The Fourth House, ironically named Sunny Acres, was a failed attempt at appearing welcoming. The large open hall was supported by vibrantly painted columns, replete with iron sconces holding flaming torches. Potted palms and flowering hibiscuses were scattered about, a superficial attempt to bring cheer to the place.
Large windows overlooked the Lake of Fire, whose orange light flickered within the house. The smell of sulfur hung in the air, and the paintings on the walls depicted scenes of the Egyptian afterlife, accompanied by hieroglyphic slogans like "Immortality with Security" and "Life Begins at 3000!"
Clay shabtis in white medical uniforms and brightly glowing light servants bustled back and forth, pushing medicine trays and wheelchairs. But the patients, in contrast, moved slowly, as if the weight of centuries kept them trapped in time. Dressed in linen robes and bracelets with names engraved in hieroglyphs, some sat motionless, staring into the void, while others wandered aimlessly, dragging IV stands with blood bags.
Among them, an elderly woman with a lioness's head pushed her wheelchair, muttering "Meow, meow" repeatedly. A wrinkled man, blue-skinned and short in stature, stood still, his eyes lost in some distant memory. An old man with a crane's head rocked back and forth in a metal chair, absentmindedly pecking at a game of senet on the coffee table.
The place was a sad parody of ancient grandeur, a refuge for forgotten gods, reduced to echoes of the past.
Elsewhere in the Fourth House…
"You're running against time," Taueret said in a deep voice. She was an Egyptian goddess.
And she was, in fact, a hippopotamus. Her long snout was shaped like an upside-down heart, with 237 bristling whiskers and small nostrils. Her mouth displayed two enormous lower teeth, giving her an almost comical appearance. Her small, round eyes shone with unusual intensity. She wore an open nursing blouse, like a jacket, which revealed a bikini top that, let's just say, attempted to cover a very large area with a very small amount of fabric. Her belly, pinkish-purple and incredibly swollen, looked like she was nine months pregnant.
Despite the lack of sun, the gnomon cast a clear light on the hieroglyph for the number five behind her on the sundial.
Carter frowned as he looked at the sundial. "Isn't this the place of the Fourth House of Night?"
"Yes, dear," Taueret replied with a wide smile. "It has different names—Sunny Acres, the Rest Home—but it's also the Fourth House."
"Then how can the sundial be on five?" Carter asked, still confused. "Shouldn't we be, like, frozen in the fourth hour?"
"That's not how it works, child," Bes interjected, his voice soft and patient. "Mortal time doesn't stop passing just because we're in the Fourth House. If you want to follow the sun god's journey, you have to stay in sync with his time."
Sadie sensed a complicated explanation was coming, but she decided to embrace ignorance and move on. Carter, as always, wouldn't let it go.
"So what happens if we fall too far behind?" he asked again.
Taueret glanced at the sundial, which was slowly creeping past the last five years. "The Houses are connected to their times of night. You can stay in each one as long as you like, but you can only enter or exit them near the time they represent."
"Uh-huh." Sadie rubbed her temples. "Do you have any headache remedies behind the nurses' station?"
"It's not that confusing," Carter said, trying to be annoying. "It's like a revolving door. You have to wait for it to open and step in."
"More or less," Taueret agreed. "There's a bit of leeway with most of the Houses. You can leave the Fourth House, for instance, practically whenever you want. But certain doors are impossible to pass until your time is exactly right. You can only enter the First House at sunset. You can only exit the Twelfth House at dawn. And the doors of the Eighth House, the House of Challenges... can only be entered during the eighth hour."
"House of Challenges?" Sadie said with a grimace. "I already hate that."
"Oh, you have Bes with you." Taueret looked at him with a dreamy look. "The challenges will be no problem."
Bes shot a panicked look at Sadie, as if silently pleading for help.
"But if you take too long," Taueret continued, her voice grave and serious, "the doors will be closed before you can get there. You'll be trapped in the Duat until tomorrow night."
"And if we don't stop Apophis?" Sadie said. "There won't be a tomorrow night. I got that part."
"So you can help us?" Carter asked Taueret. "Where's Ra?"
The goddess fussed with her hair. Her hands were a cross between human and hippo, with small, stubby fingers and thick nails.
"That's the problem, dear," she replied. "I don't know. The Fourth House is enormous. Ra is probably around here somewhere, but the corridors and doors seem endless. We have so many patients."
"You don't keep track of them?" Carter asked. "Isn't there a map or something?"
Taueret shook her head sadly. "I do my best, but it's just me, the shabti, and the serving lights... And there are thousands of old gods here."
Sadie's heart sank. She could barely keep up with the ten or so major gods she'd met, but thousands? In that room alone, she counted a dozen patients, six corridors branching off in different directions, two staircases, and three elevators. Maybe it was her imagination, but it seemed like some of the corridors had appeared since they'd entered the room.
"All these old people are gods?" Sadie asked.
Taueret nodded. "Most were minor deities, even in ancient times. The magicians didn't consider them worth imprisoning. Over the centuries, they've wasted away, abandoned and forgotten. Sometimes they make their way here. They just wait."
"To die?" Sadie asked, a note of sad curiosity in her voice.
Taueret's eyes took on a distant look. "I wish I knew. Sometimes they disappear, but I don't know if they simply get lost wandering the halls, or find a new room to hide in, or truly vanish into nothing. The sad truth is, it's all the same. Their names are forgotten by the world above. Once your name is no longer spoken, what good is life?" She glanced at Bes, as if trying to tell him something.
The dwarf god quickly looked away. "That's Mekhit, isn't it?" He pointed to the old lion woman who was wheeling herself around. "She had a temple near Abydos, I think. Minor lion goddess. Always got mixed up with Sekhmet."
The lioness growled faintly when Bes said Sekhmet's name. Then, she resumed wheeling her chair, muttering, "Meow, meow."
"Sad story," Taueret said melancholically. "She came here with her husband, the god Onuris. They were quite the celebrity couple in the old days, so romantic. He once traveled all the way from Nubia to rescue her. They got married. A happy ending, we all thought. But they were both forgotten. They came here together. Then Onuris vanished. Mekhit's mind went downhill fast after that. Now she wheels herself around the room aimlessly every day. She can't remember her own name, but we keep reminding her."
Sadie looked at the old goddess Mekhit, mewing and growling, wheeling around with no memory of her former glory. She pictured herself trying to care for thousands of gods like that—elderly people who never got better and never died.
"Taueret, how can you stand it?" she said with admiration. "Why do you work here?"
The goddess touched her nurse's cap self-consciously.
"Long story, dear. And we have so little time. I wasn't always here. Once I was a protector goddess. I scared away demons, though not nearly as well as Bes."
"You were very scary," Bes said.
The hippo goddess beamed at him adoringly. "That's so sweet. I also protected mothers giving birth—"
"Because you're pregnant?" Carter asked, gesturing at her enormous belly.
Taueret looked mystified. "No. Why would you think that?"
"Um—"
"So!" Sadie interrupted. "You were explaining why you take care of aging gods."
Taueret checked the sundial, and Sadie was alarmed to see how quickly the shadow was creeping toward six.
"I've always enjoyed helping people, but in the world above, well…it became clear I wasn't needed anymore."
She was careful not to look at Bes, but the dwarf god blushed even deeper red.
"Someone needed to care for the aging gods," Taueret continued. "I think I understand their sadness. I understand about waiting forever—"
Bes coughed into his fist. "Look at the time! Yes, about Ra. Have you seen him since you've worked here?"
Taueret pondered. "It's possible. I saw a falcon-headed god in a room on the southwest wing, oh, centuries ago. I thought it was Nemty, but it's possible it was Ra. Sometimes he liked to take falcon form."
"Which way?" Sadie pleaded. "If we get close, the Book of Ra might be able to guide us."
Taueret turned to Bes. "Are you asking me this, Bes? Do you truly believe this is important, or are you just doing this because Bastet asked you to?"
"No! Yes!" He puffed up his face desperately. "I mean, yes, it's important. Yes, I'm asking. I need your help."
Taueret pulled a torch from the nearest sconce. "In that case, this way."
They wandered the halls of the infinite magic nursing home, led by a hippo nurse with a torch. Truly, just an ordinary night for the Kanes.
They passed so many rooms that Sadie lost count. Most of the doors were closed, but a few stood open, revealing frail old gods in their beds, staring at the flickering light of televisions or simply lying in the dark weeping. After twenty or thirty of those rooms, she stopped looking. It was too depressing.
She held the Book of Ra, hoping it would get warm as they drew closer to the sun god, but no such luck.
Taueret hesitated at every intersection. It was clear she wasn't sure where she was leading them.
After a few more corridors and still no change from the scroll, Sadie started to get agitated. Carter seemed to notice.
"It's okay," he promised. "We'll find him."
She remembered how fast the sundial was moving in the nurses' station. And she thought about Vlad Menshikov. She wanted to believe he'd turned into Russian fries when he'd fallen into the Lake of Fire, but that was probably too much to hope for. If he was still hunting them, he couldn't be far behind.
They went down another corridor, and Taueret frowned. "Oh, dear."
In front of them, an old woman with the head of a frog was hopping around—and when she said hopping, she meant it literally. She would leap ten feet in the air, croak a few times, then spring against the wall and cling before bouncing off to the opposite wall. Her body and limbs seemed human, dressed in a green hospital gown, but her head was totally amphibian—brown, wet, and warty. Her bulbous eyes swiveled in every direction, and from the distracted sound of her croaking, she seemed lost.
"Hekt's gotten out again," Taueret said. "Excuse me for a moment."
She hurried toward the frog woman.
Bes pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of his Hawaiian shirt and wiped his forehead nervously.
"I was wondering what had happened to Hekt. She's the frog goddess, you know."
"I would never have guessed," Carter said.
Sadie watched as Taueret tried to soothe the old goddess. She spoke in soft tones, promising to help Hekt find her room if she stopped bouncing off the walls.
"She's brilliant," Sadie said. "Taueret, I mean."
"Yeah," Bes said. "Yeah, she's lovely."
"Lovely?" Sadie repeated. "Well, she likes you. Why are you so…"
Suddenly, the truth hit her in the face. She felt almost as thick as Carter.
"Oh, I get it. She mentioned the horrible time at the palace, didn't she? She was the one who freed you in Russia."
Bes wiped his neck with his handkerchief. He really was sweating a lot.
"Wh-what made you say that?"
"That's why you get so embarrassed around her! Like…" Sadie was about to say "like when she saw you in your underwear," but she doubted that would mean much to the God of Speedos. "Like when she saw you at your worst, and you wanted to forget it."
Bes looked over at Taueret with a sad expression, the way he had looked back at Prince Menshikov's palace in St. Petersburg.
"She's always saving me," he said. "She's always wonderful, sympathetic, kind. In the old days, everyone assumed we were dating. They always said we were a cute couple—the two scary demon gods, the two misfits, whatever. We went out a few times, but Taueret was so… so nice. And I kind of had a crush on someone else."
"Bastet," Carter guessed.
The dwarf god's shoulders slumped.
"Obvious, huh? Yeah, Bastet. She was the most popular goddess with the common people. I was the most popular god. So, you know, we'd see each other at festivals and such. She was… well, beautiful."
Typical male, Sadie thought. All surface. But she kept her mouth shut.
"Anyway," Bes sighed, "Bastet treated me like a little brother. She still does. She's got no interest in me, but it took me a long time to realize that. I was so obsessed, I wasn't very good to Taueret over the years."
"But she came to get you in Russia," Sadie said.
He nodded.
"I sent out cries for help. I thought Bastet would come help me. Or Horus. Or somebody. I didn't know where they all were, see, but I had lots of friends in the old days. I thought someone would show up. The only one who did was Taueret. She risked her life sneaking into the palace during the dwarf wedding. She saw everything—saw me being humiliated in front of the great people. During the night, she broke my cage and freed me. I owe her everything. But, once I was free…I just ran. I was so ashamed, I couldn't look at her. Every time I thought about her, thought about that night, and I heard the laughter."
The panic in his voice was raw, as if he were describing something that had happened yesterday, not three centuries ago.
"Bes, it's not her fault," Sadie said gently. "She cares about you. It's obvious."
"It's too late," Bes said. "I hurt her too much. I wish I could go back, but…" He faltered. Taueret was walking toward them, leading the frog goddess by the arm.
"Now, dear," Taueret said, "just come with us, and we'll find your room. No need to hop."
"But it's a leap of faith," Hekt croaked. (She made that sound; thankfully, she didn't actually die on them.) "My temple is around here somewhere. It used to be in Qus. Lovely town."
"Yes, dear," Taueret said. "But your temple is gone now. All the temples are gone. You have a lovely room, though—"
"No," Hekt muttered. "The priests will have sacrifices for me. I have to…" She fixed her huge yellow eyes on Sadie, who understood, suddenly, how a fly must feel before being snagged by a frog's tongue.
"This is my priestess!" Hekt said. "She's come to visit me."
"No, dear," Taueret corrected. "This is Sadie Kane."
"My priestess." Hekt patted Sadie's shoulder with her damp, webbed hand, and Sadie did her best not to flinch.
"Tell the temple to start without me, all right? I'll join them later. Will you tell them?"
"Um, yes," Sadie said. "Of course, Lady Hekt."
"Good, good." Her eyes unfocused. "I'm very sleepy now. Hard work, remembering…"
"Yes, dear," Taueret said. "Why don't you lie down in one of those rooms now?" She guided Hekt inside the nearest vacant room.
Bes watched them with sad eyes. "I'm a horrible dwarf." Perhaps Sadie should have reassured him, but her mind was racing with other matters.
*Start without me,* Hekt had said. *A leap of faith.* Suddenly, she found it hard to breathe.
"Sadie?" Carter asked. "What's wrong?"
"I know why the scroll isn't guiding us," Sadie said. "I have to start on the second part of the incantation."
"But we're not there yet," Carter said.
"And we won't get there unless I start the incantation. It's the part about finding Ra."
"What is it?" Taueret appeared at Bes's side and almost startled the dwarf out of his Hawaiian shirt.
"The incantation," Sadie explained. "I have to take a leap of faith."
"I think the frog goddess infected you," Carter joked.
"No, you donkey!" Sadie snapped. "This is the only way we're going to find Ra. I'm sure of it."
"Hey, kid," Bes said. "If you start that incantation, and we don't find Ra by the time you finish reading it—"
"I know," Sadie interrupted. "The incantation will backfire." And when she said backfire, she meant literally. If the incantation didn't find the proper target, the power of the Book of Ra could explode in her face.
"It's the only way," Sadie insisted. "We don't have time to wander the halls forever, and Ra isn't just going to appear unless we summon him. We have to prove ourselves, take the risk. You guys will have to carry me. I can't stumble over the words."
"You have courage, dear," Taueret said, holding up her torch. "Don't worry, I'll guide you. Just do your reading."
Sadie opened the scroll to the second section. The lines of hieroglyphs, which before had seemed like random phrases, now made perfect sense.
"'I invoke the name of Ra,'" she read aloud, "'the sleeping king, lord of the midday Sun, who sits upon the throne of fire…'"
Well, that was the idea. She described how Ra had risen from the sea of Chaos. She remembered his light shining on the original land of Egypt, bringing life to the Nile Valley. As she read, she felt herself getting warmer.
"Sadie," Carter said. "You're smoking."
It's hard not to panic when someone makes a comment like that, but Sadie realized Carter was right. Smoke was curling out of her body, forming a gray plume that drifted down the hallway.
"Is it my imagination," Carter asked, "or is the smoke showing us the way?"
Ow! He said that last part because Sadie stepped on his foot, which she could have done perfectly well without breaking her concentration. He got the message: Shut up and start walking.
Taueret took Sadie's arm and guided her forward. Bes and Carter flanked them like security guards. They followed the smoke trail through two more corridors and up a flight of stairs. The Book of Ra became uncomfortably hot in Sadie's hands. The smoke from her body began to obscure the letters.
Taueret glanced at Sadie with an approving smile. "You're doing great, Sadie," she said. "This corridor looks familiar." Sadie didn't know how Taueret could possibly tell, but she kept her focus on the scroll. She continued describing Ra's sun boat sailing across the sky, telling of his majestic wisdom and the battles he fought against Apophis.
A bead of sweat trickled down Sadie's face. Her eyes started to sting, and she prayed they weren't literally on fire. When she got to the line "Ra, the apex of the sun…", she realized they had stopped in front of a door. She pushed it open and stepped inside. The room was dark, and by the flickering light of Taueret's torch, Sadie saw the oldest man in the world asleep in bed. His face was deeply wrinkled, his arms like twigs, and his translucent skin revealed every vein. Some of the Baharyia mummies looked more lively than this old husk.
"'Ra's light returns,'" she read, and nodded toward the heavy-curtained window. Thankfully, Bes and Carter got the message. They pulled back the drapes, and the red light of the Lake of Fire flooded the room. The old man didn't stir. His mouth was pursed, as if it had been sewn shut.
Sadie moved to the head of the bed and continued reading. She described Ra waking at dawn, taking his throne as his boat rose through the sky, the plants turning to the sun's warmth. "It's not working," Bes muttered. Sadie panicked. Only two lines left. She could feel the power of the spell building up, her body getting overheated. She was still smoking, and the smell of Sadie-on-the-grill was not pleasant. She had to wake Ra or she would die there.
The god's mouth… Of course.
She laid the scroll on Ra's bed, doing her best to keep it open with one hand. "'I sing the praises of the sun god.'" She stretched out her free hand to Carter and snapped her fingers. Thank goodness, Carter understood. He rummaged in his bag and passed her Anubis's obsidian *netjeri* blade. If there was ever a time for the Opening of the Mouth, it was now.
Sadie touched the knife to the old man's lips and spoke the last line of the incantation: "'Awake, my king, with the new day.'"
The old man gasped. Smoke spiraled out of his mouth as if he'd become a vacuum cleaner, and the magic of the spell channeled into him. Sadie's temperature dropped back to normal. She almost fainted with relief.
Ra's eyes opened. With horrified fascination, Sadie watched as blood began to flow again through his veins, slowly inflating him like a hot-air balloon. He turned toward her, his eyes still cloudy and milky with cataracts. "Huh?"
"He still looks old," Carter said nervously. "Wasn't he supposed to get young?"
Taueret bowed to the sun god (a gesture that should definitely not be attempted if you were a hippo pregnant up to the eyeballs) and felt Ra's forehead. "He's not fully there yet, you'll need to complete the night's journey."
"And the third part of the incantation," Carter suggested. "He has one more aspect, right? The scarab?"
Bes nodded, though he didn't seem optimistic. "Khepri, the beetle. Perhaps if we find the last piece of his spirit, he can be properly born."
Ra smiled, revealing a gummy grin. "I like zebras!"
Sadie was so exhausted she wondered if she'd heard correctly. "Excuse me, you said zebras?"
Ra beamed at them like a child who'd just discovered something magnificent. "The weasels are sick."
"Ri-i-ight," Carter said, sounding disconcerted. "Maybe he needs these…" He took the crook and flail from his belt, offering them to Ra. The old god took the crook and began sucking on it like a pacifier.
Sadie felt a growing sense of unease, and not just because of Ra's condition. How much time had passed? Where was Vlad Menshikov? Had Ikki managed to deal with him? How *was* Ikki? Where was he...?