The Throne of Fire (Kane Chronicles #2)(41)

“But unless we wake Ra, the world ends in four days,” I said.

“Three days now,” Sadie corrected, “if it’s after midnight.”

I winced. “Thanks for the reminder.”

“So take the abbreviated tour,” Bes said. “Start with the Egyptian section. Ground floor, main museum.”

“Aren’t you coming with us?” I asked.

“He can’t, can he?” Sadie guessed. “Like Bast couldn’t enter Desjardins’ house in Paris. The magicians charm their headquarters against the gods. Isn’t that right?”

Bes made an even uglier face. “I’ll walk you down to the bridge, but I can’t go any farther. If I cross the River Neva too close to the Hermitage, I’ll set off all kinds of alarms. You’ll have to sneak inside somehow—”

“Breaking into a museum at night,” Sadie muttered. “We’ve had such good luck with that.”

“—and find the entrance to the Eighteenth Nome. And don’t get captured alive.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “It’s better to be captured dead?”

The look in his eyes was grim. “Just trust me. You don’t want to be Menshikov’s prisoner.”

Bes snapped his fingers, and suddenly we were wearing fleece parkas, ski pants, and winter boots.

“Come on, malishi,” he said. “I’ll walk you to the Dvortsovyy Bridge.”

The bridge was only a few hundred yards away, but it seemed farther. March obviously wasn’t springtime in St. Petersburg. The dark, the wind, and the snow made it feel more like January in Alaska. Personally, I would’ve preferred a sweltering day in the Egyptian desert. Even with the warm clothes Bes had summoned for us, my teeth couldn’t stop chattering.

Bes wasn’t in a hurry. He kept slowing down and giving us the guided tour until I thought my nose would fall off from frostbite. He told us we were on Vasilevsky Island, across the Neva River from the center of St. Petersburg. He pointed out the different church spires and monuments, and when he got excited, he started slipping into Russian.

“You’ve spent a lot of time here,” I said.

He walked in silence for a few paces. “Most of that was long ago. It wasn’t—”

He stopped so abruptly, I stumbled into him. He stared across the street at a big palace with canary yellow walls and a green gabled roof. Lit up in the night through a swirl of snow, it looked unreal, like one of the ghostly images in the First Nome’s Hall of Ages.

“Prince Menshikov’s palace,” Bes muttered.

His voice was full of loathing. I almost thought he was going to yell BOO at the building, but he just gritted his teeth.

Sadie looked at me for an explanation, but I wasn’t a walking Wikipedia like she seemed to think. I knew stuff about Egypt, but Russia? Not so much.

“You mean Menshikov as in Vlad the Inhaler?” I asked.

“He’s a descendant.” Bes curled his lip with distaste. He said a Russian word I was willing to bet was a pretty bad insult. “Back in the seventeen hundreds, Prince Menshikov threw a party for Peter the Great—the tsar who built this city. Peter loved dwarves. He was a lot like the Egyptians that way. He thought we were good luck, so he always kept some of us in his court. Anyway, Menshikov wanted to entertain the tsar, so he thought it would be funny to stage a dwarf wedding. He forced them…he forced us to dress up, pretend to get married, and dance around. All the big folk were laughing, jeering…”

His voice trailed off.

Bes described the party like it was yesterday. Then I remembered that this weird little guy was a god. He’d been around for eons.

Sadie put her hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Bes. Must have been awful.”

He scowled. “Russian magicians…they love capturing gods, using us. I can still hear that wedding music, and the tsar laughing…”

“How’d you get away?” I asked.

Bes glared at me. Obviously, I’d asked a bad question.

“Enough of this.” Bes turned up his collar. “We’re wasting time.”

He forged ahead, but I got the feeling he wasn’t really leaving Menshikov’s palace behind. Suddenly its cheery yellow walls and brightly lit windows looked sinister.

Another hundred yards through the bitter wind, and we reached the bridge. On the other side, the Winter Palace shimmered.

“I’ll take the Mercedes the long way around,” Bes said. “Down to the next bridge, and circle south of the Hermitage. Less likely to alert the magicians that I’m here.”

Now I realized why he was so paranoid about setting off alarms. Magicians had snared him in St. Petersburg once before. I remembered what he’d told us in the car: Don’t get captured alive.

“How do we find you if we succeed?” Sadie asked.

“When you succeed,” Bes said. “Think positive, girl, or the world ends.”

“Right.” Sadie shivered in her new parka. “Positive.”

“I’ll meet you on the Nevsky Prospekt, the main street with all the shops, just south of the Hermitage. I’ll be at the Chocolate Museum.”

“The what now?” I asked.

“Well, it’s not really a museum. More of a shop—closed this time of night, but the owner always opens up for me. They’ve got chocolate everything—chess sets, lions, Vladimir Lenin heads—”