He was right. It didn’t. Then again, I had no idea how time flowed in the Duat. One House of the Night might not correspond exactly to one mortal hour in the world above.
Anubis once told me he’d been in the Land of the Dead for five thousand years, but he still felt like a teenager, as if no time had passed.
I shuddered. What if we popped out on the other side of the River of Night and found that several eons had passed? I’d just turned thirteen. I wasn’t ready to be thirteen hundred.
I also wished I hadn’t thought of Anubis. I touched the shen amulet on my necklace. After all that had happened with Walt, the idea of seeing Anubis made me feel strangely guilty, but also a bit excited. Perhaps Anubis would help us on our journey. Perhaps he’d whisk me away to some private spot for a chat as he had last time we’d visited the Duat—a romantic little graveyard, dinner for two at the Coffin Café…
Snap out of it, Sadie, I thought. Concentrate.
I pulled the Book of Ra from my bag and scanned the instructions again. I’d read them several times already, but they were cryptic and confusing—much like a maths textbook. The scroll was chock-full of terms like “first from Chaos,” “breath into clay,” “the night’s flock” “reborn in fire,” “the acres of the sun,” “the kiss of the knife,” “the gambler of light,” and “the last scarab”—most of which made no sense to me.
I gathered that as we passed through the twelve stages of the river, I’d have to read the three sections of the Book of Ra at three separate locations, probably to revive the different aspects of the sun god, and each of three aspects would present us with some sort of challenge. I knew that if I failed—if I so much as stumbled over one word while reading the spells—I would end up worse than Vlad Menshikov. The idea terrified me, but I couldn’t dwell on the possibility of failure. I simply had to hope that when the time came, the scroll’s gibberish would make sense.
The current accelerated. So did the leaking of the boat. Carter demonstrated his combat magic skill by summoning a bucket and bailing out water, while I concentrated on keeping the crew in line. The deeper we sailed into the Duat, the more rebellious the glowing orbs became. They chafed against my will, remembering how much they wanted to incinerate me.
It’s unnerving to float down a magic river with voices whispering in your head: Die, traitor, die. Every so often I’d get the feeling we were being followed. I’d turn and think I could see a whitish smudge against the black, like the afterimage of a flash, but I decided it must be my imagination. Even more unnerving was the darkness ahead—no shoreline, no landmarks, no visibility at all. The crew could’ve steered us straight into a boulder or the mouth of a monster, and we would’ve had absolutely no warning. We just kept sailing through the dark empty void.
“Why is it so…nothing?” I murmured.
Carter emptied his bucket. He made an odd sight—a boy dressed as a pharaoh with the royal crook and flail, bailing water from a leaky boat.
“Maybe the Houses of the Night follow human sleep patterns,” he suggested.
“Human what?”
“Sleep patterns. Mom used to tell us about them before bedtime. Remember?”
I didn’t. Then again, I’d only been six when our mum died. She’d been a scientist as well as a magician, and had thought nothing of reading us Newton’s laws or the periodic table as bedtime stories. Most of it had gone over my head, but I wanted to remember. I’d always been irritated that Carter remembered Mum so much better than I did.
“Sleep has different stages,” Carter said. “Like, the first few hours, the brain is almost in a coma—a really deep sleep with hardly any dreams. Maybe that’s why this part of the river is so dark and formless. Then later in the night, the brain goes through R.E.M.—rapid eye movement. That’s when dreams happen. The cycles get more rapid and more vivid. Maybe the Houses of the Night follow a pattern like that.”
It seemed a bit far-fetched to me. Then again, Mum had always told us science and magic weren’t mutually exclusive. She’d called them two dialects of the same language. Bast had once told us there were millions of different channels and tributaries to the Duat’s river. The geography could change with each journey, responding to the traveler’s thoughts. If the river was shaped by all the sleeping minds in the world, if its course got more vivid and crazy as the night went along, then we were in for a rough ride.
The river eventually narrowed. A shoreline appeared on either side—black volcanic sand sparkling in the lights of our magic crew. The air turned colder. The underside of the boat scraped against rocks and sandbars, which made the leaks worse. Carter gave up on the pail and pulled wax from his supply bag. Together we tried to plug the leaks, speaking binding spells to hold the boat together. If I’d had any chewing gum, I would’ve used that as well.
We didn’t pass any signposts—NOW ENTERING THE THIRD HOUSE, SERVICES NEXT EXIT—but we’d clearly entered a different section of the river. Time was slipping away at an alarming rate, and still we hadn’t done anything.
“Perhaps the first challenge is boredom,” I said. “When will something happen?”
I should’ve known better than to say that aloud. Right in front of us, a shape loomed out of the darkness. A sandaled foot the size of a water bed planted itself on the prow of our ship and stopped us dead in the water.
It wasn’t an attractive foot, either. Definitely male. Its toes were splattered with mud, and its toenails were yellow, cracked, and overgrown. The leather sandal straps were covered in lichen and barnacles. In short, the foot looked and smelled very much like it had been standing on the same rock in the middle of the river, wearing the same sandal, for several thousand years.
Unfortunately, it was attached to a leg, which was attached to a body. The giant leaned down to look at us.
“You are bored?” his voice boomed, not in an unfriendly way. “I could kill you, if that would help.”