I shake my head, unable to process the new information.
The sphinx is no political crook, my brain supplies a second later to my relief. She’s just a beast with a desire to live as long as possible.
Harpoc’s telling gives me, dare I say it, an appreciation for something positive secret magic can do aside from all his parlor tricks.
“What turned her to granite? Did she disobey some edict like Lot’s wife in the Bible? Although Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt, but you get my meaning.”
“I do, but I honestly don’t know what happened.”
“But you knew she’d been turned?”
“I did. Which is another reason I came so quickly when you brought her back. She was about the last being I ever expected to see alive again. It’d never happened before.”
My eyes grow large.
Harpoc grins.
“So are all sphinx statues, formerly alive?”
“You do have an active imagination.” Harpoc grins.
“What? It’s a reasonable question.”
“That I have no answer to.” He snorts. “I deal in secrets, not biology or art.”
I hold up a hand in surrender. “And the other two? What’d they pay you to keep their secrets?”
“While I’m open to answering more of your questions—” I let my mouth fall open dramatically, making Harpoc chuckle. “—we really need to address King Midas.”
King Midas. The thought makes my stomach tense but not so much to drive away hunger.
“Can we at least grab a quick breakfast first?”
I try pushing aside visions of what the guy might look like by now, but my imagination wins, and I can only nibble at my falafels because all I can see is more of Midas fallen and unconscious, wild animals mauling him, and worse.
Carnage. Blood. Gore.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Harpoc’s earlier moodiness returns by the time we finish breakfast, but soon after, we launch, me in his arms. He’s as bad as a PMSing woman. Every time the topic of Midas comes up, he gets this way, yet he’s been in no hurry to find the golden king until now. It’s more than odd, even for him.
But I have no desire to upset him further with any of my current thoughts, so I leave him to PMS in silence as we fly the short distance, or so he says.
I’m just glad this Midas king dude isn’t another maniacal, raging beast that can eat my ass or disembowel me. And it’s only because of this that I’m not freaking despite having no clue what we’ll face.
I’m here for you, Pell, my inner voice assures.
I roll my eyes. No kidding, Sherlock.
We’re flying over a desolate, scrub-covered plain and the sun’s shining, but the area is deserted. Behind Harpoc’s windscreen, all is quiet. I’m not even picking up ground noise like I usually do. There’s certainly no wildlife, which means this is the habitat of only silent and deadly poisonous snakes and nasty critters, the kind I deplore that bite my butt.
An itch starts on my behind at just the thought, but I’m not going after it.
We approach a solitary, dirt mound that rises from the plain, which I eyeball to be maybe 150 feet tall and 1,000 feet in diameter. Good size, and the only feature on the flat-as-a-pancake landscape other than farmers’ fields, which circle the thing carving rectangles and triangles in the earth.
We’re practically on top of it when I pick up what sounds like whispering, and it’s not Harpoc. I strain to hear the words, but I can’t make them out until Harpoc translates, “King Midas has an ass’s ears.”
I furrow my brow as I look up at his scruffy jaw.
“Apollo and Pan were competing on Turkey’s Got Talent.” A corner of Harpoc’s mouth hitches.
I snort.
“Tmolus, the god of the mountain where it was held, was judge and declared Apollo the winner. Midas, who was an uninvited, spectating busybody, opened his big mouth and disagreed. Apollo was offended and retorted that Midas must have the ears of an ass and made the king’s ears such right then and there.”
“Serves him right.” I also hate busybodies.
“Midas took to wearing turbans and such to hide them, but he couldn’t hide his secret from his barber, so he swore the man to secrecy. The poor guy found it a terrible burden so one night he dug a hole and whispered the secret into it, carefully covering it up and tiptoeing away. But weeds grew on top of the spot and the moment the first breeze ruffled them, they started murmuring Midas’ secret to the whole world, as it is to this day.”
My mouth drops open. “You’re joking.”
Harpoc laughs. “Yes, I am.”
I swat at his chest.
My inner voice practically guffaws. Did you know the word “gullible” isn’t in the dictionary, Pell?
I can’t help but snort.
“It’s the way the air comes around the mound that makes that sound. I had you going, huh?” He looks pretty proud of himself, but it beats his PMSing.
I mime a fish dangling on the end of a line, gasping for air, to which he laughs.
“Throw me back in?”
His smile is his only answer as he sets us down before a limestone block path carved into the mound that leads to a massive set of doors. He stands me up, then does that swirly thing with his shadows making his wings disappear.
His mood reverts along with his shadows. It’s clear as his jaw tenses and his shoulders droop as he looks up the path.
Lordy, lordy what does the god of secrets fear? My stomach twists.
The words from that scroll revisit me, “I sought the throne
