He nodded bravely, but I looked at Carter and knew we were thinking the same thing. Leonid might not last that long. His uniform coat was soaked with blood. He kept his hand over his gut, but he’d clearly been savaged—either by claws or knives or some equally horrible magic.
I cast a Slow spell on Leonid, which would at least steady his breathing and stem the flow of blood, but it wouldn’t help much. The poor boy had risked his life to escape St. Petersburg. He’d come all the way to Brooklyn to warn me about the impending attack. Now he’d tried to defend the First Nome against his former masters, and they’d cut him down and walked right over him, leaving him to suffer a lingering death.
“We will be back,” I promised again.
Carter and I stumbled on.
We reached the bottom of the steps and were instantly thrown into battle. A shabti lion leaped at my face.
Isis reacted faster than I could have. She gave me a single word to speak: “Fah!”
And the hieroglyph for Release shimmered in the air:
The lion shrank to a wax statuette and bounced harmlessly off my chest.
All around us, the corridor was in mayhem. In either direction our initiates were locked in combat with enemy magicians. Directly in front of us, a dozen rebels had formed a wedge blocking the doors to the Hall of Ages, and our friends seemed to be trying to get past them.
For a moment, that seemed backward to me. Shouldn’t our side be defending the doors? Then I realized what must have happened. The attack on the sealed tunnel had surprised our allies. They’d rushed to help Amos, but by the time they’d got to the doors, the enemies were already inside. Now this lot was keeping our reinforcements from reaching Amos, while our uncle was inside the hall, possibly alone, facing Sarah Jacobi and her elite hit squad.
My pulse raced. I charged into battle, flinging spells from Isis’s incredibly diverse menu. It felt good to be a goddess again, I must admit, but I had to keep careful track of my energy. If I let Isis have free reign, she would destroy our enemies in seconds, but she would also burn me up in the process. I had to temper her inclination to rend the puny mortals to pieces.
I threw my wand like a boomerang and hit a large, bearded magician who was yelling in Russian as he fought sword-to-sword against Julian.
The Russian disappeared in a golden flash. Where he’d been standing, a hamster squeaked in alarm and scurried away. Julian grinned at me. His sword blade was smoking and the turn-ups of his trousers were on fire, but otherwise he looked all right.
“About time!” he said.
Another magician charged him, and we had no further time to chat.
Carter waded forward, swinging his flail and crook as if he had trained with them all his life. An enemy magician summoned a rhino—which I thought quite rude, considering the tight space we were in. Carter lashed it with his flail, and each spiked chain became a rope of fire. The rhino crumbled, cut into three pieces, and melted into a pile of wax.
Our other friends weren’t doing too badly, either. Felix used an ice spell that I’d never seen before—encasing his enemies in big fluffy snowmen, complete with carrot noses and pipes. His army of penguins waddled around him, pecking at enemy magicians and stealing their wands.
Alyssa was fighting with another earth elementalist, but this Russian woman was clearly outmatched. She’d probably never faced the power of Geb before. Each time the Russian summoned a stone creature or tried to throw boulders, her attacks dissolved into rubble. Alyssa snapped her fingers, and the floor turned to quicksand under her opponent’s feet. The Russian sank up to her shoulders, quite stuck.
At the north end of the corridor, Jaz crouched next to Cleo, tending her arm, which had been turned into a sunflower. Cleo had got off better than her opponent, though. At her feet lay a human-sized volume of the novel David Copperfield, which I had a feeling had once been an enemy magician.
(Carter tells me David Copperfield is a magician. He finds this funny for some reason. Just ignore him. I do.)
Even our ankle-biters had got into the act. Young Shelby had scattered her crayons down the hallway to trip the enemy. Now she was wielding her wand like a tennis racket, running between the legs of adult magicians, swatting them on the bottom and yelling, “Die, die, die!”
Aren’t children adorable?
She swatted a large metal warrior, a shabti no doubt, and he transformed into a rainbow-colored potbellied pig. If we lived through the day, I had a bad feeling Shelby would want to keep it.
Some of the First Nome residents were helping us, but depressingly few. A handful of tottering old magicians and desperate merchants threw talismans and deflected spells.
Slowly but surely, we waded toward the doors, where the main wedge of enemies seemed to be focused on a single attacker.
When I realized who it was, I was tempted to turn myself into a hamster and scamper away, squeaking.
Walt had arrived. He ripped through the enemy line with his bare hands—throwing one rebel magician down the hallway with inhuman strength, touching another and instantly encasing the man in mummy linen. He grabbed the staff of a third rebel, and it crumbled to dust. Finally he swept his hand toward the remaining enemies, and they shrank to the size of dolls. Canopic jars—the sort used to bury a mummy’s internal organs—sprang up around each of the tiny magicians, sealing them in with lids shaped like animal heads. The poor magicians yelled desperately, banging on the clay containers and wobbling about like a line of very unhappy bowling pins.
Walt turned to our friends. “Is everyone all right?”
He looked like normal old Walt—tall and muscular with a confident face, soft brown eyes, and strong hands. But his clothes had changed. He wore jeans, a dark Dead Weather T-shirt, and a black leather jacket—Anubis’s outfit, sized up to fit Walt’s physique. All I had to do was lower my vision into the Duat, just a bit, and I saw Anubis standing there in all his usual annoying gorgeousness. Both of them—occupying the same space.
“Get ready,” Walt told our troops. “They’ve sealed the doors, but I can—”
Then he noticed me, and his voice faltered.
“Sadie,” he said. “I—”
“Something about opening the doors?” I demanded.
He nodded mutely.
“Amos is in there?” I asked. “Fighting Kwai and Jacobi and who knows what else?”
He nodded again.
“Then stop staring at me and open the doors, you annoying boy!”
I was talking to both of them. It felt quite natural. And it felt good to let my anger out. I’d deal with those two—that one—whatever he was—later. Right now, my uncle needed me.
Walt/Anubis had the nerve to smile.
He put his hand on the doors. Gray ash spread across the surface. The bronze crumbled to dust.
“After you,” he told me, and we charged into the Hall of Ages.
18. Death Boy to the Rescue
THE GOOD NEWS: Amos wasn’t entirely alone.
The bad news: his backup was the god of evil.
As we poured into the Hall of Ages, our rescue attempt sputtered to a stop. We hadn’t expected to see a deadly aerial ballet with lightning and knives. The normal floating hieroglyphs that filled the room were gone. The holographic curtains on either side of the hall flickered weakly. Some had collapsed altogether.
As I’d suspected, an assault team of enemy magicians had locked themselves in here with Amos, but it looked like they were regretting their choice.
Hovering midair in the center of the hall, Amos was cloaked in the strangest avatar I’d ever seen. A vaguely human form swirled around him—part sandstorm, part fire, rather like the giant Apophis we’d seen upstairs, except a lot happier. The giant red warrior laughed as he fought, spinning a ten-meter black iron staff with careless force. Suspended in his chest, Amos copied the giant’s moves, his face beaded with sweat. I couldn’t tell if Amos was directing Set or trying to restrain him. Possibly both.