The Tyrant’s Tomb

I grabbed the uppermost chains and tore them like crepe paper. Then the next set, and the next. The Imperial gold broke and crumpled noiselessly in my fists. The steel locking rods felt as soft as breadsticks as I pulled them out of their fittings.

That left only the door handles.

The power may have gone to my head. I glanced back at Reyna and Meg with a self-satisfied smirk, ready to accept their silent adulation.

Instead, they looked as if I’d bent them in half, too.

Meg swayed, her complexion lima-bean green. The skin around Reyna’s eyes was tight with pain. The veins on her temples stood out like lightning bolts. My energy surge was frying them.

Finish it, Reyna mouthed. Her eyes added a silent plea: Before we pass out.

Humbled and ashamed, I grabbed the door handles. My friends had gotten me this far. If Harpocrates was indeed waiting inside this shipping box, I would make sure the full force of his anger fell on me, not Reyna or Meg.

I yanked open the doors and stepped inside.

Ever heard the phrase

“The silence is deafening”?

Yeah, that’s a real thing

IMMEDIATELY, I CRUMPLED TO my hands and knees under the weight of the other god’s power.

Silence enfolded me like liquid titanium. The cloying smell of roses was overwhelming.

I’d forgotten how Harpocrates communicated—with blasts of mental images, oppressive and devoid of sound. Back when I was a god, I’d found this annoying. Now, as a human, I realized it could pulp my brain. At the moment, he was sending me one continuous message: YOU? HATE!

Behind me, Reyna was on her knees, cupping her ears and screaming mutely. Meg was curled on her side, kicking her legs as if trying to throw off the heaviest of blankets.

A moment before, I’d been tearing through metal like it was paper. Now, I could barely lift my head to meet Harpocrates’s gaze.

The god floated cross-legged at the far end of the room.

He was still the size of a ten-year-old child, still wearing his ridiculous toga and pharaonic bowling-pin crown combo, like so many confused Ptolemaic gods who couldn’t decide if they were Egyptian or Greco-Roman. His braided ponytail snaked down one side of his shaved head. And, of course, he still held one finger to his mouth like the most frustrated, burned-out librarian in the world: SSSHHH!

He could not do otherwise. I recalled that Harpocrates required all his willpower to lower his finger from his mouth. As soon as he stopped concentrating, his hand would pop right back into position. In the old days, I had found that hilarious. Now, not so much.

The centuries had not been kind to him. His skin was wrinkled and saggy. His once-bronze complexion was an unhealthy porcelain color. His sunken eyes smoldered with anger and self-pity.

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. The setup seemed designed to siphon Harpocrates’s power and then amplify it—to broadcast his magical silence across the world. This was the source of all our communications troubles—one sad, angry, forgotten little god.

It took me a moment to understand why he remained imprisoned. Even drained of his power, a minor deity should have been able to break a few chains. Harpocrates seemed to be alone and unguarded.

Then I noticed them. 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.

Looking at them made my ribs twist into bows. In the old days, powerful Roman officials never left home without a procession of lictor bodyguards, each carrying one of those bundled axes to let the commoners know somebody important was coming through. The more fasces, the more important the official.

In the twentieth century, Benito Mussolini revived the symbol when he became Italy’s dictator. His ruling philosophy was named after those bundled axes: Fascism.

But the fasces in front of me were no ordinary standards. These blades were Imperial gold. Wrapped around the bundles of rods were silken banners embroidered with the names of their owners. Enough of the letters were visible that I could guess what they said. On the left: CAESAR MARCUS AURELIUS COMMODUS ANTONINUS AUGUSTUS. On the right: GAIUS JULIUS CAESAR AUGUSTUS GERMANICUS, otherwise known as Caligula.

These were the personal fasces of the two emperors, being used to drain Harpocrates’s power and keep him enslaved.

The god glared at me. He forced painful images into my mind: me stuffing his head into a toilet on Mount Olympus; me howling with amusement as I tied his wrists and ankles and shut him in the stables with my fire-breathing horses. Dozens of other encounters I’d completely forgotten about, and in all of them I was as golden, handsome, and powerful as any Triumvirate emperor—and just as cruel.

My skull throbbed from the pressure of Harpocrates’s assault. I felt capillaries bursting in my busted nose, my forehead, my ears. Behind me, Reyna and Meg writhed in agony. Reyna locked eyes with me, blood trickling from her nostrils. She seemed to ask, Well, genius? What now?

I crawled closer to Harpocrates.

Tentatively, using a series of mental pictures, I tried to convey a question: How did you get here?

I imagined Caligula and Commodus overpowering him, binding him, forcing him to do their bidding. I imagined Harpocrates floating alone in this dark box for months, years, unable to break free from the power of the fasces, growing weaker and weaker as the emperors used his silence to keep the demigod camps in the dark, cut off from one another, while the Triumvirate divided and conquered.

Harpocrates was their prisoner, not their ally.

Was I right?

Harpocrates replied with a withering gust of resentment.

I took that to mean both Yes and You suck, Apollo.

He forced more visions into my mind. I saw Commodus and Caligula standing where I now was, smiling cruelly, taunting him.

You should be on our side, Caligula told him telepathically. You should want to help us!

Harpocrates had refused. Perhaps he couldn’t overpower his bullies, but he intended to fight them with every last bit of his soul. That’s why he now looked so withered.

I sent out a pulse of sympathy and regret. Harpocrates blasted it away with scorn.

Just because we both hated the Triumvirate did not make us friends. Harpocrates had never forgotten my cruelty. If he hadn’t been constrained by the fasces, he would have already blasted me and my friends into a fine mist of atoms.

He showed me that image in vivid color. I could tell he relished thinking about it.

Meg tried to join our telepathic argument. At first, all she could send was a garbled sense of pain and confusion. Then she managed to focus. I saw her father smiling down at her, handing her a rose. For her, the rose was a symbol of love, not secrets. Then I saw her father dead on the steps of Grand Central Station, murdered by Nero. She sent Harpocrates her life story, captured in a few painful snapshots. She knew about monsters. She had been raised by the Beast. No matter how much Harpocrates hated me—and Meg agreed that I could be pretty stupid sometimes—we had to work together to stop the Triumvirate.