by Rick Riordan
It would’ve been the perfect place to plop down and leaf through a relaxing novel, except for that pesky smell of boiling oil and leather. There was no visible tattoo-parlor equipment, but against the back wall, under a sign that read SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, a set of thick velvet curtains seemed to provide access to a back room.
“Very nice,” I said, trying not to make it sound like a question.
“Books!” Tyson repeated. “Because it’s a bookstore!”
“Of course.” I nodded agreeably. “Is this, um, your store?”
Tyson pouted. “No. Sort of. The owner died. In the battle. It was sad.”
“Ah.” I wasn’t sure what to say to that. “At any rate, it’s good to see you again, Tyson. You probably don’t recognize me in this form, but—”
“You are Apollo!” He laughed. “You look funny now.”
Frank covered his mouth and coughed, no doubt to hide a smile. “Tyson, is Ella around? I wanted Apollo to hear what you guys discovered.”
“Ella is in the back room. She was giving me a tattoo!” He leaned toward me and lowered his voice. “Ella is pretty. But shh. She doesn’t like me saying that all the time. She gets embarrassed. Then I get embarrassed.”
“I won’t tell,” I promised. “Lead on, General Tyson.”
“General.” Tyson laughed some more. “Yes. That’s me. I bashed some heads in the war!”
He galloped away like he was riding a hobbyhorse, straight through the velvet curtains.
Part of me wanted to turn, leave, and take Frank for another cup of coffee. I dreaded what we might find on the other side of those curtains.
Then something at my feet said, Mrow.
The cat had found me. The enormous orange tabby, which must have eaten all the other bookstore cats to achieve its current size, pushed its head against my leg.
“It’s touching me,” I complained.
“That’s Aristophanes.” Frank smiled. “He’s harmless. Besides, you know how Romans feel about cats.”
“Yes, yes, don’t remind me.” I had never been a fan of felines. They were self-centered, smug, and thought they owned the world. In other words…All right, I’ll say it. I didn’t like the competition.
For Romans, however, cats were a symbol of freedom and independence. They were allowed to wander anywhere they wished, even inside temples. Several times over the centuries, I’d found my altar smelling like a tomcat’s new marking post.
Mrow, Aristophanes said again. His sleepy eyes, pale green as lime pulp, seemed to say, You’re mine now, and I may pee on you later.
“I have to go,” I told the cat. “Frank Zhang, let’s find our harpy.”
As I suspected, the special-collections room had been set up as a tattoo parlor.
Rolling bookshelves had been pushed aside, heaped with leather-bound volumes, wooden scroll cases, and clay cuneiform tablets. Dominating the center of the room, a black leather reclining chair with foldable arms gleamed under an LED magnifying lamp. At its side stood a workstation with four humming electric steel-needle guns connected to ink hoses.
I myself had never gotten a tattoo. When I was a god, if I wanted some ink on my skin, I could simply will it into being. But this setup reminded me of something Hephaestus might try—a lunatic experiment in godly dentistry, perhaps.
In the back corner, a ladder led to a second-level balcony similar to the one in the main room. Two sleeping areas had been created up there: one a harpy’s nest of straw, cloth, and shredded paper; the other a sort of cardboard fort made of old appliance boxes. I decided not to inquire.
Pacing behind the tattoo chair was Ella herself, mumbling as if having an internal argument.
Aristophanes, who had followed us inside, began shadowing the harpy, trying to butt his head against Ella’s leathery bird legs. Every so often, one of her rust-colored feathers fluttered away and Aristophanes pounced on it. Ella ignored the cat completely. They seemed like a match made in Elysium.
“Fire…” Ella muttered. “Fire with…something, something…something bridge. Twice something, something…Hmm.”
She seemed agitated, though I gathered that was her natural state. From what little I knew, Percy, Hazel, and Frank had discovered Ella living in Portland, Oregon’s main library, subsisting on food scraps and nesting in discarded novels. Somehow, at some point, the harpy had chanced across copies of the Sibylline Books, three volumes that had been thought lost forever in a fire toward the end of the Roman Empire. (Discovering a copy would’ve been like finding an unknown Bessie Smith recording, or a pristine Batman No. 1 from 1940, except more…er, prophecy-ish.)
With her photographic but disjointed memory, Ella was now the sole source of those old prophecies. Percy, Hazel, and Frank had brought her to Camp Jupiter, where she could live in safety and hopefully re-create the lost books with the help of Tyson, her doting boyfriend. (Cyclops-friend? Interspecies significant other?)
Past that, Ella was an enigma wrapped in red feathers wrapped in a linen shift.
“No, no, no.” She ran one hand through her luxurious swirls of red hair, ruffling it so vigorously I was afraid she might give her scalp lacerations. “Not enough words. ‘Words, words, words.’ Hamlet, act two, scene two.”
She looked in good health for a former street harpy. Her humanlike face was angular but not emaciated. Her arm feathers were carefully preened. Her weight seemed about right for an avian, so she must have been getting plenty of birdseed or tacos or whatever harpies preferred to eat. Her taloned feet had shredded a well-defined path where she paced across the carpet.
“Ella, look!” Tyson announced. “Friends!”
Ella frowned, her eyes sliding off Frank and me as if we were minor annoyances—pictures hung askew on a wall.
“No,” she decided. Her long fingernails clacked together. “Tyson needs more tattoos.”
“Okay!” Tyson grinned as if this were fantastic news. He bounded over to the reclining chair.
“Wait,” I pleaded. It was bad enough to smell the tattoos. If I saw them being made, I was sure I would puke all over Aristophanes. “Ella, before you start, could you please explain what’s going on?”
“‘What’s Going On,’” Ella said. “Marvin Gaye, 1971.”
“Yes, I know,” I said. “I helped write that song.”
“No.” Ella shook her head. “Written by Renaldo Benson, Al Cleveland, and Marvin Gaye; inspired by an incident of police brutality.”
Frank smirked at me. “You can’t argue with the harpy.”
“No,” Ella agreed. “You can’t.”
She scuttled over and studied me more carefully, sniffing at my bandaged belly, poking my chest. Her feathers glistened like rust in the rain. “Apollo,” she said. “You’re all wrong, though. Wrong body. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Don Siegel, 1956.”
I did not like being compared to a black-and-white horror film, but I’d just been told not to argue with the harpy.
Meanwhile, Tyson adjusted the tattoo chair into a flat bed. He lay on his stomach, the recently inked purple lines of script rippling across his scarred, muscular back.
“Ready!” he announced.
The obvious finally dawned on me.
“The words that memory wrought are set to fire,” I recalled. “You’re rewriting the Sibylline Books on Tyson with hot needles. That’s what the prophecy meant.”
“Yep.” Ella poked my love handles as if assessing them for a writing surface. “Hmm. Nope. Too flabby.”
“Thanks,” I grumbled.
Frank shifted his weight, suddenly looking self-conscious about his own writing surfaces. “Ella says it’s the only way she can record the words in the right order,” he explained. “On living skin.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised. In the last few months, I’d sorted out prophecies by listening to the insane voices of trees, hallucinating in a dark cave, and racing across a fiery crossword puzzle. By comparison, assembling a manuscript on a Cyclops’s back so
unded downright civilized.
“But…how far have you gotten?” I asked.
“The first lumbar,” Ella said.
She showed no sign that she was joking.
Facedown on his torture bed, Tyson paddled his feet excitedly. “READY! Oh, boy! Tattoos tickle!”
“Ella,” I tried again, “what I mean is: Have you found anything useful for us concerning—oh, I don’t know—threats in the next four days? Frank said you had a lead?”
“Yep, found the tomb.” She poked my love handles again. “Death, death, death. Lots of death.”
Dearly beloved,
We are gathered here because
Hera stinks. Amen.
IF THERE IS ANYTHING worse than hearing Death, death, death, it’s hearing those words while having your flab poked.
“Can you be more specific?”
I actually wanted to ask: Can you make all of this go away, and can you also stop poking me? But I doubted I would get either wish.
“Cross references,” Ella said.
“Sorry?”
“Tarquin’s tomb,” she said. “The Burning Maze words. Frank told me: Apollo faces death in Tarquin’s tomb unless the doorway to the soundless god is opened by Bellona’s daughter.”
“I know the prophecy,” I said. “I sort of wish people would stop repeating it. What exactly—?”
“Cross-referenced Tarquin and Bellona and soundless god with Tyson’s index.”
I turned to Frank, who seemed to be the only other comprehensible person in the room. “Tyson has an index?”
Frank shrugged. “He wouldn’t be much of a reference book without an index.”
“On the back of my thigh!” Tyson called, still happily kicking his feet, waiting to be engraved with red-hot needles. “Want to see?”
“No! Gods, no. So you cross-referenced—”
“Yep, yep,” said Ella. “No results for Bellona or the soundless god. Hmm.” She tapped the sides of her head. “Need more words for those. But Tarquin’s tomb. Yep. Found a line.”
She scuttled to the tattoo chair, Aristophanes trotting close behind, swatting at her wings. Ella tapped Tyson’s shoulder blade. “Here.”
Tyson giggled.
“A wildcat near the spinning lights,” Ella read aloud. “The tomb of Tarquin with horses bright. To open his door, two-fifty-four.”
Mrow, said Aristophanes.
“No, Aristophanes,” Ella said, her tone softening, “you are not a wildcat.”
The beast purred like a chainsaw.
I waited for more prophecy. Most of the Sibylline Books read like The Joy of Cooking, with sacrificial recipes to placate the gods in the event of certain catastrophes. Plague of locusts ruining your crops? Try the Ceres soufflé with loaves of honey bread roasted over her altar for three days. Earthquake destroying the city? When Neptune comes home tonight, surprise him with three black bulls basted in holy oil and burned in a fire pit with sprigs of rosemary!
But Ella seemed to be done reading.
“Frank,” I said, “did that make any sense to you?”
He frowned. “I thought you would understand it.”
When would people realize that just because I was the god of prophecy didn’t mean I understood prophecies? I was also the god of poetry. Did I understand the metaphors in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land? No.
“Ella,” I said, “could those lines describe a location?”
“Yep, yep. Close by, probably. But only to go in. Look around. Find out the right things and leave. Not to kill Tarquinius Superbus. Nope. He’s much too dead to kill. For that, hmm…Need more words.”
Frank Zhang picked at the mural-crown badge on his chest. “Tarquinius Superbus. The last king of Rome. He was considered a myth even back in Imperial Roman times. His tomb was never discovered. Why would he be…?” He gestured around us.
“In our neck of the woods?” I finished. “Probably the same reason Mount Olympus is hovering above New York, or Camp Jupiter is in the Bay Area.”
“Okay, that’s fair,” Frank admitted. “Still, if the tomb of a Roman king was near Camp Jupiter, why would we just be learning about it now? Why the attack of the undead?”
I didn’t have a ready answer. I’d been so fixated on Caligula and Commodus, I hadn’t given much thought to Tarquinius Superbus. As evil as he might have been, Tarquin had been a minor-league player compared to the emperors. Nor did I understand why a semilegendary, barbaric, apparently undead Roman king would have joined forces with the Triumvirate.
Some distant memory tickled at the base of my skull…. It couldn’t be a coincidence that Tarquin would make himself known just as Ella and Tyson were reconstructing the Sibylline Books.
I remembered my dream of the purple-eyed entity, the deep voice that had possessed the eurynomos in the tunnel: You of all people should understand the fragile boundary between life and death.
The cut across my stomach throbbed. Just once, for variety, I wished I could encounter a tomb where the occupants were actually dead.
“So, Ella,” I said, “you suggest we find this tomb.”
“Yep. Go in the tomb. Tomb Raider for PC, Playstation, and Sega Saturn, 1996. Tombs of Atuan, Ursula Le Guin, Atheneum Press, 1971.”
I barely noticed the extraneous information this time. If I stayed here much longer, I’d probably start speaking in Ella-ese, too, spouting random Wikipedia references after every sentence. I really needed to leave before that happened.
“But we only go in to look around,” I said. “To find out—”
“The right things. Yep, yep.”
“And then?”
“Come back alive. ‘Stayin’ Alive,’ the Bee Gees, second single, Saturday Night Fever motion picture sound track, 1977.”
“Right. And…you’re sure there’s no more information in the Cyclops index that might actually be, oh, helpful?”
“Hmm.” Ella stared at Frank, then trotted over and sniffed his face. “Firewood. Something. No. That’s for later.”
Frank couldn’t have looked more like a cornered animal if he’d actually turned into one. “Um, Ella? We don’t talk about the firewood.”
That reminded me of another reason I liked Frank Zhang. He, too, was a member of the I Hate Hera club. In Frank’s case, Hera had inexplicably tied his life force to a small piece of wood, which I’d heard Frank now carried around with him at all times. If the wood burned up, so did Frank. Such a typical controlling Hera thing to do: I love you and you’re my special hero, and also here’s a stick—when it burns you die HA-HA-HA-HA-HA. I disliked that woman.
Ella ruffled her feathers, providing Aristophanes with lots of new targets to play with. “Fire with…something, something bridge. Twice something, something…Hmm, nope. That’s later. Need more words. Tyson needs a tattoo.”
“Yay!” said Tyson. “Can you also do a picture of Rainbow? He’s my friend! He’s a fish pony!”
“A rainbow is white light,” Ella said. “Refracted through water droplets.”
“Also a fish pony!” Tyson said.
“Hmph,” said Ella.
I got the feeling I had just witnessed the closest the harpy and Cyclops ever came to having an argument.
“You two can go.” Ella brushed us away. “Come back tomorrow. Maybe three days. ‘Eight Days a Week,’ Beatles. First UK release, 1964. Not sure yet.”
I was about to protest that we had only four days before Caligula’s yachts arrived and Camp Jupiter suffered another onslaught of destruction, but Frank stopped me with a touch on the arm. “We should go. Let her work. It’s almost time for evening muster anyway.”
After the mention of firewood, I got the feeling he would have used any faun-level excuse to get out of that bookstore.
My last glimpse of the special-collections room was Ella holding her tattoo gun, etching steaming words on Tyson’s back while the Cyclops giggled, “IT TICKLES!” and Aristophanes used the harpy’s rough leather legs as scratching posts.
Some images, like Cyclops tattoos, are permanent once burned onto your brain.
Frank hustled us back to camp as fast as my wounded gut would tolerate.
I wanted to ask him about Ella’s comments, but Frank wasn’t in a talkative mood. Every so often his hand strayed to the side of his belt, where a cloth pouch hung tucked behind his scabbard. I hadn’t noticed it before, but I assumed this was where he stored his Hera-Cursed Life-Ending Souvenir™.
Or perhaps Frank was somber because he knew what awaited us at evening muster.
The legion had assembled for the funeral procession.
At the head of the column stood Hannibal, the legion’s elephant, decked in Kevlar and black flowers. Harnessed behind him was a wagon with Jason’s coffin, draped in purple and gold. Four of the cohorts had fallen into line behind the coffin, with purple Lares shifting in and out of their ranks. The Fifth Cohort, Jason’s original unit, served as honor guards and torch bearers on either side of the wagon. Standing with them, between Hazel and Lavinia, was Meg McCaffrey. She frowned when she saw me and mouthed, You’re late.
Frank jogged over to join Reyna, who was waiting at Hannibal’s shoulder.
The senior praetor looked drained and weary, as if she’d spent the last few hours weeping in private and then pulled herself back together as best she could. Next to her stood the legion’s standard bearer, holding aloft the eagle of the Twelfth.
Being close to the eagle made my hairs stand on end. The golden icon reeked of Jupiter’s power. The air around it crackled with energy.
“Apollo.” Reyna’s tone was formal, her eyes like empty wells. “Are you prepared?”
“For…?” The question died in my throat.
Everyone was staring at me expectantly. Did they want another song?
No. Of course. The legion had no high priest, no pontifex maximus. Their former augur, my descendant Octavian, had died in the battle against Gaia. (Which I had a hard time feeling sad about, but that’s another story.) Jason would’ve been the logical next choice to officiate, but he was our guest of honor. That meant that I, as a former god, was the ranking spiritual authority. I would be expected to lead the funeral rites.
