The two guards snapped to attention. They turned away from us, facing the archway, then marched through, side by side, into the darkness.
Lavinia’s gum almost fell out of her mouth. “How?” she whispered.
Hazel put her finger to her lips, then motioned for us to follow.
The chamber was now empty except for the bones scattered across the floor. Perhaps the skeleton warriors came here to pick up spare parts. Along the opposite wall, above the archway, ran a balcony accessed by a staircase on either side. Its railing was a latticework of contorted human skeletons, which did not freak me out at all. Two doorways led off from the balcony. Except for the main archway through which our skeleton friends had marched, those seemed to be the only exits from the chamber.
Hazel led us up the left-hand staircase. Then, for reasons known only to herself, she crossed the balcony and took the doorway on the right. We followed her through.
At the end of a short corridor, about twenty feet ahead, firelight illuminated another balcony with a skeletal railing, the mirror image of the one we’d just left. I couldn’t see much of the chamber beyond it, but the space was clearly occupied. A deep voice echoed from within—a voice I recognized.
Meg flicked her wrists, retracting her swords into rings—not because we were out of danger, but because she understood that even a little extra glow might give away our position. Lavinia tugged an oil cloth from her back pocket and draped it over her manubalista. Hazel gave me a look of warning that was completely unnecessary.
I knew what lay just ahead. Tarquin the Proud was holding court.
I crouched behind the balcony’s skeletal latticework and peered into the throne room below, desperately hoping none of the undead would look up and see us. Or smell us. Oh, human body odor, why did you have to be so pungent after several hours of hiking?
Against the far wall, between two massive stone pillars, sat a sarcophagus chiseled with bas relief images of monsters and wild animals, much like the creatures on the Tilden Park carousel. Lounging across the sarcophagus lid was the thing that had once been Tarquinius Superbus. His robes had not been laundered in several thousand years. They hung off him in moldering shreds. His body had withered to a blackened skeleton. Patches of moss clung to his jawbone and cranium, giving him a grotesque beard and hairdo. Tendrils of glowing purple gas slithered through his rib cage and circled his joints, coiling up his neck and into his skull, lighting his eye sockets fiery violet.
Whatever that purple light was, it seemed to be holding Tarquin together. It probably wasn’t his soul. I doubted Tarquin ever had one of those. More likely it was his sheer ambition and hatred, a stubborn refusal to give up no matter how long he’d been dead.
The king seemed to be in the midst of scolding the two skeleton guards Hazel had manipulated.
“Did I call you?” demanded the king. “No, I did not. So why are you here?”
The skeletons looked at each other as if wondering the same thing.
“Get back to your posts!” Tarquin shouted.
The guards marched back the way they had come.
This left three eurynomoi and half a dozen zombies milling around in the room, though I got the feeling there might be more directly beneath our balcony. Even worse, the zombies—vrykolakai, whatever you wanted to call them—were former Roman legionnaires. Most were still dressed for battle in dented armor and torn clothing, their skin puffy, their lips blue, gaping wounds in their chests and limbs.
The pain in my gut became almost intolerable. The words from the Burning Maze prophecy were stuck on replay in my mind: Apollo faces death. Apollo faces death.
Next to me, Lavinia trembled, her eyes tearing up. Her gaze was fixed on one of the dead legionnaires: a young man with long brown hair, the left side of his face badly burned. A former friend, I guessed. Hazel gripped Lavinia’s shoulder—perhaps to comfort her, perhaps to remind her to be silent. Meg knelt at my other side, her eyeglasses glinting. I desperately wished I had a permanent marker to black out her rhinestones.
She seemed to be counting enemies, calculating how fast she could take them all down. I had great faith in Meg’s sword skills, at least when she wasn’t exhausted from bending eucalyptus trees, but I also knew these enemies were too many, too powerful.