Kane 2 - The Throne of Fire (10 page)

[Don’t punch me, Sadie. It’s true!]

“C’mon, Walt,” Julian called. “Kill it already.”

“You’ve got this,” Alyssa said.

Walt reached for one of his rings. Then he stepped backward and stumbled over the shards of Felix’s broken
shabti.

I shouted, “Look out!”

But Walt slipped and fell hard. His
shabti
opponent rushed forward, slashing down with its sword.

I raced to help, but I was too far away. Walt’s hand was already rising instinctively to block the strike. The enchanted ceramic blade was almost as sharp as real metal. It should’ve hurt Walt pretty badly, but he grabbed it, and the
shabti
froze. Under Walt’s fingers, the blade turned gray and became webbed with cracks. The gray spread like frost over the entire warrior, and the
shabti
crumbled into a pile of dust.

Walt looked stunned. He opened his hand, which was perfectly fine.

“That was cool!” Felix said. “What amulet was that?”

Walt gave me a nervous glance, and I knew the answer. It wasn’t an amulet. Walt had no idea how he’d done it.

That would have been enough excitement for one day. Seriously. But the weirdness was just beginning.

Before either of us could say anything, the floor shook. I thought maybe Walt’s magic was spreading into the building, which wouldn’t have been good. Or maybe someone below us was experimenting with exploding donkey curses again.

Alyssa yelped. “Guys…”

She pointed to the statue of Ra jutting out from the wall, ten feet above us. Our godly basketball hoop was crumbling.

At first I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. The Ra statue wasn’t turning to dust like the
shabti.
It was breaking apart, falling to the floor in pieces. Then my stomach clenched. The pieces weren’t stone. The statue was turning into scarab shells.

The last of the statue crumbled away, and the pile of dung beetle husks began to move. Three serpent heads rose from the center.

I don’t mind telling you: I panicked. I thought my vision of Apophis was coming true right then and there. I stumbled back so quickly, I ran into Alyssa. The only reason I didn’t bolt from the room was because four trainees were looking to me for reassurance.

It can’t be Apophis,
I told myself.

The snakes emerged, and I realized they weren’t three different animals. It was one massive cobra with three heads.

Even weirder, it unfurled a pair of hawklike wings. The thing’s trunk was as thick as my leg. It stood as tall as me, but it wasn’t nearly big enough to be Apophis. Its eyes weren’t glowing red. They were regular creepy green snake eyes.

Still…with all three heads staring right at me, I can’t say I relaxed.

“Carter?” Felix asked uneasily. “Is this part of the lesson?”

The serpent hissed in three-part harmony. Its voice seemed to speak inside my head—and it sounded exactly like the
bau
in the Brooklyn Museum.

Your last warning, Carter Kane,
it said.
Give me the scroll.

My heart skipped a beat. The scroll—Sadie had given it to me after breakfast. Stupid me—I should’ve locked it up, put it in one of our secure cubbyholes in the library; but it was still in the bag on my shoulder.

What are you?
I asked the snake.

“Carter.” Julian drew his sword. “Do we attack?”

My trainees gave no indication that they’d heard either the snake or me speak.

Alyssa raised her hands like she was ready to catch a dodgeball. Walt positioned himself between the snake and Felix, and Felix leaned sideways to see around him.

Give it to me.
The serpent coiled to strike, crushing dead beetle shells under its body. Its wings spread so wide, they could’ve wrapped around us all.
Give up your quest, or I will destroy the girl you seek, just as I destroyed her village.

I tried to draw my sword, but my arms wouldn’t move. I felt paralyzed, as if those three sets of eyes had put me into a trance.

Her village, I thought. Zia’s village.

Snakes can’t laugh, but this thing’s hiss sounded amused.

You’ll have to make a choice, Carter Kane—the girl or the god. Abandon your foolish quest, or soon you’ll be just another dry husk like Ra’s scarabs.

My anger saved me. I shook off the paralysis and yelled, “Kill it!” just as the serpent opened its mouths, blasting out three columns of flames.

I raised a green shield of magic to deflect the fire. Julian chucked his sword like a throwing-ax. Alyssa gestured with her hand and three stone statues leaped off their pedestals, flying at the serpent. Walt fired a bolt of gray light from his wand. And Felix took off his left shoe and lobbed it at the monster.

Right about then, it sucked to be the serpent. Julian’s sword sliced off one of its heads. Felix’s shoe bounced off another. The blast from Walt’s wand turned the third to dust. Then Alyssa’s statues slammed into it, smashing the monster under a ton of stone.

What was left of the serpent’s body dissolved into sand.

The room was suddenly quiet. My four trainees looked at me. I reached down and picked up one of the scarab shells.

“Carter, that was part of the lesson, right?” Felix asked. “Tell me that was part of the lesson.”

I thought about the serpent’s voice—the same voice as the
bau
’s in the Brooklyn Museum. I realized why it sounded so familiar. I’d heard it before during the battle at the Red Pyramid.

“Carter?” Felix looked like he was about to cry. He was such a troublemaker, I sometimes forgot he was only nine years old.

“Yes, just a test,” I lied. I looked at Walt, and we came to a silent agreement:
We need to talk about this later.
But first, I had someone else to question. “Class dismissed.”

I ran to find Amos.

C A R T E R

A
MOS TURNED THE SCARAB SHELL
in his fingers. “A three-headed snake, you say.”

I felt guilty dumping this on him. He’d been through so much since Christmas. Then he finally got healed and came home, and
boom—
a monster invades our practice room. But I didn’t know who else to talk to. I was kind of sorry Sadie wasn’t around.

[All right, Sadie, don’t gloat. I wasn’t
that
sorry.]

“Yeah,” I said, “with wings and flamethrower breath. Ever seen something like that before?”

Amos put the scarab shell on the table. He nudged it, as if expecting it to come to life. We had the library to ourselves, which was unusual. Often, the big round chamber was filled with trainees hunting through rows of cubbyholes for scrolls, or sending retrieval
shabti
across the world for artifacts, books, or pizza. Painted on the floor was a picture of Geb the earth god, his body dotted with trees and rivers. Above us, the starry-skinned sky goddess Nut stretched across the ceiling. I usually felt safe in this room, sheltered between two gods who’d been friendly to us in the past. But now I kept glancing at the retrieval
shabti
stationed around the library and wondering if they would dissolve into scarab shells or decide to attack us.

Finally Amos spoke a command word:
“A’max.”

Burn.

A small red hieroglyph blazed over the scarab:

The shell burst into flames and crumbled to a tiny mound of ash.

“I seem to recall a painting,” Amos said, “in the tomb of Thuthmose III. It showed a three-headed winged snake like the one you described. But what it means…” He shook his head. “Snakes can be good
or
bad in Egyptian legend. They can be the enemies of Ra, or his protectors.”

“This wasn’t a protector,” I said. “It wanted the scroll.”

“And yet it had three heads, which might symbolize the three aspects of Ra. And it was born from the rubble of Ra’s statue.”

“It wasn’t from Ra,” I insisted. “Why would Ra want to stop us from finding him? Besides, I recognized the snake’s voice. It was the voice of your—” I bit my tongue. “I mean, it was the voice of Set’s minion from the Red Pyramid—the one who was possessed by Apophis.”

Amos’s eyes became unfocused.

“Face of Horror,” he remembered. “You think Apophis was speaking to you through this serpent?”

I nodded. “I think he set those traps at the Brooklyn Museum. He spoke to me through that
bau.
If he’s so powerful that he can infiltrate this mansion—”

“No, Carter. Even if you’re right, it wasn’t Apophis himself. If he’d broken out of his prison, it would cause ripples through the Duat so powerful, every magician would feel them. But possessing the minds of minions, even sending them into protected places to deliver a message—that’s much easier. I don’t think that snake could’ve done you much harm. It would’ve been quite weak after breaching our defenses. It was mostly sent to warn you, and scare you.”

“It worked,” I said.

I didn’t ask Amos how he knew so much about possession and the ways of Chaos. Having had his body taken over by Set, the god of evil, had given him an intensive crash course in stuff like that. Now he seemed back to normal, but I knew from my own experience of sharing a mind with Horus: once you hosted a god—whether it was voluntary or not—you were never quite the same. You retained the memories, even some traces of the god’s power. I couldn’t help noticing that the color of Amos’s magic had changed. It used to be blue. Now when he summoned hieroglyphs, they glowed red—the color of Set.

“I’ll strengthen the charms around the house,” he promised. “It’s high time I upgraded our security. I’ll make sure Apophis can’t send messengers through again.”

I nodded, but his promise didn’t make me feel much better.

Tomorrow,
if
Sadie came back safely, we’d be off on a quest to find the other two scrolls for the Book of Ra.

Sure, we’d survived our last adventure fighting Set, but Apophis was in a totally different league. And we weren’t hosting gods anymore. We were just kids, facing evil magicians, demons, monsters, spirits, and the eternal Lord of Chaos. In the plus column, I had a cranky sister, a sword, a baboon, and a griffin with a personality disorder. I wasn’t liking those odds.

“Amos,” I said, “what if we’re wrong? What if awakening Ra doesn’t work?”

It had been a long time since I’d seen my uncle smile. He didn’t look much like my father, but when he smiled, he got the same crinkles around his eyes.

“My boy, look what you’ve accomplished. You and Sadie have rediscovered a way of magic that hasn’t been practiced in millennia. You’ve taken your trainees further in two months than most First Nome initiates would get in two years. You’ve battled gods. You’ve accomplished more than any living magician has—even me, even Michel Desjardins. Trust your instincts. If I were a betting man, my money would be on you and your sister every time.”

A lump formed in my throat. I hadn’t gotten a pep talk like that since my dad was still alive, and I guess I hadn’t realized how much I needed one.

Unfortunately, hearing Desjardins’ name reminded me that we had other problems besides Apophis. As soon as we started our quest, a magical Russian ice cream salesman named Vlad the Inhaler was going to try to assassinate us. And if Vlad was the third-most powerful magician in the world…

“Who’s second?” I asked.

Amos frowned. “What do you mean?”

“You said this Russian guy, Vlad Menshikov, is the third-most powerful magician alive. Desjardins is the most powerful. So who’s second? I want to know if we have another enemy to look out for.”

The idea seemed to amuse Amos. “Don’t worry about that. And despite your past dealings with Desjardins, I would not say he’s truly an enemy.”

“Tell
him
that,” I muttered.

“I did, Carter. We talked several times while I was at the First Nome. I think what you and Sadie accomplished at the Red Pyramid shook him deeply. He knows he could not have defeated Set without you. He still opposes you, but if we had more time, I might be able to convince him…”