The Battle of the Labyrinth pjato-4

by Rick Riordan

  It was too easy, but I approached the dais.

  The sarcophagus was just like I remembered—about ten feet long, much too big for a human. It was carved with elaborate scenes of death and destruction, pictures of the gods being trodden under chariots, temples and famous world landmarks being smashed and burned. The whole coffin gave off an aura of extreme cold, like I was walking into a freezer. My breath began to steam.

  I drew Riptide and too a little comfort from the familiar weight of the sword in my hand.

  Whenever I’d approached Kronos before, his evil voice had spoken in my mind. Why was he silent now? He’d been shred into a thousand pieces, cut with his own scythe. What would I find if I opened that lid? How could they make a new body for him?

  I had no answers. I just knew that if he was about to rise, I had to strike him down before he got his scythe. I had to figure out a way to stop him. I stood over the coffin. The lid was decorated even more intricately than the sides—with scenes of carnage and power. In the middle was an inscription carved in letters even older than Greek, a language of magic. I couldn’t read it, exactly, but I knew what it said: KRONOS, LORD OF

  TIME.

  My hand touched the lid. My fingertips turned blue. Frost gathered on my sword.

  Then I heard noises behind me—voices approaching. It was now or never. I pushed back the golden lid and it fell to the floor with a huge WHOOOOM!

  I lifted my sword, ready to strike. But when I looked inside, I didn’t comprehend what I was seeing. Mortal legs, dressed in gray pants. A white T-shirt, hands folded over his stomach. One piece of his chest was missing—a clean black hole about the size of a bullet wound, right where his heart should’ve been. His eyes were closed. His skin was pale. Blond hair…and a scar running along the left side of his face.

  The body in the coffin was Luke’s.

  * * *

  I should have stabbed him right then. I should’ve brought the point of Riptide down with all my strength.

  But I was too stunned. I didn’t understand. As much as I hated Luke, as much as he had betrayed me, I just didn’t get why he was in the coffin, and why he looked so very, very dead.

  Then the voices of the telekhines were right behind me.

  “What has happened!” one of the demons screamed when he saw the lid. I stumbled away from the dais, forgetting that I was invisible, and hid behind a column as they approached.

  “Careful!” the other demon warned. “Perhaps he stirs. We must present the gifts now. Immediately!”

  The two telekhines shuffled forward and knelt, holding up the scythe on its wrapping cloth. “My lord,” one said. “Your symbol of power is remade.”

  Silence. Nothing happened in the coffin.

  “You fool,” the other telekhine muttered. “He requires the half-blood first.”

  Ethan stepped back. “Whoa, what do you mean, he requires me?”

  “Don’t be a coward!” the first telekhine hissed. “He does not require your death. Only your allegiance. Pledge him your service. Renounce the gods. That is all.”

  “No!” I yelled. It was a stupid thing to do, but I charged into the room and took off the cap. “Ethan, don’t!”

  “Trespasser!” The telekhines bared their seal teeth. “The master will deal with you soon enough. Hurry, boy!”

  “Ethan,” I pleaded, “don’t listen to them. Help me destroy it.”

  Ethan turned toward me, his eye patch blending in with the shadows on his face. His expression was something like pity. “I told you not to spare me, Percy. ‘An eye for an eye.’ You ever hear that saying? I learned what it means the hard way—when I discovered my godly parent. I’m the child of Nemesis, Goddess of Revenge. And this is what I was made to do.”

  He turned toward the dais. “I renounce the gods! What have they ever done for me? I will see them destroyed. I will serve Kronos.”

  The building rumbled. A wisp of blue light rose from the floor at Ethan Nakamura’s feet. It drifted toward the coffin and began to shimmer, like a cloud of pure energy. Then it descended on the sarcophagus. Luke sat bolt upright. His eyes opened, and they were no longer blue. They were golden, the same color as the coffin. The hole in his chest was gone. He was complete. He leaped out of the coffin with ease, and where his feet touched the floor, the marble froze like craters of ice. He looked at Ethan and the telekhines with htose horrible golden eyes, as if he were a newborn baby, not sure what he was seeing. Then he looked at me, and a smile of recognition crept across his mouth.

  “This body has been well prepared.” His voice was like a razor blade running over my skin. It was Luke’s, but not Luke’s. underneath his voice was another, more horrible sound—an ancient, cold sound like metal scraping against rock. “Don’t you think so, Percy Jackson?”

  I couldn’t move. I couldn’t answer.

  Kronos threw back his head and laughed. The scar on his face rippled.

  “Luke feared you,” the Titan’s voice said. “His jealously and hatred have been powerful tools. It has kept him obedient. For that I thank you.”

  Ethan collapsed in terror. He covered his face with his hands. The telekhines trembled, holding up the scythe.

  Finally I found my nerve. I lunged at the thing that used to be Luke, thrusting my blade straight at his chest, but his skin deflected the blow like he was made of pure steel. He looked at me with amusement. Then he flicked his hand, and I flew across the room.

  I slammed against a pillar. I struggled to my feet, blinking the stars out of my eyes, but Kronos had already grasped the handle of his scythe.

  “Ah…much better,” he said. “Backbiter, Luke called it. An appropriate name. now that it is re-forged completely, it shall indeed bite back.”

  “What have you done to Luke?” I groaned.

  Kronos raised his scythe. “He serves me with his whole being, as I require. The difference is, he feared you, Percy Jackson. I do not.”

  That’s when I ran. There wasn’t even any thought to it. No debate in my mind about—gee, should I stand up to him and try to fight again? Nope, I simply ran.

  But my feet felt like lead. Time slowed down around me, like the world was turning to Jell-O. I’d had this feeling once before, and I knew it was the power of Kronos. His presence was so strong it could bend time itself.

  “Run, little hero,” he laughed. “Run!”

  I glanced back and saw him approaching leisurely, swinging his scythe as if he were enjoying the feel of having it in his hands again. No weapon in the world could stop him. No amount of celestial bronze.

  He was ten feet away when I heard, “PERCY!”

  Rachel’s voice.

  Something flew past me, and a blue plastic hairbrush hit Kronos in the eye.

  “Ow!” he yelled. For a moment it was only Luke’s voice, full of surprise and pain. My limbs were freed and I ran straight into Rachel, Nico, and Annabeth, who were standing in the entry hall, their eyes filled with dismay.

  “Luke?” Annabeth called. “What—”

  I grabbed her by the shirt and hauled her after me. I ran as fast as I’ve ever run, straight out of the fortress. We were almost back to the Labyrinth entrance when I heard the loudest bellow in the world—the voice of Kronos, coming back into control. “AFTER THEM!”

  “No!” Nico yelled. He clapped his hands together, and a jagged spire of rock the size of an eighteen-wheeler erupted from the ground right in front of the fortress. The tremor it caused was so powerful the front columns of the building came crashing down. I heard muffled screams from the telekhines inside. Dust billowed everywhere.

  We plunged into the Labyrinth and kept running, the howl of the Titan lord shaking the entire world behind us.

  SEVENTEEN

  THE LOST GOD SPEAKS

  We ran until we were exhausted. Rachel steered us away from traps, but we had no destination in mind—only away from that dark mountain and the roar of Kronos.

  We stopped in a tunnel of wet white rock, like part of
a natural cave. I couldn’t hear anything behind us, but I didn’t feel any safer. I could still remember those unnatural golden eyes staring out of Luke’s face, and the feeling that my limbs were slowly turning to stone.

  “I can’t go any farther,” Rachel gasped, hugging her chest. Annabeth had been crying the entire time we’d been running. Now she collapsed and put her head between her knees. Her sobs echoed in the tunnel. Nico and I sat next to each other. He dropped his sword next to mine and took a shaky breath.

  “That sucked,” he said, which I thought summed things up pretty well.

  “You saved our lives,” I said.

  Nico wiped the dust off his face. “Blame the girls for dragging me along. That’s the only thing they could agree on. We needed to help you or you’d mess things up.”

  “Nice that they trust me so much,” I shined my flashlight across the cavern. Water dripped from the stalactites like a slow-motion rain.

  “Nico…you, uh, kind of gave yourself away.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That wall of black stone? That was pretty impressive. If Kronos didn’t know who you were before, he does now—a child of the Underworld.”

  Nico frowned. “Big deal.”

  I let it drop. I figured he was just trying to hide how scared he was, and I couldn’t blame him.

  Annabeth lifted her head. Her eyes were red from crying. “What…what was wrong with Luke? What did they do to him?”

  I told her what I’d seen in the coffin, the way the last piece of Kronos’s spirit had entered Luke’s body when Ethan Nakamura pledged his service.

  “No,” Annabeth said. “That can’t be true. He couldn’t—”

  “He gave himself over to Kronos,” I said. “I’m sorry, Annabeth. But Luke is gone.”

  “No!” she insisted. “You saw when Rachel hit him.”

  I nodded, looking at Rachel with respect. “You hit the Lord of the Titans in the eye with a blue plastic hairbrush.”

  Rachel looked embarrassed. “It was the only thing I had.”

  “But you saw,” Annabeth insisted. “When it hit him, just for a second, he was dazed. He came back to his senses.”

  “So maybe Kronos wasn’t completely settled in the body, or whatever,” I said. “It doesn’t mean Luke was in control.”

  “You want him to be evil, is that it?” Annabeth yelled. “You didn’t know him before, Percy. I did!”

  “What is it with you?” I snapped. “Why do you keep defending him?”

  “Whoa, you two,” Rachel said. “Knock it off!”

  Annabeth turned on her. “Stay out of it, mortal girl! If it wasn’t for you…”

  Whatever she was going to say, her voice broke. She put her head down and sobbed miserably. I wanted to comfort her, but I didn’t know how. I still felt stunned, like Kronos’s time-slow effect had affected my brain. I just couldn’t comprehend what I’d seen. Kronos was alive. He was armed. And the end of the world was probably close at hand.

  “We have to keep moving,” Nico said. “He’ll send monsters after us.”

  Nobody was in any shape to run, but Nico was right. I hauled myself up and helped Rachel to her feet.

  “You did good back there,” I told her.

  She managed a weak smile. “Yeah, well. I didn’t want you to die.” She blushed. “I mean…just because, you know. You owe me too many favors. How am I going to collect if you die?”

  I knelt next to Annabeth. “Hey, I’m sorry. We need to move.”

  “I know,” she said. “I’m…I’m all right.”

  She was clearly not all right. But she got to her feet, and we started straggling back through the Labyrinth again.

  “Back to New York,” I said. “Rachel, can you—”

  I froze. A few feet in front of us, my flashlight beam fixed on a trampled clump of red fabric lying on the ground. It was a Rasta cap: the one Grover always wore.

  * * *

  My hands shook as I picked up the cap. It looked like it had been stepped on by a huge muddy boot. After all that I’d gone through today, I couldn’t stand the thought that something might’ve happened to Grover, too. Then I noticed something else. The cave floor was mushy and wet from the water dripping off the stalactites. There were large footprints like Tyson’s, and smaller ones—goat hooves—leading off to the left.

  “We have to follow them,” I said. “They went that way. It must have been recently.”

  “What about Camp Half-Blood?” Nico said. “There’s no time.”

  “We have to find them,” Annabeth insisted. “They’re our friends.”

  She picked up Grover’s smashed cap and forged ahead.

  I followed bracing myself for the worst. The tunnel was treacherous. It sloped at weird angles and was slimy with moisture. Half the time we were slipping and sliding rather than walking.

  Finally we got to the bottom of a slope and found ourselves in a large cave with huge stalagmite columns. Through the center of the room ran an underground river, and Tyson was sitting by the banks, cradling Grover in his lap. Grover’s eyes were closed. He wasn’t moving.

  “Tyson!” I yelled.

  “Percy! Come quick!”

  We ran over to him. Grover wasn’t dead, thank the gods, but his whole body trembled like he was freezing to death.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “So many things,” Tyson murmured. “Large snake. Large dogs. Men with swords. But then…we got close to here. Grover was excited. He ran. Then we reached this room, and he fell. Like this.”

  “Did he say anything?” I asked.

  “He said, ‘We’re close.’ Then hit his head on rocks.”

  I knelt next to him. The only other time I’d seen Grover pass out was New Mexico, when he’d felt the presence of Pan.

  I shined my flashlight around the cavern. The rocks glittered. At the far end was the entrance to another cave, flanked by gigantic columns of crystal that looked like diamonds. And beyond that entrance…

  “Grover,” I said. “Wake up.”

  “Uhhhhhhhh.”

  Annabeth knelt next to him and splashed icy cold river water in his face.

  “Splurg!” His eyelids fluttered. “Percy? Annabeth? Where…”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “You passed out. The presence was too much for you.”

  “I—I remember. Pan.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Something powerful is just beyond that doorway.”

  * * *

  I made quick introductions, since Tyson and Grover had never met Rachel. Tyson told Rachel she was pretty, which made Annabeth’s nostrils flare like she was going to blow fire.

  “Anyway,” I said. “Come on, Grover. Lean on me.”

  Annabeth and I helped him up, and together we waded across the underground river. The current was strong. The water came up to our waists. I willed myself to stay dry, which is a handy little ability, but that didn’t help the others, and I could still feel the cold, like wading through a snowdrift.

  “I think we’re in Carlsbad Caverns,” Annabeth said, her teeth chattering.

  “Maybe an unexplored section.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Carlsbad is in New Mexico,” she said. “That would explain last winter.”

  I nodded. Grover’s swooning episode had happened when we passed through New Mexico. That’s where he’d felt closest to the power of Pan. We got out of the water and kept walking. As the crystal pillars loomed larger, I started to feel the power emanating from the next room. I’d been in the presence of gods before, but this was different. My skin tingled with living energy. My weariness fell away, as if I’d just gotten a good night’s sleep. I could feel myself growing stronger, like one of those plants in a time-lapse video. And the scent coming from the cave was nothing like the dank wet underground. It smelled of trees and flowers and a warm summer day.

  Grover whimpered with excitement. I was too stunned to talk. Even Nico seemed speechless. We stepped into th
e cave, and Rachel said, “Oh, wow.”

  The walls glittered with crystals—red, green, and blue. In the strange light, beautiful plants grew—giant orchids, star-shaped flowers, vines bursting with orange and purple berries that crept among the crystals. The cave floor was covered with green moss. Overhead, the ceiling was higher than a cathedral, sparkling like a galaxy of stars. In the center of the cave stood a Roman-style bed, gilded wood shaped like a curly U, with velvet cushions. Animals lounged around it—but they were animals that shouldn’t have been alive. There was a dodo bird, something that looked like a cross between a wolf and a tiger, a huge rodent like the mother of all guinea pigs, and roaming behind the bed, picking berries with its trunk, was a wooly mammoth.

  On the bed lay an old satyr. He watched us as we approached, his eyes as blue as the sky. His curly hair was white and so was his pointed beard. Even the goat fur on his legs was frosted with gray. His horns were enormous—

  glossy brown and curved. There was no way he could’ve hidden those under a hat the way Grover did. Around his neck hung a set of reed pipes. Grover fell to his knees in front of the bed. “Lord Pan!”

  The god smiled kindly, but there was sadness in his eyes. “Grover, my dear, brave satyr. I have waited a very long time for you.”

  “I…got lost,” Grover apologized.

  Pan laughed. It was a wonderful sound, like the first breeze of springtime, filling the whole cavern with hope. The tiger-wolf sighed and rested his head on the god’s knee. The dodo bird pecked affectionately at the god’s hooves, making a strange sound in the back of its bill. I could swear it was humming

  “It’s a Small World.”

  Still, Pan looked tired. His whole form shimmered as if he were made of Mist.

  I noticed my other friends were kneeling. They had awed looks on their faces. I got to my knees.

  “You have a humming dodo bird,” I said stupidly.

  The god’s eyes twinkled. “Yes, that’s Dede. My little actress.”

  Dede the dodo looked offended. She pecked at Pan’s knee and hummed something that sounded like a funeral dirge.

  “This is the most beautiful place!” Annabeth said. “It’s better than any building ever designed.”