The Tyrant's Tomb

I wondered if she was trying to make me laugh. “Roses? Why in the
name of the twelve gods would I smell roses up here?”
Reyna said, “All I smell is Lester’s shoes. I think he stepped in
something.”
“A large puddle of shame,” I muttered.
“I smell roses,” Meg insisted. “Whatever. Keep moving.”
I did, since I had no choice.
At last, we reached the first set of crossbeams. A catwalk ran the length
of the girders, allowing us to stand and rest for a few minutes. We were only
about sixty feet above the relay station, but it felt much higher. Below us
spread an endless grid of city blocks, rumpling and twisting across the hills
whenever necessary, the streets making designs that reminded me of the Thai
alphabet. (The goddess Nang Kwak had tried to teach me their language
once, over a lovely dinner of spicy noodles, but I was hopeless at it.)
Down in the parking lot, Aurum and Argentum looked up at us and
wagged their tails. They seemed to be waiting for us to do something. The
mean-spirited part of me wanted to shoot an arrow to the top of the next hill
and yell, FETCH! but I doubted Reyna would appreciate that.
“It’s fun up here,” Meg decided. She did a cartwheel, because she
enjoyed giving me heart palpitations.
I scanned the triangle of catwalks, hoping to see something besides
cables, circuit boxes, and satellite equipment—preferably something labeled:
PUSH THIS BUTTON TO COMPLETE QUEST AND COLLECT REWARD.
Of course not, I grumbled to myself. Tarquin wouldn’t be so kind as to
put whatever we needed on the lowest level.
“Definitely no silent gods here,” Reyna said.
“Thanks a lot.”
She smiled, clearly still in a good mood from my earlier misstep into the
puddle of shame. “I also don’t see any doors. Didn’t the prophecy say I’m
supposed to open a door?”
“Could be a metaphorical one,” I speculated. “But you’re right, there’s
nothing here for us.”
Meg pointed to the next level of crossbeams—another sixty feet up,
barely visible in the belly of the fog bank. “The smell of roses is stronger
from up there,” she said. “We should keep climbing.”
I sniffed the air. I smelled only the faint scent of eucalyptus from the
woods below us, my own sweat cooling against my skin, and the sour whiff