Jake Ransom and the Howling Sphinx (26 page)

Jake barreled into Marika, pinning her beneath him. Pindor pinned Nefertiti. Bach'uuk dove for the shelter of a roped set of barrels.

As the ship hit the wall of flames, Jake sprawled flat. He covered both of their bodies with his cloak, pulling it over their heads. Marika scrambled for his hand until she found it.

They held tightly to each other.

Then the world flared brightly, stinging his eyes. The blast came with a deafening roar and a blistering heat that sought to bake them to the boards.

Jake held his breath, fearing his lungs would boil.

Then darkness fell back over him, and the roar faded.

Sharp cries from the crew reached Jake's ears.

He tossed back his cloak and rolled free. They'd made it through the firestorm.

But not unscathed.

Patches of fire danced atop the deck as the crew bustled to put them out. But that was the least of their problems. The ship listed to one side. A glance over a rail revealed that one of the rubbery wings had melted down to its bony struts.

Politor burst from belowdecks, rolling out of the hatch in a thick choke of smoke. He came to rest on his hands and knees, coughing heavily.

A loud hissing pop drew all eyes upward.

Air was escaping from the balloon at an accelerating rate as rivulets of flaming, melted rubber dribbled to the deck.

As Jake watched, the balloon shredded wider with a ripping tear.

From the stern, Horus yelled a needless warning.

“We're going down!”

The
Breath of Shu
gave out its last gasp as its balloon collapsed in flame. Jake crouched with the others on the middeck. Everyone huddled, preparing for the crash to come.

Horus worked to get as much distance as he could from the burning ship. Politor performed miracles, using the remaining wing to turn their deathly plummet into a long glide. Jake watched as the ship cleared the last of the Flame Forest, but they were not out of danger.

Beyond the rail the desert rose in rippling dunes. Gliding above, it was not hard to imagine that the windrider was an ordinary boat sailing through a rolling sea. Then the keel hit the first dune. The entire ship jarred, sliding everyone forward. But the ship had only grazed the top. The windrider flew onward, skidding across another dune, then another. It slowed each time—but they were still flying fast.

“Ready for impact!” Horus screamed.

The next strike tore out the bottom of the boat, leaving a trail of broken planks and woven reeds. Jake bounced a full yard above the deck, flying for a moment with the ship—then crashing back down.

“Hold tight!” Horus hollered, still bravely manning the rudder as the
Breath of Shu
hit another dune.

The ship shot straight up, tilting high, rolling everyone toward the stern. The prow pointed at the sky, threatening to topple over. But with a final grinding groan, the windrider came to rest.

“Abandon ship!” Horus called.

No one had to be told twice. The crew leaped and clambered from the ship to the sand. Everyone headed up the dune. No one wanted to risk having the ship come rolling back down on top of them.

Reaching the crest of the dune, Jake regrouped with his friends. Marika and Bach'uuk looked banged up but otherwise unhurt. Nefertiti helped Pindor, who'd taken a hard hit to the head. It was already raising a goose egg above his eyebrow.

“You didn't have to shield me,” Nefertiti scolded.

“Couldn't let that barrel hit you,” Pindor said blearily, sitting down abruptly.

Nefertiti scowled at him, a fist on her hip. But before leaving his side, she patted his head, as if she were rewarding a puppy. And as she turned away, a shadow of a smile
played at the edges of her lips.

Marika joined Jake. “Here we are again.”

Jake raised a questioning eyebrow.

She waved to the dunes. “Dropped into the middle of the desert … isn't this how this whole adventure started?”

She tried to grin, but Jake read the fear in her face.

“We'll be okay,” he said, though he had no facts to back that up. “C'mon.”

He followed after Nefertiti as she joined Horus and Shaduf. Politor sat nearby, staring at the ship. He looked as if he'd lost a close friend.

“What do we do now?” Jake asked the group.

Shaduf shrugged. “Unless you can sprout some wings, we're not flying.”

“We still have a good lead on Kree's forces,” Horus said. “It is not a far hike to Ankh Tawy.”

“But it is a dangerous one.” Nefertiti's eyes kept scanning the area. The princess had become the hunter again. “To reach the Great Wind means crossing through the Crackles on foot.”

“What are the Crackles?” Jake asked.

Nefertiti pointed across the rolling sea of sand. About a mile away rose broken cliffs of black rock. It looked as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to a thick slab of asphalt.

Nefertiti nodded to that blasted landscape. “The Crackles is a labyrinth of rock, sand, and shadows. It's easy to
get lost in there. Easier to get killed. All manner of desert creatures take refuge from the sun under the rocks' thick shadows.”

Shaduf looked worried. “But that's not the worst of it.”

Marika moved closer to Jake. “Why's that?”

“The Crackles reach almost to the Great Wind. It lies within the very shadow of Ankh Tawy. It is that
shadow
you need to fear the most. For it shelters creatures, like the harpies, that could not exist in any other place.”

Nefertiti sighed loudly. “That's just stories.”

Marika glanced at Jake. The two of them had seen too many
stories
come to life. Still, he read the certainty in her eyes. No matter the danger, they had no choice.

Jake faced the others. “Then what are we waiting for?”

They'd been marching from the wreckage for close to a half hour and only crossed a mile of the desert. Boot-sucking sand slowed their pace to a crawl.

As they hiked, the sun baked any exposed skin. By now, Ra sat on the western horizon, taunting them by refusing to set. Jake's body streamed with sweat. His legs ached from struggling with the loose sand.

At least they had plenty of water, salvaged from the crashed ship. Along with weapons, a handful of desert survival gear had also been collected: cloaks, tents, tools for hunting and cooking. Who knew how long they'd be out here?

As Jake marched up yet another dune, the texture of the sand changed, firming up, making it easier to hike. The constant
crunch-crunch
of grains became more of a
crackle
, as if he were walking through shells on a beach.

Squinting against the glare, he bent and scooped a handful of sand and let it sift through his fingers. The grains were no larger than fine powder. Brittle chunks and bits of varying sizes and shapes filled his palm.

“Bones,” Nefertiti said, noting his attention. “Ground by the winds and churning sands.”

Appalled, he dropped the bone shards and wiped his palm on his shirt. Then as he crested the dune, he saw the broken black cliffs of the Crackles rising about a hundred yards ahead.

As they headed down the last dune, sun-bleached skulls, some as large as boulders, stared back at them from their empty sockets. They were crossing a massive boneyard. All around, giant rib cages formed arched cathedrals or smaller prison cells. Lengths of neck bones snaked across their path. The place would have been a gold mine for any Paleolithic-period fossil hunter, but Jake only found it chilling.

“Why are there so many?” Marika asked.

Nefertiti shrugged. “Some of the creatures were dragged here by the smaller hunters who dwell within the Crackles. But the carcasses were too large to squeeze into the narrow passages of the cliffs, so they were left to rot.” She waved to
encompass the field of bones. “Most other creatures came on their own and died, unable to climb the cliffs.”

“Why come here?” Jake frowned at the intact skeleton of a pterodactyl, its bony wings stretched and perfectly preserved. “What drove them?”

Shaduf stepped forward, eavesdropping on their conversation. “No one knows for sure. Most believe they are drawn to the ruins of Ankh Tawy. Like I said before, the shadow cast by that dead city is powerful and strange.”

At last, they reached the edge of the cliffs. The black rock rose in a sheer face broken by crevices and shadowy canyons. From the ground, it seemed an impassable barrier.

“You say there's a way through there?” Pindor asked, the doubt plain on his face.

“If we can find it,” Nefertiti said. “Inside, the canyons twist and cross, climb and fall. Blind ends and sudden drops betray the unwary.”

“I've been through before,” Shaduf reassured them. “When I was hunting crystals and stones cast out from Ankh Tawy by the storm.”

He led the entire party to the largest canyon between the rocks. An elephant could have walked into it, though the canyon quickly narrowed, leaving only a thin line of sky above. Shaduf pinched up some grains and let them fall from his fingertips, noting how they drifted on a thin breeze sighing out of the chute.

“We must follow the breath of the Great Wind,” he explained. “It blows straight through the Crackles. It will show us the right path.”

With the matter settled, the group headed down a dry wash between towering cliff walls. The party had dwindled to thirty men and women, a mix of sailors, and a handful of Djer's rebels. Many limped; others sported bandages. They all had weapons in hand.

“Take care to follow closely and stay together,” Shaduf warned. “If you drift even a few steps, you can get lost quickly. The lurkers in the Crackle will shy from our numbers, but if you're caught off alone …”

He didn't have to finish that sentence. Jake still had bits of bone stuck in the treads of his boots.

As they marched, the group was forced to move in pairs as the walls pinched together. The open sky squeezed to a slit far overhead. Shadows fell heavily. It was almost chilly after the open desert; but rather than refreshing, it felt menacing, like the cold clamminess of an open grave. The casual chatter among the group died away.

As they continued to go deeper, the canyon branched out. Nefertiti's uncle would stop at each crossroad, test the way with a sprinkle of sand, and lead them onward. Soon other canyons tangled with theirs; some climbed up, others sank away and became tunnels.

As the sun sank away, it became night in the canyons. Several of the group had scavenged long bones from the
graveyard and turned them into torches by stabbing fire gourds onto their ends. Jake took one, studying how the torch crafters had bored small holes in the gourds near the stems to channel the flames.

He held his torch aloft and followed Shaduf, Politor, and Horus. His friends stuck to his side.

“Can't be much farther,” Shaduf said, though he sounded unsure as he stopped at the crossroads of five canyons.

A bustling commotion rose behind them. Nefertiti scooted her way from the rear of their party. Breathless, she shoved back the hood of her hunting outfit.

“We're being tracked,” she announced. “I heard hissing, the scrape of rock. Coming from many directions.”

Confirming this, a rattle of falling rock echoed from one of the canyons
ahead
of them. A bestial cough from another.

“I thought you said the lurkers wouldn't bother us in a group,” Pindor said.

Shaduf shrugged. “They usually don't. Something must have them agitated. That, or they're very hungry.”

Not the words Pindor wanted to hear.

Jake didn't like them much either.

“What do we do?” Marika said.

Both Nefertiti and Shaduf answered at the same time … though their responses were vastly different.

“We fight,” Nefertiti said, and lifted a spear.

“We run,” Shaduf cautioned, and pointed.

The decision was made for them.

Jake spotted a flicker as something shot past overhead. He might have missed it, but it wafted straight through the smoke of his torch. He swung around, searching for it, but couldn't find it.

Had he imagined it?

Before he could decide, a warbling screech rose from all directions. A mass of saurians burst from the surrounding chutes, tunnels, and canyons. The creatures ran on two legs, hissing and shouldering into one another. Each bore a sickle-shaped claw poking from the back of its ankle.

Jake recognized them like old friends.

Velociraptors.