To 8Ball3- Oh, of course! Trebuchets are awesome! Again, how has no-one assassinated this bloke yet? If you are eligible to vote in America, please vote for Biden! And I kept it because it was funny, I love it and I love making Lester squirm ^_^
To readingbooksforlife- I thoroughly enjoyed this chapter, in the book and both rewrites, it was exactly what Apollo needed to deflate his head XD What about 'in a while, crocodile'? Better? Worse? O.o
Mortal security was not a problem. Simply put, there wasn't any. Across a flat expanse of rocks and weeds, the relay station sat nestled at the base of Sutro Tower. The blocky brown building had clusters of white satellite dishes dotting its roof, like toadstools after a rain shower. The door stood wide open. The windows were dark. The parking area at the front was empty.
"This isn't right." Reyna murmured. "Didn't Tarquin say there were doubling security?"
"Doubling the flock." Meg corrected. "But I don't see any sheep or anything." That idea made Apollo shudder. Over the millennia, he had seen quite a few flocks of guardian sheep. They tended to be poisonous and/or carnivorous. And they smelled like mildewed sweaters. Yuck.
"Apollo, any thoughts?" Reyna asked. At least she could look at him without laughing now, but he didn't trust himself to speak. He just shook his head helplessly. He was good at that.
"Maybe we're in the wrong place?" Meg offered. Reyna bit her lower lip.
"Something's definitely off here. Let me check inside the station. Aurum and Argentum can make a quick search. If we encounter any mortals, I'll just say I was hiking and got lost. You guys wait here. Guard my exit. If you hear barking, that means trouble." She jogged across the field, her dogs at her heels, and disappeared inside the building.
Meg peered at Apollo over the top of her cat-eye glasses.
"How come you made her laugh?"
"That wasn't my intention." He grumbled. "Besides, it isn't illegal to make someone laugh."
"You asked her to be your girlfriend, didn't you?"
"I-what? No! Sort of. Yes." He finished glumly.
"That was stupid." It was an extra lash to his humiliation to have his love life criticised by a little girl in traffic light colours and wearing a unicorn-and-crossbones badge.
"You wouldn't understand." He muttered. Meg snorted.
"I understand she has a girlfriend." She snickered. He seemed to be everyone's source of amusement today.
To distract himself, Apollo studied the tower that loomed above them. Up the side of the nearest support column, a steel-ribbed chute enclosed a row of rungs, forming a tunnel that one could climb through- if one were crazy enough- to reach the first set of crossbeams, which bristled with more satellite dishes and cellular-antenna fungi. From there, the rungs continued upward into a low-lying blanket of fog that swallowed the tower's top half. In the white mist, a hazy black V floated in and out of sight- a bird of some sort.
He shivered, thinking of the strixes that had attacked them in the Burning Maze. Strixes, however, only hunted at night-time. That dark shape had to be something else, maybe a hawk looking for mice. The law of averages dictated that once in a while, he would have to come across a creature that didn't want to kill him, right?
Nevertheless, the fleeting shape filled him with dread. It reminded him of the many near-death experiences he had shared with Meg, and of the promise he had made to himself to be honest with her, back in the good old days of ten minutes ago. Before Reyna had nuked his self-esteem and warned him off with her psycho girlfriend.
"Meg," he said, "last night-"
"You saw Peaches. I know." She might have been talking about the weather, so casual her tone. Her gaze stayed fixed on the doorway of the relay station.
"You know." Apollo repeated.
"He's been around for a couple of days."
"You've seen him?"
"I sensed him. He's got his reasons for staying away. Doesn't like the Romans. He's working on a plan to help the local nature spirits."
"And… if that plan is to help them run away?" In the diffused grey light of the fog bank, Meg's glasses looked like her own tiny satellite dishes.
"You think that's what he wants?" She asked. "Or what the nature spirits want?" Apollo remembered the fauns' fearful expressions at People's Park, the dryads' weary anger.
"I don't know. But Lavinia-"
"Yeah. She's with them." Meg shrugged a shoulder. "The centurions noticed her missing at roll call. They're trying to downplay it. Bad for morale." He stared at his young companion, who had apparently been taking lessons from Lavinia in Advanced Camp Gossip.
"Does Reyna know?"
"That Lavinia is gone? Sure. Where Lavinia went? Nah. I don't either, really. Whatever she and Peaches and the rest are planning, there's not much we can do about it now. We've got other stuff to worry about." Apollo crossed his arms.
"Well, I'm glad we had this talk, so I can unburden myself of all the things you already knew. I was also going to say that you're important to me and I might even love you like a sister, but-"
"I already know that too." She shone him a crooked grin. "'S OK. You've got less annoying too."
"Hmmph."
"Look, here comes Reyna." And so ended their warm family moment. The praetor emerged from the station, her expression unsettled, her greyhounds happily circling her legs as if waiting for jellybeans.
"The place is empty." She announced. "Looks like everybody left in a hurry. I'd say something cleared them out- like a bomb threat, maybe."
"In that case, wouldn't there be emergency vehicles here?" Apollo asked with a frown.
"The Mist." Meg guessed. "Could've made the mortals see anything to get them out of here. Clearing the scene before…" Apollo was about to make the idiot mistake of asking before what? But then he decided he didn't want the answer.
Meg was right, of course. The Mist was a strange force, able to manipulate mortal minds after supernatural events- like damage control. Sometimes, it operated in advance of a catastrophe, pushing away mortals who might otherwise wind up as collateral damage.
"Well," Reyna said, "if that's true, it means we're in the right place. And I can only think of one other direction to explore." Her gaze travelled up the pylons of Sutro Tower until they disappeared into the fog. "Who wants to climb first?"
Want had nothing to do with it. Apollo was drafted. The ostensible reason was so Reyna could steady him if he started feeling shaky on the ladder. The real reason, he deduced, was so that he couldn't back out if he got scared. Meg came last, perhaps to gain time to select the proper gardening seeds to throw at their enemies while they mauled his face and Reyna pushed him forward.
Aurum and Argentum, being unable to climb, stayed on the ground to guard their exit. If the climbers did end up plummeting to their deaths, the dogs would be right there to bark excitedly at their corpses.
The rungs were slippery and cold. The chute's metal ribs brought the sensation of crawling through a giant Slinky. Supposedly, they were some sort of safety features. Apollo could only see them as more instruments of pain should he fall.
Within a few minutes, his lousy mortal limbs were trembling with exertion, his fingers as equally unsteady. The first set of crossbeams seemed no closer. With a look down, he saw they had barely cleared the radar dishes on the station's rooftop.
The cold wind buffeted them around the cage, ripping at their clothes, rattling weapons. Whatever Tarquin's guards were, if they caught them on the ladder, their weapons would be no good. At least killer sheep couldn't climb ladders.
In the fog above, midnight dark shapes swirled- definitely birds of some kind.
"Do you guys smell roses?" Meg asked.
"Roses?" Apollo croaked a nervous laugh. "Why in the name of the twelve gods would I smell roses up here?"
"All I smell is Lester's shoes." Reyna remarked, voice thick through trying not to breathe through her nose. "I think he stepped in something."
"A large puddle of shame." Apollo muttered.
"I smell roses." Meg insisted. "Whatever. Keep moving."
At last, after what Apollo could only describe as another decade's worth of climbing, they reached the first set of crossbeams. A catwalk ran the length of the girders, allowing them to stand and rest for a few minutes. They were only about sixty feet above the relay station, but it felt much higher. Below, an endless grid of city blocks spread out, rumpling and twisting across the hills whenever necessary, the streets making designs that vaguely resembled the Thai alphabet.
Down in the parking lot, the silver and gold dogs looked up at them and wagged their tails. They seemed to be waiting for them to do something. The mean-spirited part of Apollo wanted to shoot an arrow to the top of the next hill and yell 'FETCH!' but he doubted Reyna would find anything funny in that.
Meg placed her hands on her hips. "It's fun up here." She did a cartwheel, giving Apollo heart palpitations to rival all palpitating predecessors.
He scanned the triangle of catwalks, hoping to see something besides cables, circuit boxes and satellite equipment.
"Definitely no silent gods here." Reyna informed.
"Thanks." Apollo dead-panned. "Hadn't noticed." She smiled, clearly still in a good mood from his earlier misstep into the aforementioned puddle of shame.
"I also don't see any doors." She continued. "Didn't the prophecy say I would have to open a door?"
"Could be a metaphorical one." Apollo speculated. "But you're right, there's nothing here for us."
Meg stopped cartwheeling to point up, indicating the next level of crossbeams. They were another sixty feet up, hardly visible in the low fog.
"The smell of roses is stronger from up there." She told them. "We should keep climbing." Apollo sniffed the air, but all he could smell was the faint scent of eucalyptus from the woods below, his own sweat cooling on his skin and the sour whiff of antiseptic and infection rising from his bandaged abdomen.
"Hooray." He sighed. "More climbing."
Reyna took the lead this time. And there was no climbing cage to the second level, just bare metal rungs against the side of the girder. Now that it was gone, Apollo realised that it had brought him some psychological comfort. At least he had been able to pretend he was inside a safe structure, not free-climbing a giant tower like a lunatic.
He did not understand why Tarquin would put something as important as his silent god at the top of the radio tower, or as to why he had allied himself with the emperors in the first place, or why the smell of roses getting stronger may have been a signal that they were getting closer to their goal. He also had a few questions about the dark birds still circling in the fog above them. Weren't they cold? Didn't they have jobs? What were they?
The only thing that didn't need questioning was how much he knew they had to climb this monstrous tripod. It felt right, in the sense that it was terrifying and wrong. He had a premonition that everything would make sense to him soon enough and, when it did, he would not like it.
They were halfway to the second set of crossbeams when an angry shadow dived out of the fog, plummeting past his shoulder. The gust from its wings nearly knocked him off the ladder.
"Whoa!" Meg grabbed his left ankle, though that did nothing to steady him. "What was that?" Apollo caught a glimpse of the bird as it retreated into the fog- oily black wings, black beak, black eyes. A sob built in his throat.
"A raven."
"A raven?" Reyna frowned down at him. "That thing was huge!" The creature that had buzzed him easily had a wingspan of twenty feet. Several angry croaks sounded from somewhere in the fog, slotting the final piece into place in Apollo's mind.
"Ravens, plural." He corrected. "Giant ravens."
Half a dozen spiralled into view, their hungry black eyes dancing over them like targeting lasers, assessing their soft-and-tasty-weak spots.
"A flock of ravens." Meg gaped, half-incredulous, half-fascinated. "Those are the guards? They're pretty." Apollo groaned, wishing he could be anywhere else- like in a bed under a thick layer of Kevlar quilts. He wanted to protest that a group of ravens was called an unkindness or a conspiracy. He wanted to shout that Tarquin's guards should be disqualified on that technicality. Not that Tarquin would care about such niceties. The ravens most certainly did not. They would kill them either way, no matter how pretty Meg thought they were.
"They're here because of Koronis." He mumbled dejectedly. "This is my fault."
"Who's Koronis?" Reyna demanded.
"Long story." He looked at the birds over his shoulder, raising his voice to a yell. "Guys! I've apologised a million times!" The ravens croaked back angrily. A dozen more dropped out of the fog and began to circle them. "They'll tear us apart. We have to retreat. Back to the first platform."
"But the second platform is closer." Reyna said. "Keep climbing!"
"Maybe they're checking us out." Meg suggested. "Maybe they won't attack."
She should not have said that.
Ravens were contrary creatures. He should know- he had shaped them into what they were. As soon as Meg expressed the hope they wouldn't attack, they did.