The Tyrant's Tomb: Chapters 23–32

“And double-check with the quartermaster about those flaming barricades.”

Hey, did you know your karpos is holding clandestine meetings with the fauns and crabgrasses in People's Park?

True, I hadn’t seen Lavinia that morning before we left, but maybe her plans weren’t as nefarious as I thought.

“How do you know Thalia?” I tried to sound nonchalant.

“Letters...” I seemed to remember those, back from around the days of vellum and wax seals.

I tried to fathom that. Many descriptions came to mind when I thought about Thalia Grace.

“That was a rhetorical question,” Reyna added. “I do not need a response.”

She forbade me to approach you. She said if I ever tried to woo you, she would curse me forever.

She managed to restrain her mirth long enough to blink at me through the tears, as if to make sure I was really there and she’d heard me correctly. “You. Me? HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA.”

In the diffused gray light of the fog bank, Meg’s glasses looked like her own tiny satellite dishes.

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.

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.

A catwalk ran the length of the girders, allowing us to stand and rest for a few minutes.

She did a cartwheel, because she enjoyed giving me heart palpitations.

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.

Besides, calling ravens unkind and conspiratorial had always seemed redundant to me.

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.

At the far end of the catwalk, abutting the next support pylon, stood a large rectangular box like a shipping container.

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.

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.

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.

Its voice resonated in my head—more tactile than audible—rattling my eyeballs.

VERILY, THE NAME DOTH BEGIN WITH AN H.

I felt petulant, but I’d never enjoyed word puzzles, even before my horrific experience in the Burning Maze.

The emperors would’ve considered Harpocrates just another dangerous, amusing plaything, like their trained monsters and humanoid lackeys.

Either way, they would find it entertaining—one more gladiator match to break the monotony of their immortal lives.

I glanced back at Reyna and Meg with a self-satisfied smirk, ready to accept their silent adulation.

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.

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.

His ruling philosophy was named after those bundled axes: Fascism.

If he hadn’t been constrained by the fasces, he would have already blasted me and my friends into a fine mist of atoms.

At first, all she could send was a garbled sense of pain and confusion.

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 saw a eurynomos lope into Harpocrates’s prison, the glass jar tucked under one arm.

Meg pictured the way I’d saved her in the myrmekes' lair at Camp Half-Blood, singing about my romantic failures with such honesty it rendered giant ants catatonic with depression.

How did one commemorate the death of a god of silence? A moment of silence seemed superfluous.

Just ahead, a maintenance truck was trundling along, a worker on the tailgate picking up cones that had been blocking the left lane for some unknown reason.

In moments of personal crisis, my followers often used to implore me: Apollo, take the wheel, hoping I would guide them through their problems.

Meg, semiconscious, was listlessly waving one hand, trying to conduct.

Reginald extricated Meg from her shopping cart and revived her with hand-fed bits of ambrosia.