The Burning Maze (The Trials of Apollo #3)

Boat eighteen had been converted into a triage centre. The wounded were sprawled everywhere, groaning from bashed heads, broken limbs, bleeding noses and bruised groins. Many of their injuries were at knee level or below – just where Meg McCaffrey liked to kick. A flock of strixes wheeled overhead, screeching hungrily. Perhaps they were just on guard duty, but I got the feeling they were waiting to see which of the wounded did not pull through.

Boat fourteen was Meg McCaffrey’s coup de grace. Boston ivy had engulfed the entire yacht, including most of the crew, who were stitched to the walls by a thick web of crawlers. A cadre of horticulturists – no doubt called up from the botanical gardens on boat sixteen – were now trying to free their comrades using clippers and weed-whackers.

I was heartened to see that our friends had made it this far and caused so much damage. Perhaps Crest had been mistaken about them being captured. Surely two capable demigods like Jason and Meg would have managed to escape if they got cornered. I was counting on it, since I now needed them to rescue me.

But what if they could not? I racked my brain for clever ideas and devious schemes. Rather than racing, my mind moved at a wheezing jog.

I managed to come up with phase one of my master plan: I would escape without getting myself killed, then free my friends. I was hard at work on phase two – how do I do that? – when I ran out of time. Incitatus crossed to the deck of Julia Drusilla XII, cantered through a set of double golden doors and carried us down a ramp into the ship’s interior, which contained a single massive room – the audience chamber of Caligula.

Entering this space was like plunging down the throat of a sea monster. I’m sure the effect was intentional. The emperor wanted you to feel a sense of panic and helplessness.

You have been swallowed, the room seemed to say. Now you will be digested.

No windows here. The fifty-foot-high walls screamed with garishly painted frescoes of battles, volcanoes, storms, wild parties – all images of power gone amok, boundaries erased, nature overturned.

The tiled floor was a similar study in chaos – intricate, nightmarish mosaics of the gods being devoured by various monsters. Far above, the ceiling was painted black, and dangling from it were golden candelabras, skeletons in cages and bare swords that hung by the thinnest of cords and looked ready to impale anyone below.

I found myself tilting sideways on Incitatus’s back, trying to find my equilibrium, but it was impossible. The chamber offered no safe place to rest my gaze. The rocking of the yacht didn’t help.

Standing guard along the length of the throne room were a dozen pandai – six to port and six to starboard. They held gold-tipped spears and wore golden chain mail from head to foot, including giant metal flaps over their ears that, when struck, must have given them terrible tinnitus.

At the far end of the room, where the boat’s hull narrowed to a point, the emperor had set his dais – putting his back to the corner like any good paranoid ruler. Before him swirled two columns of wind and debris that I couldn’t quite make sense of – some sort of ventus performance art?

At the emperor’s right hand stood another pandos dressed in the full regalia of a praetorian commander – Reverb, I guessed, captain of the guard. To the emperor’s left stood Medea, her eyes gleaming with triumph.

The emperor himself was much as I remembered – young and lithe, handsome enough, though his eyes were too far apart, his ears too prominent (but not in comparison to the pandai), his smile too thin.

He was dressed in white trousers, white boat shoes, a striped blue-and-white shirt, a blue blazer and a captain’s hat. I had a horrible flashback to 1975, when I’d made the mistake of blessing Captain and Tennille with their hit single ‘Love Will Keep Us Together’. If Caligula was the Captain, that made Medea Tennille, which felt wrong on so many levels. I tried to push the thought from my mind.

As our procession approached the throne, Caligula leaned forward and rubbed his hands, as if the next course of his dinner had just arrived.

‘Perfect timing!’ he said. ‘I’ve been having the most fascinating conversation with your friends.’

My friends?

Only then did my brain allow me to process what was inside the swirling columns of wind.

In one hovered Jason Grace. In the other, Meg McCaffrey. Both struggled helplessly. Both screamed without making a sound. Their tornado prisons whirled with glittering shrapnel – tiny pieces of Celestial bronze and Imperial gold that sliced at their clothes and skin, slowly cutting them to pieces.

Caligula rose, his placid brown eyes fixed on me. ‘Incitatus, this can’t actually be him, can it?’

‘Afraid so, pal,’ said the horse. ‘May I present the pathetic excuse for a god, Apollo, also known as Lester Papadopoulos.’

The stallion knelt on his forelegs, spilling Piper and me onto the floor.





31


I give you my heart

I mean metaphorically

Put away that knife





I could think of many names to call Caligula. Pal was not one of them.

Nevertheless, Incitatus seemed perfectly at home in the emperor’s presence. He trotted to starboard, where two pandai began brushing his coat while a third knelt to offer him oats from a golden bucket.

Jason Grace lashed out in his wind tunnel of shrapnel, trying to break free. He cast a distressed look at Piper and yelled something I couldn’t hear. In the other wind column, Meg floated with her arms and legs crossed, scowling like an angry genie, ignoring the bits of metal cutting her face.

Caligula stepped down from his dais. He strolled between the wind columns with a jaunty lilt in his step, no doubt the effect of wearing a yacht-captain outfit. He stopped a few feet in front of me. In his open palm, he bounced two small bits of gold – Meg McCaffrey’s rings.

‘This must be the lovely Piper McLean.’ He frowned down at her, as if just realizing she was barely conscious. ‘Why is she like this? I can’t taunt her in this condition. Reverb!’

The praetor commander snapped his fingers. Two guards shuffled forward and dragged Piper to her feet. One waved a small bottle under her nose – smelling salts, perhaps, or some vile magical equivalent of Medea’s.

Piper’s head snapped back. A shudder ran through her body, then she pushed the pandai away.

‘I’m fine.’ She blinked at her surroundings, saw Jason and Meg in their wind columns, then glared at Caligula. She struggled to pull her knife, but her fingers didn’t seem to work. ‘I’ll kill you.’

Caligula chuckled. ‘That would be amusing, my love. But let’s not kill each other quite yet, eh? Tonight, I have other priorities.’

He beamed at me. ‘Oh, Lester. What a gift Jupiter has given me!’ He walked a circuit around me, running his fingertips along my shoulders as if checking for dust. I suppose I should have attacked him, but Caligula radiated such cool confidence, such a powerful aura that it befuddled my mind.

‘Not much left of your godliness, is there?’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. Medea will coax it out of you. Then I’ll take revenge on Zeus for you. Have some comfort in that.’

‘I – I don’t want revenge.’

‘Of course you do! It will be wonderful, just wait and see … Well, actually, you’ll be dead, but you’ll have to trust me. I’ll make you proud.’

‘Caesar,’ Medea called from her side of the dais, ‘perhaps we could begin soon?’

She did her best to hide it, but I heard the strain in her voice. As I’d seen in the parking garage of death, even Medea had her limits. Keeping Meg and Jason in twin tornadoes must have required a great deal of her strength. She couldn’t possibly maintain her ventus prisons and do whatever magic she needed to de-god me. If only I could figure out how to exploit that weakness …

Annoyance flickered across Caligula’s face. ‘Yes, yes, Medea. In a moment. First, I must greet my loyal servants …’ He turned to the pandai who’d accompanied us from the ship of shoes. ‘Which of you is Wah-Wah?’

Wah-Wah bowed, his ears spreading across the mosaic floor. ‘H-here, sire.’

‘Served me well, have you?’

‘Yes, sire!’

‘Until today.’

The pandos looked like he was trying to swallow Tiny Tim’s ukulele. ‘They – they tricked us, lord! With horrible music!’