The Tyrant’s Tomb by Rick Riordan

Welcome to the war

We hope you enjoy your death

Please come again soon!

OKAY, BUT WHY DIDit have to be bicycles?

I understood that cars were a deal-breaker. We had crashed enough vehicles for one week. I understood that jogging to camp was out of the question, given the fact that we could barely stand.

But why didn’t demigods have some sort of ride-share app for summoning giant eagles? I decided I would create one as soon as I became a god again. Right after I figured out a way to let demigods use smartphones safely.

Across the street from Target stood a rack of canary-yellow Go-Glo bikes. Meg inserted a credit card into the kiosk (where she got the card, I had no idea), freed two cycles from the rack, and offered one to me.

Joy and happiness. Now we could pedal into battle like the neon-yellow warriors of old.

We took the side streets and sidewalks, using the columns of smoke in the hills to guide our way. With Highway 24 closed, traffic was snarled everywhere, angry drivers honking and yelling and threatening violence. I was tempted to tell them that if they really wanted a fight, they could just follow us. We could use a few thousand angry commuters on our side.

As we passed the Rockridge BART station, we spotted the first enemy troops. Pandai patrolled the elevated platform, with furry black ears folded around themselves like firefighter turnout coats, and flat-head axes in their hands. Fire trucks were parked along College Avenue, their lights strobing in the underpass. More faux-firefighter pandai guarded the station doors, turning away mortals. I hoped the real firefighters were okay, because firefighters are important and also because they are hot, and no, that wasn’t relevant right then.

“This way!” Meg veered up the steepest hill she could find, just to annoy me. I was forced to stand as I pedaled, pushing with all my weight to make progress against the incline.

At the summit, more bad news.

In front of us, arrayed across the higher hills, troops marched doggedly toward Camp Jupiter. There were squads of blemmyae, pandai, and even some six-armed Earthborn who had served Gaea in the Recent Unpleasantness, all fighting their way through flaming trenches, staked barricades, and Roman skirmishers trying to put my archery lessons to good use. In the early evening gloom, I could only see bits and pieces of the battle. Judging from the mass of glittering armor and the forest of battle pennants, the main part of the emperors’ army was concentrated on Highway 24, forcing its way toward the Caldecott Tunnel. Enemy catapults hurled projectiles toward the legion’s positions, but most disappeared in bursts of purple light as soon as they got close. I assumed that was the work of Terminus, doing his part to defend the camp’s borders.

Meanwhile, at the base of the tunnel, flashes of lightning pinpointed the location of the legion’s standard. Tendrils of electricity zigzagged down the hillsides, arcing through enemy lines and frying them to dust. Camp Jupiter’s ballistae launched giant flaming spears at the invaders, raking through their lines and starting more forest fires. The emperors’ troops kept coming.

The ones making the best progress were huddled behind large armored vehicles that crawled on eight legs and…Oh, gods. My guts felt like they’d gotten tangled in my bike chain. Those weren’t vehicles.

“Myrmekes,” I said. “Meg, those are myr—”

“I see them.” She didn’t even slow down. “It doesn’t change anything. Come on!”

How could it not change anything? We’d faced a nest of those giant ants at Camp Half-Blood and barely survived. Meg had nearly been pulped into Gerber’s larvae purée.

Now we were confronting myrmekes trained for war, snapping trees in half with their pincers and spraying acid to melt through the camp’s defensive pickets.

This was a brand-new flavor of horrible.

“We’ll never get through their lines!” I protested.

“Lavinia’s secret tunnel.”

“It collapsed!”

“Not that tunnel. A different secret tunnel.”

“How many does she have?”

“Dunno. A lot? C’mon.”

With that rousing oratory complete, Meg pedaled onward. I followed, having nothing better to do.

She led me up a dead-end street to a generator station at the base of an electrical tower. The area was ringed in barbed-wire fencing, but the gate stood wide open. If Meg had told me to climb the tower, I would have given up and made my peace with zombie eternity. Instead, she pointed to the side of the generator, where metal doors were set into the concrete like the entrance to a storm cellar or a bomb shelter.

“Hold my bike,” she said.

She jumped off and summoned one of her swords. With a single strike, she slashed through the padlocked chains, then pulled open the doors, revealing a dark shaft slanting downward at a precarious angle.

“Perfect,” she said. “It’s big enough to ride through.”

“What?”

She hopped back on her Go-Glo and plunged into the tunnel, the click, click, click of her bike chain echoing off the concrete walls.

“You have a very broad definition of perfect,” I muttered. Then I coasted in after her.

Much to my surprise, in the total darkness of the tunnel, the Go-Glo bike actually, well, glowed. I suppose I should have expected that. Ahead of me, I could see the faint, fuzzy apparition of Meg’s neon war machine. When I looked down, the yellow aura of my own bike was almost blinding. It did little to help me navigate down the steep shaft, but it would make me a much easier target for enemies to pick out in the gloom. Hooray!

Against all odds, I did not wipe out and break my neck. The tunnel leveled, then began to climb again. I wondered who had excavated this passageway and why they hadn’t installed a convenient lift system so I didn’t have to expend so much energy pedaling.

Somewhere overhead, an explosion shook the tunnel, which was excellent motivation to keep moving. After a bit more sweating and gasping, I realized I could discern a dim square of light ahead of us—an exit covered in branches.

Meg burst straight through it. I wobbled after her, emerging in a landscape lit by fire and lightning and ringing with the sounds of chaos.

We had arrived in the middle of the war zone.

I will give you free advice.

If you plan to pop into a battle, the place you do not want to be is in the middle of it. I recommend the very back, where the general often has a comfortable tent with hors d’oeuvres and beverages.

But the middle? No. Always bad, especially if you arrive on canary-yellow glow-in-the-dark bikes.

As soon as Meg and I emerged, we were spotted by a dozen large humanoids covered in shaggy blond hair. They pointed at us and began to scream.

Khromandae. Wow. I hadn’t seen any of their kind since Dionysus’s drunken invasion of India back in the BCE. Their species has gorgeous gray eyes, but that’s about the only flattering thing I can say about them. Their dirty, shaggy blond pelts make them look like Muppets who have been used as dust rags. Their doglike teeth clearly never get a proper flossing. They are strong, aggressive, and can only communicate in earsplitting shrieks. I once asked Ares and Aphrodite if the Khromandae were their secret love children from their longstanding affair, because they were such a perfect mix of the two Olympians. Ares and Aphrodite did not find that funny.

Meg, like any reasonable child when confronted with a dozen hairy giants, hopped off her bike, summoned her swords, and charged. I yelped in alarm and drew my bow. I was low on arrows after playing catch with the ravens, but I managed to slay six of the Khromandae before Meg reached them. Despite how exhausted she must’ve been, she handily dispatched the remaining six with a blur of her golden blades.

I laughed—actually laughed—with satisfaction. It felt so good to be a decent archer again, and to watch Meg at her swordplay. What a team we made!

That’s one of the dangers of being in a battle. (Along with getting killed.) When things are going well, you tend to get tunnel vision. You zero in on your little area and forget the big picture. As Meg gave the last Khromanda a haircut straight through the chest, I allowed myself to think that we were winning!

Then I scanned our surroundings, and I realized we were surrounded by a whole lot of not winning. Gargantuan ants trampled their way toward us, spewing acid to clear the hillside of skirmishers. Several steaming bodies in Roman armor sprawled in the underbrush, and I did not want to think about who they might have been or how they had died.

Pandai in black Kevlar and helmets, almost invisible in the dusk, glided around on their huge parasail ears, dropping onto any unsuspecting demigod they could find. Higher up, giant eagles fought with giant ravens, their wingtips glinting in the bloodred moonlight. Just a hundred yards to my left, wolf-headed cynocephali howled as they bounded into battle, crashing into the shields of the nearest cohort (the Third?), which looked small and alone and critically undermanned in a sea of bad guys.

That was only on our hill. I could see fires burning across the whole western front along the valley’s borders—maybe half a mile of patchwork battles. Ballistae launched glowing spears from the summits. Catapults hurled boulders that shattered on impact, spraying shards of Imperial gold into the enemy lines. Flaming logs—always a fun Roman party game—rolled down the hillsides, smashing through packs of Earthborn.

For all the legion’s efforts, the enemy kept advancing. On the empty eastbound lanes of Highway 24, the emperors’ main columns marched toward the Caldecott Tunnel, their gold-and-purple banners raised high. Roman colors. Roman emperors bent on destroying the last true Roman legion. This was how it ended, I thought bitterly. Not fighting threats from the outside, but fighting against the ugliest side of our own history.

“TESTUDO!”A centurion’s shout brought my attention back to the Third Cohort. They were struggling to form a protective turtle formation with their shields as the cynocephali swarmed over them in a snarling wave of fur and claws.

“Meg!” I yelled, pointing to the imperiled cohort.

She ran toward them, me at her heels. As we closed in, I scooped up an abandoned quiver from the ground, trying not to think about why it had been dropped there, and sent a fresh volley of arrows into the pack. Six fell dead. Seven. Eight. But there were still too many. Meg screamed in fury and launched herself at the nearest wolf-headed men. She was quickly surrounded, but our advance had distracted the pack, giving the Third Cohort a few precious seconds to regroup.

“OFFENSE ROMULUS!” shouted the centurion.

If you have ever seen a pill bug uncurl, revealing its hundreds of legs, you can imagine what the Third Cohort looked like as it broke testudo and formed a bristling forest of spears, skewering the cynocephali.

I was so impressed I almost got my face chewed off by a stray charging wolf-man. Just before it reached me, Centurion Larry hurled his javelin. The monster fell at my feet, impaled in the middle of his incredibly un-manscaped back.

“You made it!” Larry grinned at us. “Where’s Reyna?”

“She’s okay,” I said. “Er, she’s alive.”

“Cool! Frank wants to see you, ASAP!”

Meg stumbled to my side, breathing hard, her swords glistening with monster goo. “Hey, Larry. How’s it going?”

“Terrible!” Larry sounded delighted. “Carl, Reza—escort these two to Praetor Zhang immediately.”

“YESSIR!” Our escorts hustled us off toward the Caldecott Tunnel, while behind us, Larry called his troops back to action: “Come on, legionnaires! We’ve drilled for this. We’ve got this!”

After a few more terrible minutes of dodging pandai, jumping fiery craters, and skirting mobs of monsters, Carl and Reza brought us safely to Frank Zhang’s command post at the mouth of the Caldecott Tunnel. Much to my disappointment, there were no hors d’oeuvres or beverages. There wasn’t even a tent—just a bunch of stressed-out Romans in full battle gear, rushing around carrying orders and shoring up defenses. Above us, on the concrete terrace that stretched over the tunnel’s mouth, Jacob the standard-bearer stood with the legion’s eagle and a couple of spotters, keeping watch on all the approaches. Whenever an enemy got too close, Jacob would zap them like the Oprah Winfrey version of Jupiter: And YOU get a lightning bolt! And YOU get a lightning bolt! Unfortunately, he’d been using the eagle so much that it was beginning to smoke. Even superpowerful magic items have their limits. The legion’s standard was close to total overload.

When Frank Zhang saw us, a whole g of weight seemed to lift from his shoulders. “Thank the gods! Apollo, your face looks terrible. Where’s Reyna?”

“Long story.” I was about to launch into the short version of that long story when Hazel Levesque materialized on a horse right next to me, which was an excellent way of testing whether my heart still worked properly.

“What’s going on?” Hazel asked. “Apollo, your face—”

“I know.” I sighed.

Her immortal steed, the lightning-fast Arion, gave me the side-eye and nickered as if to say, This fool ain’t no Apollo.

“Good to see you too, cuz,” I grumbled.

I told them all in brief what had happened, with Meg occasionally adding helpful comments like “He was stupid,” and “He was more stupid,” and “He did good; then he got stupid again.”

When Hazel heard about our encounter in the Target parking lot, she gritted her teeth. “Lavinia. That girl, I swear. If anything happens to Reyna—”

“Let’s focus on what we can control,” Frank said, though he looked shaken that Reyna wouldn’t be coming back to help. “Apollo, we’ll buy you as much time as possible for your summoning. Terminus is doing what he can to slow the emperors down. Right now, I’ve got ballistae and catapults targeting the myrmekes. If we can’t bring them down, we’ll never stop the advance.”

Hazel grimaced. “The First through Fourth Cohorts are spread pretty thin across these hills. Arion and I have been zipping back and forth between them as needed, but…” She stopped herself from stating the obvious: We’re losing ground. “Frank, if you can spare me for a minute, I’ll get Apollo and Meg to Temple Hill. Ella and Tyson are waiting.”

“Go.”

“Wait,” I said—not that I wasn’t super anxious to summon a god with a jelly jar, but something Hazel said had made me uneasy. “If the First through Fourth Cohorts are here, where’s the Fifth?”

“Guarding New Rome,” said Hazel. “Dakota’s with them. At the moment, thank the gods, the city is secure. No sign of Tarquin.”

POP.Right next to me appeared a marble bust of Terminus, dressed in a World War I British Army cap and khaki greatcoat that covered him to the foot of his pedestal. With his loose sleeves, he might have been a double amputee from the trenches of the Somme. Unfortunately, I’d met more than a few of those in the Great War.

“The city is not secure!” he announced. “Tarquin is attacking!”

“What?” Hazel looked personally offended. “From where?”

“Underneath!”

“The sewers.” Hazel cursed. “But how—?”

“Tarquin built the original cloaca maxima of Rome,” I reminded her. “He knows sewers.”

“I remembered that! I sealed the exits myself!”

“Well, somehow he unsealed them!” Terminus said. “The Fifth Cohort needs help. Immediately!”

Hazel wavered, clearly rattled by Tarquin outfoxing her.

“Go,” Frank told her. “I’ll send the Fourth Cohort to reinforce you.”

Hazel laughed nervously. “And leave you here with only three? No.”

“It’s fine,” Frank said. “Terminus, can you open our defensive barriers here at the main gate?”

“Why would I do that?”

“We’ll try the Wakanda thing.”

“The what?”

“You know,” Frank said. “We’ll funnel the enemy into one location.”

Terminus glowered. “I do not recall any ‘Wakanda thing’ in the Roman military manuals. But very well.”

Hazel frowned. “Frank, you’re not going to do anything stupid—”

“We’ll concentrate our people here and hold the tunnel. I can do this.” He mustered another confident smile. “Good luck, guys. See you on the other side!”

Or not,I thought.

Frank didn’t wait for more protests. He marched off, shouting orders to form up the troops and send the Fourth Cohort into New Rome. I remembered the hazy images I’d seen from the holographic scroll—Frank ordering his workers around in the Caldecott Tunnel, digging and toting urns. I recalled Ella’s cryptic words about bridges and fires…. I didn’t like where those thoughts led me.

“Saddle up, kids,” Hazel said, offering me a hand.

Arion whinnied indignantly.

“Yes, I know,” Hazel said. “You don’t like carrying three. We’ll just drop off these two at Temple Hill and then head straight for the city. There’ll be plenty of undead for you to trample, I promise.”

That seemed to mollify the horse.

I climbed on behind Hazel. Meg took the rumble seat on the horse’s rear.

I barely had time to hug Hazel’s waist before Arion zoomed off, leaving my stomach on the Oakland side of the hills.