The Tyrant's Tomb (The Trials of Apollo, #4)(65)

Stop it, Apollo, I chided myself. There’s nothing you can do now but keep climbing.

I concentrated on one perilous slippery rung at a time. The soles of my shoes squeaked against the metal.

Below me, Meg asked, “Do you guys smell roses?”

I wondered if she was trying to make me laugh. “Roses? Why in the name of the twelve gods would I smell roses up here?”

Reyna said, “All I smell is Lester’s shoes. I think he stepped in something.”

“A large puddle of shame,” I muttered.

“I smell roses,” Meg insisted. “Whatever. Keep moving.”

I did, since I had no choice.

At last, we reached the first set of crossbeams. A catwalk ran the length of the girders, allowing us to stand and rest for a few minutes. We were only about sixty feet above the relay station, but it felt much higher. Below us spread an endless grid of city blocks, rumpling and twisting across the hills whenever necessary, the streets making designs that reminded me of the Thai alphabet. (The goddess Nang Kwak had tried to teach me their language once, over a lovely dinner of spicy noodles, but I was hopeless at it.)

Down in the parking lot, Aurum and Argentum looked up at us and wagged their tails. They seemed to be waiting for us to do something. The mean-spirited part of me wanted to shoot an arrow to the top of the next hill and yell, FETCH! but I doubted Reyna would appreciate that.

“It’s fun up here,” Meg decided. She did a cartwheel, because she enjoyed giving me heart palpitations.

I scanned the triangle of catwalks, hoping to see something besides cables, circuit boxes, and satellite equipment—preferably something labeled: PUSH THIS BUTTON TO COMPLETE QUEST AND COLLECT REWARD.

Of course not, I grumbled to myself. Tarquin wouldn’t be so kind as to put whatever we needed on the lowest level.

“Definitely no silent gods here,” Reyna said.

“Thanks a lot.”

She smiled, clearly still in a good mood from my earlier misstep into the puddle of shame. “I also don’t see any doors. Didn’t the prophecy say I’m supposed to open a door?”

“Could be a metaphorical one,” I speculated. “But you’re right, there’s nothing here for us.”

Meg pointed to the next level of crossbeams—another sixty feet up, barely visible in the belly of the fog bank. “The smell of roses is stronger from up there,” she said. “We should keep climbing.”

I sniffed the air. I smelled only the faint scent of eucalyptus from the woods below us, my own sweat cooling against my skin, and the sour whiff of antiseptic and infection rising from my bandaged abdomen.

“Hooray,” I said. “More climbing.”

This time, Reyna took the lead. There was no climbing cage going to the second level—just bare metal rungs against the side of the girder, as if the builders had decided Welp, if you made it this far, you must be crazy, so no more safety features! Now that the metal-ribbed chute was gone, I realized it had given me some psychological comfort. At least I could pretend I was inside a safe structure, not free-climbing a giant tower like a lunatic.

It made no sense to me why Tarquin would put something as important as his silent god at the top of a radio tower, or why he had allied himself with the emperors in the first place, or why the smell of roses might signal that we were getting closer to our goal, or why those dark birds kept circling above us in the fog. Weren’t they cold? Didn’t they have jobs?

Still, I had no doubt we were meant to climb this monstrous tripod. It felt right, by which I mean it felt terrifying and wrong. I had a premonition that everything would make sense to me soon enough, and when it did, I wouldn’t like it.

It was as if I were standing in the dark, staring at small disconnected lights in the distance, wondering what they might be. By the time I realized Oh, hey, those are the headlights of a large truck barreling toward me! it would be too late.

We were halfway to the second set of crossbeams when an angry shadow dove out of the fog, plummeting past my shoulder. The gust from its wings nearly knocked me off the ladder.

“Whoa!” Meg grabbed my left ankle, though that did nothing to steady me. “What was that?”

I caught a glimpse of the bird as it disappeared back into the fog: oily black wings, black beak, black eyes.

A sob built in my throat, as one of the proverbial truck’s headlights became very clear to me. “A raven.”

“A raven?” Reyna frowned down at me. “That thing was huge!”

True, the creature that buzzed me must’ve had a wingspan of at least twenty feet, but then several angry croaks sounded from somewhere in the mist, leaving me in no doubt.

“Ravens, plural,” I corrected. “Giant ravens.”

Half a dozen spiraled into view, their hungry black eyes dancing over us like targeting lasers, assessing our soft-and-tasty weak spots.

“A flock of ravens.” Meg sounded half-incredulous, half-fascinated. “Those are the guards? They’re pretty.”

I groaned, wishing I could be anywhere else—like in bed, under a thick layer of warm Kevlar quilts. I was tempted to protest that a group of ravens was actually called an unkindness or a conspiracy. I wanted to shout that Tarquin’s guards should be disqualified on that technicality. But I doubted Tarquin cared about such niceties. I knew the ravens didn’t. They would kill us either way, no matter how pretty Meg thought they were. Besides, calling ravens unkind and conspiratorial had always seemed redundant to me.