The Kane Chronicles(84)

I didn’t know what he meant. Perhaps he’d had some sort of near-death vision? His voice sounded clearer, free of pain, but still weak. “Sadie, hurry. You know the spell now. It will work on…on the serpent’s shadow.”

“Walt, what happened?” I brushed the tears from my face. “What gate?”

He pointed feebly. A few meters away, a door of darkness hovered in the air. “The whole quest was a trap,” he said. “Setne…I see his plan now. Your brother needs your help.”

“But what about you? Come with me!”

He shook his head. “I’m still too weak. I will do my best to summon reinforcements for you in the Duat—you’ll need them—but I can barely move. I’ll meet you at sunrise, at the First Nome, if—if you’re sure you don’t hate me.”

“Hate you?” I was completely baffled. “Why on earth would I hate you?”

He smiled sadly—a smile that wasn’t quite like him.

“Look,” he said.

It took me a moment to understand his meaning. A cold feeling washed over me. How had Walt survived? Where was Anubis? And what had they been conspiring about?

Neith had called Walt a child of Set, but he wasn’t. Set’s only child was Anubis.

I tried to tell her, Walt had said.

He was born under the shadow of death, Anubis had told me. That’s why we understand each other.

I didn’t want to, but I lowered my vision into the Duat. Where Walt lay, I saw a different person, like a superimposed image…a young man lying weak and pale, in a gold neckband and black Egyptian kilt, with familiar brown eyes and a sad smile. Deeper still, I saw the glowing gray radiance of a god—the jackal-headed form of Anubis.

“Oh…no, no.” I got up and stumbled away from him. From them. Too many puzzle pieces fell together at once. My head was spinning. Walt’s ability to turn things to dust…it was the path of Anubis. He’d been channeling the god’s power for months. Their friendship, their discussions, the other way Anubis hinted at for saving Walt…

“What have you done?” I stared at him in horror. I wasn’t even sure what to call him.

“Sadie, it’s me,” Walt said. “Still me.”

In the Duat, Anubis spoke in unison: “Still me.”

“No!” My legs trembled. I felt betrayed and cheated. I felt as if the world was already crumbling into the Sea of Chaos.

“I can explain,” he said in two voices. “But Carter needs your help. Please, Sadie—”

“Stop it!” I’m not proud of how I acted, but I turned and fled, leaping straight through the doorway of darkness. At the moment I didn’t even care where it led, as long as it was away from that deathless creature I had thought I loved.





C A R T E R





15. I Become a Purple Chimpanzee


JELLY BABIES? SERIOUSLY?

I hadn’t heard that part. My sister never ceases to amaze me—[and no, Sadie, that’s not a compliment, either.]

Anyway, while Sadie was having her supernatural guy drama, I was confronting an ax-murdering riverboat captain who apparently wanted to change his name to Even-More-Bloodstained Blade.

“Back down,” I told the demon. “That’s an order.”

Bloodstained Blade made a humming sound that might’ve been laughter. He swung his head to the left—kind of an Elvis Presley dance move—and smashed a hole in the wall. Then he faced me again, splinters all over his shoulders.

“I have other orders,” he hummed. “Orders to kill!”

He charged like a bull. After the mess we’d just been through in the serapeum, a bull was the last thing I wanted to deal with.

I thrust out my fist. “Ha-wi!”

The hieroglyph for Strike glowed between us:



A blue fist of energy slammed into Bloodstained Blade, pushing him out the door and straight through the wall of the opposite stateroom. A hit like that would have knocked out a human, but I could hear BSB digging out from the rubble, humming angrily.

I tried to think. It would’ve been nice to keep smashing him with that hieroglyph over and over, but magic doesn’t work that way. Once spoken, a divine word can’t be used again for several minutes, sometimes even hours.

Besides, divine words are top-of-the-line magic. Some magicians spend years mastering a single hieroglyph. I’d learned the hard way that saying too many will burn through your energy really fast, and I didn’t have much to spare.

First problem: keep the demon away from Zia. She was still half-conscious and totally defenseless. I summoned as much magic as I could and said: “N’dah!”—Protect.



Blue light shimmered around her. I had a horrible flashback to when I found Zia in her watery tomb last spring. If she woke up encased in blue energy and thought she was imprisoned again…