Underworlds #3: Revenge of the Scorpion King Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  A Map of the Underworlds

  Chapter One: Myths R Us

  Chapter Two: Breathless

  Chapter Three: Eternal Night

  Chapter Four: Into the Great Tower

  Chapter Five: Fight to the …

  Chapter Six: The Hanging Gardens … of Death

  Chapter Seven: Lost and Found

  Chapter Eight: Too Close to Home

  Chapter Nine: The Fires of Midgard

  Chapter Ten: Flying High

  Glossary

  Teaser

  About the Author

  Copyright

  JON DOYLE POKED ME IN THE RIBS. “OWEN, 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 someth
ing 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.

  AN INSTANT LATER, I SHOT UP OUT OF THE WATER, gasping for air. There was a splash next to me.

  “I’ll get the others,” a voice growled.

  “What — who —” I sputtered.

  “Shhh! The serpent will hear you!”

  Before I could see who was talking, there was another splash and I was alone.

  I sucked in mouthfuls of air over and over. I shook my head and blinked my eyes. I saw … what did I see? I was surrounded by a cluster of tall reeds somewhere downriver from the serpent.

  Splash! Jon, Dana, and Sydney exploded up next to me, gasping and gurgling.

  Jon coughed. “What is going on —”

  “Shhh!” the voice growled again. “The serpent will give up if he doesn’t hear us.”

  Standing there was a creature with the head of a lion. Water was dripping from his mane as he held up a paw.

  Dana raised her silver glove warily. “Who exactly are you?”

  “Just the guy who saved your lives,” the lion-headed creature whispered. “Hush.”

  The roars of the serpent gradually faded. A long minute later, we heard the distant boom of the gate. The lion-headed creature relaxed. “They’re back in the city. We’re safe.”

  His voice wasn’t as deep as the warriors we’d seen before, and his mane was short, not fully grown. I guessed maybe he was a boy.

  “You know, you’re pretty lucky you ran into me,” he said. “Most strangers aren’t dealt with kindly. And by that, I mean kkkkk!” He ran his finger under his furry chin. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Panu, chief guard of the Eighth Gate of the Babylonian Underworld.”

  We stared at him for what seemed like an hour before Sydney finally spoke. “Okay. Panu. Well, thanks. For saving us, I mean.”

  “Wait. According to legend, aren’t there only seven gates in the Babylonian Underworld?” asked Dana, tapping her book.

  Her notes were good.

  The lion-boy snorted. “It’s an unofficial position. But I will be a guard one day. And as a future guard of our city, may I ask what you are doing here?”

  We went quiet again.

  “How do we know you won’t turn us in?” I asked. “I mean, we know it’s pretty much a crime to mess around in an Underworld when we … haven’t been invited.”

  Panu wrinkled his snout into what I guessed was a smile. “Only when you want to leave. There are rules against leaving.”

  I didn’t like how that sounded, either, but once again it was Sydney who broke the ice. “We’re here because of Loki,” she said.

  Panu narrowed his large lion eyes. “The silver man? I saw him enter the city.”

  “He’s evil,” I said.

  “There’s plenty of evil here, believe me,” said Panu.

  “Loki is a Norse god,” Dana put in. “And he’s here to recruit the Babylonian monsters for his war against a bigger god. He plans to use our world as a stepping-stone.”

  “He’ll destroy it to smithereens,” said Jon.

  Panu frowned. “I knew I didn’t like the look of him. He’ll want the fire monsters. They’re famous in the Underworlds. You’ve already met Fire Serpent.”

  “Who nearly charbroiled us,” said Syd. “Good thing he can’t see.”

  “Stone blind,” said Panu. “But his nose is as sensitive as it is ugly. He lives in the tower with the others.” He paused for a minute. “If you want Loki, I can get you into the city. Come with me.” He waded through the reeds and up the riverbank toward the dunes.

  “This seems almost too easy,” I said.

  “We have to trust him, a little,” whispered Sydney.

  “I think he’s cool,” said Jon. “That hair is awesome.”

  Dana and I exchanged looks.

  “Let’s go with him, but be on our guard,” she said, nodding.

  With that, we followed Panu up the bank and across the dunes.

  The tower that rose up from the city seemed more and more enormous as we got closer. Bonfires inside the walls cast wobbly golden light up the sides of the tower, and for the first time we saw gardens of vines and flowers hanging from the top all the way to the ground. Then it struck me.

  “Guys, we’re looking at the Hanging Gardens of Babylon!” I said. “One of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World!”

  Jon stared at the tower. “If only this were on a test. It’s the one answer I’d get right.”

  Panu beamed as we wove between the dunes. “The hanging gardens are famous. The seven gates to the Underworld are also pretty well-known. Plus there are seven monsters, one for each of the seven levels of the Great Tower.”

  “Seven must be a special number in mythology,” Jon said. “Owen’s lyre has seven strings, too.”

  I carefully removed the lyre from its holster and checked it over. It was dry, and the strings were as tight as when I’d first held it.

  Panu looked at the lyre closely. “Have you ever heard of the lost chord? It’s a Babylonian legend about a bunch of notes that contain really powerful magic.”

  “Not really,” I said. “I’m just learning how to use this.”

  Panu nodded. “The chord is lost, but the legend says that ‘Only what is lost can be found.’ Strange, right?”

  I didn’t know anything about the lost chord. All I knew was that Orpheus’s lyre was magical … and incredibly handy. If you played it properly, you could make people and things do whatever you wanted. But its magic had a dark side, too. Whenever I plucked the strings, I got wobbly and my head felt like it was going to blow up. Not the best side effect.

  “This way,” said Panu, leading us quickly along the outside of the wall, past two of the gates. “Stay close. The guards have night vision. They have to, since it’s always night here.”

  Jon frowned and mumbled, “Eagle-eyed lion-heads.”r />
  ROOOOO!

  A loud bellow echoed inside the city. Panu paused and looked up at the tower.

  “Is that one of the monsters?” Sydney asked.

  Panu shook his head. “No, that’s Kingu. He was a famous warrior who used to command the fire monsters. But he led them against Marduk, the great god of the Babylonian empire. So Marduk cursed him and his monsters to the Underworld and turned him into … something else.” He was quiet for a moment. “He is cursed to remain in the Underworld, a prisoner of the monsters he used to rule.”

  Looking into the eyes of a lion was a strange feeling, but I saw how expressive they could be. Panu felt sorry for this Kingu guy, even though he had battled the gods.

  “Loki wants those monsters,” said Sydney, getting back to business. “He’ll use his runes to get to them.”

  “Runes?” said Panu.

  “Stones with magic symbols carved on them,” Dana explained. “They’re very old and powerful.”

  Panu frowned. “I don’t like the sound of runes. But you have magic, too. The lyre. And this?” He pointed to the silver glove on Dana’s hand.

  “A little,” Dana said, shrugging. She held her gloved hand close to her side, trying not to show how much it hurt. But I knew that the glove caused her as much pain as the lyre did me. The glove was super-useful, but part of me couldn’t wait until she was free of it.

  “Here we are.” Panu paused at a section of the wall marked with decorative stones. He twisted one, pushed another, tapped a third, and a block in the wall moved aside smoothly to reveal a passage.

  “Not bad, huh?” Panu ducked into the passage, and we followed him inside the city. The air instantly became stifling and hot and close, as if we had entered a sealed oven.

  Zigging and zagging through the city streets to avoid patrols of armed guards, we soon found ourselves in a wide, moonlit courtyard. Flaming torches shone on the statue of a horrible beast with a winged head and a long beak.

  “That’s Marduk, the god who cursed Kingu,” Panu said with a scowl. “A constant reminder of the failed war. Kingu says he’s going to get his revenge the moment he’s free.”