The Tyrant's Tomb (The Trials of Apollo, #4)(74)

Tentatively, using a series of mental pictures, I tried to convey a question: How did you get here?

I imagined Caligula and Commodus overpowering him, binding him, forcing him to do their bidding. I imagined Harpocrates floating alone in this dark box for months, years, unable to break free from the power of the fasces, growing weaker and weaker as the emperors used his silence to keep the demigod camps in the dark, cut off from one another, while the Triumvirate divided and conquered.

Harpocrates was their prisoner, not their ally.

Was I right?

Harpocrates replied with a withering gust of resentment.

I took that to mean both Yes and You suck, Apollo.

He forced more visions into my mind. I saw Commodus and Caligula standing where I now was, smiling cruelly, taunting him.

You should be on our side, Caligula told him telepathically. You should want to help us!

Harpocrates had refused. Perhaps he couldn’t overpower his bullies, but he intended to fight them with every last bit of his soul. That’s why he now looked so withered.

I sent out a pulse of sympathy and regret. Harpocrates blasted it away with scorn.

Just because we both hated the Triumvirate did not make us friends. Harpocrates had never forgotten my cruelty. If he hadn’t been constrained by the fasces, he would have already blasted me and my friends into a fine mist of atoms.

He showed me that image in vivid color. I could tell he relished thinking about it.

Meg tried to join our telepathic argument. At first, all she could send was a garbled sense of pain and confusion. Then she managed to focus. I saw her father smiling down at her, handing her a rose. For her, the rose was a symbol of love, not secrets. Then I saw her father dead on the steps of Grand Central Station, murdered by Nero. She sent Harpocrates her life story, captured in a few painful snapshots. She knew about monsters. She had been raised by the Beast. No matter how much Harpocrates hated me—and Meg agreed that I could be pretty stupid sometimes—we had to work together to stop the Triumvirate.

Harpocrates shredded her thoughts with rage. How dare she presume to understand his misery?

Reyna tried a different approach. She shared her memories of Tarquin’s last attack on Camp Jupiter: so many wounded and killed, their bodies dragged off by ghouls to be reanimated as vrykolakai. She showed Harpocrates her greatest fear: that after all their battles, after centuries of upholding the best traditions of Rome, the Twelfth Legion might face their end tonight.

Harpocrates was unmoved. He bent his will toward me, burying me in hatred.

All right! I pleaded. Kill me if you must. But I am sorry! I have changed!

I sent him a flurry of the most horrible, embarrassing failures I’d suffered since becoming mortal: grieving over the body of Heloise the griffin at the Waystation, holding the dying pandos Crest in my arms in the Burning Maze, and, of course, watching helplessly as Caligula murdered Jason Grace.

Just for a moment, Harpocrates’s wrath wavered.

At the very least, I had managed to surprise him. He had not been expecting regret or shame from me. Those weren’t my trademark emotions.

If you let us destroy the fasces, I thought, that will free you. It will also hurt the emperors, yes?

I showed him a vision of Reyna and Meg cutting through the fasces with their swords, the ceremonial axes exploding.

Yes, Harpocrates thought back, adding a brilliant red tint to the vision.

I had offered him something he wanted.

Reyna chimed in. She pictured Commodus and Caligula on their knees, groaning in pain. The fasces were connected to them. They’d taken a great risk leaving their axes here. If the fasces were destroyed, the emperors might be weakened and vulnerable before the battle.

Yes, Harpocrates replied. The pressure of the silence eased. I could almost breathe again without agony. Reyna staggered to her feet. She helped Meg and me to stand.

Unfortunately, we were not out of danger. I imagined any number of terrible things Harpocrates could do to us if we freed him. And since I’d been talking with my mind, I couldn’t help but broadcast those fears.

Harpocrates’s glare did nothing to reassure me.

The emperors must have anticipated this. They were smart, cynical, horribly logical. They knew that if I did release Harpocrates, the god’s first act would probably be to kill me. For the emperors, the potential loss of their fasces apparently didn’t outweigh the potential benefit of having me destroyed…or the entertainment value of knowing I’d done it to myself.

Reyna touched my shoulder, making me flinch involuntarily. She and Meg had drawn their weapons. They were waiting for me to decide. Did I really want to risk this?

I studied the soundless god.

Do what you want with me, I thought to him. Just spare my friends. Please.

His eyes burned with malice, but also a hint of glee. He seemed to be waiting for me to realize something, as if he’d written ZAP ME on my backpack when I wasn’t looking.

Then I saw what he was holding in his lap. I hadn’t noticed it while I was down on my hands and knees, but now that I was standing, it was hard to miss: a glass jar, apparently empty, sealed with a metal lid.

I felt as if Tarquin had just dropped the final rock into the drowning cage around my head. I imagined the emperors howling with delight on the deck of Caligula’s yacht.

Rumors from centuries before swirled in my head: The Sibyl’s body had crumbled away…. She could not die…. Her attendants kept her life force…her voice…in a glass jar.