The Tower of Nero: Chapters 14–22

Nevertheless, I racked my brain for any factoids I might have gleaned from Aelian’s trashy best seller On the Nature of Animals.

I was already committed, though, so I ran at Potty Cow with great bravado and zero clue how to fight it.

It might have been a clever ploy to fall into his boyfriend’s arms—I had used the catch me, handsome fainting trick a few times myself—but since Nico immediately began to snore, I decided he was not faking.

The concrete ledge upon which we sat was comfortably upholstered with lichen and scum.

He insisted we partake liberally of his medicinal stockpile of Kit Kat bars.

He pulled out what appeared to be a foot-long desiccated lizard wrapped in a handkerchief.

“The troglodytes... If the legends are true...they consider lizards a great, you know...” I mimed putting something in my mouth. “Delicacy.”

Bits of stone and moss decorated their dark plaited hair.

The real showstopper, however, was their selection of hats, some piled three or four high on their heads: tricorns, bowlers, racing caps, top hats, hard hats, ski caps, and baseball caps.

His speech was interspersed with clicks, screeches, and growls, so it actually sounded like “CLICK. We—grr—see you—SCREEE—Nico—CLICK—di Angelo—grr.”

He was drooling all over his cravat.

Rachel and Meg looked alarmed, probably because Screech-Bling was still drooling profusely as he talked about not eating us.

We were surrounded by a throng of cheering, growling shareholders.

I had no idea how the trogs had managed to skin and stitch the impervious hides, but clearly, as the ancestral enemies of the forest bulls, they had found a way.

Our special tonight:
A lovely braised Apollo
Under a Mets hat

My stomach convulsed with a combination of nausea and hunger.

“What about hats?” Will asked. “How many haberdasheries will burn if we don’t stop Nero? Dead haberdashers cannot make trog haberdashery.”

I had appealed to their altruism.

With one last forlorn glance at his crystal ball, Beanie Boy leaped off the platform and disappeared down the road.

The bull, blinded, screamed and veered off into the bedlam.

You would think, with my musical skills, I would be better at picking up the nuances of languages, but apparently, I did not have Nico’s panache for Troglodytish.

His brown eyes were inscrutable as cavern walls.

I expected a moat filled with alligators. A wrought-iron portcullis. Possibly some vats of boiling oil.

Nero’s decorating taste usually tended more toward gold filigree and severed heads.

They pushed her down, prostrate, in front of the emperor, ignoring her screams and the creaking of her leg braces.

I kicked my Germani in the shins to no avail. I might as well have been kicking a forest bull.

“You see, children,” he told his adopted eleven, “if you ever decide to depose me, you’ll have to do much better than this. Honestly, I’m disappointed.”

“Cauterize,” I mumbled to myself. “I need—”
My right hand burst into flame.
At the time, I didn’t find this strange. A little spark of my old sun-god power? Sure, why not? I sealed the stumps of Lu’s poor wrists, slathered them with healing ointment, then re-bandaged them properly, leaving her with two stubby Q-tips instead of hands.

"...But if a hero isn’t ready to lose everything for a greater cause, is that person really a hero?”
He weighted the word person subtly, as if to stress it could mean a human, a faun, a dryad, a griffin, a pandos...even a god.

Gunther appeared outside our cell, holding a silver tray laden with sandwiches and assorted canned sodas.

I needed food badly, but just looking at the sandwiches made my stomach roil.

Now he was raising his own brood of junior despots.

Now he was raising his own brood of junior despots.

I pictured her in an opulent room much like this one—minus the bars, perhaps, but a cell nonetheless.

No wonder, back in the old days, she preferred to roam the alleys of Hell’s Kitchen, accosting thugs with bags of rotten vegetables and adopting former gods to be her servants.

Having unleashed the Beast, Nero would now feign kindness.

Nero was his own good cop/bad cop—the consummate manipulator.

I wanted to discuss plans with Lu—if for no other reason than to raise her spirits, to let her know that my terrific troglodyte tunneling team might be on their way to scuttle Nero’s Greek-fire Sewer Super Soakers, which would mean that Lu’s sacrifice had not been completely in vain.

As the god of prophecy, I’d often sent visions to those who needed them—warnings, glimpses of the future, suggestions for what sort of temple incense I liked best.

My team of fiery horses could always feel when their driver was weak or uncertain. (Poor Phaethon had found that out the hard way.) Dreams were no less ornery.