by Rick Riordan
Three pits lay side by side like finger holes on a recorder. Each one was perfectly round, two feet in diameter, tiled around the rim with limestone; each one plunged straight into darkness. Every few seconds, seemingly at random, one of the three pits shot a column of fire into the sky. Each time, the colour and intensity of the flames were different.
‘They weren’t doing this before.’ Annabeth walked a wide arc around the pits. She still looked shaky and pale, but her mind was now obviously engaged in the problem at hand. ‘There doesn’t seem to be any pattern. The timing, the colour, the height of the fire … I don’t get it.’
‘Did we activate them somehow?’ Piper wondered. ‘Maybe that surge of fear you felt on the hill … Uh, I mean we both felt.’
Annabeth didn’t seem to hear her. ‘There must be some kind of mechanism … a pressure plate, a proximity alarm.’
Flames shot from the middle pit. Annabeth counted silently. The next time, a geyser erupted on the left. She frowned. ‘That’s not right. It’s inconsistent. It has to follow some kind of logic.’
Piper’s ears started to ring. Something about these pits …
Each time one ignited, a horrible thrill went through her – fear, panic, but also a strong desire to get closer to the flames.
‘It isn’t rational,’ she said. ‘It’s emotional.’
‘How can fire pits be emotional?’
Piper held her hand over the pit on the right. Instantly, flames leaped up. Piper barely had time to withdraw her fingers. Her nails steamed.
‘Piper!’ Annabeth ran over. ‘What were you thinking?’
‘I wasn’t. I was feeling. What we want is down there. These pits are the way in. I’ll have to jump.’
‘Are you crazy? Even if you don’t get stuck in the tube, you have no idea how deep it is.’
‘You’re right.’
‘You’ll be burned alive!’
‘Possibly.’ Piper unbuckled her sword and tossed it into the pit on the right. ‘I’ll let you know if it’s safe. Wait for my word.’
‘Don’t you dare,’ Annabeth warned.
Piper jumped.
For a moment she was weightless in the dark, the sides of the hot stone pit burning her arms. Then the space opened up around her. Instinctively she tucked and rolled, absorbing most of the impact as she hit the stone floor.
Flames shot up in front of her, singeing her eyebrows, but Piper snatched up her sword, unsheathed it and swung before she’d even stopped rolling. A bronze dragonhead, neatly decapitated, wobbled across the floor.
Piper stood, trying to get her bearings. She looked down at the fallen dragonhead and felt a moment of guilt, as if she’d killed Festus. But this wasn’t Festus.
Three bronze dragon statues stood in a row, aligned with the holes in the roof. Piper had decapitated the middle one. The two intact dragons were each three feet tall, their snouts pointed upward and their steaming mouths open. They were clearly the source of the flames, but they didn’t seem to be automatons. They didn’t move or try to attack her. Piper calmly sliced off the heads of the other two.
She waited. No more flames shot upward.
‘Piper?’ Annabeth’s voice echoed from far above like she was yelling down a chimney.
‘Yeah!’ Piper shouted.
‘Thank the gods! You okay?’
‘Yeah. Hold on a sec.’
Her eyesight adjusted to the dark. She scanned the chamber. The only light came from her glowing blade and the openings above. The ceiling was about thirty feet high. By all rights, Piper should’ve broken both legs in the fall, but she wasn’t going to complain.
The chamber itself was round, about the size of a helicopter pad. The walls were made of rough-hewn stone blocks chiselled with Greek inscriptions – thousands and thousands of them, like graffiti.
At the far end of the room, on a stone dais, stood the human-sized bronze statue of a warrior – the god Ares, Piper guessed – with heavy bronze chains wrapped around his body, anchoring him to the floor.
On either side of the statue loomed two dark doorways, ten feet high, with a gruesome stone face carved over each archway. The faces reminded Piper of gorgons, except they had lions’ manes instead of snakes for hair.
Piper suddenly felt very much alone.
‘Annabeth!’ she called. ‘It’s a long drop, but it’s safe to come down. Maybe … uh, you have a rope you could fasten so we can get back up?’
‘On it!’
A few minutes later a rope dropped from the centre pit. Annabeth shinned down.
‘Piper McLean,’ she grumbled, ‘that was without a doubt the dumbest risk I’ve ever seen anyone take, and I date a dumb risk-taker.’
‘Thank you.’ Piper nudged the nearest decapitated dragon-head with her foot. ‘I’m guessing these are the dragons of Ares. That’s one of his sacred animals, right?’
‘And there’s the chained god himself. Where do you think those doorways –’
Piper held up her hand. ‘Do you hear that?’
The sound was like a drumbeat … with a metallic echo.
‘It’s coming from inside the statue,’ Piper decided. ‘The heartbeat of the chained god.’
Annabeth unsheathed her drakon-bone sword. In the dim light, her face was ghostly pale, her eyes colourless. ‘I – I don’t like this, Piper. We need to leave.’
The rational part of Piper agreed. Her skin crawled. Her legs ached to run. But something about this room felt strangely familiar …
‘The shrine is ramping up our emotions,’ she said. ‘It’s like being around my mom, except this place radiates fear, not love. That’s why you started feeling overwhelmed on the hill. Down here, it’s a thousand times stronger.’
Annabeth scanned the walls. ‘Okay … we need a plan to get the statue out. Maybe haul it up with the rope, but –’
‘Wait.’ Piper glanced at the snarling stone faces above the doorways. ‘A shrine that radiates fear. Ares had two divine sons, didn’t he?’
‘Ph-phobos and Deimos.’ Annabeth shivered. ‘Panic and Fear. Percy met them once in Staten Island.’
Piper decided not to ask what the twin gods of panic and fear had been doing in Staten Island. ‘I think those are their faces above the doors. This place isn’t just a shrine to Ares. It’s a temple of fear.’
Deep laughter echoed through the chamber.
On Piper’s right, a giant appeared. He didn’t come through either doorway. He simply emerged from the darkness as if he’d been camouflaged against the wall.
He was small for a giant – perhaps twenty-five feet tall, which would give him enough room to swing the massive sledgehammer in his hands. His armour, his skin and his dragon-scale legs were all the colour of charcoal. Copper wires and smashed circuit boards glittered in the braids of his oil-black hair.
‘Very good, child of Aphrodite.’ The giant smiled. ‘This is indeed the Temple of Fear. And I am here to make you believers.’
XX
Piper
PIPER KNEW FEAR, BUT THIS WAS DIFFERENT.
Waves of terror crashed over her. Her joints turned to jelly. Her heart refused to beat.
Her worst memories crowded her mind – her father tied up and beaten on Mount Diablo; Percy and Jason fighting to the death in Kansas; the three of them drowning in the nymphaeum in Rome; herself standing alone against Khione and the Boreads. Worst of all, she relived her conversation with her mother about what was to come.
Paralysed, she watched as the giant raised his sledgehammer to smash them flat. At the last moment, she leaped to one side, tackling Annabeth.
The hammer cracked the floor, peppering Piper’s back with stone shrapnel.
The giant chuckled. ‘Oh, that wasn’t fair!’ He hefted his sledgehammer again.
‘Annabeth, get up!’ Piper helped her to her feet. She pulled her towards the far end of the room, but Annabeth moved sluggishly, her eyes wide and unfocused.
Piper understood why. The temple was amplifyin
g their personal fears. Piper had seen some horrible things, but it was nothing compared to what Annabeth had experienced. If she was having flashbacks of Tartarus, enhanced and compounded with all her other bad memories, her mind wouldn’t be able to cope. She might literally go insane.
‘I’m here,’ Piper promised, filling her voice with reassurance. ‘We will get out of this.’
The giant laughed. ‘A child of Aphrodite leading a child of Athena! Now I’ve seen everything. How would you defeat me, girl? With makeup and fashion tips?’
A few months ago that comment might’ve stung, but Piper was way past that. The giant lumbered towards them. Fortunately, he was slow and carrying a heavy hammer.
‘Annabeth, trust me,’ Piper said.
‘A – a plan,’ she stammered. ‘I go left. You go right. If we –’
‘Annabeth, no plans.’
‘W-what?’
‘No plans. Just follow me!’
The giant swung his hammer, but they dodged it easily. Piper leaped forward and slashed her sword across the back of the giant’s knee. As the giant bellowed in outrage, Piper pulled Annabeth into the nearest tunnel. Immediately they were engulfed in total darkness.
‘Fools!’ the giant roared somewhere behind them. ‘That is the wrong way!’
‘Keep moving.’ Piper held tight to Annabeth’s hand. ‘It’s fine. Come on.’
She couldn’t see anything. Even the glow of her sword was snuffed out. She barrelled ahead anyway, trusting her emotions. From the echo of their footfalls, the space around them must have been a vast cavern, but she couldn’t be sure. She simply went in the direction that made her fear the sharpest.
‘Piper, it’s like the House of Night,’ Annabeth said. ‘We should close our eyes.’
‘No!’ Piper said. ‘Keep them open. We can’t try to hide.’
The giant’s voice came from somewhere in front of them. ‘Lost forever. Swallowed by the darkness.’
Annabeth froze, forcing Piper to stop, too.
‘Why did we just plunge in?’ Annabeth demanded. ‘We’re lost. We did what he wanted us to! We should have bided our time, talked to the enemy, figured out a plan. That always works!’
‘Annabeth, I never ignore your advice.’ Piper kept her voice soothing. ‘But this time I have to. We can’t defeat this place with reason. You can’t think your way out of your emotions.’
The giant’s laughter echoed like a detonating depth charge. ‘Despair, Annabeth Chase! I am Mimas, born to slay Hephaestus. I am the breaker of plans, the destroyer of the well-oiled machines. Nothing goes right in my presence. Maps are misread. Devices break. Data is lost. The finest minds turn to mush!’
‘I – I’ve faced worse than you!’ Annabeth cried.
‘Oh, I see!’ The giant sounded much closer now. ‘Are you not afraid?’
‘Never!’
‘Of course we’re afraid,’ Piper corrected. ‘Terrified!’
The air moved. Just in time, Piper pushed Annabeth to one side.
CRASH!
Suddenly they were back in the circular room, the dim light almost blinding now. The giant stood close by, trying to yank his hammer out of the floor where he’d embedded it. Piper lunged and drove her blade into the giant’s thigh.
‘AROOO!’ Mimas let go of the hammer and arched his back.
Piper and Annabeth scrambled behind the chained statue of Ares, which still pulsed with a metallic heartbeat: thump, thump, thump.
The giant Mimas turned towards them. The wound on his leg was already closing.
‘You cannot defeat me,’ he growled. ‘In the last war, it took two gods to bring me down. I was born to kill Hephaestus, and would have done so if Ares hadn’t ganged up on me as well! You should have stayed paralysed in your fear. Your death would’ve been quicker.’
Days ago, when she faced Khione on the Argo II, Piper had started talking without thinking, following her heart no matter what her brain said. Now she did the same thing. She moved in front of the statue and faced the giant, though the rational part of her screamed, RUN, YOU IDIOT!
‘This temple,’ she said. ‘The Spartans didn’t chain Ares because they wanted his spirit to stay in their city.’
‘You think not?’ The giant’s eyes glittered with amusement. He wrapped his hands around his sledgehammer and pulled it from the floor.
‘This is the temple of my brothers, Deimos and Phobos.’ Piper’s voice shook, but she didn’t try to hide it. ‘The Spartans came here to prepare for battle, to face their fears. Ares was chained to remind them that war has consequences. His power – the spirits of battle, the makhai – should never be unleashed unless you understand how terrible they are, unless you’ve felt fear.’
Mimas laughed. ‘A child of the love goddess lectures me about war. What do you know of the makhai?’
‘We’ll see.’ Piper ran straight at the giant, unbalancing his stance. At the sight of her jagged blade coming at him, his eyes widened and he stumbled backwards, cracking his head against the wall. A jagged fissure snaked upward in the stones. Dust rained from the ceiling.
‘Piper, this place is unstable!’ Annabeth warned. ‘If we don’t leave –’
‘Don’t think about escape!’ Piper ran towards their rope, which dangled from the ceiling. She leaped as high as she could and cut it.
‘Piper, have you lost your mind?’
Probably, she thought. But Piper knew this was the only way to survive. She had to go against reason, follow emotion instead, keep the giant off balance.
‘That hurt!’ Mimas rubbed his head. ‘You realize you cannot kill me without the help of a god and Ares is not here! The next time I face that blustering idiot, I will smash him to bits. I wouldn’t have had to fight him in the first place if that cowardly fool Damasen had done his job –’
Annabeth let loose a guttural cry. ‘Do not insult Damasen!’
She ran at Mimas, who barely managed to parry her drakon-blade with the handle of his hammer. He tried to grab Annabeth, and Piper lunged, slashing her blade across the side of the giant’s face.
‘GAHHH!’ Mimas staggered.
A severed pile of dreadlocks fell to the floor along with something else – a large fleshy thing lying in a pool of golden ichor.
‘My ear!’ Mimas wailed. Before he could recover his wits, Piper grabbed Annabeth’s arm and together they plunged through the second doorway.
‘I will bring down this chamber!’ the giant thundered. ‘The Earth Mother shall deliver me, but you shall be crushed!’
The floor shook. The sound of breaking stone echoed all around them.
‘Piper, stop,’ Annabeth begged. ‘How – how are you dealing with this? The fear, the anger –’
‘Don’t try to control it. That’s what the temple is about. You have to accept the fear, adapt to it, ride it like the rapids on a river.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘I don’t know it. I just feel it.’
Somewhere nearby, a wall crumbled with a sound like an artillery blast.
‘You cut the rope,’ Annabeth said. ‘We’re going to die down here!’
Piper cupped her friend’s face. She pulled Annabeth forward until their foreheads touched. Through her fingertips, she could feel Annabeth’s rapid pulse. ‘Fear can’t be reasoned with. Neither can hate. They’re like love. They’re almost identical emotions. That’s why Ares and Aphrodite like each other. Their twin sons – Fear and Panic – were spawned from both war and love.’
‘But I don’t … this doesn’t make sense.’
‘No,’ Piper agreed. ‘Stop thinking about it. Just feel.’
‘I hate that.’
‘I know. You can’t plan for feelings. Like with Percy, and your future – you can’t control every contingency. You have to accept that. Let it scare you. Trust that it’ll be okay anyway.’
Annabeth shook her head. ‘I don’t know if I can.’
‘Then for right now concentrate on revenge for Damasen.
Revenge for Bob.’
A moment of silence. ‘I’m good now.’
‘Great, because I need your help. We’re going to run out there together.’
‘Then what?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘Gods, I hate it when you lead.’
Piper laughed, which surprised even her. Fear and love really were related. At that moment she clung to the love she had for her friend. ‘Come on!’
They ran in no particular direction and found themselves back in the shrine room, right behind the giant Mimas. They each slashed one of his legs and brought him to his knees.
The giant howled. More chunks of stone tumbled from the ceiling.
‘Weak mortals!’ Mimas struggled to stand. ‘No plan of yours can defeat me!’
‘That’s good,’ Piper said. ‘Because I don’t have a plan.’
She ran towards the statue of Ares. ‘Annabeth, keep our friend occupied!’
‘Oh, he’s occupied!’
‘GAHHHHH!’
Piper stared at the cruel bronze face of the war god. The statue thrummed with a low metallic pulse.
The spirits of battle, she thought. They’re inside, waiting to be freed.
But they weren’t hers to unleash – not until she’d proven herself.
The chamber shook again. More cracks appeared in the walls. Piper glanced at the stone carvings above the doorways: the scowling twin faces of Fear and Panic.
‘My brothers,’ Piper said, ‘sons of Aphrodite … I give you a sacrifice.’
At the feet of Ares, she set her cornucopia. The magic horn had become so attuned to her emotions it could amplify her anger, love or grief and spew forth its bounty accordingly. She hoped that would appeal to the gods of fear. Or maybe they would just appreciate some fresh fruits and vegetables in their diets.
‘I’m terrified,’ she confessed. ‘I hate doing this. But I accept that it’s necessary.’
She swung her blade and took off the bronze statue’s head.
‘No!’ Mimas yelled.
Flames roared up from the statue’s severed neck. They swirled around Piper, filling the room with a firestorm of emotions: hatred, bloodlust and fear, but also love – because no one could face battle without caring for something: comrades, family, home.
Piper held out her arms and the makhai made her the centre of their whirlwind.
We will answer your call, they whispered in her mind. Once only, when you need us, destruction, waste, carnage shall answer. We shall complete your cure.
The flames vanished along with the cornucopia, and the chained statue of Ares crumbled into dust.
‘Foolish girl!’ Mimas charged her, Annabeth at his heels. ‘The makhai have abandoned you!’
‘Or maybe they’ve abandoned you,’ Piper said.
Mimas raised his hammer, but he’d forgotten about Annabeth. She jabbed him in the thigh and the giant staggered forward, off balance. Piper stepped in calmly and stabbed him in the gut.
