The Serpents Shadow

  “Good luck, then.” Carter swallowed. “I hope…”

  He faltered. I realized the poor boy was trying to say good-bye to his girlfriend, possibly for the last time, and he couldn’t even kiss her without kissing the sun god.

  Carter began to change shape. His clothes, his pack, even the crook and flail melted into plumage. His form shrank until he was a brown-and-white falcon. Then he spread his wings and dove off the side of the boat.

  “Oh, I hate this part,” I muttered.

  I called on Isis and invited her in: Now. It’s time to act as one.

  Immediately her magic flowed into me. It felt as if someone had switched on enough hydroelectric generators to light up a nation and channeled all that power straight into me. I turned into a kite (the bird) and soared into the air.

  For once, I had no problem turning back to human. Carter and I rendezvoused at the feet of the Great Sphinx and studied the newly blasted tunnel entrance. The rebels hadn’t been too subtle. Stone blocks the size of cars had been reduced to rubble. The surrounding sand had blackened and melted to glass. Either Sarah Jacobi’s crew had used a ha-di spell or several sticks of dynamite.

  “This tunnel…” I said. “Doesn’t the other end open just across from the Hall of Ages?”

  Carter nodded grimly. He pulled out the crook and flail, which were now glowing with ghostly white fire. He plunged into the darkness. I summoned my staff and wand and followed him inside.

  As we descended, we saw evidence of battle. Explosions had scorched the walls and steps. One portion of the ceiling had buckled. Carter was able to clear a path with the strength of Horus, but as soon as we were through, the tunnel collapsed behind us. We wouldn’t be exiting that way.

  Below us, I heard the sounds of combat—divine words being cast; fire, water, and earth magic clashing. A lion roared. Metal clanged on metal.

  A few meters farther, and we found the first casualty. A young man in a tattered gray military uniform was propped against the wall, holding his stomach and wheezing painfully.

  “Leonid!” I cried.

  My Russian friend was pale and bloody. I put my hand on his forehead. His skin was cold.

  “Below,” he gasped. “Too many. I try—”

  “Stay here,” I said, which I realized was silly, since he could hardly move. “We’ll be back with help.”

  He nodded bravely, but I looked at Carter and knew we were thinking the same thing. Leonid might not last that long. His uniform coat was soaked with blood. He kept his hand over his gut, but he’d clearly been savaged—either by claws or knives or some equally horrible magic.

  I cast a Slow spell on Leonid, which would at least steady his breathing and stem the flow of blood, but it wouldn’t help much. The poor boy had risked his life to escape St. Petersburg. He’d come all the way to Brooklyn to warn me about the impending attack. Now he’d tried to defend the First Nome against his former masters, and they’d cut him down and walked right over him, leaving him to suffer a lingering death.

  “We will be back,” I promised again.

  Carter and I stumbled on.

  We reached the bottom of the steps and were instantly thrown into battle. A shabti lion leaped at my face.

  Isis reacted faster than I could have. She gave me a single word to speak: “Fah!”

  And the hieroglyph for Release shimmered in the air:

  The lion shrank to a wax statuette and bounced harmlessly off my chest.

  All around us, the corridor was in mayhem. In either direction our initiates were locked in combat with enemy magicians. Directly in front of us, a dozen rebels had formed a wedge blocking the doors to the Hall of Ages, and our friends seemed to be trying to get past them.

  For a moment, that seemed backward to me. Shouldn’t our side be defending the doors? Then I realized what must have happened. The attack on the sealed tunnel had surprised our allies. They’d rushed to help Amos, but by the time they’d got to the doors, the enemies were already inside. Now this lot was keeping our reinforcements from reaching Amos, while our uncle was inside the hall, possibly alone, facing Sarah Jacobi and her elite hit squad.

  My pulse raced. I charged into battle, flinging spells from Isis’s incredibly diverse menu. It felt good to be a goddess again, I must admit, but I had to keep careful track of my energy. If I let Isis have free reign, she would destroy our enemies in seconds, but she would also burn me up in the process. I had to temper her inclination to rend the puny mortals to pieces.

  I threw my wand like a boomerang and hit a large, bearded magician who was yelling in Russian as he fought sword-to-sword against Julian.

  The Russian disappeared in a golden flash. Where he’d been standing, a hamster squeaked in alarm and scurried away. Julian grinned at me. His sword blade was smoking and the turn-ups of his trousers were on fire, but otherwise he looked all right.

  “About time!” he said.

  Another magician charged him, and we had no further time to chat.

  Carter waded forward, swinging his flail and crook as if he had trained with them all his life. An enemy magician summoned a rhino—which I thought quite rude, considering the tight space we were in. Carter lashed it with his flail, and each spiked chain became a rope of fire. The rhino crumbled, cut into three pieces, and melted into a pile of wax.

  Our other friends weren’t doing too badly, either. Felix used an ice spell that I’d never seen before—encasing his enemies in big fluffy snowmen, complete with carrot noses and pipes. His army of penguins waddled around him, pecking at enemy magicians and stealing their wands.

  Alyssa was fighting with another earth elementalist, but this Russian woman was clearly outmatched. She’d probably never faced the power of Geb before. Each time the Russian summoned a stone creature or tried to throw boulders, her attacks dissolved into rubble. Alyssa snapped her fingers, and the floor turned to quicksand under her opponent’s feet. The Russian sank up to her shoulders, quite stuck.

  At the north end of the corridor, Jaz crouched next to Cleo, tending her arm, which had been turned into a sunflower. Cleo had got off better than her opponent, though. At her feet lay a human-sized volume of the novel David Copperfield, which I had a feeling had once been an enemy magician.

  (Carter tells me David Copperfield is a magician. He finds this funny for some reason. Just ignore him. I do.)

  Even our ankle-biters had got into the act. Young Shelby had scattered her crayons down the hallway to trip the enemy. Now she was wielding her wand like a tennis racket, running between the legs of adult magicians, swatting them on the bottom and yelling, “Die, die, die!”

  Aren’t children adorable?

  She swatted a large metal warrior, a shabti no doubt, and he transformed into a rainbow-colored potbellied pig. If we lived through the day, I had a bad feeling Shelby would want to keep it.

  Some of the First Nome residents were helping us, but depressingly few. A handful of tottering old magicians and desperate merchants threw talismans and deflected spells.

  Slowly but surely, we waded toward the doors, where the main wedge of enemies seemed to be focused on a single attacker.

  When I realized who it was, I was tempted to turn myself into a hamster and scamper away, squeaking.

  Walt had arrived. He ripped through the enemy line with his bare hands—throwing one rebel magician down the hallway with inhuman strength, touching another and instantly encasing the man in mummy linen. He grabbed the staff of a third rebel, and it crumbled to dust. Finally he swept his hand toward the remaining enemies, and they shrank to the size of dolls. Canopic jars—the sort used to bury a mummy’s internal organs—sprang up around each of the tiny magicians, sealing them in with lids shaped like animal heads. The poor magicians yelled desperately, banging on the clay containers and wobbling about like a line of very unhappy bowling pins.

  Walt turned to our friends. “Is everyone all right?”

  He looked like normal old Walt—tall and muscular with a confiden
t face, soft brown eyes, and strong hands. But his clothes had changed. He wore jeans, a dark Dead Weather T-shirt, and a black leather jacket—Anubis’s outfit, sized up to fit Walt’s physique. All I had to do was lower my vision into the Duat, just a bit, and I saw Anubis standing there in all his usual annoying gorgeousness. Both of them—occupying the same space.

  “Get ready,” Walt told our troops. “They’ve sealed the doors, but I can—”

  Then he noticed me, and his voice faltered.

  “Sadie,” he said. “I—”

  “Something about opening the doors?” I demanded.

  He nodded mutely.

  “Amos is in there?” I asked. “Fighting Kwai and Jacobi and who knows what else?”

  He nodded again.

  “Then stop staring at me and open the doors, you annoying boy!”

  I was talking to both of them. It felt quite natural. And it felt good to let my anger out. I’d deal with those two—that one—whatever he was—later. Right now, my uncle needed me.

  Walt/Anubis had the nerve to smile.

  He put his hand on the doors. Gray ash spread across the surface. The bronze crumbled to dust.

  “After you,” he told me, and we charged into the Hall of Ages.

  S A D I E

  18. Death Boy to the Rescue

  THE GOOD NEWS: Amos wasn’t entirely alone.

  The bad news: his backup was the god of evil.

  As we poured into the Hall of Ages, our rescue attempt sputtered to a stop. We hadn’t expected to see a deadly aerial ballet with lightning and knives. The normal floating hieroglyphs that filled the room were gone. The holographic curtains on either side of the hall flickered weakly. Some had collapsed altogether.

  As I’d suspected, an assault team of enemy magicians had locked themselves in here with Amos, but it looked like they were regretting their choice.

  Hovering midair in the center of the hall, Amos was cloaked in the strangest avatar I’d ever seen. A vaguely human form swirled around him—part sandstorm, part fire, rather like the giant Apophis we’d seen upstairs, except a lot happier. The giant red warrior laughed as he fought, spinning a ten-meter black iron staff with careless force. Suspended in his chest, Amos copied the giant’s moves, his face beaded with sweat. I couldn’t tell if Amos was directing Set or trying to restrain him. Possibly both.

  Enemy magicians flew circles around him. Kwai was easy to spot, with his bald head and blue robes, darting through the air like one of those martial arts monks who could defy gravity. He shot bolts of red lightning at the Set avatar, but they didn’t seem to have much effect.

  With her spiky black hair and flowing white robes, Sarah Jacobi looked like the Schizophrenic Witch of the West, especially as she was surfing about on a storm cloud like a flying carpet. She held two black knives like barbershop razors, which she threw over and over in a horrific juggling act, launching them into the Set avatar, then catching them as they returned to her hands. I’d seen knives like that before—netjeri blades, made from meteoric iron. They were mostly used in funeral ceremonies, but they seemed to work quite well as weapons. With every strike, they disrupted the avatar’s sandy flesh a little more, slowly wearing it down. As I watched her throw her knives, anger clenched inside me like a fist. Some instinct told me that Jacobi had stuck my Russian friend Leonid with those knives before leaving him to die.

  The other rebels weren’t quite as successful with their attacks, but they were certainly persistent. Some blasted Set with gusts of wind or water. Others launched shabti creatures, like giant scorpions and griffins. One fat bloke was pelting Amos with bits of cheese. Honestly, I’m not sure I would have chosen a Cheese Master for my elite hit squad, but perhaps Sarah Jacobi got peckish during her battles.

  Set seemed to be enjoying himself. The giant red warrior slammed his iron staff into Kwai’s chest and sent him spiraling through the air. He kicked another magician into the holographic curtains of the Roman Age, and the poor man collapsed with smoke coming out his ears, his mind probably overloaded with visions of toga parties.

  Set thrust his free hand toward the Cheese Master. The fat magician was swallowed in a sandstorm and began to scream, but just as quickly, Set retracted his hand. The storm died. The magician dropped to the floor like a rag doll, unconscious but still alive.

  “Bah!” the red warrior bellowed. “Come on, Amos, let me have some fun. I only wanted to strip the flesh from his bones!”

  Amos’s face was tight with concentration. Clearly he was doing his best to control the god, but Set had many other enemies to play with.

  “Pull!” The red god shot lightning at a stone sphinx and blasted it to dust. He laughed insanely and swatted his staff at Sarah Jacobi. “This is fun, little magicians! Don’t you have any more tricks?”

  I’m not sure how long we stood in the doorway, watching the battle. Probably not more than a few seconds, but it seemed like an eternity.

  Finally Jaz choked back a sob. “Amos…he’s possessed again.”

  “No,” I insisted. “No, this is different! He’s in control.”

  Our initiates gazed at me with disbelief. I understood their panic. I remembered better than anyone how Set had nearly broken my uncle’s sanity. It was hard to comprehend that Amos would ever willingly channel the red god’s power. Yet he was doing the impossible. He was winning.

  Still, even the Chief Lector couldn’t channel that much power for long.

  “Look at him!” I pleaded. “We have to help him! Amos isn’t possessed. He’s controlling Set!”

  Walt frowned. “Sadie, that—that’s impossible. Set can’t be controlled.”

  Carter raised his crook and flail. “Obviously he can be, because Amos is doing it. Now, are we going to war, or what?”

  We charged forward, but we’d hesitated too long. Sarah Jacobi had noticed our presence. She yelled down at her followers: “Now!”

  She may have been evil, but she was not a fool. Their assault on Amos thus far had simply been to distract him and weaken him. On her cue, the real attack began. Kwai blasted lightning at Amos’s face just as the other magicians drew out magic ropes and threw them at the Set avatar.

  The red warrior staggered as the ropes tightened all at once, lashing around his legs and arms. Sarah Jacobi sheathed her knives and produced a long black lariat. Sailing her storm cloud above the avatar, she deftly lassoed his head and pulled the noose tight.

  Set roared with outrage, but the avatar began to shrink. Before we could even close the distance, Amos was kneeling on the floor of the Hall of Ages, surrounded by only the thinnest of glowing red shields. Magical ropes now bound him tight. Sarah Jacobi stood behind him, holding the black lasso like a leash. One of her netjeri blades was pressed against Amos’s neck.

  “Stop!” she commanded us. “This ends now.”

  My friends hesitated. The rebel magicians turned and faced us warily.

  Isis spoke in my mind: Regrettable, but we must let him die. He hosts Set, our old enemy.

  That’s my uncle! I replied.

  He has been corrupted, Isis said. He is already gone.

  “No!” I yelled. Our connection wavered. You can’t share the mind of a god and have a disagreement. To be the Eye, you must act in perfect unison.

  Carter seemed to be having similar trouble with Horus. He summoned the hawk warrior avatar, but almost immediately it dissipated and dropped Carter to the floor.

  “Come on, Horus!” he growled. “We have to help.”

  Sarah Jacobi’s laugh sounded like metal scraped through sand.

  “Do you see?” She pulled tight on the noose around Amos’s neck. “This is what comes from the path of the gods! Confusion. Chaos. Set himself in the Hall of Ages! Even you misguided fools cannot deny this is wrong!”

  Amos clawed at his throat. He growled in outrage, but it was Set’s voice that spoke. “I try to do something nice, and this is my thanks? You should have let me kill them, Amos!”

  I stepped
forward, careful to make no sudden movements. “Jacobi, you don’t understand. Amos is channeling Set’s power, but he’s in control. He could have killed you, but he didn’t. Set was a lieutenant of Ra. He’s a useful ally, properly managed.”

  Set snorted. “Useful, yes! I don’t know about the properly managed business. Let me go, puny magicians, so I can crush you!”

  I glared at my uncle. “Set! Not helping!”

  Amos’s expression changed from anger to concern. “Sadie!” he said with his own voice. “Go: fight Apophis. Leave me here!”

  “No,” I said. “You’re the Chief Lector. We’ll fight for the House of Life.”

  I didn’t look behind me, but I hoped that my friends would agree. Otherwise my last stand would be very, very short.

  Jacobi sneered. “Your uncle is a servant of Set! You and your brother are sentenced to death. The rest of you, lay down your weapons. As your new Chief Lector, I will give you amnesty. Then we will battle Apophis together.”

  “You’re in league with Apophis!” I yelled.

  Jacobi’s face turned stony cold. “Treason.”

  She thrust out her staff. “Ha-di.”

  I raised my wand, but Isis wasn’t helping me this time. I was just Sadie Kane, and my defenses were slow. The explosion ripped through my weak shields and threw me backward into a curtain of light. Images from the Age of the Gods crackled around me—the founding of the world, the crowning of Osiris, the battle between Set and Horus—like having sixty different movies downloaded into my brain while being electrocuted. The light shattered, and I lay on the floor, dazed and drained.

  “Sadie!” Carter charged toward me, but Kwai blasted him with a bolt of red lightning. Carter fell to his knees. I didn’t even have the strength to cry out.

  Jaz ran toward him. Little Shelby yelled, “Stop it! Stop it!” Our other initiates seemed stunned, unable to move.

  “Give up,” Jacobi said. I realized she was speaking with words of power, just like the ghost Setne had done. She was using magic to paralyze my friends. “The Kanes have brought you nothing but trouble. It’s time this ended.”