The Kane Chronicles, Book One: The Red Pyramid Page 11

  “Serqet,” Bast growled.

  “The scorpion goddess,” I guessed. Maybe that should’ve terrified me, but I was already pretty much at my maximum. “Can you take her?”

  Bast’s expression didn’t reassure me.

  “Carter, Sadie,” she said, “this is going to get ugly. Get to the museum. Find the temple. It may protect you.”

  “What temple?” I asked.

  “And what about you?” Sadie added.

  “I’ll be fine. I’ll catch up.” But when Bast looked at me, I could tell she wasn’t sure. She was just buying us time.

  “Go!” she ordered. She turned her giant green cat warrior to face the mass of scorpions.

  Embarrassing truth? In the face of those scorpions, I didn’t even pretend to be brave. I grabbed Sadie’s arm and we ran.

  S A D I E

  11. We Meet the Human Flamethrower

  RIGHT, I’M TAKING THE MICROPHONE. There is no chance Carter would tell this part properly, as it’s about Zia. [Shut up, Carter. You know it’s true.]

  Oh, who is Zia? Sorry, getting ahead of myself.

  We raced to the entrance of the museum, and I had no idea why, except that a giant glowing cat woman had told us to. Now, you must realize I was already devastated by everything that had happened. First, I’d lost my father. Second, my loving grandparents had kicked me out of the flat. Then I’d discovered I was apparently “blood of the pharaohs,” born to a magical family, and all sorts of rubbish that sounded quite impressive but only brought me loads of trouble. And as soon as I’d found a new home—a mansion with proper breakfast and friendly pets and quite a nice room for me, by the way—Uncle Amos disappeared, my lovely new crocodile and baboon friends were tossed in a river, and the mansion was set on fire. And if that wasn’t enough, my faithful cat Muffin had decided to engage in a hopeless battle with a swarm of scorpions.

  Do you call it a “swarm” for scorpions? A herd? A gaggle? Oh, never mind.

  The point is I couldn’t believe I’d been asked to open a magic doorway when clearly I had no such skill, and now my brother was dragging me away. I felt like an utter failure. [And no comments from you, Carter. As I recall, you weren’t much help at the time, either.]

  “We can’t just leave Bast!” I shouted. “Look!”

  Carter kept running, dragging me along, but I could see quite clearly what was happening back at the obelisk. A mass of scorpions had crawled up Bast’s glowing green legs and were wriggling into the hologram like it was gelatin. Bast smashed hundreds of them with her feet and fists, but there were simply too many. Soon they were up to her waist, and her ghostly shell began to flicker. Meanwhile, the brown-robed goddess advanced slowly, and I had a feeling she would be worse than any number of scorpions.

  Carter pulled me through a row of bushes and I lost sight of Bast. We burst onto Fifth Avenue, which seemed ridiculously normal after the magic battle. We ran down the sidewalk, shoved through a knot of pedestrians, and climbed the steps of the Met.

  A banner above the entrance announced some sort of special Christmas event, which I suppose is why the museum was open on a holiday, but I didn’t bother reading the details. We pushed straight inside.

  What did it look like? Well, it was a museum: huge entry hall, lots of columns and so on. I can’t claim I spent much time admiring the decor. I do remember it had queues for the ticket windows, because we ran right past them. There were also security guards, because they yelled at us as we dashed into the exhibits. By luck, we ended up in the Egyptian area, in front of a reconstructed tomb sort of place with narrow corridors. Carter probably could’ve told you what the structure was supposed to be, but honestly I didn’t care.

  “Come on,” I said.

  We slipped inside the exhibit, which proved quite enough to lose the security guards, or perhaps they had better things to do than pursue naughty children.

  When we popped out again, we sneaked around until we were sure we weren’t being followed. The Egypt wing wasn’t crowded—just a few clumps of old people and a foreign tour group with a guide explaining a sarcophagus in French. “Et voici la momie!”

  Strangely, no one seemed to notice the enormous sword on Carter’s back, which surely must’ve been a security issue (and much more interesting than the exhibits). A few old people did give us odd looks, but I suspect that was because we were dressed in linen pajamas, drenched in sweat, and covered in grass and leaves. My hair was probably a nightmare as well.

  I found an empty room and pulled Carter aside. The glass cases were full of shabti. A few days earlier I wouldn’t have given them a second thought. Now, I kept glancing at the statues, sure they’d come to life any minute and try to bash me on the head.

  “What now?” I asked Carter. “Did you see any temple?”

  “No.” He knit his eyebrows as if trying hard to remember. “I think there’s a rebuilt temple down that hall...or is that in the Brooklyn Museum? Maybe the one in Munich? Sorry, I’ve been to so many museums with Dad that they all get mixed together.”

  I sighed in exasperation. “Poor boy, forced to travel the world, skip school, and spend time with Dad while I get a whole two days a year with him!”

  “Hey!” Carter turned on me with surprising force. “You get a home! You get friends and a normal life and don’t wake up each morning wondering what country you’re in! You don’t—”

  The glass case next to us shattered, spraying glass at our feet.

  Carter looked at me, bewildered. “Did we just—”

  “Like my exploding birthday cake,” I grumbled, trying not to let on how startled I was. “You need to control your temper.”

  “Me?”

  Alarms began to blare. Red lights pulsed through the corridor. A garbled voice came on the loudspeaker and said something about proceeding calmly to the exits. The French tour group ran past us, screaming in panic, followed by a crowd of remarkably fast old people with walkers and canes.

  “Let’s finish arguing later, shall we?” I told Carter. “Come on!”

  We ran down another corridor, and the sirens died as suddenly as they’d started. The blood-red lights kept pulsing in eerie silence. Then I heard it: the slithering, clacking sounds of scorpions.

  “What about Bast?” My voice choked up. “Is she—”

  “Don’t think about it,” Carter said, though, judging from his face, that’s exactly what he was thinking about. “Keep moving!”

  Soon we were hopelessly lost. As far as I could tell, the Egyptian part of the museum was designed to be as confusing as possible, with dead ends and halls that doubled back on themselves. We passed hieroglyphic scrolls, gold jewelry, sarcophagi, statues of pharaohs, and huge chunks of limestone. Why would someone display a rock? Aren’t there enough of those in the world?

  We saw no one, but the slithering sounds grew louder no matter which way we ran. Finally I rounded a corner and smacked straight into someone.

  I yelped and scrambled backwards, only to stumble into Carter. We both fell on our bums in a most unflattering way. It’s a miracle Carter didn’t impale himself on his own sword.

  At first I didn’t recognize the girl standing in front of us, which seems strange, looking back on it. Perhaps she was using some sort of magic aura, or perhaps I just didn’t want to believe it was her.

  She looked a bit taller than me. Probably older, too, but not by much. Her black hair was trimmed along her jawline and longer in the front so that it swept over her eyes. She had caramel-colored skin and pretty, vaguely Arab features. Her eyes—lined in black kohl, Egyptian style—were a strange amber color that was either quite beautiful or a bit scary; I couldn’t decide which. She had a backpack on her shoulder, and wore sandals and loose-fitting linen clothes like ours. She looked as if she were on her way to a martial arts class. God, now that I think of it, we probably looked the same way. How embarrassing.

  I slowly began to realize I’d seen her before. She was the girl with the knife from the British Muse
um. Before I could say anything, Carter sprang to his feet. He moved in front of me and brandished his sword as if trying to protect me. Can you believe the nerve?

  “Get—get back!” he stammered.

  The girl reached into her sleeve and produced a curved white piece of ivory—an Egyptian wand.

  She flicked it to one side, and Carter’s sword flew out of his hands and clattered to the floor.

  “Don’t embarrass yourself,” the girl said sternly. “Where is Amos?”

  Carter looked too stunned to speak. The girl turned towards me. Her golden eyes were both beautiful and scary, I decided, and I didn’t like her a bit.

  “Well?” she demanded.

  I didn’t see why I needed to tell her a bloody thing, but an uncomfortable pressure started building in my chest, like a burp trying to get free. I heard myself say, “Amos is gone. He left this morning.”

  “And the cat demon?”

  “That’s my cat,” I said. “And she’s a goddess, not a demon. She saved us from the scorpions!”

  Carter unfroze. He snatched up his sword and pointed it at the girl again. Full credit for persistence, I suppose.

  “Who are you?” he demanded. “What do you want?”

  “My name is Zia Rashid.” She tilted her head as if listening.

  Right on cue, the entire building rumbled. Dust sprinkled from the ceiling, and the slithering sounds of scorpions doubled in volume behind us.

  “And right now,” Zia continued, sounding a bit disappointed, “I must save your miserable lives. Let’s go.”

  I suppose we could’ve refused, but our choices seemed to be Zia or the scorpions, so we ran after her.

  She passed a case full of statues and casually tapped the glass with her wand. Tiny granite pharaohs and limestone gods stirred at her command. They hopped off their pedestals and crashed through the glass. Some wielded weapons. Others simply cracked their stone knuckles. They let us pass, but stared down the corridor behind us as if waiting for the enemy.

  “Hurry,” Zia told us. “These will only—”

  “Buy us time,” I guessed. “Yes, we’ve heard that before.”

  “You talk too much,” Zia said without stopping.

  I was about to make a withering retort. Honestly, I would’ve put her in her place quite properly. But just then we emerged into an enormous room and my voice abandoned me.

  “Whoa,” Carter said.

  I couldn’t help agreeing with him. The place was extremely whoa.

  The room was the size of a football stadium. One wall was made completely of glass and looked out on the park. In the middle of the room, on a raised platform, an ancient building had been reconstructed. There was a freestanding stone gateway about eight meters tall, and behind that an open courtyard and square structure made of uneven sandstone blocks carved all over on the outside with images of gods and pharaohs and hieroglyphs. Flanking the building’s entrance were two columns bathed in eerie light.

  “An Egyptian temple,” I guessed.

  “The Temple of Dendur,” Zia said. “Actually it was built by the Romans—”

  “When they occupied Egypt,” Carter said, like this was delightful information. “Augustus commissioned it.”

  “Yes,” Zia said.

  “Fascinating,” I murmured. “Would you two like to be left alone with a history textbook?”

  Zia scowled at me. “At any rate, the temple was dedicated to Isis, so it will have enough power to open a gate.”

  “To summon more gods?” I asked.

  Zia’s eyes flashed angrily. “Accuse me of that again, and I will cut out your tongue. I meant a gateway to get you out of here.”

  I felt completely lost, but I was getting used to that. We followed Zia up the steps and through the temple’s stone gateway.

  The courtyard was empty, abandoned by the fleeing museum visitors, which made it feel quite creepy. Giant carvings of gods stared down at me. Hieroglyphic inscriptions were everywhere, and I was afraid that if I concentrated too hard, I might be able to read them.

  Zia stopped at the front steps of the temple. She held up her wand and wrote in the air. A familiar hieroglyph burned between the columns.

  Open—the same symbol Dad had used at the Rosetta Stone. I waited for something to blow up, but the hieroglyph simply faded.

  Zia opened her backpack. “We’ll make our stand here until the gate can be opened.”

  “Why not just open it now?” Carter asked.

  “Portals can only appear at auspicious moments,” Zia said. “Sunrise, sunset, midnight, eclipses, astrological alignments, the exact time of a god’s birth—”

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “How can you possibly know all that?”

  “It takes years to memorize the complete calendar,” Zia said. “But the next auspicious moment is easy: high noon. Ten and a half minutes from now.”

  She didn’t check a watch. I wondered how she knew the time so precisely, but I decided it wasn’t the most important question.

  “Why should we trust you?” I asked. “As I recall, at the British Museum, you wanted to gut us with a knife.”

  “That would’ve been simpler.” Zia sighed. “Unfortunately, my superiors think you might be innocents. So for now, I can’t kill you. But I also can’t allow you to fall into the hands of the Red Lord. And so...you can trust me.”

  “Well, I’m convinced,” I said. “I feel all warm and fuzzy inside.”

  Zia reached in her bag and took out four little statues—animal-headed men, each about five centimeters tall. She handed them to me. “Put the Sons of Horus around us at the cardinal points.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “North, south, east, west.” She spoke slowly, as if I were an idiot.

  “I know compass directions! But—”

  “That’s north.” Zia pointed out the wall of glass. “Figure out the rest.”

  I did what she asked, though I didn’t see how the little men would help. Meanwhile, Zia gave Carter a piece of chalk and told him to draw a circle around us, connecting the statues.

  “Magic protection,” Carter said. “Like what Dad did at the British Museum.”

  “Yes,” I grumbled. “And we saw how well that worked.”

  Carter ignored me. What else is new? He was so eager to please Zia that he jumped right to the task of drawing his sidewalk art.

  Then Zia took something else from her bag—a plain wooden rod like the one our dad had used in London. She spoke a word under her breath, and the rod expanded into a two-meter-long black staff topped with a carved lion’s head. She twirled it around single-handedly like a baton—just showing off, I was sure—while holding the wand in her other hand.

  Carter finished the chalk circle as the first scorpions appeared at the gallery’s entrance.

  “How much longer on that gate?” I asked, hoping I didn’t sound as terrified as I felt.

  “Stay inside the circle no matter what,” Zia said. “When the gate opens, jump through. And keep behind me!”

  She touched her wand to the chalk circle, spoke another word, and the circle began to glow dark red.

  Hundreds of scorpions swarmed towards the temple, turning the floor into a living mass of claws and stingers. Then the woman in brown, Serqet, entered the gallery. She smiled at us coldly.

  “Zia,” I said, “that’s a goddess. She defeated Bast. What chance do you have?”

  Zia held up her staff and the carved lion’s head burst into flames—a small red fireball so bright, it lit the entire room. “I am a scribe in the House of Life, Sadie Kane. I am trained to fight gods.”

  S A D I E

  12. A Jump Through the Hourglass

  WELL, THAT WAS ALL VERY IMPRESSIVE, I suppose. You should’ve seen Carter’s face—he looked like an excited puppy. [Oh, stop shoving me. You did!]

  But I felt much less sure of Miss Zia “I’m-So-Magical” Rashid when the army of scorpions scuttled towards us. I wouldn’t have thought it possible so many
scorpions existed in the world, much less in Manhattan. The glowing circle round us seemed like insignificant protection against the millions of arachnids crawling over one another, many layers deep, and the woman in brown, who was even more horrible.

  From a distance she looked all right, but as she got closer I saw that Serqet’s pale skin glistened like an insect shell. Her eyes were beady black. Her long, dark hair was unnaturally thick, as if made from a million bristling bug antennae. And when she opened her mouth, sideways mandibles snapped and retracted outside her regular human teeth.

  The goddess stopped about twenty meters away, studying us. Her hateful black eyes fixed on Zia. “Give me the younglings.”

  Her voice was harsh and raspy, as if she hadn’t spoken in centuries.

  Zia crossed her staff and wand. “I am mistress of the elements, Scribe of the First Nome. Leave or be destroyed.”

  Serqet clicked her mandibles in a gruesome foamy grin. Some of her scorpions advanced, but when the first one touched the glowing lines of our protective circle, it sizzled and turned to ashes. Mark my words, nothing smells worse than burned scorpion.

  The rest of the horrible things retreated, swirling round the goddess and crawling up her legs. With a shudder, I realized they were wriggling into her robes. After a few seconds, all the scorpions had disappeared into the brown folds of her clothes.

  The air seemed to darken behind Serqet, as if she were casting an enormous shadow. Then the darkness rose up and took the form of a massive scorpion tail, arcing over Serqet’s head. It lashed down at us at blazing speed, but Zia raised her wand and the sting glanced off the ivory tip with a hissing sound. Steam rolled off Zia’s wand, smelling of sulfur.

  Zia pointed her staff towards the goddess, engulfing her body in fire. Serqet screamed and staggered backwards, but the fire died almost instantly. It left Serqet’s robes seared and smoking, but the goddess looked more enraged than hurt.