At the base of the pyramid, snaky coils encircled Walt. He tried to force his way out, blasting the serpent with gray light that turned his scales to ashes; but the serpent just regenerated, closing tighter and tighter around Walt. A few hundred feet away, Julian had summoned a full Horus avatar, a giant green hawk-headed warrior with a khopesh in either hand. He sliced away at the serpent’s tail—or at least one version of it—while the tail lashed around and tried to impale him. Deeper in the Duat, the goddess Serqet stood in nearly the same place. She had turned herself into a giant black scorpion and was confronting another image of the serpent’s tail, parrying it with her stinger in a bizarre sword fight. Even Amos had been waylaid. He faced the wrong direction (or so it looked to me) and sliced his staff through the empty air, shouting command words at nothing.
I hoped that we were weakening Apophis by forcing him to deal with so many of us at once, but I couldn’t see any sign of the serpent’s power decreasing.
“He’s dividing us!” Sadie shouted. Even standing right next to me, she seemed to be speaking from the other side of a roaring wind tunnel.
“Grab hold!” I held out the pharaoh’s crook. “We have to stay together!”
She took the other end of the crook, and we forged ahead.
The closer we got to the serpent’s head, the harder it was to move. I felt like we were running through layers of clear syrup, each thicker and more resistant than the last. I looked around us and realized most of our allies had fallen away. Some I couldn’t even see because of the Chaos distortion.
Ahead of us, a bright light shimmered as if through fifty feet of water.
“We have to get to Ra,” I said. “Concentrate on him!”
What I was really thinking: I have to save Zia. But I was pretty sure Sadie knew that without my spelling it out.
I could hear Zia’s voice, summoning waves of fire against her enemy. She couldn’t be much farther—maybe twenty feet in mortal distance? Through the Duat it might have been a thousand miles.
“Almost there!” I said.
You’re too late, little ones, the voice of Apophis hummed in my ears. Ra will be my breakfast today.
A snake coil as big as a subway car slammed into the sand at our feet, almost crushing us. The scales rippled with Chaos energy, making me want to double over with nausea. Without Horus shielding me, I’m pretty sure I would have been vaporized just standing so close to it. I swung my flail. Three lines of fire cut through the snake’s hide, blasting it to shreds of red and gray fog.
“Okay?” I asked Sadie.
She looked pale, but nodded. We trudged on.
A few of the most powerful gods still fought around us. Babi the baboon was riding one version of the serpent’s head, pounding his massive fists between Apophis’s eyes, but the serpent seemed only mildly annoyed. The hunter goddess Neith hid behind a pile of stone blocks, sniping at another snakehead with her arrows. She was pretty easy to spot because of the palm fronds in her hair, and she kept yelling something about a Jelly Baby conspiracy. Farther on, another serpent’s mouth sank its fangs into Nekhbet the vulture goddess, who shrieked in pain and exploded into a pile of black feathers.
“We’re running out of gods!” Sadie cried.
Finally we reached the middle of the Chaos storm. Walls of red and gray smoke swirled around us, but the roar died in the center as if we’d stepped into the eye of a hurricane. Above us rose the true head of the serpent—or at least the manifestation that held most of his power.
How did I know this? His skin looked more solid, glistening with golden red scales. His mouth was a pink cavern with fangs. His eyes glowed, and his cobra’s hood spread so wide, it blocked a quarter of the sky.
Before him stood Ra, a shining apparition too bright to look at directly. If I glanced from the corner of my eye, however, I could see Zia at the center of the light. She now wore the clothes of an Egyptian princess—a silky dress of white and gold, a golden necklace and armbands. Even her staff and wand were gilded. Her image danced in the hot vapor, causing the serpent to misjudge her location every time he struck.
Zia shot tracers of red flame toward Apophis—blinding his eyes and burning away patches of his skin—but the damage seemed to heal almost instantly. He was growing stronger and larger. Zia wasn’t so fortunate. If I concentrated, I could sense her life force, her ka, growing weaker. The luminous glow at the center of her chest was becoming smaller and more concentrated, like a flame reduced to a pilot light.
Meanwhile, our feline friend Bast was doing her best to distract her old enemy. Over and over she jumped on the serpent’s back, slashing with her knives and mewling in anger, but Apophis just shook her off, throwing her back into the storm.