The Burning Maze (The Trials of Apollo #3)

‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘I met these ladies downtown and we sort of made an alliance.’

Grover gulped. ‘But Crest said the main entrance would be a death trap! It was heavily guarded!’

‘Yeah, it was …’ Piper pointed at the dryads. ‘Not any more.’

The dryads looked pleased with themselves.

‘The ash is mighty,’ said one.

The others murmured in agreement.

Herophile stepped out from her hiding place behind the toilet. ‘But the fires. How did you –?’

‘Ha!’ cried a dryad. ‘It would take more than the fires of a sun Titan to destroy us!’ She held up her shield. One corner was blackened, but the soot was already falling away, revealing new, unblemished wood underneath.

Judging from Meg’s scowl, I could tell her mind was working overtime. That made me nervous.

‘So … you guys serve me now?’ she asked.

The dryads banged their shields again in unison.

‘We will obey the commands of the Meg!’ said the leader.

‘Like, if I asked you to go get me some enchiladas –?’

‘We would ask how many!’ shouted another dryad. ‘And how hot you like your salsa!’

Meg nodded. ‘Cool. But first maybe you could escort us safely out of the maze?’

‘It shall be done!’ said the lead dryad.

‘Hold on,’ Piper said. ‘What about …?’

She gestured to the floor tiles, where my golden nonsense words still glowed across the stone.

While kneeling in chains, I hadn’t really been able to appreciate their arrangement:

BRONZE UPON GOLD DESTROY THE TYRANT

EAST MEETS WEST AID THE WINGED

LEGIONS ARE REDEEMED UNDER GOLDEN HILLS

LIGHT THE DEPTHS GREAT STALLION’S FOAL

ONE AGAINST MANY HARKEN THE TRUMPETS

NEVER SPIRIT DEFEATED TURN RED TIDES

ANCIENT WORDS SPOKEN ENTER STRANGER’S HOME

SHAKING OLD FOUNDATIONS REGAIN LOST GLORY

‘What does it mean?’ Grover asked, looking at me as if I had the faintest idea.

My mind ached with exhaustion and sorrow. While Crest had distracted Medea, giving Piper time to arrive and save my friends’ lives, I had been spouting nonsense: two columns of text with a fiery margin down the middle. They weren’t even formatted in an interesting font.

‘It means Apollo succeeded!’ the Sibyl said proudly. ‘He finished the prophecy!’

I shook my head. ‘But I didn’t. Apollo faces death in Tarquin’s Tomb unless the doorway to the soundless god is opened by … All of that?’

Piper scanned the lines. ‘That’s a lot of text. Should I write it down?’

The Sibyl’s smile wavered. ‘You mean … you don’t see it? It’s right there.’

Grover squinted at the golden words. ‘See what?’

‘Oh.’ Meg nodded. ‘Okay, yeah.’

The seven dryads all leaned towards her, fascinated.

‘What does it mean, great daughter of the creator?’ asked the leader.

‘It’s an acrostic,’ Meg said. ‘Look.’

She jogged to the upper left corner of the room. She walked along the first letter in each line, then hopped across the margin and walked the first letters of the lines in that column, all while saying the letters out loud: ‘B-E-L-L-O-N-A-S D-A-U-G-H-T-E-R.’

‘Wow.’ Piper shook her head in amazement. ‘I’m still not sure what the prophecy means, about Tarquin and a soundless god and all that. But apparently you need the help of Bellona’s daughter. That means the senior praetor at Camp Jupiter: Reyna Avila Ramírez-Arellano.’





44


Ha-ha-ha, dryads?

That’s straight from the horse’s mouth

Goodbye, Mr Horse





‘Hail, the Meg!’ cried the lead dryad. ‘Hail, the solver of the puzzle!’

‘HAIL!’ the others agreed, followed by much kneeling, banging of spears on shields, and offers to retrieve enchiladas.

I might have argued with Meg’s hail-worthiness. If I hadn’t just been magically half flayed to death in burning chains, I could have solved the puzzle. I was also pretty sure Meg hadn’t known what an acrostic was until I explained it to her.

But we had bigger problems. The chamber began to shake. Dust trickled from the ceiling. A few stone tiles fell and splashed into the pool of ichor.

‘We must leave,’ said Herophile. ‘The prophecy is complete. I am free. This room will not survive.’

‘I like leaving!’ Grover agreed.

I liked leaving, too, but there was one promise I still meant to keep, no matter how much Styx hated me.

I knelt at the edge of the platform and stared into the fiery ichor.

‘Uh, Apollo?’ Meg asked.

‘Should we pull him away?’ asked a dryad.

‘Should we push him in?’ asked another.

Meg didn’t respond. Maybe she was weighing which offer sounded better. I tried to focus on the fires below.

‘Helios,’ I murmured, ‘your imprisonment is over. Medea is dead.’

The ichor churned and flashed. I felt the Titan’s half-conscious anger. Now that he was free, he seemed to be thinking why shouldn’t he vent his power from these tunnels and turn the countryside into a wasteland? He probably also wasn’t too happy about getting two pandai, some ragweed and his evil granddaughter dumped into his nice, fiery essence.

‘You have a right to be angry,’ I said. ‘But I remember you – your brilliance, your warmth. I remember your friendship with the gods and the mortals of the earth. I can never be as great a sun deity as you were, but every day I try to honour your memory – to remember your best qualities.’

The ichor bubbled more rapidly.

I am just talking to a friend, I told myself. This is not at all like convincing an intercontinental ballistic missile not to launch itself.

‘I will endure,’ I told him. ‘I will regain the sun chariot. As long as I drive it, you will be remembered. I will keep your old path across the sky steady and true. But you know, more than anyone, that the fires of the sun don’t belong on the earth. They weren’t meant to destroy the land, but to warm it! Caligula and Medea have twisted you into a weapon. Don’t allow them to win! All you have to do is rest. Return to the ether of Chaos, my old friend. Be at peace.’

The ichor turned white-hot. I was sure my face was about to get an extreme dermal peel.

Then the fiery essence fluttered and shimmered like a pool full of moth wings – and the ichor vanished. The heat dissipated. The stone tiles disintegrated into dust and rained into the empty pit. On my arms, the terrible burns faded. The split skin mended itself. The pain ebbed to a tolerable level of I’ve-just-been-tortured-for-six-hours agony, and I collapsed, shaking and cold, on the stone floor.

‘You did it!’ Grover cried. He looked at the dryads, then at Meg, and laughed in amazement. ‘Can you feel it? The heat wave, the drought, the wildfires … they’re gone!’

‘Indeed,’ said the lead dryad. ‘The Meg’s weakling servant has saved nature! Hail to the Meg!’

‘HAIL!’ the other dryads chimed in.

I didn’t even have the energy to protest.

The chamber rumbled more violently. A large crack zigzagged down the middle of the ceiling.

‘Let’s get out of here.’ Meg turned to the dryads. ‘Help Apollo.’

‘The Meg has spoken!’ said the lead dryad.

Two dryads hauled me to my feet and carried me between them. I tried to put weight on my feet, just for dignity’s sake, but it was like roller-skating on wheels of wet macaroni.

‘You know how to get there?’ Grover asked the dryads.

‘We do now,’ said one. ‘It is the quickest way back to nature, and that is something we can always find.’

On a Help, I’m Going to Die scale from one to ten, exiting the maze was a ten. But, since everything else I’d done that week was a fifteen, it seemed like a piece of baklava. Tunnel roofs collapsed around us. Floors crumbled. Monsters attacked, only to be stabbed to death by seven eager dryads yelling, ‘HAIL!’

Finally, we reached a narrow shaft that slanted upward towards a tiny square of sunlight.

‘This isn’t the way we came in,’ Grover fretted.

‘It is close enough,’ said the lead dryad. ‘We will go first!’