The Tyrant’s Tomb

Harpocrates shredded her thoughts with rage. How dare she presume to understand his misery?

Reyna tried a different approach. She shared her memories of Tarquin’s last attack on Camp Jupiter: so many wounded and killed, their bodies dragged off by ghouls to be reanimated as vrykolakai. She showed Harpocrates her greatest fear: that after all their battles, after centuries of upholding the best traditions of Rome, the Twelfth Legion might face their end tonight.

Harpocrates was unmoved. He bent his will toward me, burying me in hatred.

All right! I pleaded. Kill me if you must. But I am sorry! I have changed!

I sent him a flurry of the most horrible, embarrassing failures I’d suffered since becoming mortal: grieving over the body of Heloise the griffin at the Waystation, holding the dying pandos Crest in my arms in the Burning Maze, and, of course, watching helplessly as Caligula murdered Jason Grace.

Just for a moment, Harpocrates’s wrath wavered.

At the very least, I had managed to surprise him. He had not been expecting regret or shame from me. Those weren’t my trademark emotions.

If you let us destroy the fasces, I thought, that will free you. It will also hurt the emperors, yes?

I showed him a vision of Reyna and Meg cutting through the fasces with their swords, the ceremonial axes exploding.

Yes, Harpocrates thought back, adding a brilliant red tint to the vision.

I had offered him something he wanted.

Reyna chimed in. She pictured Commodus and Caligula on their knees, groaning in pain. The fasces were connected to them. They’d taken a great risk leaving their axes here. If the fasces were destroyed, the emperors might be weakened and vulnerable before the battle.

Yes, Harpocrates replied. The pressure of the silence eased. I could almost breathe again without agony. Reyna staggered to her feet. She helped Meg and me to stand.

Unfortunately, we were not out of danger. I imagined any number of terrible things Harpocrates could do to us if we freed him. And since I’d been talking with my mind, I couldn’t help but broadcast those fears.

Harpocrates’s glare did nothing to reassure me.

The emperors must have anticipated this. They were smart, cynical, horribly logical. They knew that if I did release Harpocrates, the god’s first act would probably be to kill me. For the emperors, the potential loss of their fasces apparently didn’t outweigh the potential benefit of having me destroyed…or the entertainment value of knowing I’d done it to myself.

Reyna touched my shoulder, making me flinch involuntarily. She and Meg had drawn their weapons. They were waiting for me to decide. Did I really want to risk this?

I studied the soundless god.

Do what you want with me, I thought to him. Just spare my friends. Please.

His eyes burned with malice, but also a hint of glee. He seemed to be waiting for me to realize something, as if he’d written ZAP ME on my backpack when I wasn’t looking.

Then I saw what he was holding in his lap. I hadn’t noticed it while I was down on my hands and knees, but now that I was standing, it was hard to miss: a glass jar, apparently empty, sealed with a metal lid.

I felt as if Tarquin had just dropped the final rock into the drowning cage around my head. I imagined the emperors howling with delight on the deck of Caligula’s yacht.

Rumors from centuries before swirled in my head: The Sibyl’s body had crumbled away…. She could not die…. Her attendants kept her life force…her voice…in a glass jar.

Harpocrates cradled all that remained of the Sibyl of Cumae—another person who had every reason to hate me; a person the emperors and Tarquin knew I would feel obligated to help.

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 turned to Reyna and Meg and thought as clearly as I could: Destroy the fasces. Cut him free.

A voice and a shh.

I have seen stranger couples.

Wait. No, I haven’t.

TURNS OUT THAT WAS a bad idea.

Reyna and Meg moved cautiously—as one does when approaching a cornered wild animal or an angry immortal. They took up positions on either side of Harpocrates, raised their blades above the fasces, and mouthed in unison: One, two, three!

It was almost like the fasces had been waiting to explode. Despite Reyna’s earlier protestations that Imperial gold blades might take forever to hack through Imperial gold chains, her sword and Meg’s cut through the cords and cables as if they were nothing but illusions themselves.

Their blades hit the fasces and shattered them—sending bundles of rods blasting into splinters, shafts breaking, golden crescents toppling to the floor.

The girls stepped back, clearly surprised by their own success.

Harpocrates gave me a thin, cruel smile.

Without a sound, the fetters on his hands and feet cracked and fell away like spring ice. The remaining cables and chains shriveled and blackened, curling against the walls. Harpocrates stretched out his free hand—the one that was not gesturing, Shh, I’m about to kill you—and the two golden ax blades from the broken fasces flew into his grip. His fingers turned white hot. The blades melted, gold dribbling through his fingers and pooling beneath him.

A small, terrified voice in my head said, Well, this is going great.

The god plucked the glass jar from his lap. He raised it on his fingertips like a crystal ball. For a moment, I was afraid he would give it the gold-ax treatment, melting whatever remained of the Sibyl just to spite me.

Instead, he assaulted my mind with new images.

I saw a eurynomos lope into Harpocrates’s prison, the glass jar tucked under one arm. The ghoul’s mouth slavered. Its eyes glowed purple.

Harpocrates thrashed in his chains. It seemed he had not been in the box very long at that point. He wanted to crush the eurynomos with silence, but the ghoul seemed unaffected. His body was being driven by another mind, far away in the tyrant’s tomb.

Even through telepathy, it was clear the voice was Tarquin’s—heavy and brutal as chariot wheels over flesh.

I brought you a friend, he said. Try not to break her.

He tossed the jar to Harpocrates, who caught it out of surprise. Tarquin’s possessed ghoul limped away, chuckling evilly, and chained the doors behind him.

Alone in the dark, Harpocrates’s first thought was to smash the jar. Anything from Tarquin had to be a trap, or poison, or something worse. But he was curious. A friend? Harpocrates had never had one of those. He wasn’t sure he understood the concept.

He could sense a living force inside the jar: weak, sad, fading, but alive, and possibly more ancient than he was. He opened the lid. The faintest voice began to speak to him, cutting straight through his silence as if it didn’t exist.

After so many millennia, Harpocrates, the silent god who was never supposed to exist, had almost forgotten sound. He wept with joy. The god and the Sibyl began to converse.

They both knew they were pawns, prisoners. They were only here because they served some purpose for the emperors and their new ally, Tarquin. Like Harpocrates, the Sibyl had refused to cooperate with her captors. She would tell them nothing of the future. Why should she? She was beyond pain and suffering. She had literally nothing left to lose and longed only to die.

Harpocrates shared the feeling. He was tired of spending millennia slowly wasting away, waiting until he was obscure enough, forgotten by all humankind, so he could cease to exist altogether. His life had always been bitter—a never-ending parade of disappointments, bullying, and ridicule. Now he wanted sleep. The eternal sleep of extinct gods.