The Trials of Apollo, Book Three: The Burning Maze

by Rick Riordan

  As the dragons barreled toward us, Meg stood her ground, which was either admirable or suicidal. I tried to decide whether to cower behind her or leap out of the way—both options less admirable but also less suicidal—when the choice became irrelevant. Piper threw her dagger, impaling the left dragon’s eye.

  Left Dragon shrieked in pain, pushed against Right Dragon, and sent the chariot veering off course. Medea barreled past us, just out of reach of Meg’s swords, and disappeared into the darkness while screaming insults at her pets in ancient Colchian—a language no longer spoken, but which featured twenty-seven different words for kill and not a single way to say Apollo rocks. I hated the Colchians.

  “You guys okay?” Piper asked. The tip of her nose was sunburn red. The harpy feather smoldered in her hair. Such things happened during close encounters with superheated lizards.

  “Fine,” Meg grumbled. “I didn’t even get to stab anything.”

  I gestured at Piper’s empty knife sheath. “Nice shot.”

  “Yeah, now if I only had more daggers. Guess I’m back to using blowgun darts.”

  Meg shook her head. “Against those dragons? Did you see their armored hides? I’ll take them with my swords.”

  In the distance, Medea continued yelling, trying to get her beasts under control. The harsh creak of wheels told me the chariot was turning for another pass.

  “Meg,” I said, “it’ll only take Medea one charmspoken word to defeat you. If she says stumble at the right moment…”

  Meg glowered at me, as if it were my fault the sorceress could charmspeak. “Can we shut up Magic Lady somehow?”

  “It would be easier to cover your ears,” I suggested.

  Meg retracted her blades. She rummaged through her supplies while the rumble of the chariot’s wheels got faster and closer.

  “Hurry,” I said.

  Meg ripped open a pack of seeds. She sprinkled some in each of her ear canals, then pinched her nose and exhaled. Tufts of bluebonnets sprouted from her ears.

  “That’s interesting,” Piper said.

  “WHAT?” Meg shouted.

  Piper shook her head. Never mind.

  Meg offered us bluebonnet seeds. We both declined. Piper, I guessed, was naturally resistant to other charmspeakers. As for me, I did not intend to get close enough to be Medea’s primary target. Nor did I have Meg’s weakness—a conflicted desire, misguided but powerful, to please her stepfather and reclaim some semblance of home and family—which Medea could and would exploit. Besides, the idea of walking around with lupines sticking out of my ears made me queasy.

  “Get ready,” I warned.

  “WHAT?” Meg asked.

  I pointed at Medea’s chariot, now charging toward us out of the gloom. I traced my finger across my throat, the universal sign for kill that sorceress and her dragons.

  Meg summoned her swords.

  She charged the sun dragons as if they were not ten times her size.

  Medea yelled with what sounded like real concern, “Move, Meg!”

  Meg charged on, her festive ear protection bouncing up and down like giant blue dragonfly wings. Just before a head-on collision, Piper shouted, “DRAGONS, HALT!”

  Medea countered, “DRAGONS, GO!”

  The result: chaos not seen since Plan Thermopylae.

  The beasts lurched in their harnesses, Right Dragon charging forward, Left Dragon stopping completely. Right stumbled, pulling Left forward so the two dragons crashed together. The yoke twisted and the chariot toppled sideways, throwing Medea across the pavement like a cow from a catapult.

  Before the dragons could recover, Meg plunged in with her double blades. She beheaded Left and Right, releasing from their bodies a blast of heat so intense my sinuses sizzled.

  Piper ran forward and yanked her dagger from the dead dragon’s eye.

  “Good job,” she told Meg.

  “WHAT?” Meg asked.

  I emerged from behind a cement column, where I had courageously taken cover, waiting in case my friends required backup.

  Pools of dragon blood steamed at Meg’s feet. Her lupine ear accessories smoked, and her cheeks were burned, but otherwise she looked unharmed. The heat radiating from the sun dragon bodies had already started to cool.

  Thirty feet away, in a COMPACT CAR ONLY spot, Medea struggled to her feet. Her dark braided hairdo had come undone, spilling down one side of her face like oil from a punctured tanker. She staggered forward, baring her teeth.

  I slung my bow from my shoulder and fired a shot. My aim was decent, but even for a mortal, my strength was feeble. Medea flicked her fingers. A gust of wind sent my arrow spinning into the dark.

  “You killed Phil and Don!” snarled the sorceress. “They’ve been with me for millennia!”

  “WHAT?” Meg asked.

  With a wave of her hand, Medea summoned a stronger blast of air. Meg flew across the parking garage, crashed into the pillar, and crumpled, her swords clattering against the asphalt.

  “Meg!” I tried to run to her, but more wind swirled around me, caging me in a vortex.

  Medea laughed. “Stay right there, Apollo. I’ll get to you in a moment. Don’t worry about Meg. The descendants of Plemnaeus are of hardy stock. I won’t kill her unless I have to. Nero wants her alive.”

  The descendants of Plemnaeus? I wasn’t sure what that meant, or how it applied to Meg, but the thought of her being returned to Nero made me struggle harder.

  I threw myself against the miniature cyclone. The wind shoved me back. If you’ve ever held your hand out the window of the sun Maserati as it speeds across the sky, and felt the force of a thousand-mile-an-hour wind shear threatening to rip your immortal fingers off, I’m sure you can relate.

  “As for you, Piper…” Medea’s eyes glittered like black ice. “You remember my aerial servants, the venti? I could simply have one throw you against a wall and break every bone in your body, but what fun would that be?” She paused and seemed to consider her words. “Actually, that would be a lot of fun!”

  “Too scared?” Piper blurted out. “Of facing me yourself, woman to woman?”

  Medea sneered. “Why do heroes always do that? Why do they try to taunt me into doing something foolish?”

  “Because it usually works,” Piper said sweetly. She crouched with her blowgun in one hand and her knife in the other, ready to lunge or dodge as needed. “You keep saying you’re going to kill me. You keep telling me how powerful you are. But I keep beating you. I don’t see a powerful sorceress. I see a lady with two dead dragons and a bad hairdo.”

  I understood what Piper was doing, of course. She was giving us time—for Meg to regain consciousness, and for me to find a way out of my personal tornado prison. Neither event seemed likely. Meg lay motionless where she had fallen. Try as I might, I could not body-slam my way through the swirling ventus.

  Medea touched her crumbling hairdo, then pulled her hand away.

  “You’ve never beaten me, Piper McLean,” she growled. “In fact, you did me a favor by destroying my home in Chicago last year. If not for that, I wouldn’t have found my new friend here in Los Angeles. Our goals align very well indeed.”

  “Oh, I bet,” Piper said. “You and Caligula, the most twisted Roman emperor in history? A match made in Tartarus. In fact, that’s where I’m going to send you.”

  On the other side of the chariot wreckage, Meg McCaffrey’s fingers twitched. Her bluebonnet earplugs shivered as she took a deep breath. I had never been so glad to see wildflowers tremble in someone’s ears!

  I pushed my shoulder against the wind. I still couldn’t break through, but the barrier seemed to be softening, as if Medea was losing focus on her minion. Venti were fickle spirits. Without Medea keeping it on task, the air servant was likely to lose interest and fly off to find some nice pigeons or airplane pilots to harass.

  “Brave words, Piper,” said the sorceress. “Caligula wanted to kill you and Jason Grace, you know. It would have been simpler. But I convinced hi
m it would be better to let you suffer in exile. I liked the idea of you and your formerly famous father stuck on a dirt farm in Oklahoma, both of you slowly going mad with boredom and hopelessness.”

  Piper’s jaw muscles tensed. Suddenly she reminded me of her mother, Aphrodite, whenever someone on earth compared their own beauty to hers. “You’re going to regret letting me live.”

  “Probably.” Medea shrugged. “But it has been fun watching your world fall apart. As for Jason, that lovely boy with the name of my former husband—”

  “What about him?” Piper demanded. “If you’ve hurt him—”

  “Hurt him? Not at all! I imagine he’s in school right now, listening to some boring lecture, or writing an essay, or whatever dreary work mortal teenagers do. The last time you two were in the maze…” She smiled. “Yes, of course I know about that. We granted him access to the Sibyl. That’s the only way to find her, you know. I have to allow you to reach the center of the maze—unless you’re wearing the emperor’s shoes, of course.” Medea laughed, as if the idea amused her. “And really, they wouldn’t go with your outfit.”

  Meg tried to sit up. Her glasses had slipped sideways and were hanging from the tip of her nose.

  I elbowed my cyclone cage. The wind was definitely swirling more slowly now.

  Piper gripped her knife. “What did you do to Jason? What did the Sibyl say?”

  “She only told him the truth,” Medea said with satisfaction. “He wanted to know how to find the emperor. The Sibyl told him. But she told him a bit more than that, as Oracles often do. The truth was enough to break Jason Grace. He won’t be a threat to anyone now. Neither will you.”

  “You’re going to pay,” Piper said.

  “Lovely!” Medea rubbed her hands. “I’m feeling generous, so I’ll grant your request. A duel just between us, woman to woman. Choose your weapon. I’ll choose mine.”

  Piper hesitated, no doubt remembering how the wind had knocked my arrow aside. She shouldered her blowgun, leaving herself armed with just her dagger.

  “A pretty weapon,” Medea said. “Pretty like Helen of Troy. Pretty like you. But, woman to woman, let me give you some advice. Pretty can be useful. Powerful is better. For my weapon, I choose Helios, the Titan of the sun!”

  She lifted her arms, and fire erupted around her.

  RULE of dueling etiquette: When choosing a weapon for single combat, you should absolutely not choose to wield your grandfather.

  I was no stranger to fire.

  I had fed nuggets of molten gold to the sun horses with my bare hands. I’d gone swimming in the calderas of active volcanoes. (Hephaestus does throw a great pool party.) I had withstood the fiery breath of giants, dragons, and even my sister before she’d brushed her teeth in the morning. But none of those horrors could compare to the pure essence of Helios, former Titan of the sun.

  He had not always been hostile. Oh, he was fine in his glory days! I remembered his beardless face, eternally young and handsome, his curly dark hair crowned with a golden diadem of fire that made him too bright to look upon for more than an instant. In his flowing golden robes, his burning scepter in hand, he would stroll through the halls of Olympus, chatting and joking and flirting shamelessly.

  Yes, he was a Titan, but Helios had supported the gods during our first war with Kronos. He had fought at our sides against the giants. He possessed a kind and generous aspect—warm, as one would expect from the sun.

  But gradually, as the Olympians gained power and fame among human worshippers, the memory of the Titans faded. Helios appeared less and less often in the halls of Mount Olympus. He became distant, angry, fierce, withering—all those less desirable solar qualities.

  Humans began to look at me—brilliant, golden, and shining—and associate me with the sun. Can you blame them?

  I never asked for the honor. One morning I simply woke up and found myself the master of the sun chariot, along with all my other duties. Helios faded to a dim echo, a whisper from the depths of Tartarus.

  Now, thanks to his evil sorceress granddaughter, he was back. Sort of.

  A white-hot maelstrom roared around Medea. I felt Helios’s anger, his scorching temper that used to scare the daylights out of me. (Ew, bad pun. Sorry.)

  Helios had never been a god of all trades. He was not like me, with many talents and interests. He did one thing with dedication and piercing focus: he drove the sun. Now, I could feel how bitter he was, knowing that his role had been assumed by me, a mere dabbler in solar matters, a weekend sun-chariot driver. For Medea, gathering his power from Tartarus had not been difficult. She had simply called on his resentment, his desire for revenge. Helios was burning to destroy me, the god who had eclipsed him. (Ew, there’s another one.)

  Piper McLean ran. This was not a matter of bravery or cowardice. A demigod’s body simply wasn’t designed to endure such heat. Had she stayed in Medea’s proximity, Piper would have burst into flames.

  The only positive development: my ventus jailer vanished, most likely because Medea couldn’t focus on both him and Helios. I stumbled toward Meg, yanked her to her feet, and dragged her away from the growing firestorm.

  “Oh, no, Apollo,” Medea called out. “No running away!”

  I pulled Meg behind the nearest cement column and covered her as a curtain of flame sliced across the garage—sharp and fast and deadly, sucking the air from my lungs and setting my clothes on fire. I rolled instinctively, desperately, and crawled behind the next column over, smoking and dizzy.

  Meg staggered to my side. She was steaming and red but still alive, her toasted lupines stubbornly rooted in her ears. I had shielded her from the worst of the heat.

  From somewhere across the parking garage, Piper’s voice echoed, “Hey, Medea! Your aim sucks!”

  I peeked around the column as Medea turned toward the sound. The sorceress stood fixed in place, encircled in fire, releasing slices of white heat in every direction like spokes from the center of a wheel. One wave blasted in the direction of Piper’s voice.

  A moment later, Piper called, “Nope! Getting colder!”

  Meg shook my arm. “WHAT DO WE DO?”

  My skin felt like a cooked sausage casing. Blood sang in my veins, the lyrics being HOT, HOT, HOT!

  I knew I would die if I suffered even another glancing blast from that fire. But Meg was right. We had to do something. We couldn’t let Piper take all the (quite literal) heat.

  “Come out, Apollo!” Medea taunted. “Say hello to your old friend! Together you will fuel the New Sun!”

  Another curtain of heat flashed past, a few columns away. The essence of Helios did not roar or dazzle with many colors. It was ghostly white, almost transparent, but it would kill us as fast as exposure to a nuclear core. (Public safety announcement: Reader, do not go to your local nuclear power plant and stand in the reactor chamber.)

  I had no strategy to defeat Medea. I had no godly powers, no godly wisdom, nothing but a terrified feeling that, if I survived this, I would need another set of pink camo pants.

  Meg must have seen the hopelessness in my face.

  “ASK THE ARROW!” she yelled. “I WILL KEEP MAGIC LADY DISTRACTED!”

  I hated that idea. I was tempted to yell back WHAT?

  Before I could, Meg darted off.

  I fumbled for my quiver and pulled forth the Arrow of Dodona. “O Wise Projectile, we need help!”

  IS’T HOT IN HITHER? the arrow asked. OR IS’T JUST ME?

  “We have a sorceress throwing Titan heat around!” I yelled. “Look!”

  I wasn’t sure if the arrow had magical eyes, or radar, or some other way to sense its environment, but I stuck its point around the corner of the pillar, where Piper and Meg were now playing a deadly game of chicken—fried chicken—with Medea’s blasts of grandfather fire.

  HAST YON WENCH A BLOWGUN? the arrow demanded.

  “Yes.”

  FIE! A BOW AND ARROWS ART FAR SUPERIOR!

  “She’s half-Cherokee,” I said.
“It’s a traditional Cherokee weapon. Now can you please tell me how to defeat Medea?”

  HMM, the arrow mused. THOU MUST USE THE BLOWGUN.

  “But you just said—”

  REMIND ME NOT! ’TIS BITTER TO SPEAK OF! THOU HAST THY ANSWER!

  The arrow went silent. The one time I wanted it to elaborate, the arrow shut up. Naturally.

  I shoved it back in my quiver and ran to the next column, taking cover under a sign that read HONK!

  “Piper!” I yelled.

  She glanced over from five pillars away. Her face was pulled in a tight grimace. Her arms looked like cooked lobster shells. My medical mind told me she had a few hours at best before heatstroke set in—nausea, dizziness, unconsciousness, probably death. But I focused on the few hours part. I needed to believe we would live long enough to die from such causes.

  I mimed shooting a blowgun, then pointed in Medea’s direction.

  Piper stared at me like I was crazy. I couldn’t blame her. Even if Medea didn’t bat away the dart with a gust of wind, the missile would never make it through that swirling wall of heat. I could only shrug and mouth the words Trust me. I asked my arrow.

  What Piper thought of that, I couldn’t tell, but she unslung her blowgun.

  Meanwhile, across the parking garage, Meg taunted Medea in typical Meg fashion.

  “DUMMY!” she yelled.

  Medea sent out a vertical blade of heat, though judging from her aim, she was trying to scare Meg rather than kill her.

  “Come out and stop this foolishness, dear!” she called, filling her words with concern. “I don’t want to hurt you, but the Titan is hard to control!”

  I ground my teeth. Her words were a little too close to Nero’s mind games, holding Meg in check with the threat of his alter ego, the Beast. I just hoped Meg couldn’t hear a word through her smoldering wildflower earbuds.

  While Medea had her back turned, looking for Meg, Piper stepped into the open.

  She took her shot.

  The dart flew straight through the wall of fire and speared Medea between the shoulder blades. How? I can only speculate. Perhaps, being a Cherokee weapon, it was not subject to the rules of Greek magic. Perhaps, just as Celestial bronze will pass straight through regular mortals, not recognizing them as legitimate targets, the fires of Helios could not be bothered to disintegrate a puny blowgun dart.