Rick Riordan - The Serpent's Shadow

“Hullo, brother dear,” she said in a shaky voice. “Need some help?”

She managed to dispel the glamor on us. She looked surprised to find me holding Ra’s crook and flail. “How in the world—?”

Zia briefly explained what we’d been up to—from the fight with the giant hippo through Setne’s most recent betrayals.

“All that,” Sadie marveled, “and you had to drag my brother along too? You poor girl. But how can we even survive here? The Chaos power…” She focused on Zia’s scarab pendant. “Oh. I really am thick. No wonder Tawaret looked at you strangely. You’re channeling the power of Ra.”

“Ra chose me,” Zia said. “I didn’t want this.”

Sadie got very quiet—which wasn’t like her.

“Sis,” I said, as gently as possible, “what happened to Walt?”

Her eyes were so full of pain that I wanted to apologize for even asking. I hadn’t seen her look like that since…well, since our mom died, when Sadie was little.

“He’s not coming,” she said. “He’s…gone.”

“Sadie, I’m so sorry,” I said. “Are you—?”

“I’m fine!” she snapped.

Translation: I’m most definitely not fine, but if you ask again I’ll stuff wax in your mouth.

“We have to hurry,” she continued, trying to modulate her voice. “I know how to capture the shadow. Just give me the figurine.”

I had a moment of panic. Did I still have the statue of Apophis that Walt had made? Coming all the way here and forgetting it would’ve been a major bonehead move.

Fortunately, it was still at the bottom of my pack.

I handed it to Sadie, who stared at the careful red carving of the coiled serpent, the hieroglyphs of binding around the name Apophis . I imagined she was thinking of Walt, and all the effort he’d put into making it.

She knelt at the edge of the jetty, where the obelisk’s base met the shadow.

“Sadie,” I said.

She froze. “Yeah?”

My mouth felt like it was full of glue. I wanted to tell her to forget the whole thing.

Seeing her at the obelisk, with that massive shadow coiling toward the horizon…I just knew something would go wrong. The shadow would attack. The spell would backfire somehow.

Sadie reminded me so much of our mom. I couldn’t shake the impression that we were repeating history. Our parents had tried to restrain Apophis once before, at Cleopatra’s Needle, and our mom had died. I’d spent years watching my dad deal with his guilt. If I stood by now while Sadie got hurt…

Zia took my hand. Her fingers were trembling, but I was grateful for her presence. “This will work,” she promised.

Sadie blew a strand of hair from her face. “Listen to your girlfriend, Carter. And stop distracting me.”

She sounded exasperated, but there was no irritation in her eyes. Sadie understood my concerns as clearly as she knew my secret name. She was just as scared as I was, but in her own annoying way, she was trying to reassure me.

“May I continue?” she asked.

“Good luck,” I managed.

Sadie nodded.

She touched the figurine to the shadow and began to chant.

I was afraid the waves of Chaos might dissolve the figurine, or, worse, pull Sadie in. Instead, the serpent’s shadow began to thrash. Slowly it shrank, writhing and snapping its mouth as if it were being hit with a cattle prod. The figurine absorbed the darkness. Soon the shadow was completely gone, and the statue was midnight black. Sadie spoke a simple binding spell on the figurine: “ Hi-nehm. ”

A long hiss escaped from the sea—almost like a sigh of relief—and the sound echoed across the hills. The churning waves turned a lighter shade of red, as if some murky sediment had been dredged away. The pull of Chaos seemed to lessen just slightly.

Sadie stood. “Right. We’re ready.”

I stared at my sister. Sometimes she teased me that she’d eventually catch up to me in age and be my older sibling. Looking at her now, with that determined glint in her eyes and the confidence in her voice, I could almost believe her. “That was amazing,” I said. “How did you know the spell?”

She scowled. Of course, the answer was obvious: she’d watched Walt do the same spell on Bes’s shadow…before whatever happened to Walt.

“The execration will be easy,” she said. “We have to be facing Apophis, but otherwise it’s the same spell we’ve been practicing.”

Zia prodded Setne with her foot. “That’s another thing this maggot lied about. What should we do with him? We’ll have to get the Book of Thoth out of those bindings, obviously, but after that should we shove him into the drink?”

“MMM!” Setne protested.

Sadie and I exchanged looks. We silently agreed that we couldn’t dissolve Setne—even as horrible as he was. Maybe we’d seen too many awful things over the past few days, and we didn’t need to see any more. Or maybe we knew that Osiris had to be the one to decide Setne’s punishment, since we had promised to bring the ghost back to the Hall of Judgment.

Maybe, standing next to the obelisk of Ma’at, surrounded by the Sea of Chaos, we both realized that restraining ourselves from vengeance is what made us different from Apophis. Rules had their place. They kept us from unraveling.

“Drag him along,” Sadie said. “He’s a ghost. Can’t be that heavy.”

I grabbed his feet, and we made our way back down the jetty. Setne’s head bonked against the rocks, but that didn’t concern me. It took all my concentration to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Moving away from the Sea of Chaos was even harder than moving toward it.

By the time we reached the beach, I was exhausted. My clothes were drenched in sweat. We trudged across the sand and finally crested the hill.

“Oh…” I uttered some words that were definitely not divine.

In the cratered field below us, demons had gathered—hundreds of them, all marching in our direction. As Setne had guessed, the shadow had sent a distress signal to the forces of Apophis, and the call had been answered. We were trapped between the Sea of Chaos and a hostile army.

At this point, I was starting to wonder, Why me?

All I wanted was to infiltrate the most dangerous part of the Duat, steal the shadow of the primordial Lord of Chaos, and save the world. Was that too much to ask?

The demons were maybe two football fields away, closing rapidly. I estimated that there were at least three or four hundred of them, and more kept pouring onto the field. Several dozen winged monsters were even closer, spiraling lower and lower overhead. Against this army, we had two Kanes, Zia, and a gift-wrapped ghost. I didn’t like those odds.

“Sadie, can you make a gate to the surface?” I asked.

She closed her eyes and concentrated. She shook her head. “No signal from Isis. Possibly we’re too close to the Sea of Chaos.”

That was a scary thought. I tried to summon the avatar of Horus. Nothing happened. I guess I should have known it would be hard to channel his powers down here, especially after I had asked him for a weapon back on the ship, and the best he could do was an ostrich feather.

“Zia?” I said. “Your powers from Khepri are still working. Can you get us out of here?”

She clutched her scarab amulet. “I don’t think so. All Khepri’s energy is being spent shielding us from Chaos. He can’t do any more.”

I considered running back to the white obelisk. Maybe we could use it to open a portal. But I quickly dismissed the idea. The demons would be on us before we ever got there.

“We’re not going to get out of this,” I decided. “Can we cast the execration on Apophis right now?”