The Red Pyramid (Kane Chronicles #1)(111)

“Sadie?” I called. “Zia?”

“Help!” Sadie yelled. She was on the other side of the boat, dragging Zia out from under the flaming hull. We managed to pull her free and slide down the pile onto the floor.

The warehouse seemed to be a massive facility for drying peppers, with thirty or forty mountains of chilis and rows of wooden drying racks. The wreckage of our boat filled the air with spicy smoke, and through the hole we’d made in the roof, I could see the blazing figure of Sekhmet descending.

We ran, plowing through another pile of peppers. [No, I didn’t pick a peck of them, Sadie—just shut up.] We hid behind a drying rack, where shelves of peppers made the air burn like hydrochloric acid.

Sekhmet landed, and the warehouse floor shuddered. Up close, she was even more terrifying. Her skin glowed like liquid gold, and her chest armor and skirt seemed to be woven of tiles made from molten lava. Her hair was like a thick lion’s mane. Her eyes were feline, but they didn’t sparkle like Bast’s or betray any kindness or humor. Sekhmet’s eyes blazed like her arrows, designed only to seek and destroy. She was beautiful the way an atomic explosion is beautiful.

“I smell blood!” she roared. “I will feast on enemies of Ra until my belly is full!”

“Charming,” Sadie whispered. “So Zia...this plan?”

Zia didn’t look so well. She was shivering and pale, and seemed to have trouble focusing on us. “When Ra...when he first called Sekhmet to punish humans because they were rebelling against him...she got out of hand.”

“Hard to imagine,” I whispered, as Sekhmet ripped through the burning wreckage of our boat.

“She started killing everyone,” Zia said, “not just the wicked. None of the other gods could stop her. She would just kill all day until she was gorged on blood. Then she’d leave until the next day. So the people begged the magicians to come up with a plan, and—”

“You dare hide?” Flames roared as Sekhmet’s arrows destroyed pile after pile of dried peppers. “I will roast you alive!”

“Run now,” I decided. “Talk later.”

Sadie and I dragged Zia between us. We managed to get out of the warehouse just before the whole place imploded from the heat, billowing a spicy-hot mushroom cloud into the sky. We ran through a parking lot filled with semitrailers and hid behind a sixteen-wheeler.

I peeked out, expecting to see Sekhmet walk through the flames of the warehouse. Instead, she leaped out in the form of a giant lion. Her eyes blazed, and floating over her head was a disk of fire like a miniature sun.

“The symbol of Ra,” Zia whispered.

Sekhmet roared: “Where are you, my tasty morsels?” She opened her maw and breathed a blast of hot air across the parking lot. Wherever her breath touched, the asphalt melted, cars disintegrated into sand, and the parking lot turned into barren desert.

“How did she do that?” Sadie hissed.

“Her breath creates the deserts,” Zia said. “That is the legend.”

“Better and better.” Fear was closing up my throat, but I knew we couldn’t hide much longer. I summoned my sword. “I’ll distract her. You two run—”

“No,” Zia insisted. “There is another way.” She pointed at a row of silos on the other side of the lot. Each one was three stories tall and maybe twenty feet in diameter, with a giant chili pepper painted on the side.

“Petrol tanks?” Sadie asked.

“No,” I said. “Must be salsa, right?”

Sadie stared at me blankly. “Isn’t that a type of music?”

“It’s a hot sauce,” I said. “That’s what they make here.”

Sekhmet breathed in our direction, and the three trailers next to us melted into sand. We scuttled sideways and jumped behind a cinder block wall.

“Listen,” Zia gasped, her face beading with sweat. “When the people needed to stop Sekhmet, they got huge vats of beer and colored them bright red with pomegranate juice.”

“Yeah, I remember now,” I interrupted. “They told Sekhmet it was blood, and she drank until she passed out. Then Ra was able to recall her into the heavens. They transformed her into something gentler. A cow goddess or something.”

“Hathor,” Zia said. “That is Sekhmet’s other form. The flip side of her personality.”

Sadie shook her head in disbelief. “So you’re saying we offer to buy Sekhmet a few pints, and she’ll turn into a cow.”

“Not exactly,” Zia said. “But salsa is red, is it not?”

We skirted the factory grounds as Sekhmet chewed up trucks and blasted huge swathes of the parking lot to sand.

“I hate this plan,” Sadie grumbled.

“Just keep her occupied for a few seconds,” I said. “And don’t die.”

“Yeah, that’s the hard bit, isn’t it?”

“One...” I counted. “Two...three!”

Sadie burst into the open and used her favorite spell: “Ha-di!”

The glyphs blazed over Sekhmet’s head:

And everything around her exploded. Trucks burst to pieces. The air shimmered with energy. The ground heaved upward, creating a crater fifty feet deep into which the lioness tumbled.

It was pretty impressive, but I didn’t have time to admire Sadie’s work. I turned into a falcon and launched myself toward the salsa tanks.