Underworlds #3: Revenge of the Scorpion King
Read Underworlds #3: Revenge of the Scorpion King Online
Authors: Tony Abbott
J
ON
D
OYLE POKED ME IN THE RIBS
. “O
WEN, WE SHOULD
really hide.”
“We
are
hiding,” I said, “behind this very big sand dune.”
“I mean hide
better
,” he said. “So we don’t die.”
Jon had a way with words.
Sydney Lamberti peeked over the sand dune and slid back down. “Jon’s right,” she said. “Those guys aren’t just regular Underworld soldiers. They have nasty lion heads. And long swords. And they brought a big ugly
thing
with them.”
Underworld soldiers. Lion heads. A big ugly
thing
.
This was my life right now.
Ignoring the fact that my brain was spinning non-stop, I peered over the crest of the dune and tried to focus.
It was nighttime, and the crescent moon shone in the black sky like a jewel. But even in the pale darkness, the big ugly
thing
was easy to spot because it took up so much space.
“He looks like a serpent,” I said. “A cross between a dragon and a giant crocodile.”
Dana Runson edged up beside me. “He’s coming really fast —”
WHOOM!
The air roared like a thousand jet engines, and green flames shot out of the serpent’s mouth like a cannonball. Just like that, our hiding place wasn’t there anymore.
“Get — out — of — here!” cried Jon.
We turned and ran across the sand. That’s fairly hard for people to do, but apparently it’s what Babylonian Underworld monsters are built for. The serpent’s four webbed feet clawed the ground like propellers as he leaped over the dunes.
WHOOM!
The sand to our left crackled and went shiny in the moonlight.
“Glass!” Sydney said. “He just turned the sand into glass! I don’t want to be glass! Run this way —”
The sand exploded in front of her.
“Run the other way!”
We jumped over the top of the next dune and rolled down the other side. Then we zigzagged right and left until we heard the serpent’s thundering steps slow to a stop.
We huddled at the base of a big dune and all held our breath. A slow minute went by.
“No sound,” Dana whispered. “I can’t look. Did we lose him?”
My stomach flip-flopped as we crawled up to peek over the sand. Not twenty yards away the serpent stood on his hind legs, moving his head back and forth. It was clear that he couldn’t see very well, but his snout was snorting in and out as if it were a bellows.
“He’s trying to smell us,” I whispered.
“Humans sweat, and sweat smells,” said Sydney, sliding down the dune. “The glands in our skin give off sweat when we’re running for our lives.”
“Thank you, Encyclopedia Syd,” said Jon.
Sydney thinks and talks a little like a computer sometimes, even when there are more important things to worry about.
Beyond the serpent marched a long column of warriors. They were bigger than regular men — just our luck! — and each of their heads had the snout and long, shaggy mane of a jungle lion. Great.
“Halt!” one of the guards growled, and the soldiers surrounded a wooden sledge with long, curved rails that looked a little like a Santa’s sleigh. Except I knew that its owner, Loki, was the exact opposite of friendly old Santa. Loki was an evil Norse trickster, determined to overthrow Odin, the Norse god who lived in the mythological world of Asgard.
Myths were my life now, too.
“The soldiers are bringing the sledge into the city,” Dana whispered.
The city.
A few minutes earlier, we’d watched as Loki and his wolf, Fenrir, had entered the gates of that city. We’d soon realized that it was the capital of the Babylonian Underworld. Surrounded by a massive wall of amber stone and marked with a series of tall blue gates, the city must have been hundreds of square miles in size. It looked like the world’s largest, oldest, most terrifying prison. A single tower stood just inside the walls and rose up into the black sky, as if it might touch the moon.
Sydney tapped my shoulder. “The serpent is still sniffing. I say we don’t move.”
“Good plan,” I said.
I didn’t want to move.
I didn’t want to do anything.
Only a few hours before, Sydney, Dana, Jon, and I had been more or less safe in our little town of Pinewood Bluffs.
I say “more or less,” because we’d been in the process of returning a pair of escaped Cyclopes — the one-eyed giants of Greek mythology — to Hades’ Underworld, whose entrance was under our school. No big deal, right? Once we did that, we were about to go home and call it a day when we spotted Loki slipping away in his sledge.
We already knew that Loki was cruel, sly, and dangerous. But after the Cyclopes made him a suit of magical armor, he became practically indestructible.
Loki was now the complete evil package.
Probably because we were too tired to think straight after wrangling the giants, we decided we couldn’t just let Loki escape. So we stowed away on his sledge.
Brilliant, huh?
Not so much. Because before we knew it, we were in the crazy, evil Babylonian Underworld hiding from a big ugly
thing
.
“Loki must be after the seven fire monsters of Babylonian mythology,” Dana said, gazing at the city and tapping a finger on her beat-up copy of
Bulfinch’s Mythology
. “Remember what we heard him say?”
How could we forget?
The horned, the clawed, the fanged.
All of them will join me.
“
Bulfinch’s
doesn’t have any Babylonian stories in it,” Dana said, scanning the margins of the book’s tattered pages, “but luckily, I took lots of notes from my parents’ library.”
Dana’s parents were in Iceland, on the hunt for something called the Crystal Rune, which Loki needed in his war against Odin.
“I’m pretty sure that creature is called Fire Serpent,” Dana said, rifling through the pages of her book. “In fact, most of the Babylonian monsters have something to do with fire.”
Clank!
The lion-headed warriors hitched a pair of heavy chains to Loki’s sledge. With a growl from their commander, they dragged the sledge across the sand toward the nearest blue gate.
The serpent didn’t go with them.
Jon slumped down the dune and sighed a long, slow breath. “I don’t want to say it, but I think we need to get past the serpent and inside that scary city. We have to stop Loki from collecting more monsters, even if it, you know, kills us, or something.”
That was a lot of words for Jon. I guess he was nervous. Actually,
nervous
didn’t cover it. Terrified was more like it. Also crazy. Confused. Exhausted.
So were the rest of us.
“Jon, we’ll be all right,” I said.
“We’d better be,” he said. “I have stuff to do before class on Monday.” He took a deep breath and turned to Dana. “So where is Fire Serpent on the Babylonian scale of creepy?”
She scanned her scribbled notes. “There’s one called Thornviper. And another known as Mad Dog. There’s also something called Furnace.”
Sydney sighed. “Nice.”
At least we had some help.
We had an old lyre made by the ancient Greek musician Orpheus. I could play it a little, and its notes seemed to do magical things. Maybe more important, Dana had stolen one of Loki’s armored gloves — which was both good and bad. The good part was that she could shoot bolts of lightning from its fingers. The bad part was that it had grown over her hand and wouldn’t come off. Oh, and Loki could sense when the glove was near, which almost gave us away on the sledge. Luckily, I was able to figure out the right notes to play on the lyre, which somehow shielded us.
Together, my lyre and Dana’s glove had helped us escape a miserable death a few times already. I really hoped they would keep doing that.
“Fire Serpent on the move,” Sydney whispered.
We slid to the bottom of the dune and backed away slowly until we heard the quiet lapping of water.
“If this Underworld is set up like the ancient empire of Babylon,” said Dana, “then this could be the Tigris River —”
WHOOM!
Hot green flames suddenly blasted the sand behind us. Fire Serpent leaped over the top of the dune.
“Into the river!” Jon shouted.
We tumbled, rolled, ran, and fell down the dunes all the way to the riverbank. But the serpent had our scent and was hot on our heels. Really hot.
WHOOM!
The riverbed exploded, showering us with wet sand.
WHOOM!
The reeds on the bank burst into flame.
Clutching the lyre’s holster to my chest, I dived into the river just as —
WHOOM!
— a fist of green flame roared over our heads.
I swam underwater and kept myself submerged until I felt the water cool off downstream. I was about to pop up for air when I felt a sudden force on my back, keeping me down. I kicked and thrashed, trying to free myself, but the pressure was too strong.
I glimpsed Dana, Sydney, and Jon swimming toward me, but whatever was on my back forced me deeper under the surface. My lungs burned. My chest felt like bursting. Finally, I couldn’t hold my breath anymore.
My lips opened in a rush of bubbles, and the space in front of my eyes went black.