The Tyrant's Tomb (The Trials of Apollo, #4)(71)

“The Marx Brothers? How do you even know about them? They were from the 1930s! I mean, yes, of course, I loved them. They brightened a dreary decade, but…Wait. The one who played the harp. Harpo. I always found his music sweet and sad and…”

The silence turned colder and heavier around me.

Harpo, I thought. Hippocrates. Put the names together and you got…

“Harpocrates,” I said. “Arrow, please tell me that’s not the answer. Please tell me he’s not waiting in that box.”

The arrow did not reply, which I took as confirmation of my worst fears.

I returned my Shakespearean friend to his quiver and trudged back to Reyna and Meg.

Meg frowned. “I don’t like that look on your face.”

“Me neither,” Reyna said. “What did you learn?”

I gazed out at the fog, wishing we could deal with something as easy as killer giant ravens. As I suspected, the name of the god had shaken loose my memories—bad, unwelcome memories.

“I know which god we face,” I said. “The good news is he’s not very powerful, as gods go. About as obscure as you can imagine. A real D-lister.”

Reyna folded her arms. “What’s the catch?”

“Ah…well.” I cleared my throat. “Harpocrates and I didn’t exactly get along. He might have…er, sworn that someday he’d see me vaporized.”





We all need a hand

On our shoulder sometimes so

We can chew through steel

“VAPORIZED,” SAID REYNA.

“Yes.”

“What did you do to him?” Meg asked.

I tried to look offended. “Nothing! I may have teased him a bit, but he was a very minor god. Rather silly-looking. I may have made some jokes at his expense in front of the other Olympians.”

Reyna knit her eyebrows. “So you bullied him.”

“No! I mean…I did write zap me in glowing letters on the back of his toga. And I suppose I might have been a bit harsh when I tied him up and locked him in the stalls with my fiery horses overnight—”

“OH, MY GODS!” Meg said. “You’re awful!”

I fought down the urge to defend myself. I wanted to shout, Well, at least I didn’t kill him like I did my pregnant girlfriend Koronis! But that wasn’t much of a gotcha.

Looking back on my encounters with Harpocrates, I realized I had been awful. If somebody had treated me, Lester, the way I had treated that puny Ptolemaic god, I would want to crawl in a hole and die. And if I were honest, even back when I was a god, I had been bullied—only the bully had been my father. I should have known better than to share the pain.

I hadn’t thought about Harpocrates in eons. Teasing him had seemed like no big deal. I suppose that’s what made it even worse. I had shrugged off our encounters. I doubted he had.

Koronis’s ravens…Harpocrates…

It was no coincidence they were both haunting me today like the Ghosts of Saturnalias Past. Tarquin had orchestrated all this with me in mind. He was forcing me to confront some of my greatest hits of dreadfulness. Even if I survived the challenges, my friends would see exactly what kind of dirtbag I was. The shame would weigh me down and make me ineffective—the same way Tarquin used to add rocks to a cage around his enemy’s head, until eventually, the burden was too much. The prisoner would collapse and drown in a shallow pool, and Tarquin could claim, I didn’t kill him. He just wasn’t strong enough.

I took a deep breath. “All right, I was a bully. I see that now. I will march right into that box and apologize. And then hope Harpocrates doesn’t vaporize me.”

Reyna did not look thrilled. She pushed up her sleeve, revealing a simple black watch on her wrist. She checked the time, perhaps wondering how long it would take to get me vaporized and then get back to camp.

“Assuming we can get through those doors,” she said, “what are we up against? Tell me about Harpocrates.”

I tried to summon a mental image of the god. “He usually looks like a child. Perhaps ten years old?”

“You bullied a ten-year-old,” Meg grumbled.

“He looks ten. I didn’t say he was ten. He has a shaved head except for a ponytail on one side.”

“Is that an Egyptian thing?” Reyna asked.

“Yes, for children. Harpocrates was originally an incarnation of the god Horus—Harpa-Khruti, Horus the Child. Anyway, when Alexander the Great invaded Egypt, the Greeks found all these statues of the god and didn’t know what to make of him. He was usually depicted with his finger to his lips.” I demonstrated.

“Like be quiet,” Meg said.

“That’s exactly what the Greeks thought. The gesture had nothing to do with shh. It symbolized the hieroglyph for child. Nevertheless, the Greeks decided he must be the god of silence and secrets. They changed his name to Harpocrates. They built some shrines, started worshipping him, and boom, he’s a Greek-Egyptian hybrid god.”

Meg snorted. “It can’t be that easy to make a new god.”

“Never underestimate the power of thousands of human minds all believing the same thing. They can remake reality. Sometimes for the better, sometimes not.”

Reyna peered at the doors. “And now Harpocrates is in there. You think he’s powerful enough to cause all our communications failures?”