The Red Pyramid (Kane Chronicles #1)(40)

Then a chilling thought occurred to me: This was a bird with a human head, the same form I’d imagined taking when I slept in Amos’s house, when my soul left my body and flew to Phoenix. I had no idea what that meant, but it scared me.

The bird creature scratched at the stone floor. Then, unexpectedly, he smiled.

“Pari, niswa nafeer,” he told me, or at least that’s what it sounded like.

Zia gasped. She and Sadie were standing behind me now, their faces pale. Apparently they’d managed to cross the chasm without my noticing.

Finally Zia seemed to collect herself. She bowed to the bird creature. Sadie followed her example.

The creature winked at me, as if we’d just shared a joke. Then he vanished. The red light faded. The statues retracted their arms, uncrossing their spears from the entrance.

“That’s it?” I asked. “What did the turkey say?”

Zia looked at me with something like fear. “That was not a turkey, Carter. That was a ba.”

I’d heard my dad use that word before, but I couldn’t place it. “Another monster?”

“A human soul,” Zia said. “In this case, a spirit of the dead. A magician from ancient times, come back to serve as a guardian. They watch the entrances of the House.”

She studied my face as if I’d just developed some terrible rash.

“What?” I demanded. “Why are you looking at me that way?”

“Nothing,” she said. “We must hurry.”

She squeezed by me on the ledge and disappeared into the tunnel.

Sadie was staring at me too.

“All right,” I said. “What did the bird guy say? You understood it?”

She nodded uneasily. “He mistook you for someone else. He must have bad eyesight.”

“Because?”

“Because he said, ‘Go forth, good king.’”

I was in a daze after that. We passed through the tunnel and entered a vast underground city of halls and chambers, but I only remember bits and pieces of it.

The ceilings soared to twenty or thirty feet, so it didn’t feel like we were underground. Every chamber was lined with massive stone columns like the ones I’d seen in Egyptian ruins, but these were in perfect condition, brightly painted to resemble palm trees, with carved green fronds at the top, so I felt like I was walking through a petrified forest. Fires burned in copper braziers. They didn’t seem to make any smoke, but the air smelled good, like a marketplace for spices—cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, and others I couldn’t identify. The city smelled like Zia. I realized that this was her home.

We saw a few other people—mostly older men and women. Some wore linen robes, some modern clothes. One guy in a business suit walked past with a black leopard on a leash, as if that were completely normal. Another guy barked orders to a small army of brooms, mops, and buckets that were scuttling around, cleaning up the city.

“Like that cartoon,” Sadie said. “Where Mickey Mouse tries to do magic and the brooms keep splitting and toting water.”

“‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,’” Zia said. “You do know that was based on an Egyptian story, don’t you?”

Sadie just stared back. I knew how she felt. It was too much to process.

We walked through a hall of jackal-headed statues, and I could swear their eyes watched us as we passed. A few minutes later, Zia led us through an open-air market—if you can call anything “open-air” underground—with dozens of stalls selling weird items like boomerang wands, animated clay dolls, parrots, cobras, papyrus scrolls, and hundreds of different glittering amulets.

Next we crossed a path of stones over a dark river teeming with fish. I thought they were perch until I saw their vicious teeth.

“Are those piranhas?” I asked.

“Tiger fish from the Nile,” Zia said. “Like piranhas, except these can weigh up to sixteen pounds.”

I watched my step more closely after that.

We turned a corner and passed an ornate building carved out of black rock. Seated pharaohs were chiseled into the walls, and the doorway was shaped like a coiled serpent.

“What’s in there?” Sadie asked.

We peeked inside and saw rows of children—maybe two dozen in all, about six to ten years old or so—sitting cross-legged on cushions. They were hunched over brass bowls, peering intently into some sort of liquid and speaking under their breath. At first I thought it was a classroom, but there was no sign of a teacher, and the chamber was lit only by a few candles. Judging by the number of empty seats, the room was meant to hold twice as many kids.

“Our initiates,” Zia said, “learning to scry. The First Nome must keep in contact with our brethren all over the world. We use our youngest as...operators, I suppose you would say.”

“So you’ve got bases like this all over the world?”

“Most are much smaller, but yes.”

I remembered what Amos had told us about the nomes. “Egypt is the First Nome. New York is the Twenty-first. What’s the last one, the Three-hundred-and-sixtieth?”

“That would be Antarctica,” Zia said. “A punishment assignment. Nothing there but a couple of cold magicians and some magic penguins.”

“Magic penguins?”

“Don’t ask.”