CHAPTER
10. Bast Goes Green
[Sadie, stop it! Yeah, I’m getting to that part.] Sorry, she keeps trying to distract me by setting fire to my—never mind. Where was I?
We barreled off the Williamsburg Bridge into Manhattan and headed north on Clinton Street.
“They’re still following,” Sadie warned.
Sure enough, the carriers were only a block behind us, weaving around cars and trampling over sidewalk displays of tourist junk.
“We’ll buy some time.” Bast growled deep in her throat—a sound so low and powerful it made my teeth buzz. She yanked the wheel and swerved right onto East Houston.
I looked back. Just as the carriers turned the corner, a horde of cats materialized all around them. Some jumped from windows. Some ran from the sidewalks and alleys. Some crawled from the storm drains. All of them converged on the carriers in a wave of fur and claws—climbing up their copper legs, scratching their backs, clinging to their faces, and weighing down the sedan box. The carriers stumbled, dropping the box. They began blindly swatting at the cats. Two cars swerved to avoid the animals and collided, blocking the entire street, and the carriers went down under the mass of angry felines. We turned onto the FDR Drive, and the scene disappeared from view.
“Nice,” I admitted.
“It won’t hold them long,” Bast said. “Now—Central Park!”
Bast ditched the Lexus at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“We’ll run from here,” she said. “It’s just behind the museum.”
When she said run, she meant it. Sadie and I had to sprint to keep up, and Bast wasn’t even breaking a sweat. She didn’t stop for little things like hot dog stands or parked cars. Anything under ten feet tall she leaped over with ease, leaving us to scramble around the obstacles as best we could.
We ran into the park on the East Drive. As soon as we turned north, the obelisk loomed above us. A little over seventy feet tall, it looked like an exact copy of the needle in London. It was tucked away on a grassy hill, so it actually felt isolated, which is hard to achieve in the center of New York. There was no one around except a couple of joggers farther down the path. I could hear the traffic behind us on Fifth Avenue, but even that seemed far away.
We stopped at the obelisk’s base. Bast sniffed the air as if smelling for trouble. Once I was standing still, I realized just how cold I was. The sun was directly overhead, but the wind ripped right through my borrowed linen clothes.
“I wish I’d grabbed something warmer,” I muttered. “A wool coat would be nice.”
“No, it wouldn’t,” Bast said, scanning the horizon. “You’re dressed for magic.”
Sadie shivered. “We have to freeze to be magical?”
“Magicians avoid animal products,” Bast said absently. “Fur, leather, wool, any of that. The residual life aura can interfere with spells.”
“My boots seem all right,” Sadie noted.
“Leather,” Bast said with distaste. “You may have a higher tolerance, so a bit of leather won’t bother your magic. I don’t know. But linen clothing is always best, or cotton—plant material. At any rate, Sadie, I think we’re clear for the moment. There’s a window of auspicious time starting right now, at eleven thirty, but it won’t last long. Get started.”
Sadie blinked. “Me? Why me? You’re the goddess!”
“I’m not good at portals,” Bast said. “Cats are protectors. Just control your emotions. Panic or fear will kill a spell. We have to get out of here before Set summons the other gods to his cause.”
I frowned. “You mean Set’s got, like, other evil gods on speed dial?”
Bast glanced nervously toward the trees. “Evil and good may not be the best way to think of it, Carter. As a magician, you must think about chaos and order. Those are the two forces that control the universe. Set is all about chaos.”
“But what about the other gods Dad released?” I persisted. “Aren’t they good guys? Isis, Osiris, Horus, Nephthys—where are they?”
Bast fixed her eyes on me. “That’s a good question, Carter.”
A Siamese cat broke through the bushes and ran up to Bast. They looked at each other for a moment. Then the Siamese dashed away.
“The carriers are close,” Bast announced. “And something else…something much stronger, closing in from the east. I think the carriers’ master has grown impatient.”
My heart did a flip. “Set is coming?”
“No,” Bast said. “Perhaps a minion. Or an ally. My cats are having trouble describing what they’re seeing, and I don’t want to find out. Sadie, now is the time. Just concentrate on opening a gateway to the Duat. I’ll keep off the attackers. Combat magic is my specialty.”
“Like what you did in the mansion?” I asked.
Bast showed her pointed teeth. “No, that was just combat.”
The woods rustled, and the carriers emerged. Their sedan chair’s shroud had been shredded by cat claws. The carriers themselves were scratched and dented. One walked with a limp, his leg bent backward at the knee. Another had a car fender wrapped around his neck.
The four metal men carefully set down their sedan chair. They looked at us and drew golden metal clubs from their belts.
“Sadie, get to work,” Bast ordered. “Carter, you’re welcome to help me.”
The cat goddess unsheathed her knives. Her body began to glow with a green hue. An aura surrounded her, growing larger, like a bubble of energy, and lifting her off the ground. The aura took shape until Bast was encased in a holographic projection about four times her normal size. It was an image of the goddess in her ancient form—a twenty-foot-tall woman with the head of a cat. Floating in midair in the center of the hologram, Bast stepped forward. The giant cat goddess moved with her. It didn’t seem possible that a see-through image could have substance, but its foot shook the ground. Bast raised her hand. The glowing green warrior did the same, unsheathing claws as long and sharp as rapiers. Bast swiped the sidewalk in front of her and shredded the pavement to concrete ribbons. She turned and smiled at me. The giant cat’s head did likewise, baring horrible fangs that could’ve bitten me in half.
“This,” Bast said, “is combat magic.”
At first I was too stunned to do anything but watch as Bast launched her green war machine into the middle of the carriers.
She slashed one carrier to pieces with a single swipe, then stepped on another and flattened him into a metal pancake. The other two carriers attacked her holographic legs, but their metal clubs bounced harmlessly off the ghostly light with showers of sparks.
Meanwhile Sadie stood in front of the obelisk with her arms raised, shouting: “Open, you stupid piece of rock!”
Finally I drew my sword. My hands were shaking. I didn’t want to charge into battle, but I felt like I should help. And if I had to fight, I figured having a twenty-foot-tall glowing cat warrior on my side was the way to do it. “Sadie, I—I’m going to help Bast. Keep trying!”
“I am!”
I ran forward just as Bast sliced the other two carriers apart like loaves of bread. With relief, I thought: Well, that’s it.
Then all four carriers began to re-form. The flat one peeled himself off the pavement. The sliced ones’ pieces clicked together like magnets, and the carriers stood up good as new.
“Carter, help me hack them apart!” Bast called. “They need to be in smaller pieces!”
I tried to stay out of Bast’s way as she sliced and stomped. Then as soon as she disabled a carrier, I went to work chopping its remains into smaller pieces. They seemed more like Play-Doh than metal, because my blade mashed them up pretty easily.
Another few minutes and I was surrounded by piles of coppery rubble. Bast made a glowing fist and smashed the sedan into kindling.
“That wasn’t so hard,” I said. “What were we running for?”
Inside her glowing shell, Bast’s face was coated with sweat. It hadn’t occurred to me that a goddess could get tired, but her magic avatar must’ve taken a lot of effort.
“We’re not safe yet,” she warned. “Sadie, how’s it coming?”
“It’s not,” Sadie complained. “Isn’t there another way?”
Before Bast could answer, the bushes rustled with a new sound—like rain, except more slithery.
A chill ran up my back. “What…what is that?”
“No,” Bast murmured. “It can’t be. Not her.”
Then the bushes exploded. A thousand brown creepy-crawlies poured from the woods in a carpet of grossness—all pincers and stinging tails.
I wanted to yell, “Scorpions!” But my voice wouldn’t work. My legs started trembling. I hate scorpions. They’re everywhere in Egypt. Many times I’d found them in my hotel bed or shower. Once I’d even found one in my sock.
“Sadie!” Bast called urgently.
“Nothing!” Sadie moaned.
The scorpions kept coming—thousands upon thousands. Out of the woods a woman appeared, walking fearlessly through the middle of the arachnids. She wore brown robes with gold jewelry glinting around her neck and arms. Her long black hair was cut Ancient Egyptian–style with a strange crown on top. Then I realized it wasn’t a crown—she had a live, supersize scorpion nesting on her head. Millions of the little nasties swirled around her like she was the center of their storm.
“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.
SADIE
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 Museum. 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.”
SADIE
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.
“Your days are past, magician. The House is weak. Lord Set will lay waste to this land.”
Zia threw her wand like a boomerang. It smashed into the shadowy scorpion tail and exploded in a blinding flash of light. Serqet lurched back and averted her eyes, and as she did, Zia reached into her sleeve and brought out something small—something closed inside her fist.
The wand was a diversion, I thought. A magician’s sleight of hand.
Then Zia did something reckless: she leaped out of the magic circle—the very thing she’d warned us not to do.
“Zia!” Carter called. “The gate!”
I glanced behind me, and my heart almost stopped. The space between the two columns at the temple’s entrance was now a vertical tunnel of sand, as if I were looking into the funnel of an enormous sideways hourglass. I could feel it tugging at me, pulling me towards it with magical gravity.
“I’m not going in there,” I insisted, but another flash of light brought my attention back to Zia.
She and the goddess were involved in a dangerous dance. Zia twirled and spun with her fiery staff, and everywhere she passed, she left a trail of flames burning in the air. I had to admit it: Zia was almost as graceful and impressive as Bast.
I had the oddest desire to help. I wanted—very badly, in fact—to step outside the circle and engage in combat. It was a completely mad urge, of course. What could I possibly have done? But still I felt I shouldn’t—or couldn’t—jump through the gate without helping Zia.
“Sadie!” Carter grabbed me and pulled me back. Without my even realizing it, my foot had almost stepped across the line of chalk. “What are you thinking?”
I didn’t have an answer, but I stared at Zia and mumbled in a sort of trance, “She’s going to use ribbons. They won’t work.”
“What?” Carter demanded. “Come on, we’ve got to go through the gate!”
Just then Zia opened her fist and small red tendrils of cloth fluttered into the air. Ribbons. How had I known? They zipped about like living things—like eels in water—and began to grow larger.
Serqet was still concentrating on the fire, trying to keep Zia from caging her. At first she didn’t seem to notice the ribbons, which grew until they were several meters long. I counted five, six, seven of them in all. They zipped around, orbiting Serqet, ripping through her shadow scorpion as if it were a harmless illusion. Finally they wrapped around Serqet’s body, pinning her arms and legs. She screamed as if the ribbons burned her. She dropped to her knees, and the shadow scorpion disintegrated into an inky haze.
Zia spun to a stop. She pointed her staff at the goddess’s face. The ribbons began to glow, and the goddess hissed in pain, cursing in a language I didn’t know.
“I bind you with the Seven Ribbons of Hathor,” Zia said. “Release your host or your essence will burn forever.”
“Your death will last forever!” Serqet snarled. “You have made an enemy of Set!”
Zia twisted her staff, and Serqet fell sideways, writhing and smoking.
“I will…not…” the goddess hissed. But then her black eyes turned milky white, and she lay still.
“The gate!” Carter warned. “Zia, come on! I think it’s closing!”
He was right. The tunnel of sand seemed to be moving a bit more slowly. The tug of its magic did not feel as strong.
Zia approached the fallen goddess. She touched Serqet’s forehead, and black smoke billowed from the goddess’s mouth. Serqet transformed and shrank until we were looking at a completely different woman wrapped in red ribbons. She had pale skin and black hair, but otherwise she didn’t look anything like Serqet. She looked, well, human.
“Who is that?” I asked.
“The host,” Zia said. “Some poor mortal who—”
She looked up with a start. The black haze was no longer dissipating. It was getting thicker and darker again, swirling into a more solid form.
“Impossible,” Zia said. “The ribbons are too powerful. Serqet can’t re-form unless—”
“Well, she is re-forming,” Carter yelled, “and our exit is closing! Let’s go!”
I couldn’t believe he was willing to jump into a churning wall of sand, but as I watched the black cloud take the shape of a two-story-tall scorpion—a very angry scorpion—I made my decision.
“Coming!” I yelled.
“Zia!” Carter yelled. “Now!”
“Perhaps you’re right,” the magician decided. She turned, and together we ran and plunged straight into the swirling vortex.