The Burning Maze (The Trials of Apollo #3)

The Burning Maze (The Trials of Apollo #3)

Rick Riordan




To Melpomene, the Muse of Tragedy,

I hope you’re pleased with yourself





The Dark Prophecy


The words that memory wrought are set to fire,

Ere new moon rises o’er the Devil’s Mount.

The changeling lord shall face a challenge dire,

Till bodies fill the Tiber beyond count.

Yet southward must the sun now trace its course,

Through mazes dark to lands of scorching death

To find the master of the swift white horse

And wrest from him the crossword speaker’s breath.

To westward palace must the Lester go;

Demeter’s daughter finds her ancient roots.

The cloven guide alone the way does know,

To walk the path in thine own enemy’s boots.

When three are known and Tiber reached alive,

’Tis only then Apollo starts to jive.





1


Once was Apollo

Now a rat in the Lab’rinth

Send help. And cronuts





No.

I refuse to share this part of my story. It was the lowest, most humiliating, most awful week in my four-thousand-plus years of life. Tragedy. Disaster. Heartbreak. I will not tell you about it.

Why are you still here? Go away!

But, alas, I suppose I have no choice. Doubtless, Zeus expects me to tell you the story as part of my punishment.

It’s not enough that he turned me, the once-divine Apollo, into a mortal teenager with acne, flab and the alias Lester Papadopoulos. It’s not enough that he sent me on a dangerous quest to liberate five great ancient Oracles from a trio of evil Roman emperors. It’s not even enough that he enslaved me – his formerly favourite son – to a pushy twelve-year-old demigod named Meg!

On top of all that, Zeus wants me to record my shame for posterity.

Very well. But I have warned you. In these pages, only suffering awaits.

Where to begin?

With Grover and Meg, of course.

For two days, we had travelled the Labyrinth – across pits of darkness and around lakes of poison, through dilapidated shopping malls with only discount Halloween stores and questionable Chinese food buffets.

The Labyrinth could be a bewildering place. Like a web of capillaries beneath the skin of the mortal world, it connected basements, sewers and forgotten tunnels around the globe with no regard to the rules of time and space. One might enter the Labyrinth through a manhole in Rome, walk ten feet, open a door and find oneself at a training camp for clowns in Buffalo, Minnesota. (Please don’t ask. It was traumatic.)

I would have preferred to avoid the Labyrinth altogether. Sadly, the prophecy we’d received in Indiana had been quite specific: Through mazes dark to lands of scorching death. Fun! The cloven guide alone the way does know.

Except that our cloven guide, the satyr Grover Underwood, did not seem to know the way.

‘You’re lost,’ I said, for the fortieth time.

‘Am not!’ he protested.

He trotted along in his baggy jeans and green tie-dyed T-shirt, his goat hooves wobbling in his specially modified New Balance 520s. A red Rasta cap covered his curly hair. Why he thought this disguise helped him better pass for human, I couldn’t say. The bumps of his horns were clearly visible beneath the hat. His shoes popped off his hooves several times a day, and I was getting tired of being his sneaker retriever.

He stopped at a T in the corridor. In either direction, rough-hewn stone walls marched into darkness. Grover tugged his wispy goatee.

‘Well?’ Meg asked.

Grover flinched. Like me, he had quickly come to fear Meg’s displeasure.

Not that Meg McCaffrey looked terrifying. She was small for her age, with traffic-light-coloured clothes – green dress, yellow leggings, red high-tops – all torn and dirty thanks to our many crawls through narrow tunnels. Cobwebs streaked her dark pageboy haircut. The lenses of her cat-eye glasses were so grimy I couldn’t imagine how she could see. In all, she looked like a kindergartner who had just survived a vicious playground brawl for possession of a tyre swing.

Grover pointed to the tunnel on the right. ‘I – I’m pretty sure Palm Springs is that way.’

‘Pretty sure?’ Meg asked. ‘Like last time, when we walked into a bathroom and surprised a Cyclops on the toilet?’

‘That wasn’t my fault!’ Grover protested. ‘Besides, this direction smells right. Like … cacti.’

Meg sniffed the air. ‘I don’t smell cacti.’

‘Meg,’ I said, ‘the satyr is supposed to be our guide. We don’t have much choice but to trust him.’

Grover huffed. ‘Thanks for the vote of confidence. Your daily reminder: I didn’t ask to be magically summoned halfway across the country and wake up in a rooftop tomato patch in Indianapolis!’

Brave words, but he kept his eyes on the twin rings around Meg’s middle fingers, perhaps worried she might summon her golden scimitars and slice him into rotisserie-style cabrito.

Ever since learning that Meg was a daughter of Demeter, the goddess of growing things, Grover Underwood had acted more intimidated by her than by me, a former Olympian deity. Life was not fair.

Meg wiped her nose. ‘Fine. I just didn’t think we’d be wandering around down here for two days. The new moon is in –’

‘Three more days,’ I said, cutting her off. ‘We know.’

Perhaps I was too brusque, but I didn’t need a reminder about the other part of the prophecy. While we travelled south to find the next Oracle, our friend Leo Valdez was desperately flying his bronze dragon towards Camp Jupiter, the Roman demigod training ground in Northern California, hoping to warn them about the fire, death and disaster that supposedly faced them at the new moon.

I tried to soften my tone. ‘We have to assume Leo and the Romans can handle whatever’s coming in the north. We have our own task.’

‘And plenty of our own fires.’ Grover sighed.

‘Meaning what?’ Meg asked.

As he had for the last two days, Grover remained evasive. ‘Best not to talk about it … here.’

He glanced around nervously as if the walls might have ears, which was a distinct possibility. The Labyrinth was a living structure. Judging from the smells that emanated from some of the corridors, I was fairly sure it had a lower intestine at least.

Grover scratched his ribs. ‘I’ll try to get us there fast, guys,’ he promised. ‘But the Labyrinth has a mind of its own. Last time I was here, with Percy …’

His expression turned wistful, as it often did when he referred to his old adventures with his best friend, Percy Jackson. I couldn’t blame him. Percy was a handy demigod to have around. Unfortunately, he was not as easy to summon from a tomato patch as our satyr guide had been.

I placed my hand on Grover’s shoulder. ‘We know you’re doing your best. Let’s keep going. And, while you’re sniffing for cacti, if you could keep your nostrils open for breakfast – perhaps coffee and lemon-maple cronuts – that would be great.’

We followed our guide down the right-hand tunnel.

Soon the passage narrowed and tapered, forcing us to crouch and waddle in single file. I stayed in the middle, the safest place to be. You may not find that brave, but Grover was a lord of the Wild, a member of the satyrs’ ruling Council of Cloven Elders. Allegedly, he had great powers, though I hadn’t seen him use any yet. As for Meg, she could not only dual-wield golden scimitars but also do amazing things with packets of gardening seeds, which she’d stocked up on in Indianapolis.

I, on the other hand, had grown weaker and more defenceless by the day. Since our battle with the emperor Commodus, whom I’d blinded with a burst of divine light, I had not been able to summon even the smallest bit of my former godly power. My fingers had grown sluggish on the fret board of my combat ukulele. My archery skills had deteriorated. I’d even missed a shot when I fired at that Cyclops on the toilet. (I’m not sure which of us had been more embarrassed.) At the same time, the waking visions that sometimes paralysed me had become more frequent and more intense.