“You understand it?” I asked. “Can you translate?”
Tyson closed his eyes and began to speak in a horrible, raspy woman’s voice. “You will work for the master or suffer.”
Annabeth shuddered. “I hate it when he does that.”
Like all Cyclopes, Tyson had superhuman hearing and an uncanny ability to mimic voices. It was almost like he entered a trance when he spoke in other voices.
“I will not serve,” Tyson said in a deep, wounded voice.
He switched to the monster’s voice: “Then I shall enjoy your pain, Briares.” Tyson faltered when he said that name. I’d never heard him break character when he was mimicking somebody, but he let out a strangled gulp. Then he continued in the monster’s voice. “If you thought your first imprisonment was unbearable, you have yet to feel true torment. Think on this until I return.”
The dragon lady tromped toward the stairwell, vipers hissing around her legs like grass skirts. She spread wings that I hadn’t noticed before—huge bad wings she kept folded against her dragon back. She leaped off the catwalk and soared across the courtyard. We crouched lower in the shadows. A hot sulfurous wind blasted my face as the monster flew over. Then she disappeared around the corner.
“H-h-horrible,” Grover said. “I’ve never smelled any monster that strong.”
“Cyclopes’ worst nightmare,” Tyson murmured. “Kampê.”
“Who?” I asked.
Tyson swallowed. “Every Cyclops knows about her. Stories about her scare us when we’re babies. She was our jailer in the bad years.”
Annabeth nodded. “I remember now. When the Titans ruled, they imprisoned Gaea and Ouranos’s earlier children—the Cyclopes and the Hekatonkheires.”
“The Heka-what?” I asked.
“The Hundred-Handed Ones,” she said. “They called them that because…well, they had a hundred hands. They were elder brothers of the Cyclopes.”
“Very powerful,” Tyson said. “Wonderful! As tall as the sky. So strong they could break mountains!”
“Cool,” I said. “Unless you’re a mountain.”
“Kampê was the jailer,” he said. “She worked for Kronos. She kept our brothers locked up in Tartarus, tortured them always, until Zeus came. He killed Kampê and freed Cyclopes and Hundred-Handed Ones to help fight against the Titans in the big war.”
“And now Kampê is back,” I said.
“Bad,” Tyson summed up.
“So who’s in that cell?” I asked. “You said a name—”
“Briares!” Tyson perked up. “He is a Hundred-Handed One. They are as tall as the sky and—”
“Yeah,” I said. “They break mountains.”
I looked up at the cells above us, wondering how something as tall as the sky could fit in a tiny cell, and why he was crying.
“I guess we should check it out,” Annabeth said, “before Kampê comes back.”
***
As we approached the cell, the weeping got louder. When I first saw the creature inside, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. He was human-size and his skin was very pale, the color of milk. He wore a loincloth like a big diaper. His feet seemed too big for his body, with cracked dirty toenails, eight toes on each foot. But the top half of his body was the weird part. He made Janus look downright normal. His chest sprouted more arms than I could count, in rows, all around his body. The arms looked like normal arms, but there were so many of them, all tangled together, that his chest looked kind of like a forkful of spaghetti somebody had twirled together. Several of his hands were covering his face as he sobbed.
“Either the sky isn’t as tall as it used to be,” I muttered, “or he’s short.”
Tyson didn’t pay any attention. He fell to his knees.
“Briares!” he called.
The sobbing stopped.
“Great Hundred-Handed One!” Tyson said. “Help us!”
Briars looked up. His face was long and sad, with a crooked nose and bad teeth. He had deep brown eyes—I mean completely brown with no whites or black pupils, like eyes formed out of clay.
“Run while you can, Cyclops,” Briares said miserably. “I cannot even help myself.”
“You are a Hundred-Handed One!” Tyson insisted. “You can do anything!”
Briars wiped his nose with five or six hands. Several others were fidgeting with little pieces of metal and wood from a broken bed, the way Tyson always played with spare parts. It was amazing to watch. The hands seemed to have a mind of their own. They built a toy boat out of wood, then disassembled it just as fast. Other hands were scratching at the cement floor for no apparent reason. Others were playing rock, paper, scissors. A few others were making ducky and doggie shadow puppets against the wall.
“I cannot,” Briares moaned. “Kampê is back! The Titans will rise and throw us back into Tartarus.”
“Put on your brave face!” Tyson said.
Immediately Briares’s face morphed into something else. Same brown eyes, but otherwise totally different features. He had an upturned nose, arched eyebrows, and a weird smile, like he was trying to act brave. But then his face turned back to what it had been before.
“No good,” he said. “My scared face keeps coming back.”
“How did you do that?” I asked.
Annabeth elbowed me. “Don’t be rude. The Hundred-Handed Ones all have fifty different faces.”
“Must make it hard to get a yearbook picture,” I said.