The Complete Kane Chronicles (43 page)

Sadie picked at her scrambled eggs. “I suppose it would be selfish to ask for more.”

I stared at her, and I realized we were thinking the same thing. When the gods had said a gift… Well, you can hope for things, but as Sadie said, I guess you can’t get greedy.

“It’s going to be hard to travel if we need to go recruiting,” I said cautiously. “Two unaccompanied minors.”

Sadie nodded. “No Amos. No responsible adult. I don’t think Khufu counts.”

And that’s when the gods completed their gift.

A voice from the doorway said, “Sounds like you have a job opening.”

I turned and felt a thousand pounds of grief drop from my shoulders. Leaning against the door in a leopard-spotted jumpsuit was a dark-haired lady with golden eyes and two very large knives.

“Bast!” Sadie cried.

The cat goddess gave us a playful smile, as if she had all kinds of trouble in mind. “Someone call for a chaperone?”

A few days later, Sadie had a long phone conversation with Gran and Grandpa Faust in London. They didn’t ask to talk to me, and I didn’t listen in. When Sadie came back down to the Great Room, she had a faraway look in her eyes. I was afraid—
very
afraid—that she was missing London.

“Well?” I asked reluctantly.

“I told them we were all right,” she said. “They told me the police have stopped bothering them about the explosion at the British Museum. Apparently the Rosetta Stone turned up unharmed.”

“Like magic,” I said.

Sadie smirked. “The police decided it might’ve been a gas explosion, some sort of accident. Dad’s off the hook, as are we. I could go home to London, they said. Spring term starts in a few weeks. My mates Liz and Emma have been asking about me.”

The only sound was the crackle of fire in the hearth. The Great Room suddenly seemed bigger to me, emptier.

At last I said, “What did you tell them?”

Sadie raised an eyebrow. “God, you’re thick sometimes. What do you think?”

“Oh.” My mouth felt like sandpaper. “I guess it’ll be good to see your friends and get back your old room, and—”

Sadie punched my arm. “Carter! I told them I couldn’t very well go home, because I already
was
home. This is where I belong. Thanks to the Duat, I can see my friends whenever I want. And besides, you’d be lost without me.”

I must’ve grinned like a fool, because Sadie told me to wipe the silly look off my face—but she sounded pleased about it. I suppose she knew she was right, for once. I would’ve been lost without her. [And no, Sadie, I can’t believe I just said that either.]

Just when things were settling down to a nice safe routine, Sadie and I embarked on our new mission. Our destination was a school that Sadie had seen in a dream. I won’t tell you which school, but Bast drove us a long way to get there. We recorded this tape along the way. Several times the forces of chaos tried to stop us. Several times we heard rumors that our enemies were starting to hunt down other descendants of the pharaohs, trying to thwart our plans.

We got to the school the day before the spring term started. The hallways were empty, and it was easy to slip inside. Sadie and I picked a locker at random, and she told me to set the combination. I summoned some magic and mixed around the numbers: 13/32/33. Hey, why mess with a good formula?

Sadie said a spell and the locker began to glow. Then she put the package inside and closed the door.

“Are you sure about this?” I asked.

She nodded. “The locker is partially in the Duat. It’ll store the amulet until the right person opens it.”

“But if the
djed
falls into the wrong hands—”

“It won’t,” she promised. “The blood of the pharaohs is strong. The right kids will find the amulet. If they figure out how to use it, their powers should awaken. We have to trust that the gods will guide them to Brooklyn.”

“We won’t know how to train them,” I argued. “No one has studied the path of the gods for two thousand years.”

“We’ll figure it out,” Sadie said. “We have to.”

“Unless Apophis gets us first,” I said. “Or Desjardins and the House of Life. Or unless Set breaks his word. Or a thousand other things go wrong.”

“Yes,” Sadie said with a smile. “Be fun, eh?”

We locked the locker and walked away.

Now we’re back at the Twenty-first Nome in Brooklyn.

We’re going to send out this tape to a few carefully chosen people and see if it gets published. Sadie believes in fate. If the story falls into your hands, there’s probably a reason. Look for the
djed
. It won’t take much to awaken your power. Then the trick is learning to use that power without dying.

As I said at the beginning: the whole story hasn’t happened yet. Our parents promised to see us again, so I know we’ll have to go back to the Land of the Dead eventually, which I think is fine with Sadie, as long as Anubis is there.

Zia is out there somewhere—the real Zia. I intend to find her.

Most of all, chaos is rising. Apophis is gaining strength. Which means we have to gain strength too—gods and men, united like in olden times. It’s the only way the world won’t be destroyed.

So the Kane family has a lot of work to do. And so do you.

Maybe you’ll want to follow the path of Horus or Isis, Thoth or Anubis, or even Bast. I don’t know. But whatever you decide, the House of Life needs new blood if we’re going to survive.

So this is Carter and Sadie Kane signing off.

Come to Brooklyn. We’ll be waiting.

Much of this story is based on fact, which makes me think that either the two narrators, Sadie and Carter, did a great deal of research…or they are telling the truth.

The House of Life did exist, and was an important part of Egyptian society for several millennia. Whether or not it still exists today—that is something I cannot answer. But it is undeniable that Egyptian magicians were famed throughout the ancient world, and many of the spells they could supposedly cast are exactly as described in this story.

The way the narrators portray Egyptian magic is also supported by archaeological evidence.
Shabti
, Curved Wands, and Magicians’ boxes have survived, and can be viewed in many museums. All of the artifacts and monuments Sadie and Carter mention actually exist—with the possible exception of the red pyramid. There is a “Red Pyramid” at Giza, but it is only called that because the original white casing stones were stripped away, revealing the pink granite blocks underneath. In fact the pyramid’s owner, Senefru, would be horrified to learn his pyramid is now red, the color of Set. As for the magical red pyramid mentioned in the story, we can only hope that it has been destroyed.

Should further recordings fall into my hands, I will relay the information. Until then, we can only hope that Carter and Sadie are wrong in their predictions about the rise of chaos….

For Conner and Maggie, the Riordan family’s great brother-sister team

This is a transcript of an audio recording. Carter and Sadie Kane first made themselves known in a recording I received last year, which I transcribed as
The Red Pyramid.
This second audio file arrived at my residence shortly after that book was published, so I can only assume the Kanes trust me enough to continue relaying their story. If this second recording is a truthful account, the turn of events can only be described as alarming. For the sake of the Kanes, and for the world, I hope what follows is fiction. Otherwise we are all in very serious trouble.

C A R T E R

C
ARTER HERE
.

Look, we don’t have time for long introductions. I need to tell this story quickly, or we’re all going to die.

If you didn’t listen to our first recording, well…pleased to meet you: the Egyptian gods are running around loose in the modern world; a bunch of magicians called the House of Life is trying to stop them; everyone hates Sadie and me; and a big snake is about to swallow the sun and destroy the world.

[Ow! What was that for?]

Sadie just punched me. She says I’m going to scare you too much. I should back up, calm down, and start at the beginning.

Fine. But personally, I think you
should
be scared.

The point of this recording is to let you know what’s really happening and how things went wrong. You’re going to hear a lot of people talking trash about us, but we didn’t cause those deaths. As for the snake, that wasn’t our fault either. Well…not exactly. All the magicians in the world
have
to come together. It’s our only chance.

So here’s the story. Decide for yourself. It started when we set Brooklyn on fire.

The job was supposed to be simple: sneak into the Brooklyn Museum, borrow a particular Egyptian artifact, and leave without getting caught.

No, it wasn’t robbery. We would have returned the artifact eventually. But I guess we did look suspicious: four kids in black ninja clothes on the roof of the museum. Oh, and a baboon, also dressed like a ninja.
Definitely
suspicious.

The first thing we did was send our trainees Jaz and Walt to open the side window, while Khufu, Sadie, and I examined the big glass dome in the middle of the roof, which was supposed to be our exit strategy.

Our exit strategy wasn’t looking too good.

It was well after dark, and the museum was supposed to be closed. Instead, the glass dome glowed with light. Inside, forty feet below, hundreds of people in tuxedos and evening gowns mingled and danced in a ballroom the size of an airplane hangar. An orchestra played, but with the wind howling in my ears and my teeth chattering, I couldn’t hear the music. I was freezing in my linen pajamas.

Magicians are supposed to wear linen because it doesn’t interfere with magic, which is probably a great tradition in the Egyptian desert, where it’s hardly ever cold and rainy. In Brooklyn, in March—not so much.

My sister, Sadie, didn’t seem bothered by the cold. She was undoing the locks on the dome while humming along to something on her iPod. I mean, seriously—who brings their own tunes to a museum break-in?

She was dressed in clothes like mine except she wore combat boots. Her blond hair was streaked with red highlights —very subtle for a stealth mission. With her blue eyes and her light complexion, she looked absolutely nothing like me, which we both agreed was fine. It’s always nice to have the option of denying that the crazy girl next to me is my sister.

“You said the museum would be empty,” I complained.

Sadie didn’t hear me until I pulled out her earbuds and repeated myself.

“Well, it was
supposed
to be empty.” She’ll deny this, but after living in the States for the last three months, she was starting to lose her British accent. “The Web site said it closed at five. How was I to know there’d be a wedding?”

A wedding? I looked down and saw that Sadie was right. Some of the ladies wore peach-colored bridesmaid dresses. One of the tables had a massive tiered white cake. Two separate mobs of guests had lifted the bride and groom on chairs and were carrying them through the room while their friends swirled around them, dancing and clapping. The whole thing looked like a head-on furniture collision waiting to happen.

Khufu tapped on the glass. Even in his black clothes, it was hard for him to blend into the shadows with his golden fur, not to mention his rainbow-colored nose and rear end.

“Agh!”
he grunted.

Since he was a baboon, that could’ve meant anything from
Look, there’s food down there
to
This glass is dirty
to
Hey, those people are doing stupid things with chairs.

“Khufu’s right,” Sadie interpreted. “We’ll have a hard time sneaking out through the party. Perhaps if we pretend we’re a maintenance crew—”

“Sure,” I said. “‘Excuse us. Four kids coming through with a three-ton statue. Just going to float it up through the roof. Don’t mind us.’”

Sadie rolled her eyes. She pulled out her wand—a curved length of ivory carved with pictures of monsters—and pointed it at the base of the dome. A golden hieroglyph blazed, and the last padlock popped open.

“Well, if we’re not going to use this as an exit,” she said, “why am I opening it? Couldn’t we just come out the way we’re going in—through the side window?”

“I told you. The statue is
huge.
It won’t fit through the side window. Plus, the traps—”

“Try again tomorrow night, then?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Tomorrow the whole exhibit is being boxed up and shipped off on tour.”

She raised her eyebrows in that annoying way she has. “Perhaps if someone had given us more
notice
that we needed to steal this statue—”

“Forget it.” I could tell where this conversation was going, and it wasn’t going to help if Sadie and I argued on the roof all night. She was right, of course. I hadn’t given her much notice. But, hey—my sources weren’t exactly reliable. After weeks of asking for help, I’d finally gotten a tip from my buddy the falcon war god Horus, speaking in my dreams:
Oh, by the way, that artifact you wanted? The one that might hold the key to saving the planet? It’s been sitting down the street in the Brooklyn Museum for the last thirty years, but tomorrow it leaves for Europe, so you’d better hurry! You’ll have five days to figure out how to use it, or we’re all doomed. Good luck!

I could’ve screamed at him for not telling me sooner, but it wouldn’t have made any difference. Gods only talk when they’re ready, and they don’t have a good sense of mortal time. I knew this because Horus had shared space in my head a few months ago. I still had some of his antisocial habits—like the occasional urge to hunt small furry rodents or challenge people to the death.

“Let’s just stick to the plan,” Sadie said. “Go in through the side window, find the statue, and float it out through the ballroom. We’ll figure out how to deal with the wedding party when we get that far. Maybe create a diversion.”

I frowned. “A diversion?”

“Carter, you worry too much,” she said. “It’ll be brilliant. Unless you have another idea?”

The problem was—I didn’t.

You’d think magic would make things easier. In fact, it usually made things more complicated. There were always a million reasons why this or that spell wouldn’t work in certain situations. Or there’d be other magic thwarting you—like the protective spells on this museum.

We weren’t sure who had cast them. Maybe one of the museum staff was an undercover magician, which wouldn’t have been uncommon. Our own dad had used his Ph.D. in Egyptology as a cover to gain access to artifacts. Plus, the Brooklyn Museum has the largest collection of Egyptian magic scrolls in the world. That’s why our uncle Amos had located his headquarters in Brooklyn. A lot of magicians might have reasons to guard or booby-trap the museum’s treasures.

Whatever the case, the doors and windows had some pretty nasty curses on them. We couldn’t open a magic portal into the exhibit, nor could we use our retrieval
shabti
—the magical clay statues that served us in our library—to bring us the artifact we needed.

We’d have to get in and get out the hard way; and if we made a mistake, there was no telling what sort of curse we’d unleash: monster guardians, plagues, fires, exploding donkeys (don’t laugh; they’re bad news).

The only exit that wasn’t booby-trapped was the dome at the top of the ballroom. Apparently the museum’s guardians hadn’t been worried about thieves levitating artifacts out of an opening forty feet in the air. Or maybe the dome
was
trapped, and it was just too well hidden for us to see.

Either way, we had to try. We only had tonight to steal—sorry,
borrow
—the artifact. Then we had five days to figure out how to use it. I just love deadlines.

“So we push on and improvise?” Sadie asked.

I looked down at the wedding party, hoping we weren’t about to ruin their special night. “Guess so.”

“Lovely,” Sadie said. “Khufu, stay here and keep watch. Open the dome when you see us coming up, yeah?”

“Agh!”
said the baboon.

The back of my neck tingled. I had a feeling this heist was
not
going to be lovely.

“Come on,” I told Sadie. “Let’s see how Jaz and Walt are doing.”

We dropped to the ledge outside the third floor, which housed the Egyptian collection.

Jaz and Walt had done their work perfectly. They’d duct-taped four Sons of Horus statues around the edges of the window and painted hieroglyphs on the glass to counteract the curses and the mortal alarm system.

As Sadie and I landed next to them, they seemed to be in the middle of a serious conversation. Jaz was holding Walt’s hands. That surprised me, but it surprised Sadie even more. She made a squeaking sound like a mouse getting stepped on.

[Oh yes, you did. I was
there.
]

Why would Sadie care? Okay, right after New Year’s, when Sadie and I sent out our
djed
amulet beacon to attract kids with magic potential to our headquarters, Jaz and Walt had been the first to respond. They’d been training with us for seven weeks, longer than any of the other kids, so we’d gotten to know them pretty well.

Jaz was a cheerleader from Nashville. Her name was short for Jasmine, but don’t ever call her that unless you want to get turned into a shrub. She was pretty in a blond cheerleader kind of way—not really my type—but you couldn’t help liking her because she was nice to everyone and always ready to help. She had a talent for healing magic, too, so she was a great person to bring along in case something went wrong, which happened with Sadie and me about ninety-nine percent of the time.

Tonight she’d covered her hair in a black bandanna. Slung across her shoulder was her magician’s bag, marked with the symbol of the lion goddess Sekhmet.

She was just telling Walt, “We’ll figure it out,” when Sadie and I dropped down next to them.

Walt looked embarrassed.

He was…well, how do I describe Walt?

[No thanks, Sadie. I’m not going to describe him as
hot.
Wait your turn.]

Walt was fourteen, same as me, but he was tall enough to play varsity forward. He had the right build for it—lean and muscular—and the dude’s feet were huge. His skin was coffee-bean brown, a little darker than mine, and his hair was buzz cut so that it looked like a shadow on his scalp. Despite the cold, he was dressed in a black sleeveless tee and workout shorts—not standard magician clothes—but nobody argued with Walt. He’d been our first trainee to arrive—all the way from Seattle—and the guy was a natural
sau
—a charm maker. He wore a bunch of gold neck chains with magic amulets he’d made himself.

Anyway, I was pretty sure Sadie was jealous of Jaz and liked Walt, though she’d never admit it because she’d spent the last few months moping about another guy—actually a god—she had a crush on.

[Yeah, fine, Sadie. I’ll drop it for now. But I notice you’re not denying it.]

When we interrupted their conversation, Walt let go of Jaz’s hands real quick and stepped away. Sadie’s eyes moved back and forth between them, trying to figure out what was going on.

Walt cleared his throat. “Window’s ready.”

“Brilliant.” Sadie looked at Jaz. “What did you mean, ‘We’ll figure it out’?”

Jaz flapped her mouth like a fish trying to breathe.

Walt answered for her: “You know. The Book of Ra. We’ll figure it out.”

“Yes!” Jaz said. “The Book of Ra.”

I could tell they were lying, but I figured it was none of my business if they liked each other. We didn’t have time for drama.

“Okay,” I said before Sadie could demand a better explanation. “Let’s start the fun.”

The window swung open easily. No magic explosions. No alarms. I breathed a sigh of relief and stepped into the Egyptian wing, wondering if maybe we had a shot at pulling this off, after all.

The Egyptian artifacts brought back all kinds of memories. Until last year, I’d spent most of my life traveling around the world with my dad as he went from museum to museum, lecturing on Ancient Egypt. That was before I knew he was a magician—before he unleashed a bunch of gods, and our lives got complicated.

Now I couldn’t look at Egyptian artwork without feeling a personal connection. I shuddered when we passed a statue of Horus—the falcon-headed god who’d inhabited my body last Christmas. We walked by a sarcophagus, and I remembered how the evil god Set had imprisoned our father in a golden coffin at the British Museum. Everywhere there were pictures of Osiris, the blue-skinned god of the dead, and I thought about how Dad had sacrificed himself to become Osiris’s new host. Right now, somewhere in the magic realm of the Duat, our dad was the king of the underworld. I can’t even describe how weird it felt seeing a five-thousand-year-old painting of some blue Egyptian god and thinking, “Yep, that’s my dad.”