Rick Riordan - The Throne of Fire

“Why are you barefooted?” I demanded.

“It wasn’t my idea!” He winced as he plucked a toothpick-size piece of deck from between his toes. “I guess because ancient warriors fought barefoot. Sandals got too slippery from sweat and blood, and all.”

“And the skirt?”

“Let’s just go, all right?”

That proved easier said than done.

The boat drifted away from the docks, then got stuck in a backwater a few meters downstream. We began turning in circles.

“Tiny question,” I said. “Do you know anything about boats?”

“Nothing,” Carter admitted.

Our tattered sail was about as useful as a ripped tissue. The oars were either broken or trailing uselessly in the water, and they looked quite heavy. I didn’t see how the two of us could row a boat meant for a crew of twenty, even if the river stayed calm. On our last trip through the Duat, the ride had been more like a roller coaster.

“What about those glowing balls of light?” I asked. “Like the crew we had on the Egyptian Queen ?”

“Can you summon some?”

“Right,” I grumbled. “Throw the hard questions back to me.”

I looked around the boat, hoping to spot a button that read: push here for glowing sailors! I saw nothing so helpful. I knew the sun god’s barque once had had a crew of lights. I’d seen them in my vision. But how to summon them?

The tent pavilion was empty. The throne of fire was gone. The boat was silent except for water gurgling through the cracks in the hull. The spinning of the ship was starting to make me sick.

Then a horrible feeling crept over me. A dozen tiny voices whispered at the base of my skull: Isis. Schemer. Poisoner. Traitor.

I realized my nausea wasn’t just from the spiraling current. The entire ship was sending malicious thoughts my way. The boards under my feet, the railing, the oars and rigging—every part of the sun god’s barque hated my presence.

“Carter, the boat doesn’t like me,” I announced.

“You’re saying the boat has good taste?”

“Ha-ha. I mean, it senses Isis. She poisoned Ra and forced him into exile, after all. This boat remembers.”

“Well…apologize, or something.”

“Hullo, boat,” I said, feeling quite foolish. “Sorry about the poisoning business. But you see—I’m not Isis. I’m Sadie Kane.”

Traitor, the voices whispered.

“I can see why you’d think so,” I admitted. “I probably have that ‘Isis magic’ smell to me, don’t I? But honestly, I sent Isis packing. She doesn’t live here anymore. My brother and I are going to bring back Ra.”

The boat shuddered. The dozen little voices fell silent, as if for the first time in their immortal lives they were truly and properly stunned. (Well, they hadn’t met me yet, had they?)

“That would be good, yes?” I ventured. “Ra back, just like old times, rolling on the river, and so on? We’re here to make things right, but to do that we need to journey through the Houses of the Night. If you could just cooperate—”

A dozen glowing orbs blazed to life. They circled me like an angry swarm of flaming tennis balls, their heat so intense, I thought they’d combust my new dress.

“Sadie,” Carter warned. “They don’t look happy.”

And he wonders why I called him Captain Obvious.

I tried to remain calm.

“Behave,” I told the lights sternly. “This isn’t for me. It’s for Ra. If you want your pharaoh back, you’ll man your stations.”

I thought I’d be roasted like a tandoori chicken, but I stood my ground. Since I was surrounded, I really I had no choice. I exerted my magic and tried to bend the lights to my will—the way I might have done to turn someone into a rat or a lizard.

You will be helpful, I ordered. You will do your work obediently.

There was a collective hiss inside my head, which either meant I’d blown a brain gasket, or the lights were relenting.

The crew scattered. They took up their stations, hauling lines, mending the sail, manning the unbroken oars, and guiding the tiller.

The leaky hull groaned as the boat turned its nose downstream.

Carter exhaled. “Good job. You okay?”

I nodded, but my head felt like it was still spinning in circles. I wasn’t sure if I’d convinced the orbs, or if they were simply biding their time, waiting for revenge. Either way, I wasn’t thrilled to have put our fate in their hands.

We sailed into the dark. The cityscape of London melted away. My stomach got that familiar free-fall sensation as we passed deeper into the Duat.

“We’re entering the Second House,” I guessed.

Carter grabbed the mast to steady himself. “You mean the Houses of the Night, like Bes mentioned? What are they, anyway?”

It felt strange to be explaining Egyptian myths to Carter. I thought he might be teasing me, but he seemed genuinely perplexed.

“Something I read in the Book of Ra,” I said. “Each hour of the night is a ‘House.’ We have to pass through the twelve stages of the river, representing twelve hours of the night.”

Carter peered into the darkness ahead of us. “So if we’re in the Second House, you mean an hour has already passed? It didn’t feel that long.”

He was right. It didn’t. Then again, I had no idea how time flowed in the Duat. One House of the Night might not correspond exactly to one mortal hour in the world above.

Anubis once told me he’d been in the Land of the Dead for five thousand years, but he still felt like a teenager, as if no time had passed.

I shuddered. What if we popped out on the other side of the River of Night and found that several eons had passed? I’d just turned thirteen. I wasn’t ready to be thirteen hundred.

I also wished I hadn’t thought of Anubis. I touched the shen amulet on my necklace. After all that had happened with Walt, the idea of seeing Anubis made me feel strangely guilty, but also a bit excited. Perhaps Anubis would help us on our journey. Perhaps he’d whisk me away to some private spot for a chat as he had last time we’d visited the Duat—a romantic little graveyard, dinner for two at the Coffin Café…

Snap out of it, Sadie, I thought. Concentrate.

I pulled the Book of Ra from my bag and scanned the instructions again. I’d read them several times already, but they were cryptic and confusing—much like a maths textbook. The scroll was chock-full of terms like “first from Chaos,” “breath into clay,” “the night’s flock” “reborn in fire,” “the acres of the sun,” “the kiss of the knife,” “the gambler of light,” and “the last scarab”—most of which made no sense to me.

I gathered that as we passed through the twelve stages of the river, I’d have to read the three sections of the Book of Ra at three separate locations, probably to revive the different aspects of the sun god, and each of three aspects would present us with some sort of challenge. I knew that if I failed—if I so much as stumbled over one word while reading the spells—I would end up worse than Vlad Menshikov. The idea terrified me, but I couldn’t dwell on the possibility of failure. I simply had to hope that when the time came, the scroll’s gibberish would make sense.

The current accelerated. So did the leaking of the boat. Carter demonstrated his combat magic skill by summoning a bucket and bailing out water, while I concentrated on keeping the crew in line. The deeper we sailed into the Duat, the more rebellious the glowing orbs became. They chafed against my will, remembering how much they wanted to incinerate me.

It’s unnerving to float down a magic river with voices whispering in your head: Die, traitor, die. Every so often I’d get the feeling we were being followed. I’d turn and think I could see a whitish smudge against the black, like the afterimage of a flash, but I decided it must be my imagination. Even more unnerving was the darkness ahead—no shoreline, no landmarks, no visibility at all. The crew could’ve steered us straight into a boulder or the mouth of a monster, and we would’ve had absolutely no warning. We just kept sailing through the dark empty void.