The Throne of Fire Read online

  Renew, they said. New life. New light.

  That sounded promising until I grasped some less pleasant facts. I still couldn’t breathe. My body liked breathing. Also, it was getting much hotter. I could feel my protection glyph failing, the ink burning against my hand. I reached out blindly and grabbed an arm—Carter’s, I assumed. We held hands, and even though I couldn’t see him, it was comforting to know he was there. Perhaps it was my imagination, but the heat seemed to lessen.

  Long ago, Amos had told us that we were more powerful together. We increased each other’s magic just by being in proximity. I hoped that was true now. I tried to send my thoughts to Carter, urging him to help me maintain the fire shield.

  The ship sailed on through the flames. I thought we were starting to ascend, but it might have been wishful thinking. My vision began to go dark. My lungs were screaming. If I inhaled fire, I wondered if I would end up like Vlad Menshikov.

  Just when I knew I would pass out, the boat surged upward, and we broke the surface.

  I gasped—and not just because I needed the air. We had docked at the shoreline of the boiling lake, in front of a large limestone gateway, like the entrance to the ancient temple I’d seen at Luxor. I was still holding Carter’s hand. As far as I could tell, we were both fine.

  The sun boat was better than fine. It had been renewed. Its sail gleamed white, the symbol of the sun shining gold in its center. The oars were repaired and newly polished. The paint was freshly lacquered black and gold and green. The hull no longer leaked, and the tent house was once more a beautiful pavilion. There was no throne, and no Ra, but the crew glowed brightly and cheerfully as they tied off the lines to the dock.

  I couldn’t help it. I threw my arms around Carter and let out a sob. “Are you all right?”

  He pulled away awkwardly and nodded. The glyph on his forehead had burned off.

  “Thanks to you,” he said. “Where—”

  “Sunny Acres,” said a familiar voice.

  Bes came down the steps to the dock. He wore a new, even louder Hawaiian shirt and only his Speedo for pants, so I can’t say he was a sight for sore eyes. Now that he was in the Duat, he fairly glowed with power. His hair had turned darker and curlier, and his face looked decades younger.

  “Bes!” I said. “What took you so long? Are Walt and Zia—”

  “They’re fine,” he said. “And I told you I’d meet you at the Fourth House.” He jabbed his thumb at a sign carved into the limestone archway. “Used to be called the House of Rest. Apparently they’ve changed the name.”

  The sign was in hieroglyphs, but I had no trouble reading it.

  “‘Sunny Acres Assisted-Living Community,’” I read. “‘Formerly the House of Rest. Under New Management.’ What exactly—”

  “We should get going,” Bes said. “Before your stalker arrives.”

  “Stalker?” Carter asked.

  Bes pointed to the top of the fiery waterfall, now a good half mile away. At first I didn’t see anything. Then there was a streak of white against the red flames—as if a man in an ice cream suit had plunged into the lake. Apparently I hadn’t imagined that white smudge in the darkness. We were being followed.

  “Menshikov?” I said. “That’s—that’s—”

  “Bad news,” Bes said. “Now, come on. We have to find the sun god.”

  S A D I E

  20. We Visit the House of the Helpful Hippo

  HOSPITALS. CLASSROOMS. Now I’ll add to my list of least-favorite places: old people’s homes.

  That may sound odd, as I lived with my grandparents. I suppose their flat counts as an old people’s home. But I mean institutions. Nursing homes. Those are the worst. They smell like an unholy mixture of canteen food, cleaning supplies, and pensioners. The inmates (sorry, patients) always look so miserable. And the homes have absurdly happy names, like Sunny Acres. Please.

  We stepped through the limestone gateway into a large open hall—the Egyptian version of assisted living. Rows of colorfully painted columns were studded with iron sconces holding blazing torches. Potted palms and flowering hibiscus plants were placed here and there in a failed attempt to make the place feel cheerful. Large windows looked out on the Lake of Fire, which I suppose was a nice view if you enjoyed brimstone. The walls were painted with scenes of the Egyptian afterlife, along with jolly hieroglyphic mottos like immortality with security and life starts at 3000!

  Glowing servant lights and clay shabti in white medical uniforms bustled about, carrying trays of medication and pushing wheelchairs. The patients, however, didn’t bustle much. A dozen withered figures in linen hospital gowns sat around the room, staring vacantly into space. A few wandered the room, pushing wheelie poles with IV bags. All wore bracelets with their names in hieroglyphs.

  Some looked human, but many had animal heads. An old man with the head of a crane rocked back and forth in a metal folding chair, pecking at a game of senet on the coffee table. An old woman with a grizzled lioness’s head scooted herself around in a wheelchair, mumbling, “Meow, meow.” A shriveled blue-skinned man not much taller than Bes hugged one of the limestone columns and cried softly, as if he were afraid the column might try to leave him.

  In other words, the scene was thoroughly depressing.

  “What is this place?” I asked. “Are those all gods?”

  Carter seemed just as mystified as I was. Bes looked like he was about to crawl out of his skin.

  “Never actually been here,” he admitted. “Heard rumors, but…” He swallowed as if he’d just eaten a spoonful of peanut butter. “Come on. Let’s ask at the nurses’ station.”

  The desk was a crescent of granite with a row of telephones (though I couldn’t imagine who they’d call from the Duat), a computer, lots of clipboards, and a platter-size stone disk with a triangular fin—a sundial, which seemed strange, as there was no sun.

  Behind the counter, a short, heavy woman stood with her back to us, checking a whiteboard with names and medication times. Her glossy black hair was plaited down her back like an extra-large beaver’s tail, and her nurse’s cap barely fit on her wide head.

  We were halfway to the desk when Bes froze. “It’s her.”

  “Who?” Carter asked.

  “This is bad.” Bes turned pale. “I should’ve known….Curse it! You’ll have to go without me.”

  I looked more closely at the nurse, who still had her back to us. She did seem a bit imposing, with massive beefy arms, a neck thicker than my waist, and oddly tinted purplish skin. But I couldn’t understand why she bothered Bes so much.

  I turned to ask him, but Bes had ducked behind the nearest potted plant. It wasn’t big enough to hide him, and certainly didn’t camouflage his Hawaiian shirt.

  “Bes, stop it,” I said.

  “Shhh! I’m invisible!”

  Carter sighed. “We don’t have time for this. Come on, Sadie.”

  He led the way to the nurses’ station.

  “Excuse us,” he called across the desk.

  The nurse turned, and I yelped. I tried to contain my shock, but it was difficult, as the woman was a hippopotamus.

  I don’t mean that as an unflattering comparison. She was actually a hippo. Her long snout was shaped like an upsidedown valentine heart, with bristly whiskers, tiny nostrils, and a mouth with two large bottom teeth. Her eyes were small and beady. Her face looked quite odd framed with luxurious black hair, but it wasn’t nearly as peculiar as her body. She wore her nurse’s blouse open like a jacket, revealing a bikini top that—how to put this delicately—was trying to cover a very great deal of top with very little fabric. Her purple-pink belly was incredibly swollen, as if she were nine months pregnant.

  “May I help you?” she asked. Her voice was pleasant and kindly—not what one would expect from a hippopotamus. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t expect any voice from a hippopotamus.

  “Um, hippo—I mean, hullo!” I stammered. “My brother and I are looking for…” I glanced at Carter and
found he was not staring at the nurse’s face. “Carter!”

  “What?” He shook himself out of his trance. “Right. Sorry. Uh, aren’t you a goddess? Tawaret, or something?”

  The hippo woman bared her two enormous teeth in what I hoped was a smile. “Why, how nice to be recognized! Yes, dear. I’m Tawaret. You said you were looking for someone? A relative? Are you gods?”

  Behind us, the potted hibiscus rustled as Bes picked it up and tried to move it behind a column. Tawaret’s eyes widened.

  “Is that Bes?” she called. “Bes!”

  The dwarf stood abruptly and brushed off his shirt. His face was redder than Set’s. “Plant looks like it’s getting enough water,” he muttered. “I should check the ones over there.”

  He started to walk away, but Tawaret called again, “Bes! It’s me, Tawaret! Over here!”

  Bes stiffened like she’d shot him in the back. He turned with a tortured smile.

  “Well…hey. Tawaret. Wow!”

  She scrambled out from the behind the desk, wearing high heels that seemed inadvisable for a pregnant water mammal. She spread her chubby arms for a hug, and Bes thrust out his hand to shake. They ended up doing an awkward sort of dance, half hug, half shake, which made one thing perfectly obvious to me.

  “So, you two used to date?” I asked.

  Bes shot eye-daggers at me. Tawaret blushed, which made it the first time I’d ever embarrassed a hippo.

  “A long time ago…” Tawaret turned to the dwarf god. “Bes, how are you? After that horrible time at the palace, I was afraid—”

  “Good!” he shouted. “Yes, thanks. Good. You’re good? Good! We’re here on important business, as Sadie was about to tell you.”

  He kicked me in the shin, which I thought quite unnecessary.

  “Yes, right,” I said. “We’re looking for Ra, to awaken him.”

  If Bes had been hoping to redirect Tawaret’s train of thought, the plan worked. Tawaret opened her mouth in a silent gasp, and as if I’d just suggested something horrible, like a hippo hunt.

  “Awaken Ra?” she said. “Oh, dear…oh, that is unfortunate. Bes, you’re helping them with this?”

  “Uh-hum,” he stuttered. “Just, you know—”

  “Bes is doing us a favor,” I said. “Our friend Bast asked him to look after us.”

  I could tell right away I’d made matters worse. The temperature in the air seemed to drop ten degrees.

  “I see,” Tawaret said. “A favor for Bast.”

  I wasn’t sure what I’d said wrong, but I tried my best to backtrack. “Please. Look, the fate of the world is at stake It’s very important we find Ra.”

  Tawaret crossed her arms skeptically. “Dear, he’s been missing for millennia. And trying to awaken him would be terribly dangerous. Why now?”

  “Tell her, Sadie.” Bes inched backward as if preparing to dive into the hibiscus. “No secrets here. Tawaret can be trusted completely.”

  “Bes!” She perked up immediately and fluttered her eyelashes. “Do you mean that?”

  “Sadie, talk!” Bes pleaded.

  And so I did. I showed Tawaret the Book of Ra. I explained why we needed to wake the sun god—the threat of Apophis’s ascension, mass chaos and destruction, the world about to end at sunrise, et cetera. It was difficult to judge her hippoish expressions [Yes, Carter, I’m sure that’s a word], but as I spoke, Tawaret twirled her long black hair nervously.

  “That’s not good,” she said. “Not good at all.”

  She glanced behind her at the sundial. Despite the lack of sun, the needle cast a clear shadow over the hieroglyphic number five:

  “You’re running out of time,” she said.

  Carter frowned at the sundial. “Isn’t this place the Fourth House of the Night?”

  “Yes, dear,” Tawaret agreed. “It goes by different names —Sunny Acres, the House of Rest—but it’s also the Fourth House.”

  “So how can the sundial be on five?” he asked. “Shouldn’t we be, like, frozen at the fourth hour?”

  “Doesn’t work that way, kid,” Bes put in. “Time in the mortal world doesn’t stop passing just because you’re in the Fourth House. If you want to follow the sun god’s voyage, you have to keep in synch with his timing.”

  I felt a head-splitting explanation coming on. I was ready to accept blissful ignorance and get on with finding Ra, but Carter, naturally, wouldn’t let it drop.

  “So what happens if we get too far behind?” he asked.

  Tawaret checked the sundial again, which was slowly creeping past five. “The houses are connected to their times of night. You can stay in each one as long as you want, but you can only enter or exit them close to the hours they represent.”

  “Uh-huh.” I rubbed my temples. “Do you have any headache medicine behind that nurses’ station?”

  “It’s not that confusing,” said Carter, just to be annoying. “It’s like a revolving door. You have to wait for an opening and jump in.”

  “More or less,” Tawaret agreed. “There is a little wiggle room with most of the Houses. You can leave the Fourth House, for instance, pretty much whenever you want. But certain gates are impossible to pass unless you time it exactly right. You can only enter the First House at sunset. You can only exit the Twelfth House at dawn. And the gates of the Eighth House, the House of Challenges…can only be entered during the eighth hour.”

  “House of Challenges?” I said. “I hate it already.”

  “Oh, you have Bes with you.” Tawaret stared at him dreamily. “The challenges won’t be a problem.”

  Bes shot me a panicked look, like, Save me!

  “But if you take too long,” Tawaret continued, “the gates will close before you can get there. You’ll be locked in the Duat until tomorrow night.”

  “And if we don’t stop Apophis,” I said, “there won’t be a tomorrow night. That part I understand.”

  “So can you help us?” Carter asked Tawaret. “Where is Ra?”

  The goddess fidgeted with her hair. Her hands were a cross between human and hippo, with short stubby fingers and thick nails.

  “That’s the problem, dear,” she said. “I don’t know. The Fourth House is enormous. Ra is probably here somewhere, but the hallways and doors go on forever. We have so many patients.”

  “Don’t you keep track of them?” Carter asked. “Isn’t there a map or something?”

  Tawaret shook her head sadly. “I do my best, but it’s just me, the shabti and the servant lights….And there are thousands of old gods.”

  My heart sank. I could barely keep track of the ten or so major gods I’d met, but thousands? In this room alone, I counted a dozen patients, six hallways leading off in different directions, two staircases, and three elevators. Perhaps it was my imagination, but it seemed as if some of the hallways had appeared since we’d entered the room.

  “All these old folks are gods?” I asked.

  Tawaret nodded. “Most were minor deities even in ancient times. The magicians didn’t consider them worth imprisoning. Over the centuries, they’ve wasted away, lonely and forgotten. Eventually they made their way here. They simply wait.”

  “To die?” I asked.

  Tawaret got a faraway look in her eyes. “I wish I knew. Sometimes they disappear, but I don’t know if they simply get lost wandering the halls, or find a new room to hide in, or truly fade to nothing. The sad truth is it amounts to the same thing. Their names have been forgotten by the world above. Once your name is no longer spoken, what good is life?”

  She glanced at Bes, as if trying to tell him something.

  The dwarf god looked away quickly. “That’s Mekhit, isn’t it?” He pointed to the old lion woman who was making her way around in a wheelchair. “She had a temple near Abydos, I think. Minor lion goddess. Always got confused with Sekhmet.”

  The lioness snarled weakly when Bes said the name Sekhmet. Then she went back to rolling her chair, muttering, “Meow, meow.”

  “Sad
story,” Tawaret said. “She came here with her husband, the god Onuris. They were a celebrity couple in the old days, so romantic. He once traveled all the way to Nubia to rescue her. They got married. Happy ending, we all thought. But they were both forgotten. They came here together. Then Onuris disappeared. Mekhit’s mind began to go quickly after that. Now she rolls her chair around the room aimlessly all day. She can’t remember her own name, though we keep reminding her.”

  I thought about Khnum, whom we’d met on the river, and how sad he’d seemed, not knowing his secret name. I looked at the old goddess Mekhit, meowing and snarling and scooting along with no memory of her former glory. I imagined trying to care for a thousand gods like that—senior citizens who never got better and never died.

  “Tawaret, how can you stand it?” I said in awe. “Why do you work here?”

  She touched her nurse’s cap self-consciously. “A long story, dear. And we have very little time. I wasn’t always here. I was once a protector goddess. I scared away demons, though not as well as Bes.”

  “You were plenty scary,” Bes said.

  The hippo goddess sighed with adoration. “That’s so sweet. I also protected mothers giving birth—”

  “Because you’re pregnant?” Carter asked, nodding at her enormous belly.

  Tawaret looked mystified. “No. Why would you think that?”

  “Um—”

  “So!” I broke in. “You were explaining why you take care of aging gods.”

  Tawaret checked the sundial, and I was alarmed to see how fast the shadow was creeping toward six. “I’ve always liked to help people, but in the world above, well…it became clear I wasn’t needed anymore.”

  She was careful not to look at Bes, but the dwarf god blushed even more.

  “Someone was needed to look after the aging gods,” Tawaret continued. “I suppose I understand their sadness. I understand about waiting forever—”

  Bes coughed into his fist. “Look at the time! Yes, about Ra. Have you seen him since you’ve been working here?”