The Tyrant's Tomb Read online

  “One afternoon in the unicorn stables, and you’re an expert on Roman senatorial proceedings.”

  “Lavinia told me.” Meg sounded positively smug about it. She lay on her cot, tossing her other high-top in the air and catching it again. How she managed this without her glasses on, I had no idea.

  Minus the rhinestone cat-eye frames, her face looked older, her eyes darker and more serious. I would have even called her mature, had she not come back from her day at the stables wearing a glittery green T-shirt that read VNICORNES IMPERANT!

  “What if I don’t have a plan?” I asked.

  I expected Meg to throw her other shoe at me. Instead she said, “You do.”

  “I do?”

  “Yep. You might not have it all put together yet, but you will by tomorrow.”

  I couldn’t tell if she was giving me an order, or expressing faith in me, or just vastly underestimating the dangers we faced.

  Continue to act strong, Lupa had told me. It is how we start.

  “Okay,” I said tentatively. “Well, for starters, I was thinking that we could—”

  “Not now! Tomorrow. I don’t want spoilers.”

  Ah. There was the Meg I knew and tolerated.

  “What is it with you and spoilers?” I asked.

  “I hate them.”

  “I’m trying to strategize with y—”

  “Nope.”

  “Talking through my ideas—”

  “Nope.” She tossed aside her shoe, put a pillow over her head, and commanded in a muffled voice: “Go to sleep!”

  Against a direct order, I had no chance. Weariness washed over me, and my eyelids crashed shut.

  Dirt and bubble gum

  Lavinia brought enough

  For the whole senate

  HOW DO YOU TELL a dream from a nightmare?

  If it involves a book burning, it’s probably a nightmare.

  I found myself in the Roman senate room—not the grand, famous chamber of the republic or the empire, but the old senate room of the Roman kingdom. The mudbrick walls were painted slapdash white and red. Straw covered the filthy floor. Fires from iron braziers billowed soot and smoke, darkening the plaster ceiling.

  No fine marble here. No exotic silk or imperial purple grandeur. This was Rome in its oldest, rawest form: all hunger and viciousness. The royal guards wore cured leather armor over sweaty tunics. Their black iron spears were crudely hammered, their helmets stitched of wolf hide. Enslaved women knelt at the foot of the throne, which was a rough-hewn slab of rock covered with furs. Lining either side of the room were crude wooden benches—the bleachers for the senators, who sat more like prisoners or spectators than powerful politicians. In this era, senators had only one true power: to vote for a new king when the old one died. Otherwise, they were expected to applaud or shut up as required.

  On the throne sat Lucius Tarquinius Superbus—seventh king of Rome, murderer, schemer, slave-driver, and all-around swell guy. His face was like wet porcelain cut with a steak knife—a wide glistening mouth pulled into a lopsided scowl; cheekbones too pronounced; a nose broken and healed in an ugly zigzag; heavy-lidded, suspicious eyes; and long, stringy hair that looked like drizzled clay.

  Just a few years before, when he ascended the throne, Tarquin had been praised for his manly good looks and his physical strength. He’d dazzled the senators with flattery and gifts, then plopped himself onto his father-in-law’s throne and persuaded the senate to confirm him as the new king.

  When the old king rushed in to protest that he was, you know, still very much alive, Tarquin picked him up like a sack of turnips, carried him outside, and threw him into the street, where the old king’s daughter, Tarquin’s wife, ran over her unfortunate dad with her chariot, splattering the wheels with his blood.

  A lovely start to a lovely reign.

  Now Tarquin wore his years heavily. He’d grown hunched and thick, as if all the building projects he’d forced on his people had actually been heaped on his own shoulders. He wore the hide of a wolf for a cloak. His robes were such a dark mottled pink, it was impossible to tell if they’d once been red and then spattered with bleach, or had once been white and spattered with blood.

  Aside from the guards, the only person standing in the room was an old woman facing the throne. Her rose-colored hooded cloak, her hulking frame, and her stooped back made her look like a mocking reflection of the king himself: the Saturday Night Live version of Tarquin. In the crook of one arm she held a stack of six leather-bound volumes, each the size of a folded shirt and just as floppy.

  The king scowled at her. “You’re back. Why?”

  “To offer you the same deal as before.”

  The woman’s voice was husky, as if she’d been shouting. When she pulled down her hood, her stringy gray hair and haggard face made her look even more like Tarquin’s twin sister. But she was not. She was the Cumaean Sibyl.

  Seeing her again, my heart twisted. She had once been a lovely young woman—bright, strong-willed, passionate about her prophetic work. She had wanted to change the world. Then things between us soured…and I had changed her instead.

  Her appearance was only the beginning of the curse I had set on her. It would get much, much worse as the centuries progressed. How had I put this out of mind? How could I have been so cruel? The guilt for what I’d done burned worse than any ghoul scratch.

  Tarquin shifted on his throne. He tried for a laugh, but the sound came out more like a bark of alarm. “You must be insane, woman. Your original price would have bankrupted my kingdom, and that was when you had nine books. You burned three of them, and now you come back to offer me only six, for the same exorbitant sum?”

  The woman held out the books, one hand on top as if preparing to say an oath. “Knowledge is expensive, King of Rome. The less there is, the more it is worth. Be glad I am not charging you double.”

  “Oh, I see! I should be grateful, then.” The king looked at his captive audience of senators for support. That was their cue to laugh and jeer at the woman. None did. They looked more afraid of the Sibyl than of the king.

  “I expect no gratitude from the likes of you,” the Sibyl rasped. “But you should act in your own self-interest, and in the interest of your kingdom. I offer knowledge of the future…how to avert disaster, how to summon the help of the gods, how to make Rome a great empire. All that knowledge is here. At least…six volumes of it remain.”

  “Ridiculous!” snapped the king. “I should have you executed for your disrespect!”

  “If only that were possible.” The Sibyl’s voice was as bitter and calm as an arctic morning. “Do you refuse my offer, then?”

  “I am high priest as well as king!” cried Tarquin. “Only I decide how to appease the gods! I don’t need—”

  The Sibyl took the top three books off the stack and casually threw them into the nearest brazier. The volumes blazed immediately, as if they’d been written in kerosene on sheets of rice paper. In a single great roar, they were gone.

  The guards gripped their spears. The senators muttered and shifted on their seats. Perhaps they could feel what I could feel—a cosmic sigh of anguish, the exhale of destiny as so many volumes of prophetic knowledge vanished from the world, casting a shadow across the future, plunging generations into darkness.

  How could the Sibyl do it? Why?

  Perhaps it was her way of taking revenge on me. I’d criticized her for writing so many volumes, for not letting me oversee her work. But by the time she wrote the Sibylline Books, I had been angry at her for different reasons. My curse had already been set. Our relationship was beyond repair. By burning her own books, she was spitting on my criticism, on the prophetic gift I had given her, and on the too-high price she had paid to be my Sibyl.

  Or perhaps she was motivated by something other than bitterness. Perhaps she had a reason for challenging Tarquin as she did and exacting such a high penalty for his stubbornness.

  “Last chance,” she told the king. “I off
er you three books of prophecy for the same price as before.”

  “For the same—” The king choked on his rage.

  I could see how much he wanted to refuse. He wanted to scream obscenities at the Sibyl and order his guards to impale her on the spot.

  But his senators were shifting and whispering uneasily. His guards’ faces were pale with fear. His enslaved women were doing their best to hide behind the dais.

  Romans were a superstitious people.

  Tarquin knew this.

  As high priest, he was responsible for protecting his subjects by interceding with the gods. Under no circumstances was he supposed to make the gods angry. This old woman was offering him prophetic knowledge to help his kingdom. The crowd in the throne room could sense her power, her closeness to the divine.

  If Tarquin allowed her to burn those last books, if he threw away her offer…it might not be the Sibyl whom his guards decided to impale.

  “Well?” the Sibyl prompted, holding her three remaining volumes close to the flames.

  Tarquin swallowed back his anger. Through clenched teeth, he forced out the words: “I agree to your terms.”

  “Good,” said the Sibyl, no visible relief or disappointment on her face. “Let payment be brought to the Pomerian Line. Once I have it, you will have the Books.”

  The Sibyl disappeared in a flash of blue light. My dream dissolved with her.

  “Put on your sheet.” Meg threw a toga in my face, which was not the nicest way to be woken up.

  I blinked, still groggy, the smell of smoke, moldy straw, and sweaty Romans lingering in my nostrils. “A toga? But I’m not a senator.”

  “You’re honorary, because you used to be a god or whatever.” Meg pouted. “I don’t get to wear a sheet.”

  I had a horrible mental image of Meg in a traffic-light-colored toga, gardening seeds spilling from the folds of the cloth. She would just have to make do with her glittery unicorn T-shirt.

  Bombilo gave me his usual Good morning glare when I came downstairs to appropriate the café bathroom. I washed up, then changed my bandages with a kit the healers had thoughtfully left in our room. The ghoul scratch looked no worse, but it was still puckered and angry red. It still burned. That was normal, right? I tried to convince myself it was. As they say, doctor gods make the worst patient gods.

  I got dressed, trying to remember how to fold a toga, and mulled over the things I’d learned from my dream. Number one: I was a terrible person who ruined lives. Number two: There was not a single bad thing I’d done in the last four thousand years that was not going to come back and bite me in the clunis, and I was beginning to think I deserved it.

  The Cumaean Sibyl. Oh, Apollo, what had you been thinking?

  Alas, I knew what I’d been thinking—that she was a pretty young woman I wanted to get with, despite the fact that she was my Sibyl. Then she’d outsmarted me, and being the bad loser that I was, I had cursed her.

  No wonder I was now paying the price: tracking down the evil Roman king to whom she’d once sold her Sibylline Books. If Tarquin was still clinging to some horrible undead existence, could the Cumaean Sibyl be alive as well? I shuddered to think what she might be like after all these centuries, and how much her hatred for me would have grown.

  First things first: I had to tell the senate my marvelous plan to make things right and save us all. Did I have a marvelous plan? Shockingly, maybe. Or at least the beginnings of a marvelous plan. The marvelous index of one.

  On our way out, Meg and I grabbed Lemurian-spice lattes and a couple of blueberry muffins—because Meg clearly needed more sugar and caffeine—then we joined the loose procession of demigods heading for the city.

  By the time we got to the Senate House, everyone was taking their seats. Flanking the rostrum, Praetors Reyna and Frank were arrayed in their finest gold and purple. The first row of benches was occupied by the camp’s ten senators—each in a white toga trimmed in purple—along with the senior-most veterans, those with accessibility needs, and Ella and Tyson. Ella fidgeted, doing her best to avoid brushing shoulders with the senator on her left. Tyson grinned at the Lar on his right, wriggling his fingers inside the ghost’s vaporous rib cage.

  Behind them, the semicircle of tiered seats was packed to overflowing with legionnaires, Lares, retired veterans, and other citizens of New Rome. I hadn’t seen a lecture hall this crowded since Charles Dickens’s 1867 Second American Tour. (Great show. I still have the autographed T-shirt framed in my bedroom in the Palace of the Sun.)

  I thought I should sit in front, being an honorary wearer of bed linens, but there was simply no room. Then I spotted Lavinia (thank you, pink hair) waving at us from the back row. She patted the bench next to her, indicating that she’d saved us seats. A thoughtful gesture. Or maybe she wanted something.

  Once Meg and I had settled on either side of her, Lavinia gave Meg the supersecret Unicorn Sisterhood fist bump, then turned and ribbed me with her sharp elbow. “So, you’re really Apollo, after all! You must know my mom.”

  “I—what?”

  Her eyebrows were extra distracting today. The dark roots had started to grow out under the pink dye, which made them seem to hover slightly off center, as if they were about to float off her face.

  “My mom?” she repeated, popping her bubble gum. “Terpsichore?”

  “The—the Muse of Dance. Are you asking me if she’s your mother, or if I know her?”

  “Of course she’s my mother.”

  “Of course I know her.”

  “Well, then!” Lavinia drummed a riff on her knees, as if to prove she had a dancer’s rhythm despite being so gangly. “I wanna hear the dirt!”

  “The dirt?”

  “I’ve never met her.”

  “Oh. Um…” Over the centuries, I’d had many conversations with demigods who wanted to know more about their absentee godly parents. Those talks rarely went well. I tried to conjure a picture of Terpsichore, but my memories of Olympus were getting fuzzier by the day. I vaguely recalled the Muse frolicking around one of the parks on Mount Olympus, casting rose petals in her wake as she twirled and pirouetted. Truth be told, Terpsichore had never been my favorite of the Nine Muses. She tended to take the spotlight off me, where it rightly belonged.

  “She had your color hair,” I ventured.

  “Pink?”

  “No, I mean…dark. Lots of nervous energy, I suppose, like you. She was never happy unless she was moving, but…”

  My voice died. What could I say that wouldn’t sound mean? Terpsichore was graceful and poised and didn’t look like a wobbly giraffe? Was Lavinia sure there hadn’t been some mistake about her parentage? Because I couldn’t believe they were related.

  “But what?” she pressed.

  “Nothing. Hard to remember.”

  Down at the rostrum, Reyna was calling the meeting to order. “Everyone, if you’ll please take your seats! We need to get started. Dakota, can you scoot in a little to make room for—Thanks.”

  Lavinia regarded me skeptically. “That’s the lamest dirt ever. If you can’t tell me about my mom, at least tell me what’s going on with you and Ms. Praetor down there.”

  I squirmed. The bench suddenly felt a great deal harder under my clunis. “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “Oh, please. The way you’ve been sneaking glances at Reyna since you got here? I noticed it. Meg noticed.”

  “I noticed,” Meg confirmed.

  “Even Frank Zhang noticed.” Lavinia turned up her palms as if she’d just provided the ultimate proof of complete obviousness.

  Reyna began to address the crowd: “Senators, guests, we have called this emergency meeting to discuss—”

  “Honestly,” I whispered to Lavinia, “it’s awkward. You wouldn’t understand.”

  She snorted. “Awkward is telling your rabbi that Daniella Bernstein is going to be your date for your bat mitzvah party. Or telling your dad that the only dancing you want to do is tap, so you’re not going to carry on
the Asimov family tradition. I know all about awkward.”

  Reyna continued, “In light of Jason Grace’s ultimate sacrifice, and our own recent battle against the undead, we have to take very seriously the threat—”

  “Wait,” I whispered to Lavinia, her words sinking in. “Your dad is Sergei Asimov? The dancer? The—” I stopped myself before I could say The smoking-hot Russian ballet star, but judging from Lavinia’s eye roll, she knew what I was thinking.

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said. “Stop trying to change the subject. Are you going to dish on—?”

  “Lavinia Asimov!” Reyna called from the rostrum. “Did you have something to say?”

  All eyes turned toward us. A few legionnaires smirked, as if this was not the first time Lavinia had been called out during a senate meeting.

  Lavinia glanced from side to side, then pointed to herself as if unsure which of the many Lavinia Asimovs Reyna might be addressing. “No, ma’am. I’m good.”

  Reyna did not look amused by being called ma’am. “I notice you’re chewing gum as well. Did you bring enough for the whole senate?”

  “Er, I mean…” Lavinia pulled multiple packs of gum from her pockets. She scanned the crowd, doing a quick guesstimate. “Maybe?”

  Reyna glanced heavenward, as if asking the gods, Why do I have to be the only adult in the room?

  “I’ll assume,” the praetor said, “that you were just trying to draw attention to the guest seated next to you, who has important information to share. Lester Papadopoulos, rise and address the senate!”

  I now have a plan

  To make a plan concerning

  The plan for my plan

  NORMALLY, WHEN I’M ABOUT to perform, I wait backstage. Once I’m announced and the crowd is frenzied with anticipation, I burst through the curtains, the spotlights hit me, and TA-DA! I am A GOD!

  Reyna’s introduction did not inspire wild applause. Lester Papadopoulos, rise and address the senate was about as exciting as We will now have a PowerPoint about adverbs.

  As soon as I started making my way to the aisle, Lavinia tripped me. I glared back at her. She gave me an innocent face, like her foot just happened to be there. Given the size of her legs, maybe it had been.