The Throne of Fire

I finished The Red Pyramid on a Sunday and ordered this one the same night, which tells you most of what you need to know about how the first book ends. Riordan leaves enough threads burning that going back to a world without Carter and Sadie arguing in your ear feels wrong. So I read this fast, mostly late at night, and mostly with the same grin the first book gave me. First published in May 2011 by Disney Hyperion Books, The Throne of Fire runs 452 pages in its first hardcover edition and is book two of three in The Kane Chronicles. Carter and Sadie Kane narrate in turns, presenting the whole thing as a recorded warning for young magicians of the House of Life.

The setup is simple and cruel. Set is beaten but the greater serpent Apophis is stirring in his prison, and the kids learn he will break free within days. Five days, to be exact. The gods are divided, the House of Life is hunting them, and the only power that might stand against chaos eating the sun is the sun himself. Ra, the first and greatest of the gods, retired thousands of years ago and sank into the Duat, the shadow under the world, where he now drifts as a senile old man who barely remembers his own names. Carter and Sadie decide to wake him. Nobody thinks it will work. That includes them.

Five Days And Two Voices

The narration trick still carries so much weight. Carter is fourteen, careful, raised on dig sites by their Egyptologist father, always noting exits and translating signs in his head. Sadie is twelve going on trouble, London raised, funny out loud and furious underneath about the mother she lost and the family that split her from her brother. They interrupt each other. Carter will describe a fight in careful order and Sadie will cut in to say he forgot the part where he screamed. Sadie will skip a detail out of pride and Carter will add a footnote correcting her. It should get old. It never quite does, because the corrections reveal character. Carter corrects facts. Sadie corrects feelings.

The deadline shapes every chapter. Apophis, the serpent of chaos, grows stronger each night, and his rising will start with the gods and end with everything. The kids have five days to find the three scrolls of the Book of Ra and speak them at dawn, noon, and sunset, calling back the three forms of the sun god one by one. If they miss a single reading, the chain breaks. Riordan counts the days at chapter breaks, which gave my reading a drumbeat. Every detour costs hours they do not have, and the book never lets you forget it.

What has changed since book one matters here. Brooklyn House is now a working school with new students. The House of Life under Michel Desjardins wants the Kanes stopped, convinced that hosting gods means ruin. Amos is away recruiting magicians who might side with the kids. And Vlad Menshikov, a scarred Russian magician with one dead eye, has stepped into the open as their worst human problem. He serves Apophis willingly. He wants the scrolls destroyed and the Kanes dead, in that order.

Brooklyn House At Full Noise

Brooklyn House remains my favorite place in the series. From the street it is a plain mansion. Inside it sprawls, full of living statues, a three story library, training rooms, and a crocodile named Philip who floats in the pool judging everyone. Khufu the baboon still wears basketball shorts and eats anything wrapped in paper. The students give the middle chapters their warmth. Jaz is the healer, kind and glowing when she works, the one who patches everyone after fights. Walt Stone is the quiet charm maker from Seattle, skilled with protective objects, polite to everyone, carrying a family curse that is slowly killing him. Using magic burns through his short supply of life, and he knows it. Felix is small, excitable, and fixed on penguins in a way that pays off beautifully late in the book. Alyssa shapes stone. They bicker over chores and steal food and drill spells on the roof.

Sadie now splits her life. School in London with her friends Liz and Emma, grandparents who worry, a birthday she tries to keep normal. Then portals back to Brooklyn and the end of the world. The split works because Riordan lets London feel real. Her friends have no idea gods exist. Her grandparents want homework done. Sadie sits through lessons about exams while counting the hours until Apophis rises, and the contrast makes the danger feel heavier than any speech about chaos could.

The attack on the house lands early and hard. Menshikov does not scheme from far away. He sends force directly at their home, a storm carrying things with teeth, and the wards shake. Walt holds the lines with charms until his hands bleed. Jaz drags the wounded clear. Felix does something with magic and waterfowl I will not spoil. Carter holds a collapsing stair with words he barely knows. It is the first proof the students are not background. They are the reason the house survives the week.

Carter also gets the griffin. During the New York fighting, a young griffin imprints on the group, and Sadie names him Freak. He is the size of a truck, eats constantly, and regards Carter as his person. Freak gives the book its best flying scenes and its dumbest jokes, and I mean dumbest with love. Every grim chapter earns a page where Freak tries to fit through a doorway built for humans.

The Plan To Wake The Sun

The plan sounds mad because it is mad. Ra gave up his throne ages ago. His power scattered into three aspects tied to the hours of the day. At dawn he rises as Khepri, the scarab pushing the sun upward. At noon he burns as the full sun. At evening he sinks as an old ram headed god into the night. The Book of Ra holds three scrolls, each containing the spell to call one aspect home, and each must be read at its matching hour in the presence of Ra himself. Miss dawn and the rest fails. Lose a scroll and the rest fails. Find all three and drag a confused old god through all three readings while Apophis sends everything hungry after you, and you might get a sunrise.

Carter and Sadie divide the work the way siblings do, which means badly and then well. Carter chases the thread of Zia. The Zia he knew in book one, the prickly fire skilled girl he liked, turned out to be a shabti, a clay stand in. The real Zia Rashid was hidden away as a child because her gift for fire runs so hot it scared her teachers. She sleeps in a secret place, guarded and dreaming. Carter cannot think straight about her, and Sadie mocks him for it in her chapters with real sisterly precision. But Zia matters beyond the crush. Only someone born to fire can help with one stage of the waking, and Carter sets out to find her for reasons that start romantic and turn practical.

Sadie carries the heavier magical load here. She hosts Isis still, in flashes, and Isis pushes her toward ruthless choices. Twice Sadie must decide between the clever godly answer and the human one, and twice she pays for choosing human. I liked that Riordan keeps the cost physical. Hosting leaves nosebleeds, shaking hands, dreams that do not feel like dreams. Magic here is never free. Every portal Sadie opens takes something from her skin and sleep.

They also consult Thoth, god of knowledge, who lives in exile with too many books and opinions. Thoth cannot hand them the scrolls. Gods have rules about interference, and chaos has agents watching him. What he gives them is direction and a warning. One scroll sits in the mortal world under guard. One sits behind Menshikov in Russia. The last sits where the living should not walk. Then he more or less wishes them luck and goes back to his shelves, which feels exactly right for a god of wisdom in wartime.

Museums, Mansions, And The Dead

The three hunts give the book its shape, and they each play differently enough that I stayed with them. The first scroll waits in New York, in a museum collection where old magic hides among labeled cases. The kids go in quiet and come out loud. Wards trip. Stone things wake. Carter fights something with too many teeth in a gallery while Sadie reads hieroglyphs under failing light and shouts corrections at him mid swing. They escape with the scroll and no dignity, which is the house style.

Russia is the best sequence in the book. Menshikov keeps the second scroll in his stronghold near St. Petersburg, and the kids walk straight into his circle. Bes goes with them, and Bes at a formal gathering of hostile magicians is worth the price of the book alone. He is short, loud, bowlegged, wearing tourist clothes among robes, eating from trays and insulting people who could kill him. The theft itself runs on nerves. Sadie talks her way past guards with a borrowed name and a straight face. Carter finds the scroll behind protections keyed to pain. When the alarm goes up they leave through chaos of their own making, with Menshikov himself arriving in fury. The one eyed magician shows his strength here. He does not throw minions at them. He bends the building.

The third scroll waits past the living world, and this is where the book turns cold and strange in the best way. To reach it they travel the Duat toward the Land of the Dead, down black water under stars that watch. They pass trials set by gods who answer to no one. A crocodile god bars their path in the waterways and nearly ends them; Carter stands ground he should not be able to stand while Sadie works the spell with river water around her knees. In the halls of judgment they plead their case before gods who weigh hearts against feathers. Osiris sits in that hall, and the scenes with him land quietly. He is their father Julius now, merged with the god, kind and distant at once, and neither kid knows how to talk to him. They get the scroll. The price comes due on the way out.

What Bes Pays

Bes is the soul of this book, and I want to be careful describing him because he is easy to flatten into jokes. He is a protector god, short and bowlegged, loud in Hawaiian shirts, a married funny fighter who scares evil with noise and stands in front of children. In the first book he arrived late and stole his scenes. Here he becomes the heart. He loves Tawaret, the hippo goddess who runs a sanctuary for worn out and retired gods, and his teasing about her covers real devotion. He treats the trainees like his own kids. Felix worships him. Walt relaxes around him in a way he does with no one else. When the way out of the underworld demands a payment, Bes pays it before the kids can argue.

The payment is his memory. To pull Carter and Sadie back across the boundary, Bes gives up his ren, his secret name, the seat of identity. He drinks of the dark water and lets himself be unwritten. What walks out afterward breathes and eats but knows no one. He does not know Tawaret. He does not know the kids. He sits quiet and empty where a loud god used to be. Sadie, who narrates those pages, falls apart in a way that feels true for a twelve year old pretending to be tough. She rages at the unfairness, then goes quiet, then holds his hand while Tawaret takes charge of him. Tawaret carries him home to her sanctuary and promises to wait, because gods measure hope in centuries.

I found this the strongest writing in the series so far. Riordan earns the loss across two hundred pages of noise and loyalty, then refuses to soften it. No last minute rescue. No trick that returns the memories by the final chapter. The book lets a good god be broken saving children who cannot pay him back, and lets the children carry it. If the middle sags anywhere, and it does in the travel between hunts, the Bes chapters pull it straight again. His absence hangs over the ending more than Apophis does.

Menshikov, Desjardins, And The Shadow

Everything converges with two days left and no margin anywhere. Menshikov stops hiding behind servants and offers himself fully as a vessel. Apophis pours into him, and the result is a man shaped storm with a serpent moving behind his eyes. He comes for Brooklyn House first, meaning to kill the students and burn the scrolls. The defense of the house is the book's loudest stretch. Walt spends charms like coins and pays in blood. Jaz heals until she drops. Felix summons something absurd that turns the fight for one vital minute. Freak the griffin rips into demons from above while Carter duels on the roof with a sword that feels too heavy. They drive Menshikov off, but everyone understands he was testing them.

The last stand happens among old stones in Egypt, under a sky going wrong. Apophis rises through Menshikov, bigger each hour, eating magic and light. The gods fight him and lose ground. This is where Desjardins, the stern Chief Lector who hunted the kids for a whole book, turns. He sees Menshikov for what he has become and understands the House was wrong about the greater threat. Desjardins spends his own life on an execration, a ritual cursing that binds and banishes, hurling himself and his power at the serpent. It does not kill Apophis. Nothing can kill chaos outright. But it wounds him and buys the minutes Carter and Sadie need.

The killing stroke, if you can call it that, uses Apophis's shadow. In Egyptian belief the sheut, the shadow, is part of the soul, and to bind it is to bind the person. The kids capture the serpent's shadow with help they hate accepting. Set, god of disorder, lends force against Apophis, because even Set fears being swallowed by greater chaos. Carter and Sadie speak the execration over the bound shadow while their friends hold the circle. The spell takes. Apophis is driven back into his prison, screaming, diminished but alive. Menshikov is gone, used up from within by the thing he invited in. The sky clears. Nobody cheers for long.

Ra wakes, and the waking is the book's bravest joke. After all that hunting and bleeding, the sun god returns as a wrinkled old man in a bathrobe of light, vague and hungry, more interested in lunch than in ruling. He sails off in his sun boat to resume his old path, which will slow Apophis but not stop him. The gods withdraw to their own quarrels. Amos becomes Chief Lector and starts rebuilding the House around cooperation with gods instead of war. The real Zia wakes and joins Brooklyn House, and she and Carter finally talk face to face, awkward and hopeful. Walt is still dying, still joking about it, and Sadie is caught between him and Anubis, the gentle death god who walks as a boy and clearly cares for her. Bes sits quiet in Tawaret's sanctuary, waiting for memories that may never come back.

Fair criticism belongs here because the book invites it. The middle repeats its pattern. Find a scroll, survive the guardians, escape loudly, three times. Taken one at a time each hunt shines. Back to back they blur, and I skimmed pages of the second chase on first read. Apophis also suffers from being an idea more than a person. Set in book one talked and schemed and hated. Apophis mostly hungers, which is scary in concept and thin on the page. Menshikov carries the human menace well but vanishes into the serpent at the end, so the final fight has spectacle without a face. And Ra's return as comedy undercuts the triumph on purpose, which some readers will love and some will resent. I landed in the middle. The joke is honest. Waking a god who quit on the world should feel strange rather than glorious.

Still, I closed the book eager for the third. The voices never flag. Sadie's grief over Bes and Carter's gangly devotion to Zia give the noise a center. The magic stays rule bound enough to trust, costly enough to fear. Brooklyn House feels lived in now, full of kids I would follow into the next fight. Apophis is only banished, not beaten, and everyone knows it. The recording ends with a warning and an invitation. There are more young magicians out there. The war is coming back. Read the last book soon, because the night will not wait.