What did Bill mean, tomb robbers had let a curse loose?
The news left Will and Aisha shaken.
Egyptian curses were notorious, especially the curses of the pharaohs. Will had read about them in Secrets of the Curse: The Life of a Curse-Breaker.
Some were horrifying. The curses on certain pyramids could trap tomb robbers between life and death for years, even decades. Unable to leave, they would suffer through their bodies rotting every day, only to come back to life the next morning.
Only when a professional Curse-Breaker lifted the curse could they be freed.
The most terrifying large-scale curses could have far-reaching effects. With the aid of elaborate rituals, they could affect a city or even an entire country. The best-known example was the Ten Plagues of Egypt: water turning to blood, frogs, lice, flies, diseased livestock, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, and the death of the firstborn.
Of course, the power of the men who arranged those rituals mattered too. Moses and Aaron had been among the finest wizards of their time.
All of this showed how terrifying curses could be. They had always been a strange and dangerous form of magic.
And now Bill, a Curse-Breaker for Gringotts, was telling Will that someone had released a curse from the tomb of Ramesses II?
Just who was Ramesses II?
He had been a wizard at the very pinnacle of his age in the thirteenth century BC, a man who truly stood at the top of the pyramid.
If that did not put it in perspective, consider Merlin. Nearly eighteen hundred years separated Merlin's era from Ramesses's. Even in Merlin's time, Ramesses II had been a figure of legend.
Ramesses II was one of Egypt's most famous pharaohs, the third pharaoh of Ancient Egypt's Nineteenth Dynasty. An outstanding statesman,