walk the realm, as do the gods whose existence they usually ignored and disbelieved.

Will Teppic act to save his kingdom? Or will he take the opportunity to ride off with the pretty and scantily clad handmaiden into the sunset? I’ll leave it to you to find out.

Once again, this is a Terry Pratchett romp between fantasy and satire, showing religion at its silliest while making us ask, what would happen if the gods really showed up? And all those pyramids? Pratchett leaves us to wonder if the real Pharaohs would equally have hated the idea. And perhaps it all was just a poke at the silliness of “pyramid power”!