The Tyrant’s Tomb by Rick Riordan

Nice stroll into town

Happy birthday to Lester

Here’s some gift-wrapped pain

I DID NOT FEELup to it.

My gut hurt terribly. My legs could barely support my weight. Even after using the restroom, washing, dressing, and grabbing a Lemurian-spice latte and a muffin from our grumpy host, Bombilo, I didn’t see how I could walk the mile or so to New Rome.

I had no desire to find out more about the prophecy from the Burning Maze. I didn’t want to face more impossible challenges, especially after my dream of that thing in the tomb. I didn’t even want to be human. But, alas, I had no choice.

What do mortals say—suck it up? I sucked it way, way up.

Meg stayed at camp. She had an appointment in an hour to feed the unicorns with Lavinia, and Meg was afraid if she went anywhere, she might miss it. Given Lavinia’s reputation for going AWOL, I supposed Meg’s concern was valid.

Frank led me through the main gates. The sentries snapped to attention. They had to hold that pose for quite a while, since I was moving at the speed of cold syrup. I caught them studying me apprehensively—perhaps because they were worried I might launch into another heartbreaking song, or perhaps because they still couldn’t believe this shambling heap of adolescence had once been the god Apollo.

The afternoon was California perfect: turquoise sky, golden grass rippling on the hillsides, eucalyptus and cedar rustling in the warm breeze. This should have dispelled any thoughts of dark tunnels and ghouls, yet I couldn’t seem to get the smell of grave dust out of my nostrils. Drinking a Lemurian-spice latte did not help.

Frank walked at my speed, staying close enough that I could lean on him if I felt shaky, but not insisting on helping.

“So,” he said at last, “what’s with you and Reyna?”

I stumbled, sending fresh jabs of pain through my abdomen. “What? Nothing. What?”

Frank brushed a raven feather off his cloak. I wondered how that worked, exactly—being left with bits and pieces after shape-shifting. Did he ever discard a spare feather and realize later, Whoops, that was my pinky finger? I’d heard rumors that Frank could even turn into a swarm of bees. Even I, a former god who used to transform himself all the time, had no idea how he managed that.

“It’s just that…when you saw Reyna,” he said, “you froze, like…I dunno, you realized you owed her money or something.”

I had to restrain a bitter laugh. If only my problem regarding Reyna were as simple as that.

The incident had come back to me with glass-shard clarity: Venus scolding me, warning me, upbraiding me as only she could. You will not stick your ugly, unworthy godly face anywhere near her, or I swear on the Styx…

And of course she’d done this in the throne room, in the presence of all the other Olympians, as they howled with cruel amusement and shouted Ooh! Even my father had joined in. Oh, yes. He loved every minute of it.

I shuddered.

“There is nothing with Reyna and me,” I said quite honestly. “I don’t think we’ve ever exchanged more than a few words.”

Frank studied my expression. Obviously, he realized I was holding something back, but he didn’t push. “Okay. Well, you’ll see her tonight at the funeral. She’s trying to get some sleep right now.”

I almost asked why Reyna would be asleep in the middle of the afternoon. Then I remembered that Frank had been wearing a pajama shirt when we’d encountered him at dinnertime…. Had that really been the day before yesterday?

“You’re taking shifts,” I realized. “So one of you is always on duty?”

“It’s the only way,” he agreed. “We’re still on high alert. Everyone is edgy. There’s so much to do since the battle….”

He said the word battle the same way Hazel had, as if it was a singular, terrible turning point in history.

Like all the divinations Meg and I had retrieved during our adventures, the Dark Prophecy’s nightmarish prediction about Camp Jupiter remained burned into my mind:

The words that memory wrought are set to fire,

Ere new moon rises o’er the Devil’s Mount.

The changeling lord shall face a challenge dire,

Till bodies fill the Tiber beyond count.

After hearing that, Leo Valdez had raced across country on his bronze dragon, hoping to warn the camp. According to Leo, he had arrived just in time, but the toll had still been horrendous.

Frank must have read my pained expression.

“It would’ve been worse if it hadn’t been for you,” he said, which only made me feel guiltier. “If you hadn’t sent Leo here to warn us. One day, out of nowhere, he just flew right in.”

“That must have been quite a shock,” I said. “Since you thought Leo was dead.”

Frank’s dark eyes glittered like they still belonged to a raven. “Yeah. We were so mad at him for making us worry, we lined up and took turns hitting him.”

“We did that at Camp Half-Blood, too,” I said. “Greek minds think alike.”

“Mmm.” Frank’s gaze drifted toward the horizon. “We had about twenty-four hours to prepare. It helped. But it wasn’t enough. They came from over there.”

He pointed north to the Berkeley Hills. “They swarmed. Only way to describe it. I’d fought undead before, but this…” He shook his head. “Hazel called them zombies. My grandmother would have called them jiangshi. The Romans have a lot of words for them: immortuos, lamia, nuntius.”

“Messenger,” I said, translating the last word. It had always seemed an odd term to me. A messenger from whom? Not Hades. He hated it when corpses wandered around the mortal world. It made him look like a sloppy warden.

“The Greeks call them vrykolakai,” I said. “Usually, it’s rare to see even one.”

“There were hundreds,” Frank said. “Along with dozens of those other ghoul things, the eurynomoi, acting as herders. We cut them down. They just kept coming. You’d think having a fire-breathing dragon would’ve been a game-changer, but Festus could only do so much. The undead aren’t as flammable as you might think.”

Hades had explained that to me once, in one of his famously awkward “too much information” attempts at small talk. Flames didn’t deter the undead. They just wandered right through, no matter how extra crispy they became. That’s why he didn’t use the Phlegethon, the River of Fire, as the boundary of his kingdom. Running water, however, especially the dark magical waters of the River Styx, was a different story….

I studied the glittering current of the Little Tiber. Suddenly a line of the Dark Prophecy made sense to me. “Bodies fill the Tiber beyond count. You stopped them at the river.”

Frank nodded. “They don’t like freshwater. That’s where we turned the battle. But that line about ‘bodies beyond count’? It doesn’t mean what you think.”

“Then what—?”

“HALT!” yelled a voice right in front of me.

I’d been so lost in Frank’s story, I hadn’t realized how close we were getting to the city. I hadn’t even noticed the statue on the side of the road until it screamed at me.

Terminus, the god of boundaries, looked just as I remembered him. From the waist up, he was a finely sculpted man with a large nose, curly hair, and a disgruntled expression (which may have been because no one had ever carved him a pair of arms). From the waist down, he was a block of white marble. I used to tease him that he should try skinny jeans, as they’d be very slimming. From the way he glowered at me now, I guessed he remembered those insults.

“Well, well,” he said. “Who do we have here?”

I sighed. “Terminus, can we not?”

“No!” he barked. “No, we cannot not. I need to see identification.”

Frank cleared his throat. “Uh, Terminus…” He tapped the praetor’s laurels on his breastplate.

“Yes, Praetor Frank Zhang. You are good to go. But your friend here—”

“Terminus,” I protested, “you know very well who I am.”

“Identification!”

A cold slimy feeling spread outward from my Lemurian spice–bandaged gut. “Oh, you can’t mean—”

“ID.”

I wanted to protest this unnecessary cruelty. Alas, there is no arguing with bureaucrats, traffic cops, or boundary gods. Struggling would just make the pain last longer.

Slumped in defeat, I pulled out my wallet. I produced the junior driver’s license Zeus had provided me when I fell to earth. Name: Lester Papadopoulos. Age: Sixteen. State: New York. Photo: 100 percent eye acid.

“Hand it over,” Terminus demanded.

“You don’t—” I caught myself before I could say have hands. Terminus was stubbornly delusional about his phantom appendages. I held up the driver’s license for him to see. Frank leaned in, curious, then caught me glaring and backed away.

“Very well, Lester,” Terminus crowed. “It’s unusual to have a mortal visitor in our city—an extremely mortal visitor—but I suppose we can allow it. Here to shop for a new toga? Or perhaps some skinny jeans?”

I swallowed back my bitterness. Is there anyone more vindictive than a minor god who finally gets to lord it over a major god?

“May we pass?” I asked.

“Any weapons to declare?”

In better times, I would have answered, Only my killer personality. Alas, I was beyond even finding that ironic. The question did make me wonder what had happened to my ukulele, bow, and quiver, however. Perhaps they were tucked under my cot? If the Romans had somehow lost my quiver, along with the talking prophetic Arrow of Dodona, I would have to buy them a thank-you gift.

“No weapons,” I muttered.

“Very well,” Terminus decided. “You may pass. And happy impending birthday, Lester.”

“I…what?”

“Move along! Next!”

There was no one behind us, but Terminus shooed us into the city, yelling at the nonexistent crowd of visitors to stop pushing and form a single line.

“Is your birthday coming up?” Frank asked as we continued. “Congratulations!”

“It shouldn’t be.” I stared at my license. “April eighth, it says here. That can’t be right. I was born on the seventh day of the seventh month. Of course, the months were different back then. Let’s see, the month of Gamelion? But that was in the wintertime—”

“How do gods celebrate, anyway?” Frank mused. “Are you seventeen now? Or four thousand and seventeen? Do you eat cake?”

He sounded hopeful about that last part, as if imagining a monstrous gold-frosted confection with seventeen Roman candles on the top.

I tried to calculate my correct day of birth. The effort made my head pound. Even when I’d had a godly memory, I hated keeping track of dates: the old lunar calendar, the Julian calendar, the Gregorian calendar, leap year, daylight savings time. Ugh. Couldn’t we just call every day Apolloday and be done with it?

Yet Zeus had definitely assigned me a new birthdate: April 8. Why? Seven was my sacred number. The date 4/8 had no sevens. The sum wasn’t even divisible by seven. Why would Zeus mark my birthday as four days from now?

I stopped in my tracks, as if my own legs had turned into a marble pedestal. In my dream, Caligula had insisted that his pandai finish their work by the time the blood moon rose in five days. If what I observed had happened last night…that meant there were only four days left from today, which would make doomsday April 8, Lester’s birthday.

“What is it?” Frank asked. “Why is your face gray?”

“I—I think my father left me a warning,” I said. “Or perhaps a threat? And Terminus just pointed it out to me.”

“How can your birthday be a threat?”

“I’m mortal now. Birthdays are always a threat.” I fought down a wave of anxiety. I wanted to turn and run, but there was nowhere to go—only forward into New Rome, to gather more unwelcome information about my impending doom.

“Lead on, Frank Zhang,” I said halfheartedly, slipping my license back in my wallet. “Perhaps Tyson and Ella will have some answers.”

New Rome…the likeliest city on earth to find Olympian gods lurking in disguise. (Followed closely by New York, then Cozumel during spring break. Don’t judge us.)

When I was a god, I would often hover invisibly over the red-tiled rooftops, or walk the streets in mortal form, enjoying the sights, sounds, and smells of our imperial heyday.

It was not the same as ancient Rome, of course. They’d made quite a few improvements. No slavery, for one thing. Better personal hygiene, for another. Gone was the Subura—the jam-packed slum quarter with its firetrap apartments.

Nor was New Rome a sad theme-park imitation, like a mock Eiffel Tower in the middle of Las Vegas. It was a living city where modern and ancient mixed freely. Walking through the Forum, I heard conversations in a dozen languages, Latin among them. A band of musicians held a jam session with lyres, guitars, and a washboard. Children played in the fountains while adults sat nearby under trellises shaded with grape vines. Lares drifted here and there, becoming more visible in the long afternoon shadows. All manner of people mingled and chatted—one-headed, two-headed, even dog-headed cynocephali who grinned and panted and barked to make their points.

This was a smaller, kinder, much-improved Rome—the Rome we always thought mortals were capable of but never achieved. And, yes, of course we gods came here for nostalgia, to relive those wonderful centuries when mortals worshipped us freely across the empire, perfuming the air with burnt sacrifices.

That may sound pathetic to you—like an oldies concert cruise, pandering to over-the-hill fans of washed-up bands. But what can I say? Nostalgia is one ailment immortality can’t cure.

As we approached the Senate House, I began to see vestiges of the recent battle. Cracks in the dome glistened with silver adhesive. The walls of some buildings had been hastily replastered. As with the camp, the city streets seemed less crowded than I remembered, and every so often—when a cynocephalus barked, or a blacksmith’s hammer clanged against a piece of armor—the people nearby flinched at the noise, as if wondering whether they should seek shelter.

This was a traumatized city, trying very hard to get back to normal. And based on what I’d seen in my dreams, New Rome was about to be re-traumatized in just a few days.

“How many people did you lose?” I asked Frank.

I was afraid to hear numbers, but I felt compelled to ask.

Frank glanced around us, checking if anyone else was in earshot. We were heading up one of New Rome’s many winding cobblestone streets into the residential neighborhoods.

“Hard to say,” he told me. “From the legion itself, at least twenty-five. That’s how many are missing from the roster. Our maximum strength is…was two hundred and fifty. Not that we actually have that many in camp at any given time, but still. The battle literally decimated us.”

I felt as if a Lar had passed through me. Decimation, the ancient punishment for bad legions, was a grim business: every tenth soldier was killed whether they were guilty or innocent.

“I’m so sorry, Frank. I should have…”

I didn’t know how to finish that sentence. I should have what? I was no longer a god. I could no longer snap my fingers and cause zombies to explode from a thousand miles away. I had never adequately appreciated such simple pleasures.

Frank pulled his cloak tighter around his shoulders. “It was hardest on the civilians. A lot of retired legionnaires from New Rome came out to help. They’ve always acted as our reserves. Anyway, that line of prophecy you mentioned: Bodies fill the Tiber beyond count? That didn’t mean there were many bodies after the battle. It meant we couldn’t count our dead, because they disappeared.”

My gut wound began to seethe. “Disappeared how?”

“Some were dragged away when the undead retreated. We tried to get them all, but…” He turned up his palms. “A few got swallowed by the ground. Even Hazel couldn’t explain it. Most went underwater during the fight in the Little Tiber. The naiads tried to search and recover for us. No luck.”

He didn’t vocalize the truly horrible thing about this news, but I imagined he was thinking it. Their dead had not simply disappeared. They would be back—as enemies.

Frank kept his gaze on the cobblestones. “I try not to dwell on it. I’m supposed to lead, stay confident, you know? But like today, when we saw Terminus…There’s usually a little girl, Julia, who helps him out. She’s about seven. Adorable kid.”

“She wasn’t there today.”

“No,” Frank agreed. “She’s with a foster family. Her father and mother both died in the fight.”

It was too much. I put my hand against the nearest wall. Another innocent little girl made to suffer, like Meg McCaffrey, when Nero killed her father…Like Georgina, when she was taken from her mothers in Indianapolis. These three monstrous Roman emperors had shattered so many lives. I had to put a stop to it.

Frank took my arm gently. “One foot in front of the other. That’s the only way to do it.”

I had come here to support the Romans. Instead this Roman was supporting me.

We made our way past cafés and storefronts. I tried to focus on anything positive. The grape vines were budding. The fountains still had running water. The buildings in this neighborhood were all intact.

“At least—at least the city didn’t burn,” I ventured.

Frank frowned like he didn’t see the cause for optimism. “What do you mean?”

“That other line of prophecy: The words that memory wrought are set to fire. That refers to Ella and Tyson’s work on the Sibylline Books, doesn’t it? The Books must be safe, since you prevented the city from burning.”

“Oh.” Frank made a sound somewhere between a cough and a laugh. “Yeah, funny thing about that…”

He stopped in front of a quaint-looking bookstore. Painted on the green awning was the simple word LIBRI. Racks of used hardcovers were set out on the sidewalk for browsing. Inside the window, a large orange cat sunned itself atop a stack of dictionaries.

“Prophecy lines don’t always mean what you think they do.” Frank rapped on the door: three sharp taps, two slow ones, then two fast ones.

Immediately, the door flew inward. Standing in the entrance was a bare-chested, grinning Cyclops.

“Come in!” said Tyson. “I am getting a tattoo!”