The Tyrant’s Tomb by Rick Riordan

Frozen in terror

Like a god in the headlights

Why U speeding up?

MORTAL SECURITY WAS NOTa problem.

There wasn’t any.

Across a flat expanse of rocks and weeds, the relay station sat nestled at the base of Sutro Tower. The blocky brown building had clusters of white satellite dishes dotting its roof like toadstools after a rain shower. The door stood wide open. The windows were dark. The parking area out front was empty.

“This isn’t right,” Reyna murmured. “Didn’t Tarquin say they were doubling security?”

“Doubling the flock,” Meg corrected. “But I don’t see any sheep or anything.”

That idea made me shudder. Over the millennia, I’d seen quite a few flocks of guardian sheep. They tended to be poisonous and/or carnivorous, and they smelled like mildewed sweaters.

“Apollo, any thoughts?” Reyna asked.

At least she could look at me now without bursting into laughter, but I didn’t trust myself to speak. I just shook my head helplessly. I was good at that.

“Maybe we’re in the wrong place?” Meg asked.

Reyna bit her lower lip. “Something’s definitely off here. Let me check inside the station. Aurum and Argentum can make a quick search. If we encounter any mortals, I’ll just say I was hiking and got lost. You guys wait here. Guard my exit. If you hear barking, that means trouble.”

She jogged across the field, Aurum and Argentum at her heels, and disappeared inside the building.

Meg peered at me over the top of her cat-eye glasses. “How come you made her laugh?”

“That wasn’t my intention. Besides, it isn’t illegal to make someone laugh.”

“You asked her to be your girlfriend, didn’t you?”

“I—What? No. Sort of. Yes.”

“That was stupid.”

I found it humiliating to have my love life criticized by a little girl wearing a unicorn-and-crossbones button. “You wouldn’t understand.”

Meg snorted.

I seemed to be everyone’s source of amusement today.

I studied the tower that loomed above us. Up the side of the nearest support column, a steel-ribbed chute enclosed a row of rungs, forming a tunnel that one could climb through—if one were crazy enough—to reach the first set of crossbeams, which bristled with more satellite dishes and cellular-antenna fungi. From there, the rungs continued upward into a low-lying blanket of fog that swallowed the tower’s top half. In the white mist, a hazy black V floated in and out of sight—a bird of some sort.

I shivered, thinking of the strixes that had attacked us in the Burning Maze, but strixes only hunted at nighttime. That dark shape had to be something else, maybe a hawk looking for mice. The law of averages dictated that once in a while I’d have to come across a creature that didn’t want to kill me, right?

Nevertheless, the fleeting shape filled me with dread. It reminded me of the many near-death experiences I’d shared with Meg McCaffrey, and of the promise I’d made to myself to be honest with her, back in the good old days of ten minutes ago, before Reyna had nuked my self-esteem.

“Meg,” I said. “Last night—”

“You saw Peaches. I know.”

She might have been talking about the weather. Her gaze stayed fixed on the doorway of the relay station.

“You know,” I repeated.

“He’s been around for a couple of days.”

“You’ve seen him?”

“Just sensed him. He’s got his reasons for staying away. Doesn’t like the Romans. He’s working on a plan to help the local nature spirits.”

“And…if that plan is to help them run away?”

In the diffused gray light of the fog bank, Meg’s glasses looked like her own tiny satellite dishes. “You think that’s what he wants? Or what the nature spirits want?”

I remembered the fauns’ fearful expressions at People’s Park, the dryads’ weary anger. “I don’t know. But Lavinia—”

“Yeah. She’s with them.” Meg shrugged one shoulder. “The centurions noticed her missing at morning roll call. They’re trying to downplay it. Bad for morale.”

I stared at my young companion, who had apparently been taking lessons from Lavinia in Advanced Camp Gossip. “Does Reyna know?”

“That Lavinia is gone? Sure. Where Lavinia went? Nah. I don’t either, really. Whatever she and Peaches and the rest are planning, there’s not much we can do about it now. We’ve got other stuff to worry about.”

I crossed my arms. “Well, I’m glad we had this talk, so I could unburden myself of all the things you already knew. I was also going to say that you’re important to me and I might even love you like a sister, but—”

“I already know that, too.” She gave me a crooked grin, offering proof that Nero really should have taken her to the orthodontist when she was younger. “ ’S’okay. You’ve gotten less annoying, too.”

“Hmph.”

“Look, here comes Reyna.”

And so ended our warm family moment, as the praetor reemerged from the station, her expression unsettled, her greyhounds happily circling her legs as if waiting for jelly beans.

“The place is empty,” Reyna announced. “Looks like everybody left in a hurry. I’d say something cleared them out—like a bomb threat, maybe.”

I frowned. “In that case, wouldn’t there be emergency vehicles here?”

“The Mist,” Meg guessed. “Could’ve made the mortals see anything to get them out of here. Clearing the scene before…”

I was about to ask Before what? But I didn’t want the answer.

Meg was right, of course. The Mist was a strange force. Sometimes it manipulated mortal minds after a supernatural event, like damage control. Other times, it operated in advance of a catastrophe, pushing away mortals who might otherwise wind up as collateral damage—like ripples in a local pond warning of a dragon’s first footstep.

“Well,” Reyna said, “if that’s true, it means we’re in the right place. And I can only think of one other direction to explore.” Her eyes followed the pylons of Sutro Tower until they disappeared into the fog. “Who wants to climb first?”

Wanthad nothing to do with it. I was drafted.

The ostensible reason was so Reyna could steady me if I started feeling shaky on the ladder. The real reason was probably so I couldn’t back out if I got scared. Meg went last, I suppose because that would give her time to select the proper gardening seeds to throw at our enemies while they were mauling my face and Reyna was pushing me forward.

Aurum and Argentum, not being able to climb, stayed on the ground to guard our exit like the opposable-thumb-lacking slackers they were. If we ended up plummeting to our deaths, the dogs would be right there to bark excitedly at our corpses. That gave me great comfort.

The rungs were slippery and cold. The chute’s metal ribs made me feel like I was crawling through a giant Slinky. I imagined they were meant as some kind of safety feature, but they did nothing to reassure me. If I slipped, they would just be more painful things for me to hit on my way down.

After a few minutes, my limbs were shaking. My fingers trembled. The first set of crossbeams seemed to be getting no closer. I looked down and saw we had barely cleared the radar dishes on the station’s rooftop.

The cold wind buffeted me around the cage, ripping through my hoodie, rattling the arrows in my quiver. Whatever Tarquin’s guards were, if they caught me on this ladder, my bow and my ukulele would do me no good. At least a flock of killer sheep couldn’t climb ladders.

Meanwhile, in the fog high above us, more dark shapes swirled—definitely birds of some kind. I reminded myself that they couldn’t be strixes. Still, a queasy sense of danger gnawed at my stomach.

What if—?

Stop it, Apollo,I chided myself. There’s nothing you can do now but keep climbing.

I concentrated on one perilous slippery rung at a time. The soles of my shoes squeaked against the metal.

Below me, Meg asked, “Do you guys smell roses?”

I wondered if she was trying to make me laugh. “Roses? Why in the name of the twelve gods would I smell roses up here?”

Reyna said, “All I smell is Lester’s shoes. I think he stepped in something.”

“A large puddle of shame,” I muttered.

“I smell roses,” Meg insisted. “Whatever. Keep moving.”

I did, since I had no choice.

At last, we reached the first set of crossbeams. A catwalk ran the length of the girders, allowing us to stand and rest for a few minutes. We were only about sixty feet above the relay station, but it felt much higher. Below us spread an endless grid of city blocks, rumpling and twisting across the hills whenever necessary, the streets making designs that reminded me of the Thai alphabet. (The goddess Nang Kwak had tried to teach me their language once, over a lovely dinner of spicy noodles, but I was hopeless at it.)

Down in the parking lot, Aurum and Argentum looked up at us and wagged their tails. They seemed to be waiting for us to do something. The mean-spirited part of me wanted to shoot an arrow to the top of the next hill and yell, FETCH! but I doubted Reyna would appreciate that.

“It’s fun up here,” Meg decided. She did a cartwheel, because she enjoyed giving me heart palpitations.

I scanned the triangle of catwalks, hoping to see something besides cables, circuit boxes, and satellite equipment—preferably something labeled: PUSH THIS BUTTON TO COMPLETE QUEST AND COLLECT REWARD.

Of course not,I grumbled to myself. Tarquin wouldn’t be so kind as to put whatever we needed on the lowest level.

“Definitely no silent gods here,” Reyna said.

“Thanks a lot.”

She smiled, clearly still in a good mood from my earlier misstep into the puddle of shame. “I also don’t see any doors. Didn’t the prophecy say I’m supposed to open a door?”

“Could be a metaphorical one,” I speculated. “But you’re right, there’s nothing here for us.”

Meg pointed to the next level of crossbeams—another sixty feet up, barely visible in the belly of the fog bank. “The smell of roses is stronger from up there,” she said. “We should keep climbing.”

I sniffed the air. I smelled only the faint scent of eucalyptus from the woods below us, my own sweat cooling against my skin, and the sour whiff of antiseptic and infection rising from my bandaged abdomen.

“Hooray,” I said. “More climbing.”

This time, Reyna took the lead. There was no climbing cage going to the second level—just bare metal rungs against the side of the girder, as if the builders had decided Welp, if you made it this far, you must be crazy, so no more safety features! Now that the metal-ribbed chute was gone, I realized it had given me some psychological comfort. At least I could pretend I was inside a safe structure, not free-climbing a giant tower like a lunatic.

It made no sense to me why Tarquin would put something as important as his silent god at the top of a radio tower, or why he had allied himself with the emperors in the first place, or why the smell of roses might signal that we were getting closer to our goal, or why those dark birds kept circling above us in the fog. Weren’t they cold? Didn’t they have jobs?

Still, I had no doubt we were meant to climb this monstrous tripod. It felt right, by which I mean it felt terrifying and wrong. I had a premonition that everything would make sense to me soon enough, and when it did, I wouldn’t like it.

It was as if I were standing in the dark, staring at small disconnected lights in the distance, wondering what they might be. By the time I realized Oh, hey, those are the headlights of a large truck barreling toward me! it would be too late.

We were halfway to the second set of crossbeams when an angry shadow dove out of the fog, plummeting past my shoulder. The gust from its wings nearly knocked me off the ladder.

“Whoa!” Meg grabbed my left ankle, though that did nothing to steady me. “What was that?”

I caught a glimpse of the bird as it disappeared back into the fog: oily black wings, black beak, black eyes.

A sob built in my throat, as one of the proverbial truck’s headlights became very clear to me. “A raven.”

“A raven?” Reyna frowned down at me. “That thing was huge!”

True, the creature that buzzed me must’ve had a wingspan of at least twenty feet, but then several angry croaks sounded from somewhere in the mist, leaving me in no doubt.

“Ravens, plural,” I corrected. “Giant ravens.”

Half a dozen spiraled into view, their hungry black eyes dancing over us like targeting lasers, assessing our soft-and-tasty weak spots.

“A flock of ravens.” Meg sounded half-incredulous, half-fascinated. “Those are the guards? They’re pretty.”

I groaned, wishing I could be anywhere else—like in bed, under a thick layer of warm Kevlar quilts. I was tempted to protest that a group of ravens was actually called an unkindness or a conspiracy. I wanted to shout that Tarquin’s guards should be disqualified on that technicality. But I doubted Tarquin cared about such niceties. I knew the ravens didn’t. They would kill us either way, no matter how pretty Meg thought they were. Besides, calling ravens unkind and conspiratorial had always seemed redundant to me.

“They’re here because of Koronis,” I said miserably. “This is my fault.”

“Who’s Koronis?” Reyna demanded.

“Long story.” I yelled at the birds, “Guys, I’ve apologized a million times!”

The ravens croaked back angrily. A dozen more dropped out of the fog and began to circle us.

“They’ll tear us apart,” I said. “We have to retreat—back to the first platform.”

“The second platform is closer,” Reyna said. “Keep climbing!”

“Maybe they’re just checking us out,” Meg said. “Maybe they won’t attack.”

She shouldn’t have said that.

Ravens are contrary creatures. I should know—I shaped them into what they are. As soon as Meg expressed the hope that they wouldn’t attack, they did.