The Tower of Nero (The Trials of Apollo #5) - Rick Riordan Page 0,72
power—exponentially more than the two fasces Meg and I had destroyed at Sutro Tower.
The meaning of this dawned on me…whispered into my brain like a line of Python’s poisoned prophecy. The three emperors of the Triumvirate hadn’t just linked themselves through a corporation. Their life forces, their ambitions, their greed and malice, had entwined over the centuries. By killing Commodus and Caligula, I had consolidated all the power of the Triumvirate into the fasces of Nero. I had made the surviving emperor three times as powerful and harder to kill. Even if the fasces were unguarded, destroying it would be difficult.
And the fasces was not unguarded.
Behind the glowing ax, his hands spread as if in benediction, the guardian stood. His body was humanoid, seven feet tall. Patches of gold fur covered his muscular chest, arms, and legs. His feathery white wings reminded me of one of Zeus’s wind spirits, or the angels that Christians liked to paint.
His face, however, was not angelic. He had the shaggy-maned visage of a lion, ears rimmed with black fur, mouth open to reveal fangs and a panting red tongue. His huge golden eyes radiated a sort of sleepy, self-confident strength.
But the strangest thing about the guardian was the serpent that encircled his body from ankles to neck—a slithering spiral of green flesh that corkscrewed around him like an endless escalator—a snake with no head or tail.
The lion man saw me. My dream state was nothing to him. Those gold eyes locked onto me and would not let me go. They turned me and examined me as if I were a trog boy’s crystal sphere.
He communicated wordlessly. He told me he was the leontocephaline, a creation of Mithras, a Persian god so secretive even we Olympians had never really understood him. In Mithras’s name, the leontocephaline had overseen the movement of the stars and the phases of the zodiac. He had also been the keeper of Mithras’s great specter of immortality, but that had been lost eons ago. Now the leontocephaline had been given a new job, a new symbol of power to guard.
Just looking at him threatened to tear my mind apart. I tried to ask him questions. I understood that fighting him was impossible. He was eternal. He could no more be killed than one could kill time. He guarded the immortality of Nero, but wasn’t there any way…?
Oh, yes. He could be bargained with. I saw what he wanted. The realization made my soul curl up like a squashed spider.
Nero was clever. Horribly, evilly clever. He had set a trap with his own symbol of power. He was cynically betting that I would never pay the price.
At last, his point made, the leontocephaline released me. My dream-self snapped back into my body.
I sat up in bed, gasping and soaked in sweat.
“About time,” Lu said.
Incredibly, she was on her feet, pacing the cell. My healing power must have done more than just soothe her amputation wounds. She wobbled a bit, but she did not look like someone who’d been using crutches and leg braces just a day ago. Even the bruises on her face had faded.
“You…You look better,” I noted. “How long was I out?”
“Too long. Gunther brought dinner an hour ago.” She nodded to a new platter of food on the floor. “He said he’d be back soon to get us for the party. But the fool was careless. He left us silverware!”
She brandished her stumps.
Oh, gods. What had she done? Somehow, she had managed to attach a fork to one stump and a knife to the other. She had inserted the handles into the folds of her bandages, then fastened them in place with…Wait. Was that my surgical tape?
I looked at the foot of my bed. Sure enough, my pack was open, the contents scattered about.
I tried to ask how and why at the same time, so it came out as “Hawhy?”
“If you have enough time, some tape, and a set of working teeth, you can do a lot,” Lu said proudly. “I couldn’t wait for you to wake up. Didn’t know when Gunther would be back. Sorry about the mess.”
“I—”
“You can help.” She tested her silverware attachments with a few kung fu jabs. “I tied these babies on as tight as I could, but you can wrap them one more time. I have to be able to use them in combat.”
“Er—”
She plopped down on the sofa next to me. “While you work, you can tell me what you learned.”