The Red Pyramid

The boat stops before a closed gate separating the river from the fiery lake. Iskandar’s ba appears. He freezes everyone but Sadie and then tells her that her mother foresaw the day when order would fall to chaos and that the only way to prevent this was for the gods and magicians to unite. Despite her warnings, Iskandar did nothing, leading to Sadie’s mom’s death. Order and chaos will clash in the coming days, and Sadie and Carter “will be instrumental in balancing those forces, or destroying everything” (349). Iskandar grants them passage into the Lake of Fire, unfreezes the others, and disappears.

The boat docks at an island in the middle of the lake that holds the Hall of Judgment. The group disembarks, and a jackal scares off Bast. The jackal morphs into a handsome young man—Anubis—who leads Sadie and Carter into the temple, where he shows them the broken judgment scales. Sadie hears jazz music in the distance, and suddenly, the hall changes to New Orleans, and she’s alone with Anubis.

Anubis crafts a bench out of mummy wrappings that look like toilet paper and tells Sadie he can’t give her a feather of truth because it’s too dangerous—if she lies at all while it’s in her possession, she’ll turn to ash. Sadie works out that Set is Anubis’s dad, and Anubis confesses he never met Set because Nephthys gave him to Osiris when he was young. Anubis believes his mother didn’t know what to do with him because he was different and not a warrior. Sadie understands his feelings and wants to help bring Osiris back, both to help him and to repair the Hall of Judgment.

Anubis gives her a feather under the conditions that she not let anyone else handle it and to listen to Nephthys should she find the goddess. He also asks three questions to prove Sadie is truthful. She answers the first two without hesitation. The third is whether she’s willing to sacrifice her father to save the world, and feeling enormous guilt, she says she would. Anubis praises her for her truthfulness and disappears, dumping Sadie back in the Hall of Judgment with Carter. He asks her what happened, but she storms away without answering because she is “in no mood to tell the truth” (366).