“Welcome,” he said, “to the last room you will ever see.”
Carter looked around in awe. “The Hall of Judgment.” He focused on the hippodoodle and frowned. “Is that...”
“Ammit the Devourer,” Anubis said. “Look upon him and tremble.”
Ammit apparently heard his name in his sleep. He made a yipping sound and turned on his back. His lion and hippo legs twitched. I wondered if netherworld monsters dreamed of chasing rabbits.
“I always pictured him...bigger,” Carter admitted.
Anubis gave Carter a harsh look. “Ammit only has to be big enough to eat the hearts of the wicked. Trust me, he does his job well. Or...he did it well, anyway.”
Up on the scales, Khufu grunted. He almost lost his balance on the central beam, and the dented saucer clanged against the floor.
“Why are the scales broken?” I asked.
Anubis frowned. “Ma’at is weakening. I’ve tried to fix them, but...” He spread his hands helplessly.
I pointed to the ghostly rows of tombs. “Is that why the, ah, graveyard is butting in?”
Carter looked at me strangely. “What graveyard?”
“The tombs,” I said. “The trees.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He can’t see them,” Anubis said. “But you, Sadie—you’re perceptive. What do you hear?”
At first I didn’t know what he meant. All I heard was the blood rushing through my ears, and the distant rumble and crackle of the Lake of Fire. (And Khufu scratching himself and grunting, but that was nothing new.)
Then I closed my eyes, and I heard another distant sound—music that triggered my earliest memories, my father smiling as he danced me round our house in Los Angeles.
“Jazz,” I said.
I opened my eyes, and the Hall of Judgment was gone. Or not gone, but faded. I could still see the broken scales and the empty throne. But no black columns, no roar of fire. Even Carter, Khufu, and Ammit had disappeared.
The cemetery was very real. Cracked paving stones wobbled under my feet. The humid night air smelled of spices and fish stew and old mildewed places. I might’ve been back in England—a churchyard in some corner of London, perhaps—but the writing on the graves was in French, and the air was much too mild for an English winter. The trees hung low and lush, covered with Spanish moss.
And there was music. Just outside the cemetery’s fence, a jazz band paraded down the street in somber black suits and brightly colored party hats. Saxophonists bobbed up and down. Cornets and clarinets wailed. Drummers grinned and swayed, their sticks flashing. And behind them, carrying flowers and torches, a crowd of revelers in funeral clothes danced round an old-fashioned black hearse as it drove along.
“Where are we?” I said, marveling.
Anubis jumped from the top of a tomb and landed next to me. He breathed in the graveyard air, and his features relaxed. I found myself studying his mouth, the curve of his lower lip.
“New Orleans,” he said.
“Sorry?”
“The Drowned City,” he said. “In the French Quarter, on the west side of the river—the shore of the dead. I love it here. That’s why the Hall of Judgment often connects to this part of the mortal world.”
The jazz procession made its way down the street, drawing more onlookers into the party.
“What are they celebrating?”
“A funeral,” Anubis said. “They’ve just put the deceased in his tomb. Now they’re ‘cutting the body loose.’ The mourners celebrate the dead one’s life with song and dance as they escort the empty hearse away from the cemetery. Very Egyptian, this ritual.”
“How do you know so much?”
“I’m the god of funerals. I know every death custom in the world—how to die properly, how to prepare the body and soul for the afterlife. I live for death.”