Rick Riordan - The Red Pyramid

I slowly began to realize I’d seen her before. She was the girl with the knife from the British Museum. Before I could say anything, Carter sprang to his feet. He moved in front of me and brandished his sword as if trying to protect me. Can you believe the nerve?

“Get-get back!” he stammered.

The girl reached into her sleeve and produced a curved white piece of ivory-an Egyptian wand.

She flicked it to one side, and Carter’s sword flew out of his hands and clattered to the floor.

“Don’t embarrass yourself,” the girl said sternly. “Where is Amos?”

Carter looked too stunned to speak. The girl turned towards me. Her golden eyes were both beautiful and scary, I decided, and I didn’t like her a bit.

“Well?” she demanded.

I didn’t see why I needed to tell her a bloody thing, but an uncomfortable pressure started building in my chest, like a burp trying to get free. I heard myself say, “Amos is gone. He left this morning.”

“And the cat demon?”

“That’s my cat,” I said. “And she’s a goddess, not a demon. She saved us from the scorpions!”

Carter unfroze. He snatched up his sword and pointed it at the girl again. Full credit for persistence, I suppose.

“Who are you?” he demanded. “What do you want?”

“My name is Zia Rashid.” She tilted her head as if listening.

Right on cue, the entire building rumbled. Dust sprinkled from the ceiling, and the slithering sounds of scorpions doubled in volume behind us.

“And right now,” Zia continued, sounding a bit disappointed, “I must save your miserable lives. Let’s go.”

I suppose we could’ve refused, but our choices seemed to be Zia or the scorpions, so we ran after her.

She passed a case full of statues and casually tapped the glass with her wand. Tiny granite pharaohs and limestone gods stirred at her command. They hopped off their pedestals and crashed through the glass. Some wielded weapons. Others simply cracked their stone knuckles. They let us pass, but stared down the corridor behind us as if waiting for the enemy.

“Hurry,” Zia told us. “These will only-”

“Buy us time,” I guessed. “Yes, we’ve heard that before.”

“You talk too much,” Zia said without stopping.

I was about to make a withering retort. Honestly, I would’ve put her in her place quite properly. But just then we emerged into an enormous room and my voice abandoned me.

“Whoa,” Carter said.

I couldn’t help agreeing with him. The place was extremely whoa.

The room was the size of a football stadium. One wall was made completely of glass and looked out on the park. In the middle of the room, on a raised platform, an ancient building had been reconstructed. There was a freestanding stone gateway about eight meters tall, and behind that an open courtyard and square structure made of uneven sandstone blocks carved all over on the outside with images of gods and pharaohs and hieroglyphs. Flanking the building’s entrance were two columns bathed in eerie light.

“An Egyptian temple,” I guessed.

“The Temple of Dendur,” Zia said. “Actually it was built by the Romans-”

“When they occupied Egypt,” Carter said, like this was delightful information. “Augustus commissioned it.”

“Yes,” Zia said.

“Fascinating,” I murmured. “Would you two like to be left alone with a history textbook?”

Zia scowled at me. “At any rate, the temple was dedicated to Isis, so it will have enough power to open a gate.”

“To summon more gods?” I asked.

Zia’s eyes flashed angrily. “Accuse me of that again, and I will cut out your tongue. I meant a gateway to get you out of here.”

I felt completely lost, but I was getting used to that. We followed Zia up the steps and through the temple’s stone gateway.

The courtyard was empty, abandoned by the fleeing museum visitors, which made it feel quite creepy. Giant carvings of gods stared down at me. Hieroglyphic inscriptions were everywhere, and I was afraid that if I concentrated too hard, I might be able to read them.

Zia stopped at the front steps of the temple. She held up her wand and wrote in the air. A familiar hieroglyph burned between the columns.

Open-the same symbol Dad had used at the Rosetta Stone. I waited for something to blow up, but the hieroglyph simply faded.

Zia opened her backpack. “We’ll make our stand here until the gate can be opened.”

“Why not just open it now?” Carter asked.

“Portals can only appear at auspicious moments,” Zia said. “Sunrise, sunset, midnight, eclipses, astrological alignments, the exact time of a god’s birth-”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “How can you possibly know all that?”

“It takes years to memorize the complete calendar,” Zia said. “But the next auspicious moment is easy: high noon. Ten and a half minutes from now.”

She didn’t check a watch. I wondered how she knew the time so precisely, but I decided it wasn’t the most important question.

“Why should we trust you?” I asked. “As I recall, at the British Museum, you wanted to gut us with a knife.”

“That would’ve been simpler.” Zia sighed. “Unfortunately, my superiors think you might be innocents. So for now, I can’t kill you. But I also can’t allow you to fall into the hands of the Red Lord. And so…you can trust me.”

“Well, I’m convinced,” I said. “I feel all warm and fuzzy inside.”

Zia reached in her bag and took out four little statues-animal-headed men, each about five centimeters tall. She handed them to me. “Put the Sons of Horus around us at the cardinal points.”

“Excuse me?”

“North, south, east, west.” She spoke slowly, as if I were an idiot.

“I know compass directions! But-”

“That’s north.” Zia pointed out the wall of glass. “Figure out the rest.”

I did what she asked, though I didn’t see how the little men would help. Meanwhile, Zia gave Carter a piece of chalk and told him to draw a circle around us, connecting the statues.

“Magic protection,” Carter said. “Like what Dad did at the British Museum.”

“Yes,” I grumbled. “And we saw how well that worked.”

Carter ignored me. What else is new? He was so eager to please Zia that he jumped right to the task of drawing his sidewalk art.

Then Zia took something else from her bag-a plain wooden rod like the one our dad had used in London. She spoke a word under her breath, and the rod expanded into a two-meter-long black staff topped with a carved lion’s head. She twirled it around single-handedly like a baton-just showing off, I was sure-while holding the wand in her other hand.

Carter finished the chalk circle as the first scorpions appeared at the gallery’s entrance.

“How much longer on that gate?” I asked, hoping I didn’t sound as terrified as I felt.

“Stay inside the circle no matter what,” Zia said. “When the gate opens, jump through. And keep behind me!”

She touched her wand to the chalk circle, spoke another word, and the circle began to glow dark red.

Hundreds of scorpions swarmed towards the temple, turning the floor into a living mass of claws and stingers. Then the woman in brown, Serqet, entered the gallery. She smiled at us coldly.

“Zia,” I said, “that’s a goddess. She defeated Bast. What chance do you have?”

Zia held up her staff and the carved lion’s head burst into flames-a small red fireball so bright, it lit the entire room. “I am a scribe in the House of Life, Sadie Kane. I am trained to fight gods.”

S A D I E