The Red Pyramid

33. We Go Into the Salsa Business

YOU’RE FORGETTING SOMETHING, Horus told me.

A little busy here! I thought back.

You might think it’s easy steering a magic boat through the sky. You’d be wrong. I didn’t have Amos’s animated coat, so I stood in the back trying to shift the tiller myself, which was like stirring cement. I couldn’t see where we were going. We kept tilting back and forth while Sadie tried her best to keep an unconscious Zia from flopping over the side.

It’s my birthday, Horus insisted. Wish me happy birthday!

“Happy birthday!” I yelled. “Now, shut up!”

“Carter, what are you on about?” Sadie screamed, grabbing the railing with one hand and Zia with the other as the boat tipped sideways. “Have you lost your mind?”

“No, I was talking to-Oh, forget it.”

I glanced behind us. Something was approaching-a blazing figure that lit up the night. Vaguely humanoid, definitely bad news. I urged the boat to go faster.

Did you get me anything? Horus urged.

Will you please do something helpful? I demanded. That thing following us-is that what I think it is?

Oh. Horus sounded bored. That’s Sekhmet. The Eye of Ra, destroyer of the wicked, the great huntress, lady of flame, et cetera.

Great, I thought. And she’s following us because…

The Chief Lector has the power to summon her once during his lifetime, Horus explained. It’s an old, old gift-goes back to the days when Ra first blessed man with magic.

Once during his lifetime, I thought. And Desjardins chooses now?

He never was very good at being patient.

I thought that the magicians don’t like gods!

They don’t, Horus agreed. Just shows you what a hypocrite he is. But I suppose killing you was more important than standing on principle. I can appreciate that.

I looked back again. The figure was definitely getting closer-a giant golden woman in glowing red armor, with a bow in one hand and a quiver of arrows slung across her back-and she was hurtling toward us like a rocket.

How do we beat her? I asked.

You pretty much don’t, Horus said. She is the incarnation of the sun’s wrath. Back in the days when Ra was active, she would’ve been much more impressive, but still…She’s unstoppable. A born killer. A slaying machine-

“Okay, I get it!” I yelled.

“What?” Sadie demanded, so loud that Zia stirred.

“Wha-what?” Her eyes fluttered open.

“Nothing,” I shouted. “We’re being followed by a slaying machine. Go back to sleep.”

Zia sat up woozily. “A slaying machine? You don’t mean-”

“Carter, veer right!” Sadie yelled.

I did, and a flaming arrow the size of a predator drone grazed our port side. It exploded above us, setting the roof of our boathouse on fire.

I steered the boat into a dive, and Sekhmet shot past but then pirouetted in the air with irritating agility and dove after us.

“We’re burning,” Sadie pointed out helpfully.

“Noticed!” I yelled back.

I scanned the landscape below us, but there was nowhere safe to land-just subdivisions and office parks.

“Die, enemies of Ra!” Sekhmet yelled. “Perish in agony!”

She’s almost as annoying as you, I told Horus.

Impossible, Horus said. No one bests Horus.

I took another evasive turn, and Zia yelled, “There!”

She pointed toward a well-lit factory complex with trucks, warehouses, and silos. A giant chili pepper was painted on the side of the biggest warehouse, and a floodlit sign read: magic salsa, inc.

“Oh, please,” Sadie said. “It’s not really magic! That’s just a name.”

“No,” Zia insisted. “I’ve got an idea.”

“Those Seven Ribbons?” I guessed. “The ones you used on Serqet?”

Zia shook her head. “They can only be summoned once a year. But my plan-”

Another arrow blazed past us, only inches from our starboard side.

“Hang on!” I yanked at the tiller and spun the boat upside down just before the arrow exploded. The hull shielded us from the brunt of the blast, but the entire bottom of the ship was now on fire, and we were going down.

With my last bit of control, I aimed the boat toward the roof of the warehouse, and we crashed through, slamming into a huge mound of…something crunchy.

I clawed my way clear of the boat and sat up in a daze. Fortunately, the stuff we’d crashed into was soft. Unfortunately, it was a twenty-foot pile of dried chili peppers, and the boat had set them on fire. My eyes began to sting, but I knew better than to rub them, because my hands were now covered in chili oil.

“Sadie?” I called. “Zia?”

“Help!” Sadie yelled. She was on the other side of the boat, dragging Zia out from under the flaming hull. We managed to pull her free and slide down the pile onto the floor.

The warehouse seemed to be a massive facility for drying peppers, with thirty or forty mountains of chilis and rows of wooden drying racks. The wreckage of our boat filled the air with spicy smoke, and through the hole we’d made in the roof, I could see the blazing figure of Sekhmet descending.

We ran, plowing through another pile of peppers. [No, I didn’t pick a peck of them, Sadie-just shut up.] We hid behind a drying rack, where shelves of peppers made the air burn like hydrochloric acid.

Sekhmet landed, and the warehouse floor shuddered. Up close, she was even more terrifying. Her skin glowed like liquid gold, and her chest armor and skirt seemed to be woven of tiles made from molten lava. Her hair was like a thick lion’s mane. Her eyes were feline, but they didn’t sparkle like Bast’s or betray any kindness or humor. Sekhmet’s eyes blazed like her arrows, designed only to seek and destroy. She was beautiful the way an atomic explosion is beautiful.

“I smell blood!” she roared. “I will feast on enemies of Ra until my belly is full!”

“Charming,” Sadie whispered. “So Zia…this plan?”

Zia didn’t look so well. She was shivering and pale, and seemed to have trouble focusing on us. “When Ra…when he first called Sekhmet to punish humans because they were rebelling against him…she got out of hand.”

“Hard to imagine,” I whispered, as Sekhmet ripped through the burning wreckage of our boat.

“She started killing everyone,” Zia said, “not just the wicked. None of the other gods could stop her. She would just kill all day until she was gorged on blood. Then she’d leave until the next day. So the people begged the magicians to come up with a plan, and-”

“You dare hide?” Flames roared as Sekhmet’s arrows destroyed pile after pile of dried peppers. “I will roast you alive!”

“Run now,” I decided. “Talk later.”

Sadie and I dragged Zia between us. We managed to get out of the warehouse just before the whole place imploded from the heat, billowing a spicy-hot mushroom cloud into the sky. We ran through a parking lot filled with semitrailers and hid behind a sixteen-wheeler.

I peeked out, expecting to see Sekhmet walk through the flames of the warehouse. Instead, she leaped out in the form of a giant lion. Her eyes blazed, and floating over her head was a disk of fire like a miniature sun.

“The symbol of Ra,” Zia whispered.

Sekhmet roared: “Where are you, my tasty morsels?” She opened her maw and breathed a blast of hot air across the parking lot. Wherever her breath touched, the asphalt melted, cars disintegrated into sand, and the parking lot turned into barren desert.

“How did she do that?” Sadie hissed.

“Her breath creates the deserts,” Zia said. “That is the legend.”

“Better and better.” Fear was closing up my throat, but I knew we couldn’t hide much longer. I summoned my sword. “I’ll distract her. You two run-”

“No,” Zia insisted. “There is another way.” She pointed at a row of silos on the other side of the lot. Each one was three stories tall and maybe twenty feet in diameter, with a giant chili pepper painted on the side.

“Petrol tanks?” Sadie asked.

“No,” I said. “Must be salsa, right?”

Sadie stared at me blankly. “Isn’t that a type of music?”

“It’s a hot sauce,” I said. “That’s what they make here.”

Sekhmet breathed in our direction, and the three trailers next to us melted into sand. We scuttled sideways and jumped behind a cinder block wall.

“Listen,” Zia gasped, her face beading with sweat. “When the people needed to stop Sekhmet, they got huge vats of beer and colored them bright red with pomegranate juice.”

“Yeah, I remember now,” I interrupted. “They told Sekhmet it was blood, and she drank until she passed out. Then Ra was able to recall her into the heavens. They transformed her into something gentler. A cow goddess or something.”

“Hathor,” Zia said. “That is Sekhmet’s other form. The flip side of her personality.”

Sadie shook her head in disbelief. “So you’re saying we offer to buy Sekhmet a few pints, and she’ll turn into a cow.”

“Not exactly,” Zia said. “But salsa is red, is it not?”

We skirted the factory grounds as Sekhmet chewed up trucks and blasted huge swathes of the parking lot to sand.

“I hate this plan,” Sadie grumbled.

“Just keep her occupied for a few seconds,” I said. “And don’t die.”

“Yeah, that’s the hard bit, isn’t it?”

“One…” I counted. “Two…three!”

Sadie burst into the open and used her favorite spell: “Ha-di!”

The glyphs blazed over Sekhmet’s head:

And everything around her exploded. Trucks burst to pieces. The air shimmered with energy. The ground heaved upward, creating a crater fifty feet deep into which the lioness tumbled.

It was pretty impressive, but I didn’t have time to admire Sadie’s work. I turned into a falcon and launched myself toward the salsa tanks.

“RRAAAARR!” Sekhmet leaped out of the crater and breathed desert wind in Sadie’s direction, but Sadie was long gone. She ran sideways, ducking behind trailers and releasing a few lengths of magical rope as she fled. The ropes whipped through the air and tried to tie themselves around the lioness’s mouth. They failed, of course, but they did annoy the Destroyer.

“Show yourself!” Sekhmet bellowed. “I will feast on your flesh!”

Perched on a silo, I concentrated all my power and turned straight from falcon to avatar. My glowing form was so heavy, its feet sank into the top of the tank.

“Sekhmet!” I yelled.

The lioness whirled and snarled, trying to locate my voice.

“Up here, kitty!” I called.

She spotted me and her ears went back. “Horus?”

“Unless you know another guy with a falcon head.”

She padded back and forth uncertainly, then roared in challenge. “Why do you speak to me when I am in my raging form? You know I must destroy everything in my path, even you!”

“If you must,” I said. “But first, you might like to feast on the blood of your enemies!”

I drove my sword into the tank and salsa gushed out in a chunky red waterfall. I leaped to the next tank and sliced it open. And again, and again, until six silofuls of Magic Salsa were spewing into the parking lot.

“Ha, ha!” Sekhmet loved it. She leaped into the red sauce torrent, rolling in it, lapping it up. “Blood. Lovely blood!”

Yeah, apparently lions aren’t too bright, or their taste buds aren’t very developed, because Sekhmet didn’t stop until her belly was bulging and her mouth literally began to smoke.

“Tangy,” she said, stumbling and blinking. “But my eyes hurt. What kind of blood is this? Nubian? Persian?”

“Jalapeño,” I said. “Try some more. It gets better.”

Her ears were smoking too now as she tried to drink more. Her eyes watered, and she began to stagger.

“I…” Steam curled from her mouth. “Hot…hot mouth…”

“Milk is good for that,” I suggested. “Maybe if you were a cow.”

“Trick,” Sekhmet groaned. “You…you tricked…”

But her eyes were too heavy. She turned in a circle and collapsed, curling into a ball. Her form twitched and shimmered as her red armor melted into spots on her golden skin, until I was looking down at an enormous sleeping cow.

I dropped off the silo and stepped carefully around the sleeping goddess. She was making cow snoring sounds, like “Moo-zzz, moo-zzz.” I waved my hand in front of her face, and when I was convinced she was out cold, I dispelled my avatar. Sadie and Zia emerged from behind a trailer.

“Well,” said Sadie, “that was different.”

“I will never eat salsa again,” I decided.

“You both did wonderfully,” Zia said. “But your boat is burned. How do we get to Phoenix?”

“We?” Sadie said. “I don’t recall inviting you.”

Zia’s face turned salsa red. “Surely you don’t still think I led you into a trap?”

“I don’t know,” Sadie said. “Did you?”

I couldn’t believe I was hearing this.

“Sadie.” My voice sounded dangerously angry, even to myself. “Lay off. Zia summoned that pillar-of-fire thing. She sacrificed her magic to save us. And she told us how to beat the lioness. We need her.”

Sadie stared at me. She glanced back and forth between Zia and me, probably trying to judge how far she could push things.

“Fine.” She crossed her arms and pouted. “But we need to find Amos first.”

“No!” Zia said. “That would be a very bad idea.”

“Oh, so we can trust you, but not Amos?”

Zia hesitated. I got the feeling that was exactly what she meant, but she decided to try a different approach. “Amos would not want you to wait. He said to keep going, didn’t he? If he survived Sekhmet, he will find us on the road. If not…”

Sadie huffed. “So how do we get to Phoenix? Walk?”

I gazed across the parking lot, where one sixteen-wheeler was still intact. “Maybe we don’t have to.” I took off the linen coat I’d borrowed from Amos’s supply locker. “Zia, Amos had a way of animating his coat so it could steer his boat. Do you know the spell?”

She nodded. “It’s fairly simple with the right ingredients. I could do it if I had my magic.”

“Can you teach me?”

She pursed her lips. “The hardest part is the figurine. The first time you enchant the piece of clothing, you’d need to smash a shabti into the fabric and speak a binding charm to meld them together. It would require a clay or wax figure that has already been imbued with a spirit.”

Sadie and I looked at each other, and simultaneously said, “Doughboy!”

C A R T E R