Read Underworlds #3: Revenge of the Scorpion King for Free Online Page B

of his insectlike head.
    “Can you return what is lost?” he went on quietly.
    The lightning flashed in my brain for a second time, and I suddenly became a genius. Only what is lost can be found. It all made sense! Each level of the tower had its own tone, its own musical note. That was part of the riddle and the curse. All the notes together made up a chord of notes.
    The lost chord of legend.
    Loki fumed, his fingers sparking like mad. “I want those Tablets of Destiny now!”
    Panu stepped over to me, Jon, and Sydney. “This is the second riddle!” he whispered. “Kingu needs the lost chord!”
    Looking down at the lyre in my hands, I realized something. “I only have six working strings … but the seventh beast has no note. He’s buried. He’s silent!”
    Jon’s eyes widened. “Owen, strum the lyre —”
    So I did.
    I played the six-string chord, with each string in its new tuning, and they vibrated with the notes of each level of the tower. Over and over I strummed the strings, creating a sound that swept over all of us, across the summit, down to the stones under our feet.
    And under the stones, too.
    “Stop that noise!” Loki snapped. “It hurts my —”
    He didn’t have a chance to finish before the roof beneath our feet rumbled violently and split apart, throwing us back on our heels. Then arose a giant man of stone.
    He smelled like wet sand and roots and moss and damp stone. His gargantuan arms bulged with stone muscles. His feet were three feet long from heel to toe. The stones of his joints ground together when he moved.
    Loki staggered. “The seventh beast —”
    In his massive, stony hands the giant cradled two flat stones carved with words that smoked as if they had just been written by a lightning bolt.
    “The Tablets!” Loki said.
    “Ullikummi stands before you, alive once more!” the giant thundered as he raised the smoking tablets high over his head. The skies rumbled when he spoke.
    “Give me the Tablets of Destiny!” Loki said, his rune stone glowing silver in the night air. “Bow down and give them to me!”
    Kingu turned to Loki. Then to us.
    He bristled from legs to arms to neck to head. Fire erupted in his yellow eyes.
    Then his stingers twitched.

K INGU’S TAIL HARDLY MOVED.
    I didn’t take my eyes off of it, but all I saw was a blur.
    “Ahh!” Loki shrieked as Kingu’s stinger made contact. The armor at his shoulder burst open, and we saw white bone. Loki collapsed to his knees, clutching his shoulder, and Dana stumbled away from him. I pulled her behind us.
    “Kingu, you fiend —” Loki shouted, then gasped for air.
    “You dare speak to me!” Kingu boomed, his tail arching high over his head. “You dare cast darkness upon me? I invented darkness, Pale Master!” He spat out those last two words as if they were a curse. Then he swung his head around to the giant.
    “Ullikummi!” he said.
    “By the Sun and Moon of Babylon, I obey you, Father!” the giant thundered. “What would you have me do?”
    Kingu glared at Loki then, and with the slightest movement of his pincer, he indicated the ground below us, where Fenrir and the six monsters awaited. “Send the Tablets below!”
    Without a pause, the stone giant threw the Tablets of Destiny from the top of the tower. They exploded like a bomb, shattering into dust at the feet of the beasts.
    “NO!” Loki cried, peering over the edge of the tower in disbelief.
    I suddenly understood what had just happened. The lost chord was the only thing that released the seventh monster and the Tablets of Destiny, which would free Kingu from his curse. But Kingu could never tell Loki that. So instead, he tricked him. Kingu tricked the trickster.
    “My curse is ended! My son lives!” Kingu bellowed. “Loki, your childish runes cannot control me. I have tricked you. These children have tricked you! God for god, you do not want to fight me.”
    Loki staggered backward, his expression a mask of rage. Holding one silver hand