by Rick Riordan
‘ “My biggest what-if”,’ Passalos said. ‘ “Should’ve taken a crystal.” That’s what he kept muttering in his sleep, the night we stole it.’ Passalos shrugged. ‘No idea what he meant. But the shiny is yours! Can we go now?’
Leo wasn’t sure why he wanted the astrolabe. It was obviously broken, and he didn’t get the sense that this was what Hecate meant them to find. Still, he slipped it into one of his tool belt’s magic pockets.
He turned his attention to the other strange piece of loot – the leather-bound book. Its title was in gold leaf, in a language Leo couldn’t understand, but nothing else about the book seemed shiny. He didn’t figure the Kerkopes for big readers.
‘What’s this?’ He wagged it at the dwarfs, who were still teary-eyed from the smoke.
‘Nothing!’ Akmon said. ‘Just a book. It had a pretty gold cover, so we took it from him.’
‘Him?’ Leo asked.
Akmon and Passalos exchanged a nervous look.
‘Minor god,’ Passalos said. ‘In Venice. Really, it’s nothing.’
‘Venice.’ Jason frowned at Leo. ‘Isn’t that where we’re supposed to go next?’
‘Yeah.’ Leo examined the book. He couldn’t read the text, but it had lots of illustrations: scythes, different plants, a picture of the sun, a team of oxen pulling a cart. He didn’t see how any of that was important, but if the book had been stolen from a minor god in Venice – the next place Hecate had told them to visit – then this had to be what they were looking for.
‘Where exactly can we find this minor god?’ Leo asked.
‘No!’ Akmon shrieked. ‘You can’t take it back to him! If he finds out we stole it –’
‘He’ll destroy you,’ Jason guessed. ‘Which is what we’ll do if you don’t tell us, and we’re a lot closer.’ He pressed the point of his sword against Akmon’s furry throat.
‘Okay, okay!’ the dwarf shrieked. ‘La Casa Nera! Calle Frezzeria!’
‘Is that an address?’ Leo asked.
The dwarfs both nodded vigorously.
‘Please don’t tell him we stole it,’ Passalos begged. ‘He isn’t nice at all!’
‘Who is he?’ Jason asked. ‘What god?’
‘I – I can’t say,’ Passalos stammered.
‘You’d better,’ Leo warned.
‘No,’ Passalos said miserably. ‘I mean, I really can’t say. I can’t pronounce it! Tr – Tri – It’s too hard!’
‘Truh,’ Akmon said. ‘Tru-toh – Too many syllables!’
They both burst into tears.
Leo didn’t know if the Kerkopes were telling them the truth, but it was hard to stay mad at weeping dwarfs, no matter how annoying and badly dressed they were.
Jason lowered his sword. ‘What do you want to do with them, Leo? Send them to Tartarus?’
‘Please, no!’ Akmon wailed. ‘It might take us weeks to come back.’
‘Assuming Gaia even lets us!’ Passalos sniffled. ‘She controls the Doors of Death now. She’ll be very cross with us.’
Leo looked at the dwarfs. He’d fought lots of monsters before and never felt bad about dissolving them, but this was different. He had to admit he sort of admired these little guys. They played cool pranks and liked shiny things. Leo could relate. Besides, Percy and Annabeth were in Tartarus right now, hopefully still alive, trudging towards the Doors of Death. The idea of sending these twin monkey boys there to face the same nightmarish problem … well, it didn’t seem right.
He imagined Gaia laughing at his weakness – a demigod too softhearted to kill monsters. He remembered his dream about Camp Half-Blood in ruins, Greek and Roman bodies littering the fields. He remembered Octavian speaking with the earth goddess’s voice: The Romans move east from New York. They advance on your camp, and nothing can slow them down.
‘Nothing can slow them down,’ Leo mused. ‘I wonder …’
‘What?’ Jason asked.
Leo looked at the dwarfs. ‘I’ll make you a deal.’
Akmon’s eyes lit up. ‘Thirty percent?’
‘We’ll leave you all your treasure,’ Leo said, ‘except the stuff that belongs to us and the astrolabe and this book, which we’ll take back to the dude in Venice.’
‘But he’ll destroy us!’ Passalos wailed.
‘We won’t say where we got it,’ Leo promised. ‘And we won’t kill you. We’ll let you go free.’
‘Uh, Leo …?’ Jason asked nervously.
Akmon squealed with delight. ‘I knew you were as smart as Hercules! I will call you Black Bottom, the Sequel!’
‘Yeah, no thanks,’ Leo said. ‘But in return for us sparing your lives, you have to do something for us. I’m going to send you somewhere to steal from some people, harass them, make life hard for them any way you can. You have to follow my directions exactly. You have to swear on the River Styx.’
‘We swear!’ Passalos said. ‘Stealing from people is our speciality!’
‘I love harassment!’ Akmon agreed. ‘Where are we going?’
Leo grinned. ‘Ever heard of New York?’
XIII
PERCY
Percy had taken his girlfriend on some romantic walks before. This wasn’t one of them.
They followed the River Phlegethon, stumbling over the glassy black terrain, jumping crevices and hiding behind rocks whenever the vampire girls slowed in front of them.
It was tricky to stay far enough back to avoid getting spotted but close enough to keep Kelli and her comrades in view through the dark hazy air. The heat from the river baked Percy’s skin. Every breath was like inhaling sulphur-scented fibreglass. When they needed a drink, the best they could do was sip some refreshing liquid fire.
Yep. Percy definitely knew how to show a girl a good time.
At least Annabeth’s ankle seemed to have healed. She was hardly limping at all. Her various cuts and scrapes had faded. She’d tied her blonde hair back with a strip of denim torn from her jeans, and in the fiery light of the river her grey eyes flickered. Despite being beat-up, sooty and dressed like a homeless person, she looked great to Percy.
So what if they were in Tartarus? So what if they stood a slim chance of surviving? He was so glad that they were together he had the ridiculous urge to smile.
Physically, Percy felt better too, though his clothes looked like he’d been through a hurricane of broken glass. He was thirsty, hungry and scared out of his mind (though he wasn’t going to tell Annabeth that), but he’d shaken off the hopeless cold of the River Cocytus. And as nasty as the firewater tasted it seemed to keep him going.
Time was impossible to judge. They trudged along, following the river as it cut through the harsh landscape. Fortunately the empousai weren’t exactly speed walkers. They shuffled on their mismatched bronze and donkey legs, hissing and fighting with each other, apparently in no hurry to reach the Doors of Death.
Once, the demons sped up in excitement and swarmed something that looked like a beached carcass on the riverbank. Percy couldn’t tell what it was – a fallen monster? An animal of some kind? The empousai attacked it with relish.
When the demons moved on, Percy and Annabeth reached the spot and found nothing left except a few splintered bones and glistening stains drying in the heat of the river. Percy had no doubt the empousai would devour demigods with the same gusto.
‘Come on.’ He led Annabeth gently away from the scene. ‘We don’t want to lose them.’
As they walked, Percy thought about the first time he’d fought the empousa Kelli at Goode High School’s freshman orientation, when he and Rachel Elizabeth Dare got trapped in the band hall. At the time, it had seemed like a hopeless situation. Now, he’d give anything to have a problem that simple. At least he’d been in the mortal world then. Here, there was nowhere to run.
Wow. When he started looking back on the war with Kronos as the good old days – that was sad. He kept hoping things would get better for Annabeth and him, but their lives just got more and more dangerous, as if the Three Fates were up t
here spinning their futures with barbed wire instead of thread just to see how much two demigods could tolerate.
After a few more miles, the empousai disappeared over a ridge. When Percy and Annabeth caught up, they found themselves at the edge of another massive cliff. The River Phlegethon spilled over the side in jagged tiers of fiery waterfalls. The demon ladies were picking their way down the cliff, jumping from ledge to ledge like mountain goats.
Percy’s heart crept into his throat. Even if he and Annabeth reached the bottom of the cliff alive, they didn’t have much to look forward to. The landscape below them was a bleak ash-grey plain bristling with black trees, like insect hair. The ground was pocked with blisters. Every once in a while, a bubble would swell and burst, disgorging a monster like a larva from an egg.
Suddenly Percy wasn’t hungry any more.
All the newly formed monsters were crawling and hobbling in the same direction – towards a bank of black fog that swallowed the horizon like a storm front. The Phlegethon flowed in the same direction until about halfway across the plain, where it met another river of black water – maybe the Cocytus? The two floods combined in a steaming, boiling cataract and flowed on as one towards the black fog.
The longer Percy looked into that storm of darkness, the less he wanted to go there. It could be hiding anything – an ocean, a bottomless pit, an army of monsters. But if the Doors of Death were in that direction it was their only chance to get home.
He peered over the edge of the cliff.
‘Wish we could fly,’ he muttered.
Annabeth rubbed her arms. ‘Remember Luke’s winged shoes? I wonder if they’re still down here somewhere.’
Percy remembered. Those shoes had been cursed to drag their wearer into Tartarus. They’d almost taken his best friend, Grover. ‘I’d settle for a hang-glider.’
‘Maybe not a good idea.’ Annabeth pointed. Above them, dark winged shapes spiralled in and out of the blood-red clouds.
‘Furies?’ Percy wondered.
‘Or some other kind of demon,’ Annabeth said. ‘Tartarus has thousands.’
‘Including the kind that eats hang-gliders,’ Percy guessed. ‘Okay, so we climb.’
He couldn’t see the empousai below them any more. They’d disappeared behind one of the ridges, but that didn’t matter. It was clear where he and Annabeth needed to go. Like all the maggot monsters crawling over the plains of Tartarus, they should head towards the dark horizon. Percy was just brimming with enthusiasm for that.
XIV
PERCY
As they started down the cliff, Percy concentrated on the challenges at hand: keeping his footing, avoiding rockslides that would alert the empousai to their presence and of course making sure he and Annabeth didn’t plummet to their deaths.
About halfway down the precipice, Annabeth said, ‘Stop, okay? Just a quick break.’
Her legs wobbled so badly, Percy cursed himself for not calling a rest earlier.
They sat together on a ledge next to a roaring fiery waterfall. Percy put his arm around Annabeth, and she leaned against him, shaking from exhaustion.
He wasn’t much better. His stomach felt like it had shrunk to the size of a gumdrop. If they came across any more monster carcasses, he was afraid he might pull an empousa and try to devour it.
At least he had Annabeth. They would find a way out of Tartarus. They had to. He didn’t think much of fates and prophecies, but he did believe in one thing: Annabeth and he were supposed to be together. They hadn’t survived so much just to get killed now.
‘Things could be worse,’ Annabeth ventured.
‘Yeah?’ Percy didn’t see how, but he tried to sound upbeat.
She snuggled against him. Her hair smelled of smoke, and if he closed his eyes he could almost imagine they were at the campfire at Camp Half-Blood.
‘We could’ve fallen into the River Lethe,’ she said. ‘Lost all our memories.’
Percy’s skin crawled just thinking about it. He’d had enough trouble with amnesia for one lifetime. Only last month, Hera had erased his memories to put him among the Roman demigods. Percy had stumbled into Camp Jupiter with no idea who he was or where he came from. And a few years before that he’d fought a Titan on the banks of the Lethe, near Hades’s palace. He’d blasted the Titan with water from that river and completely wiped his memory clean. ‘Yeah, the Lethe,’ he muttered. ‘Not my favourite.’
‘What was the Titan’s name?’ Annabeth asked.
‘Uh … Iapetus. He said it meant the Impaler or something.’
‘No, the name you gave him after he lost his memory. Steve?’
‘Bob,’ Percy said.
Annabeth managed a weak laugh. ‘Bob the Titan.’
Percy’s lips were so parched, it hurt to smile. He wondered what had happened to Iapetus after they’d left him in Hades’s palace … if he was still content being Bob, friendly, happy and clueless. Percy hoped so, but the Underworld seemed to bring out the worst in everyone – monsters, heroes and gods.
He gazed across the ashen plains. The other Titans were supposed to be here in Tartarus – maybe bound in chains, or roaming aimlessly, or hiding in some of those dark crevices. Percy and his allies had destroyed the worst Titan, Kronos, but even his remains might be down here somewhere – a billion angry Titan particles floating through the blood-coloured clouds or lurking in that dark fog.
Percy decided not to think about that. He kissed Annabeth’s forehead. ‘We should keep moving. You want some more fire to drink?’
‘Ugh. I’ll pass.’
They struggled to their feet. The rest of the cliff looked impossible to descend – nothing more than a crosshatching of tiny ledges – but they kept climbing down.
Percy’s body went on autopilot. His fingers cramped. He felt blisters popping up on his ankles. He got shaky from hunger.
He wondered if they would die of starvation, or if the firewater would keep them going. He remembered the punishment of Tantalus, who’d been permanently stuck in a pool of water under a fruit tree but couldn’t reach either food or drink.
Jeez, Percy hadn’t thought about Tantalus in years. That stupid guy had been paroled briefly to serve as director at Camp Half-Blood. Probably he was back in the Fields of Punishment. Percy had never felt sorry for the jerk before, but now he was starting to sympathize. He could imagine what it would be like, getting hungrier and hungrier for eternity but never being able to eat.
Keep climbing, he told himself.
Cheeseburgers, his stomach replied.
Shut up, he thought.
With fries, his stomach complained.
A billion years later, with a dozen new blisters on his feet, Percy reached the bottom. He helped Annabeth down, and they collapsed on the ground.
Ahead of them stretched miles of wasteland, bubbling with monstrous larvae and big insect-hair trees. To their right, the Phlegethon split into branches that etched the plain, widening into a delta of smoke and fire. To the north, along the main route of the river, the ground was riddled with cave entrances. Here and there, spires of rock jutted up like exclamation points.
Under Percy’s hand, the soil felt alarmingly warm and smooth. He tried to grab a handful, then realized that, under a thin layer of dirt and debris, the ground was a single vast membrane … like skin.
He almost threw up, but forced himself not to. There was nothing in his stomach but fire.
He didn’t mention it to Annabeth, but he started to feel like something was watching them – something vast and malevolent. He couldn’t zero in on it, because the presence was all around them. Watching was the wrong word, too. That implied eyes, and this thing was simply aware of them. The ridges above them now looked less like steps and more like rows of massive teeth. The spires of rock looked like broken ribs. And if the ground was skin …
Percy forced those thoughts aside. This place was just freaking him out. That was all.
Annabeth stood, wiping soot from her face. She gazed to
wards the darkness on the horizon. ‘We’re going to be completely exposed, crossing this plain.’
About a hundred yards ahead of them, a blister burst on the ground. A monster clawed its way out … a glistening telkhine with slick fur, a seal-like body and stunted human limbs. It managed to crawl a few yards before something shot out of the nearest cave, so fast that Percy could only register a dark green reptilian head. The monster snatched the squealing telkhine in its jaws and dragged it into the darkness.
Reborn in Tartarus for two seconds, only to be eaten. Percy wondered if that telkhine would pop up in some other place in Tartarus, and how long it would take to re-form.
He swallowed down the sour taste of firewater. ‘Oh, yeah. This’ll be fun.’
Annabeth helped him to his feet. He took one last look at the cliffs, but there was no going back. He would’ve given a thousand golden drachmas to have Frank Zhang with them right now – good old Frank, who always seemed to show up when needed and could turn into an eagle or a dragon to fly them across this stupid wasteland.
They started walking, trying to avoid the cave entrances, sticking close to the bank of the river.
They were just skirting one of the spires when a glint of movement caught Percy’s eye – something darting between the rocks to their right.
A monster following them? Or maybe it was just some random baddie, heading for the Doors of Death.
Suddenly he remembered why they’d started following this route, and he froze in his tracks.
‘The empousai.’ He grabbed Annabeth’s arm. ‘Where are they?’
Annabeth scanned a three-sixty, her grey eyes bright with alarm.
Maybe the demon ladies had been snapped up by that reptile in the cave. If the empousai were still ahead of them, they should’ve been visible somewhere on the plains.
Unless they were hiding …
Too late, Percy drew his sword.
The empousai emerged from the rocks all around them – five of them forming a ring. A perfect trap.
Kelli limped forward on her mismatched legs. Her fiery hair burned across her shoulders like a miniature Phlegethon waterfall. Her tattered cheerleader outfit was splattered with rusty-brown stains, and Percy was pretty sure they weren’t ketchup. She fixed him with her glowing red eyes and bared her fangs.
