Rick Riordan - The Throne of Fire

“ Um, thanks.”

“You remind me of myself,” Bes continued, “back when I was a young dwarf. You got a stubborn streak. When it comes to girl problems, you’re clueless.”

“Girl problems?” I thought nobody could embarrass me as much as Sadie did when she learned my secret name, but Bes was doing a pretty good job. “This isn’t just a girl problem.”

Bes regarded me like I was a poor lost puppy. “You want to save Zia. I get that. You want her to like you. But when you rescue somebody…it complicates things. Don’t get starry-eyed about somebody you can’t have, especially if it blinds you to somebody who’s really important. Don’t…don’t make my mistakes.”

I heard the pain in his voice. I knew he was trying to help, but it still felt weird getting guy advice from a four-foot-tall god in an ugly hat.

“The person who rescued you,” I said. “It was a goddess, wasn’t it? Someone besides Bast—somebody you were involved with?”

His knuckles turned white on the steering wheel. “Kid.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m glad we had this talk. Now, if you value your teeth—”

“I’ll shut up.”

“That’s good.” Bes put his foot on the brake. “Because I think we’re here.”

The sun was going down at our backs. Everything in front of us was bathed in red light—the sand, the water of the Nile, the hills on the horizon. Even the fronds of the palm trees looked like they were tinged with blood.

Set would love this place, I thought.

There was no sign of civilization—just a few gray herons flying overhead and an occasional splash in the river: maybe fish or a crocodile. I imagined this part of the Nile hadn’t looked too different in the time of the pharaohs.

“Come on,” Bes said. “Bring your stuff.”

Bes didn’t wait for me. When I caught up to him, he was standing on the riverbank, sifting sand through his fingers.

“It’s not just the light,” I realized. “That stuff is really red.”

Bes nodded. “You know why?”

My mom would have said iron oxide or something like that. She’d had a scientific explanation for everything. But something told me Bes wasn’t looking for that kind of answer.

“Red is the color of evil,” I said. “The desert. Chaos. Destruction.”

Bes dusted off his hands. “This was a bad place to build a village.”

I looked around for any sign of a settlement. The red sand stretched in either direction for about a hundred yards. Thick grass and willow trees bordered the area, but the sand itself was completely barren. The way it glittered and shifted under my feet reminded me of the mounds of dried scarab shells in the Duat, holding back Apophis. I really wished I hadn’t thought of that.

“There’s nothing here,” I said. “No ruins. Nothing.”

“Look again.” Bes pointed to the river. Old dead reeds stuck up here and there over an area the size of a soccer field. Then I realized the reeds weren’t reeds—they were decaying boards and wooden poles, the remains of simple dwellings. I walked to the edge of the water. A few feet out, it was calm and shallow enough that I could make out a line of submerged mud bricks: the foundation of a wall slowly dissolving into silt.

“The whole village sank?”

“It was swallowed,” Bes said. “The Nile is trying to wash away the evil that happened here.”

I shivered. The fang wounds on my shoulder started throbbing again. “If it’s such an evil place, why would Iskandar hide Zia here?”

“Good question,” Bes said. “You want to find the answer, you’ll have to wade out there.”

Part of me wanted to run back to the truck. The last time I’d waded into a river—the Rio Grande in El Paso—it hadn’t gone so well. We’d battled the crocodile god Sobek and barely gotten away with our lives. This was the Nile. Gods and monsters would be much stronger here.

“You’re coming too, aren’t you?” I asked Bes.

The corner of his eye twitched. “Running water’s not good for gods. Loosens our connection to the Duat…”

He must have seen the look of desperation on my face.

“Yeah, okay,” he sighed. “I’m right behind you.”

Before I could chicken out, I put one boot in the river and sank up to my ankle.

“Gross.” I waded out, my feet making sounds like a cow chewing gum.

A little too late, I realized how poorly prepared I was. I didn’t have my sword, because I’d lost it in St. Petersburg. I hadn’t been able to summon it back. For all I knew, the Russian magicians had melted it down. I still had my wand, but that was mostly for defensive spells. If I had to go on the offense, I’d be at a serious disadvantage.

I pulled an old stick out of the mud and used it to poke around. Bes and I trudged through the shallows, trying to find anything useful. We kicked over some bricks, discovered a few intact sections of walls, and brought up some pottery shards. I thought about the story Zia had told me—how her dad caused the destruction of the village by unearthing a demon trapped in a jar. For all I knew, these were shards of that same jar.

Nothing attacked us except mosquitoes. We didn’t find any traps. But every splash in the river made me think of crocodiles (and not the nice albino kind like Philip back in Brooklyn) or the big toothy tiger fish Zia had shown me once in the First Nome. I imagined them swimming around my feet, trying to decide which leg looked the tastiest.

Out of the corner of my eye I kept seeing ripples and tiny whirlpools like something was following me. When I stabbed the water with my stick, there was nothing there.

After an hour of searching, the sun had almost set. We were supposed to make it back to Alexandria to meet up with Sadie by morning, which left us almost no time to find Zia. And twenty-four hours from now, the next time the sun went down, the equinox would begin.

We kept looking, but didn’t find anything more interesting than a muddy deflated soccer ball and a set of dentures. [Yes, Sadie, they were even more disgusting than Gramps’s.] I stopped to swat the mosquitoes off my neck. Bes snatched something out of the water—a wriggly fish or a frog—and stuck it in his mouth.

“Do you have to?” I asked.

“What?” he said, still chewing. “It’s dinnertime.”

I turned in disgust and poked my stick in the water.

Thunk.

I struck something harder than mud brick or wood. This was stone.

I traced my stick along the bottom. It wasn’t a rock. It was a flat row of hewn blocks. The edge dropped off to another row of stones about a foot lower: like stairs, leading down.

“Bes,” I called.

He waded over. The water came up almost to his armpits. His form shimmered in the current like he might disappear any minute.

I showed him what I’d found.

“Huh.” He dunked his head underwater. When he came back up, his beard was covered in muck and weeds. “Stairs, all right. Reminds me of the entrance to a tomb.”

“A tomb,” I said, “in the middle of a village?”

Off to my left, there was another splash.

Bes frowned. “Did you see that?”

“Yeah. Ever since we got into the water. You haven’t noticed?”

Bes stuck his finger in the water as if testing the temperature. “We should hurry.”

“Why?”

“Probably nothing.” He lied even worse than my dad. “Let’s get a look at this tomb. Part the river.”

He said that as if it were a perfectly normal request, like Pass the salt.

“I’m a combat magician,” I said. “I don’t know how to part a river.”

Bes looked offended. “Oh, come on. That’s standard stuff. Back in Khufu’s day I knew a magician who parted the Nile just so he could climb to the bottom and retrieve a girl’s necklace. Then there was that Israelite fellow, Mickey.”