The Shadow Summoner | Book Three - PJO Universe

fourteen

A GOD DIES

Immediately, Apollo crumpled to his hands and knees under the weight of the other god's power.

Silence enfolded them like liquid titanium. The cloying smell of roses was overwhelming.

Apollo had forgotten how Harpocrates communicated-with blasts of mental images, oppressive and devoid of sound.

Back when he was a god, he had found this annoying. Now, as a human, he realised it could pulp his brain.

At the moment, he was sending me one continuous message: YOU? HATE!

Behind him, Reyna was on her knees, cupping her ears and screaming mutely. Meg was curled on her side, kicking her legs as if trying to throw off the heaviest of blankets.

And Ariana? If looks could kill, the god would be dead. That's if the daughter of Hades wasn't curled up on the floor - looking clinically insane.

Apollo made a mental note to get out of her bad books.

A moment before, he had been tearing through metal like it was paper. Now, he could barely lift his head to meet Harpocrates's gaze.

The god floated cross-legged at the far end of the room.

He was still the size of a ten-year-old child, still wearing his ridiculous toga and pharaonic bowling-pin crown combo, like so many confused Ptolemaic gods who couldn't decide if they were Egyptian or Greco-Roman.

His braided ponytail snaked down one side of his shaved head. And, of course, he still held one finger to his mouth like the most frustrated, burned-out librarian in the world: SSSHHH!

He could not do otherwise. Apollo recalled that Harpocrates required all his willpower to lower his finger from his mouth.

As soon as he stopped concentrating, his hand would pop right back into position. In the old days, he had found that hilarious. Now, not so much.

The centuries had not been kind to him. His skin was wrinkled and saggy. His once-bronze complexion was an unhealthy porcelain color. His sunken eyes smoldered with anger and self-pity.

Imperial gold fetters were clamped around Harpocrates's wrists and ankles, connecting him to a web of chains, cords, and cables-some hooked up to elaborate control panels, others channeled through holes in the walls of the container, leading out to the tower's superstructure.

The setup seemed designed to siphon Harpocrates's power and then amplify it-to broadcast his magical silence across the world.

This was the source of all their communications troubles-one sad, angry, forgotten little god.
It took Ariana a moment to understand why he remained imprisoned.

Even drained of his power, a minor deity should have been able to break a few chains. Harpocrates seemed to be alone and unguarded.

Then Ariana noticed them, even in her dazed pain. Floating on either side of the god, so entangled in chains that they were hard to distinguish from the general chaos of machinery and wires, were two objects Apollo hadn't seen in centuries: identical ceremonial axes, each about four feet tall, with a crescent blade and a thick bundle of wooden rods fastened around the shaft.

Fasces.

The ultimate symbol of Roman might.

Looking at them made Ariana's ribs twist into bows. In the old days, powerful Roman officials never left home without a procession of lictor bodyguards, each carrying one of those bundled axes to let the commoners know somebody important was coming through.