Rick Riordan - The Throne of Fire

“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 cloud.”

Before I could lose my cool, I stepped through the portal.

I almost fell and broke my face. The other side of the portal was a mirror hanging five feet off the floor. I’d stepped onto a fireplace mantel. I caught Sadie as she came through, just in time to keep her from toppling off the ledge.

“Ta,” she whispered. “Someone’s been reading too much Alice Through the Looking Glass.”

I’d thought the Egyptian room was impressive, but it was nothing compared to this ballroom. Coppery geometric designs glittered on the ceiling. The walls were lined with dark green columns and gilded doors. White and gold inlaid marble made a huge octagonal pattern on the floor. With a blazing chandelier above, the golden filigree and green and white polished stone gleamed so brightly, they hurt my eyes.

Then I realized most of the light wasn’t coming from the chandelier. It was coming from the magician casting a spell at the other end of the room. His back was turned, but I could tell it was Vlad Menshikov. Just as Sadie had described, he was a pudgy little man with curly gray hair and a white suit. He stood in a protective circle that pulsed with emerald light. He raised his staff, and the tip burned like a welding torch. To his right, just outside the circle, stood a green vase the size of a grown man. To his left, writhing in glowing chains, was a creature I recognized as a demon. It had a hairy humanoid body with purplish skin, but instead of a head, a giant corkscrew sprouted between its shoulders.

“Mercy!” it screamed in a watery, metallic voice. Don’t ask me how a demon could scream with a corkscrew head—but the sound resonated up the screw like it was a massive tuning fork.

Vlad Menshikov kept chanting. The green vase throbbed with light.

Sadie nudged me and whispered, “Look.”

“Yeah,” I whispered back. “Some kind of summoning ritual.”

“No,” she hissed. “Look there. ”

She pointed to our right. In the corner of the room, twenty feet from the fireplace mantel, was an old-fashioned mahogany desk.

Sadie had told me about Anubis’s instructions: We were supposed to find Menshikov’s desk. The next section of the Book of Ra would be in the middle drawer. Could that really be the desk? It seemed too easy. As quietly as we could, Sadie and I climbed off the mantel and crept along the wall. I prayed the invisibility shroud wouldn’t send up any more fireworks.

We were about halfway to the desk when Vlad Menshikov finished his chant. He slammed his staff against the floor, and it stuck there straight up, the tip still burning at a million degrees. He turned his head slightly, and I caught the glint of his white sunglasses. He rummaged in his coat pockets while the big green vase glowed and the demon screamed in his chains.

“Don’t fuss, Death-to-Corks,” Menshikov chided. His voice was even rougher than Sadie had described—like a heavy smoker talking through the blades of a fan. “You know I need a sacrifice to summon such a major god. It’s nothing personal.”

Sadie frowned at me and mouthed, Major god?

I shook my head, baffled. The House of Life didn’t allow mortals to summon gods. It was the main reason Desjardins hated us. Menshikov was supposedly his best bud. So what was he doing, breaking the rules?

“Hurts!” the poor demon wailed. “Served you for fifty years, master. Please!”

“Now, now,” Menshikov said without a trace of sympathy. “I have to use execration. Only the most painful form of banishment will generate enough energy.”

From his suit coat pocket, Menshikov pulled a regular corkscrew and a shard of pottery covered with red hieroglyphics.

He held up both items and began to chant again: “I name you Death-to-Corks, Servant of Vladimir, He Who Turns in the Night.”

As the demon’s names were spoken, the magical chains steamed and tightened around his body. Menshikov held the corkscrew over the flame of his staff. The demon thrashed and wailed. As the smaller corkscrew turned red hot, the demon’s body began to smoke.

I watched in horror. I knew about sympathetic magic, of course. The idea was to make something small affect something large by binding them together. The more alike the items were—like the corkscrew and the demon—the easier they were to bind. Voodoo dolls worked on the same theory.

But execration was serious stuff. It meant destroying a creature utterly—erasing its physical form and even its name from existence. It took some serious magic to pull off that kind of spell. If done wrong, it could destroy the caster. But if done right, most victims didn’t stand a chance. Regular mortals, magicians, ghosts, even demons could be wiped off the face of the earth. Execration might not destroy major powers like gods, but it would still be like detonating a nuclear bomb in their face. They’d be blasted so deep into the Duat, they might never come back.

Vlad Menshikov worked the spell like he did it every day. He kept chanting as the corkscrew began to melt, and the demon melted with it. Menshikov dropped the pottery shard on the floor—the red hieroglyphs that spelled all the demon’s various names. With one final word of power, Menshikov stepped on the shard and crushed it to bits. Death-to-Corks dissolved, chains and all.