The Throne of Fire

  “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “—without putting some protective spells around her. Set and Apophis apparently both want you to find this place, which means it cannot be good for you. You’re leaving your sister and Walt on their own. On top of all that, we’re traipsing through Desjardins’ backyard, and after that stunt in St. Petersburg, Menshikov won’t rest until he finds you. So, yeah, I’d say this isn’t your brightest idea.”

  I stared out the windshield. I wanted to be mad at Bes for calling me stupid, but I was afraid he might be right. I’d been hoping for a happy reunion with Zia. The chances were I’d never make it through tonight alive.

  “Maybe Menshikov is still recovering from his head injuries,” I said hopefully.

  Bes laughed. “Take it from me, kid. Menshikov is already after you. He never forgets an insult.”

  His voice smoldered with anger, like it did in St. Petersburg when he’d told us about the dwarf wedding. I wondered what had really happened to Bes in that palace, and why he was still brooding over it three hundred years later.

  “Was it Vlad?” I asked. “Was he the one who captured you?”

  It didn’t seem so far-fetched. I’d met several magicians who were centuries old. But Bes shook his head.

  “His grandfather, Prince Alexander Menshikov.” Bes said the name like it was a major insult. “He was secretly the head of the Eighteenth Nome. Powerful. Cruel. A lot like his grandson. I’d never dealt with a magician like that. It was the first time I’d been captured.”

  “But didn’t the magicians lock all you gods in the Duat after Egypt fell?”

  “Most of us,” Bes agreed. “Some slept the entire two millennia until your dad unleashed us. Others broke out from time to time and the House of Life would track them down and put them back. Sekhmet broke out in 1918. Big influenza epidemic. But a few of the gods like me stayed in the mortal world the entire time. Back in the ancient days, I was just, you know, a friendly guy. I scared away spirits. The commoners liked me. So when Egypt fell, the Romans adopted me as one of their gods. Then, in the Middle Ages, the Christians modeled gargoyles after me, to protect their cathedrals and whatnot. They made up legends about gnomes, dwarves, helpful leprechauns—all based on me.”

  “Helpful leprechauns?”

  He scowled. “You don’t think I’m helpful? I look good in green tights.”

  “I didn’t need that image.”

  Bes huffed. “Anyway, the House of Life was never serious about tracking me down. I just kept a low profile and stayed out of trouble. I was never captured until Russia. Probably still be a prisoner there if it wasn’t for—” He stopped himself, as if realizing he’d said too much.

  He turned off the road. The truck rattled over hard-packed sand and rocks, heading for the river.

  “Someone helped you escape?” I guessed. “Bast?”

  The dwarf’s neck turned bright red. “No…not Bast. She was stuck in the abyss fighting Apophis.”

  “Then—”

  “The point is, I got free, and I got my revenge. I managed to get Alexander Menshikov convicted on corruption charges. He was disgraced, stripped of his wealth and titles. His whole family was shipped off to Siberia. Best day of my life. Unfortunately, his grandson Vladimir made a comeback. Eventually he moved back to St. Petersburg, rebuilt his grandfather’s fortune, and took over the Eighteenth Nome. If Vlad had the chance to capture me…”

  Bes shifted in the driver’s seat like the springs were getting uncomfortable. “I guess why I’m telling you this…You’re okay, kid. The way you stood up for your sister on Waterloo Bridge, ready to take me on—that took guts. And trying to ride a tjesu heru? That was plenty brave. Stupid, but brave.”

  “Um, thanks.”

  “You remind me of myself,” Bes continued, “back when I was a young dwarf. You got a stubborn streak. When it comes to girl problems, you’re clueless.”

  “Girl problems?” I thought nobody could embarrass me as much as Sadie did when she learned my secret name, but Bes was doing a pretty good job. “This isn’t just a girl problem.”

  Bes regarded me like I was a poor lost puppy. “You want to save Zia. I get that. You want her to like you. But when you rescue somebody…it complicates things. Don’t get starry-eyed about somebody you can’t have, especially if it blinds you to somebody who’s really important. Don’t…don’t make my mistakes.”

  I heard the pain in his voice. I knew he was trying to help, but it still felt weird getting guy advice from a four-foot-tall god in an ugly hat.

  “The person who rescued you,” I said. “It was a goddess, wasn’t it? Someone besides Bast—somebody you were involved with?”

  His knuckles turned white on the steering wheel. “Kid.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m glad we had this talk. Now, if you value your teeth—”

  “I’ll shut up.”

  “That’s good.” Bes put his foot on the brake. “Because I think we’re here.”

  The sun was going down at our backs. Everything in front of us was bathed in red light—the sand, the water of the Nile, the hills on the horizon. Even the fronds of the palm trees looked like they were tinged with blood.

  Set would love this place, I thought.

  There was no sign of civilization—just a few gray herons flying overhead and an occasional splash in the river: maybe fish or a crocodile. I imagined this part of the Nile hadn’t looked too different in the time of the pharaohs.

  “Come on,” Bes said. “Bring your stuff.”

  Bes didn’t wait for me. When I caught up to him, he was standing on the riverbank, sifting sand through his fingers.

  “It’s not just the light,” I realized. “That stuff is really red.”

  Bes nodded. “You know why?”

  My mom would have said iron oxide or something like that. She’d had a scientific explanation for everything. But something told me Bes wasn’t looking for that kind of answer.

  “Red is the color of evil,” I said. “The desert. Chaos. Destruction.”

  Bes dusted off his hands. “This was a bad place to build a village.”

  I looked around for any sign of a settlement. The red sand stretched in either direction for about a hundred yards. Thick grass and willow trees bordered the area, but the sand itself was completely barren. The way it glittered and shifted under my feet reminded me of the mounds of dried scarab shells in the Duat, holding back Apophis. I really wished I hadn’t thought of that.

  “There’s nothing here,” I said. “No ruins. Nothing.”

  “Look again.” Bes pointed to the river. Old dead reeds stuck up here and there over an area the size of a soccer field. Then I realized the reeds weren’t reeds—they were decaying boards and wooden poles, the remains of simple dwellings. I walked to the edge of the water. A few feet out, it was calm and shallow enough that I could make out a line of submerged mud bricks: the foundation of a wall slowly dissolving into silt.

  “The whole village sank?”

  “It was swallowed,” Bes said. “The Nile is trying to wash away the evil that happened here.”

  I shivered. The fang wounds on my shoulder started throbbing again. “If it’s such an evil place, why would Iskandar hide Zia here?”

  “Good question,” Bes said. “You want to find the answer, you’ll have to wade out there.”

  Part of me wanted to run back to the truck. The last time I’d waded into a river—the Rio Grande in El Paso—it hadn’t gone so well. We’d battled the crocodile god Sobek and barely gotten away with our lives. This was the Nile. Gods and monsters would be much stronger here.

  “You’re coming too, aren’t you?” I asked Bes.

  The corner of his eye twitched. “Running water’s not good for gods. Loosens our connection to the Duat…”

  He must have seen the look of desperation on my face.

  “Yeah, okay,” he sighed. “I’m right behind you.”

  Before I could chicken out, I p
ut one boot in the river and sank up to my ankle.

  “Gross.” I waded out, my feet making sounds like a cow chewing gum.

  A little too late, I realized how poorly prepared I was. I didn’t have my sword, because I’d lost it in St. Petersburg. I hadn’t been able to summon it back. For all I knew, the Russian magicians had melted it down. I still had my wand, but that was mostly for defensive spells. If I had to go on the offense, I’d be at a serious disadvantage.

  I pulled an old stick out of the mud and used it to poke around. Bes and I trudged through the shallows, trying to find anything useful. We kicked over some bricks, discovered a few intact sections of walls, and brought up some pottery shards. I thought about the story Zia had told me—how her dad caused the destruction of the village by unearthing a demon trapped in a jar. For all I knew, these were shards of that same jar.

  Nothing attacked us except mosquitoes. We didn’t find any traps. But every splash in the river made me think of crocodiles (and not the nice albino kind like Philip back in Brooklyn) or the big toothy tiger fish Zia had shown me once in the First Nome. I imagined them swimming around my feet, trying to decide which leg looked the tastiest.

  Out of the corner of my eye I kept seeing ripples and tiny whirlpools like something was following me. When I stabbed the water with my stick, there was nothing there.

  After an hour of searching, the sun had almost set. We were supposed to make it back to Alexandria to meet up with Sadie by morning, which left us almost no time to find Zia. And twenty-four hours from now, the next time the sun went down, the equinox would begin.

  We kept looking, but didn’t find anything more interesting than a muddy deflated soccer ball and a set of dentures. [Yes, Sadie, they were even more disgusting than Gramps’s.] I stopped to swat the mosquitoes off my neck. Bes snatched something out of the water—a wriggly fish or a frog—and stuck it in his mouth.

  “Do you have to?” I asked.

  “What?” he said, still chewing. “It’s dinnertime.”

  I turned in disgust and poked my stick in the water.

  Thunk.

  I struck something harder than mud brick or wood. This was stone.

  I traced my stick along the bottom. It wasn’t a rock. It was a flat row of hewn blocks. The edge dropped off to another row of stones about a foot lower: like stairs, leading down.

  “Bes,” I called.

  He waded over. The water came up almost to his armpits. His form shimmered in the current like he might disappear any minute.

  I showed him what I’d found.

  “Huh.” He dunked his head underwater. When he came back up, his beard was covered in muck and weeds. “Stairs, all right. Reminds me of the entrance to a tomb.”

  “A tomb,” I said, “in the middle of a village?”

  Off to my left, there was another splash.

  Bes frowned. “Did you see that?”

  “Yeah. Ever since we got into the water. You haven’t noticed?”

  Bes stuck his finger in the water as if testing the temperature. “We should hurry.”

  “Why?”

  “Probably nothing.” He lied even worse than my dad. “Let’s get a look at this tomb. Part the river.”

  He said that as if it were a perfectly normal request, like Pass the salt.

  “I’m a combat magician,” I said. “I don’t know how to part a river.”

  Bes looked offended. “Oh, come on. That’s standard stuff. Back in Khufu’s day I knew a magician who parted the Nile just so he could climb to the bottom and retrieve a girl’s necklace. Then there was that Israelite fellow, Mickey.”

  “Moses?”

  “Yeah, him,” Bes said. “Anyway, you should totally be able to part the water. We gotta hurry.”

  “If it’s so easy, why don’t you do it?”

  “Now he gets an attitude. I told you, kid, running water interferes with godly power. Probably one of the reasons Iskandar hid your friend down there, if that’s where she is. You can do this. Just—”

  He suddenly tensed. “Get to the shore.”

  “But you said—”

  “Now!”

  Before we could move, the river erupted around us. Three separate waterspouts blasted upward, and Bes was pulled underwater.

  I tried to run, but my feet stuck in the mud. The waterspouts surrounded me. They swirled into human shapes with heads, shoulders, and arms made from ribbons of churning water, as if they were mummies created from the Nile.

  Twenty feet downstream, Bes broke to the surface. “Water demons!” he spluttered. “Ward them off!”

  “How?” I shouted.

  Two of the water demons veered toward Bes. The dwarf god tried to keep his footing, but the river boiled into whitewater rapids, and he was already up to his armpits.

  “Come on, kid!” he yelled. “Every shepherd used to know charms against water demons!”

  “Well, find me a shepherd, then!”

  Bes yelled, “BOO!” and the first water demon evaporated. He turned toward the second, but before he could scare it, the water demon blasted him in the face.

  Bes choked and stumbled, water shooting out his nostrils. The demon crashed over him, and Bes went under again.

  “Bes!” I yelled.

  The third demon surged toward me. I raised my wand and managed a weak shield of blue light. The demon slammed against it, knocking me backward.

  Its mouth and eyes spun like miniature whirlpools. Looking in its face was like using a scrying bowl. I could sense the thing’s endless hunger, its hatred for humans. It wanted to break every dam, devour every city, and drown the world in a sea of chaos. And it would start by killing me.

  My concentration faltered. The thing rushed me, shattering my shield and pulling me underwater.

  Ever get water up your nose? Imagine an entire wave up your nose—an intelligent wave that knows exactly how to drown you. I lost my wand. My lungs filled with liquid. All rational thought dissolved into panic.

  I thrashed and kicked, knowing I was only in three or four feet of water, but I couldn’t get up. I couldn’t see anything through the murk. My head broke the surface, and I saw a fuzzy image of Bes getting tossed around atop a waterspout, screaming, “Boo, already! Be more scared!”

  Then I went under again, my hands clawing at the mud.

  My heart pounded. My vision started to go dark. Even if I could have thought of a spell, I couldn’t have spoken it. I wished I had sea god powers, but they weren’t exactly Horus’s specialty.

  I was losing consciousness when something gripped my arm. I punched at it wildly, and my fist connected with a bearded face.

  I broke the surface again, gasping for breath. Bes was half-drowning next to me, yelling: “Stupid—glub, glub—trying to save your glub glub.”

  The demon pulled me under again, but suddenly my thoughts were clearer. Maybe that last mouthful of oxygen had done the trick. Or maybe punching Bes had snapped me out of my panic.

  I remembered Horus had been in a situation like this before. Set had once tried to drown him, pulling him into the Nile.

  I latched on to that memory and made it my own.

  I reached into the Duat and channeled the power of the war god into my body. Rage filled me. I would not be pinned down. I followed the Path of Horus. I would not let a stupid liquid mummy drown me in three feet of water.

  My vision turned red. I screamed, expelling the water from my lungs in one huge blast.

  WHOOOM! The Nile exploded. I collapsed on a field of mud.

  At first I was too tired to do anything but cough. When I managed to stagger to my feet and wipe the silt out of my eyes, I saw that the river had changed its course. It now curved around the ruins of the village. Exposed in the glistening red mud were bricks and boards, trash, old clothes, the fender of a car, and bones that might’ve been animal or human. A few fish flopped around, wondering where the river had gone. There was no sign of the water demons. About ten feet away, Bes was scowling at me
in annoyance. He had a bloody nose and was buried up to his waist in mud.

  “Usually when you part a river,” he grumbled, “it doesn’t involve punching a dwarf. Now, get me out of here!”

  I managed to pry him free, which caused a sucking noise so impressive that I wished I had recorded it. [And no, Sadie, I’m not going to try to make it for the microphone.]

  “I’m sorry,” I stammered. “I didn’t mean to—”

  He waved aside the apology. “You handled the water demons. That’s what matters. Now we gotta see if you can handle that.”

  I turned and saw the tomb.

  It was a rectangular pit about the size of a walk-in closet, lined with stone blocks. Steps led down to a closed stone door etched with hieroglyphs. The largest was the symbol for the House of Life:

  “Those demons were guarding the entrance,” Bes said. “There may be worse inside.”

  Underneath the symbol, I recognized a row of phonetic hieroglyphs:

  “Z—I—A,” I read. “Zia’s inside.”

  “And that,” Bes muttered, “is what we call in the magic business a trap. Last chance to change your mind, kid.”

  But I wasn’t really listening. Zia was down there. Even if I’d known what was about to happen, I don’t think I could’ve stopped myself. I climbed down the steps and pushed open the door.

  C A R T E R

  14. At the Tomb of Zia Rashid

  THE SARCOPHAGUS was made of water.

  It was an oversize human figure with rounded feet, wide shoulders, and a larger-than-life smiling face, like other Egyptian coffins I’d seen; but the whole thing was sculpted from pure glowing liquid. It sat on a stone dais in the middle of a square chamber. Egyptian art decorated the walls, but I didn’t pay too much attention to that.

  Inside the sarcophagus, Zia Rashid floated in white robes. Her arms were crossed over her chest. In her hands she gripped a shepherd’s crook and a war flail, the symbols of a pharaoh. Her staff and wand floated at her side. Her short black hair drifted around her face, which was just as beautiful as I remembered. If you’ve ever seen the famous sculpture of Queen Nefertiti, Zia reminded me of her, with the raised eyebrows, high cheekbones, graceful nose, and perfect red lips.