Trials of Apollo 5

meet my eyes.
I wondered again who Luguselwa was, and what she meant to Meg. Not
once in our months of travel had Meg mentioned her. This fact disturbed me.
Rather than indicating that Lu was unimportant, it made me suspect she was
very important indeed.
And why a Gaul? Gauls had been unusual in Nero’s Rome. By the time
he became emperor, most of them had been conquered and forcibly
“civilized.” Those who still wore tattoos and torques and lived according to
the old ways had been pushed to the fringes of Brittany or forced over to the
British Isles. The name Luguselwa…My Gaulish had never been very good,
but I thought it meant beloved of the god Lugus. I shuddered. Those Celtic
deities were a strange, fierce bunch.
My thoughts were too unhinged to solve the puzzle of Lu. I kept thinking
back to the poor amphisbaena she’d killed—a harmless monster commuter
who would never make it home to his wife, all because a prophecy had made
him its pawn.
His message had left me shaken—a verse in terza rima, like the one we’d
received at Camp Jupiter:
O son of Zeus the final challenge face.
The tow’r of Nero two alone ascend.
Dislodge the beast that hast usurped thy place.
Yes, I had memorized the cursed thing.
Now we had our second set of instructions, clearly linked to the previous
set, because the first and third lines rhymed with ascend. Stupid Dante and
his stupid idea for a never-ending poem structure:
The son of Hades, cavern-runners’ friend,
Must show the secret way unto the throne.
On Nero’s own your lives do now depend.
I knew a son of Hades: Nico di Angelo. He was probably still at Camp
Half-Blood on Long Island. If he had some secret way to Nero’s throne, he’d
never get the chance to show us unless we escaped this train. How Nico
might be a “cavern-runners’ friend,” I had no idea.
The last line of the new verse was just cruel. We were presently
surrounded by “Nero’s own,” so of course our lives depended on them. I