The Mark of Athena (The Heroes of Olympus, Book Three) (36 page)

The tunnel ran straight and smooth,
but after her fall, Annabeth decided to take no chances. She used the wall for support and tapped the floor in front of her with her crutch to make sure there were no traps.

As she walked, the sickly sweet smell got stronger and set her nerves on edge. The sound of running water faded behind her. In its place came a dry chorus of whispers like a million tiny voices. They seemed to be coming from inside the walls, and they were getting louder.

Annabeth tried to speed up, but she couldn’t go much faster without losing her balance or jarring her broken ankle. She hobbled onward, convinced that something was following her. The small voices were massing together, getting closer.

She touched the wall, and her hand came back covered in cobwebs.

She yelped, then cursed herself for making a sound.

It’s only a web, she told herself. But that didn’t stop the roaring in her ears.

She’d expected spiders. She knew what was ahead:
The weaver. Her Ladyship.
The voice in the dark.
But the webs made her realize how close she was.

Her hand trembled as she wiped it on the stones. What had she been thinking? She couldn’t do this quest alone.

Too late, she told herself. Just keep going.

She made her way down the corridor one painful step at a time. The whispering sounds got louder behind her until they sounded like millions of dried leaves swirling in the wind. The cobwebs became thicker, filling the tunnel. Soon she was pushing them out of her face, ripping through gauzy curtains that covered her like Silly String.

Her heart wanted to break out of her chest and run. She stumbled ahead more recklessly, trying to ignore the pain in her ankle.

Finally the corridor ended in a doorway filled waist-high with old lumber. It looked as if someone had tried to barricade the opening. That didn’t bode well, but Annabeth used her crutch to push away the boards as best she could. She crawled over the remaining pile, getting a few dozen splinters in her free hand.

On the other side of the barricade was a chamber the size of a basketball court. The floor was done in Roman mosaics. The remains of tapestries hung from the walls. Two unlit torches sat in wall sconces on either side of the doorway, both covered in cobwebs.

At the far end of the room, the Mark of Athena burned over another doorway. Unfortunately, between Annabeth and that exit, the floor was bisected by a chasm fifty feet across. Spanning the pit were two parallel wooden beams, too far apart for both feet, but each too narrow to walk on unless Annabeth was an acrobat, which she wasn’t, and didn’t have a broken ankle, which she did.

The corridor she’d come from was filled with hissing noises. Cobwebs trembled and danced as the first of the spiders appeared: no larger than gumdrops, but plump and black, skittering over the walls and the floor.

What kind of spiders? Annabeth had no idea. She only knew they were coming for her, and she only had seconds to figure out a plan.

Annabeth wanted to sob. She wanted someone,
anyone
, to be here for her. She wanted Leo with his fire skills, or Jason with his lightning, or Hazel to collapse the tunnel. Most of all she wanted Percy. She always felt braver when Percy was with her.

I am not going to die here, she told herself. I’m going to see Percy again.

The first spiders were almost to the door. Behind them came the bulk of the army—a black sea of creepy-crawlies.

Annabeth hobbled to one of the wall sconces and snatched up the torch. The end was coated in pitch for easy lighting. Her fingers felt like lead, but she rummaged through her backpack and found the matches. She struck one and set the torch ablaze.

She thrust it into the barricade. The old dry wood caught immediately. Flames leaped to the cobwebs and roared down the corridor in a flash fire, roasting spiders by the thousands.

Annabeth stepped back from her bonfire. She’d bought herself some time, but she doubted that she’d killed all the spiders. They would regroup and swarm again as soon as the fire died.

She stepped to the edge of the chasm.

She shined her light into the pit, but she couldn’t see the bottom. Jumping in would be suicide. She could try to cross one of the bars hand over hand, but she didn’t trust her arm strength, and she didn’t see how she would be able to haul herself up with a full backpack and a broken ankle once she reached the other side.

She crouched and studied the beams. Each had a set of iron eye hooks along the inside, set at one-foot intervals. Maybe the rails had been the sides of a bridge and the middle planks had been removed or destroyed. But eye hooks? Those weren’t for supporting planks. More like…

She glanced at the walls. The same kind of hooks had been used to hang the shredded tapestries.

She realized the beams weren’t meant as a bridge. They were some kind of loom.

Annabeth threw her flaming torch to the other side of the chasm. She had no faith her plan would work, but she pulled all the string out of her backpack and began weaving between the beams, stringing a cat’s cradle pattern back and forth from eye hook to eye hook, doubling and tripling the line.

Her hands moved with blazing speed. She stopped thinking about the task and just did it, looping and tying off lines, slowly extending her woven net over the pit.

She forgot the pain in her leg and the fiery barricade guttering out behind her. She inched over the chasm. The weaving held her weight. Before she knew it, she was halfway across.

How had she learned to do this?

It’s Athena, she told herself. My mother’s skill with useful crafts. Weaving had never seemed particularly useful to Annabeth—until now.

She glanced behind her. The barricade fire was dying. A few spiders crawled in around the edges of the doorway.

Desperately she continued weaving, and finally she made it across. She snatched up the torch and thrust it into her woven bridge. Flames raced along the string. Even the beams caught fire as if they’d been pre-soaked in oil.

For a moment, the bridge burned in a clear pattern—a fiery row of identical owls. Had Annabeth really woven them into the string, or was it some kind of magic? She didn’t know, but as the spiders began to cross, the beams crumbled and collapsed into the pit.

Annabeth held her breath. She didn’t see any reason why the spiders couldn’t reach her by climbing the walls or the ceiling. If they started to do that, she’d have to run for it, and she was pretty sure she couldn’t move fast enough.

For some reason, the spiders didn’t follow. They massed at the edge of the pit—a seething black carpet of creepiness. Then they dispersed, flooding back into the burned corridor, almost as if Annabeth was no longer interesting.

“Or I passed a test,” she said aloud.

Her torch sputtered out, leaving her with only the light of her dagger. She realized that she’d left her makeshift crutch on the other side of the chasm.

She felt exhausted and out of tricks, but her mind was clear. Her panic seemed to have burned up along with that woven bridge.

The weaver,
she thought. I must be close. At least I know what’s ahead.

She made her way down the next corridor, hopping to keep the weight off her bad foot.

She didn’t have far to go.

After twenty feet, the tunnel opened into a cavern as large as a cathedral, so majestic that Annabeth had trouble processing everything she saw. She guessed that this was the room from Percy’s dream, but it wasn’t dark. Bronze braziers of magical light, like the gods used on Mount Olympus, glowed around the circumference of the room, interspersed with gorgeous tapestries. The stone floor was webbed with fissures like a sheet of ice. The ceiling was so high, it was lost in the gloom and layers upon layers of spiderwebs.

Strands of silk as thick as pillars ran from the ceiling all over the room, anchoring the walls and the floor like the cables of a suspension bridge.

Webs also surrounded the centerpiece of the shrine, which was so intimidating that Annabeth had trouble raising her eyes to look at it. Looming over her was a forty-foot-tall statue of Athena, with luminous ivory skin and a dress of gold. In her outstretched hand, Athena held a statue of Nike, the winged victory goddess—a statue that looked tiny from here, but was probably as tall as a real person. Athena’s other hand rested on a shield as big as a billboard, with a sculpted snake peeking out from behind, as if Athena was protecting it.

The goddess’s face was serene and kindly…and it
looked
like Athena. Annabeth had seen many statues that didn’t resemble her mom at all, but this giant version, made thousands of years ago, made her think that the artist must have met Athena in person. He had captured her perfectly.

“Athena Parthenos,” Annabeth murmured. “It’s really here.”

All her life, she had wanted to visit the Parthenon. Now she was seeing the main attraction that
used
to be there—and she was the first child of Athena to do so in millennia.

She realized her mouth was hanging open. She forced herself to swallow. Annabeth could have stood there all day looking at the statue, but she had only accomplished half her mission. She had found the Athena Parthenos. Now, how could she rescue it from this cavern?

Strands of web covered it like a gauze pavilion. Annabeth suspected that without those webs, the statue would have fallen through the weakened floor long ago. As she stepped into the room, she could see that the cracks below were so wide, she could have lost her foot in them. Beneath the cracks, she saw nothing but empty darkness.

A chill washed over her. Where was the guardian? How could Annabeth free the statue without collapsing the floor? She couldn’t very well shove the Athena Parthenos down the corridor that she’d come from.

She scanned the chamber, hoping to see something that might help. Her eyes wandered over the tapestries, which were heart-wrenchingly beautiful. One showed a pastoral scene so three-dimensional, it could’ve been a window. Another tapestry showed the gods battling the giants. Annabeth saw a landscape of the Underworld. Next to it was the skyline of modern Rome. And in the tapestry to her left…

She caught her breath. It was a portrait of two demigods kissing underwater: Annabeth and Percy, the day their friends had thrown them into the canoe lake at camp. It was so lifelike that she wondered if the weaver had been there, lurking in the lake with a waterproof camera.

“How is that possible?” she murmured.

Above her in the gloom, a voice spoke. “For ages I have known that you would come, my sweet.”

Annabeth shuddered. Suddenly she was seven years old again, hiding under her covers, waiting for the spiders to attack her in the night. The voice sounded just as Percy had described: an angry buzz in multiple tones, female but not human.

In the webs above the statue, something moved—something dark and large.

“I have seen you in my dreams,” the voice said, sickly sweet and evil, like the smell in the corridors. “I had to make sure you were worthy, the
only
child of Athena clever enough to pass my tests and reach this place alive. Indeed, you are her most talented child. This will make your death so much more painful to my old enemy when you
fail utterly
.”

The pain in Annabeth’s ankle was nothing compared to the icy acid now filling her veins. She wanted to run. She wanted to plead for mercy. But she couldn’t show weakness—not now.

“You’re Arachne,” she called out. “The weaver who was turned into a spider.”

The figure descended, becoming clearer and more horrible. “Cursed by your mother,” she said. “Scorned by all and made into a hideous thing…because
I
was the better weaver.”

“But you lost the contest,” Annabeth said.

“That’s the story written by the winner!” cried Arachne. “Look on my work! See for yourself!”

Annabeth didn’t have to. The tapestries were the best she’d ever seen—better than the witch Circe’s work, and, yes, even better than some weavings she’d seen on Mount Olympus. She wondered if her mother truly
had
lost—if she’d hidden Arachne away and rewritten the truth. But right now, it didn’t matter.

“You’ve been guarding this statue since the ancient times,” Annabeth guessed. “But it doesn’t belong here. I’m taking it back.”

“Ha,” Arachne said.

Even Annabeth had to admit her threat sounded ridiculous. How could one girl in a Bubble Wrap ankle cast remove this huge statue from its underground chamber?

“I’m afraid you would have to defeat me first, my sweet,” Arachne said. “And alas, that is impossible.”

The creature appeared from the curtains of webbing, and Annabeth realized that her quest was hopeless. She was about to die.

Arachne had the body of a giant black widow, with a hairy red hourglass mark on the underside of her abdomen and a pair of oozing spinnerets. Her eight spindly legs were lined with curved barbs as big as Annabeth’s dagger. If the spider came any closer, her sweet stench alone would have been enough to make Annabeth faint. But the most horrible part was her misshapen face.