Kane 2 - The Throne of Fire (29 page)

“King Tut?” I asked. “You’re related to King Tut?”

“Unfortunately,” Walt said. “Tutankhamen was the first to suffer the curse. He died at nineteen. And he was one of the luckier ones.”

“Hang on. What curse?”

That’s when Katrina came to a screeching halt. You may protest that camels can’t screech, but you’re quite wrong. As she reached the top of a massive sand dune, Katrina made a wet screechy sound much worse than a car’s brakes. Hindenburg came to more of a farting halt.

I looked down the other side of the dune. Below us, in the middle of the desert, a hazy valley of green fields and palm trees sprawled out, roughly the size of central London. Birds flew overhead. Small lakes sparkled in the afternoon sun. Smoke rose from cooking fires at a few dwellings dotted here and there. After so long in the desert, my eyes hurt from looking at all the colors, like when you come out of a dark cinema into a bright afternoon.

I understood how ancient travelers must’ve felt, discovering an oasis like this after days in the wilderness. It was the closest thing I’d ever seen to the Garden of Eden.

The camels hadn’t stopped to admire the beautiful scenery, though. A trail of tiny footprints wound through the sand, all the way from the edge of the oasis to our dune. And coming up the hill was a very disgruntled-looking cat.

“It’s about time,” said the cat.

I slid off Katrina’s back and stared at the cat in amazement. Not because it spoke—I’d seen stranger things—but because I recognized the voice.

“Bast?” I said. “What are you doing inside that—what
is
that, exactly?”

The cat stood on its hind legs and spread its front paws like:
Voilà!
“An Egyptian mau, of course. Beautiful leopard spots, bluish fur—”

“It looks like it’s been through a blender!”

I wasn’t just being harsh. The cat was terribly beaten up. Large chunks of its fur were missing. It might once have been beautiful, but I was more inclined to think it had always been feral. Its remaining fur was dirty and matted, and its eyes were swollen and scarred almost as badly as Vlad Menshikov’s.

Bast—or the cat—or
whatever
was in charge—dropped back on all fours and sniffed indignantly. “Sadie, dear, I believe we’ve talked about battle scars on cats. This old tom is a warrior!”

A warrior who loses,
I thought, but I decided not to say that.

Walt slid off Hindenburg’s back. “Bast, how—where are you?”

“Still deep in the Duat.” She sighed. “It’ll be another day at least before I can find my way out. Things down here are a bit…chaotic.”

“Are you all right?” I asked.

The cat nodded. “I just have to be careful. The abyss is teeming with enemies. All the regular paths and river ways are guarded. I’ll have to take a long detour to get back safely, and since the equinox starts tomorrow at sunset, the timing is going to be tight. I thought I’d better send you a message.”

“So…” Walt knit his eyebrows. “That cat isn’t real?”

“Of course it’s real,” Bast said. “Just controlled by a sliver of my
ba.
I can speak through cats easily, you know, at least for a few minutes at a time, but this is the first time you’ve been close to one. Did you realize that? Unbelievable! You really need to hang around more cats. By the way, this mau will need a reward when I’m gone. Some nice fish, perhaps, or some milk—”

“Bast,” I interrupted. “You said you had a message?”

“Right. Apophis is waking.”

“We knew that!”

“But it’s worse than we thought,” she said. “He’s got a legion of demons working on his cage, and he’s timing his release to coincide with your waking Ra. In fact, he’s
counting
on your freeing Ra. It’s part of his plan.”

My head felt like it was turning to jelly, though that may have been because Katrina the camel was sucking on my hair. “Apophis
wants
us to free his archenemy? That makes no sense.”

“I can’t explain it,” Bast said, “but as I got closer to his cage, I could glean his thoughts. I suppose because we fought so many centuries we have some sort of connection. At any rate, the equinox begins tomorrow at sunset, as I said. The following dawn, the morning of March twenty-first, Apophis intends to rise from the Duat. He plans to swallow the sun and destroy the world. And he believes your plan to awaken Ra will help him do that.”

Walt frowned. “If Apophis wants us to succeed, why is he trying so hard to stop us?”

“Is he?” I asked.

A dozen small things that had bothered me over the past few days suddenly clicked together: why had Apophis only
scared
Carter in the Brooklyn Museum, when the Arrows of Sekhmet could have destroyed him? How had we escaped so easily from St. Petersburg? Why had Set volunteered the location of the third scroll?

“Apophis wants chaos,” I said. “He wants to divide his enemies. If Ra comes back, it could throw us into a civil war. The magicians are already divided. The gods would be fighting each other. There would be no clear ruler. And if Ra isn’t reborn in a strong new form—if he’s as old and feeble as I saw in my vision—”

“So we
shouldn’t
awaken Ra?” Walt asked.

“That’s not the answer either,” I said.

Bast tilted her head. “I’m confused.”

My mind was racing. Katrina the camel was still chewing on my hair, turning it into a slimy mess, but I hardly noticed. “We
have
to stick to the plan. We need Ra. Ma’at and Chaos have to balance, right? If Apophis rises, Ra has to as well.”

Walt twisted his rings. “But if Apophis
wants
Ra awakened, if he thinks it will help him destroy the world—”

“We have to believe Apophis is wrong.” I remembered something Jaz’s
ren
had told me:
We choose to believe in Ma’at.

“Apophis can’t imagine that anyone could unite the gods and magicians,” I said. “He thinks the return of Ra will weaken us even further. We have to prove him wrong. We have to make order from chaos. That’s what Egypt has always done. It’s a risk—a
huge
risk—but if we do nothing because we fear we’ll fail, we play right into Apophis’s hands.”

It’s hard to give a rousing speech with a camel licking your head, but Walt nodded. The cat didn’t look quite so enthusiastic. Then again, cats rarely do.

“Don’t underestimate Apophis,” Bast said. “You haven’t fought him. I have.”

“Which is why we need you back quickly.” I told her about Vlad Menshikov’s conversation with Set, and his plans to destroy Brooklyn House. “Bast, our friends are in terrible danger. Menshikov is possibly even more insane than Amos realizes. As soon as you’re able, go to Brooklyn. I have a feeling our last stand is going to be there. We’ll get the third scroll and find Ra.”

“I don’t like last stands,” the cat said. “But you’re right. It sounds bad. By the way, where are Bes and Carter?” She looked suspiciously at the camels. “You didn’t turn them into those, did you?”

“The idea is appealing,” I said. “But, no.”

I told her briefly what Carter was up to.

Bast hissed with distaste. “A foolish detour! I’ll have words with that dwarf about letting you go off on your own.”

“What am I, invisible?” Walt protested.

“Sorry, dear, I didn’t mean—” The cat’s eyes twitched. It coughed like it had a hairball. “My connection is failing. Good luck, Sadie. The best entrance to the tombs is on a small date farm just to the southeast. Look for a black water tower. And do watch out for the Romans. They’re quite—”

The cat puffed up its tail. Then it blinked and looked around in confusion.

“What Romans?” I asked. “They’re quite what?”

“Mrow.” The cat stared at me with an expression that said:
Who are you and where is the food?

I swatted the camel’s nose away from my slimy hair. “Come on, Walt,” I grumbled. “Let’s go find some mummies.”

We provided the cat with bits of beef jerky and some water from our supplies. It wasn’t as good as fish and milk, but the cat seemed happy enough. As it was in sight of the oasis and obviously knew its way around better than we did, we left it to finish its meal. Walt turned the camels back into amulets, thank goodness, and we trudged into Bahariya on foot.

The date farm wasn’t difficult to find. The black water tower sat at the edge of the property, and it was the tallest structure in sight. We made our way toward it, weaving through acres of palm trees, which provided some shade from the sun. An adobe farmhouse stood in the distance, but we didn’t see any people. Probably the Egyptians knew better than to be out in the afternoon heat.

When we reached the water tower, I didn’t see any obvious tomb entrance. The tower looked quite old—four rusty steel posts holding a round tank the size of a garage about fifteen meters in the air. The tank had a slow leak. Every few seconds water dropped from the sky and smacked against the hard-packed sand underneath. There wasn’t much else in sight except for more palm trees, a few tarnished farm tools, and a weathered plywood sign lying on the ground. The sign was spray-painted in Arabic and English, probably from some attempt by the farmer to sell his wares in the market. The English read:
Dates—best price. Cold Bebsi.

“Bebsi?” I asked.

“Pepsi,” Walt said. “I read about that on the Internet. There’s no ‘p’ in Arabic. Everyone here calls soda Bebsi.”

“So you have to have Bebsi with your bizza?”

“Brobably.”

I snorted. “If this is a famous dig site, shouldn’t there be more activity? Archaeologists? Ticket booths? Souvenir merchants?”

“Maybe Bast sent us to a secret entrance,” Walt said. “Better than sneaking past a bunch of guards and caretakers.”

A secret entrance sounded quite intriguing, but unless the water tower was a magic teleporter, or one of the date trees had a concealed door, I wasn’t sure where this oh-so-helpful entrance might be. I kicked the Bebsi sign. There was nothing underneath except more sand, slowly turning to mud from the drip, drip, drip of the leaky tower.

Then I looked more closely at the wet spot on the ground.

“Hang on.” I knelt. The water was pooling in a little canal, as if the sand were seeping into a subterranean crack. The crevice was about a meter long and no wider than a pencil, but much too straight to be natural. I dug in the sand. Six centimeters down, my fingernails scraped stone.

“Help me clear this,” I told Walt.

A minute later we’d uncovered a flat paving stone about one meter square. I tried to work my fingers under the wet edges, but the stone was too thick and much too heavy to lift.

“We can use something as a lever,” Walt suggested. “Pry it up.”

“Or,” I said, “stand back.”

Walt looked ready to protest, but when I brought out my staff, he knew enough to get out of the way. With my new understanding of godly magic, I didn’t so much
think
about what I needed as
feel
a connection to Isis. I remembered a time when she’d found her husband’s coffin grown into the trunk of a cypress tree, and in her anger and desperation she blew the tree apart. I channeled those emotions and pointed at the stone.
“Ha-di!”

Good news: the spell worked even better than in St. Petersburg. The hieroglyph glowed at the end of my staff, and the stone was blasted to rubble, revealing a dark hole underneath.

Bad news: that’s not all I destroyed. Around the hole, the ground began to crumble. Walt and I scrambled backward as more stones fell into the pit, and I realized I’d just destabilized the entire roof of a subterranean room. The hole widened until it reached the support legs of the water tower. The water tower began to creak and sway.

“Run!” Walt yelled.

We didn’t stop until we were hiding behind a palm tree thirty meters away. The water tower sprang a hundred different leaks, wobbled back and forth like a drunken man, then fell toward us and shattered, soaking us from head to toe and sending a flood through the rows of palm trees.

The noise was so deafening, it must’ve been heard throughout the oasis.

“Oops,”
I said.

Walt looked at me like I was mad. I suppose I was guilty as charged. But it’s just so bloody tempting to blow things up, isn’t it?

We ran to the Sadie Kane Memorial Crater. It was now the size of a swimming pool. Five meters down, under a pile of sand and rocks, were rows of mummies, all wrapped in old cloth and laid out on stone slabs. The mummies were now flattened, I’m afraid, but I could tell they’d been brightly painted with red, blue, and gold.

“Golden mummies.” Walt looked horrified. “Part of the tomb system that hasn’t been excavated yet. You just ruined—”

“I
did
say
Oops.
Now, help me down there, before the owner of this water tower shows up with a shotgun.”

S A D I E

T
O BE FAIR, THE MUMMIES
in that particular room were mostly ruined already, thanks to the moisture from the leaking tower above. Just add water to mummies for a truly horrible smell.