The Tyrant’s Tomb by Rick Riordan

Ever heard the phrase

“The silence is deafening”?

Yeah, that’s a real thing

IMMEDIATELY, I CRUMPLED TOmy hands and knees under the weight of the other god’s power.

Silence enfolded me like liquid titanium. The cloying smell of roses was overwhelming.

I’d forgotten how Harpocrates communicated—with blasts of mental images, oppressive and devoid of sound. Back when I was a god, I’d found this annoying. Now, as a human, I realized it could pulp my brain. At the moment, he was sending me one continuous message: YOU? HATE!

Behind me, Reyna was on her knees, cupping her ears and screaming mutely. Meg was curled on her side, kicking her legs as if trying to throw off the heaviest of blankets.

A moment before, I’d been tearing through metal like it was paper. Now, I could barely lift my head to meet Harpocrates’s gaze.

The god floated cross-legged at the far end of the room.

He was still the size of a ten-year-old child, still wearing his ridiculous toga and pharaonic bowling-pin crown combo, like so many confused Ptolemaic gods who couldn’t decide if they were Egyptian or Greco-Roman. His braided ponytail snaked down one side of his shaved head. And, of course, he still held one finger to his mouth like the most frustrated, burned-out librarian in the world: SSSHHH!

He could not do otherwise. I recalled that Harpocrates required all his willpower to lower his finger from his mouth. As soon as he stopped concentrating, his hand would pop right back into position. In the old days, I had found that hilarious. Now, not so much.

The centuries had not been kind to him. His skin was wrinkled and saggy. His once-bronze complexion was an unhealthy porcelain color. His sunken eyes smoldered with anger and self-pity.

Imperial gold fetters were clamped around Harpocrates’s wrists and ankles, connecting him to a web of chains, cords, and cables—some hooked up to elaborate control panels, others channeled through holes in the walls of the container, leading out to the tower’s superstructure. The setup seemed designed to siphon Harpocrates’s power and then amplify it—to broadcast his magical silence across the world. This was the source of all our communications troubles—one sad, angry, forgotten little god.

It took me a moment to understand why he remained imprisoned. Even drained of his power, a minor deity should have been able to break a few chains. Harpocrates seemed to be alone and unguarded.

Then I noticed them. Floating on either side of the god, so entangled in chains that they were hard to distinguish from the general chaos of machinery and wires, were two objects I hadn’t seen in centuries: identical ceremonial axes, each about four feet tall, with a crescent blade and a thick bundle of wooden rods fastened around the shaft.

Fasces. The ultimate symbol of Roman might.

Looking at them made my ribs twist into bows. In the old days, powerful Roman officials never left home without a procession of lictor bodyguards, each carrying one of those bundled axes to let the commoners know somebody important was coming through. The more fasces, the more important the official.

In the twentieth century, Benito Mussolini revived the symbol when he became Italy’s dictator. His ruling philosophy was named after those bundled axes: Fascism.

But the fasces in front of me were no ordinary standards. These blades were Imperial gold. Wrapped around the bundles of rods were silken banners embroidered with the names of their owners. Enough of the letters were visible that I could guess what they said. On the left: CAESAR MARCUS AURELIUS COMMODUS ANTONINUS AUGUSTUS. On the right: GAIUS JULIUS CAESAR AUGUSTUS GERMANICUS, otherwise known as Caligula.

These were the personal fasces of the two emperors, being used to drain Harpocrates’s power and keep him enslaved.

The god glared at me. He forced painful images into my mind: me stuffing his head into a toilet on Mount Olympus; me howling with amusement as I tied his wrists and ankles and shut him in the stables with my fire-breathing horses. Dozens of other encounters I’d completely forgotten about, and in all of them I was as golden, handsome, and powerful as any Triumvirate emperor—and just as cruel.

My skull throbbed from the pressure of Harpocrates’s assault. I felt capillaries bursting in my busted nose, my forehead, my ears. Behind me, Reyna and Meg writhed in agony. Reyna locked eyes with me, blood trickling from her nostrils. She seemed to ask, Well, genius? What now?

I crawled closer to Harpocrates.

Tentatively, using a series of mental pictures, I tried to convey a question: How did you get here?

I imagined Caligula and Commodus overpowering him, binding him, forcing him to do their bidding. I imagined Harpocrates floating alone in this dark box for months, years, unable to break free from the power of the fasces, growing weaker and weaker as the emperors used his silence to keep the demigod camps in the dark, cut off from one another, while the Triumvirate divided and conquered.

Harpocrates was their prisoner, not their ally.

Was I right?

Harpocrates replied with a withering gust of resentment.

I took that to mean both Yes and You suck, Apollo.

He forced more visions into my mind. I saw Commodus and Caligula standing where I now was, smiling cruelly, taunting him.

You should be on our side,Caligula told him telepathically. You should want to help us!

Harpocrates had refused. Perhaps he couldn’t overpower his bullies, but he intended to fight them with every last bit of his soul. That’s why he now looked so withered.

I sent out a pulse of sympathy and regret. Harpocrates blasted it away with scorn.

Just because we both hated the Triumvirate did not make us friends. Harpocrates had never forgotten my cruelty. If he hadn’t been constrained by the fasces, he would have already blasted me and my friends into a fine mist of atoms.

He showed me that image in vivid color. I could tell he relished thinking about it.

Meg tried to join our telepathic argument. At first, all she could send was a garbled sense of pain and confusion. Then she managed to focus. I saw her father smiling down at her, handing her a rose. For her, the rose was a symbol of love, not secrets. Then I saw her father dead on the steps of Grand Central Station, murdered by Nero. She sent Harpocrates her life story, captured in a few painful snapshots. She knew about monsters. She had been raised by the Beast. No matter how much Harpocrates hated me—and Meg agreed that I could be pretty stupid sometimes—we had to work together to stop the Triumvirate.

Harpocrates shredded her thoughts with rage. How dare she presume to understand his misery?

Reyna tried a different approach. She shared her memories of Tarquin’s last attack on Camp Jupiter: so many wounded and killed, their bodies dragged off by ghouls to be reanimated as vrykolakai. She showed Harpocrates her greatest fear: that after all their battles, after centuries of upholding the best traditions of Rome, the Twelfth Legion might face their end tonight.

Harpocrates was unmoved. He bent his will toward me, burying me in hatred.

All right!I pleaded. Kill me if you must. But I am sorry! I have changed!

I sent him a flurry of the most horrible, embarrassing failures I’d suffered since becoming mortal: grieving over the body of Heloise the griffin at the Waystation, holding the dying pandos Crest in my arms in the Burning Maze, and, of course, watching helplessly as Caligula murdered Jason Grace.

Just for a moment, Harpocrates’s wrath wavered.

At the very least, I had managed to surprise him. He had not been expecting regret or shame from me. Those weren’t my trademark emotions.

If you let us destroy the fasces,I thought, that will free you. It will also hurt the emperors, yes?

I showed him a vision of Reyna and Meg cutting through the fasces with their swords, the ceremonial axes exploding.

Yes,Harpocrates thought back, adding a brilliant red tint to the vision.

I had offered him something he wanted.

Reyna chimed in. She pictured Commodus and Caligula on their knees, groaning in pain. The fasces were connected to them. They’d taken a great risk leaving their axes here. If the fasces were destroyed, the emperors might be weakened and vulnerable before the battle.

Yes,Harpocrates replied. The pressure of the silence eased. I could almost breathe again without agony. Reyna staggered to her feet. She helped Meg and me to stand.

Unfortunately, we were not out of danger. I imagined any number of terrible things Harpocrates could do to us if we freed him. And since I’d been talking with my mind, I couldn’t help but broadcast those fears.

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.