Alex nodded grimly. “Yeah,” he said. “Pretty sure.”
It made sense to Alex that the mummies would look like the people they’d once been while they were still in the afterlife. Then they’d be mummies again when they stepped back into the world of the living. And he knew The Order’s first target was NYC, a high-profile demonstration of their abilities, meant to strike fear into the rest of the world.
But he had a bigger concern, too. Ren had asked the ibis where the Spells were. He’d heard her with his own ears. But he also knew that her attention was divided by her homesickness and concern about her parents. And the ibis knew it, too. The last time she’d tried to ask it about their mission, it had shown her home instead.
Was this time different? he wondered as they headed north along the riverbank. Or were they chasing the wrong thing?
“So that portal, or false door or whatever,” she said, “it leads to New York?”
“Man,” said Luke. “I would love to get back to NYC.”
“Guys!” Alex snapped. “We need to concentrate on what we’re doing here, okay?”
“I know,” said Luke. “I’m just, like, seriously missing my PlayStation.”
They walked on wordlessly for a while, keeping their eyes and ears open and doing their best to move quietly, though the ground had grown so muddy that their footsteps made small squelches. The three of them were spread out in a line, with Ren farthest up the bank, Alex in the middle, and Luke closer to the river. Together, their six feet were making a chorus of burpy sounds in the soggy soil. Alex turned to the others to tell them to step softly, but as he did, he saw a man in black robes slip silently out from behind a palm tree and step in front of Ren. “Watch out!” he blurted.
But she’d already stopped cold.
She saw the knife, too.
Alex and Luke both grabbed for their amulets, but the man held the knife just under Ren’s chin. “There is no need for that,” he said. “I just came to see who passes along my bank.”
Alex didn’t dare unleash a burst of wind with the knife so close to Ren, but the amulet did allow him to understand the man’s ancient tongue. “Your bank?” he said, trying to keep the fear and concern from his voice.
“I maintain it,” said the man.
Luke moved a few squelches closer to Alex and whispered, “I could get him.”
Alex shook his head slowly and whispered back, “Not yet. Can’t risk it.” If Luke hit this guy at top speed, the impact could drive the knife right into Ren.
The man paid no attention to the hushed conversation and continued to talk about maintaining the bank. “If it weren’t for me, it would be a swamp. There is a spring — and many snakes. But I keep it nice. Nice for you to pass.”
“Uh, thanks?” said Ren, who had quietly taken hold of her amulet, too. She said it through her teeth to avoid opening her mouth too wide and cutting herself on the blade.
“You are welcome!” said the man grandly, lowering his knife just a touch. Then he seemed to remember something sad and shook his head ruefully. “But such work is not easy. I am afraid I must ask —”
“For a small contribution?” volunteered Alex eagerly, suddenly understanding. “Just a reasonable toll, perhaps?”
The man smiled broadly. “I am glad you understand me! Clearly you are a very intelligent boy.”
And you’re a bandit and a thief, thought Alex, but what he said was: “Hold on.”
Once again, Alex swung the pack from his back. He stuck his hand in and began rifling through the bottom. Soon he felt the old, cold gold clinking under his hand.
“No tricks,” said the man.
Alex pulled his hand out of the pack and held up three ancient coins — another gift from the overstocked museum. “Of course not,” he said. “Just a small, um, appreciation.”
Thousands of years had dulled the luster of the coins, but the man eyed them greedily as Alex walked them over to him, spread out on his outstretched palm. The man lunged for them with his free hand, but Alex pulled back and pocketed one of the coins. “We will give you this one when we cross ‘your bank’ safely on the way back.”
The bandit smiled and grabbed the two remaining coins with the quickness of a cobra striking. Alex felt the man’s ragged nails scratch across his palm. Then the bandit lowered his knife and began to back away, bowing slightly. “You truly are a smart boy,” he said. “And these are fine coins. So I will give you one last bit of information. Beware, strange children, for the borderlands are unsettled. There is discord between the world of the living and the world of the dead.”
“Uh, no offense,” said Ren, no longer needing to talk through her teeth. “But we kind of know that already.”
“Smarter than I thought, then,” said the thief, pocketing the coins and sheathing his knife. “But did you know that Ammit herself prowls these lands now, upset by the imbalance?”
“Ammit?” said Alex. “The devourer of souls?” Alex had seen Ammit’s strange image many times, carved into the walls of tombs and painted on the scrolls of the Book of the Dead. A demigod with the head of a crocodile, the body of a lion, and the hindquarters of a hippo, she had one grim job: to devour the hearts — and souls — of those who failed the weighing of the heart ceremony.
“Yes,” said the man, looking both ways nervously as he stepped back alongside the thick old tree. “The pull of the far shore is strong, but I have stayed on this side for long ages to avoid her fearsome jaws. Now she has come to the borderlands!”
“Uh, okay,” said Ren, clearly ready to be done with this man. “We’ll keep our eyes open.”
“Your ears,” he said. “You will know the devourer by her cry.”
And then, without another word, he stepped toward the tree and disappeared completely. Not behind it but, somehow, inside.
“Good thing Todtman thought of giving us those old coins,” said Ren, glaring at the old tree. “That guy could’ve killed me.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Alex, giddy with relief to see his best friend still alive. He knocked on the tree trunk as they walked past. “His bark is worse than his bite.”
Ren groaned at the pun, and Alex slung the pack back over his shoulder. It was lighter now, without the boat and coins. He felt a few old scrolls, protective spells from the Book of the Dead, rolling around inside.
Luke led the way, high-tech sneakers on timeless soil, as they angled back down the bank and followed the river around a wide corner. New knowledge jumbled together in Alex’s head like puzzle pieces in a box:
Ammit herself prowls the borderlands …
The gods are stronger …
“There it is!” said Luke, pointing toward the river.
The little wooden boat was lying on its side on the riverbank. Alex looked back over his shoulder as they walked toward it. He couldn’t say exactly how far it had come — or they had come — since they’d first set this thing in the water. All he knew was that the golden light was starting to fade, and the colors swirling in the air were getting darker and more ominous, bloodreds replacing rosy pinks, blues edging toward black. The growls and groans and huffs and wails that had sounded far-off before seemed louder now, closer. Alex didn’t like any of it, and the darkening world wasn’t his only concern. “We need to be careful.” he said as Ren bent down to pick up the boat. “If the boat’s here, the Stung Man could be, too.”
Kneeling in the sand with her hand a few inches from the boat, Ren paused and looked back toward him. “Maybe we got here first,” she said. “Maybe I was wrong.”
As she spoke, Alex saw a large black scorpion scamper up from the little pocket of shade under the boat’s hull. “Ren!” he gasped.
“What?” she said, her fingers just inches from the scorpion’s flexed tail, the curved stinger twisting into position for a strike.
“Scorpion!” shouted Luke.
Ren jumped up and back as the angry arachnid struck out at empty air.
“Where did that come from
?” said Ren. “Do you think it’s one of his?”
The first Death Walker had faced a grisly demise from scorpion stings thousands of years earlier, and back in New York, the venomous insects had been a surefire calling card of the Stung Man. But here, in between palm trees and the Nile, the little creepy-crawler seemed to fit right in. “Maybe not?” Alex said hopefully.
“Uh, what about those ones?” she said, her voice suddenly shaky.
Alex turned and saw why. The bank was suddenly dotted with scorpions. Some were large and black and others were small and pale, but all of them were packing potent venom and heading down the bank, their exoskeletons clicking and clacking softly.
“This place is really starting to bug me,” muttered Luke.
Alex grabbed his amulet, planning to clear a path through the arachnid army with a gust of desert wind. Instead, he got a warning. A sharp pulse, like a radar signal bouncing off a mountain, rang in his mind. Alex spun around. And there he was.
“I was hoping we’d meet again,” said the Stung Man. He stood just up the bank, no more than twelve feet away.
“Oh no,” breathed Ren, grabbing for her own amulet.
The Stung Man advanced toward them with long, confident strides, and the scorpions scurrying all around him.
“What happened to his face?” whispered Luke. Alex realized it was his cousin’s first encounter with this Walker and the swollen, discolored flesh of his eternally unhealing wounds. But there was no time for explanation — only action.
Ren raised her hand and delivered a blinding white flash that caught the Stung Man by surprise. He closed his eyes too late and grunted in annoyance.
Meanwhile, Alex delivered a whipping, whistling lance of wind that scattered dirt and scorpions as it cut up from the bank to the line of palm trees. “Go!” he shouted, and the friends took off running toward the tree line. There was nothing to be gained from fighting the Stung Man out in the open, before they’d ever located the Spells, and the only plan that made sense was escape.
As they raced up the bank, Alex pictured the massive stinger that took the place of the Stung Man’s left hand. He could almost feel it shooting forth and piercing his back with its cruel, curved point. He ran faster as Luke whooshed past him in a cheetah-powered blur. Half a step behind him, Ren’s feet slapped dirt. “Come on, come on!” he called over his shoulder.
Luke was at the crest of the bank. Moving at hyper-speed, he had already molded the dark soil of the floodplain into a dozen perfectly round dirt balls. Now he delivered the first one down the slope in a high-kicking baseball pitch.
A dull THOKK! of exploding dirt gave way to an indignant shout from the Walker.
Alex didn’t need to turn around to know that Luke’s first pitch was a strike. Instead, he eyed the fields just beyond his cousin. The grain was higher here, as if unharvested for some time — perfect for hiding three kids!
“Into the field!” he called.
Luke whipped one more major league dirtball down the slope as Alex and Ren reached the top of the bank and sprinted straight past him. Luke turned and followed, immediately overtaking the others. Their own frantic footsteps mixed with the beat of the Stung Man’s sandals slapping the dirt behind them. As the sound of the Walker’s pursuit grew closer — hoarse shouts and muttered curses mixing with heavy footfalls — Alex tensed up, preparing for the terrible pain of the massive stinger piercing his back.
And then he felt it.
The rough slap of tall sprouts of barley hitting his face as they burst into the field. “Keep going!” he said as the Stung Man roared his disapproval behind them.
Alex crashed through the tall ripe stalks, his vision just a whirl of green and gold and tan. His heart pounded and he gasped for breath, feeling like he was sucking in nearly as much grain and dust as air.
For a few chaotic moments he lost track of the others and panicked. Had Ren fallen? Had Luke been brought down by the stinger? But then he heard Ren. “This is going to be murder on my allergies!” she huffed from right behind him. The crash of stalks laid low in front of him told Alex his cousin was still at full speed.
But if he could hear his friends, so could the Stung Man. “Slow down!” he gasped. “We have to be quiet if we want to lose him.”
The crashing subsided. “Okay,” Ren said softly from beside him.
“Good plan,” said Luke from a few yards ahead.
Alex took the lead as they snaked their way through the field single file. The grain grew taller the deeper they went, and soon even Luke could stand up straight with no fear of being seen.
“Okay,” whispered Alex. “Let’s stop for a second.”
They stood still, catching their breath and listening carefully. The only sound Alex could hear was the wind gently rustling the grain. He took hold of his amulet and searched, but the intense radar signal was gone. All he felt was the same general buzzing hum as before. “I think we lost him,” he said. “I’m not getting any signal from the amulet.”
“None?” said Ren. “Not the Lost Spells, either?”
Alex shook his head. “I think they must be hidden again,” he said. They knew it was a possibility. When The Order had captured the Spells from his mom’s desert hideout, they’d also captured the ancient cloaking spells she’d wrapped them in.
“We’ll never find them now,” said Ren angrily, punctuating the thought with a small sneeze. Choo!
“Not cool,” said Luke.
Had they really come all this way — into another world! — only to come up short? Alex refused to believe it. “Wait,” he said as the three knelt down next to each other in the sea of swaying grain. “We did see the first thing the ibis showed you. And then we ran into the Stung Man.”
“Okay, so what does that mean?” asked Luke.
“We banished him here. But Todtman said that if The Order got the Spells, the Walkers we’d banished would be able to come back,” Alex explained. “So if the Stung Man’s still hanging around here, then maybe it means he’s helping to guard the Spells.”
“Okay, maybe,” said Ren. “But they’re not going to hide the most powerful spells in the world in some field. Remember what else Todtman said, right before we left? ‘Even in the afterlife they will guard their prize closely.’ They wouldn’t just leave them out in the open.”
Alex considered it. “Right … so we’re looking for some kind of building, and we know it’s on this side of the river and that we’re probably pretty close.”
“Not many buildings around here,” said Luke, plucking a stalk of barley from the ground. “It’s not exactly midtown.”
Midtown … Skyscrapers … It gave Alex an idea. He looked up at the sky, cut into sections above him by the waving grain. “We need to get up high and look.”
Ren looked back the way they’d come. “Maybe if we climbed one of those trees by the river?”
“We can’t risk going back,” said Alex. “The Stung Man could still be there.”
Luke eyed the top of the grain. “I might be able to, like, high-jump it,” he mused. “For, like, a second.”
Alex pictured his cousin jack-in-the-boxing up over the fields, getting a quick glimpse at most. Then he had a better idea. Better … and worse. He dropped his head. “Oh, this bites,” he said. He’d seen kids do this at the pool at the YMCA. He’d always been too sick and weak to join in, and the lifeguards always blew their whistles to stop it, anyway. He looked up at his undersized friend. He was so much stronger and healthier since his mom had used the Spells to save him — but he still couldn’t believe what he was about to say.
“What?” said Ren.
Alex sighed. “Do you know what a chicken fight is?”
Alex boosted Ren up on his shoulders. Luke was the obvious choice for the job — taller and stronger — but the big jock had balked. “This is seriously all you,” he’d said, putting his hands up and backing up a step.
Alex did his best, but it was more of a launch than a lift. As soon a
s Ren was more or less in position, Alex lurched up and forward. Ren wobbled and rose, and rose and wobbled. Luke reconsidered slightly, helping to steady her. But five seconds later, it all came crashing down. Ren toppled from Alex’s shoulders, taking him with her. And when Luke tried to catch them, he wound up on the ground, too. The three fell in a heap among some crushed stalks of barley.
“Did you see anything?” asked Alex from the bottom of the pile.
“I saw some roofs!” crowed Ren.
Alex pumped his fist: Yes. “Let’s go,” he said. And as the first skittering, chittering sounds of scorpions advancing through the tall grasses reached their ears, Ren and Luke didn’t argue.
Alex and Luke followed Ren’s lead. They kept low and tried to disturb the tall stalks as little as possible, easily outpacing their tiny, tail-heavy pursuers. Soon, they came to the edge of the field. They stopped just short, peering through the last few rows of barley.
Ren’s sense of direction had been unerring: A complex lay before them. Three square stone buildings were arranged in a triangular formation. And at its point stood Ta-mesah. As an Order operative, he’d nearly finished off Alex and Ren in London. Now, as a hulking, ten-foot-tall Death Walker with the head of a huge crocodile, he stood sentry in front of the largest building.
In front of the other two buildings, two enormous crocodiles basked in the late-day sun. “They’ve got to be twenty feet long,” said Luke.
Alex peered through the thin veil of barley as it swayed in a light breeze. The air was dark gold now, and it swirled and glimmered with shifting shapes, but as he watched, he saw three glowing rectangles hold firm.
He pointed them out to the others. “Portals,” he said. “More false doors, like the one we came in through.”
“This is like the Grand Central Terminal of the afterlife,” Ren whispered.
The Final Kingdom Page 9
