Zeus is Dead

by Michael G. Munz

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  “One constant in life is that nothing worth doing is ever easy. It would be trivial for the gods to change this; however, as the reverse of this adage must also be true (i.e., nothing easy is ever worth doing), they’ve decided it’s not worth it.”

  —Olympian Priesthood in Thirty Days!

  (Day 1: Know Your Place, Mortal)

  DESPITE THE COMPLETE LACK of upkeep, it was an admirable temple. The wall carvings were eroded, the paint was long faded, and the place possessed a distinct emptiness, but its location within the mountaintop lent it an aura of mystical majesty. Though there were no torches to provide any sort of compelling firelight, sunlight shone down from the wide hole in the rock above with a power of its own. It highlighted the floating dust motes, illuminated the white marble altar in the center of the room, and deepened the shadows along the edges of the temple it could not reach.

  The power of the place, faint but surely present, tingled on Tracy’s skin as she made her way to the altar. Her feet moved of their own accord. This was less unsettling than it might have been, were she not of a mind to go where her feet led anyway. She said nothing, silenced by her own anticipation.

  Leif was the first to break the silence. “The force field goes all the way up above, does it?”

  “It doesn’t cover the entire mountaintop, but it does wrap the portion that houses the temple, which of course means that skylight, yes,” Thalia answered. “And thank you for doubting that I did a thorough job of checking.”

  “Not doubting, just doing a thorough job of asking.”

  Tracy continued her own thorough job of staying quiet as she climbed the couple of steps around the altar dais. Well. This is it. Been a very odd week. Her fingertips traced the altar’s edge as she admired the lightning bolts and Greek lettering etched across it on all sides. The marble was cool, and though she supposed she ought to have expected that, it surprised her nonetheless. The amulet grew warmer, however, and soon bathed the marble in a soft purple glow.

  “So what now?” she asked Apollo.

  “Place the amulet upon the altar.” Apollo, with millennia of experience in such matters, knew to make the distinction between placing an object on an altar, and placing it upon said altar. Though the practical result is the same either way, the latter sounds much more impressive.

  Tracy did so. Even after her fingertips lay the amulet (up)on the marble and then let it go, the tingling sensation remained. She could sense an aura, felt more than seen, connecting her to the amulet regardless of physical contact. It swelled to envelop the altar as well.

  “And then there was something I have to say, right?”

  “You must speak some words of power.” Apollo recited the preternatural phrasing of the required words and then repeated them more slowly for her to mimic. The words were in no language she recognized, though she was hardly a linguist. “It’s Olympian,” he explained in response to her unspoken question. “Try turning your tongue to one side. It helps.” He repeated the words again.

  “What’s that mean in English?” Leif whispered.

  “Literally translated?” answered Thalia. “It means ‘some words of power.’” She sighed. “Yes, I know.”

  “Huh. ‘Cthulhu fhtagn’ has more kick to it.”

  “Oh, you don’t want to know what that really means either, I assure you.”

  “I thought that stuff wasn’t real?”

  “Yes, but—”

  Tracy cleared her throat at the two kibitzers. They quieted, for the moment, and Apollo repeated the words for her once more. With a nod, she took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and took the plunge.

  “Wÿhr üairîe nah’c ûl’lá.”

  Nothing occurred. Or almost nothing: Leif’s foot shifted against the ground, and a seagull gave a cry somewhere outside, but she figured those things had nothing to do with the ritual. Wait, did Zeus like seagulls? Tracy considered that maybe she just wasn’t able to tell if the ritual had worked. Yet if she was going to resurrect a god, surely she ought to feel something, right?

  “Is that it?” she asked.

  Apollo frowned. “Nothing happened.”

  “Noticed that too, then.”

  “Maybe we have to wait for it to kick in?” Leif offered. “More dramatic that way?”

  “No,” Apollo told them. “It ought to have been immediate. Something’s wrong.”

  “Maybe this isn’t a temple of Zeus after all?” Leif tried. “You know, aside from the lightning imagery and the talking tree out front who said so.”

  “Don’t forget the writing declaring this a temple to King Zeus,” Thalia added with a sad pat on his shoulder. “You’re grasping at straws, honey.”

  “It might be a trick!”

  “It’s not a trick,” Apollo said. “Trust me. Though Zeus’s death lessened the temple’s power, I still sense it.”

  Tracy nodded. “He’s right. I can feel—” A passing thought wandered out of Tracy’s head and clocked her in the face. “Uh-oh. Oh, damn it.”

  “Really shouldn’t say that kind of thing in a temple,” Thalia warned. “Especially while standing at the altar.”

  Tracy ignored her and turned to Apollo. “You’re diminished.”

  Apollo winced like a man with a burgeoning compulsion to buy a ridiculously expensive car. “Of this I am aware.”

  “I got the quest through your oracle!” she explained. “She gains her power through you, isn’t that how it works? So whatever quest she gave me, it wouldn’t be enough! Is that it?”

  “Oh, damn it,” Apollo agreed.

  Thalia glared.

  “Then there’s no choice!” Leif said. “You have to seduce me.”

  “No!”

  “Hey, I’m not exactly thrilled either, you know! There’s hardly the time or comfort or privacy I’d have hoped for, but—Hey, can you two go outside?”

  “There’s another way!” Tracy shot.

  “You mean spill your blood all over the altar? Are you freaking nuts?” He rushed to Apollo. “Tell me you can heal her after! You can do that, right?”

  Apollo shook his head. “The amount of blood required would kill her. As with Jason, I cannot heal death.”

  “I’m sure Apollo could at least conjure up another tent,” Thalia offered, not without hesitation.

  “No!”

  “And as I told you before, Leif isn’t heroic enough for our purposes,” Apollo reminded.

  “I beat Dionysus in cards! Come on! She’s already done her Cerberus thing, that’s got to be enough to put her over the edge!”

  “Leif—” Tracy tried.

  “No! You keep acting like this is just about me getting to sleep with you, but for crying out loud, you’re talking about killing yourself! Geez, if you’re not worried about your life at least worry about giving me a hell of a complex!”

  Tracy began to speak when Apollo cut her off with a raised hand. It was the sort of gesture that would have annoyed her had she any idea of something to say.

  “Trust me, the both of you, when I say—”

  Apollo himself was cut off by a bellowing rush of words from outside. “No! Guardian-tree is not being letting flying uglies into temple!”

  “The guardian-tree!” Thalia announced so unnecessarily that it’s a wonder the line itself wasn’t edited out of this book before publication.

  Leif shot Tracy a desperate look. “We’re out of time!”

  “It won’t let them in.”

  The tree’s voice lowered yet continued to filter in from outside. “Is chainsaw like rock over—?”

  The rest was drowned out by the rev of a gasoline engine.

  “Leif! Thalia!” Apollo pointed at them both. “Hold them off!” Joint protests erupted, but Apollo spoke over them. “Do as I say, or all of this is for nothing! Go now!”

  Diminished or not, it seemed he could still be commanding when he wanted. Though it pleased neither, they nodded and made for the exit. Leif got as far as
two steps away before he turned, rushed for Tracy, and planted a kiss on her before she could stop him. Hurried and off target, he nevertheless stunned her to inaction until he broke the kiss and stepped back. A flustered, speechless look showed on his face before he turned and ran toward the sound of a chainsaw carving through a tree that could scream.

  They’d vanished up the exit tunnel before Tracy regained her wits. Her heart pounded. Her mind raced for alternatives and found none. The option to run barely registered. Even were she not bound and determined to help her murdered father, the amulet had completely stolen the strength from her legs. Her arms, however, remained strong. She pointed to Apollo, fixing him with as firm a gaze as she could manage.

  “I’m not going to sleep with you.”

  “I know. Though, would it be so bad?”

  “Not the point.”

  “The sacrifice, then.”

  Thalia and Leif crouched midway up the tunnel from the temple, hidden from those outside. Though the voices were indistinct and spoke over each other like caffeinated six-year-olds, it was obvious to whom they belonged.

  “Erinyes,” Thalia whispered.

  Leif groaned. They'd already killed Jason. What the heck could he do against them? The only thing he liked less than death was the thought of living the rest of his life without Tracy. The need to buy time for her so she could find a way to get through the ritual alive was all that kept him hiding behind the nearest rock. “Okay, so . . . here’s the plan. We hold them here in this tunnel. It’s narrow; it’ll help us hold them off. Tactical advantage. We can do this, right?”

  “Golly, let me think! Um, no! They’re fury on wings; we’re mice with toothpicks!”

  “The tunnel’s narrow! They can only come at us one at a time!” Leif’s courage flared as he tried to rally the Muse. “This is our best shot!” His heart pounded. “This is our only shot!” His adrenaline spiked further as the realization that he was currently in Greece propelled him into a glorious culmination of, “This! Is! Spart—”

  Thalia decked him right in the face before he could finish, grabbed him by the collar, and yanked him close to whisper. “First of all, we’re nowhere near Sparta, and second of all, just no! And anyway I’m a Muse, not a fighter!”

  “You just punched me in the face!”

  “You’re not a vicious, taloned vengeance-machine with blood gushing out your eyes, and anyway it had to be done! Maybe if they make some annoyingly clichéd reference I might be motivated to deck one of them too, but—”

  The Erinyes’ enraged shrieks cut through the air. Leif and Thalia reflexively pressed back against the wall as the voices carried in from outside.

  “You see! The barrier's not fading, you spastic bitch! You killed it too soon!”

  “Killing the guardian ought to have brought it down! That is how these things work!”

  “Clearly not!”

  “Then it should be! And you try being patient when wielding a chainsaw!”

  The argument again turned chaotic and impossible to make out. Leif didn’t bother to try. “They haven’t found that key! Hurry!” He grabbed Thalia’s hand and rushed for the exit. He was forming a plan, but he needed to get a look at things before he could be sure.

  “This is foolish!” she cried, following him. “Foolish, foolish, foolish! Why did Apollo send me?”

  “Stop whining! At least you’re immortal!”

  “That doesn’t mean I don’t feel pain and—”

  They rushed out into the light and stopped short at the sight of all three Erinyes hovered above the guardian-tree’s stump. The rest of the unfortunate being lay ten yards down the slope, its bark raked with talon marks, eyes shut, and mouth frozen in a silent yell.

  Thalia removed the hand she’d clapped over her mouth, composing herself with a remarkable resilience to address the Erinyes. “Alecto, Megaera, Tisiphone. Whatever brings you here? Are you lost?”

  “Musey!” cackled Megaera. “We’ve come for Apollo!”

  “And anyone else in there!” Alecto added. She still held the idling chainsaw.

  “Send him to us, and we’ll spare you a world of torment!” Megaera continued.

  “A cosmos of torment!” Tisiphone added.

  “Torment-torment-torment!” Alecto cried.

  Leif wondered if he was included in that offer, but the sight of Tisiphone skinning him alive with her eyes was not encouraging, and it wouldn’t help Tracy anyway. In a flash he scanned the area. The barrier key was nowhere to be seen, so he hoped that meant it was still inside the tree itself. Trusting on the barrier to keep him safe, he turned his back on the Erinyes and tugged Thalia back into the tunnel mouth.

  “We’ll go get him!” he called over his shoulder.

  “Hey!” called Megaera. “We were talking to her! Double-vengeance for rudeness!”

  At this Alecto cackled maniacally, which is probably redundant, but there it is.

  “Is this barrier a one-way thing like the one at the Styx exit?” he whispered. “Can you fly out while it’s still up?”

  Thalia gave a quick nod. “Yes. Or maybe. Just possibly maybe. I don’t really know. I mean, I ought to know; you get a lot of barriers and force fields and the like in sci-fi, but there’s really a broad variety and—”

  “Is it likely?”

  Thalia nodded again.

  “So, new idea: you fly out and draw them away for a second or something. I’ll grab the key when their backs are turned and run back behind the barrier. Problem solved!”

  “Leaving me outside! What am I supposed to do then, did you think of that? I’m far too pretty to be rent and torn, and chainsaws are very bad for me. I have combination skin!”

  The Erinyes continued their hovering, shrieking jeers at them and hurling rocks against the barrier (which—for some reason perhaps best left to philosophers—deflected the rocks despite their being utterly mundane). Tisiphone drifted back to break a branch off the felled tree, getting dangerously close to the key’s hiding spot.

  “Just—just do it, please?” Leif couldn’t think of a better argument, adding somewhat lamely, “For Zeus? Before they find it! Just chuck a few insults at them, fly off faster than they can and escape!”

  Thalia growled in frustration. “Calypso would call this all very heroic and I wish to the Fates she were here instead because this is the dumbest thing I’ve done since Time Moronz!”

  She peeked around Leif at the Erinyes, who’d formed a midair huddle of their own. Their discussion was impossible to make out over Alecto’s increasingly fanatical chainsaw-revving. Thalia ducked back with a tortured whine.

  “Seven hundred years avoiding those virulent bitches and now I’m tangling with them twice in a few days? What has become of my life? I’m an artist!”

  Leif punctuated his get-on-with-it gestures with a rapid nod. “There, angst! You’re still an artist. Can we do this please before I lose my nerve?”

  “Art doesn’t have to be angsty!” she shot. “Oh gods, ‘angsty’? That’s not even a word! That’s not even a word! Oh, stop looking at me like that, I’m going, I’m going! I’m older than you, you know!”

  With that, Thalia stepped into view and grabbed a rock.

  “Hey!” she yelled. “Alecto! A newborn puppy’s more intimidating than you, you vacillating bunny-cuddler!”

  Thalia hurled the rock in a direction that could only be generously described as “toward” the vacillating bunny-cuddler in question. Fortunately Erinyes take offense the way fish take to water. Before the rock could travel half a stone’s throw, Alecto pointed her chainsaw and dived at the Muse with a shriek that became a wail upon her near-instant impact with the barrier. The chainsaw flew from her talons, careened through the air between her two sisters, and smashed apart on the side of a boulder.

  “There, that’s a little better,” Thalia muttered. “Time to work blue.” She launched herself straight up through the barrier, flipped off the Erinyes with both hands in an ascending pirouette, then
made a beeline for that mythical place known as “the frog’s balls away from there.”

  Even hidden as he was in a cleft of the rock, Leif knew the Erinyes took the bait from the way their shrieks faded into the distance. He gave Thalia a three-count to draw them away, gulped down a mouthful of fear, and bolted out of the tunnel. He passed through the barrier without trouble, and a dozen more hurried strides took him down the path to hunch over the poor guardian-tree and stick his hand in its knot.

  “Please still have the key, please still have the key, please still have the—” It was then that he heard the voice behind him.

  “So, Leifferson, we meet again.”

  “The sacrifice must be done with an appropriate dagger,” Apollo told Tracy.

  She swallowed, steadying herself against an onslaught of thoughts: a mix of self-preservation; self-sacrifice; and a last-minute, fruitless scramble for alternatives. And, of course, the unresolved sundae issue.

  “Okay,” she said finally. “Give it here.”

  Apollo looked uncomfortable. “I, ah, didn’t bring one.”

  “You didn’t bring—? Why not?”

  “You performed your quest,” he grumbled. “It followed that we wouldn’t need it.”

  “Yeah, but—can’t you pull one out of wherever you got the sword and the bow? And the tents? And—”

  “It doesn’t work that way. Such daggers are special, and—”

  “It doesn’t work that way?”

  “They must be specially consecrated and can’t be pulled out of thin air! And they’ve a lot of points and sharp edges that makes them a pain to carry concealed! If you are to repeat everything I say—” The god cut himself short, taking a breath. “This is a temple. There is likely to be something suitable lying about somewhere. We shall make a search. But hurry.”

  “Oh, gosh: hurry. Right. I didn’t think of that.”

  She turned from the altar and rushed as much as she could on leaden legs. Why did everything have to be so damn difficult?