The Throne of Fire

GETTING INSIDE THE HERMITAGE wasn’t a problem.

State-of-the-art security doesn’t protect against magic. Sadie and I had to combine forces to get past the perimeter, but with a little concentration, ink and papyrus, and some tapped energy from our godly friends Isis and Horus, we managed to pull off a short stroll through the Duat.

One minute we were standing in the abandoned Palace Square. Then everything went gray and misty. My stomach tingled like I was in free fall. We slipped out of synch with the mortal world and passed through the iron gates and solid stone into the museum.

The Egyptian room was on the ground floor, just as Bes had said. We re-entered the mortal realm and found ourselves in the middle of the collection: sarcophagi in glass cases, hieroglyphic scrolls, statues of gods and pharaohs. It wasn’t much different from a hundred other Egyptian collections I’d seen, but the setting was pretty impressive. A vaulted ceiling soared overhead. The polished marble floor was done in a white-andgray diamond pattern, which made walking on it kind of like walking on an optical illusion. I wondered how many rooms there were like this in the tsar’s palace, and if it really took eleven days to see them all. I hoped Bes was right about the secret entrance to the nome being somewhere in this room. We didn’t have eleven days to search. In less than seventy-two hours, Apophis would break free. I remembered that glowing red eye beneath the scarab shells—a force of chaos so powerful, it could melt human senses. Three days, and that thing would be unleashed on the world.

Sadie summoned her staff and pointed it at the nearest security camera. The lens cracked and made a sound like a bug zapper. Even in the best of situations, technology and magic don’t get along. One of the easiest spells in the world is to make electronics malfunction. I just have to look at a cell phone funny to make it blow up. And computers? Forget about it. I imagined Sadie had just sent a magical pulse through the security system that would fry every camera and sensor in the network.

Still, there were other kinds of surveillance—magical kinds. I pulled a piece of black linen and a pair of crude wax shabti out of my bag. I wrapped the shabti in the cloth and spoke a command word: “I’mun.”

The hieroglyph for Hide glowed briefly over the cloth. A mass of darkness bloomed from the package, like a squid’s ink cloud. It expanded until it covered both Sadie and me in a gauzy bubble of shadows. We could see through it, but hopefully nothing could see in. The cloud would be invisible to anyone outside.

“You got it right this time!” Sadie said. “When did you master the spell?”

I probably blushed. I’d been obsessed with figuring out the invisibility spell for months, ever since I’d seen Zia use it in the First Nome.

“Actually I’m still—” A gold spark shot out of the cloud like a miniature fireworks rocket. “I’m still working on it.”

Sadie sighed. “Well…better than last time. The cloud looked like a lava lamp. And the time before, when it smelled like rotten eggs—”

“Could we just get going?” I asked. “Where shouldwestart?”

Her eyes locked on one of the displays. She drifted toward it in a trance.

“Sadie?” I followed her to a limestone grave marker—a stele—about two feet by three feet. The description next to it was in Russian and English.

“‘From the tomb of the scribe Ipi,’” I read aloud. “‘Worked in the court of King Tut.’ Why are you interested… oh.”

Stupid me. The picture on the gravestone showed the deceased scribe honoring Anubis. After talking with Anubis in person, Sadie must’ve found it strange to see him in a three-thousand-year-old tomb painting, especially when he was pictured with the head of a jackal, wearing a skirt.

“Walt likes you.”

I have no idea why I blurted that out. This wasn’t the time or the place. I knew I wasn’t doing Walt any favors by taking his side. But I’d started to feel bad for him after Bes kicked him out of the limo. The guy had come all the way to London to help me save Sadie, and we’d dumped him in Crystal Palace Park like an unwanted hitchhiker.

I was kind of angry at Sadie for giving him the cold shoulder and crushing so hard on Anubis, who was five thousand years too old for her and not even human. Plus, the way she snubbed Walt reminded me too much of the way Zia had treated me at first. And maybe, if I was honest with myself, I was also irritated with Sadie because she’d solved her own problems in London without needing our help.

Wow. That sounded really selfish. But I suppose it was true. Amazing how many different ways a younger sister can annoy you at once.

Sadie didn’t take her eyes off the stele. “Carter, you have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You’re not giving the guy a chance,” I insisted. “Whatever’s going on with him, it’s got nothing to do with you.”

“Very reassuring, but that’s not—”

“Besides, Anubis is a god. You don’t honestly think—”

“Carter!” she snapped. My cloaking spell must’ve been sensitive to emotion, because another gold spark whistled and popped from our not-so-invisible cloud. “I wasn’t looking at this stone because of Anubis.”

“You weren’t?”

“No. And I’m certainly not having an argument with you about Walt. Contrary to what you might think, I don’t spend every waking hour thinking about boys.”

“Just most waking hours?”

She rolled her eyes. “Look at the gravestone, birdbrain. It’s got a border around it, like a window frame or —”

“A door,” I said. “It’s a false door. Lots of tombs had those. It was like a symbolic gateway for the dead person’s ba, so it could go back and forth from the Duat.”

Sadie pulled her wand and traced the edges of the stele. “This bloke Ipi was a scribe, which was another word for magician. He could’ve been one of us.”

“So?”

“So maybe that’s why the stone is glowing, Carter. What if this false door’s not false?”

I looked at the stele more closely, but I didn’t see any glow. I thought maybe Sadie was hallucinating from exhaustion or too much potion in her system. Then she touched her wand to the center of the stele and spoke the first command word we’d ever learned: “W’peh.”

Open. A golden hieroglyph burned on the stone:

The grave marker shot out a beam of light like a movie projector. Suddenly, a full-size doorway shimmered in front of us—a rectangular portal showing the hazy image of another room.

I looked at Sadie in amazement. “How did you do that?” I asked. “You’ve never been able to do that before.”

She shrugged as if it were no big deal. “I wasn’t thirteen before. Maybe that’s it.”

“But I’m fourteen!” I protested. “And I still can’t do that.”

“Girls mature earlier.”

I gritted my teeth. I hated the spring months—March, April, May—because until my birthday rolled around in June, Sadie could claim to be only a year younger than me. She always got an attitude after her birthday, as if she’d catch up to me somehow and become my big sister. Talk about a nightmare.

She gestured at the glowing doorway. “After you, brother, dear. You’re the one with the sparkly invisibility