by Rick Riordan
Ares came towards me, grinning confidently. I lowered my blade, as if I were too exhausted to go on. Wait for it, I told the sea. The pressure now was almost lifting me off my feet. Ares raised his sword. I released the tide and jumped, rocketing straight over Ares on a wave.
A two-metre wall of water smashed him full in the face, leaving him cursing and sputtering with a mouth full of seaweed. I landed behind him with a splash and feinted towards his head, as I’d done before. He turned in time to raise his sword, but this time he was disoriented, he didn’t anticipate the trick. I changed direction, lunged to the side and stabbed Riptide straight down into the water, sending the point through the god’s heel.
The roar that followed made Hades’s earthquake look like a minor event. The very sea was blasted back from Ares, leaving a wet circle of sand fifteen metres wide.
Ichor, the golden blood of the gods, flowed from a gash in the war god’s boot. The expression on his face was beyond hatred. It was pain, shock, complete disbelief that he’d been wounded.
He limped towards me, muttering ancient Greek curses.
Something stopped him.
It was as if a cloud covered the sun, but worse. Light faded. Sound and colour drained away. A cold, heavy presence passed over the beach, slowing time, dropping the temperature to freezing and making me feel like life was hopeless, fighting was useless.
The darkness lifted.
Ares looked stunned.
Police cars were burning behind us. The crowd of spectators had fled. Annabeth and Grover stood on the beach, in shock, watching the water flood back around Ares’s feet, his glowing golden ichor dissipating in the tide.
Ares lowered his sword.
‘You have made an enemy, godling,’ he told me. ‘You have sealed your fate. Every time you raise your blade in battle, every time you hope for success, you will feel my curse. Beware, Perseus Jackson. Beware.’
His body began to glow.
‘Percy!’ Annabeth shouted. ‘Don’t watch!’
I turned away as the god Ares revealed his true immortal form. I somehow knew that if I looked, I would disintegrate into ashes.
The light died.
I looked back. Ares was gone. The tide rolled out to reveal Hades’s bronze helmet of darkness. I picked it up and walked towards my friends.
But before I got there, I heard the flapping of leathery wings. Three evil-looking grandmothers with lace hats and fiery whips drifted down from the sky and landed in front of me.
The middle Fury, the one who had been Mrs Dodds, stepped forward. Her fangs were bared, but for once she didn’t look threatening. She looked more disappointed, as if she’d been planning to have me for supper, but had decided I might give her indigestion.
‘We saw the whole thing,’ she hissed. ‘So… it truly was not you?’
I tossed her the helmet, which she caught in surprise.
‘Return that to Lord Hades,’ I said. ‘Tell him the truth. Tell him to call off the war.’
She hesitated, then ran a forked tongue over her green, leathery lips. ‘Live well, Percy Jackson. Become a true hero. Because if you do not, if you ever come into my clutches again…’
She cackled, savouring the idea. Then she and her sisters rose on their bat’s wings, fluttered into the smoke-filled sky and disappeared.
I joined Grover and Annabeth, who were staring at me in amazement.
‘Percy…’ Grover said. ‘That was so incredibly…’
‘Terrifying,’ said Annabeth.
‘Cool!’ Grover corrected.
I didn’t feel terrified. I certainly didn’t feel cool. I was tired and sore and completely drained of energy.
‘Did you guys feel that… whatever it was?’ I asked.
They both nodded uneasily.
‘Must’ve been the Furies overhead,’ Grover said.
But I wasn’t so sure. Something had stopped Ares from killing me, and whatever could do that was a lot stronger than the Furies.
I looked at Annabeth, and an understanding passed between us. I knew now what was in that pit, what had spoken from the entrance of Tartarus.
I reclaimed my backpack from Grover and looked inside. The master bolt was still there. Such a small thing to almost cause World War III.
‘We have to get back to New York,’ I said. ‘By tonight.’
‘That’s impossible,’ Annabeth said, ‘unless we –’
‘Fly,’ I agreed.
She stared at me. ‘Fly, like, in an aeroplane, which you were warned never to do lest Zeus strike you out of the sky, and carrying a weapon that has more destructive power than a nuclear bomb?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Pretty much exactly like that. Come on.’
21 I Settle My Tab
It’s funny how humans can wrap their mind around things and fit them into their version of reality. Chiron had told me that long ago. As usual, I didn’t appreciate his wisdom until much later.
According to the L.A. news, the explosion at the Santa Monica beach had been caused when a crazy kidnapper fired a shotgun at a police car. He accidentally hit a gas main that had ruptured during the earthquake.
This crazy kidnapper (a.k.a. Ares) was the same man who had abducted me and two other adolescents in New York and brought us across country on a ten-day odyssey of terror.
Poor little Percy Jackson wasn’t an international criminal, after all. He’d caused a commotion on that Greyhound bus in New Jersey trying to get away from his captor (and afterwards, witnesses would even swear they had seen the leather-clad man on the bus – ‘Why didn’t I remember him before?’) The crazy man had caused the explosion in the St Louis Arch. After all, no kid could’ve done that. A concerned waitress in Denver had seen the man threatening his abductees outside her diner, gotten a friend to take a photo and notified the police. Finally, brave Percy Jackson (I was beginning to like this kid) had stolen a gun from his captor in Los Angeles and battled him shotgun-to-rifle on the beach. Police had arrived just in time. But in the spectacular explosion, five police cars had been destroyed and the captor had fled. No fatalities had occurred. Percy Jackson and his two friends were safely in police custody.
The reporters fed us this whole story. We just nodded and acted tearful and exhausted (which wasn’t hard), and played victimized kids for the cameras.
‘All I want,’ I said, choking back my tears, ‘is to see my loving stepfather again. Every time I saw him on TV, calling me a delinquent punk, I knew… somehow… we would be okay. And I know he’ll want to reward each and every person in this beautiful city of Los Angeles with a free major appliance from his store. Here’s the phone number.’ The police and reporters were so moved that they passed around the hat and raised money for three tickets on the next plane to New York.
I knew there was no choice but to fly. I hoped Zeus would cut me some slack, considering the circumstances. But it was still hard to force myself on board the flight.
Takeoff was a nightmare. Every spot of turbulence was scarier than a Greek monster. I didn’t unclench my hands from the armrests until we touched down safely at La Guardia. The local press was waiting for us outside security, but we managed to evade them thanks to Annabeth, who lured them away in her invisible Yankees cap, shouting, ‘They’re over by the frozen yogurt! Come on!’, then rejoined us at baggage claim.
We split up at the taxi stand. I told Annabeth and Grover to get back to Half-Blood Hill and let Chiron know what had happened. They protested, and it was hard to let them go after all we’d been through, but I knew I had to do this last part of the quest by myself. If things went wrong, if the gods didn’t believe me… I wanted Annabeth and Grover to survive to tell Chiron the truth.
I hopped in a taxi and headed into Manhattan.
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-four hours.
I w
ent up to the guard at the front desk and said, ‘Six hundredth floor.’
He was reading a huge book with a picture of a wizard on the front. I wasn’t much into fantasy, but the book must’ve been good, because the guard took a while to look up. ‘No such floor, kiddo.’
‘I need an audience with Zeus.’
He gave me a vacant smile. ‘Sorry?’
‘You heard me.’
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, ‘No appointment, no audience, kiddo. Lord Zeus doesn’t see anyone unannounced.’
‘Oh, I think he’ll make an exception.’ I slipped off my backpack and unzipped the top.
The guard looked inside at the metal cylinder, not getting what it was for a few seconds. Then his face went pale. ‘That isn’t…’
‘Yes, it is,’ I promised. ‘You want me take it out and –’
‘No! No!’ He scrambled out of his seat, fumbled around his desk for a key card, then handed it 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. The card disappeared and a new button appeared on the console, a red one that said 600.
I pressed it and waited, and waited.
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, white marble 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.
From the top of the clouds rose the decapitated peak of a mountain, its summit covered with snow. Clinging to the mountainside were dozens of multilevelled palaces – a city of mansions – all with white-columned porticos, gilded terraces and bronze braziers glowing with a thousand fires. Roads wound crazily up to the peak, where the largest palace gleamed against the snow. Precariously perched gardens bloomed with olive trees and rosebushes. I could make out an open-air market filled with colourful tents, a stone amphitheatre built on one side of the mountain, a hippodrome and a coliseum on the other. It was an Ancient Greek city, except it wasn’t in ruins. It was new, and clean, and 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 good-looking 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.
I climbed the main road, towards the big palace at the peak. It was a reverse copy of the palace in the Underworld. There, everything had been black and bronze. Here, everything glittered white and silver.
I realized Hades must’ve built his palace to resemble this one. He wasn’t welcomed in Olympus except on winter solstice, so he’d built his own Olympus underground. Despite my bad experience with him, I felt a little sorry for the guy. To be banished from this place seemed really unfair. It would make anybody bitter.
Steps led up to a central courtyard. Past that, the throne room.
Room really isn’t the right word. The place made Grand Central Station look like a broom closet. Massive columns rose to a domed ceiling, which was gilded with moving constellations.
Twelve thrones, built for beings the size of Hades, were arranged in an inverted U, just like the cabins at Camp Half-Blood. An enormous fire crackled in the central hearth pit. The thrones were empty except for two at the end: the head throne on the right, and the one to its immediate left. I didn’t have to be told who the two gods were that were sitting there, waiting for me to approach. I came towards them, my legs trembling.
The gods were in giant human form, as Hades had been, but I could barely look at them without feeling a tingle, as if my body were starting to burn. Zeus, the Lord of the Gods, wore a dark blue, pinstriped suit. He sat on a simple throne of solid platinum. He had a well-trimmed beard, marbled grey and black like a storm cloud. His face was proud and handsome and grim, his eyes rainy grey. As I got nearer to him, the air crackled and smelled of ozone.
The god sitting next to him was his brother, without a doubt, but he was dressed very differently. He reminded me of a beachcomber from Key West. He wore leather sandals, khaki Bermuda shorts, and a Tommy Bahama shirt with coconuts and parrots all over it. His skin was deeply tanned, his hands scarred like an old-time fisherman’s. His hair was black, like mine. His face had that same brooding look that had always got me branded a rebel. But his eyes, sea-green like mine, were surrounded by sun-crinkles that told me he smiled a lot, too.
His throne was a deep-sea fisherman’s chair. It was the simple swivelling kind, with a black leather seat and a built-in holster for a fishing pole. Instead of a pole, the holster held a bronze trident, flickering with green light around the tips.
The gods weren’t moving or speaking, but there was tension in the air, as if they’d just finished an argument.
I approached the fisherman’s throne and knelt at his feet. ‘Father.’ I dared not look up. My heart was racing. I could feel the energy emanating from the two gods. If I said the wrong thing, I had no doubt they could blast me into dust.
To my left, Zeus spoke. ‘Should you not address the master of this house first, boy?’
I kept my head down, and waited.
‘Peace, brother,’ Poseidon finally said. His voice stirred my oldest memories: that warm glow I remembered as a baby, the sensation of this god’s hand on my forehead. ‘The boy defers to his father. This is only right.’
‘You still claim him then?’ Zeus asked menacingly. ‘You claim this child whom you sired against our sacred oath?’
‘I have admitted my wrongdoing,’ Poseidon said. ‘Now I would hear him speak.’
Wrongdoing.
A lump welled up in my throat. Was that all I was? A wrongdoing? The result of a god’s mistake?
‘I have spared him once already,’ Zeus grumbled. ‘Daring to fly through my domain… pah! I should have blasted him out of the sky for his impudence.’
‘And risk destroying your own master bolt?’ Poseidon asked calmly. ‘Let us hear him out, brother.’
Zeus grumbled some more. ‘I shall listen,’ he decided. ‘Then I shall make up my mind whether or not to cast this boy down from Olympus.’
‘Perseus,’ Poseidon said. ‘Look at me.’
I did, and I wasn’t sure what I saw in his face. There was no clear sign of love or approval. Nothing to encourage me. It was like looking at the ocean: some days, you could tell what mood it was in. Most days, though, it was unreadable, mysterious.
I got the feeling Poseidon really didn’t know what to think of me. He didn’t know whether he was happy to have me as a son or not. In a strange way, I was glad that Poseidon was so distant. If he’d tried to apologize, or told me he loved me, or even smiled, it would’ve felt fake. Like a human dad, making some lame excuse for not being around. I could live with that. After all, I wasn’t sure about him yet, either.
&
nbsp; ‘Address Lord Zeus, boy,’ Poseidon told me. ‘Tell him your story.’
So I told Zeus everything, just as it had happened. I took out the metal cylinder, which began sparking in the Sky Gods presence, and laid it at his feet.
There was a long silence, broken only by the crackle of the hearth fire.
Zeus opened his palm. The lightning bolt flew into it. As he closed his fist, the metallic points flared with electricity, until he was holding what looked more like the classic thunderbolt, a five-metre javelin of arcing, hissing energy that made the hairs on my scalp rise.
‘I sense the boy tells the truth,’ Zeus muttered. ‘But that Ares would do such a thing… it is most unlike him.’
‘He is proud and impulsive,’ Poseidon said. ‘It runs in the family.’
‘Lord?’ I asked.
They both said, ‘Yes?’
‘Ares didn’t act alone. Someone else – something else – came up with the idea.’
I described my dreams, and the feeling I’d had on the beach, that momentary breath of evil that had seemed to stop the world and made Ares back off from killing me.
‘In the dreams,’ I said, ‘the voice told me to bring the bolt to the Underworld. Ares hinted that he’d been having dreams, too. I think he was being used, just as I was, to start a war.’
‘You are accusing Hades, after all?’ Zeus asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I mean, Lord Zeus, I’ve been in the presence of Hades. This feeling on the beach was different. It was the same thing I felt when I got close to that pit. That was the entrance to Tartarus, wasn’t it? Something powerful and evil is stirring down there… something even older than the gods.’
Poseidon and Zeus looked at each other. They had a quick, intense discussion in Ancient Greek. I only caught one word. Father.
Poseidon made some kind of suggestion, but Zeus cut him off. Poseidon tried to argue. Zeus held up his hand angrily. ‘We will speak of this no more,’ Zeus said. ‘I must go personally to purify this thunderbolt in the waters of Lemnos, to remove the human taint from its metal.’