The Serpent's Shadow (The Kane Chronicles, Book Three) (18 page)

“You said Amos thought that
at first
,” I noted. “There’s more to the story, then?”

Zia gazed at the melted wheelchair. The light from outside turned her hair the color of rusted iron.

“He was here,” she murmured. “He was here for eons, trapped.”

I took a moment to process that. “You mean Ra.”

“He was miserable and alone,” she said. “He had been forced to abdicate his throne. He left the mortal world and lost the will to live.”

I stamped out a smoldering daisy on the carpet. “I don’t know, Zia. He looked quite happy when we woke him up, singing and grinning and so on.”

“No.” Zia walked toward the windows, as if drawn by the lovely view of brimstone. “His mind is still sleeping. I’ve spent time with him, Sadie. I’ve watched his expressions while he naps. I’ve heard him whimpering and mumbling. That old body is a cage, a prison. The true Ra is trapped inside.”

She was starting to worry me now. Fireballs I could deal with. Incoherent rambling—not so much.

“I suppose it makes sense you’d have sympathy with Ra,” I ventured. “You’re a fire elementalist. He’s a fiery sort of god. You were trapped in that tomb. Ra was trapped in a nursing home. Perhaps that’s what caused your blackout just now. This place reminded you of your own imprisonment.”

That’s right—Sadie Kane, junior psychologist. And why not? I’d spent enough time diagnosing my crazed mates Liz and Emma back in London.

Zia stared out at the burning lake. I had the feeling that my attempt at therapy might not have been so therapeutic.

“Amos tried to help me,” she said. “He knows what I’m going through. He cast a spell on me to focus my mind, but…” She shook her head. “It’s been getting worse. This is the first day in weeks that I
haven’t
taken care of Ra, and the more time I spend with him, the fuzzier my thoughts get. When I summon fire now, I have trouble controlling it. Even simple spells I’ve done for years—I channel too much power. If that happens during a blackout…”

I understood why she sounded frightened. Magicians have to be careful with spells. If we channel too much power, we might inadvertently exhaust our reserves. Then the spell would tap directly into the magician’s life force—with unpleasant consequences.

You will need to advise her
, Isis had told me.
She must learn
the path quickly.

An uncomfortable thought began to form. I remembered Ra’s delight when he had first met Zia, the way he’d tried to give her his last remaining scarab beetle. He’d babbled on and on about zebras…possibly meaning Zia. And now Zia was starting to empathize with the old god, even trying to burn down the nursing home where he’d been trapped for so long.

That couldn’t be good. But how could I advise her when I had no idea what was happening?

Isis’s warnings rattled around in my head: The path of the gods was the answer for all the Kanes. Zia was struggling. Amos was still tainted by his time with Set.

“Zia…” I hesitated. “You said Amos knows what you’re going through. Is that why he asked Bast to watch Ra today? To give you time away from the sun god?”

“I—I suppose.”

I tried to steady my breathing. Then I asked the harder question: “In the war room, Amos said he might have to use other means to fight his enemies. He hasn’t…um, he hasn’t been having trouble with Set?”

Zia wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Sadie, I promised him—”

“Oh, gods of Egypt! He’s
calling
on Set? Trying to channel his power, after all Set did to him? Please, no.”

She didn’t answer, which was an answer in itself.

“He’ll be overwhelmed!” I cried. “If the rebel magicians find out that the Chief Lector is meddling with the god of evil, just as they suspected—”

“Set isn’t just the god of evil,” Zia reminded me. “He is Ra’s lieutenant. He defended the sun god against Apophis.”

“You think that makes it all better?” I shook my head in disbelief. “And now Amos thinks you’re having trouble with Ra? Does he think Ra is trying to…” I pointed to Zia’s head.

“Sadie, please…” Her voice trailed off in misery.

I suppose it wasn’t fair for me to press her. She seemed even more confused than I was.

Still, I hated the idea of Zia being disoriented so close to our final battle—blacking out, throwing random fireballs, losing control of her own power. Even worse was the possibility that Amos had some sort of link with Set—that he might actually have
chosen
to let that horrible god back into his head.

The thought tied my gut into
tyets
—Isis knots.

I imagined my old enemy Michel Desjardins scowling.
Ne
voyez-vous pas, Sadie Kane? This is what comes from the path of
the gods. This is why the magic was forbidden.

I kicked the melted remains of the wheelchair. One bent wheel squeaked and wobbled.

“We’ll have to table that conversation,” I decided. “We’re running out of time. Now…where have all the old folks gone?”

Zia pointed out the window. “There,” she said calmly. “They’re having a beach day.”

We made our way down to the black sand beach by the Lake of Fire. It wouldn’t have been my top vacation spot, but elderly gods were lounging on deck chairs under brightly colored umbrellas. Others snored on beach towels or sat in their wheelchairs and stared at the boiling vista.

One shriveled bird-headed goddess in a one-piece bathing suit was building a sand pyramid. Two old men—I assumed they were fire gods—stood waist-deep in the blazing surf, laughing and splashing lava in each other’s faces.

Tawaret the caretaker beamed when she saw us.

“Sadie!” she called. “You’re early this week! And you’ve brought a friend.”

Normally, I wouldn’t have stood still as an upright grinning female hippo charged toward me for a hug, but I’d got used to Tawaret.

She’d traded her high heels for flip-flops. Otherwise she was dressed in her usual white nurse’s uniform. Her mascara and lipstick were tastefully done, for a hippo, and her luxuriant black hair was pinned under a nurse’s cap. Her ill-fitting blouse opened over an enormous belly—possibly a sign of permanent pregnancy, as she was the goddess of childbirth, or possibly a sign of eating too many cupcakes. I’d never been entirely sure.

She embraced me without crushing me, which I greatly appreciated. Her lilac perfume reminded me of my Gran, and the tinge of sulfur on her clothes reminded me of Gramps.

“Tawaret,” I said, “this is Zia Rashid.”

Tawaret’s smile faded. “Oh…Oh, I see.”

I’d never seen the hippo goddess so uneasy. Did she somehow know that Zia had melted her wheelchair and torched her daisies?

As the silence got awkward, Tawaret recovered her smile. “Sorry, yes. Hello, Zia. It’s just that you look…well, never mind! Are you a friend of Bes’s too?”

“Uh, not really,” Zia admitted. “I mean, I suppose, but—”

“We’re here on a mission,” I said. “Things in the upper world have gone a bit wonky.”

I told Tawaret about the rebel magicians, Apophis’s plans for attack, and our mad scheme to find the serpent’s shadow and stomp it to death.

Tawaret mashed her hippoish hands together. “Oh, dear. Doomsday tomorrow? Bingo night was supposed to be Friday. My poor darlings will be so disappointed.…”

She glanced down the beach at her senile charges, some of whom were drooling in their sleep or eating black sand or trying to talk to the lava.

Tawaret sighed. “I suppose it would be kinder not to tell them. They’ve been here for eons, forgotten by the mortal world. Now they have to perish along with everyone else. They don’t deserve such a fate.”

I wanted to remind her that
no one
deserved such a fate—not my friends, not my family, and certainly not a brilliant young woman named Sadie Kane, who had her whole life ahead of her. But Tawaret was so kindhearted, I didn’t want to sound selfish. She didn’t seem concerned for herself at all, just the fading gods she cared for.

“We’re not giving up yet,” I promised.

“But this plan of yours!” Tawaret shuddered, causing a tsunami of jiggling hippo flesh. “It’s impossible!”

“Like reviving the sun god?” I asked.

She conceded that with a shrug. “Very well, dear. I’ll admit you’ve done the impossible before. Nevertheless…” She glanced at Zia, as if my friend’s presence still made her nervous. “Well, I’m sure you know what you’re doing. How can I help?”

“May we see Bes?” I asked.

“Of course…but I’m afraid he hasn’t changed.”

She led us down the beach. The past few months I’d visited Bes at least once a week, so I knew many of the elderly gods by sight. I spotted Heket the frog goddess perched atop a beach umbrella as if it were a lily pad. Her tongue shot out to catch something from the air. Did they have flies in the Duat?

Farther on, I saw the goose god Gengen-Wer, whose name—I kid you not—meant the Great Honker. The first time Tawaret told me that, I almost spewed tea. His Supreme Honkiness was waddling along the beach, squawking at the other gods and startling them out of their sleep.

Yet every time I visited, the crowd changed. Some gods disappeared. Others popped up—gods of cities that no longer existed; gods who had only been worshipped for a few centuries before being replaced by others; gods so old, they’d forgot their own names. Most civilizations left behind pottery shards or monuments or literature. Egypt was so old, it had left behind a landfill’s worth of deities.

Halfway down the beach, we passed the two old codgers who’d been playing in the lava. Now they were wrestling waist-deep in the lake. One pummeled the other with an
ankh
and warbled, “It’s
my
pudding!
My
pudding!”

“Oh dear,” Tawaret said. “Fire-embracer and Hot Foot are at it again.”

I choked back a laugh. “Hot Foot? What sort of godly name is that?”

Tawaret studied the fiery surf, as if looking for a way to navigate through it without getting incinerated. “They’re gods from the Hall of Judgment, dear. Poor things. There used to be forty-two of them, each in charge of judging a different crime. Even in the old days, we could never keep them all straight. Now…” She shrugged. “They’re quite forgotten, sadly. Fire-embracer, the one with the
ankh
—he used to be the god of robberies. I’m afraid it made him paranoid. He always thinks Hot Foot has stolen his pudding. I’ll have to break up the fight.”

“Let me,” Zia said.

Tawaret stiffened. “You, my…dear?”

I got the feeling she was going to say something other than
dear
.

“The fire won’t bother me,” Zia assured her. “You two go ahead.”

I wasn’t sure how Zia could be so confident. Perhaps she simply preferred swimming in flames to seeing Bes in his present state. If so, I couldn’t blame her. The experience was unsettling.

Whatever the case, Zia strode toward the surf and waded straight in like a flame-retardant
Baywatch
lifeguard.

Tawaret and I continued along the beach. We reached the dock where Ra’s sun boat had anchored the first time Carter and I had visited this place.

Bes sat at the end of the pier in a comfy leather chair, which Tawaret must have brought down especially for him. He wore a fresh red-and-blue Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts. His face was thinner than it had been last spring, but otherwise he looked unchanged—the same scraggly nest of black hair, the same bristly mane that passed for a beard, the same lovably grotesque face that reminded me of a pug dog’s.

But Bes’s soul was gone. He stared vacantly at the lake, not reacting at all when I knelt next to him and gripped his furry hand.

I remembered the first time he’d saved my life—picking me up in a limo full of rubbish, driving me to Waterloo Bridge, then scaring away two gods who had been chasing me. He had jumped out of the car wearing nothing but a Speedo and screamed, “Boo!”

Yes, he’d been a true friend.

“Dear Bes,” I said, “we’re going to try to help you.”

I told him everything that had happened since my last visit. I knew he couldn’t hear me. Since his secret name had been stolen, his mind simply wasn’t there. But talking to him made me feel better.

Tawaret sniffled. I knew she had loved Bes forever, though Bes hadn’t always returned her feelings. He couldn’t have had a better caretaker.

“Oh, Sadie…” The hippo goddess wiped away a tear. “If you truly could help him, I—I’d do anything. But how is it possible?”

“Shadows,” I said. “This bloke Setne…he found a way to use shadows for an execration spell. If the
sheut
is a backup copy of the soul, and if Setne’s magic could be used in reverse…”

Tawaret’s eyes widened. “You believe you could use Bes’s shadow to bring him back?”

“Yes.” I knew it sounded mad, but I
had
to believe. Saying it aloud to Tawaret, who cared about Bes even more than I did…well, I simply couldn’t let her down. Besides, if we could do this for Bes, then who knew? Perhaps we could use the same magic to get the sun god Ra back in fighting shape. First things first, however. I intended to keep my promise to the dwarf god.

“Here’s the tricky bit,” I said. “I’m hoping you can help me locate Bes’s shadow. I don’t know much about gods and their
sheuts
and whatnot. I understand that you often hide them?”

Tawaret shifted nervously, her feet creaking on the pier boards. “Um, yes…”

“I’m hoping they’re a bit like secret names,” I forged on. “Since I can’t ask Bes where he keeps his shadow, I thought I’d ask the person who was closest to him. I thought you’d have the best chance of knowing.”

Seeing a hippo blush is quite odd. It almost made Tawaret look delicate—in a massive sort of way.

“I—I saw his shadow once,” she admitted. “During one of our best moments together. We were sitting on the temple wall in Saïs.”

“Sorry?”

“A city in the Nile Delta,” Tawaret explained. “The home of a friend of ours—the hunting goddess Neith. She liked to invite Bes and me on her hunting excursions. We would, ah, flush her prey for her.”

I imagined Tawaret and Bes, two gods with super-ugly powers, plowing through the marshes hand in hand, yelling “Boo!” to scare up bevies of quail. I decided to keep that image to myself.