MY TURN.
First of all, Sadie’s “puppy dog” comment was totally out of line. I was not starry-eyed about Zia. It’s just that I don’t meet a lot of people who can throw fireballs and battle gods. [Stop making faces at me, Sadie. You look like Khufu.]
Anyway, we plunged into the sand tunnel.
Everything went dark. My stomach tingled with that top-of-the-roller- coaster weightlessness as I hurtled forward. Hot winds whipped around me, and my skin burned.
Then I tumbled out onto a cold tile floor, and Sadie and Zia crashed on top of me.
“Ow!” I grumbled.
The first thing I noticed was the fine layer of sand covering my body like powdered sugar. Then my eyes adjusted to the harsh light. We were in a big building like a shopping mall, with crowds bustling around us.
No…not a mall. It was a two-level airport concourse, with shops, lots of windows, and polished steel columns. Outside, it was dark, so I knew we must be in a different time zone. Announcements echoed over the intercom in a language that sounded like Arabic.
Sadie spit sand out of her mouth. “Yuck!” “Come on,” Zia said. “We can’t stay here.”
I struggled to my feet. People were streaming past—some in Western clothes, some in robes and headscarves. A family arguing in German rushed by and almost ran over me with their suitcases.
Then I turned and saw something I recognized. In the middle of the concourse stood a life-size replica of an Ancient Egyptian boat made from glowing display cases—a sales counter for perfume and jewelry.
“This is the Cairo airport,” I said. “Yes,” Zia said. “Now, let’s go!”
“Why the rush? Can Serqet…can she follow us through that sand gate?”
Zia shook her head. “An artifact overheats whenever it creates a gate. It requires a twelve-hour cooldown before it can be used again. But we still have to worry about airport security. Unless you’d like to meet the Egyptian
police, you’ll come with me now.”
She grabbed our arms and steered us through the crowd. We must’ve looked like beggars in our old-fashioned clothes, covered head-to-toe in sand. People gave us a wide berth, but nobody tried to stop us.
“Why are we here?” Sadie demanded. “To see the ruins of Heliopolis,” Zia said. “Inside an airport?” Sadie asked.
I remembered something Dad had told me years ago, and my scalp tingled.
“Sadie, the ruins are under us.” I looked at Zia. “That’s right, isn’t it?”
She nodded. “The ancient city was pillaged centuries ago. Some of its monuments were carted away, like Cleopatra’s two needles. Most of its temples were broken down to make new buildings. What was left disappeared under Cairo’s suburbs. The largest section is under this airport.”
“And how does that help us?” Sadie asked.
Zia kicked open a maintenance door. On the other side was a broom closet. Zia muttered a command—“Sahad”—and the image of the closet shimmered and disappeared, revealing a set of stone steps leading down.
“Because not all Heliopolis is in ruins,” Zia said. “Follow closely. And touch nothing.”
The stairs must’ve led down about seven million miles, because we descended forever. The passage had been made for miniature people, too. We had to crouch and crawl most of the way, and even so, I bonked my head on the ceiling a dozen times. The only light was from a ball of fire in Zia’s palm, which made shadows dance across the walls.
I’d been in places like this before—tunnels inside pyramids, tombs my dad had excavated—but I’ve never liked them. Millions of tons of rock above me seemed to crush the air out of my lungs.
Finally we reached the bottom. The tunnel opened up, and Zia stopped abruptly. After my eyes adjusted, I saw why. We were standing at the edge of a chasm.
A single wooden plank spanned the void. On the opposite ledge, two jackal-headed granite warriors flanked a doorway, their spears crossed over the entrance.
Sadie sighed. “Please, no more psychotic statues.”
“Do not joke,” Zia warned. “This is an entrance to the First Nome, the oldest branch of the House of Life, headquarters for all magicians. My job was to bring you here safely, but I cannot help you cross. Each magician must unbar the path for herself, and the challenge is different for each supplicant.”
She looked at Sadie expectantly, which annoyed me. First Bast, now Zia
—both of them treated Sadie like she should have some kind of superpowers. I mean, okay, so she’d been able to blast the library doors apart, but why
didn’t anyone look at me to do cool tricks?
Plus, I was still annoyed with Sadie for the comments she’d made at the museum in New York—how I had it so good traveling the world with Dad. She had no idea how often I wanted to complain about the constant traveling, how many days I wished I didn’t have to get on a plane and could just be like a normal kid going to school and making friends. But I couldn’t complain. You always have to look impeccable, Dad had told me. And he didn’t just mean my clothes. He meant my attitude. With Mom gone, I was all he had. Dad needed me to be strong. Most days, I didn’t mind. I loved my dad. But it was also hard.
Sadie didn’t understand that. She had it easy. And now she seemed to be getting all the attention, as if she were the special one. It wasn’t fair.
Then I heard Dad’s voice in my head: “Fairness means everyone gets what they need. And the only way to get what you need is to make it happen yourself.”
I don’t know what got into me, but I drew my sword and marched across the plank. It was like my legs were working by themselves, not waiting for my brain. Part of me thought: This is a really bad idea. But part of me answered: No, we do not fear this. And the voice didn’t sound like mine.
“Carter!” Sadie cried.
I kept walking. I tried not to look down at the yawning void under my feet, but the sheer size of the chasm made me dizzy. I felt like one of those gyroscope toys, spinning and wobbling as I crossed the narrow plank.
As I got closer to the opposite side, the doorway between the two statues began to glow, like a curtain of red light.
I took a deep breath. Maybe the red light was a portal, like the gate of sand. If I just charged through fast enough…
Then the first dagger shot out of the tunnel.
My sword was in motion before I realized it. The dagger should’ve impaled me in the chest, but somehow I deflected it with my blade and sent it sailing into the abyss. Two more daggers shot out of the tunnel. I’d never had the best reflexes, but now they sped up. I ducked one dagger and hooked the other with the curved blade of my sword, turned the dagger and flung it back into the tunnel. How the heck did I do that?
I advanced to the end of the plank and slashed through the red light, which flickered and died. I waited for the statues to come alive, but nothing happened. The only sound was a dagger clattering against the rocks in the chasm far below.
The doorway began to glow again. The red light coalesced into a strange form: a five-foot-tall bird with a man’s head. I raised my sword, but Zia yelled, “Carter, no!”
The bird creature folded his wings. His eyes, lined with kohl, narrowed
as they studied me. A black ornamental wig glistened on his head, and his face was etched with wrinkles. One of those fake braided pharaoh beards was stuck on his chin like a backward ponytail. He didn’t look hostile, except for the red flickering light all around him, and the fact that from the neck down he was the world’s largest killer turkey.
Then a chilling thought occurred to me: This was a bird with a human head, the same form I’d imagined taking when I slept in Amos’s house, when my soul left my body and flew to Phoenix. I had no idea what that meant, but it scared me.
The bird creature scratched at the stone floor. Then, unexpectedly, he smiled.
“Pari, niswa nafeer,” he told me, or at least that’s what it sounded like.
Zia gasped. She and Sadie were standing behind me now, their faces pale. Apparently they’d managed to cross the chasm without my noticing.
Finally Zia seemed to collect herself. She bowed to the bird creature.
Sadie followed her example.
The creature winked at me, as if we’d just shared a joke. Then he vanished. The red light faded. The statues retracted their arms, uncrossing their spears from the entrance.
“That’s it?” I asked. “What did the turkey say?”
Zia looked at me with something like fear. “That was not a turkey, Carter. That was a ba.”
I’d heard my dad use that word before, but I couldn’t place it. “Another monster?”
“A human soul,” Zia said. “In this case, a spirit of the dead. A magician from ancient times, come back to serve as a guardian. They watch the entrances of the House.”
She studied my face as if I’d just developed some terrible rash. “What?” I demanded. “Why are you looking at me that way?” “Nothing,” she said. “We must hurry.”
She squeezed by me on the ledge and disappeared into the tunnel. Sadie was staring at me too.
“All right,” I said. “What did the bird guy say? You understood it?”
She nodded uneasily. “He mistook you for someone else. He must have bad eyesight.”
“Because?”
“Because he said, ‘Go forth, good king.’”
I was in a daze after that. We passed through the tunnel and entered a vast underground city of halls and chambers, but I only remember bits and pieces of it.
The ceilings soared to twenty or thirty feet, so it didn’t feel like we were
underground. Every chamber was lined with massive stone columns like the ones I’d seen in Egyptian ruins, but these were in perfect condition, brightly painted to resemble palm trees, with carved green fronds at the top, so I felt like I was walking through a petrified forest. Fires burned in copper braziers. They didn’t seem to make any smoke, but the air smelled good, like a marketplace for spices—cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, and others I couldn’t identify. The city smelled like Zia. I realized that this was her home.
We saw a few other people—mostly older men and women. Some wore linen robes, some modern clothes. One guy in a business suit walked past with a black leopard on a leash, as if that were completely normal. Another guy barked orders to a small army of brooms, mops, and buckets that were scuttling around, cleaning up the city.
“Like that cartoon,” Sadie said. “Where Mickey Mouse tries to do magic and the brooms keep splitting and toting water.”
“‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,’” Zia said. “You do know that was based on an Egyptian story, don’t you?”
Sadie just stared back. I knew how she felt. It was too much to process.
We walked through a hall of jackal-headed statues, and I could swear their eyes watched us as we passed. A few minutes later, Zia led us through an open-air market—if you can call anything “open-air” underground—with dozens of stalls selling weird items like boomerang wands, animated clay dolls, parrots, cobras, papyrus scrolls, and hundreds of different glittering amulets.
Next we crossed a path of stones over a dark river teeming with fish. I thought they were perch until I saw their vicious teeth.
“Are those piranhas?” I asked.
“Tiger fish from the Nile,” Zia said. “Like piranhas, except these can weigh up to sixteen pounds.”
I watched my step more closely after that.
We turned a corner and passed an ornate building carved out of black rock. Seated pharaohs were chiseled into the walls, and the doorway was shaped like a coiled serpent.
“What’s in there?” Sadie asked.
We peeked inside and saw rows of children—maybe two dozen in all, about six to ten years old or so—sitting cross-legged on cushions. They were hunched over brass bowls, peering intently into some sort of liquid and speaking under their breath. At first I thought it was a classroom, but there was no sign of a teacher, and the chamber was lit only by a few candles. Judging by the number of empty seats, the room was meant to hold twice as many kids.
“Our initiates,” Zia said, “learning to scry. The First Nome must keep in contact with our brethren all over the world. We use our youngest
as…operators, I suppose you would say.”
“So you’ve got bases like this all over the world?” “Most are much smaller, but yes.”
I remembered what Amos had told us about the nomes. “Egypt is the First Nome. New York is the Twenty-first. What’s the last one, the Three- hundred-and-sixtieth?”
“That would be Antarctica,” Zia said. “A punishment assignment.
Nothing there but a couple of cold magicians and some magic penguins.” “Magic penguins?”
“Don’t ask.”
Sadie pointed to the children inside. “How does it work? They see images in the water?”
“It’s oil,” Zia said. “But yes.”
“So few,” Sadie said. “Are these the only initiates in the whole city?”
“In the whole world,” Zia corrected. “There were more before—” She stopped herself.
“Before what?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Zia said darkly. “Initiates do our scrying because young minds are most receptive. Magicians begin training no later than the age of ten…with a few dangerous exceptions.”
“You mean us,” I said.
She glanced at me apprehensively, and I knew she was still thinking about what the bird spirit had called me: a good king. It seemed so unreal, like our family name in that Blood of the Pharaohs scroll. How could I be related to some ancient kings? And even if I was, I certainly wasn’t a king. I had no kingdom. I didn’t even have my single suitcase anymore.
“They’ll be waiting for you,” Zia said. “Come along.” We walked so far, my feet began to ache.
Finally we arrived at a crossroads. On the right was a massive set of bronze doors with fires blazing on either side; on the left, a twenty-foot-tall sphinx carved into the wall. A doorway nestled between its paws, but it was bricked in and covered in cobwebs.
“That looks like the Sphinx at Giza,” I said.
“That’s because we are directly under the real Sphinx,” Zia said. “That tunnel leads straight up to it. Or it used to, before it was sealed.”
“But…” I did some quick calculations in my head. “The Sphinx is, like, twenty miles from the Cairo Airport.”
“Roughly.”
“No way we’ve walked that far.”
Zia actually smiled, and I couldn’t help noticing how pretty her eyes were. “Distance changes in magic places, Carter. Surely you’ve learned that by now.”
Sadie cleared her throat. “So why is the tunnel closed, then?”
“The Sphinx was too popular with archaeologists,” Zia said. “They kept digging around. Finally, in the 1980s, they discovered the first part of the tunnel under the Sphinx.”
“Dad told me about that!” I said. “But he said the tunnel was a dead end.”
“It was when we got through with it. We couldn’t let the archaeologists know how much they’re missing. Egypt’s leading archaeologist recently speculated that they’ve only discovered thirty percent of the ancient ruins in Egypt. In truth, they’ve only discovered one tenth, and not even the interesting tenth.”
“What about King Tut’s tomb?” I protested.
“That boy king?” Zia rolled her eyes. “Boring. You should see some of the good tombs.”
I felt a little hurt. Dad had named me after Howard Carter, the guy who discovered King Tut’s tomb, so I’d always felt a personal attachment to it. If that wasn’t a “good” tomb, I wondered what was.
Zia turned to face the bronze doors.
“This is the Hall of Ages.” She placed her palm against the seal, which bore the symbol of the House of Life.
The hieroglyphs began to glow, and the doors swung open.
Zia turned to us, her expression deadly serious. “You are about to meet the Chief Lector. Behave yourselves, unless you wish to be turned into insects.”
