Percy
_
Just after dawn, the quest group met at Zeus's Fist. I'd packed my knapsack—thermos with nectar, baggie of ambrosia, bedroll, rope, clothes, flashlights, and lots of extra batteries. I had my sword from Beckendorf in my pocket.
It was a clear morning. The fog had burned off and the sky was blue. Campers would be having their lessons today, flying pegasi and practicing archery and scaling the lava wall. Meanwhile, we could be heading underground.
Chiron stood with the other campers who'd come to wish us well, but there was too much activity for it to feel like a happy send-off. A couple of tents had been set up by the rocks for guard duty. Beckendorf and his siblings were working on a line of defensive spikes and trenches. Chiron had decided we needed to guard the Labyrinth exit at all times, just in case.
Zoe was doing one last check on her supply pack. When I came over, she frowned. "Percy, you look terrible."
"Bad memories," I muttered.
She looked concerned, but before she could ask, Chiron trotted over. "Well, it appears you are ready!"
He tried to sound upbeat, but I could tell he was anxious.
"I have a feeling I'm not ready for whatever's in there," Killian said, staring at the crack in the rocks.
Chiron's smile became strained. "I am sure you will do us proud. Take care, and good hunting."
"You too," I said.
We walked over to the rocks. I stared at the crack between the boulders—the entrance that was about to swallow us.
"Well," Lilly said nervously, "good-bye sunshine."
"Hello rocks," Killian agreed.
And together, the four of us descended into darkness.
We made it a hundred feet before we were hopelessly lost.
The tunnel looked nothing like the one Zoe had stumbled into before. Now it was round like a sewer, constructed of red brick with iron barred portholes every ten feet. I shined a light through one of the portholes out of curiosity, but I couldn't see anything. It opened into infinite darkness. I thought I heard voices on the other side, but it may have been just the cold wind.
Zoe tried her best to guide us. She had this idea that we should stick to the left wall.
"If we keep one hand on the left wall and follow it," she said, "we should be able to find our way out again by reversing course."
Unfortunately, as soon as she said that, the left wall disappeared. We found ourselves in the middle of a circular chamber with eight tunnels leading out, and no idea how we'd gotten there.
"Um, which way did we come in?" Lilly said nervously.
"Just turn around," Zoe said.
We each turned toward a different tunnel. It was ridiculous. None of us could decide which way led back to camp.
"Well, that wasn't very nice," Killian said. "Which way now?"
Zoe swept her flashlight beam over the archways of the eight tunnels. As far as I could tell, they were identical. "That way," she said.
"How do you know?" I asked.
"Deductive reasoning."
"So...you're guessing."
"Just come on," she said.
The tunnel she'd chosen narrowed quickly. The walls turned to gray cement, and the ceiling got so low that pretty soon we were hunching over. Killian was forced to crawl.
We kept shuffling forward. Just when I was sure the tunnel would get so narrow it would squish us, it opened into a huge room. I shined my light around the walls and said, "Whoa."
The whole room was covered in mosaic tiles. The pictures were grimy and faded, but I could still make out the colors—red, blue, green, gold. The frieze showed the Olympian gods at a feast. There was my dad, Poseidon, with his trident, holding out grapes for Dionysus to turn into wine. Zeus was partying with satyrs, and Hermes was flying through the air on his winged sandals. The pictures were beautiful, but they weren't very accurate. I'd seen the gods. Dionysus was not that handsome, and Hermes's nose wasn't that big.
In the middle of the room was a three-tiered fountain. It looked like it hadn't held water in a long time.
"What is this place?" I muttered. "It looks—"
"Roman," Zoe said. "Those mosaics are about two thousand years old."
"But how can they be Roman?" I wasn't that great on ancient history, but I was pretty sure the Roman Empire never made it as far as Long Island.
"The Labyrinth is a patchwork," Zoe said. "I told you, it's always expanding, adding pieces. It's the only work of architecture that grows by itself."
"You make it sound like it's alive."
A groaning noise echoed from the tunnel in front of us.
"Let's not talk about it being alive," Lilly whimpered. "Please?"
"All right," Zoe said. "Forward."
"Down the hall with the bad sounds?" Killian said. Even he looked nervous.
"Yeah," Zoe said. "The architecture is getting older. That's a good sign. Daedalus's workshop would be in the oldest part."
That made sense. But soon the maze was toying with us—we went fifty feet and the tunnel turned back to cement, with brass pipes running down the sides. The walls were spray-painted with graffiti. A neon tagger sign read MOZ RULZ.
"I'm thinking this is not Roman," I said helpfully.
Zoe took a deep breath, then forged ahead.
Every few feet the tunnels twisted and turned and branched off. The floor beneath us changed from cement to mud to bricks and back again. There was no sense to any of it. We stumbled into a wince cellar—a bunch of dusty bottles in wooden racks—like we were walking through somebody's basement, only there was no exit above us, just more tunnels leading on.
Later the ceiling turned to wooden planks, and I could hear voices above us and the creaking of footsteps, as if we were walking under some kind of bar. It was reassuring to hear people, but then again, we couldn't get to them. We were stuck down here with no way out. Then we found our first skeleton.
He was dressed in white clothes, like some kind of uniform. A wooden crate of glass bottles sat next to him.
"A milkman," Zoe said.
"What?" Killian asked.
"They used to deliver milk."
"Yeah, I know what they are, but...that was when my mom was little, like a million years ago. What's he doing here?"
"Some people wander in by mistake," Zoe said. "Some come exploring on purpose and never make it back. A long time ago, the Cretans sent people in here as human sacrifices."
Lilly gulped. "He's been down here a long time." She pointed to the skeleton's bottles, which were coated with white dust. The skeleton's fingers were clawing at the brick wall, like he had died trying to get out.
"We have to get deeper into the maze," Zoe said. "There has to be a way to the center."
She led us to the right, then the left, through a corridor of stainless steel like some kind of air shaft, and we arrived back in the Roman tile room with the fountain.
There were two doorways. One that led left, and one that led right.
"Which way should we go?" I asked. I couldn't remember which way we went last time. I could barely remember why this room seemed familiar.
Zoe and Killian suddenly tensed. "Left," they both said.
Lilly frowned. "How can you be sure?"
"Because something is coming from the right," Zoe said.
"Something big," Killian agreed. "And it's in a hurry."
"Left is sounding pretty good," I decided. Together we plunged into the dark corridor.
The good news: the left tunnel was straight with no side exits, twists, or turns. The bad news; it was a dead end. After sprinting a hundred yards, we ran into an enormous boulder that completely blocked our path. Behind us, the sounds of dragging footsteps and heavy breathing echoed down the corridor. Something—definitely not human—was on our tail.
"Killian," I said, "try pushing it using your Titan strength."
"Titan strength?"
"Michael has it, so you do too. Just start pushing!"
"Okay!" He slammed his shoulder against the rock so hard the whole tunnel shook. Dust trickled from the stone ceiling.
"Hurry!" Lilly said. "Don't bring the roof down, but hurry!"
The boulder finally gave way with a horrible grinding noise. Killian pushed it into a small room and we dashed through behind it.
"Close the entrance!" Zoe said. We all got on the other side of the boulder and pushed. Whatever was chasing us wailed in frustration as we heaved the rock back into placed and sealed the corridor.
"We trapped it," I said.
"Or trapped ourselves," Lilly said.
I turned. We were in a twenty-foot-square cement room and the opposite wall was covered with metal bars. We'd tunneled straight into a cell.
"What in Hades?" Zoe tugged on the bars. They didn't budge. Through the bars we could see rows of cells in a ring around a dark courtyard—at least three stories of metal doors and metal catwalks.
"A prison," I said. "Maybe Killian can break—"
"Shh," said Lilly. "Listen."
Somewhere above us, deep sobbing echoed through the building. There was another sound, too—a raspy voice muttering something that I couldn't make out. The words were strange, like rocks in a tumbler.
"What's that language?" Killian whispered.
"An ancient tongue," Zoe said. "One that not even I can understand."
"I can," Lilly said quietly. They turned to her, but I stepped towards the bars.
"I do, too," I murmured. "Can someone get us through this?"
"Let me," Lilly said, trying to get away from Zoe and Killian's curious gazes. She stepped past me, and a glint of pink caught my eye. I don't know how I hadn't noticed it before, but she was wearing a glass hairpin that was in the shape of a pink rose.
She put her hands on the bars and they started to steam. After a couple seconds, she lowered her hands, revealing that she had melted her way through the bars. She did it again on a lower part of the bars, then gently set them on the ground when they came loose.
We all stared at her. She blushed.
"Acid," she muttered.
"Cool," Killian said.
I carefully stepped out of the cell and started running towards the voice. The prison was dark, only a few dim fluorescent lights flickering above.
"I know this place," Killian said. "This is Alcatraz."
"You mean that island is near San Francisco?"
He nodded. "My school took a field trip here. It's like a museum."
It didn't seem possible that we could've popped out of the Labyrinth on the other side of the country, but I knew he was right. This place seemed very familiar.
"Freeze," Killian warned.
But Lilly kept going. Killian grabbed her arm and pulled her back. "Stop, Lilly!" he whispered. "Can't you see it?"
I looked where he was pointing, and my stomach did a somersault. On the second-floor balcony, across the courtyard, was a monster more horrible than anything I'd ever seen before.
It was sort of like a centaur, with a woman's body from the waist up. But instead of a horse's lower body, it had the body of a dragon—at least twenty feet long, black and scaly with enormous claws and a barbed tail. Her legs looked like they were tangled in vines, but then I realized they were sprouting snakes, hundreds of vipers darting around, constantly looking for something to bite. The woman's hair was also made of snakes, like Medusa's. Weirdest of all, around her waist, where the woman part met the dragon part, her skin bubbled and morphed, occasionally producing the heads of animals—a vicious wolf, a bear, a lion, as if she were wearing a belt of ever-changing creatures. I got the feeling I was looking at something half formed, a monster so old it was from the beginning of time, before shapes had been fully defined.
"Get down!" Zoë said.
We crouched in the shadows, but the monster wasn't paying us any attention. It seemed to be talking to someone inside a cell on the second floor. That's where the sobbing was coming from. The dragon woman said something in her weird rumbling language.
"What's she saying?" Killian muttered. "What's that language?"
"It's...it's the tongue of the old times." Lilly shivered. "It's what the old gods used to speak. It's what...it's what my mother speaks to me."
"It's a primordial tongue?" Zoe gasped.
"Then why can I understand it?" I murmured.
"Can you translate?" Killian asked.
I shook my head but Lilly said, "I think...I think I can."
"Give it a shot," Zoe whispered.
Lilly closed her eyes and began to speak in a horrible, raspy woman's voice. "You will work for the master or suffer."
I shuddered. "Oh, that's horrible."
"I will not serve," Lilly said in a deep, wounded voice.
She switched to the monster's voice: "Then I shall enjoy your pain, Briares. If you thought your first imprisonment was unbearable, you have yet to feel true torment. Think on this until I return."
The dragon lady tromped toward the stairwell, vipers hissing around her legs like grass skirts. She spread wings that I hadn't noticed before—huge bad wings she kept folded against her dragon back. She leaped off the catwalk and soared across the courtyard. We crouched lower in the shadows. A hot sulfurous wind blasted my face as the monster flew over. Then she disappeared around the corner.
"She's horrible," Killian said.
"She's worse than anything I've ever seen," Zoe added.
"Cyclopes' worst nightmare," I murmured, remembering Tyson's exact words last time. "Kampê."
"Who?" Lilly asked.
"I remember now," Zoe said. "When the Titans ruled, they imprisoned Gaea and Ouranos's earlier children—the Cyclopes and the Hekatonkheires."
"The Heka-what?" Killian asked.
"The Hundred-Handed Ones," she said. "They called them that because...well, they had a hundred hands. They were elder brothers of the Cyclopes."
"They're very powerful," I said. "As tall as the sky. So strong they could break mountains."
"Cool," Killian said. "Unless you're a mountain."
"Kampê was the jailer," Zoe said. "She worked for Kronos. She kept our brothers locked up in Tartarus, tortured them always, until Zeus came. He killed Kampê and freed Cyclopes and Hundred-Handed Ones to help fight against the Titans in the big war."
"And now Kampê is back," I said.
"Bad," Lilly summed up.
"So who's in that cell?" Killian asked. "You said a name—"
"Briares," Lilly repeated.
"He is a Hundred-Handed One," Zoe said.
I looked up at the cells above us, wondering how something as tall as the sky could fit in a tiny cell, and why he was crying.
"I guess we should check it out," Zoe said, "before Kampê comes back."
As we approached the cell, the weeping got louder. When I first saw the creature inside, I wasn't sure what I was looking at. He was human-size and his skin was very pale, the color of milk. He wore a loincloth like a big diaper. His feet seemed too big for his body, with cracked dirty toenails, eight toes on each foot. But the top half of his body was the weird part. He made Janus look downright normal. His chest sprouted more arms than I could count, in rows, all around his body. The arms looked like normal arms, but there were so many of them, all tangled together, that his chest looked kind of like a forkful of spaghetti somebody had twirled together. Several of his hands were covering his face as he sobbed.
"Either the sky isn't as tall as it used to be," Zoe muttered, "or he's short."
"Briares!" I called.
The sobbing stopped.
"Great Hundred-Handed One!" I said. "Help us!"
Briars looked up. His face was long and sad, with a crooked nose and bad teeth. He had deep brown eyes—I mean completely brown with no whites or black pupils, like eyes formed out of clay.
"Run while you can, demigods," Briares said miserably. "I cannot even help myself."
"Chin up," I told him. "We are here to rescue you!"
"We are?" Killian and Lilly said at the same time.
"Think about it," I said, turning to them. "If we free him, he can help us in the war. Think about the prophecy. 'New allies soon to be amassed.' What if he's one of them?"
"That's risky, Percy," Zoe said. "I don't know."
"It's what happened last time," I said seriously. "We were here last time. I remember now. We freed him, escaped Kampê, and he came to help us when Kronos attacked the camp. It can work!" I turned back to Briares. "Please, just help us."
Briars wiped his nose with five or six hands. Several others were fidgeting with little pieces of metal and wood from a broken bed, the way Leo always played with spare parts. It was amazing to watch. The hands seemed to have a mind of their own. They built a toy boat out of wood, then disassembled it just as fast. Other hands were scratching at the cement floor for no apparent reason. Others were playing rock, paper, scissors. A few others were making ducky and doggie shadow puppets against the wall.
"I cannot," Briares moaned. "Kampê is back! The Titans will rise and throw us back into Tartarus."
"Put on your brave face!" I said.
Immediately Briares's face morphed into something else. Same brown eyes, but otherwise totally different features. He had an upturned nose, arched eyebrows, and a weird smile, like he was trying to act brave. But then his face turned back to what it had been before.
"No good," he said. "My scared face keeps coming back."
"How did you do that?" Killian asked.
Zoe elbowed him. "Don't be rude. The Hundred-Handed Ones all have fifty different faces."
"Must make it hard to get a yearbook picture," he said.
"Guys," Lilly interrupted. "We have to get out of here. Kampê will be back. She'll sense us sooner or later."
"Killian, break the bars," I said.
He nodded and stepped forward. He grabbed the cell door and ripped it off its hinges like it was made of wet clay.
"I'm not ever gonna get used to that," he muttered, staring at his hands in shock.
"Come on, Briares," Lilly said. "Let's get you out of here."
She held out her hand. For a second, Briares's face morphed to a hopeful expression. Several of his arms reached out, but twice as many slapped them away.
"I cannot," he said. "She will punish me."
"It's all right," I promised. "You fought the Titans before, and you won, remember?"
"I remember the war." Briares's face morphed again—furrowed brow and a pouting mouth. His brooding face, I guess. "Lightning shook the world. We threw many rocks. The Titans and the monsters almost won. Now they are getting strong again. Kampê said so."
"Don't listen to her," I said. "Come on!"
He didn't move. I knew Lilly was right. We didn't have much time before Kampê returned. But I couldn't just leave him here.
"One game of rock, paper, scissors," I blurted out. "If I win, you come with us. If I lose, we'll leave you in jail."
Zoe looked at me like I was crazy.
Briares's face morphed to doubtful. "I always win rock, paper, scissors."
"Then let's do it!"
I pounded my fist in my palm three times. Briares did the same with all one hundred hands, which sounded like an army marching three steps forward. He came up with a whole avalanche of rocks, a classroom set of scissors, and enough paper to make a fleet of airplanes.
"I told you," he said sadly. "I always—"
His face morphed to confusion. "What is that you made?"
"A gun," I told him, showing him my finger gun. It was a trick Paul Blofis had pulled on me, but I wasn't going to tell him that. "A gun beats anything."
"That's not fair."
"I didn't say anything about fair. Kampê's not going to be fair if we hang around. She's going to blame you for ripping off the bars. Now come on!"
Briares sniffled. "Demigods are cheaters." But he slowly rose to his feet and followed us out of the cell.
"That we are, my friend," I agreed.
I started to feel hopeful. All we had to do was get downstairs and find the Labyrinth entrance. But then Killian froze.
On the ground floor right below, Kampê was snarling at us.
