The Tyrant’s Tomb by Rick Riordan

I’d like to sing a

Classic for you now. Thank you.

Please stop stabbing me.

IN RETROSPECT, I SHOULDhave given ravens sponges for beaks—nice, soft, squishy sponges that weren’t capable of stabbing. While I was at it, I should’ve thrown in some Nerf claws.

But nooo. I let them have beaks like serrated knives and claws like meat hooks. What had I been thinking?

Meg yelled as one of the birds dove by her, raking her arm.

Another flew at Reyna’s legs. The praetor leveled a kick at it, but her heel missed the bird and connected with my nose.

“OWEEEEE!” I yelled, my whole face throbbing.

“My bad!” Reyna tried to climb, but the birds swirled around us, stabbing and clawing and tearing away bits of our clothes. The frenzy reminded me of my farewell concert in Thessalonika back in 235 BCE. (I liked to do a farewell tour every ten years or so, just to keep the fans guessing.) Dionysus had shown up with his entire horde of souvenir-hunting maenads. Not a good memory.

“Lester, who is Koronis?” Reyna shouted, drawing her sword. “Why were you apologizing to the birds?”

“I created them!” My busted nose made me sound like I was gargling syrup.

The ravens cawed in outrage. One swooped, its claws narrowly missing my left eye. Reyna swung her sword wildly, trying to keep the flock at bay.

“Well, can you un-create them?” Meg asked.

The ravens didn’t like that idea. One dove at Meg. She tossed it a seed—which, being a raven, it instinctively snapped out of the air. A pumpkin exploded to full growth in its beak. The raven, suddenly top-heavy with a mouth full of Halloween, plummeted toward the ground.

“Okay, I didn’t exactly create them,” I confessed. “I just changed them into what they are now. And, no, I can’t undo it.”

More angry cries from the birds, though for the moment they stayed away, wary of the girl with the sword and the other one with the tasty exploding seeds.

Tarquin had chosen the perfect guards to keep me from his silent god. Ravens hated me. They probably worked for free, without even a health plan, just hoping to have the chance to bring me down.

I suspected the only reason we were still alive was that the birds were trying to decide who got the honor of the kill.

Each angry croak was a claim to my tasty bits: I get his liver!

No,I get his liver!

Well, I get his kidneys, then!

Ravens are as greedy as they are contrary. Alas, we couldn’t count on them arguing with one another for long. We’d be dead as soon as they figured out their proper pecking order. (Oh, maybe that’s why they call it a pecking order!)

Reyna took a swipe at one that was getting too close. She glanced at the catwalk on the crossbeam above us, perhaps calculating whether she’d have time to reach it if she sheathed her sword. Judging from her frustrated expression, her conclusion was no.

“Lester, I need intel,” she said. “Tell me how we defeat these things.”

“I don’t know!” I wailed. “Look, back in the old days, ravens used to be gentle and white, like doves, okay? But they were terrible gossips. One time I was dating this girl, Koronis. The ravens found out she was cheating on me, and they told me about it. I was so angry, I got Artemis to kill Koronis for me. Then I punished the ravens for being tattletales by turning them black.”

Reyna stared at me like she was contemplating another kick to my nose. “That story is messed up on so many levels.”

“Just wrong,” Meg agreed. “You had your sister kill a girl who was cheating on you?”

“Well, I—”

“Then you punished the birds that told you about it,” Reyna added, “by turning them black, as if black was bad and white was good?”

“When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound right,” I protested. “It’s just what happened when my curse scorched them. It also made them nasty-tempered flesh-eaters.”

“Oh, that’s much better,” Reyna snarled.

“If we let the birds eat you,” Meg asked, “will they leave Reyna and me alone?”

“I—What?” I worried that Meg might not be kidding. Her facial expression did not say kidding. It said serious about the birds eating you. “Listen, I was angry! Yes, I took it out on the birds, but after a few centuries I cooled down. I apologized. By then, they kind of liked being nasty-tempered flesh-eaters. As for Koronis—I mean, at least I saved the child she was pregnant with when Artemis killed her. He became Asclepius, god of medicine!”

“Your girlfriend was pregnant when you had her killed?” Reyna launched another kick at my face. I managed to dodge it, since I’d had a lot of practice cowering, but it hurt to know that this time she hadn’t been aiming at an incoming raven. Oh, no. She wanted to knock my teeth in.

“You suck,” Meg agreed.

“Can we talk about this later?” I pleaded. “Or perhaps never? I was a god then! I didn’t know what I was doing!”

A few months ago, a statement like that would have made no sense to me. Now, it seemed true. I felt as if Meg had given me her thick-lensed rhinestone-studded glasses, and to my horror, they corrected my eyesight. I didn’t like how small and tawdry and petty everything looked, rendered in perfect ugly clarity through the magic of Meg-o-Vision. Most of all, I didn’t like the way I looked—not just present-day Lester, but the god formerly known as Apollo.

Reyna exchanged glances with Meg. They seemed to reach a silent agreement that the most practical course of action would be to survive the ravens now so they could kill me themselves later.

“We’re dead if we stay here.” Reyna swung her sword at another enthusiastic flesh-eater. “We can’t fend them off and climb at the same time. Ideas?”

The ravens had one. It was called all-out attack.

They swarmed—pecking, scratching, croaking with rage.

“I’m sorry!” I screamed, futilely swatting at the birds. “I’m sorry!”

The ravens did not accept my apology. Claws ripped my pant legs. A beak clamped on to my quiver and almost pulled me off the ladder, leaving my feet dangling for a terrifying moment.

Reyna continued to slash away. Meg cursed and threw seeds like party favors from the worst parade float ever. A giant raven spiraled out of control, covered in daffodils. Another fell like a stone, its stomach bulging in the shape of a butternut squash.

My grip weakened on the rungs. Blood dripped from my nose, but I couldn’t spare a moment to wipe it away.

Reyna was right. If we didn’t move, we were dead. And we couldn’t move.

I scanned the crossbeam above us. If we could just reach it, we’d be able to stand and use our arms. We’d have a fighting chance to…well, fight.

At the far end of the catwalk, abutting the next support pylon, stood a large rectangular box like a shipping container. I was surprised I hadn’t noticed it sooner, but compared to the scale of the tower, the container seemed small and insignificant, just another wedge of red metal. I had no idea what such a box was doing up here (A maintenance depot? A storage shed?) but if we could find a way inside, it might offer us shelter.

“Over there!” I yelled.

Reyna followed my gaze. “If we can reach it…We need to buy time. Apollo, what repels ravens? Isn’t there something they hate?”

“Worse than me?”

“They don’t like daffodils much,” Meg observed, as another flower-festooned bird went into a tailspin.

“We need something to drive them all away,” Reyna said, swinging her sword again. “Something they’ll hate worse than Apollo.” Her eyes lit up. “Apollo, sing for them!”

She might as well have kicked me in the face again. “My voice isn’t that bad!”

“But you’re the—You used to be the god of music, right? If you can charm a crowd, you should be able to repulse one. Pick a song these birds will hate!”

Great. Not only had Reyna laughed in my face and busted my nose, now I was her go-to guy for repulsiveness.

Still…I was struck by the way she said I used to be a god. She didn’t seem to mean it as an insult. She said it almost like a concession—like she knew what a horrible deity I had been, but held out hope that I might be capable of being someone better, more helpful, maybe even worthy of forgiveness.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay, let me think.”

The ravens had no intention of letting me do that. They cawed and swarmed in a flurry of black feathers and pointy talons. Reyna and Meg tried their best to drive them back, but they couldn’t cover me completely. A beak stabbed me in the neck, narrowly missing my carotid artery. Claws raked the side of my face, no doubt giving me some bloody new racing stripes.

I couldn’t think about the pain.

I wanted to sing for Reyna, to prove that I had indeed changed. I was no longer the god who’d had Koronis killed and created ravens, or cursed the Cumaean Sibyl, or done any of the other selfish things that had once given me no more pause than choosing what dessert toppings I wanted on my ambrosia.

It was time to be helpful. I needed to be repulsive for my friends!

I rifled through millennia of performance memories, trying to recall any of my musical numbers that had totally bombed. Nope. I couldn’t think of any. And the birds kept attacking….

Birds attacking.

An idea sparked at the base of my skull.

I remembered a story my children Austin and Kayla had told me, back when I was at Camp Half-Blood. We were sitting at the campfire, and they’d been joking about Chiron’s bad taste in music. They said that several years earlier, Percy Jackson had managed to drive off a flock of killer Stymphalian birds simply by playing what Chiron had on his boom box.

What had he played? What was Chiron’s favorite—?

“‘VOLARE’!” I screamed.

Meg looked up at me, a random geranium stuck in her hair. “Who?”

“It’s a song Dean Martin covered,” I said. “It—it might be unacceptable to birds. I’m not sure.”

“Well, be sure!” Reyna yelled. Ravens furiously scratched and pecked at her cloak, unable to tear the magical fabric, but her front side was unprotected. Every time she swung her sword, a bird swooped in, stabbing at her exposed chest and arms. Her long-sleeve tee was quickly turning into a short-sleeve tee.

I channeled my worst King of Cool. I imagined I was on a Las Vegas stage, a line of empty martini glasses on the piano behind me. I was wearing a velvet tuxedo. I had just smoked a pack of cigarettes. In front of me sat a crowd full of adoring, tone-deaf fans.

“VOOO-LAR-RAAAAY!”I cried, modulating my voice to add about twenty syllables to the word. “WHOA! OH!”

The response from the ravens was immediate. They recoiled as if we’d suddenly become vegetarian entrées. Some threw themselves bodily against the metal girders, making the whole tower shudder.

“Keep going!” Meg yelled.

Phrased as an order, her words forced me to comply. With apologies to Domenico Modugno, who wrote the song, I gave “Volare” the full Dean Martin treatment.

It had once been such a lovely, obscure little tune. Originally, Modugno called it “Nel blu, dipinto di blu,” which, granted, was a bad title. I don’t know why artists insist on doing that. Like the Wallflowers’ “One Headlight” obviously should have been titled “Me and Cinderella.” And Ed Sheerhan’s “The A-Team” should clearly have been called “Too Cold for Angels to Fly.” I mean, come on, guys, you’re burying the lede.

At any rate, “Nel blu, dipinto di blu” might have faded into obscurity had Dean Martin not gotten ahold of it, repackaged it as “Volare,” added seven thousand violins and backup singers, and turned it into a sleazy lounge-singer classic.

I didn’t have backup singers. All I had was my voice, but I did my best to be terrible. Even when I was a god and could speak any language I wanted, I’d never sung well in Italian. I kept mixing it up with Latin, so I came off sounding like Julius Caesar with a head cold. My newly busted nose just added to the awfulness.

I bellowed and warbled, screwing my eyes shut and clinging to the ladder as ravens flapped around me, croaking in horror at my travesty of a song. Far below, Reyna’s greyhounds bayed as if they’d lost their mothers.

I became so engrossed in murdering “Volare,” I didn’t notice that the ravens had gone silent until Meg shouted, “APOLLO, ENOUGH!”

I faltered halfway through a chorus. When I opened my eyes, the ravens were nowhere in sight. From somewhere in the fog, their indignant caws grew fainter and fainter as the flock moved off in search of quieter, less revolting prey.

“My ears,” Reyna complained. “Oh, gods, my ears will never heal.”

“The ravens will be back,” I warned. My throat felt like the chute of a cement mixer. “As soon as they manage to purchase enough raven-size noise-canceling headphones, they’ll be back. Now climb! I don’t have another Dean Martin song in me.”