The Red Pyramid -1 (45 page)

"How did she do that?" Sadie hissed.

"Her breath creates the deserts," Zia said. "That is the legend."

"Better and better." Fear was closing up my throat, but I knew we couldn't hide much longer. I summoned my sword. "I'll distract her. You two run--"

"No," Zia insisted. "There is another way." She pointed at a row of silos on the other side of the lot. Each one was three stories tall and maybe twenty feet in diameter, with a giant chili pepper painted on the side.

"Petrol tanks?" Sadie asked.

"No," I said. "Must be salsa, right?"

Sadie stared at me blankly. "Isn't that a type of music?"

"It's a hot sauce," I said. "That's what they make here."

Sekhmet breathed in our direction, and the three trailers next to us melted into sand. We scuttled sideways and jumped behind a cinder block wall.

"Listen," Zia gasped, her face beading with sweat. "When the people needed to stop Sekhmet, they got huge vats of beer and colored them bright red with pomegranate juice."

"Yeah, I remember now," I interrupted. "They told Sekhmet it was blood, and she drank until she passed out. Then Ra was able to recall her into the heavens. They transformed her into something gentler. A cow goddess or something."

"Hathor," Zia said. "That is Sekhmet's other form. The flip side of her personality."

Sadie shook her head in disbelief. "So you're saying we offer to buy Sekhmet a few pints, and she'll turn into a cow."

"Not exactly," Zia said. "But salsa is red, is it not?"

We skirted the factory grounds as Sekhmet chewed up trucks and blasted huge swathes of the parking lot to sand.

"I hate this plan," Sadie grumbled.

"Just keep her occupied for a few seconds," I said. "And don't die."

"Yeah, that's the hard bit, isn't it?"

"One..." I counted. "Two...three!"

Sadie burst into the open and used her favorite spell: "Ha-di!"

The glyphs blazed over Sekhmet's head:

And everything around her exploded. Trucks burst to pieces. The air shimmered with energy.

The ground heaved upward, creating a crater fifty feet deep into which the lioness tumbled.

It was pretty impressive, but I didn't have time to admire Sadie's work. I turned into a falcon and launched myself toward the salsa tanks.

"RRAAAARR!" Sekhmet leaped out of the crater and breathed desert wind in Sadie's direction, but Sadie was long gone. She ran sideways, ducking behind trailers and releasing a few lengths of magical rope as she fled. The ropes whipped through the air and tried to tie themselves around the lioness's mouth. They failed, of course, but they did annoy the Destroyer.

"Show yourself!" Sekhmet bellowed. "I will feast on your flesh!"

Perched on a silo, I concentrated all my power and turned straight from falcon to avatar. My glowing form was so heavy, its feet sank into the top of the tank.

"Sekhmet!" I yelled.

The lioness whirled and snarled, trying to locate my voice.

"Up here, kitty!" I called.

She spotted me and her ears went back. "Horus?"

"Unless you know another guy with a falcon head."

She padded back and forth uncertainly, then roared in challenge. "Why do you speak to me when I am in my raging form? You know I must destroy everything in my path, even you!"

"If you must," I said. "But first, you might like to feast on the blood of your enemies!"

I drove my sword into the tank and salsa gushed out in a chunky red waterfall. I leaped to the next tank and sliced it open. And again, and again, until six silofuls of Magic Salsa were spewing into the parking lot.

"Ha, ha!" Sekhmet loved it. She leaped into the red sauce torrent, rolling in it, lapping it up.

"Blood. Lovely blood!"

Yeah, apparently lions aren't too bright, or their taste buds aren't very developed, because Sekhmet didn't stop until her belly was bulging and her mouth literally began to smoke.

"Tangy," she said, stumbling and blinking. "But my eyes hurt. What kind of blood is this?

Nubian? Persian?"

"Jalapeno," I said. "Try some more. It gets better."

Her ears were smoking too now as she tried to drink more. Her eyes watered, and she began to stagger.

"I..." Steam curled from her mouth. "Hot...hot mouth..."

"Milk is good for that," I suggested. "Maybe if you were a cow."

"Trick," Sekhmet groaned. "You...you tricked..."

But her eyes were too heavy. She turned in a circle and collapsed, curling into a ball. Her form twitched and shimmered as her red armor melted into spots on her golden skin, until I was looking down at an enormous sleeping cow.

I dropped off the silo and stepped carefully around the sleeping goddess. She was making cow snoring sounds, like "Moo-zzz, moo-zzz." I waved my hand in front of her face, and when I was convinced she was out cold, I dispelled my avatar. Sadie and Zia emerged from behind a trailer.

"Well," said Sadie, "that was different."

"I will never eat salsa again," I decided.

"You both did wonderfully," Zia said. "But your boat is burned. How do we get to Phoenix?"

"We?" Sadie said. "I don't recall inviting you."

Zia's face turned salsa red. "Surely you don't still think I led you into a trap?"

"I don't know," Sadie said. "Did you?"

I couldn't believe I was hearing this.

"Sadie." My voice sounded dangerously angry, even to myself. "Lay off. Zia summoned that pillar-of-fire thing. She sacrificed her magic to save us. And she told us how to beat the lioness.

We need her."

Sadie stared at me. She glanced back and forth between Zia and me, probably trying to judge how far she could push things.

"Fine." She crossed her arms and pouted. "But we need to find Amos first."

"No!" Zia said. "That would be a very bad idea."

"Oh, so we can trust you, but not Amos?"

Zia hesitated. I got the feeling that was exactly what she meant, but she decided to try a different approach. "Amos would not want you to wait. He said to keep going, didn't he? If he survived Sekhmet, he will find us on the road. If not..."

Sadie huffed. "So how do we get to Phoenix? Walk?"

I gazed across the parking lot, where one sixteen-wheeler was still intact. "Maybe we don't have to." I took off the linen coat I'd borrowed from Amos's supply locker. "Zia, Amos had a way of animating his coat so it could steer his boat. Do you know the spell?"

She nodded. "It's fairly simple with the right ingredients. I could do it if I had my magic."

"Can you teach me?"

She pursed her lips. "The hardest part is the figurine. The first time you enchant the piece of clothing, you'd need to smash a shabti into the fabric and speak a binding charm to meld them together. It would require a clay or wax figure that has already been imbued with a spirit."

Sadie and I looked at each other, and simultaneously said, "Doughboy!"

C A R T E R

I SUMMONED DAD'S MAGIC TOOLKITout of the Duat and grabbed our little legless friend.

"Doughboy, we need to talk."

Doughboy opened his wax eyes. ""Finally! You realize how stuffy it is in there? At last you've remembered that you need my brilliant guidance."

"Actually we need you to become a coat. Just for a while."

His tiny mouth fell open. "Do I look like an article of clothing? I am the lord of all knowledge!

The mighty--"

I smashed him into my jacket, wadded it up, threw it on the pavement and stepped on it. "Zia, what's that spell?"

She told me the words, and I repeated the chant. The coat inflated and hovered in front of me. It brushed itself off and ruffled its collar. If coats can look indignant, this one did.

Sadie eyed it suspiciously. "Can it drive a lorry with no feet for the pedals?"

"Shouldn't be a problem," Zia said. "It's a nice long coat."

I sighed with relief. For a moment, I'd imagined myself having to animate my pants, too. That could get awkward.

"Drive us to Phoenix," I told the coat.

The coat made a rude gesture at me--or at least, it would've been rude if the coat had hands.

Then it floated into the driver's seat.

The cab was bigger than I'd thought. Behind the seat was a curtained area with a full-size bed, which Sadie claimed immediately.

"I'll let you and Zia have some quality time," she told me. "Just the two of you and your coat."

She ducked behind the curtains before I could smack her.

The coat drove us west on I-10 as a bank of dark clouds swallowed the stars. The air smelled like rain.

After a long time, Zia cleared her throat. "Carter, I'm sorry about...I mean, I wish the circumstances were better."

"Yeah," I said. "I guess you'll get in a lot of trouble with the House."

"I will be shunned," she said. "My staff broken. My name blotted from the books. I'll be cast into exile, assuming they don't kill me."

I thought about Zia's little shrine in the First Nome--all those pictures of her village and her family that she didn't remember. As she talked about getting exiled, she had the same expression on her face that she had worn then: not regret or sadness, more like confusion, as if she herself couldn't figure out why she was rebelling, or what the First Nome had meant to her. She'd said Iskandar was like her only family. Now she had no one.

"You could come with us," I said.

She glanced over. We were sitting close together, and I was very aware of her shoulder pressing against mine. Even with the reek of burned peppers on both of us, I could smell her Egyptian perfume. She had a dried chili stuck in her hair, and somehow that made her look even cuter.

Sadie says my brain was just addled. [Seriously, Sadie, I don't interrupt this much when you're telling the story.]

Anyway, Zia looked at me sadly. "Where would we go, Carter? Even if you defeat Set and save this continent, what will you do? The House will hunt you down. The gods will make your life miserable."

"We'll figure it out," I promised. "I'm used to traveling. I'm good at improvising, and Sadie's not all bad."

"I heard that!" Sadie's muffled voice came through the curtain.

"And with you," I continued, "I mean, you know, with your magic, things would be easier."

Zia squeezed my hand, which sent a tingle up my arm. "You're kind, Carter. But you don't know me. Not really. I suppose Iskandar saw this coming."

"What do you mean?"

Zia took her hand away, which kind of bummed me out. "When Desjardins and I came back from the British Museum, Iskandar spoke to me privately. He said I was in danger. He said he would take me somewhere safe and..." Her eyebrows knit together. "That's odd. I don't remember."

A cold feeling started gnawing at me. "Wait, did he take you somewhere safe?"

"I...I think so." She shook her head. "No, he couldn't have, obviously. I'm still here. Perhaps he didn't have time. He sent me to find you in New York almost immediately."

Outside, a light rain began to fall. The coat turned on our windshield wipers.

I didn't understand what Zia had told me. Perhaps Iskandar had sensed a change in Desjardins, and he was trying to protect his favorite student. But something else about the story bothered me-something I couldn't quite put my finger on.

Zia stared into the rain as if she saw bad things out there in the night.

"We're running out of time," she said. "He's coming back."

"Who's coming back?"

She looked at me urgently. "The thing I needed to tell you--the thing you need. It's Set's secret name."

The storm surged. Thunder crackled and the truck shuddered in the wind.

"H-hold on," I stammered. "How could you know Set's name? How did you even know we needed it?"

"You stole Desjardins' book. Desjardins told us about it. He said it didn't matter. He said you could not use the spell without Set's secret name, which is impossible to get."

"So how do you know it? Thoth said it could only come from Set himself, or from the person..."

My voice trailed off as a horrible thought occurred to me. "Or from the person closest to him."