The Golden Amulet (PJO, Sequel to The Silver Ring)

Chapter 39

In retrospect, my first mistake was depending on Charlotte to identify the gender of my "companion." 

You see, horses don't speak English. And I don't speak horse. Instead, my magical ability makes whatever the horse speaks into English, and vice versa for the horse, kind of like a translator.

So then, there's another problem: languages don't have each and every word for what another one has. For example, a language might not have a word for "clown," but something similar. Instead of this, with the language of horses, it was gender.

From my experience with speaking with horses, it didn't seem as though there was a word for "he" or "she." Instead, it seemed as though the pronouns were translated into a collective form, like "they." 

So instead of saying "he" in front of Charlotte, depending on her to correct me if I was wrong, I should've asked for distinct features that I knew about Psi, like his skin tone, which was pale, but Eon's was more tanned. Or just to identify the person she recognized as a "male," or a "female," which was a simple—but an easy-to-forget way— of bypassing this problem.

But that didn't matter now. I had an Eon problem, and I had to fix it.

The easiest way to do that was to leave Charlotte to run to the nearest soldier and explain what was going on, then demand a lockdown before it was too late.

But it didn't work.

I tried to, but all I got in return was: "You think a lockdown is a joke? Go prank someone else."

I tried twice more, but nobody seemed to want to listen to me, since I was a stranger.

So I had to get to Psi.

Psi was on the other side of the compound, in the map room. All the important rooms were spaced out, since the idea was that if the enemy took over a portion of the base, they wouldn't have control over all of the important things immediately. However, this also made the walk—or sprint, in my case—into a few miles.

By the time I got to the map room, I was exhausted and racked in pain; running several miles in a full sprint with broken ribs was no easy feat. The soldiers around shot me weird glances.

I walked into the map room. It was a room filled with tables laden with dozens of maps, ranging from small ones the size of a keyboard key to big ones the size of a barn door.  The room had a quiet atmosphere, sort of like a library, but many people were softly murmuring to each other as they worked. Cartographers were everywhere, copying maps, making new ones, or even aiding people to find certain ones.

I spotted Psi at the back, going through several scrolls of maps along with a helpful cartographer. I started pushing my way through the crowd towards him, gaining many annoyed glances and yelps of surprise as my clumsiness often made me knock into people, offsetting their writing.

Because of all the noise, Psi spotted me before I could get to him. "What do you want, Percy?" Psi grumbled, setting down the scrolls onto a nearby table. "I can't find a map showing the Forbidden Forest, since it's apparently a name that only the Void soldiers call the forest."

The cartographer shot me an apologetic glance. "Locals always have different names for the places than the ones we write on our maps," she explained. "We're all from Planet Chaos, so we name things logically. Void maps won't align with ours. There's no way we can help you in such a short amount of time." She paused, then corrected herself. "Well, if you had a picture of the place I might be able to tell you where it is."

Psi turned towards me. "You still have the map from that village, right?"

By now, I had recovered from my miserable journey enough that I could speak normally. "There's no time for that. We need to lock down the base."

The cartographer reacted disbelievingly, just like the soldiers did, but Psi just looked surprised. "What happened?" he asked.

"Eon happened. She's been in the base. I don't know for how long—or if she's even here, but this is our only chance at capturing her."

"If you don't mind me asking, who is Eon?" the cartographer said at the same time as Psi said, "That's not good."

I completely ignored the cartographer and said to Psi, "We need to capture her."

Psi hesitated, seemingly weighing the pros and cons, but then decisively said, "Let's do it."

I sighed in relief: truthfully, I didn't know if Psi would listen to me or not. It was always fifty-fifty chance, depending on dozens of factors, but mainly his mood towards me.

Psi looked at the cartographer. "By being here, I'm essentially Lord Chaos' representative, right?"

"Yes," the cartographer confirmed, looking confused as to why Psi was asking this.

"Do I have control over the full base?"

"I . . . believe so, yes."

"Then lock it down," Psi ordered. "We've got a manhunt on our hands."