The Serpent's Shadow (Kane Chronicles #3)(95)

I brandished the crook and flail. “These are the symbols of the pharaoh, given to me by Ra himself. He has named me your leader. Even now, he is facing Apophis. We must join the battle. Follow me and do your duty.”

Serqet hissed. “We only follow the strong. Are you strong?”

I moved with lightning speed. I lashed the flail across the goddess, cutting her into a flaming pile of baked scorpions.

A few live critters scuttled out of the wreckage. They moved to a safe distance and began to re-form, until the goddess was whole again, cowering behind a brazier of blue flames.

The vulture goddess Nekhbet cackled. “He is strong.”

“Then come,” I said.

My ba returned to earth. I opened my eyes.

Above Khafre’s pyramid, storm clouds gathered. With a clap of thunder they parted, and the gods charged into battle—some riding war chariots, some in floating warships, some on the backs of giant falcons. The baboon god Babi landed atop the Great Pyramid. He pounded his chest and howled.

I turned to Sadie. “How’s that for a signal?”

We clambered down the pyramid to join the fight.

First tip on fighting a giant Chaos serpent: Don’t.

Even with a squadron of gods and magicians at your back, it’s not a battle you’re likely to win. I got clued in to this as we charged closer and the world seemed to fracture. I realized Apophis wasn’t just coiling in and out of the desert, wrapping himself around the pyramids. He was coiling in and out of the Duat, splintering reality into different layers. Trying to find him was like running through a fun house full of mirrors, each mirror leading to another fun house filled with more mirrors.

Our friends began to split up. All around us, gods and magicians became isolated, some sinking deeper into the Duat than others. We fought a single enemy, but we were each fighting only a fragment of his power.

At the base of the pyramid, snaky coils encircled Walt. He tried to force his way out, blasting the serpent with gray light that turned his scales to ashes; but the serpent just regenerated, closing tighter and tighter around Walt. A few hundred feet away, Julian had summoned a full Horus avatar, a giant green hawk-headed warrior with a khopesh in either hand. He sliced away at the serpent’s tail—or at least one version of it—while the tail lashed around and tried to impale him. Deeper in the Duat, the goddess Serqet stood in nearly the same place. She had turned herself into a giant black scorpion and was confronting another image of the serpent’s tail, parrying it with her stinger in a bizarre sword fight. Even Amos had been waylaid. He faced the wrong direction (or so it looked to me) and sliced his staff through the empty air, shouting command words at nothing.

I hoped that we were weakening Apophis by forcing him to deal with so many of us at once, but I couldn’t see any sign of the serpent’s power decreasing.

“He’s dividing us!” Sadie shouted. Even standing right next to me, she seemed to be speaking from the other side of a roaring wind tunnel.

“Grab hold!” I held out the pharaoh’s crook. “We have to stay together!”

She took the other end of the crook, and we forged ahead.

The closer we got to the serpent’s head, the harder it was to move. I felt like we were running through layers of clear syrup, each thicker and more resistant than the last. I looked around us and realized most of our allies had fallen away. Some I couldn’t even see because of the Chaos distortion.

Ahead of us, a bright light shimmered as if through fifty feet of water.

“We have to get to Ra,” I said. “Concentrate on him!”

What I was really thinking: I have to save Zia. But I was pretty sure Sadie knew that without my spelling it out.

I could hear Zia’s voice, summoning waves of fire against her enemy. She couldn’t be much farther—maybe twenty feet in mortal distance? Through the Duat it might have been a thousand miles.

“Almost there!” I said.

You’re too late, little ones, the voice of Apophis hummed in my ears. Ra will be my breakfast today.

A snake coil as big as a subway car slammed into the sand at our feet, almost crushing us. The scales rippled with Chaos energy, making me want to double over with nausea. Without Horus shielding me, I’m pretty sure I would have been vaporized just standing so close to it. I swung my flail. Three lines of fire cut through the snake’s hide, blasting it to shreds of red and gray fog.

“Okay?” I asked Sadie.

She looked pale, but nodded. We trudged on.

A few of the most powerful gods still fought around us. Babi the baboon was riding one version of the serpent’s head, pounding his massive fists between Apophis’s eyes, but the serpent seemed only mildly annoyed. The hunter goddess Neith hid behind a pile of stone blocks, sniping at another snakehead with her arrows. She was pretty easy to spot because of the palm fronds in her hair, and she kept yelling something about a Jelly Baby conspiracy. Farther on, another serpent’s mouth sank its fangs into Nekhbet the vulture goddess, who shrieked in pain and exploded into a pile of black feathers.

“We’re running out of gods!” Sadie cried.

Finally we reached the middle of the Chaos storm. Walls of red and gray smoke swirled around us, but the roar died in the center as if we’d stepped into the eye of a hurricane. Above us rose the true head of the serpent—or at least the manifestation that held most of his power.