How It All Goes Down
I Face the Killer Turkey
- Carter resumes narration, protesting that Sadie has mischaracterized him as all starry-eyed about Zia; it was just cool meeting someone who could battle gods and knew about magic, he says.
- Carter, Sadie, and Zia plunge into the sand-vortex-portal thing and emerge… at the Cairo Airport.
- Zia's like, let's go! Carter asks whether Serqet can follow them, and Zia explains that nope, artifacts overheat when they create a gate and require a 12-hour cool-down period before they can be used again.
- Where are they going? To the ruins of Heliopolis, Zia says. Carter remembers that this ancient city mostly lies under Cairo's suburbs.
- Zia opens a secret door with the command sahad and instructs Carter and Sadie to touch nothing.
- They go down a ton of stairs and reach a chasm. A thin wooden plank is all there is to cross on.
- According to Zia, this is the entrance to the First Nome, headquarters of the House of Life. Every magician must find her own way across—and with this statement, she looks at Sadie.
- Carter gets annoyed: everyone has been treating Sadie like she has superpowers, but Carter's capable too. And he's still miffed about the comments Sadie made in New York about how he had it sooo good traveling with their dad. He thinks his life has been hard and unfair.
- Then Carter remembers what his dad said about life not being fair, so in order to make things fair, people need to make it happen themselves. So he draws his sword and crosses the plank.
- In one part of his mind, Carter realizes that this is a bad idea. But another voice in his head says not to fear it. That seems strange to him.
- On the other side of the chasm is a doorway flanked by two jackal-headed statues. The doorway starts to glow with a red light.
- Suddenly, three daggers fly out of the light—and somehow, Carter deflects them with his sword.
- When Carter reaches the other side, the red light turns into the shape of a man-headed bird that's like five feet tall. Carter thinks it looks like a giant killer turkey.
- Unexpectedly, the man smiles, and says to Carter "Pari, niswa nafeer."
- Sadie and Zia reach the other side, and Zia bows to the bird-man, who disappears, unbarring the entrance to the doorway.
- Carter asks Zia what the turkey said, and Zia replies that the turkey was a ba, a human soul. In this case, it was the soul of a magician serving as a guardian.
- Sadie tells Carter that the turkey-man must have had bad eyesight, since it said to him go forth, good king.
- Sadie, Carter, and Zia pass through a bunch of columns, a marketplace, and so on. They only see a few other people, some looking pretty funky (like a guy in a business suit leading a leopard on a leash).
- When they pass young kids learning to scry (gaze into a liquid to see faraway images), Zia explains that there used to be more initiates and magicians, until—but then she pauses and changes the subject, saying that initiates start training at no later than ten years old, with a few dangerous exceptions.
- Carter realizes that Zia is talking about him and Sadie, since they're over ten but can do magic.
- They stop near a sphinx. According to Zia, people are missing out on the really good tombs, since they mostly know about King Tut's tomb, which doesn't rank up there with the best. This hurts Carter's feelings, since his dad named him after Howard Carter, the archaeologist who discovered King Tut's tomb.
- Zia opens the bronze doors to the Hall of Ages, telling Sadie and Carter to behave (if they don't want to be turned into insects), since they're about to meet the Chief Lector.