The Tyrant's Tomb Read online

  Harpocrates’s glare did nothing to reassure me.

  The emperors must have anticipated this. They were smart, cynical, horribly logical. They knew that if I did release Harpocrates, the god’s first act would probably be to kill me. For the emperors, the potential loss of their fasces apparently didn’t outweigh the potential benefit of having me destroyed…or the entertainment value of knowing I’d done it to myself.

  Reyna touched my shoulder, making me flinch involuntarily. She and Meg had drawn their weapons. They were waiting for me to decide. Did I really want to risk this?

  I studied the soundless god.

  Do what you want with me, I thought to him. Just spare my friends. Please.

  His eyes burned with malice, but also a hint of glee. He seemed to be waiting for me to realize something, as if he’d written ZAP ME on my backpack when I wasn’t looking.

  Then I saw what he was holding in his lap. I hadn’t noticed it while I was down on my hands and knees, but now that I was standing, it was hard to miss: a glass jar, apparently empty, sealed with a metal lid.

  I felt as if Tarquin had just dropped the final rock into the drowning cage around my head. I imagined the emperors howling with delight on the deck of Caligula’s yacht.

  Rumors from centuries before swirled in my head: The Sibyl’s body had crumbled away…. She could not die…. Her attendants kept her life force…her voice…in a glass jar.

  Harpocrates cradled all that remained of the Sibyl of Cumae—another person who had every reason to hate me; a person the emperors and Tarquin knew I would feel obligated to help.

  They had left me the starkest of choices: run away, let the Triumvirate win, and watch my mortal friends be destroyed, or free two bitter enemies and face the same fate as Jason Grace.

  It was an easy decision.

  I turned to Reyna and Meg and thought as clearly as I could: Destroy the fasces. Cut him free.

  A voice and a shh.

  I have seen stranger couples.

  Wait. No, I haven’t.

  TURNS OUT THAT WAS a bad idea.

  Reyna and Meg moved cautiously—as one does when approaching a cornered wild animal or an angry immortal. They took up positions on either side of Harpocrates, raised their blades above the fasces, and mouthed in unison: One, two, three!

  It was almost like the fasces had been waiting to explode. Despite Reyna’s earlier protestations that Imperial gold blades might take forever to hack through Imperial gold chains, her sword and Meg’s cut through the cords and cables as if they were nothing but illusions themselves.

  Their blades hit the fasces and shattered them—sending bundles of rods blasting into splinters, shafts breaking, golden crescents toppling to the floor.

  The girls stepped back, clearly surprised by their own success.

  Harpocrates gave me a thin, cruel smile.

  Without a sound, the fetters on his hands and feet cracked and fell away like spring ice. The remaining cables and chains shriveled and blackened, curling against the walls. Harpocrates stretched out his free hand—the one that was not gesturing, Shh, I’m about to kill you—and the two golden ax blades from the broken fasces flew into his grip. His fingers turned white hot. The blades melted, gold dribbling through his fingers and pooling beneath him.

  A small, terrified voice in my head said, Well, this is going great.

  The god plucked the glass jar from his lap. He raised it on his fingertips like a crystal ball. For a moment, I was afraid he would give it the gold-ax treatment, melting whatever remained of the Sibyl just to spite me.

  Instead, he assaulted my mind with new images.

  I saw a eurynomos lope into Harpocrates’s prison, the glass jar tucked under one arm. The ghoul’s mouth slavered. Its eyes glowed purple.

  Harpocrates thrashed in his chains. It seemed he had not been in the box very long at that point. He wanted to crush the eurynomos with silence, but the ghoul seemed unaffected. His body was being driven by another mind, far away in the tyrant’s tomb.

  Even through telepathy, it was clear the voice was Tarquin’s—heavy and brutal as chariot wheels over flesh.

  I brought you a friend, he said. Try not to break her.

  He tossed the jar to Harpocrates, who caught it out of surprise. Tarquin’s possessed ghoul limped away, chuckling evilly, and chained the doors behind him.

  Alone in the dark, Harpocrates’s first thought was to smash the jar. Anything from Tarquin had to be a trap, or poison, or something worse. But he was curious. A friend? Harpocrates had never had one of those. He wasn’t sure he understood the concept.

  He could sense a living force inside the jar: weak, sad, fading, but alive, and possibly more ancient than he was. He opened the lid. The faintest voice began to speak to him, cutting straight through his silence as if it didn’t exist.

  After so many millennia, Harpocrates, the silent god who was never supposed to exist, had almost forgotten sound. He wept with joy. The god and the Sibyl began to converse.

  They both knew they were pawns, prisoners. They were only here because they served some purpose for the emperors and their new ally, Tarquin. Like Harpocrates, the Sibyl had refused to cooperate with her captors. She would tell them nothing of the future. Why should she? She was beyond pain and suffering. She had literally nothing left to lose and longed only to die.

  Harpocrates shared the feeling. He was tired of spending millennia slowly wasting away, waiting until he was obscure enough, forgotten by all humankind, so he could cease to exist altogether. His life had always been bitter—a never-ending parade of disappointments, bullying, and ridicule. Now he wanted sleep. The eternal sleep of extinct gods.

  They shared stories. They bonded over their hatred of me. They realized that Tarquin wanted this to happen. He had thrown them together, hoping they’d become friends, so he could use them as leverage against each other. But they couldn’t help their feelings.

  Wait. I interrupted Harpocrates’s story. Are you two… together?

  I shouldn’t have asked. I didn’t mean to send such an incredulous thought, like how does a shh god fall in love with a voice in a glass jar?

  Harpocrates’s rage pressed down on me, making my knees buckle. The air pressure increased, as if I’d plummeted a thousand feet. I almost blacked out, but I guessed Harpocrates wouldn’t let that happen. He wanted me conscious, able to suffer.

  He flooded me with bitterness and hate. My joints began to unknit, my vocal cords dissolving. Harpocrates might have been ready to die, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t kill me first. That would bring him great satisfaction.

  I bowed my head, gritting my teeth against the inevitable.

  Fine, I thought. I deserve it. Just spare my friends. Please.

  The pressure eased.

  I glanced up through a haze of pain.

  In front of me, Reyna and Meg stood shoulder to shoulder, facing down the god.

  They sent him their own flurry of images. Reyna pictured me singing “The Fall of Jason Grace” to the legion, officiating at Jason’s funeral pyre with tears in my eyes, then looking goofy and awkward and clueless as I offered to be her boyfriend, giving her the best, most cleansing laugh she’d had in years. (Thanks, Reyna.)

  Meg pictured the way I’d saved her in the myrmekes’ lair at Camp Half-Blood, singing about my romantic failures with such honesty it rendered giant ants catatonic with depression. She envisioned my kindness to Livia the elephant, to Crest, and especially to her, when I’d given her a hug in our room at the café and told her I would never give up trying.

  In all their memories, I looked so human…but in the best possible ways. Without words, my friends asked Harpocrates if I was still the person he hated so much.

  The god scowled, considering the two young women.

  Then a small voice spoke—actually spoke—from inside the sealed glass jar. “Enough.”

  As faint and muffled as her voice was, I should not have been able to hear it. Only the utter sile
nce of the shipping container made her audible, though how she cut through Harpocrates’s dampening field, I had no idea. It was definitely the Sibyl. I recognized her defiant tone, the same way she’d sounded centuries before, when she vowed never to love me until every grain of sand ran out: Come back to me at the end of that time. Then, if you still want me, I’m yours.

  Now, here we were, at the wrong end of forever, neither of us in the right form to choose the other.

  Harpocrates regarded the jar, his expression turning sad and plaintive. He seemed to ask, Are you sure?

  “This is what I have foreseen,” whispered the Sibyl. “At last, we will rest.”

  A new image appeared in my mind—verses from the Sibylline Books, purple letters against white skin, so bright it made me squint. The words smoked as if fresh from a harpy tattoo-artist’s needle: Add the last breath of the god who speaks not, once his soul is cut free, together with the shattered glass.

  Harpocrates must have seen the words, too, judging from the way he winced. I waited for him to process their meaning, to get angry again, to decide that if anyone’s soul should be cut free, it should be mine.

  When I was a god, I rarely thought about the passage of time. A few centuries here or there, what did it matter? Now I considered just how long ago the Sibyl had written those lines. They had been scribbled into the original Sibylline Books back when Rome was still a puny kingdom. Had the Sibyl known even then what they meant? Had she realized she would end up as nothing but a voice in a jar, stuck in this dark metal box with her boyfriend who smelled like roses and looked like a withered ten-year-old in a toga and a bowling-pin crown? If so, how could she not want to kill me even more than Harpocrates did?

  The god peered into the container, maybe having a private telepathic conversation with his beloved Sibyl.

  Reyna and Meg shifted, doing their best to block me from the god’s line of sight. Perhaps they thought if he couldn’t see me, he might forget I was there. I felt awkward peeking around their legs, but I was so drained and light-headed I doubted I could stand.

  No matter what images Harpocrates had shown me, or how weary he was of life, I couldn’t imagine he would just roll over and surrender. Oh, you need to kill me for your prophecy thingie? Okay, sure! Stab me right here!

  I definitely couldn’t imagine him letting us take the Sibyl’s jar and shattering it for our summoning ritual. They had found love. Why would they want to die?

  Finally, Harpocrates nodded, as if they’d come to an agreement. His face tightening with concentration, he pulled his index finger from his mouth, lifted the jar to his lips, and gave it a gentle kiss. Normally, I would not have been moved by a man caressing a jar, but the gesture was so sad and heartfelt, a lump formed in my throat.

  He twisted off the lid.

  “Good-bye, Apollo,” said the Sibyl’s voice, clearer now. “I forgive you. Not because you deserve it. Not for your sake at all. But because I will not go into oblivion carrying hate when I can carry love.”

  Even if I could’ve spoken, I wouldn’t have known what to say. I was in shock. Her tone asked for no reply, no apology. She didn’t need or want anything from me. It was almost as if I were the one being erased.

  Harpocrates met my gaze. Resentment still smoldered in his eyes, but I could tell he was trying to let it go. The effort seemed even harder for him than keeping his hand from his mouth.

  Without meaning to, I asked, Why are you doing this? How can you just agree to die?

  It was in my interest that he did so, sure. But it made no sense. He had found another soul to live for. Besides, too many other people had already sacrificed themselves for my quests.

  I understood now, better than I ever had, why dying was sometimes necessary. As a mortal, I had made that choice just a few minutes ago in order to save my friends. But a god agreeing to cease his existence, especially when he was free and in love? No. I couldn’t comprehend that.

  Harpocrates gave me a dry smirk. My confusion, my sense of near panic must have given him what he needed to finally stop being angry at me. Of the two of us, he was the wiser god. He understood something I did not. He certainly wasn’t going to give me any answers.

  The soundless god sent me one last image: me at an altar, making a sacrifice to the heavens. I interpreted that as an order: Make this worth it. Don’t fail.

  Then he exhaled deeply. We watched, stunned, as he began to crumble, his face cracking, his crown collapsing like a sand-castle turret. His last breath, a silver glimmer of fading life force, swirled into the glass jar to be with the Sibyl. He had just enough time to twist the lid closed before his arms and chest turned to chunks of dust, and then Harpocrates was gone.

  Reyna lunged forward, catching the jar before it could hit the floor.

  “That was close,” she said, which was how I realized the god’s silence had been broken.

  Everything seemed too loud: my own breathing, the sizzle of severed electrical wires, the creaking of the container’s walls in the wind.

  Meg still had the skin tone of a legume. She stared at the jar in Reyna’s hand as if worried it might explode. “Are they…?”

  “I think—” I choked on my words. I dabbed my face and found my cheeks were wet. “I think they’re gone. Permanently. Harpocrates’s last breath is all that remains in the jar now.”

  Reyna peered through the glass. “But the Sibyl…?” She turned to face me and almost dropped the jar. “My gods, Apollo. You look terrible.”

  “A horror show. Yes, I remember.”

  “No. I mean it’s worse now. The infection. When did that happen?”

  Meg squinted at my face. “Oh, yuck. We gotta get you healed, quick.”

  I was glad I didn’t have a mirror or a phone camera to see how I looked. I could only assume the lines of purple infection had made their way up my neck and were now drawing fun new patterns on my cheeks. I didn’t feel any more zombie-ish. My stomach wound didn’t throb any worse than before. But that could’ve simply meant my nervous system was shutting down.

  “Help me up, please,” I said.

  It took both of them to do so. In the process, I put one hand on the floor to brace myself, amid the shattered fasces rods, and got a splinter in my palm. Of course I did.

  I wobbled on spongy legs, leaning on Reyna, then on Meg, trying to remember how to stand. I didn’t want to look at the glass jar, but I couldn’t help it. There was no sign of Harpocrates’s silvery life force inside. I had to have faith that his last breath was still there. Either that, or when we tried to do our summoning, I would discover that he had played a terrible final joke on me.

  As for the Sibyl, I couldn’t sense her presence. I was sure her final grain of sand had slipped away. She had chosen to exit the universe with Harpocrates—one last shared experience between two unlikely lovers.

  On the outside of the jar, the gluey remains of a paper label clung to the glass. I could just make out the faded words SMUCKER’S GRAPE. Tarquin and the emperors had much to answer for.

  “How could they…?” Reyna shivered. “Can a god do that? Just…choose to stop existing?”

  I wanted to say Gods can do anything, but the truth was, I didn’t know. The bigger question was, why would a god even want to try?

  When Harpocrates had given me that last dry smile, had he been hinting that someday I might understand? Someday, would even the Olympians be forgotten relics, yearning for nonexistence?

  I used my nails to pull the splinter from my palm. Blood pooled—regular red human blood. It ran down the groove of my lifeline, which was not a great omen. Good thing I didn’t believe in such things….

  “We need to get back,” Reyna said. “Can you move—?”

  “Shh,” Meg interrupted, putting a finger to her lips.

  I feared she was doing the most inappropriate Harpocrates impersonation ever. Then I realized she was quite serious. My newly sensitive ears picked up on what she was hearing—the faint, distant cries of angry birds. Th
e ravens were returning.

  O, blood moon rising

  Take a rain check on doomsday

  I’m stuck in traffic

  WE EMERGED FROM THE shipping container just in time to get dive-bombed.

  A raven swooped past Reyna and bit a chunk out of her hair.

  “OW!” she yelled. “All right, that’s it. Hold this.”

  She shoved the glass jar into my hands, then readied her sword.

  A second raven came within range and she slashed it out of the sky. Meg’s twin blades whirled, Vitamixing another bird into a black cloud. That left only thirty or forty more bloodthirsty hang gliders of doom swarming the tower.

  Anger swelled in me. I decided I was done with the ravens’ bitterness. Plenty of folks had valid reasons to hate me: Harpocrates, the Sibyl, Koronis, Daphne…maybe a few dozen others. Okay, maybe a few hundred others. But the ravens? They were thriving! They’d grown gigantic! They loved their new jobs as flesh-eating killers. Enough with the blame.

  I secured the glass jar in my backpack. Then I unslung the bow from my shoulder.

  “Scram or die!” I yelled at the birds. “You get one warning!”

  The ravens cawed and croaked with derision. One dove at me and got an arrow between the eyes. It spiraled downward, shedding a funnel cloud of feathers.

  I picked another target and shot it down. Then a third. And a fourth.

  The ravens’ caws became cries of alarm. They widened their circle, probably thinking they could get out of range. I proved them wrong. I kept shooting until ten were dead. Then a dozen.

  “I brought extra arrows today!” I shouted. “Who wants the next one?”

  At last, the birds got the message. With a few parting screeches—probably unprintable comments about my parentage—they broke off their assault and flew north toward Marin County.

  “Nice work,” Meg told me, retracting her blades.

  The best I could manage was a nod and some wheezing. Beads of sweat froze on my forehead. My legs felt like soggy french fries. I didn’t see how I could climb back down the ladder, much less race off for a fun-filled evening of god-summoning, combat to the death, and possibly turning into a zombie.