Rick Riordan - The Throne of Fire

It’s hard to give a rousing speech with a camel licking your head, but Walt nodded. The cat didn’t look quite so enthusiastic. Then again, cats rarely do.

“Don’t underestimate Apophis,” Bast said. “You haven’t fought him. I have.”

“Which is why we need you back quickly.” I told her about Vlad Menshikov’s conversation with Set, and his plans to destroy Brooklyn House. “Bast, our friends are in terrible danger. Menshikov is possibly even more insane than Amos realizes. As soon as you’re able, go to Brooklyn. I have a feeling our last stand is going to be there. We’ll get the third scroll and find Ra.”

“I don’t like last stands,” the cat said. “But you’re right. It sounds bad. By the way, where are Bes and Carter?” She looked suspiciously at the camels. “You didn’t turn them into those, did you?”

“The idea is appealing,” I said. “But, no.”

I told her briefly what Carter was up to.

Bast hissed with distaste. “A foolish detour! I’ll have words with that dwarf about letting you go off on your own.”

“What am I, invisible?” Walt protested.

“Sorry, dear, I didn’t mean—” The cat’s eyes twitched. It coughed like it had a hairball. “My connection is failing. Good luck, Sadie. The best entrance to the tombs is on a small date farm just to the southeast. Look for a black water tower. And do watch out for the Romans. They’re quite—”

The cat puffed up its tail. Then it blinked and looked around in confusion.

“What Romans?” I asked. “They’re quite what?”

“Mrow.” The cat stared at me with an expression that said: Who are you and where is the food?

I swatted the camel’s nose away from my slimy hair. “Come on, Walt,” I grumbled. “Let’s go find some mummies.”

We provided the cat with bits of beef jerky and some water from our supplies. It wasn’t as good as fish and milk, but the cat seemed happy enough. As it was in sight of the oasis and obviously knew its way around better than we did, we left it to finish its meal. Walt turned the camels back into amulets, thank goodness, and we trudged into Bahariya on foot.

The date farm wasn’t difficult to find. The black water tower sat at the edge of the property, and it was the tallest structure in sight. We made our way toward it, weaving through acres of palm trees, which provided some shade from the sun. An adobe farmhouse stood in the distance, but we didn’t see any people. Probably the Egyptians knew better than to be out in the afternoon heat.

When we reached the water tower, I didn’t see any obvious tomb entrance. The tower looked quite old—four rusty steel posts holding a round tank the size of a garage about fifteen meters in the air. The tank had a slow leak. Every few seconds water dropped from the sky and smacked against the hard-packed sand underneath. There wasn’t much else in sight except for more palm trees, a few tarnished farm tools, and a weathered plywood sign lying on the ground. The sign was spray-painted in Arabic and English, probably from some attempt by the farmer to sell his wares in the market. The English read: Dates—best price. Cold Bebsi.

“Bebsi?” I asked.

“Pepsi,” Walt said. “I read about that on the Internet. There’s no ‘p’ in Arabic. Everyone here calls soda Bebsi.”

“So you have to have Bebsi with your bizza?”

“Brobably.”

I snorted. “If this is a famous dig site, shouldn’t there be more activity? Archaeologists? Ticket booths? Souvenir merchants?”

“Maybe Bast sent us to a secret entrance,” Walt said. “Better than sneaking past a bunch of guards and caretakers.”

A secret entrance sounded quite intriguing, but unless the water tower was a magic teleporter, or one of the date trees had a concealed door, I wasn’t sure where this oh-so-helpful entrance might be. I kicked the Bebsi sign. There was nothing underneath except more sand, slowly turning to mud from the drip, drip, drip of the leaky tower.

Then I looked more closely at the wet spot on the ground.

“Hang on.” I knelt. The water was pooling in a little canal, as if the sand were seeping into a subterranean crack. The crevice was about a meter long and no wider than a pencil, but much too straight to be natural. I dug in the sand. Six centimeters down, my fingernails scraped stone.

“Help me clear this,” I told Walt.

A minute later we’d uncovered a flat paving stone about one meter square. I tried to work my fingers under the wet edges, but the stone was too thick and much too heavy to lift.

“We can use something as a lever,” Walt suggested. “Pry it up.”

“Or,” I said, “stand back.”

Walt looked ready to protest, but when I brought out my staff, he knew enough to get out of the way. With my new understanding of godly magic, I didn’t so much think about what I needed as feel a connection to Isis. I remembered a time when she’d found her husband’s coffin grown into the trunk of a cypress tree, and in her anger and desperation she blew the tree apart. I channeled those emotions and pointed at the stone. “Ha-di!”

Good news: the spell worked even better than in St. Petersburg. The hieroglyph glowed at the end of my staff, and the stone was blasted to rubble, revealing a dark hole underneath.

Bad news: that’s not all I destroyed. Around the hole, the ground began to crumble. Walt and I scrambled backward as more stones fell into the pit, and I realized I’d just destabilized the entire roof of a subterranean room. The hole widened until it reached the support legs of the water tower. The water tower began to creak and sway.

“Run!” Walt yelled.

We didn’t stop until we were hiding behind a palm tree thirty meters away. The water tower sprang a hundred different leaks, wobbled back and forth like a drunken man, then fell toward us and shattered, soaking us from head to toe and sending a flood through the rows of palm trees.

The noise was so deafening, it must’ve been heard throughout the oasis.

“Oops,” I said.

Walt looked at me like I was mad. I suppose I was guilty as charged. But it’s just so bloody tempting to blow things up, isn’t it?

We ran to the Sadie Kane Memorial Crater. It was now the size of a swimming pool. Five meters down, under a pile of sand and rocks, were rows of mummies, all wrapped in old cloth and laid out on stone slabs. The mummies were now flattened, I’m afraid, but I could tell they’d been brightly painted with red, blue, and gold.

“Golden mummies.” Walt looked horrified. “Part of the tomb system that hasn’t been excavated yet. You just ruined—”

“I did say Oops. Now, help me down there, before the owner of this water tower shows up with a shotgun.”

TO BE FAIR, THE MUMMIES in that particular room were mostly ruined already, thanks to the moisture from the leaking tower above. Just add water to mummies for a truly horrible smell.

We climbed over the rubble and found a corridor leading deeper underground. I couldn’t tell whether it was natural or man-made, but it snaked a good forty meters through solid rock before opening into another burial chamber. This room had not been damaged by water. Everything was remarkably well preserved. Walt had brought torches [flashlights, for you Americans], and in the dim light, on stone slabs and in niches carved along the walls, gold-painted mummies glittered. There were at least a hundred in this room alone, and more corridors led off in each direction.