The Tyrant's Tomb

I faced Reyna and Meg. I tried to shout, “Can you hear me now?”
Nothing. My vocal cords vibrated, but the sound waves seemed to die
before they left my mouth.
Meg said something I couldn’t hear. Reyna spread her arms.
I gestured for them to wait. Then I took a deep breath and forced myself
to keep going toward the box. I stopped within an arm’s length of the cargo
doors.
The rose-bouquet smell was definitely coming from inside. The chains
across the locking rods were heavy Imperial gold—enough rare magical
metal to buy a decent-size palace on Mount Olympus. Even in my mortal
form, I could feel the power radiating from the container—not just the heavy
silence, but the cold, needling aura of wards and curses placed on the metal
doors and walls. To keep us out. To keep something in.
On the left-hand door, stenciled in white paint, was a single word in
Arabic:
My Arabic was even rustier than my Dean Martin Italian, but I was fairly
sure it was the name of a city. ALEXANDRIA. As in Alexandria, Egypt.
My knees almost buckled. My vision swam. I might have sobbed, though
I couldn’t hear it.
Slowly, gripping the rail for support, I staggered back to my friends. I
only knew I’d left the zone of silence when I could hear myself muttering,
“No, no, no, no.”
Meg caught me before I could fall over. “What’s wrong? What
happened?”
“I think I understand,” I said. “The soundless god.”
“Who is it?” Reyna asked.
“I don’t know.”
Reyna blinked. “But you just said—”
“I think I understand. Remembering who it is exactly—that’s harder. I’m
pretty sure we’re dealing with a Ptolemaic god, from back in the days when
the Greeks ruled Egypt.”
Meg looked past me at the container. “So there’s a god in the box.”
I shuddered, remembering the short-lived fast food franchise Hermes had
once tried to open on Mount Olympus. Thankfully, God-in-the-Box never
took off. “Yes, Meg. A very minor Egyptian-Greek hybrid god, I think,