“Wait,” said Lityerses.
The swordsman advanced on his former master. “Commodus, go while you still can.”
“I made you, boy,” said the emperor. “I saved you from obscurity. I was a second father to you. I gave you purpose!”
“A second father even worse than the first,” Lit said. “And I’ve found a new purpose.”
Commodus charged, swinging his sword wildly.
Lit parried. He stepped toward Josephine’s workshop. “Over here, New Hercules.”
Commodus took the bait, rushing toward Lit’s voice.
Lit ducked. He blade-slapped the emperor’s butt. “Wrong way, sire.”
The emperor stumbled into Josephine’s welding station, then backed into a circular saw, which, fortunately for him, was not running at the time.
Lityerses positioned himself at the base of the giant rose window. I realized his plan as he yelled, “Over here, Commode!”
The emperor howled and charged. Lit stepped out of the way. Commodus barreled straight toward the window. He might have been able to stop himself, but at the last second, Calypso flicked her hands. A gust of wind carried Commodus forward. The New Hercules, the god-emperor of Rome, shattered the glass at the six o’clock mark and tumbled into the void.
Shakespeare, don’t bring that
Iambic pentameter
Up in my face, yo
WE GATHERED at the window and peered down. The emperor was nowhere to be seen. Some of our friends stood in the roundabout below, gazing up at us with confused expressions.
“A little warning, perhaps?” Jimmy called.
He had run out of enemies to electrocute. He and Hunter Kowalski now stood unscathed in the middle of a mosaic of fallen glass shards.
“Where’s Commodus?” I asked.
Hunter shrugged. “We didn’t see him.”
“What do you mean?” I demanded. “He literally just flew out this window.”
“No,” Leo corrected. “He Lityerses-ly flew out the window. Am I right? Those were some sweet moves, man.”
Lit nodded. “Thanks.”
The two bumped fists as if they hadn’t spent the last few days talking about how much they wanted to kill each other. They would have made fine Olympian gods.
“Well,” Thalia said. Her new gray highlights from my solar blast looked quite fetching. “I guess we should do a sweep of the neighborhood. If Commodus is still out there…” She gazed down South Illinois Street. “Wait, is that Meg?”
Rounding the corner were three karpoi, holding Meg McCaffrey aloft as if she were bodysurfing (or peach-surfing). I almost jumped out the window to get to her. Then I remembered I could not fly.
“The Throne of Memory,” I told Emmie. “We need it now!”
We met the karpoi in the building’s front foyer. One of the Peacheses had retrieved the Arrow of Dodona from under the Mercedes’s driver’s seat and now carried it in his teeth like a pirate’s accessory. He offered it to me. I wasn’t sure whether to thank him or curse him, but I slipped the arrow back into my quiver for safekeeping.
Josephine and Leo rushed in from a side room, carrying between them my old backpack—the Throne of Memory. They placed it in the center of a still-smoldering Persian rug.
The peach babies carefully lowered Meg into the seat.
“Calypso,” I said. “Notepad?”
“Got it!” She brandished her small legal tablet and pencil. I decided she would make an excellent high school student after all. She actually came to class prepared!
I knelt next to Meg. Her skin was too blue, her breath too ragged. I placed my hands on the sides of her face and checked her eyes. Her pupils were pinpoints. Her consciousness seemed to be withdrawing, getting smaller and smaller.
“Stay with me, Meg,” I pleaded. “You’re among friends now. You’re in the Throne of Mnemosyne. Speak your prophecy!”
Meg lurched upright. Her hands gripped the sides of the chair as if a strong electric current had taken hold of her.
We all backed away, forming a rough circle around her as dark smoke spewed from her mouth and encircled her legs.
When she spoke, it was thankfully not in Trophonius’s voice—just a deep neutral monotone worthy of Delphi itself:
The words that memory wrought are set to fire,
Ere new moon rises o’er the Devil’s Mount.
The changeling lord shall face a challenge dire,
Till bodies fill the Tiber beyond count.
“Oh, no,” I muttered. “No, no, no.”
“What?” Leo demanded.
I glanced at Calypso, who was scribbling furiously. “We’re going to need a bigger notepad.”
“What do you mean?” Josephine asked. “Surely the prophecy’s done—”
Meg gasped and continued:
Yet southward must the sun now trace its course,
Through mazes dark to lands of scorching death
To find the master of the swift white horse
And wrest from him the crossword speaker’s breath.
It had been centuries since I’d heard a prophecy in this form, yet I knew it well. I wished I could stop this recitation and save Meg the agony, but there was nothing I could do.
She shivered and exhaled the third stanza:
To westward palace must the Lester go;
Demeter’s daughter finds her ancient roots.
The cloven guide alone the way does know,
To walk the path in thine own enemy’s boots.
Then, the culminating horror, she spewed forth a rhyming couplet:
When three are known and Tiber reached alive,
’Tis only then Apollo starts to jive.
The dark smoke dissipated. I rushed forward as Meg slumped into my arms. Her breathing was already more regular, her skin warmer. Thank the Fates. The prophecy had been exorcised.
Leo was the first to speak. “What was that? Buy one prophecy, get three free? That was a lot of lines.”
“It was a sonnet,” I said, still in disbelief. “May the gods help us; it was a Shakespearean sonnet.”
I had thought the limerick of Dodona was bad. But a full Shakespearean sonnet, complete with ABAB rhyme scheme, ending couplet, and iambic pentameter? Such a horror could only have come from Trophonius’s cave.
I recalled my many arguments with William Shakespeare.
Bill, I said. No one will accept this poetry! Du-DUH, du-DUH, du-DUH, du-DUH, du-DUH. What sort of beat is that?
I mean, in real life, no one talks like that!
Hmm…actually the line I just wrote was in iambic pentameter. The stuff is infectious. Gah!
Thalia shouldered her bow. “That was all one poem? But it had four different sections.”