Back in the main narrative, Hades held the Idiot Ball atop his palm and then began to levitate it from one hand to the other. So focused was he that his response, when it came, came slowly.
“I . . . believe so. There is . . . no better . . . tracker.” The ball flew up into the air with a flick of his wrist before he caught it again.
Poseidon frowned at the foolish spectacle. “Brother Hades, King of the Underworld, God of Death and Precious Metals . . . What in the sacred name of Olympus are you doing?”
Hades rolled the ball in his palm, growing more and more focused on it. “Proposing . . . a course of action, King-Brother.” He flipped the ball up again, this time catching it above his head. Poseidon’s frown turned on Hera.
The queen cleared her throat. “Lord Hades, you know better than to bring toys to the Dodekatheon. Pass it here. You’ll get it back after the meeting.”
“This is not a toy.”
“It’s a little golden ball!” cried Dionysus from the balcony above. Though not currently a member of the Dodekatheon, he decided he may as well listen in while he was in the area. Were the god of the underworld not being scolded for playing with a ball, Dionysus’s presence would likely have garnered more attention. (The playboy god almost never showed up to the Dodekatheon even when he’d been a member, which was why he’d lost his council seat to Hestia in the first place. Goddess of home and hearth, she could always be counted on to be around—and far less inebriated.)
“I care not what it is,” Hera insisted. “I will have decorum in this chamber. Relinquish it.”
“If such a little thing so disturbs you.”
Hades tossed the ball to Hera, who in turn handed it to Poseidon. The king of the gods studied it a moment before dropping it into a compartment in his throne. Hades, for his part, experienced only a moment of uncertainty as the ball left his possession before he stubbornly resumed his argument. “The wraith can be set after Apollo. It will track him, unseen, wherever he may be. One head shall hold him while the other howls his presence to all who sit here. This course of action cannot fail.”
“We all know what the wraith guards,” spoke Athena. “Is it wise to pull it from such duties?”
Ares snorted. “Yer always frettin’ so damn much about defenses.”
“Says the god recently clocked in the back of the head.”
“Aw, give it a rest, already. Hades is right! I say we use the shade!”
Arguments erupted throughout the chamber. Some declared it too risky. Others insisted the risk was minimal for the brief time it would take to find Apollo. Certain Artemis-shaped others asserted they’d be damned to Tartarus if they supported anything Ares thought was a good idea. Others beyond those others (being different from previous others) accused the Artemis-shaped group of being on Apollo’s side and, therefore, deserving of such a fate.
Hestia had just thrown in her support for the wraith, suggesting they let it do the tracking while they all stayed home and played backgammon, when Poseidon pounded his trident to the floor. The continued shouting forced a second and third pounding.
“Enough!” he boomed when they all clammed up. It was entirely louder than necessary, but the need to lead by committee hacked him off, and gauging magnitudes never suited him anyway. “We will use the Orthlaelapsian wraith!”
“I—”
“Silence, Artemis, lest you be confined with the Muses!” He turned to Hades. “How swiftly can you re-task it from guard duty to seeking Apollo and . . . whatnot?”
“With utmost speed.” Consternation flickered across Hades’s stoicism. “Once I find the manual.”
“Proceed quickly,” ordered Poseidon. “The rest of you—and that means all of you, Hestia—shall commence searching on your own. Except you, Artemis. You shall search with Ares.”
“What?” the two protested at once.
“Your loyalties are suspect, Artemis, sister of our quarry.”
“You cannot pair me with him!”
“Do not tell me what I may or may not do! I am your king!”
Artemis gaped, perhaps realizing the need to tread carefully in light of Poseidon’s tone. “King Poseidon, I assure you, my loyalties—”
“Lie with me?” he finished.
Artemis nodded.
As swiftly as he had angered, Poseidon calmed again—in much the same way as the sea does before a storm. Familiar with the sea god’s dangerously unpredictable moods, none in attendance considered it anything but an ominous sign. “You will swear an oath to that effect?”
“Lord?”
“By the Styx?”
The collective gasp in the chamber at the taboo question ruled the next few moments before Artemis straightened, swallowing.
“You would dare to ask this of me?” she tried.
“You are Apollo’s twin!” Poseidon boomed. “His authority is void! His portfolio shall be redistributed! His space in the communal fridge is forfeit! Shall I confine you to chambers and make your fate the same? Swear loyalty to me in totality, or face the consequences!”
Artemis shivered. Perhaps she believed Apollo already doomed. Perhaps she considered some loophole Poseidon had missed. Perhaps, goddess of nature that she was, she simply believed in a bit of unpredictability herself. Whatever the cause, after a few moments’ consideration, she whispered, “By the Styx do I so swear loyalty to you in totality, King Poseidon—”
Poseidon smirked proudly. “Very well, then.”
“—if that is how you must secure it.” It was a jab at his fitness to rule, and all knew it. Zeus himself never demanded such an oath.
“You will still partner with Ares,” Poseidon ordered.
“Aw, come on!” Ares cried over Artemis’s own objection. “She swore your damn oath. Why I gotta be saddled with her fruity butt now?”
The insult turned the goddess’s ire on Ares and drew both into a yelling match that necessitated another pounding of the trident―plus two more because the sound was particularly pleasing to Poseidon. It shut them up, at least long enough for him to dismiss the council and avoid hearing more on the matter. To the depths with what opinion polls said! He didn’t care. He would do what he thought was wrong. Or right, rather. Right?
Whatever.
Poseidon forgot to return Hades’s little golden ball after the meeting, and Hades didn’t remind him. It was one more thing he could brood over.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“Despite the common misconception, the river Styx is not the river the newly dead must cross to reach the underworld. As any mythological scholar worth his salt will tell you (or any one of the gods themselves, were they in the mood to give a straight answer), one of the Styx’s qualities is that any mortal bathed in its waters becomes invulnerable—provided they survive (the lawyers seem to think this important; see Chapter 14: Achilles and the Importance of Good Footwear). You simply can’t leave a river like that just lying around, readily accessible to any mortal who happens to find one of the numerous passages to underworld borders. The Styx is therefore located deeper in Hades beyond the river that does border the edge of the underworld: the Acheron.
“The Acheron’s ferry crossing is but one checkpoint designed to allow only the deceased to pass, thus keeping crowds of invulnerability-seeking mortals out from underfoot. This is why there is a ferry and not a bridge; it keeps away the riffraff.
“This is not to say a bridge was not tried. According to an interview with Charon, ferryman of the Acheron, it failed. Merely touching the Acheron causes extreme pain, a phenomenon that doomed any efforts of the construction crew. The best protective gear did little, and the worker turnover rate was ruinous. According to Charon, Hades did consider the possibility of using some of the mortal souls damned to Tartarus as a source of slave labor, under the theory that the damned workers would have no choice but to endure the pain. The lack of a bridge today shows us that Hades finally eschewed this option. This is likely for the best. One need only look so far as horror cinema
(House of the Damned, Highway of the Damned, and Wetlands Preservation Culvert of the Damned, among others) to know that projects built by the damned seldom turn out well.”
—A Mortal’s Guidebook to the Olympians’ Return
TRACY SLUNG THE HALF-FILLED backpack over her other shoulder and knocked on the rickety door of the wooden dwelling. A real estate agent with generous optimism would call it quaint. To anyone with a greater duty to the truth, it was a shack, and a cramped shack at that. The wood siding, perhaps once stained in times long ago, was faded and warped from exposure to the river it overlooked. Its walls had begun to lean under the weight of the roof, which seemed to have yet failed to collapse due only to the sheer will of the cosmos. The aforementioned real estate agent (whom for no reason we shall call Warren) would cheerfully point out that the walls—clearly still parallel to each other despite leaning—ably supported what would soon be a marvelous built-in skylight. Warren would likely make some excuse to dash from the room before anyone could point out that a skylight would afford only a dull view of the ceiling of the subterranean cavern in which the whole affair hunched.
Tracy gazed up at that same cavern ceiling as she waited outside the door. While not what she would call pretty, the eerie, rust-colored light that bathed the cavern at least provided a measure of atmosphere. It was no starry sky, but it did have a certain character.
Warren would have liked Tracy, if he existed. (He does not, however, and as such is possessed of more immediate problems.)
The door opened after Tracy’s second knock, and she blinked at the face that presented itself.
“Oh, hello,” she said with a smile. “Charon, I presume?”
It wasn’t an unfair presumption. Who else would one find squatting in a shack at the ferry mooring for the river Acheron but the mythical Charon, ferryman to the land of the dead? He was the logical thing to expect to find, right ahead of a small Starbucks. And yet somehow she had always pictured him to be an old man. While the faded black robes he wore fit the part, within them stood a man who looked hardly older than she, with rich brown eyes and a full head of hair. On the other hand, the scowl that bitterly gripped his face after she asked her question fit her expectations perfectly.
“Nope,” he said. “Trust me; I’m very sorry to say Charon’s not here right now.”
“Okay. Can you help me, then? I’m—”
The man held up a hand. “Are you dead?”
“Er, no. I was told that wouldn’t be a problem.”
“Told by who? Actually, you know what? I probably don’t want to know.” The man tested her with a poke in the shoulder. The result appeared to pleasantly surprise him. “Hey, look at that. You’re not dead. Are you lost?”
“No, I’m—”
“Oh, crap, you’re not with Amway, are you?” He leveled a suspicious gaze at her slung backpack.
“No?”
“Hot damn, that’s a relief. The deceased ones are bad enough; even when they’re dead they don’t stop selling.” He crossed his arms and leaned against the door frame, quickly standing straight up again when the shack creaked in protest. “So what’re you doing down here, anyway?”
“Trying to get across to Hades. This is the ferry, isn’t it?”
“This is a rickety old crap-shack,” he said. “That’s the ferry. But I have the singular joy of running it for the moment, yes.”
“Well, then—”
“But you can’t go. Sorry. Only the dead, that’s the rule.”
Tracy peered over the man’s shoulder into the dim quarters beyond. “Is Charon in there? Could I speak to him, maybe?”
“Lady, if he was, do you think I’d be here?” He stepped aside, allowing a better view of the shack’s interior. There was little more than a small bed, a wooden desk, and a few odds, ends, and pieces of laundry lying about.
The talk-to-the-manager trick wasn’t going to work, it seemed.
“Okay, but you can’t just outright refuse, can you? I’ve read mythology and I know for a fact that live mortals have crossed the river before.”
“Mythology, and you know for a fact?” He grinned. “Want to think about that one a sec?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean, but I was a devout atheist until a little over a year ago. Still a little bitter. And maybe there’re new rules, you ever think of that?”
“Look . . . What’s your name?”
“Marcus.”
“Look, Marcus, the only reason I’m here at all is because some god’s oracle gave me a quest. If the rules weren’t bendable, I wouldn’t have gotten the quest, so—”
“Yeah, because the ‘gods’ and their pals aren’t devious pricks at all.” (He did the air quotes and everything.)
She straightened her spine, summoning up every ounce of authority she could. “The point is, I need to get over there, and I’m not leaving this spot until you take me.”
Marcus smirked. “I only run the ferry. I don’t do the ‘taking’. That’s Death’s job. How’d Charon put it? ‘He hangs around here sometimes, and he gets uptight when someone takes the living across before he gets to ’em. Says it messes up the order, and order’s his thing, you see. He’s a control freak. If you ask me, he has a bit of a stick up his ass, but he does outrank me.’”
“I meant take me across the river. I’ve no intention of dying in the process.”
“Important distinction, that.” He picked a bit of lint off of his robe. “Fine, maybe I can bend the rules if you want it badly enough to do something for me in return.”
Tracy bit down on demanding why everyone was suggesting sexual currency lately. “And what sort of something are we talking about?” came out after a moment of temper wrangling. Judging by the look on Marcus’s face, she contained her disgust poorly.
“What? Oh, no, nothing like that. Geez, I don’t even know you.”
She released her frustration with a relieved sigh. “Thank you. You wouldn’t believe the week I’ve had.”
“I’m believing a lot more things than I used to, lately.”
Well, that fit, she supposed. “So what do you want me to do, then? I don’t really have a lot of time.” Tracy braced herself for the onslaught of impending zaniness.
“I need you to go back up to the surface and get me a whole bunch of batteries. All sizes, from D on down to the tiny ones.”
“Batteries?” Tracy asked. Apollo’s oracle mentioned nothing of batteries. “What’s the catch? Are they some special batteries I have to talk to a sphinx to get or something?”
“No catch. I just need batteries. I spaced it when I came down here. Now I’ve got a shack full of electronics I can’t use. Things are all rigged up to use batteries, but that doesn’t do me much good without a single one around.”
“Er, okay. How many?”
“Fifty of each ought to do, just to be safe.”
“You’ll pay for them, of course?”
Marcus shrugged. “You look like you can afford it. If you want a rule-bending ride across, it’s on you.”
“My employment situation’s a little up in the air at the moment.”
“Want a steady job as a Hades ferryman?”
“Thanks, no.”
“Well, then. Batteries. Use a credit card or something. Oh, and none of those cheapo store brands either.”
It occurred to Tracy that she could stand there arguing details about one of the simplest things anyone had asked her to do in a while, or . . .
“Fine, I’ll pay for the damn batteries.”
Marcus laughed. “Damn batteries. That’s a good one.”
“Your sense of humor really takes a hit down here, doesn’t it?”
He shrugged and turned to go back inside. “Good luck. Oh, and I wouldn’t recommend trying to swim across instead, if you’re considering that. It’s, ah, bad. A hundredfold worse than labor pains.”
“How would you know?”
“Just . . . don’t ask.”
There was no answer.
She knocked once more, muttering a few profanities that she belatedly hoped might serve as magic words. Again, there was no answer.
The door wouldn’t budge when she tried it, and a few glances around the shore gave no sign of Marcus anywhere. Nor, she realized, did they give any sign of the ferry she’d seen before. She muttered a little more and walked the length of the dock to fruitlessly peer out through the mist that drifted above the Acheron’s obsidian current. All she could make out of the far shore were some indistinct shapes. With little else to do but hope the ferry would be back soon, she sat down on the edge of the dock to wait.
A hand-painted sign on the edge of the dock caught her eye, but her brief hope that it might provide some clue to when the ferry would be back was dashed once she read the age-worn lettering, written in at least twenty different languages:
No swimming: Lifeguard never on duty. Do not taunt the river.
Save for a few nervous glances behind her at the shore and several half-imagined sounds, Tracy’s wait was brief and unremarkable. Each time she looked behind her, she expected to be staring straight into the dead eyes of a corpse or spirit or what-have-you, but not once did she catch sight of anything. Were her mind not valiantly occupied defending itself against the heebie-jeebies, Tracy might have taken a moment to ponder something that the more annoyingly detail-oriented reader may have already wondered (or voiced, or made some snarky comment about on the Internet): It was a big world. People were dying every second. Where were all the spirits who ought to be piling up on shore by the minute?
Zeus is Dead Page 31
