The boat stops before a closed gate separating the river from the fiery lake. Iskandar’s ba appears. He freezes everyone but Sadie and then tells her that her mother foresaw the day when order would fall to chaos and that the only way to prevent this was for the gods and magicians to unite. Despite her warnings, Iskandar did nothing, leading to Sadie’s mom’s death. Order and chaos will clash in the coming days, and Sadie and Carter “will be instrumental in balancing those forces, or destroying everything” (349). Iskandar grants them passage into the Lake of Fire, unfreezes the others, and disappears.

The boat docks at an island in the middle of the lake that holds the Hall of Judgment. The group disembarks, and a jackal scares off Bast. The jackal morphs into a handsome young man—Anubis—who leads Sadie and Carter into the temple, where he shows them the broken judgment scales. Sadie hears jazz music in the distance, and suddenly, the hall changes to New Orleans, and she’s alone with Anubis.

Anubis crafts a bench out of mummy wrappings that look like toilet paper and tells Sadie he can’t give her a feather of truth because it’s too dangerous—if she lies at all while it’s in her possession, she’ll turn to ash.