by Bryan Camp
This New Orleans was quiet, but not silent. Somewhere a brass band played, or maybe a marching band, something with horns and drums and a swaggering, jubilant beat. The streets were empty of people and traffic, but she heard the droning rumble of a streetcar’s engine, the clacking sparks of its contact with the wires overhead. Part of her wanted to wait here for the streetcar to roll by, in case Barren might be in the driver’s seat, in case the caduceus’s spell had been temporary, but Cur came blundering through the hole in the air and pointed behind her, to the massive office complex called One Shell Square.
“This way,” he said.
A massive monolith of limestone and glass, One Shell Square was the tallest building in the city, her first true skyscraper, and for a long time after it was built, the tallest building in the South. Its base took up an entire city block, and it rose fifty stories above the New Orleans streets, towering over the other massive office complexes of downtown. Its top floor was higher than the peak of Mount Driskill, Louisiana’s only mountain. Renai had to crane her neck back to see the very top floor, its windows twice the size of all the stories below it.
It hadn’t occurred to her until this moment, but she had to admit that it made a certain kind of sense: where else in New Orleans would an Olympian make his home?
She hurried to catch up to Cur, who took the sprawling stone steps that led to the front door three at a time, not showing off or in a rush, just moving at the natural pace of his massive stride. Once inside, she followed him across the gleaming marble floors and glitzy, expensive trappings of any high-dollar office complex: glass and chrome and flat-screens. Broke people, Renai had always thought, were broke in their own unique ways. Money always just looked like money.
Cur led her toward the banks of elevators—each of which only serviced a selection of floors—but continued past them, even the ones that indicated they went from the lobby to floors forty and higher. Instead, he stopped at the far wall, an unadorned span of dark gray marble as reflective as her own mirror. Between one stride and the next, without slowing down at all, Cur drew his sword and aimed its point at the wall. Its tip touched its twin reflected on the marble’s surface, and then slid into the stone, smooth as cutting butter.
Renai thought at first that the soldier god was cutting the stone in half, but when she looked closer, saw that he’d simply inserted his blade into a hairline crack so thin it was nearly invisible. Once the sword was buried almost to the hilt, Cur leaned his weight against it, and the wall split open the massive stone slabs, separating with a rumble. He sheathed his sword and put one hand on each, and muscles shifted and bunched in his arms that made something in Renai’s belly squirm. Even though he wasn’t really her type, that kind of display got a girl wondering just what he looked like when he didn’t have a dog’s face, whether the rest of him was that tightly built under his armor. She bit her lip and let those thoughts linger while he opened the hidden elevator doors.
Inside, there was only one button, unmarked, which made sense. An elevator like this only went straight to the top.
The doors opened with a soft musical tinkle, like wind chimes. Sunlight came streaming through the doors, a warm glow that carried with it the scent of laurel trees. Renai stepped out of the elevator alone—Cur said he’d stay behind and hold the door for her—and onto a lush green carpet of grass. Trees grew all along the edge of the roof, enough of them to give the impression of a secluded glade, but not enough to block the view of the city stretched out beneath them. This high up, Renai could see the twisting rust-brown meander of the river, the urban sprawl of red brick and gray concrete and sparkling glass, the flat green squares of parks or cemeteries, all of it laid out like the pieces of some giant game.
In the center of the roof stood a brief semi-circle of marble columns, ribbed and decorated and capped in ways that Renai knew had names—thanks to some long-ago history teacher who spent a week on the terms but then later that year skipped over the entirety of the civil rights movement—but didn’t remember. The space inside this open-air temple had been paved with loose gravel, which made a pleasant crunching sound beneath her feet as Renai walked inside. Within, Renai found twelve backless chairs, like a shallow capital U made out of stone, a shimmer hanging in the air above each one.
As she approached the farthest one on the left, that shimmer in the air resolved itself into a lyre: a musical instrument about the size and shape of a hunter’s bow, but with multiple parallel strings like a harp, instead of one perpendicular one used to nock an arrow. Though Renai had a nice—if untrained—voice, her musical aptitude was limited to being able to keep the beat at a second line. Despite that, the lyre called to her, her fingers twitching with desire to attempt a song on its silver strings. It was a beautiful instrument, a twist of bone or horn engraved with an image of a chariot riding across the sky. Renai realized she had started to reach for it and stuffed her hands in her pockets, instead.
Following the arc of chairs, she discovered a bow made of silver and a quiver of arrows, a statue of an owl wearing a plumed helmet, a short-handled maul and a pair of tongs, a sheaf of wheat that shined like gold, a scepter with a head shaped like the frilled eye of a peacock feather, a thunderbolt, a trident, a wicked spear with a jagged-edged blade, a fringed lacy veil, a wide-bowled chalice—and at the final seat all the way on the right side of the temple, Hermes’ caduceus. She reached for it and—as she expected—her fingers passed right through it. It was as convincing an illusion as all the others, though, with depth and detail and a shadow beneath it that shifted as it spun slowly on its axis.
“What are you doing here?” a voice said from behind her.
She turned, and there he was, the god who’d called himself Mason, leaning against one of the columns, hooked nose and light brown skin and fine all the way to the ground. He wore a red plaid suit that had no business looking as good as it did, double-breasted and tailor cut, solid black undershirt and tie, and a pair of red-winged, mirror-polished black shoes. Unlike any Trickster god she’d ever met, he wasn’t smiling.
“I was just wondering if this seat was taken,” she said, unable to resist.
“Clever,” Hermes said, glancing down at his nails as if he found his cuticles more interesting, “but I truly hope you didn’t come all this way just for that joke.”
“I found your caduceus, May’s Son.” She enunciated the wordplay in the name he’d given her, Mason, to show that she’d figured out his true identity, realizing only after it left her lips that the whole caduceus thing was probably a better mic drop.
He looked up at her with feigned indifference, which told her that he actually cared very, very much about what he was about to say. “And where might that be?”
“Ramses St. Cyr still has it.”
He left his insolent lean against the column and came to stand right in front of her without bothering to cross the space in between, without making a sound on the gravel floor. He was just there and then here, faster than Renai could blink. She flinched, and then hated that she’d reacted at all. “And why, little ker, dear sweet tenebrae, why did you let some mortal child keep what was mine?”
Renai could feel his rage so clearly that it cut away some of the fear, called out a summons for her own storm to come coiling to the surface. Not enough to give her access to its power, but just enough that she could withstand the subtle seductive glamour of his honey-brown eyes. “Didn’t have much of a choice,” she said. “Which I’ll explain, once we renegotiate the terms of our deal.”
At that, Hermes did smile, though it wasn’t a kind one. “And why, in the name of Zeus’ eternally engorged prick, would I go and do a stupid thing like that?”
Renai stretched her arms out to either side, taking in everything around them. “Look where we are. The Far Lands. I got here on my own, trick. You want my help getting your little wand back, you better come correct with a better offer.”
Hermes slumped to the side, his shoulder turning and his hips cocke
d, tilting his head so that he looked at her slantways. “Oh, so you’re the big shit now, huh? You workin’ on a come-up?”
Renai did not appreciate his tone. God or no, he didn’t get to talk to her like that, not when she’d come this far. The tempest rose fully in her now, enough that she could seize its power and let some of it slip free. Lightning crackled in her fist and, yeah, it hurt, the bindings straining as she leaned hard toward the purely destructive half of her, but it was worth it when Hermes stood up straight and took a step back. His eyes—moving so quick she wasn’t entirely sure she saw it—flicked over to the thunderbolt on the chair in the middle of the row, the one raised just slightly higher than all the rest.
“I think you have mistaken me,” Renai said, “for someone else.”
Hermes showed her his palms. His voice, when he spoke, took on a placating mien. “Apologies,” he said. “I think you’ll agree that we’re both a bit caught up in the circumstances. I’m sure we’re both in a position to help one another. What is it I can do for you?”
“I need to be able to withstand the caduceus’s abilities. I don’t stand a chance against Ramses if he can knock me out as soon as he sees me.” Up until this moment she’d been hoping that the ghost word would conceal her long enough to get close to Ramses, but if Hermes could make her immune, that would be even better. “Do that for me, and we’ll go from there.”
He gestured at her with a flick of his fingers. “Okay,” he said, “done. Now tell me how the hell this child has had my property in his possession for so long.”
Renai lifted an eyebrow at him. “Seriously? That’s your best ‘fake magic’ game?”
Hermes let a reluctant, chagrined smile curl along his lips. “Okay, fine,” he said. “I admit it, I didn’t do anything. The truth is, there’s nothing more I can do for you.” Renai felt her hopes sink, and it must have shown on her face, because Hermes held a hand up. “I can’t do anything else because the caduceus only works once. It can send you to sleep. It can raise you from the grave. But it can’t do both. You’re already immune.” He nodded in the direction of the elevator. “That big Christ-bearing mook of a bodyguard, too.”
Renai’s thoughts went immediately to all the Gatekeepers, to the Thrones, who had fallen under the winged staff’s spell. “So once it puts you to sleep, you can never wake—”
Hermes was already shaking his head. “No, it can undo what it did, but again, only once. Once you return it to me, I’ll go back and reverse whatever pranks this little shit pulled.”
“Pranks? Have you not been paying attention?”
Hermes licked his lips and took a deep breath before he answered. “With my staff loose in this city during the Hallows, I thought it prudent to be somewhere else for a while. Samhain in Dublin is a real kick in the ass, for the record. I forgot how fun it is to be Amadan Dubh. Why, what’s been going on?”
And so Renai told him. About Ramses finding the caduceus and falling to its sleep spell, which allowed the demon possessing him to assume control and take Hermes’ staff. How he’d then used it to storm the Gates of the Underworld while he was still alive, putting even Death to sleep with the caduceus’s magic, sneaking into the Far Lands and headed who knew where with the staff and the cursed revolver. How all of it was part of some plan by a deity who went by the name of Cordelia.
“Eris,” Hermes said, and he made it a curse. “Of course it had to be fucking Eris.” When Renai didn’t seem suitably impressed, he continued. “You ever hear of the Trojan War? You know how it started?”
“Sure, Helen of Troy. The Greeks were coming to steal her, right?”
Hermes made a twisting motion with his wrist. “Wrong way around. The Greeks went to Troy to get her back. See, Paris stole Helen from her husband, King Menelaus, because Aphrodite promised she would be his wife.”
Renai kissed her teeth. “They started a war because some king got his ass dumped? White people are fucked up.”
Hermes chuckled. “Yeah, well, they were Greek, not white, but sure. Anyway, the important part of it is, Aphrodite promised Paris that the most beautiful mortal in the world could be his wife because he was judging a contest to see which of three goddesses deserved a golden apple of immortality. Eris is the one who gave him the apple in the first place, all because she didn’t get invited to a wedding.” He shook his head, wistful like the destruction of an entire civilization was the kind of shit everyone got into when they were young.
“You seem to know a lot about her,” Renai said.
“Who do you think brought Paris the apple?” Hermes shrugged. “I’m just trying to tell you that they called her Discord for a reason. Her whole existence is about getting snubbed or not getting something she wants, and then burning the whole thing down. If you’re not careful, this place could be next.”
“Why? She not get invited to another wedding?”
“Worse. Eris went by another name back in the day: Echidna. Her lover was a god called Typhon; when he was here in New Orleans, he called himself Mourning.”
All the pieces suddenly clicked into place. Mourning had been behind all the conflict with Jude Dubuisson five years ago, the mastermind of the plot where her own death had been collateral damage. She hadn’t been around for their final confrontation, but the way she understood it, Jude was the only one who walked away.
“Oh shit,” Renai said.
“‘Oh shit’ is right. Way I hear it, Jude shipped Mourning’s ass down to Tartarus. If I was a betting man, I’d say Eris is heading that way to bust lover boy out.”
“So what can we do to stop her?”
“We?”
“The caduceus is your responsibility, isn’t it? That damn god-killing gun, too, now that I think about it. Weren’t you supposed to protect it? You’re really not going to do anything?”
Hermes held his chin in his hand, an index finger stretched across his lips. Like he was asking for silence while he considered his response. After a moment, he said, “Since you’re about to rush off and get yourself killed, I’m going to tell you something I don’t tell anybody. There’s a reason I got so antsy when that stupid winged stick went missing. It’s my fate. My destiny. When I die, it’ll be the caduceus that takes me. So no, so sorry, but I won’t be breaking into a hell prison built to hold the worst monsters in all of creation to go chasing after a demon armed with a gun that kills gods and the magical artifact prophesied to end me. That will not be how I spend the rest of the Hallows. You have fun, though. Bring me back my caduceus if you survive, and I’ll do something nice for you.”
Renai turned her back on him, on all his lies and his promises, on his failures and cowardice. “Cur,” she shouted, “open a door for us to Tartarus!” Whether that place held no fear for him like it did for Hermes, or whether he just heard the determination in her voice, he did as she asked without hesitation.
It was dusk here, but full night on the other side of the door Cur’s blade had cut in the air. Even as far away as she was, she could feel the cold pouring in from the other side.
“You forgot to ask the most important question,” Hermes called from behind her.
Much as she wanted to walk away without giving him the satisfaction, she couldn’t risk the chance that he might actually have something valuable to say. So she stopped and turned back. “What question is that?”
“How you have immunity from the caduceus forcing you into slumber. Your boy over there fell under my staff’s spell when he was a guard dog back in the day. I put him to sleep so Heracles could fulfill a task, and I woke him back up once he was back where he belonged.” He smiled then, a feral grin that was both hungry and cruel. He couldn’t help being a bastard, Renai knew, no more than Cordelia—Eris—could help destroying everything she touched. It was in their nature. “But when you made that deal with the Thrones to give Jude a second chance, I’m the one they asked to bring you back from the dead.”
Renai turned away then, not waiting for him to finish, already knowing
what he was going to say. She was through the door and into the cold night of Tartarus before he had a chance to speak, but the knowledge had already wormed its way into her heart.
Ramses couldn’t use the caduceus to make her fall asleep, but he could use it to snatch away her resurrection.
Chapter Thirty-two
The New Orleans on the other side of the doorway was a broken mirror. Litter blew on the cold wind, which carried the hot, rancid shit stink of a backed-up sewer. The nearby interstate roared and roared, a constant drone that never left your ears, even when the wails of sirens or the sharp, intermittent pops of a semi-automatic stole your attention for a moment. She stood in the street, cracked and buckling because the sediment beneath it had washed away, the coastline creeping closer every year. The only illumination—a single buzzing streetlight overhead—flickered on and off, on and off, glittering on the broken safety glass at her feet, probably some poor bastard’s car window smashed in. Somewhere a woman screamed, shrill and full volume, impossible to tell whether it was drunken elation or fear, only that it cut off too abruptly to be by choice. Elsewhere, deep voices rose in short guttural consonants, vulgarities or threats or both.
And in front of her, the gravitational core of all this misery, the squat, ugly bulk of Orleans Parish Prison.
Like Olympus at the top of One Shell Square, the Far Land of Tartarus was an eerie reflection of the prison in the living world, an edifice of stone and sharp wire and metal bars. Standing there next to Cur, so uncomfortably similar to her memory of standing next to Sal in the Underworld, Renai half expected Cross to show up and accuse them of orchestrating a prison break. It would be especially fitting because, just like the Oubliette in the Underworld, the massive doors of Tartarus stood open, the razor-wire-topped fence’s gate swinging back and forth in the wind.
