Separated from Yourselves

by Bill Hiatt

  Looking at the angry but contained mob around him, Eros raised his hands and said, “Friends, that was merely a jest.” Then he knelt on the ground and tried to draw on primal Eros.

  I glanced over at Eva, who was blushing and looking down.

  She almost looked as if she had wanted to make love to Eros. I resisted the temptation to read her mind even though I really, really wanted to.

  Eros looked up. “Well, Granduncle, you were right. I am cut off. There may yet be a way, though, to make Tartarus care about our leaving.”

  Hades looked at him irritably. “And what might that be?”

  “We will change this place in ways he will not like. Persephone, let us create a lighter atmosphere. I will fill the air with love, and you will make young plants sprout from the soil and flower. It will be spring in Tartarus.”

  “Nothing can grow here,” snapped Hades.

  “Why are there flies here then?” I asked, realizing even as I said it that it was a pretty random question. I had noticed them before, and they actually seemed numerous—particularly for a place in which nothing could grow. With no plants or animals, what could they possibly live on?

  Hades looked at me as if I had lost my mind. “What difference does that make?”

  “Begging your pardon, Lord Hades, but if nothing can live here, aren’t the flies out of place?”

  “There are some in the Underworld,” Hades replied, looking angry. “The ones you see here must have gotten in when we or some other group were first imprisoned.”

  “Could Hecate use them as spies?” I asked. The Olympians looked very nervous.

  “We should check—” I continued.

  “If Hecate were seeing through the insects, she would already have attacked us. Were you not down here some time before you freed us?”

  “Yes, Lord Hades, but—”

  “Then let us stay focused on our escape from here!” commanded Hades with what seemed to me an overly belligerent tone. I was just trying to be cautious, after all.

  “Let us go back to Eros’s earlier speculations,” Hades continued, still agitated enough that no one was likely to mention flies again. “Though his suggestions were a waste of time, his foolishness has given me an idea. We do not need Tartarus to pay attention to us. We just need Erebus to restore the young lady’s powers and give us safe passage through his realm. Unlike Tartarus, there are things Erebus cares about.”

  “We aren’t exactly his favorite people,” I pointed out, bracing myself for yet another reprimand from the lord of the dead.

  “It matters not,” he replied, waving his hand dismissively. “Erebus would sell his own mother—if he had one—for gold. It just so happens that all the gold in the ground on this plane belongs to me.”

  While not completely dark, Tartarus was gloomy enough to make it easy for Hades to find an appropriate shadow. At first he seemed to be talking to himself, but eventually I felt the presence of Erebus on the other side.

  As I might have predicted, Erebus was reluctant to help us, but Hades offered him such a huge sum in gold that eventually the incarnation of darkness relented. He agreed to safe passage out of Tartarus and up to Olympus, as well as permanent shadow magic access for Umbra, at the cost of enough gold to fill Fort Knox twice over. He did quibble a little over whether the gold really belonged to Hecate at this point, but Hades assured him she had not yet transferred the ownership of the assets between the Underworld and the surface.

  “Can you be sure of that?” I asked Hades.

  He gave me the mental equivalent of a shrug. “No, but I have a period of time to pay. If we win, the gold is mine for sure. If we lose, I’ll end up back in Tartarus, and Erebus will have a hard time collecting then, won’t he?”

  Once the deal had been struck, we made our last preparations. I extended our psychic network to make sure all the Olympians were included, so that we could communicate and share power back and forth as needed. We all braced ourselves. Umbra swept us into the shadows, and then back out near the rear of the throne room on Mount Olympus.

  Right in front of us stood several rows of skeletal guards.

  Hecate had obviously beefed up the defenses since she had ambushed me and my party.

  There were so many of them that they blocked our original deployment plans, which had been built on having our frontline fighters immediately engage Hecate and her allies. “Get these out of the way now!” I thought to everyone as loudly as I could. Those of us best equipped to fight did as much as we could in the limited space to put ourselves between the skeletons and our less combat-ready comrades.

  The skeletons were raising their swords and clicking their teeth. I guessed the clicking must have been their way of sounding the alarm. I had a hard time seeing where the thrones were, but I could feel power building. Hecate and her allies were already aware of us, and our carefully choreographed attack strategy couldn’t be executed until we got rid of the skeleton guards.

  Unfortunately, Hecate must have raided Hephaestus’s work shop and found a huge amount of gear, because the skeletons had decent swords and shields. Not only that, but such skeleton warriors I had seen before were clumsy fighters and moved at TV-zombie speed. These were skillful swordsmen, and they were as swift as we were, as we quickly discovered when we tried to engage them.

  Their lack of flesh also made them harder to hit, especially for the archers; the target area was considerably smaller, and some shots, like through the eye or heart, obviously weren’t going to have much effect. Khalid’s arrows worked because of the combination of blast effects they produced if they touched a skeleton at all, and the sunny glow from Apollo’s arrows did some damage even if he missed, but Artemis and Eva had to hit repeatedly to do much.

  Close-combat weapons had limited effect as well. Most of our swords could cut through pretty much anything, but the skeletons’ bones were tougher than normal, probably courtesy of Hecate’s magic, so what might normally have needed only one sword stroke now required three or four. White Hilt’s fire didn’t do much damage unless I raised the temperature to levels risky to use when fighting so close together. I didn’t feel comfortable keeping the temperature that high for very long, which reduced me to hacking away, and every time I damaged one skeleton enough to knock it out of the fight, another took its place.

  Alex was having even bigger problems with the sword of chaos, which worked too well. Yes, it could cut through anything in one stroke, but it also caused the material it hit to change to something else and fly in all directions. Normally the debris didn’t go far enough to be a problem, but Alex, like me, was fighting at very close quarters, and I suspected Hecate had done something to the atmosphere in the palace that made those little bits of transformed matter more likely to hit Alex or someone else on our side, because he and the people fighting near him got burned, poked, stunned, and poisoned in various ways. In a very short time he had to sheathe the sword of chaos, grab one of the swords a skeleton had dropped, and, like me, hack away—a safer method, though also an agonizingly slow one.

  Nor were Alex and I the only ones having problems. Hades nearly fell because he spent too long trying to wrest control of the skeletons from Hecate. Fortunately, he realized that was a lost cause just in time to start taking them down with his staff. Its death touch wasn’t going to do anything, but its impact shattered them most satisfactorily. Athena had problems with her spear but quickly realized her normal stabbing movements weren’t going to do much and adapted her tactics.

  Not so lucky were Gordy and Carlos; the special powers of their swords were ineffective against skeletons, reducing them to laboriously chopping away just as Alex and I had to do. Dan’s dragon armor would make him unbeatable against a single opponent, but against a multitude, there was no guarantee, and the skeletons pressed him hard. As for Michael, Harpe could easily cut even hardened bone, but he wasn’t very good with the blade, and he was the first of us to get wounded. Only his quick healing kept him from falling. I would have
pulled him back, but he was as stubborn as I was, for obvious reasons, and frankly we needed him to avoid gaps in the line; the last thing we wanted was having the skeletons getting behind us and attacking from all sides.

  Fortunately, some of us were doing better. Jimmie was fighting well, and the sunlight from his blade made it more effective against the skeletons. David, in charge of Stan’s body at the moment, was making equally good use of his blade, which always radiated some special blessing, at least when David wielded it confidently.

  Aside from Hades, the most effective of any of us were Shar and Hercules. Zom’s antimagic aura broke the spell animating the skeletons, though I noticed he had to strike somewhat more often than usual. Hercules’s club was not as powerful as Hades’s staff, but with Hercules’s immense strength behind the club, it usually shattered a skeleton in no more than two blows.

  Something else was wrong, though. Despite our fighting achieving mixed results, as a group we were working fast enough that we should have broken through the skeletons quickly. Instead, we were still pinned against the wall. The skeletons just kept coming. Maybe Hecate was conjuring up more, but to do that, she would have to have been working very fast.

  We could probably still have beaten the skeletons eventually—if they had been our only opponents. A low-level thunderbolt struck, reminding us of the need to engage our main adversaries. Right now they were watching the show from a comfortable distance. We lucked out that time, because the thunderbolt struck Shar, and Zom’s protection held. At any time Dark Zeus could start a barrage, though, and we were still more or less pinned up against the back wall, unable to advance.

  We managed to give Magnus enough cover for him to begin playing the lyre, and he used it to raise what magic protection he could around us. Gone for the moment was the idea of reinforcing family love. We still hoped for victory but fought for survival.

  In the distance I could see Hecate floating well above the floor to get a better view. The others had risen from their thrones and were preparing to test Magnus’s defenses.

  We had pushed the skeletons back just enough to keep them from striking at our team members who were supposed to serve as power sources. I could feel Eros invoking the great power upon which he could draw, but even with Aphrodite’s assistance, the buildup was agonizingly slow. However, considering the number of other Olympians we had to draw on, between them and the lyre, Magnus had a fairly powerful shield going.

  Whether it was powerful enough or not was another question. Dark Zeus started hitting us with thunderbolts of progressively greater intensity. The shield held, but within a minute the air around us was crackling with static electricity. To make matters worse, Hecate, whose magic was extremely versatile, started flinging boulders in our direction. Her attacks were so powerful that they made me suspect someone or something else was summoning the skeletons; even she couldn’t multitask that well.

  It did not take long for Poseidon to join the fray, unleashing great sprays of salt water that would have smashed us against the wall if the shields hadn’t held. Cronus appeared to be deciding what the best way to torture us would be, but Ares, not bothering to strategize, was charging down to join the skeletons in an attack on us.

  Instead of being on the offensive, as we had planned, we were stuck playing defense against opponents with far more long-distance firepower. The skeletons had been the perfect ploy to wreck our strategy—almost as if Hecate had known what it was. The way the sword of chaos misfired suggested the same thing. Perhaps she had found some way to spy on us in Tartarus without our detecting it—like the flies Hades was so determined to ignore. Perhaps she was just having a run of incredible luck.

  Either way, we were in deep trouble.

  By now the muses, Hermes, and Dionysus had managed to join Magnus and pooled music or magic with his; Lucas was well into his dance trance; and the power was building. Unfortunately, so were the attacks on us. Magnus now had to parry the thunderbolts, boulders, a virtual tsunami from Poseidon, and some kind of spell from Cronus that weighed on the shield like lead.

  Ares’s battle cry made me tremble, and, slipping through the rows of skeletons, he struck Gordy with such force that, despite his football-player build, Gordy was driven to his knees.

  Alex, with Ascalaphus in control, shouted an equally harsh war cry, struck Ares’s sword with a loud clang, and proclaimed himself the war lord’s son. Ares actually did hesitate for a moment, but then he became like a cyclone of sword strokes. Only Athena’s moving to counter him with her spear kept him from breaking our line. The extra pressure, though, might crack us eventually. Athena was a better fighter than Ares, but having to fend off skeletons at the same time prevented her from exerting her full force against him.

  Slicing away on autopilot, I did a quick mental check on Eros, who still hadn’t gotten in touch with his primal self; the atmosphere on Olympus was definitely creating some kind of static to block him.

  I had no question now; Hecate had known we were coming, and she was well prepared. No one could be this lucky.

  I jumped a little when Hephaestus put his hand on my shoulder.

  “You are wasted as a mere fighter,” he told me. “I can take one of these swords and hold this part of the line.” I must have looked skeptical, because he added, “I may be lame, but I can stand, and my arms are strong.”

  I helped Hephaestus take a sword and shield from one of the fallen skeletons, and he started striking with reasonable efficiency. I looked around to see where best to shift my attention.

  Michael was supposed to be using Astolfo’s horn, which didn’t require music talent to generate its fear effect, but he had gotten pinned down in the front line, where he was still hacking away with enthusiasm, if not with skill. I maneuvered myself over to where he was and took the horn. I knew it wouldn’t do anything to the skeletons, but under the right circumstances, it might start to impair the Olympians.

  After four blasts on the horn, more than enough to have sent a whole mortal army fleeing for its life, the most I had gotten was a wince from Ares, who was the closest.

  Damn it! Hecate must have known about the horn, too. How could she accomplish so many things simultaneously?

  Well, if she was successfully multitasking, I would just have to make it harder for her.

  Astolfo had been a great knight but definitely not a musician, and he had no magic of his own. As I kept blowing the horn, into its power I blended my own, and instead of letting the sound diffuse throughout the chamber, I focused it on a narrow beam pointed right at Ares, who was basically a coward at heart. After a short time he turned pale and started to pull back.

  Athena took full advantage of his shaken condition, pressing him as hard as she could. Ascalaphus did the same, and Ares took wounds from both of them, shaking his confidence enough to make him turn and start to run.

  Seconds later, though, he froze, spun around, and with another war cry he threw himself back into the battle, his face betraying no emotion.

  I could feel someone else’s power surging in him. At the same time, the hail of boulders subsided, though the other attacks kept up.

  Hecate was running him like a puppet now. She might have been wiser to keep hurling boulders our way.

  I poured every ounce of power I could muster into my next blast. Ares shuddered as the two conflicting magics surged through him, and for a second he froze. Athena used that second to plunge her spear into his neck. As an Olympian, he couldn’t die, but with a scream he fell, ichor gushing from his neck. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I heard Hecate echo that scream.

  Unfortunately, the blood of Ares was not the first blood shed. Gordy, Carlos, Dan, and Michael had all taken wounds, though Dan’s sword prevented him from bleeding, and Michael regenerated quickly.

  The fall of Ares must have persuaded Hecate to up her game, because suddenly Poseidon charged us, aiming his trident at the shield.

  I checked again on Eros, still unable to draw on a greater power.


  “Magnus, how long can you hold the shield?” I asked.

  “If I have to keep defending against these levels of punishment, maybe half an hour.”

  I wasn’t sure he was counting Poseidon’s trident in that estimate. I blew the horn for all it was worth, but, though it slowed Poseidon, it didn’t stop him.

  Hades rose up and countered the blow with so much force the air vibrated from the impact, but in the process he opened himself to a skeleton attack and got stabbed once in the chest by one of Hephaestus’s blades. He fell back, ichor oozing from his chest wound, and Poseidon, momentarily stunned, would be ready in seconds to lunge forward again and strike. Not only that, but skeletons were surging against the part of the line Hades had so well defended before. He managed to start swinging again, but with less vigor than previously. I wanted to rush over and heal him, but Apollo beat me to it.

  “Archers, take out Poseidon!” I yelled in their heads. With Apollo acting as healer, that still left Khalid, Artemis, and Eva, and with Poseidon so close, they ought to have been able to wound him enough to drive him back.

  Much to my amazement, Poseidon created a swirling cloud of seawater around himself and used it to slow the arrows to the point that they were no longer effective. Even more startling, he then manipulated the cloud in such a way that it pressed up against our shield, simultaneously defending him and keeping the pressure on Magnus.

  These moves looked so much like something I would do that I couldn’t help but think someone, probably Hecate, had been studying my fighting style.

  To make matters even worse, Cronus was moving closer, ominously waving his scythe back and forth. Artemis started targeting him, as did Khalid, but their arrows slowed down so much as they neared him that they became useless. It was clear he intended to get close enough to start ripping away at our shield with the scythe.

  Without even asking, I could tell Magnus was feeling conflicted at this point. The power of the lyre gave him many offensive options, but I knew from experience it was hard to use its power for defense and offense at the same time. He might have made our shield expand outward and push on our opponents, but the bigger it got, the more power it would take to maintain.