"My feet are on fire!" Pa.s.salos wailed. "Not shiny! Not shiny at all!"
After making sure they were securely bound, Leo dragged the Kerkopes into one corner and began rifling through their treasures. He retrieved Piper"s dagger, a few of his prototype grenades and a dozen other odds and ends the dwarfs had taken from the Argo II.
"Please!" Akmon wailed. "Don"t take our shinies!"
"We"ll make you a deal!" Pa.s.salos suggested. "We"ll cut you in for ten percent if you let us go!"
"Afraid not," Leo muttered. "It"s all mine now."
"Twenty percent!"
Just then, thunder boomed overhead. Lightning flashed, and the bars on the nearest window burst into sizzling, melted stubs of iron.
Jason flew in like Peter Pan, electricity sparking around him and his gold sword steaming.
Leo whistled appreciatively. "Man, you just wasted an awesome entrance."
Jason frowned. He noticed the hog-tied Kerkopes. "What the "
"All by myself," Leo said. "I"m special that way. How did you find me?"
"Uh, the smoke," Jason managed. "And I heard popping noises. Were you having a gunfight in here?"
"Something like that." Leo tossed him Piper"s dagger, then kept rummaging through the bags of dwarf shinies. He remembered what Hazel had said about finding a treasure that would help them with the quest, but he wasn"t sure what he was looking for. There were coins, gold nuggets, jewellery, paper clips, foil wrappers, cuff links.
He kept coming back to a couple of things that didn"t seem to belong. One was an old bronze navigation device, like an astrolabe from a ship. It was badly damaged and seemed to be missing some pieces, but Leo still found it fascinating.
"Take it!" Pa.s.salos offered. "Odysseus made it, you know! Take it and let us go."
"Odysseus?" Jason asked. "Like, the Odysseus?"
"Yes!" Pa.s.salos squeaked. "Made it when he was an old man in Ithaca. One of his last inventions, and we stole it!"
"How does it work?" Leo asked.
"Oh, it doesn"t," Akmon said. "Something about a missing crystal?" He glanced at his brother for help.
""My biggest what-if"," Pa.s.salos said. ""Should"ve taken a crystal." That"s what he kept muttering in his sleep, the night we stole it." Pa.s.salos 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 t.i.tle 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 Pa.s.salos exchanged a nervous look.
"Minor G.o.d," Pa.s.salos 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 ill.u.s.trations: 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d?" 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," Pa.s.salos begged. "He isn"t nice at all!"
"Who is he?" Jason asked. "What G.o.d?"
"I I can"t say," Pa.s.salos stammered.
"You"d better," Leo warned.
"No," Pa.s.salos said miserably. "I mean, I really can"t say. I can"t p.r.o.nounce 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."
"a.s.suming Gaia even lets us!" Pa.s.salos 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 demiG.o.d 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 G.o.ddess"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!" Pa.s.salos 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, hara.s.s 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!" Pa.s.salos said. "Stealing from people is our speciality!"
"I love hara.s.sment!" 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 gla.s.sy 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 fibregla.s.s. 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 sc.r.a.pes 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 gla.s.s. 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 carca.s.s 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 demiG.o.ds 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 there spinning their futures with barbed wire instead of thread just to see how much two demiG.o.ds 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 ma.s.sive 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 br.i.m.m.i.n.g with enthusiasm for that.
XIV.