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.”
Chapter 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.