Blind Sun

Chapter 15 Wandering Olympus

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Thirty minutes later, I walked into the lobby of the Empire State Building.

I must have looked like a homeless kid, with my tattered clothes and my scraped-up face. I hadn’t slept in at least twenty hours.

I went up to the guard at the front desk and said, "Six hundredth floor."

He was reading a huge book. It must have been interesting because he took a while to respond. "No such floor, kiddo."

"I need an audience with Zeus."

"Sorry?" He asked as if he didn't hearme right.

"Chiron sent me. I caught the teumessian fox." I said as I picked Vix up to show him.

I was about to decide this guy was just a regular mortal, and I’d better run for it before he called the straitjacket patrol, when he said, "That does look like a fox, but do you have any proof Chrion sent you?"

That was when I remembered the card Chiron gave me. I scrambled and pulled it out of my back pocket and showed it to him.

"That would do." He said, I heard him fumble around his desk for something before a key card was then handed to me. "Insert this in the security slot. Make sure nobody else is in the elevator with you."

I did as he told me. As soon as the elevator doors closed, I slipped the key into the slot, which took me a few tries. I paniced when the card disappeared not noticing a new button appeared on the console, Vix however did and jumped up to press it.

Muzak played. "Raindrops keep falling on my head..."

Finally, ding. The doors slid open. I stepped out and almost had a heart attack.

I was standing on a narrow stone walkway in the middle of the air. Below me was Manhattan, from the height of an aeroplane. In front of me, steps wound up the spine of a cloud, into the sky. My eyes followed the stairway to its end, where my brain just could not accept what I saw.

Look again, my brain said.

We’re looking, my eyes insisted. It’s really there. Well unless something was wrong with the light.

From the top of the clouds rose the decapitated peak of a mountain. Clinging to the mountainside were dozens of multilevelled palaces – a city of mansions – all with columned porticos, terraces and braziers glowing with a thousand fires. Roads wound crazily up to the peak, where the largest palace gleamed in the light. Precariously perched gardens bloomed with trees and bushes. I could make out an open-air market filled with tents, an amphitheatre built on one side of the mountain. It was an Ancient Greek city, except it wasn’t in ruins. It was new, and clean, and probably colourful, the way Athens must’ve looked twenty-five hundred years ago.

This place can’t be here, I told myself. The tip of a mountain hanging over New York City like a billion-ton asteroid? How could something like that be anchored above the Empire State Building, in plain sight of millions of people, and not get noticed?

But here it was. And here I was.

My trip through Olympus was a daze. I passed some giggling wood nymphs who threw olives at me from their garden. Hawkers in the market offered to sell me ambrosia-on-a-stick, and a new shield, and a genuine glitter-weave replica of the Golden Fleece, as seen on Hephaestus-TV The nine muses were tuning their instruments for a concert in the park while a small crowd gathered – satyrs and naiads and a bunch of teenagers who might’ve been minor gods and goddesses. Nobody seemed worried about an impending civil war. In fact, everybody seemed in a festive mood. Several of them turned to watch me pass, and whispered to themselves. My focus was on not being near the edge, I didn't want to fall off.