The Complete Kane Chronicles (82 page)

Julian ruffled Shelby’s hair. “Come on, sweetie. Draw me another picture, okay?”

Shelby said, “Kill?”

Julian steered her away. Sadie, Bast, and I headed to the library.

The heavy oaken doors opened to a staircase that descended into a huge cylindrical room like a well. Painted on the domed ceiling was Nut, the sky goddess, with silver constellations glittering on her dark blue body. The floor was a mosaic of her husband, Geb, the earth god, his body covered with rivers, hills, and deserts.

Even though it was late, our self-appointed librarian, Cleo, still had her four
shabti
statues at work. The clay men rushed around, dusting shelves, rearranging scrolls, and sorting books in the honeycombed compartments along the walls. Cleo herself sat at the worktable, jotting notes on a papyrus scroll while she talked to Khufu, who squatted on the table in front of her, patting our new antique cabinet and grunting in Baboon, like:
Hey, Cleo, wanna buy a gold box?

Cleo wasn’t much in the bravery department, but she had an incredible memory. She could speak six languages, including English, her native Portuguese (she was Brazilian), Ancient Egyptian, and a few words of Baboon. She’d taken it upon herself to create a master index to all our scrolls, and had been gathering more scrolls from all over the world to help us find information on Apophis. It was Cleo who’d found the connection between the serpent’s recent attacks and the scrolls written by the legendary magician Setne.

She was a great help, though sometimes she got exasperated when she had to make room in
her
library for our school texts, Internet stations, large artifacts, and Bast’s back issues of
Cat Fancy
magazine.

When Cleo saw us coming down the stairs, she jumped to her feet. “You’re alive!”

“Don’t sound so surprised,” Sadie muttered.

Cleo chewed her lip. “Sorry, I just…I’m glad. Khufu came in alone, so I was worried. He was trying to tell me something about this gold box, but it’s empty. Did you find the Book of Overcoming Apophis?”

“The scroll burned,” I said. “We couldn’t save it.”

Cleo looked like she might scream. “But that was the last copy! How could Apophis destroy something so valuable?”

I wanted to remind Cleo that Apophis was out to destroy the entire world, but I knew she didn’t like to think about that. It made her sick from fear.

Getting outraged about the scroll was more manageable for her. The idea that anybody could destroy a book of any kind made Cleo want to punch Apophis in the face.

One of the
shabti
jumped onto the table. He tried to stick a scanner label on the golden cabinet, but Cleo shooed the clay man away.

“All of you, back to your places!” She clapped her hands, and the four
shabti
returned to their pedestals. They reverted to solid clay, though one was still wearing rubber gloves and holding a feather duster, which looked a little odd.

Cleo leaned in and studied the gold box. “There’s nothing inside. Why did you bring it?”

“That’s what Sadie, Bast, and I need to discuss,” I said. “If you don’t mind, Cleo.”

“I don’t mind.” Cleo kept examining the cabinet. Then she realized we were all staring at her. “Oh…you mean privately. Of course.”

She looked a little upset about getting kicked out, but she took Khufu’s hand. “Come on,
babuinozinho
. We’ll get you a snack.”

“Agh!”
Khufu said happily. He adored Cleo, possibly because of her name. For reasons none of us quite understood, Khufu loved things that ended in -O, like avocados, Oreos, and armadillos.

Once Cleo and Khufu were gone, Sadie, Bast, and I gathered around our new acquisition.

The cabinet was shaped like a miniature school locker. The exterior was gold, but it must’ve been a thin layer of foil covering wood, because the whole thing wasn’t very heavy. The sides and top were engraved with hieroglyphs and pictures of the pharaoh and his wife. The front was fitted with latched double doors, which opened to reveal…well, not much of anything. There was a tiny pedestal marked by gold footprints, as if an Ancient Egyptian Barbie doll had once stood there.

Sadie studied the hieroglyphs along the sides of the box. “It’s all about Tut and his queen, wishing them a happy afterlife, blah, blah. There’s a picture of him hunting ducks. Honestly? That was his idea of paradise?”

“I like ducks,” Bast said.

I moved the little doors back and forth on their hinges. “Somehow I don’t think the ducks are important. Whatever was inside here, it’s gone now. Maybe grave robbers took it, or—”

Bast chuckled. “Grave robbers took it. Sure.”

I frowned at her. “What’s so funny?”

She grinned at me, then Sadie, before apparently realizing we didn’t get the joke. “Oh…I see. You actually don’t know what this is. I suppose that makes sense. Not many have survived.”

“Not many what?” I asked.

“Shadow boxes.”

Sadie wrinkled her nose. “Isn’t that a sort of school project? Did one for English once. Deadly boring.”

“I wouldn’t know about school projects,” Bast said haughtily. “That sounds suspiciously like
work
. But this is an
actual
shadow box—a box to hold a shadow.”

Bast didn’t sound like she was kidding, but it’s hard to tell with cats.

“It’s in there right now,” she insisted. “Can’t you see it? A little shadowy bit of Tut. Hello, shadow Tut!” She wriggled her fingers at the empty box. “That’s why I laughed when you said grave robbers might have stolen it. Ha! That would be a trick.”

I tried to wrap my mind around this idea. “But…I’ve heard Dad lecture on, like, every possible Egyptian artifact. I never once heard him mention a shadow box.”

“As I told you,” Bast said, “not many have survived. Usually the shadow box was buried far away from the rest of the soul. Tut was quite silly to have it placed in his tomb. Perhaps one of the priests put it there against his orders, out of spite.”

I was totally lost now. To my surprise, Sadie was nodding enthusiastically.

“That must’ve been what Anubis meant,” she said. “
Pay
attention to what’s not there.
When I looked into the Duat, I saw darkness inside the box. And Uncle Vinnie said it was a clue to defeating Apophis.”

I made a “Time out” T with my hands. “Back up. Sadie, where did you see Anubis? And since when do we have an uncle named Vinnie?”

She looked a little embarrassed, but she described her encounter with the face in the wall, then the visions she’d had of our mom and Isis and her godly almost-boyfriend Anubis. I knew my sister’s attention wandered a lot, but even
I
was impressed by how many mystical side trips she’d managed, just walking through a museum.

“The face in the wall could’ve been a trick,” I said.

“Possibly…but I don’t think so. The face said we would need his help, and we had only two days until something happened to him. He told me this box would show us what we needed. Anubis hinted I was on the right track, saving this cabinet. And Mum…” Sadie faltered. “Mum said this was the only way we’d ever see her again. Something is happening to the spirits of the dead.”

Suddenly I felt like I was back in the Duat, wrapped in freezing fog. I stared at the box, but I still didn’t see anything. “How do shadows tie in to Apophis and spirits of the dead?”

I looked at Bast. She dug her fingernails into the table, using it like a scratching post, the way she does when she’s tense. We go through a lot of tables.

“Bast?” Sadie asked gently.

“Apophis and shadows,” Bast mused. “I’d never considered…” She shook her head. “These are really questions you should ask Thoth. He’s much more knowledgeable than I.”

A memory surfaced. My dad had given a lecture at a university somewhere…Munich, maybe? The students had asked him about the Egyptian concept of the soul, which had multiple parts, and my dad mentioned something about shadows.

Like one hand with five fingers
, he’d said.
One soul with five
parts.

I held up my own fingers, trying to remember. “Five parts of the soul…what are they?”

Bast stayed silent. She looked pretty uncomfortable.

“Carter?” Sadie asked. “What does that have to do—?”

“Just humor me,” I said. “The first part is the
ba
, right? Our personality.”

“Chicken form,” Sadie said.

Trust Sadie to nickname part of your soul after poultry, but I knew what she meant. The
ba
could leave the body when we dreamed, or it could come back to the earth as a ghost after we died. When it did, it appeared as a large glowing bird with a human head.

“Yeah,” I said. “Chicken form. Then there’s the
ka
, the life force that leaves the body when it dies. Then there’s the
ib
, the heart—”

“The record of good and bad deeds,” Sadie agreed. “That’s the bit they weigh on the scales of justice in the afterlife.”

“And fourth…” I hesitated.

“The
ren
,” Sadie supplied. “Your secret name.”

I was too embarrassed to look at her. Last spring she’d saved my life by speaking my secret name, which had basically given her access to my most private thoughts and darkest emotions. Since then she’d been pretty cool about it, but still…that’s not the kind of leverage you want to give your little sister.

The
ren
was also the part of the soul that our friend Bes had given up for us in our gambling match six months ago with the moon god Khonsu. Now Bes was a hollow shell of a god, sitting in a wheelchair in the Underworld’s divine nursing home.

“Right,” I said. “But the fifth part…” I looked at Bast. “It’s the shadow, isn’t it?”

Sadie frowned. “The shadow? How can a shadow be part of your soul? It’s just a silhouette, isn’t it? A trick of the light.”

Bast held her hand over the table. Her fingers cast a vague shadow over the wood. “You can never be free of your shadow—your
sheut
. All living beings have them.”

“So do rocks, pencils, and shoes,” Sadie said. “Does that mean
they
have souls?”

“You know better,” Bast chided. “Living beings are different from rocks…well,
most
are, anyway. The
sheut
is not just a physical shadow. It’s a magical projection—the silhouette of the soul.”

“So this box…” I said. “When you say it holds King Tut’s shadow—”

“I mean it holds one fifth of his soul,” Bast confirmed. “It houses the pharaoh’s
sheut
so it will not be lost in the afterlife.”

My brain felt like it was about to explode. I knew this stuff about shadows must be important, but I didn’t see how. It was like I’d been handed a puzzle piece, but it was for the wrong puzzle.

We’d failed to save the
right
piece—an irreplaceable scroll that might’ve helped us beat Apophis—and we’d failed to save an entire nome full of friendly magicians. All we had to show from our trip was an empty cabinet decorated with pictures of ducks. I wanted to knock King Tut’s shadow box across the room.

“Lost shadows,” I muttered. “This sounds like that
Peter
Pan
story.”

Bast’s eyes glowed like paper lanterns. “What do you think
inspired
the story of Peter Pan’s lost shadow? There have been folktales about shadows for centuries, Carter—all handed down since the days of Egypt.”

“But how does that
help
us?” I demanded. “The Book of Overcoming Apophis would’ve helped us. Now it’s gone!”

Okay, I sounded angry. I
was
angry.

Remembering my dad’s lectures made me want to be a kid again, traveling the world with him. We’d been through some weird stuff together, but I’d always felt safe and protected. He’d always known what to do. Now all I had left from those days was my suitcase, gathering dust in my closet upstairs.

It wasn’t fair. But I knew what my dad would say about that:
Fair means everyone gets what they need. And the only way to
get what you need is to make that happen yourself.

Great, Dad. I’m facing an impossible enemy, and what I
need
in order to defeat him just got destroyed.

Sadie must’ve read my expression. “Carter, we’ll figure it out,” she promised. “Bast, you were about to say something earlier about Apophis and shadows.”

“No, I wasn’t,” Bast murmured.

“Why are you so nervous about this?” I asked. “Do gods
have
shadows? Does Apophis? If so, how do they work?”

Bast gouged some hieroglyphs in the table with her fingernails. I was pretty sure the message read:
DANGER
.

“Honestly, children…this is a question for Thoth. Yes, gods have shadows. Of course we do. But—but it’s not something we’re supposed to talk about.”

I’d rarely seen Bast look so agitated. I wasn’t sure why. This was a goddess who’d fought Apophis face-to-face, claw to fang, in a magical prison for thousands of years. Why was she scared of shadows?

“Bast,” I said, “if we can’t figure out a better solution, we’ll have to go with Plan B.”

The goddess winced. Sadie stared dejectedly at the table. Plan B was something only Sadie, Bast, Walt, and I had discussed. Our other initiates didn’t know about it. We hadn’t even told our Uncle Amos. It was
that
scary.

“I—I would hate that,” Bast said. “But, Carter, I really don’t know the answers. And if you start asking about shadows, you’ll be delving into very dangerous—”

There was a knock on the library doors. Cleo and Khufu appeared at the top of the stairs.

“Sorry to disturb,” Cleo said. “Carter, Khufu just came down from your room. He seems anxious to talk with you.”

“Agh!”
Khufu insisted.

Bast translated from baboon-speak. “He says there’s a call for you on the scrying bowl, Carter. A
private
call.”

As if I weren’t stressed enough already. Only one person would be sending me a scrying vision, and if she was contacting me so late at night, it had to be bad news.

“Meeting adjourned,” I told the others. “See you in the morning.”

C A R T E R

I
WAS IN LOVE WITH A BIRDBATH
.

Most guys checked their phone for texts, or obsessed over what girls were saying about them online. Me, I couldn’t stay away from the scrying bowl.

It was just a bronze saucer on a stone pedestal, sitting on the balcony outside my bedroom. But whenever I was in my room, I found myself stealing glances at it, resisting the urge to rush outside and check for a glimpse of Zia.

The weird thing was—I couldn’t even call her my girlfriend. What do you call somebody when you fall in love with her replica
shabti
, then rescue the real person only to find she doesn’t share your feelings? And Sadie thinks
her
relationships are complicated.

Over the past six months, since Zia had gone to help my uncle at the First Nome, the bowl had been our only contact. I’d spent so many hours staring into it, talking with Zia, I could hardly remember what she looked like without enchanted oil rippling across her face.

By the time I reached the balcony, I was out of breath. From the surface of the oil, Zia stared up at me. Her arms were crossed; her eyes so angry, they looked like they might ignite. (The first scrying bowl Walt had made actually
did
ignite, but that’s another story.)

“Carter,” she said, “I’m going to strangle you.”

She was beautiful when she threatened to kill me. Over the summer she’d let her hair grow out so that it swept over her shoulders in a glossy black wave. She wasn’t the
shabti
I’d first fallen for, but her face still had a sculpted beauty—delicate nose, full red lips, dazzling amber eyes. Her skin glowed like terracotta warm from the kiln.

“You heard about Dallas,” I guessed. “Zia, I’m sorry—”

“Carter,
everyone
has heard about Dallas. Other nomes have been sending Amos
ba
messengers for the past hour, demanding answers. Magicians as far away as Cuba felt ripples in the Duat. Some claimed you blew up half of Texas. Some said the entire Fifty-first Nome was destroyed. Some said—some said you were dead.”

The concern in her voice lifted my spirits a little, but it also made me feel guiltier.

“I wanted to tell you in advance,” I said. “But by the time we realized Apophis’s target was Dallas, we had to move immediately.”

I told her what had happened at the King Tut exhibit, including our mistakes and casualties.

I tried to read Zia’s expression. Even after so many months, it was hard to guess what she was thinking. Just
seeing
her tended to short-circuit my brain. Half the time I could barely remember how to speak in complete sentences.

Finally she muttered something in Arabic—probably a curse.

“I’m glad you survived—but the Fifty-first destroyed…?” She shook her head in disbelief. “I knew Anne Grissom. She taught me healing magic when I was young.”

I remembered the pretty blond lady who had played with the band, and the ruined fiddle at the edge of the explosion.

“They were good people,” I said.

“Some of our last allies,” Zia said. “The rebels are already blaming you for their deaths. If any more nomes desert Amos…”

She didn’t have to finish that thought. Last spring, the worst villains in the House of Life had formed a hit squad to destroy Brooklyn House. We’d defeated them. Amos had even given them amnesty when he became the new Chief Lector. But some refused to follow him. The rebels were still out there—gathering strength, turning other magicians against us. As if we needed more enemies.

“They’re blaming me?” I asked. “Did they contact you?”

“Worse. They broadcasted a message to you.”

The oil rippled. I saw a different face—Sarah Jacobi, leader of the rebels. She had milky skin, spiky black hair, and dark, permanently startled eyes lined with too much kohl. In her pure white robes she looked like a Halloween ghoul.

She stood in a room lined with marble columns. Behind her glowered half a dozen magicians—Jacobi’s elite killers. I recognized the blue robes and shaven head of Kwai, who’d been exiled from the North Korean nome for murdering a fellow magician. Next to him stood Petrovich, a scar-faced Ukrainian who’d once worked as an assassin for our old enemy Vlad Menshikov.

The others I couldn’t identify, but I doubted that any of them was as bad as Sarah Jacobi herself. Until Menshikov had released her, she’d been exiled in Antarctica for causing an Indian Ocean tsunami that killed more than a quarter of a million people.

“Carter Kane!” she shouted.

Because this was a broadcast, I knew it was just a magical recording, but her voice made me jump.

“The House of Life demands your surrender,” she said. “Your crimes are unforgivable. You must pay with your life.”

My stomach barely had time to drop before a series of violent images flashed across the oil. I saw the Rosetta Stone exploding in the British Museum—the incident that had unleashed Set and killed my father last Christmas. How had Jacobi gotten a visual of that? I saw the fight at Brooklyn House last spring, when Sadie and I had arrived in Ra’s sun boat to drive out Jacobi’s hit squad. The images she showed made it look like
we
were the aggressors—a bunch of hooligans with godly powers beating up on poor Jacobi and her friends.

“You released Set and his brethren,” Jacobi narrated. “You broke the most sacred rule of magic and cooperated with the gods. In doing so, you unbalanced Ma’at, causing the rise of Apophis.”

“That’s a lie!” I said. “Apophis was rising anyway!”

Then I remembered I was yelling at a video.

The scenes kept shifting. I saw a high-rise building on fire in the Shibuya district of Tokyo, headquarters of the 234th Nome. A flying demon with the head of a samurai sword crashed through a window and carried off a screaming magician.

I saw the home of the old Chief Lector, Michel Desjardins—a beautiful Paris townhouse on the rue des Pyramides—now in ruins. The roof had collapsed. The windows were broken. Ripped scrolls and soggy books littered the dead garden, and the hieroglyph for Chaos smoldered on the front door like a cattle brand.

“All this you have caused,” Jacobi said. “You have given the Chief Lector’s mantle to a servant of evil. You have corrupted young magicians by teaching the path of the gods. You’ve weakened the House of Life and left us at the mercy of Apophis. We will not stand for this. Any who follow you will be punished.”

The vision changed to Sphinx House in London, headquarters for the British nome. Sadie and I had visited there over the summer and managed to make peace with them after hours of negotiations. I saw Kwai storming through the library, smashing statues of the gods and raking books off the shelves. A dozen British magicians stood in chains before their conqueror, Sarah Jacobi, who held a gleaming black knife. The leader of the nome, a harmless old guy named Sir Leicester, was forced to his knees. Sarah Jacobi raised her knife. The blade fell, and the scene shifted.

Jacobi’s ghoulish face stared up at me from the surface of the oil. Her eyes were as dark as the sockets of a skull.

“The Kanes are a plague,” she said. “You must be destroyed. Surrender yourself and your family for execution. We will spare your other followers as long as they renounce the path of the gods. I do not seek the office of Chief Lector, but I must take it for the good of Egypt. When the Kanes are dead, we will be strong and united again. We will undo the damage you’ve caused and send the gods and Apophis back to the Duat. Justice comes swiftly, Carter Kane. This will be your only warning.”

Sarah Jacobi’s image dissolved in the oil, and I was alone again with Zia’s reflection.

“Yeah,” I said shakily. “For a mass murderer, she’s pretty convincing.”

Zia nodded. “Jacobi has already turned or defeated most of our allies in Europe and Asia. A lot of the recent attacks—against Paris, Tokyo, Madrid—those were Jacobi’s work, but she’s blaming them on Apophis—or Brooklyn House.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“You and I know that,” she agreed. “But the magicians are scared. Jacobi is telling them that if the Kanes are destroyed, Apophis will go back to the Duat and things will return to normal. They
want
to believe it. She’s telling them that following you is a death sentence. After the destruction of Dallas—”

“I get it,” I snapped.

It wasn’t fair for me to get mad at Zia, but I felt so helpless. Everything we did seemed to turn out wrong. I imagined Apophis laughing in the Underworld. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t attacked the House of Life in full force yet. He was having too much fun watching us tear each other apart.

“Why didn’t Jacobi direct her message at Amos?” I asked. “He’s the Chief Lector.”

Zia glanced away as if checking on something. I couldn’t see much of her surroundings, but she didn’t seem to be in her dorm room at the First Nome, or in the Hall of Ages. “Like Jacobi said, they consider Amos a servant of evil. They won’t talk to him.”

“Because he was possessed by Set,” I guessed. “That wasn’t
his
fault. He’s been healed. He’s fine.”

Zia winced.

“What?” I asked. “He
is
fine, isn’t he?”

“Carter, it’s—it’s complicated. Look, the main problem is Jacobi. She’s taken over Menshikov’s old base in St. Petersburg. It’s almost as much of a fortress as the First Nome. We don’t know what she’s up to or how many magicians she has. We don’t know when she’ll strike or where. But she’s going to attack soon.”

Justice comes swiftly. This will be your only warning.

Something told me Jacobi wouldn’t attack Brooklyn House again, not after she’d been humiliated last time. But if she wanted to take over the House of Life and destroy the Kanes, what else could her target be?

I locked eyes with Zia, and I realized what she was thinking.

“No,” I said. “They’d never attack the First Nome. That would be suicide. It’s survived for five thousand years.”

“Carter…we’re weaker than you realize. We were never fully staffed. Now many of our best magicians have disappeared, possibly gone over to the other side. We’ve got some old men and a few scared children left, plus Amos and me.” She spread her arms in exasperation. “And half the time
I’m
stuck here—”

“Wait,” I said. “Where are you?”

Somewhere to Zia’s left, a man’s voice warbled, “Hell-ooooo!”

Zia sighed. “Great. He’s up from his nap.”

An old man stuck his face in the scrying bowl. He grinned, showing exactly two teeth. His bald wrinkly head made him look like a geriatric baby. “Zebras are here!”

He opened his mouth and tried to suck the oil out of the bowl, making the whole scene ripple.

“My lord, no!” Zia pulled him back. “You can’t drink the enchanted oil. We’ve talked about this. Here, have a cookie.”

“Cookies!” he squealed. “Wheee!” The old man danced off with a tasty treat in his hands.

Zia’s senile grandfather? Nope. That was Ra, god of the sun, first divine pharaoh of Egypt and archenemy of Apophis. Last spring we’d gone on a quest to find him and revive him from his twilight sleep, trusting he would rise in all his glory and fight the Chaos snake for us.

Instead, Ra woke up senile and demented. He was excellent at gumming biscuits, drooling, and singing nonsense songs. Fighting Apophis? Not so much.

“You’re babysitting
again
?” I asked.

Zia shrugged. “It’s after sunrise here. Horus and Isis watch him most nights on the sun boat. But during the day…well, Ra gets upset if I don’t come to visit, and none of the other gods want to watch him. Honestly, Carter…” She lowered her voice. “I’m afraid of what they’d do if I left Ra alone with them. They’re getting tired of him.”

“Wheee!” Ra said in the background.

My heart sank. Yet another thing to feel guilty about: I’d saddled Zia with nanny duty for a sun god. Stuck in the throne room of the gods every day, helping Amos run the First Nome every night, Zia barely had time to sleep, much less go on a date—even if I could get up the courage to ask her.

Of course, that wouldn’t matter if Apophis destroyed the world, or if Sarah Jacobi and her magical killers got to me. For a moment I wondered if Jacobi was right—if the world
had
gone sideways because of the Kane family, and if it would be better off without us.

I felt so helpless, I briefly considered calling on the power of Horus. I could’ve used some of the war god’s courage and confidence. But I suspected that joining my thoughts with Horus’s wouldn’t be a good idea. My emotions were jumbled enough without another voice in my head, egging me on.

“I know that expression,” Zia chided. “You can’t blame yourself, Carter. If it weren’t for you and Sadie, Apophis would have already destroyed the world. There’s still hope.”

Plan B, I thought. Unless we could figure out this mystery about shadows and how they could be used to fight Apophis, we’d be stuck with Plan B, which meant certain death for Sadie and me even if it worked. But I wasn’t going to tell Zia that. She didn’t need any more depressing news.

“You’re right,” I said. “We’ll figure out something.”

“I’ll be back at the First Nome tonight. Call me then, okay? We should talk about—”