The Tower of Nero (The Trials of Apollo #5)(88)

I FOUGHT.

I squirmed.

I pounded on Python’s skin with my tiny fist, then wriggled my ukulele thorn back and forth in the wound, hoping to make him so miserable he would drop me.

Instead, his giant glowing eyes simply watched, calm and satisfied, as my bones developed stress fractures I could hear in my inner ear. I was a submarine in the Mariana Trench. My rivets were popping.

DIEST THOU NOT! the Arrow of Dodona implored me. THE TIME HAS COME!

“Wh—?” I tried to wheeze out a question, but I had too little air in my lungs.

THE PROPHECY WHICH PYTHON SPAKE, said the arrow. IF THOU MUST FALL, THEN SO YOU SHALL, BUT FIRST, USETH THOU ME.

The arrow tilted in my hand, pointing toward Python’s enormous face.

My thought process was muddled, what with my brain exploding and all, but its meaning jabbed into me like a ukulele fretboard.

I can’t, I thought. No.

THOU MUST. The arrow sounded resigned, determined. I thought about how many miles I had traveled with this small sliver of wood, and how little credence I’d usually given its words. I remembered what it had told me about it being cast out of Dodona—a small expendable branch from the ancient grove, a piece no one would miss.

I saw Jason’s face. I saw Heloise, Crest, Money Maker, Don the Faun, Dakota—all those who had sacrificed themselves to get me here. Now my last companion was ready to pay the cost for my success—to have me do the one thing it had always told me never to do.

“No,” I croaked, possibly the last word I would ever be able to speak.

“What is that?” Python asked, thinking I had spoken to him. “Does the little rat beg for mercy at the end?”

I opened my mouth, unable to answer. The monster’s face loomed closer, anxious to savor my last sweet whimpers.

FARE THEE WELL, FRIEND, said the arrow. APOLLO WILL FALL, BUT APOLLO MUST RISE AGAIN.

With those last words, conveying all the power of his ancient grove, the arrow closed the reptile’s prophecy. Python came within range, and with a sob of despair, I jabbed the Arrow of Dodona up to its fletching in his enormous eye.

He roared in agony, lashing his head back and forth. His coils loosened just enough for me to wriggle free. I dropped, landing in a heap at the edge of a wide crevice.

My chest throbbed. Definitely broken ribs. Probably a broken heart. I had far exceeded the maximum recommended mileage for this Lester Papadopoulos body, but I had to keep going for the Arrow of Dodona. I hadeth to keepeth goingeth.

I struggled to my feet.

Python continued flailing, trying to dislodge the arrow from his eye. As a medical god, I could have told him that this would only make the pain worse. Seeing my old Shakespearean missile weapon sticking out of the serpent’s head made me sad and furious and defiant. I sensed that the arrow’s consciousness was gone. I hoped it had fled back to the Grove of Dodona and joined the millions of other whispering voices of the trees, but I feared it was simply no more. Its sacrifice had been real, and final.

Anger pumped through me. My mortal body steamed in earnest, bursts of light flashing under my skin. Nearby, I spotted Python’s tail thrashing. Unlike the snake that had curled around the leontocephaline, this serpent had a beginning and an end. Behind me yawned the largest of the volcanic crevices. I knew what I had to do.

“PYTHON!” My voice shook the cavern. Stalactites crashed around us. I imagined, somewhere far above us, Greek villagers freezing in their tracks as my voice echoed from the ruins of the holy site, olive trees shuddering and losing their fruit.

The Lord of Delphi had awoken.

Python turned his remaining baleful eye on me. “You will not live.”

“I’m fine with that,” I said. “As long as you die, too.”

I tackled the monster’s tail and dragged it toward the chasm.

“What are you doing?” he roared. “Stop it, you idiot!”

With Python’s tail in my arms, I leaped over the side.

My plan should not have worked. Given my puny mortal weight, I should have simply hung there like an air freshener from a rearview mirror. But I was full of righteous fury. I planted my feet against the rock wall and pulled, dragging Python down as he howled and writhed. He tried to whip his tail around and throw me off, but my feet stayed firmly planted against the side of the chasm wall. My strength grew. My body shone with brilliant light. With one final defiant shout, I pulled my enemy past the point of no return. The bulk of his coils spilled into the crevasse.

The prophecy came true. Apollo fell, and Python fell with me.

Hesiod once wrote that a bronze anvil would take nine days to fall from Earth to Tartarus.

I suspect he used the word nine as shorthand for I don’t know exactly how long, but it would seem like a long, long time.

Hesiod was right.

Python and I tumbled into the depths, flipping over one another, bouncing against walls, spinning from total darkness into the red light of lava veins and back again. Given the amount of damage my poor body took, it seems likely that I died somewhere along the way.

Yet I kept fighting. I had nothing left to wield as a weapon, so I used my fists and feet, punching the beast’s hide, kicking at every claw, wing, or nascent head that sprouted from his body.

I was beyond pain. I was now in the realm of extreme agony is the new feeling great. I torqued myself in midair so that Python took the brunt of our collisions with the walls. We couldn’t escape one another. Whenever we drifted apart, some force brought us back together again like marriage bonds.