‘You would bind me?’ Serapis cried. ‘You would name me? You do not even have the proper language to name me, little magician!’
Annabeth staggered forward, but her breathing was shallow. Now that Serapis held the staff, his aura felt ten times more powerful. Annabeth’s ears buzzed. Her ankles turned to mush. She could feel her life force being drained away – vacuumed into the red halo of the god.
Somehow, Sadie stood her ground, her expression defiant. ‘Right, Lord Cereal Bowl. You want proper language? HA-DI!’
A new hieroglyph blazed in Serapis’s face:
But the god swiped it out of the air with his free hand. He closed his fist and smoke shot between his fingers, as if he’d just crushed a miniature steam engine.
Sadie gulped. ‘That’s impossible. How –’
‘Expecting an explosion?’ Serapis laughed. ‘Sorry to disappoint you, child, but my power is both Greek and Egyptian. It combines both, consumes both, replaces both. You are favoured of Isis, I see? Excellent. She was once my wife.’
‘What?’ Sadie cried. ‘No. No, no, no.’
‘Oh, yes! When I deposed both Osiris and Zeus, Isis was forced to serve me. Now I will use you as a gateway to summon her here and bind her. Isis will once again be my queen!’
Serapis thrust out his staff. From each of the three monstrous mouths, red tendrils of light shot forth, encircling Sadie like thorny branches.
Sadie screamed, and Annabeth finally overcame her shock.
She grabbed the nearest sheet of plywood – a wobbly square about the size of a shield – and tried to remember her Ultimate Frisbee lessons from Camp Half-Blood.
‘Hey, Grain Head!’ she yelled.
She twisted from the waist, using the force of her entire body. The plywood sailed through the air just as Serapis turned to look at her, and the edge smacked him between the eyes.
‘GAH!’
Annabeth dived to one side as Serapis blindly thrust his staff in her direction. The three monster heads blasted super-heated plumes of vapour, melting a hole in the concrete where Annabeth had just been standing.
She kept moving, picking her way through mounds of debris that now littered the floor. She dived behind a pile of broken toilets as the god’s staff blasted another triple column of steam in her direction, coming so close that she felt blisters rise on the back of her neck.
Annabeth spotted Sadie about thirty yards away, on her feet and staggering away from Serapis. At least she was still alive. But Annabeth knew she would need time to recover.
‘Hey, Serapis!’ Annabeth called from behind the mountain of commodes. ‘How did that plywood taste?’
‘Child of Athena!’ the god bellowed. ‘I will devour your life force! I will use you to destroy your wretched mother! You think you are wise? You are nothing compared to the one who awakened me, and even he does not understand the power he has unleashed. None of you shall gain the crown of immortality. I control the past, present and future. I alone will rule the gods!’
And thank you for the long speech, Annabeth thought.
By the time Serapis blasted her position, turning the toilets into a porcelain slag heap, Annabeth had crept halfway across the room.
She was searching for Sadie when the magician popped up from her hiding place, only ten feet away, and shouted: ‘Suh-FAH!’
Annabeth turned as a new hieroglyph, twenty feet tall, blazed on the wall behind Serapis:
Mortar disintegrated. The side of the building groaned, and as Serapis screamed, ‘NO!’ the entire wall collapsed on top of him in a brick tidal wave, burying him under a thousand tons of wreckage.
Annabeth choked on a cloud of dust. Her eyes stung. She felt as if she’d been parboiled in a rice cooker, but she stumbled to Sadie’s side.
The young magician was covered in lime powder as if she’d been rolled in sugar. She stared at the gaping hole she’d made in the side of the building.
‘That worked,’ she muttered.
‘It was genius.’ Annabeth squeezed her shoulders. ‘What spell was that?’
‘Loosen,’ Sadie said. ‘I reckoned … well, making things fall apart is usually easier than putting them together.’