Chapter Ten
Larry stepped forward, but a birdman stopped him with its spear. "Okay, what's going on?" he asked.
"Ahkmenrah is in a very dangerous place now," the birdman replied. Larry instantly recognized the voice of Horus.
"So...shouldn't somebody back him up?"
"It is actually safer for him if he is alone. The fewer abnormalities, the better."
"Oh, right. Chaos demon." Horus nodded, and Larry backed off.
"So what now?" Al asked.
Larry faced him and said, "Right now, I honestly have no idea."
NATM
Ahkmenrah stood and turned a complete rotation. He was the only soul, embodied or otherwise, in the parched desert that stretched for miles in all directions. There were no structures, especially none to indicate a portal, and he had no way of knowing which direction was witch. The sky was the same unearthly green Kahmunrah's gate had revealed, and he doubted he could see the sun.
He took a step and looked down at where he lay and then stood. There was a depression and a small series of footprints in the dust that the cracked earth was being reduced to. By what, though, Ahkmenrah couldn't be entirely sure.
He had to go somewhere, he decided as he took another survey of his surroundings. Then he chose a direction and started walking.
NATM
Horus marveled at how humans and exhibits managed to organize themselves and initiate a plan of action so quickly, but then, Larry's skill at diplomacy and almost overwhelming honesty had never failed to impress. Within minutes of Ahkmenrah's disappearance into the underworld, several of the exhibits had secured the foyer with Larry's help, and now all that was left to do was wait and try to think of a way to safely extract the young pharaoh. "The real problem," he said after a moment of listening to their back and forth, "is not that the boy is far from you, but that now Karahe is closer to a means of summons."
"So what are we supposed to do, if we can't go there?" Al asked.
"We take the tablet up to New York," Larry said matter-of-fact-ly. It seemed Horus had only to keep doing what he was doing for everything to work out smoothly. "There's a bunch of people up there that I know that we can work with to get Ahkmenrah back and stop this freak."
"Okay."
"My friends are gonna get a kick out of this," Larry muttered as he turned to the gate and retrieved the tablet.