A little too late, I realized how poorly prepared I was. I didn’t have my sword, because I’d lost it in St. Petersburg. I hadn’t been able to summon it back. For all I knew, the Russian magicians had melted it down. I still had my wand, but that was mostly for defensive spells. If I had to go on the offense, I’d be at a serious disadvantage.
I pulled an old stick out of the mud and used it to poke around. Bes and I trudged through the shallows, trying to find anything useful. We kicked over some bricks, discovered a few intact sections of walls, and brought up some pottery shards. I thought about the story Zia had told me—how her dad caused the destruction of the village by unearthing a demon trapped in a jar. For all I knew, these were shards of that same jar.
Nothing attacked us except mosquitoes. We didn’t find any traps. But every splash in the river made me think of crocodiles (and not the nice albino kind like Philip back in Brooklyn) or the big toothy tiger fish Zia had shown me once in the First Nome. I imagined them swimming around my feet, trying to decide which leg looked the tastiest.
Out of the corner of my eye I kept seeing ripples and tiny whirlpools like something was following me. When I stabbed the water with my stick, there was nothing there.
After an hour of searching, the sun had almost set. We were supposed to make it back to Alexandria to meet up with Sadie by morning, which left us almost no time to find Zia. And twenty-four hours from now, the next time the sun went down, the equinox would begin.
We kept looking, but didn’t find anything more interesting than a muddy deflated soccer ball and a set of dentures. [Yes, Sadie, they were even more disgusting than Gramps’s.] I stopped to swat the mosquitoes off my neck. Bes snatched something out of the water—a wriggly fish or a frog—and stuck it in his mouth.
“Do you have to?” I asked.
“What?” he said, still chewing. “It’s dinnertime.”
I turned in disgust and poked my stick in the water.
Thunk.
I struck something harder than mud brick or wood. This was stone.
I traced my stick along the bottom. It wasn’t a rock. It was a flat row of hewn blocks. The edge dropped off to another row of stones about a foot lower: like stairs, leading down.
“Bes,” I called.
He waded over. The water came up almost to his armpits. His form shimmered in the current like he might disappear any minute.
I showed him what I’d found.
“Huh.” He dunked his head underwater. When he came back up, his beard was covered in muck and weeds. “Stairs, all right. Reminds me of the entrance to a tomb.”
“A tomb,” I said, “in the middle of a village?”
Off to my left, there was another splash.
Bes frowned. “Did you see that?”
“Yeah. Ever since we got into the water. You haven’t noticed?”
Bes stuck his finger in the water as if testing the temperature. “We should hurry.”
“Why?”
“Probably nothing.” He lied even worse than my dad. “Let’s get a look at this tomb. Part the river.”
He said that as if it were a perfectly normal request, like Pass the salt.
“I’m a combat magician,” I said. “I don’t know how to part a river.”
Bes looked offended. “Oh, come on. That’s standard stuff. Back in Khufu’s day I knew a magician who parted the Nile just so he could climb to the bottom and retrieve a girl’s necklace. Then there was that Israelite fellow, Mickey.”
“Moses?”
“Yeah, him,” Bes said. “Anyway, you should totally be able to part the water. We gotta hurry.”
“If it’s so easy, why don’t you do it?”
“Now he gets an attitude. I told you, kid, running water interferes with godly power. Probably one of the reasons Iskandar hid your friend down there, if that’s where she is. You can do this. Just—”