The Battle of the Labyrinth (6 page)

I blinked. “You think Pan is underground?”

“It would explain why he’s been impossible to find.”

Grover shuddered. “Satyrs hate going underground. No searcher would ever try going in
that
place. No flowers. No sunshine. No coffee shops!”

“But,” Annabeth said, “the Labyrinth can lead you almost anywhere. It reads your thoughts. It was designed to fool you, trick you and kill you; but if you can make the Labyrinth work
for
you—”

“It could lead you to the wild god,” I said.

“I can’t do it.” Grover hugged his stomach. “Just thinking about it makes me want to throw up my silverware.”

“Grover, it may be your last chance,” Annabeth said. “The council is serious.
One
week or you learn to tap dance!”

Over at the head table, Quintus cleared his throat. I got the feeling he didn’t want to make a scene, but Annabeth was really pushing it, sitting at my table so long.

“We’ll talk later,” Annabeth squeezed my arm a little too hard. “Convince him, will you?”

She returned to the Athena table, ignoring all the people who were staring at her.

Grover buried his head in his hands. “I can’t do it, Percy. My searcher’s license. Pan. I’m going to lose it all. I’ll have to start a puppet theater.”

“Don’t say that! We’ll figure something out.”

He looked at me teary-eyed. “Percy, you’re my best friend. You’ve seen me underground. In that Cyclops’s cave. Do you really think I could…”

His voice faltered. I remembered the Sea of Monsters, when he’d been stuck in a Cyclops’s cave. He’d never liked underground places to begin with, but now Grover really hated them. Cyclopes gave him the creeps, too. Even Tyson…Grover tried to hide it, but Grover and I could sort of read each other’s emotions because of this empathy link between us. I knew how he felt. Grover was terrified of the big guy.

“I have to leave,” Grover said miserably. “Juniper’s waiting for me. It’s a good thing she finds cowards attractive.”

After he was gone, I looked over at Quintus. He nodded gravely, like we were sharing some dark secret. Then he went back to cutting his sausage with a dagger.

* * *

In the afternoon, I went down to the Pegasus stables to visit my friend Blackjack.

Yo, boss!
He capered around in his stall, his black wings buffeting the air.
Ya bring me some sugar cubes?

“You know those aren’t good for you, Blackjack.”

Yeah, so you brought me some, huh?

I smiled and fed him a handful. Blackjack and I went back a long way. I sort of helped rescue him from Luke’s demon cruise ship a few years ago, and ever since, he insisted on repaying me with favors.

So we got any quests coming up?
Blackjack asked.
I’m ready to fly, boss!

I patted his nose. “Not sure, man. Everybody keeps talking about underground mazes.”

Blackjack whinnied nervously.
Nuh-uh. Not for this horse! You aint
gonna be crazy enough to go in no maze, boss. Are ya? You’ll end up in the
glue factory!

“You may be right, Blackjack. We’ll see.”

Blackjack crunched down his sugar cubes. He shook his mane like he was having a sugar seizure.
Whoa! Good stuff! Well, boss, you come to your
senses and want to fly somewhere, just give a whistle. Ole Blackjack and his
buddies, we’ll stampede anybody for ya!

I told him I’d keep it in mind. Then a group of younger campers came into the stables to start their riding lessons, and I decided it was time to leave. I had a bad feeling I wasn’t going to see Blackjack for a long time.

* * *

That night after dinner, Quintus had us suit up in combat armor like we were getting ready for capture the flag, but the mood among the campers was a lot more serious. Sometime during the day the crates in the arena had disappeared, and I had a feeling whatever was in them had been emptied into the woods.

“Right,” Quintus said, standing on the head dining table. “Gather ’round.”

He was dressed in black leather and bronze. In the torchlight, his gray hair made him look like a ghost. Mrs. O’Leary bounded happily around him, foraging for dinner scraps.

“You will be in teams of two,” Quintus announced. When everybody started talking and trying to grab their friends, he yelled: “Which have already been chosen!”

“AWWWWW!” everybody complained.

“Your goal is simple: collect the gold laurels without dying. The wreath is wrapped in a silk package, tied to the back of one of the monsters. There are six monsters. Each has a silk package. Only one holds the laurels. You must find the wreath before the other teams. And, of course…you will have to slay the monster to get it, and stay alive.”

The crowd started murmuring excitedly. The task sounded pretty straightforward. Hey, we’d all slain monsters before. That’s what we trained for.

“I will now announce your partners,” Quintus said. “There will be no trading. No switching. No complaining.”

“Aroooof!”
Mrs. O’Leary buried her face in a plate of pizza. Quintus produced a big scroll and started reading off names. Beckendorf would be with Silena Beauregard, which Beckendorf looked pretty happy about. The Stoll brothers, Travis and Connor, would be together. No surprise. They did everything together. Clarisse was with Lee Fletcher from the Apollo cabin—melee and ranged combat combined, they would be a tough combo to beat. Quintus kept rattling off the names until he said, “Percy Jackson with Annabeth Chase.”

“Nice.” I grinned at Annabeth.

“Your armor is crooked” was her only comment, and she redid my straps for me.

“Grover Underwood,” Quintus said, “with Tyson.”

Grover just about jumped out of his goat fur. “What? B-but—”

“No, no,” Tyson whimpered. “Must be a mistake. Goat boy—”

“No complaining!” Quintus ordered. “Get with your partner. You have two minutes to prepare!”

Tyson and Grover both looked at me pleadingly. I tried to give them an encouraging nod, and gestured that they should move together. Tyson sneezed. Grover started chewing nervously on his wooden club.

“They’ll be fine,” Annabeth said. “Come on. Let’s worry about how we’re going to stay alive.”

* * *

It was still light when we got into the woods, but the shadows from the trees made it feel like midnight. It was cold, too, even in summer. Annabeth and I found tracks almost immediately—scuttling marks made by something with a lot of legs. We began to follow the trail.

We jumped a creek and heard some twigs snapping nearby. We crouched behind a boulder, but it was only the Stoll brothers tripping through the woods and cursing. Their dad was the god of thieves, but they were about as stealthy as buffaloes.

Once the Stolls had passed, we forged deeper into the west woods where the monsters were wilder. We were standing on a ledge overlooking a marshy pond when Annabeth tensed. “This is where we stopped looking.”

It took me a second to realize what she meant. Last winter, when we’d given up hope of finding him, Grover, Annabeth, and I had stood on this rock, and I’d convinced them not to tell Chiron the truth: that Nico was a son of Hades. At the time it seemed the right thing to do. I wanted to protect his identity. I wanted to be the one to find him and make things right for what had happened to his sister. Now, six months later, I hadn’t even come close to finding him. It left a bitter taste in my mouth.

“I saw him last night,” I said.

Annabeth knit her eyebrows. “What do you mean?”

I told her about the Iris-message. When I was done, she stared into the shadows of the woods. “He’s summoning the dead? That’s not good.”

“The ghost was giving him bad advice,” I said. “Telling him to take revenge.”

“Yeah…spirits are never good advisers they’ve got their own agendas. Old grudges. And they resent the living.”

“He’s going to come after me,” I said. “The spirit mentioned a maze.”

She nodded. “That settles it. We
have
to figure out the Labyrinth.”

“Maybe,” I said uncomfortably. “But who sent the Iris-message? If Nico didn’t know I was there—”

A branch snapped in the woods. Dry leaves rustled. Something large was moving in the trees, just beyond the ridge.

“That’s not the Stoll brothers,” Annabeth whispered.

Together we drew our swords.

* * *

We got to Zeus’s Fist, a huge pile of boulders in the middle of the west woods. It was a natural landmark where campers often rendezvoused on hunting expeditions, but now there was nobody around.

“Over there,” Annabeth whispered.

“No, wait,” I said. “Behind us.”

It was weird. Scuttling noises seemed to be coming from several different directions. We were circling the boulders, our swords drawn, when someone right behind us said, “Hi.”

We whirled around, and the tree nymph Juniper yelped.

“Put those down!” she protested. “Dryads don’t like sharp blades, okay?”

“Juniper,” Annabeth exhaled. “What are you doing here?”

“I live here.”

I lowered my sword. “In the boulders?”

She pointed toward the edge of the clearing. “In the juniper. Duh.”

It made sense, and I felt kind of stupid. I’d been hanging around dryads for years, but I never really talked to them much. I knew they couldn’t go very far away from their tree, which was the source of life. But I didn’t know much else.

“Are you guys busy?” Juniper asked.

“Well,” I said, “we’re in the middle of this game against a bunch of monsters and we’re trying not to die.”

“We’re not busy,” Annabeth said. “What’s wrong, Juniper?”

Junper sniffled. She wiped her silky sleeve under her eyes. “It’s Grover. He seems so distraught. All year he’s been out looking for Pan. And every time he comes back, its worse. I thought maybe, at first, he was seeing another tree.”

“No,” Annabeth said as Juniper started crying. “I’m sure that’s not it.”

“He had a crush on a blueberry bush once,” Juniper said miserably.

“Juniper,” Annabeth said, “Grover would never even
look
at another tree. He’s just stressed out about his searcher’s license.”

“He can’t go underground!” she protested. “You can’t let him.”

Annabeth looked uncomfortable. “It might be the only way to help him; if we just knew where to start.”

“Ah.” Juniper wiped a green tear off her cheek. “About that…”

Another rustle in the woods, and Juniper yelled, “Hide!”

Before I could ask why, she went
poof
into green mist. Annabeth and I turned. Coming out of the woods was a glistening amber insect, ten feet long, with jagged pincers, an armored tail, and a stinger as long as my sword. A scorpion. Tied to its back was a red silk package.

“One of us gets behind it,” Annabeth said, as the thing clattered toward us.

“Cuts off its tail while the other distracts it in front.”

“I’ll take point,” I said. “You’ve got the invisibility hat.”

She nodded. We’d fought together so many times we knew each other’s moves. We could do this, easy. But it all went wrong when the other two scorpions appeared from the woods.

“Three?”
Annabeth said. “That’s not possible! The whole woods, and half the monsters come at us?”

I swallowed. One, we could take. Two, with a little luck. Three? Doubtful. The scorpions scurried toward us, whipping their barbed tails like they’d come here just to kill us. Annabeth and I put our backs against the nearest boulder.

“Climb?” I said.

“No time,” she said.

She was right. The scorpions were already surrounding us. They were so close I could see their hideous mouths foaming, anticipating an ice juicy meal of demigods.

“Look out!” Annabeth parried away a stinger with the flat of her blade. I stabbed with Riptide, but the scorpion backed out of range. We clambered sideways along the boulders, but the scorpions followed us. I slashed at another one, but going on the offensive was too dangerous. If I went for the body, the tail stabbed downward. If I went for the tail, the thing’s pincers came from either side and tried to grab me. All we could do was defend, and we wouldn’t be able to keep that up for very long.

I took another step sideways, and suddenly there was nothing behind me. It was a crack between two of the largest boulders, something I’d passed by a million times, but…

“In here,” I said.

Annabeth sliced at a scorpion then looked at me like I was crazy. “
In
there?
It’s too narrow.”

“I’ll cover you. Go!”

She ducked behind me and started squeezing between the two boulders. Then she yelped and grabbed my armor straps, and suddenly I was tumbling into a pit that hadn’t been there a moment before. I could see the scorpions above us, the purple evening sky and the trees, and then the hole shut like the lens of a camera, and we were in complete darkness.

Our breathing echoed against stone. It was wet and cold. I was sitting on a bumpy floor that seemed to be made of bricks.

I lifted Riptide. The faint glow of the blade was just enough to illuminate Annabeth’s frightened face and the mossy stone walls on either side of us.

“Wh-where are we?” Annabeth said.

“Safe from the scorpions, anyway,” I tried to sound calm, but I was freaking out. The crack between the boulders couldn’t have led into a cave. I would’ve known if there was a cave here; I was sure of it. It was like the ground had opened up and swallowed us. All I could think of was the fissure in the dining room pavilion, where those skeletons had been consumed last summer. I wondered if the same thing had happened to us.