The Tyrant’s Tomb
“Thanks, Lester,” she said. “I needed that. Now let’s go find the soundless god, shall we?”
She led the way up the hill, holding her ribs as if her chest still hurt from too much hilarity.
Then and there, I decided that if I ever became a god again, I would rearrange the order of my vengeance list. Venus had just moved up to the top spot.
Frozen in terror
Like a god in the headlights
Why U speeding up?
MORTAL SECURITY WAS NOT a problem.
There wasn’t any.
Across a flat expanse of rocks and weeds, the relay station sat nestled at the base of Sutro Tower. The blocky brown building had clusters of white satellite dishes dotting its roof like toadstools after a rain shower. The door stood wide open. The windows were dark. The parking area out front was empty.
“This isn’t right,” Reyna murmured. “Didn’t Tarquin say they were doubling security?”
“Doubling the flock,” Meg corrected. “But I don’t see any sheep or anything.”
That idea made me shudder. Over the millennia, I’d seen quite a few flocks of guardian sheep. They tended to be poisonous and/or carnivorous, and they smelled like mildewed sweaters.
“Apollo, any thoughts?” Reyna asked.
At least she could look at me now without bursting into laughter, but I didn’t trust myself to speak. I just shook my head helplessly. I was good at that.
“Maybe we’re in the wrong place?” Meg asked.
Reyna bit her lower lip. “Something’s definitely off here. Let me check inside the station. Aurum and Argentum can make a quick search. If we encounter any mortals, I’ll just say I was hiking and got lost. You guys wait here. Guard my exit. If you hear barking, that means trouble.”
She jogged across the field, Aurum and Argentum at her heels, and disappeared inside the building.
Meg peered at me over the top of her cat-eye glasses. “How come you made her laugh?”
“That wasn’t my intention. Besides, it isn’t illegal to make someone laugh.”
“You asked her to be your girlfriend, didn’t you?”
“I—What? No. Sort of. Yes.”
“That was stupid.”
I found it humiliating to have my love life criticized by a little girl wearing a unicorn-and-crossbones button. “You wouldn’t understand.”
Meg snorted.
I seemed to be everyone’s source of amusement today.
I studied the tower that loomed above us. Up the side of the nearest support column, a steel-ribbed chute enclosed a row of rungs, forming a tunnel that one could climb through—if one were crazy enough—to reach the first set of crossbeams, which bristled with more satellite dishes and cellular-antenna fungi. From there, the rungs continued upward into a low-lying blanket of fog that swallowed the tower’s top half. In the white mist, a hazy black V floated in and out of sight—a bird of some sort.
I shivered, thinking of the strixes that had attacked us in the Burning Maze, but strixes only hunted at nighttime. That dark shape had to be something else, maybe a hawk looking for mice. The law of averages dictated that once in a while I’d have to come across a creature that didn’t want to kill me, right?
Nevertheless, the fleeting shape filled me with dread. It reminded me of the many near-death experiences I’d shared with Meg McCaffrey, and of the promise I’d made to myself to be honest with her, back in the good old days of ten minutes ago, before Reyna had nuked my self-esteem.
“Meg,” I said. “Last night—”
“You saw Peaches. I know.”
She might have been talking about the weather. Her gaze stayed fixed on the doorway of the relay station.
“You know,” I repeated.
“He’s been around for a couple of days.”
“You’ve seen him?”
“Just sensed him. He’s got his reasons for staying away. Doesn’t like the Romans. He’s working on a plan to help the local nature spirits.”
“And…if that plan is to help them run away?”
In the diffused gray light of the fog bank, Meg’s glasses looked like her own tiny satellite dishes. “You think that’s what he wants? Or what the nature spirits want?”
I remembered the fauns’ fearful expressions at People’s Park, the dryads’ weary anger. “I don’t know. But Lavinia—”
“Yeah. She’s with them.” Meg shrugged one shoulder. “The centurions noticed her missing at morning roll call. They’re trying to downplay it. Bad for morale.”
I stared at my young companion, who had apparently been taking lessons from Lavinia in Advanced Camp Gossip. “Does Reyna know?”
“That Lavinia is gone? Sure. Where Lavinia went? Nah. I don’t either, really. Whatever she and Peaches and the rest are planning, there’s not much we can do about it now. We’ve got other stuff to worry about.”
I crossed my arms. “Well, I’m glad we had this talk, so I could unburden myself of all the things you already knew. I was also going to say that you’re important to me and I might even love you like a sister, but—”
“I already know that, too.” She gave me a crooked grin, offering proof that Nero really should have taken her to the orthodontist when she was younger. “ ’S’okay. You’ve gotten less annoying, too.”
“Hmph.”
“Look, here comes Reyna.”
And so ended our warm family moment, as the praetor reemerged from the station, her expression unsettled, her greyhounds happily circling her legs as if waiting for jelly beans.
“The place is empty,” Reyna announced. “Looks like everybody left in a hurry. I’d say something cleared them out—like a bomb threat, maybe.”
I frowned. “In that case, wouldn’t there be emergency vehicles here?”
“The Mist,” Meg guessed. “Could’ve made the mortals see anything to get them out of here. Clearing the scene before…”
I was about to ask Before what? But I didn’t want the answer.
Meg was right, of course. The Mist was a strange force. Sometimes it manipulated mortal minds after a supernatural event, like damage control. 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.
“Well,” Reyna said, “if that’s true, it means we’re in the right place. And I can only think of one other direction to explore.” Her eyes followed the pylons of Sutro Tower until they disappeared into the fog. “Who wants to climb first?”
Want had nothing to do with it. I was drafted.
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. Meg went last, I suppose because that would give her time to select the proper gardening seeds to throw at our enemies while they were mauling my face and Reyna was pushing me forward.
Aurum and Argentum, not being able to climb, stayed on the ground to guard our exit like the opposable-thumb-lacking slackers they were. If we ended up plummeting to our deaths, the dogs would be right there to bark excitedly at our corpses. That gave me great comfort.