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Sadie was staring at me too.
“All right,” I said. “What did the bird guy say? You understood it?”
She nodded uneasily. “He mistook you for someone else. He must have bad eyesight. ”
“Because?”
“Because he said, ‘Go forth, good king. ’”
I was in a daze after that. We passed through the tunnel and entered a vast underground city of halls and chambers, but I only remember bits and pieces of it.
The ceilings soared to twenty or thirty feet, so it didn’t feel like we were underground. Every chamber was lined with massive stone columns like the ones I’d seen in Egyptian ruins, but these were in perfect condition, brightly painted to resemble palm trees, with carved green fronds at the top, so I felt like I was walking through a petrified forest. Fires burned in copper braziers. They didn’t seem to make any smoke, but the air smelled good, like a marketplace for spices—cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, and others I couldn’t identify. The city smelled like Zia. I realized that this was her home.
We saw a few other people—mostly older men and women. Some wore linen robes, some modern clothes. One guy in a business suit walked past with a black leopard on a leash, as if that were completely normal. Another guy barked orders to a small army of brooms, mops, and buckets that were scuttling around, cleaning up the city.
“Like that cartoon,” Sadie said. “Where Mickey Mouse tries to do magic and the brooms keep splitting and toting water. ”
“‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,’” Zia said. “You do know that was based on an Egyptian story, don’t you?”
Sadie just stared back. I knew how she felt. It was too much to process.
We walked through a hall of jackal-headed statues, and I could swear their eyes watched us as we passed. A few minutes later, Zia led us through an open-air market—if you can call anything “open-air” underground—with dozens of stalls selling weird items like boomerang wands, animated clay dolls, parrots, cobras, papyrus scrolls, and hundreds of different glittering amulets.
Next we crossed a path of stones over a dark river teeming with fish. I thought they were perch until I saw their vicious teeth.
“Are those piranhas?” I asked.
“Tiger fish from the Nile,” Zia said. “Like piranhas, except these can weigh up to sixteen pounds. ”
I watched my step more closely after that.
We turned a corner and passed an ornate building carved out of black rock. Seated pharaohs were chiseled into the walls, and the doorway was shaped like a coiled serpent.
“What’s in there?” Sadie asked.
We peeked inside and saw rows of children—maybe two dozen in all, about six to ten years old or so—sitting cross-legged on cushions. They were hunched over brass bowls, peering intently into some sort of liquid and speaking under their breath. At first I thought it was a classroom, but there was no sign of a teacher, and the chamber was lit only by a few candles. Judging by the number of empty seats, the room was meant to hold twice as many kids.
“Our initiates,” Zia said, “learning to scry. The First Nome must keep in contact with our brethren all over the world. We use our youngest as. . . operators, I suppose you would say. ”
“So you’ve got bases like this all over the world?”
“Most are much smaller, but yes. ”
I remembered what Amos had told us about the nomes. “Egypt is the First Nome. New York is the Twenty-first. What’s the last one, the Three-hundred-and-sixtieth?”
“That would be Antarctica,” Zia said. “A punishment assignment. Nothing there but a couple of cold magicians and some magic penguins. ”
“Magic penguins?”
“Don’t ask. ”
Sadie pointed to the children inside. “How does it work? They see images in the water?”
“It’s oil,” Zia said. “But yes. ”
“So few,” Sadie said. “Are these the only initiates in the whole city?”
“In the whole world,” Zia corrected. “There were more before—” She stopped herself.
“Before what?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Zia said darkly. “Initiates do our scrying because young minds are most receptive. Magicians begin training no later than the age of ten. . . with a few dangerous exceptions. ”
“You mean us,” I said.
She glanced at me apprehensively, and I knew she was still thinking about what the bird spirit had called me: a good king. It seemed so unreal, like our family name in that Blood of the Pharaohs scroll. How could I be related to some ancient kings? And even if I was, I certainly wasn’t a king. I had no kingdom. I didn’t even have my single suitcase anymore.
“They’ll be waiting for you,” Zia said. “Come along. ”
We walked so far, my feet began to ache.
Finally we arrived at a crossroads. On the right was a massive set of bronze doors with fires blazing on either side; on the left, a twenty-foot-tall sphinx carved into the wall. A doorway nestled between its paws, but it was bricked in and covered in cobwebs.
“That looks like the Sphinx at Giza,” I said.
“That’s because we are directly under the real Sphinx,” Zia said. “That tunnel leads straight up to it. Or it used to, before it was sealed. ”
“But. . . ” I did some quick calculations in my head. “The Sphinx is, like, twenty miles from the Cairo Airport. ”
“Roughly. ”
“No way we’ve walked that far. ”
Zia actually smiled, and I couldn’t help noticing how pretty her eyes were. “Distance changes in magic places, Carter. Surely you’ve learned that by now. ”
Sadie cleared her throat. “So why is the tunnel closed, then?”
“The Sphinx was too popular with archaeologists,” Zia said. “They kept digging around. Finally, in the 1980s, they discovered the first part of the tunnel under the Sphinx. ”
“Dad told me about that!” I said. “But he said the tunnel was a dead end. ”
“It was when we got through with it. We couldn’t let the archaeologists know how much they’re missing. Egypt’s leading archaeologist recently speculated that they’ve only discovered thirty percent of the ancient ruins in Egypt. In truth, they’ve only discovered one tenth, and not even the interesting tenth. ”
“What about King Tut’s tomb?” I protested.
“That boy king?” Zia rolled her eyes. “Boring. You should see some of the good tombs. ”
I felt a little hurt. Dad had named me after Howard Carter, the guy who discovered King Tut’s tomb, so I’d always felt a personal attachment to it. If that wasn’t a “good” tomb, I wondered what was.
Zia turned to face the bronze doors.
“This is the Hall of Ages. ” She placed her palm against the seal, which bore the symbol of the House of Life.
The hieroglyphs began to glow, and the doors swung open.
Zia turned to us, her expression deadly serious. “You are about to meet the Chief Lector. Behave yourselves, unless you wish to be turned into insects. ”
Chapter 14. A French Guy Almost Kills Us
THE LAST COUPLE OF DAYS I’d seen a lot of crazy things, but the Hall of Ages took the prize.
Double rows of stone pillars held up a ceiling so high, you could’ve parked a blimp under it with no trouble. A shimmering blue carpet that looked like water ran down the center of the hall, which was so long, I couldn’t see the end even though it was brightly lit. Balls of fire floated around like helium basketballs, changing color whenever they bumped into one another. Millions of tiny hieroglyphic symbols also drifted through the air, randomly combining into words and then breaking apart.
I grabbed a pair of glowing red legs.
They walked across my palm before jumping off and dissolving.
But the weirdest things were the displays.
I don’t know what else to call them. Between the columns on either side of us, images shifted, coming into focus and then blurring out again like holograms in a sandstorm.
“Come on,” Zia told us. “And don’t spend too much time looking. ”
It was impossible not to. The first twenty feet or so, the magical scenes cast a golden light across the hall. A blazing sun rose above an ocean. A mountain emerged from the water, and I had the feeling I was watching the beginning of the world. Giants strode across the Nile Valley: a man with black skin and the head of a jackal, a lioness with bloody fangs, a beautiful woman with wings of light.
Sadie stepped off the rug. In a trance, she reached toward the images.
“Stay on the carpet!” Zia grabbed Sadie’s hand and pulled her back toward the center of the hall. “You are seeing the Age of the Gods. No mortal should dwell on these images. ”
“But. . . ” Sadie blinked. “They’re only pictures, aren’t they?”
“Memories,” Zia said, “so powerful they could destroy your mind. ”
“Oh,” Sadie said in a small voice.
We kept walking. The images changed to silver. I saw armies clashing—Egyptians in kilts and sandals and leather armor, fighting with spears. A tall, dark-skinned man in red-and-white armor placed a double crown on his head: Narmer, the king who united Upper and Lower Egypt. Sadie was right: he did look a bit like Dad.
“This is the Old Kingdom,” I guessed. “The first great age of Egypt. ”
Zia nodded. As we walked down the hall, we saw workers building the first step pyramid out of stone. Another few steps, and the biggest pyramid of all rose from the desert at Giza. Its outer layer of smooth white casing stones gleamed in the sun. Ten thousand workers gathered at its base and knelt before the pharaoh, who raised his hands to the sun, dedicating his own tomb.
“Khufu,” I said.
“The baboon?” Sadie asked, suddenly interested.
“No, the pharaoh who built the Great Pyramid,” I said. “It was the tallest structure in the world for almost four thousand years. ”
Another few steps, and the images turned from silver to coppery.
“The Middle Kingdom,” Zia announced. “A bloody, chaotic time. And yet this is when the House of Life came to maturity. ”
The scenes shifted more rapidly. We watched armies fighting, temples being built, ships sailing on the Nile, and magicians throwing fire. Every step covered hundreds of years, and yet the hall still went on forever. For the first time I understood just how ancient Egypt was.
We crossed another threshold, and the light turned bronze.
“The New Kingdom,” I guessed. “The last time Egypt was ruled by Egyptians. ”
Zia said nothing, but I watched scenes passing that my dad had described to me: Hatshepsut, the greatest female pharaoh, putting on a fake beard and ruling Egypt as a man; Ramesses the Great leading his chariots into battle.
I saw magicians dueling in a palace. A man in tattered robes, with a shaggy black beard and wild eyes, threw down his staff, which turned into a serpent and devoured a dozen other snakes.
I got a lump in my throat. “Is that—”
“Musa,” Zia said. “Or Moshe, as his own people knew him. You call him Moses. The only foreigner ever to defeat the House in a magic duel. ”