by Rick Riordan
I fought down the urge to defend myself. I wanted to shout, Well, at least I didn’t kill him like I did my pregnant girlfriend Koronis! But that wasn’t much of a gotcha.
Looking back on my encounters with Harpocrates, I realized I had been awful. If somebody had treated me, Lester, the way I had treated that puny Ptolemaic god, I would want to crawl in a hole and die. And if I were honest, even back when I was a god, I had been bullied—only the bully had been my father. I should have known better than to share the pain.
I hadn’t thought about Harpocrates in eons. Teasing him had seemed like no big deal. I suppose that’s what made it even worse. I had shrugged off our encounters. I doubted he had.
Koronis’s ravens…Harpocrates…
It was no coincidence they were both haunting me today like the Ghosts of Saturnalias Past. Tarquin had orchestrated all this with me in mind. He was forcing me to confront some of my greatest hits of dreadfulness. Even if I survived the challenges, my friends would see exactly what kind of dirtbag I was. The shame would weigh me down and make me ineffective—the same way Tarquin used to add rocks to a cage around his enemy’s head, until eventually, the burden was too much. The prisoner would collapse and drown in a shallow pool, and Tarquin could claim, I didn’t kill him. He just wasn’t strong enough.
I took a deep breath. “All right, I was a bully. I see that now. I will march right into that box and apologize. And then hope Harpocrates doesn’t vaporize me.”
Reyna did not look thrilled. She pushed up her sleeve, revealing a simple black watch on her wrist. She checked the time, perhaps wondering how long it would take to get me vaporized and then get back to camp.
“Assuming we can get through those doors,” she said, “what are we up against? Tell me about Harpocrates.”
I tried to summon a mental image of the god. “He usually looks like a child. Perhaps ten years old?”
“You bullied a ten-year-old,” Meg grumbled.
“He looks ten. I didn’t say he was ten. He has a shaved head except for a ponytail on one side.”
“Is that an Egyptian thing?” Reyna asked.
“Yes, for children. Harpocrates was originally an incarnation of the god Horus—Harpa-Khruti, Horus the Child. Anyway, when Alexander the Great invaded Egypt, the Greeks found all these statues of the god and didn’t know what to make of him. He was usually depicted with his finger to his lips.” I demonstrated.
“Like be quiet,” Meg said.
“That’s exactly what the Greeks thought. The gesture had nothing to do with shh. It symbolized the hieroglyph for child. Nevertheless, the Greeks decided he must be the god of silence and secrets. They changed his name to Harpocrates. They built some shrines, started worshipping him, and boom, he’s a Greek-Egyptian hybrid god.”
Meg snorted. “It can’t be that easy to make a new god.”
“Never underestimate the power of thousands of human minds all believing the same thing. They can remake reality. Sometimes for the better, sometimes not.”
Reyna peered at the doors. “And now Harpocrates is in there. You think he’s powerful enough to cause all our communications failures?”
“He shouldn’t be. I don’t understand how—”
“Those cables.” Meg pointed. “They’re connecting the box to the tower. Could they be boosting his signal somehow? Maybe that’s why he’s up here.”
Reyna nodded appreciatively. “Meg, next time I need to set up a gaming console, I’m calling you. Maybe we could just cut the cables and not open the box.”
I loved that idea, which was a pretty good indication it wouldn’t work.
“It won’t be enough,” I decided. “The daughter of Bellona has to open the door to the soundless god, right? And for our ritual summoning to work, we need the last breath of the god after his…um, soul is cut free.”
Talking about the Sibylline recipe in the safety of the praetors’ office had been one thing. Talking about it on Sutro Tower, facing the god’s big red shipping container, was quite another.
I felt a deep sense of unease that had nothing to do with the cold, or the proximity of the sphere of silence, or even the zombie poison circulating in my blood. A few moments ago, I had admitted to bullying Harpocrates. I had decided to apologize. Then what? I would kill him for the sake of a prophecy? Another rock plopped into the invisible cage around my head.
Meg must have felt similarly. She made her best I-don’t-wanna scowl and started fidgeting with the tatters of her dress. “We don’t really have to…you know, do we? I mean even if this Harpo guy is working for the emperors…”
“I don’t think he is.” Reyna nodded toward the chains on the locking rods. “It looks like he’s being kept in. He’s a prisoner.”
“That’s even worse,” Meg said.
From where I stood, I could just make out the white stenciled Arabic for Alexandria on the door of the container. I imagined the Triumvirate digging up Harpocrates from some buried temple in the Egyptian desert, wrestling him into that box, then shipping him off to America like third-class freight. The emperors would’ve considered Harpocrates just another dangerous, amusing plaything, like their trained monsters and humanoid lackeys.
And why not let King Tarquin be his custodian? The emperors could ally themselves with the undead tyrant, at least temporarily, to make their invasion of Camp Jupiter a little easier. They could let Tarquin arrange his cruelest trap for me. Whether I killed Harpocrates or he killed me, what did it matter to the Triumvirate in the end? Either way, they would find it entertaining—one more gladiator match to break the monotony of their immortal lives.
Pain flared from the stab wound in my neck. I realized I’d been clenching my jaw in anger.
“There has to be another way,” I said. “The prophecy can’t mean for us to kill Harpocrates. Let’s talk to him. Figure something out.”
“How can we,” Reyna asked, “if he radiates silence?”
“That…that’s a good question,” I admitted. “First things first. We have to get those doors open. Can you two cut the chains?”
Meg looked scandalized. “With my swords?”
“Well, I thought they would work better than your teeth, but you tell me.”
“Guys,” said Reyna. “Imperial gold blades hacking away at Imperial gold chains? Maybe we could cut through, but we’d be here until nightfall. We don’t have that kind of time. I’ve got another idea. Godly strength.”
She looked at me.
“But I don’t have any!” I protested.
“You got your archery skills back,” she said. “You got your musical skills back.”
“That Valerie song didn’t count,” Meg said.
“‘Volare,’” I corrected.
“The point is,” Reyna continued, “I may be able to boost your strength. I think that might be why I’m here.”
I thought about the jolt of energy I’d felt when Reyna touched my arm. It hadn’t been physical attraction, or a warning buzz from Venus. I recalled something she had told Frank before we left camp. “Bellona’s power,” I said. “It has something to do with strength in numbers?”
Reyna nodded. “I can amplify other people’s abilities. The bigger the group, the better it works, but even with three people…it might be sufficient to enhance your power enough to rip open those doors.”
“Would that count?” Meg asked. “I mean, if Reyna doesn’t open the door herself, isn’t that cheating the prophecy?”
Reyna shrugged. “Prophecies never mean what you think, right? If Apollo is able to open the door thanks to my help, I’m still responsible, wouldn’t you say?”
“Besides…” I pointed to the horizon. Hours of daylight remained, but the full moon was rising, enormous and white, over the hills of Marin County. Soon enough, it would turn bloodred—and so, I feared, would a whole lot of our friends. “We’re running out of time. If we can cheat, let’s cheat.”
I realized those would make terrible final words. Nevertheless, Reyna and Meg follo
wed me into the cold silence.
When we reached the doors, Reyna took Meg’s hand. She turned to me: Ready? Then she planted her other hand on my shoulder.
Strength surged through me. I laughed with soundless joy. I felt as potent as I had in the woods at Camp Half-Blood, when I’d tossed one of Nero’s barbarian bodyguards into low earth orbit. Reyna’s power was awesome! If I could just get her to follow me around the whole time I was mortal, her hand on my shoulder, a chain of twenty or thirty other demigods behind her, I bet there was nothing I couldn’t accomplish!
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 s
tupid sometimes—we had to work together to stop the Triumvirate.
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.
