The Throne of Fire (Kane Chronicles #2)(113)

Its voice hissed in my mind: I cannot be contained!

But it was having trouble rising. The sand churned around it. A portal was opening, anchored on Apophis himself.

“I erase your name,” Desjardins said. “I remove you from the memory of Egypt.”

Apophis screamed. The beach imploded around him, swallowing the serpent and sucking the red sand into the vortex.

I grabbed Sadie and ran for the boat. Desjardins had collapsed to his knees in exhaustion, but somehow I managed to hook his arm and drag him to the shore. Together Sadie and I hauled him aboard the sun boat. Ra finally scrambled out from his hiding place under the tiller. The glowing servant lights manned the oars, and we pulled away as the entire beach sank into the dark waters, flashes of red lightning rippling under the surface.

Desjardins was dying.

The hieroglyphs had faded around him. His forehead was burning hot. His skin was as dry and thin as rice paper, and his voice was a ragged whisper.

“Execration w-won’t last,” he warned. “Only bought you some time.”

I gripped his hand like he was an old friend, not a former enemy. After playing senet with the moon god, buying time wasn’t something I took lightly. “Why did you do it?” I asked. “You used all your life force to banish him.”

Desjardins smiled faintly. “Don’t like you much. But you were right. The old ways…our only chance. Tell Amos…tell Amos what happened.” He clawed feebly at his leopard-skin cape, and I realized he wanted to remove it. I helped him, and he pressed the cape into my hands. “Show this to…the others.… Tell Amos…”

His eyes rolled into his head, and the Chief Lector passed. His body disintegrated into hieroglyphs—too many to read, the story of his entire life. Then the words floated away down the River of Night.

“Bye-bye,” Ra muttered. “Weasels are sick.”

I’d almost forgotten about the old god. He slumped in his throne again, resting his head on the loop of his crook and swatting his flail halfheartedly at the servant lights.

Sadie took a shaky breath. “Desjardins saved us. I—I didn’t like him either, but—”

“I know,” I said. “But we have to keep going. Do you still have the scarab?”

Sadie pulled the wriggling golden scarab from her pocket. Together we approached Ra.

“Take it,” I told him.

Ra wrinkled his already wrinkled nose. “Don’t want a bug.”

“It’s your soul!” Sadie snapped. “You’ll take it, and you’ll like it!”

Ra looked cowed. He took the beetle, and to my horror, popped it in his mouth.

“No!” Sadie yelped.

Too late. Ra had swallowed.

“Oh, god,” Sadie said. “Was he supposed to do that? Maybe he was supposed to do that.”

“Don’t like bugs,” Ra muttered.

We waited for him to change into a powerful youthful king. Instead, he burped. He stayed old, and weird, and disgusting.

In a daze, I walked with Sadie back to the front of the ship. We’d done everything we could, and yet I felt like we’d lost. As we sailed on, the magic pressure seemed to ease. The river appeared level, but I could sense we were rising rapidly through the Duat. Despite that, I still felt like my insides were melting. Sadie didn’t look any better.

Menshikov’s words echoed in my head: Mortals can’t leave this cavern alive.

“It’s Chaos sickness,” Sadie said. “We’re not going to make it, are we?”

“We have to hold on,” I said. “At least until dawn.”

“All that,” Sadie said, “and what happened? We retrieved a senile god. We lost Bes and the Chief Lector. And we’re dying.”

I took Sadie’s hand. “Maybe not. Look.”

Ahead of us, the tunnel was getting brighter. The cavern walls dissolved, and the river widened. Two pillars rose from the water—two giant golden scarab statues. Beyond them gleamed the morning skyline of Manhattan. The River of Night was emptying out into New York Harbor.

“Each new dawn is a new world,” I remembered our dad saying. “Maybe we’ll be healed.”

“Ra, too?” Sadie asked.

I didn’t have an answer, but I was starting to feel better, stronger, like I’d had a good night’s sleep. As we passed between the golden scarab statues, I looked to our right. Across the water, smoke was rising from Brooklyn—flashes of multicolored light and streaks of fire as winged creatures engaged in aerial combat.

“They’re still alive,” Sadie said. “They need help!”

We turned the sun boat toward home—and sailed straight into battle.

23. We Throw a Wild House Party

[FATAL MISTAKE, CARTER. Giving me the microphone at the most important part? You’ll never get it back now. The end of the story is mine. Ha-ha-ha!]

Oh, that felt good. I’d be excellent at world domination.

But I digress.

You might’ve seen news reports about the strange double sunrise over Brooklyn on the morning of March twenty-first. There were many theories: haze in the air from pollution, a temperature drop in the lower atmosphere, aliens, or perhaps another sewer-gas leak causing mass hysteria. We love sewer gas in Brooklyn!

I can confirm, however, that there briefly were two suns in the sky. I know this because I was in one of them. The normal sun rose as usual. But there was also the boat of Ra, blazing as it rose from the Duat, out of New York Harbor and into the sky of the mortal world.