Beyond Hades (The Prometheus Wars)

by Luke Romyn

  It was... barely.

  Talbot hit the ground astride the giant’s ankle at about the same speed as a car crash, the impact tearing loose the sword still embedded in the flesh of the giant’s Achilles’ and hurling Talbot a good twenty feet through the air, crashing into the ground, once again winding him, and causing his newly repaired shoulder to scream in agony.

  Sucking in huge gulps of air, he struggled unsteadily to his feet. Checking himself over for injury, Talbot picked up his sword and sheathed it, gazing at the giant figure lying prone upon the ground, blood gushing from both its ankles. It struggled in vain to stand once more, holding its heels with its massive hands. Instead, it merely flopped around like an enormous fish out of water.

  Wes appeared, holding aloft the bloodied sword of Chiron and rode his unicorn directly for the giant’s huge head. Its hand moved too slowly to defend itself, and Wes slashed his blade viciously into the creature’s throat.

  Blood gushed from the horrific wound, covering Wes and his mount, almost knocking the Australian from the saddle. He held on to the pommel with difficulty and bolted out of the way as the massive hands reached up to staunch the wound in the giant’s neck. It was too late, though, and within moments the huge creature bled out and crumpled while the bloody river slowly lessened.

  Hearing hoof beats behind him, Talbot spun, scrabbling for the hilt of his Olympian sword as he did. His unicorn mount approached hesitantly, a look not unlike concern upon its equine features, and Talbot wondered if the horned animal was much more intelligent than its smaller and hornless counterpart.

  When Talbot refrained from drawing his sword, the unicorn seemed to decide it was safe to approach and drew alongside him. It then kneeled down on the blue grass to allow him to mount more easily, and Talbot felt certain there was a higher level of astuteness in the large hazel eyes which regarded him.

  Nodding slightly to the unicorn, Talbot leaped smoothly into the saddle, grabbing the reins as the huge mare rose to her feet once more. Wes swiftly rode over to him, wiping blood from his eyes and face as he did so.

  “Did you enjoy your ride?” the commando asked, a wide grin splitting his crimson-splattered features.

  “Hardly,” replied Talbot. “Well done on your kill; only two more to go now.”

  “Yeah, I sent those other boys on to begin the attack, but wanted to make sure you were still pretty.”

  Talbot grinned. “I’ll be okay. How did you avoid getting your sword stuck in the heel like I did?” he asked.

  “Simple,” replied Wes, turning his horse toward the nearest giant. “I pulled the fucker out instead of letting it pull me out...or off... whatever.”

  He let out a whoop and charged toward the next giant, which was already being attacked by the Olympian riders. Talbot moved to follow, but then saw something which caught his eye, making him gasp.

  It was Cerberus!

  When Talbot had gazed out at the initial attacking force, he hadn’t seen Cerberus simply because he’d been looking for the gigantic, three headed dog with the tail of a snake. He hadn’t thought to look for the tiny puppy within the monstrous horde.

  And there it was, running in front of the advancing line of Titans, its two remaining heads sweeping from side to side with jaws agape, tongues lolling, the stump of its tail wagging slightly.

  Then it saw Talbot. Recognition seemed to pass across the puppy’s features as it identified him and snarled. Cerberus’s hackles rose, and a loud growl reverberated across the battleground while it suddenly doubled in size repeatedly, until it towered some twenty feet high in the sky and pounced toward him.

  Talbot had no time to think, no time to decide the wisest course of action. Instinct kicked in, and he turned the head of his unicorn toward the demonic beast, urging his mount to charge.

  The unicorn responded instantly and surged forward without hesitation toward the two-headed Cerberus. The unicorn picked up pace, and Talbot gripped the saddle’s pommel and the reins in order to steady himself upon the galloping beast.

  At the very last moment, his unicorn dropped her head, lowering the three-foot-long horn to aim directly at the chest of Cerberus. The giant dog realized at the last moment and tried to turn away, exposing itself in the process. The horn smashed into Cerberus’s unprotected chest, smashing through the ribcage and skewering a lung.

  Cerberus was thrown sideways with the force of the impact, sliding clear of the horn in the same motion. White blood gushed from the wound, filling the huge dog’s lung from inside, and as it tried to howl, froth spewed from its mouths. Within seconds, the gigantic canine stopped twitching, shuddering heavily before seeming to sigh slightly.

  Cerberus was dead.

  Talbot patted the unicorn’s neck with a trembling hand. “Well done, girl,” he muttered.

  Glancing around, he saw one of the giants suddenly drop to one knee before pitching facedown to the ground. The vibrations of the impact reverberated to where he sat atop his ride almost three hundred yards distant. One of the Olympian riders darted in and severed the giant’s carotid artery. The colossus reached up and smashed him and his mount into the hard ground with its left hand, causing another vibration.

  Something flashed by Talbot’s head, and he turned to see Titan warriors rushing toward him, spears flying from their hands. In his focus upon Cerberus, and then the felling of the second giant, Talbot had momentarily forgotten about the Titans – a mistake which had almost cost him his life as a spear had only missed him by half a foot!

  Kicking the unicorn into motion, Talbot raced toward Wes and the Olympians, where they moved to take out the third and final giant.

  Or so they hoped.

  ***

  Wes angled his new mount directly toward the bulging legs of the last giant, sucking in a huge gulp of air as he did so. He’d been extremely lucky to escape the last one; it had fallen almost completely on top of him when he’d sliced through its Achilles’ tendon, and he’d only survived by hurling himself away from his unicorn, whose spine had been smashed as the giant’s knee had crashed into it. The mount he now rode belonged to an Olympian who would need it no longer – he’d jumped the wrong way and ended up beneath the falling giant instead of getting clear.

  The unicorn had initially run from him, and he’d had to chase it across the battlefield. He’d finally given up and yelled out for it to stop, and miraculously it had obeyed. Wes had mounted the trembling beast and now rode it directly for the last giant, which was rapidly approaching the outer wall of Mount Olympus.

  He wasn’t going to make it in time.

  The ten surviving Olympian riders galloped ahead of Wes, when the giant suddenly turned and jumped, both feet leaving the ground and stomping down simultaneously directly on top of the tightly bunched Olympians and their unicorns, killing them all instantly.

  “Shit!” shouted Wes.

  His chances of stopping the last giant on his own were almost zero. Even Wes, with all of his cockiness, knew that. He glanced around and saw Talbot riding swiftly toward him, but this didn’t lift his hopes too much. This third giant seemed the smartest of the bunch – his actions to destroy the threat of the Olympians attested to as much – and Wes couldn’t see how the two of them stood a chance at stopping the behemoth. Wes slowed his steed, waiting for Talbot to catch up.

  “What took you so long?” he asked.

  “Cerberus,” grunted Talbot.

  “Is it dead?”

  “I hope so,” replied Talbot. “How the hell are we gonna take this guy down?”

  “I was just about to ask you the same thing. You’re supposed to be the one with all the brains.”

  “And you’re supposed to be the deadly warrior,” retorted Talbot with a wry grin.

  “This is true. I guess that means we’re really fucked if your brains and my brawn can’t figure out a way to take this big bastard down.”

  “What’s that?” asked Talbot suddenly, pointing up at the crenellated battlements.

&
nbsp; Wes followed where he was pointing and squinted. It looked like they were loading something huge onto one of the catapults. And what was that sprouting from all around the thing, were they... arms?

  “Holy shit. That’s one of those Heca-thingies like your mate Briareus,” gasped Wes.

  “Hecatonchires,” corrected Talbot absently, shielding his eyes. “I think it’s the one called Kottos, he was wearing the green loincloth.”

  “What the hell are they playing at?” Wes glanced along the wall, noticing one of the other fifty-foot-tall Hecatonchires was sitting atop the cup-like section of the catapult arm at the other end of the wall.

  As he was watching this, Wes saw the gates open and Briareus stride out, his hundred arms flexing and fifty heads all fixed upon the giant, now almost within reach of the wall. A few more steps and it would be able to bring its huge club crashing down onto the only defensive feature of the entire city. It would smash the wall to rubble in moments.

  Briareus began to run forward and the giant peered down at him, raising the huge club in order to smash the Hecatonchires into the ground. At the same time, however, both catapults released. The arms whipped forward, throwing the two brothers directly at the giant.

  The two multi-limbed and multi-headed brothers soared through the air, crashing simultaneously into the giant’s chest at precisely the same time as Briareus hit it around the waist. Each of the Hecatonchires was fifty feet tall, and the combined impact of all three hitting the giant at the same time smashed it off its feet and into the ground.

  “Why the hell didn’t I think of that?” muttered Wes.

  “Shouldn’t we help them?” asked Talbot beside him.

  Wes snapped back into focus. He’d been so intrigued by the actions of the three Hecatonchires that he’d forgotten what they were supposed to be doing.

  “Shit,” he muttered. In a louder voice he said to Talbot, “Let’s give those bastards a hand, what do you reckon?”

  They charged their mounts forward, swiftly covering the distance to where the fallen giant lay, but before they could attack, the giant rose to a sitting position. Gyes, the Hecatonchires wearing a yellow loincloth, leaped up to its left shoulder while Kottos smashed blow after blow into the giant’s muscular midsection.

  The giant reached across with its right hand just as Gyes aimed a multi-limbed blow at its temple, grabbing the flailing figure by several of its heads, tearing the Hecatonchires loose from his precarious position on the giant’s shoulder. Gyes sought frantically to get loose from the giant’s grip, but it grabbed him roughly by the legs, and with an enormous wrench it tore the Hecatonchires apart.

  Leaving its huge club on the ground, the giant lurched to its feet once more. Wes and Talbot rode forward, but with the legs of the giant moving as unpredictably as they were, it would be madness to ride in close enough to attack. For the moment all they could do was watch.

  Wes glanced around and saw the main swarm of Titans was rapidly approaching, so whatever they did, they’d have to do it quickly or risk being overwhelmed by the horde of warriors.

  Looking back at the giant, he saw Kottos still clinging onto its waist, his smashing blows finally showing some effect. The giant moved to snatch Kottos in the same fashion it had Gyes, but Kottos scrambled away, and the giant’s snatch with its left hand missed –

  But the snatch with its right hand didn’t.

  Kottos thrashed against the giant, who managed to get a firm grip on his left leg. The Hecatonchires battled valiantly against the giant’s grip, but the colossus swung him around and threw him with all its strength, smashing him with tremendous force into the Olympian wall. So violent was the impact, in fact, that cracks spread through the brickwork all the way down to the ground. Several Olympian defenders were thrown from the battlements by the reverberations, to fall, screaming, to the rocky ground below, abruptly silenced.

  The giant glanced around, unsure of where the third Hecatonchires brother – Briareus – had gone. Wes glimpsed the giant’s back, spotting Briareus perched there. The giant might not be the brightest enemy they’d ever faced, but it would only take a moment before it realized there was a fifty-foot-tall creature with a hundred arms and fifty heads hanging behind its shoulder.

  “Let’s go, now!” he ordered Talbot, who instantly kicked his mount into a charge.

  They powered forward, splitting apart as each aimed for one of the giant’s legs. The behemoth saw them coming, turning to face them at the same time as Briareus rose up upon its shoulders and raised a mighty stone sword above his head using nearly half of his arms, while the remainder clung onto the hair sprouting from the giant’s neck.

  The giant never noticed any of this. It seemed to only have the capacity for focusing on a single enemy at any one time, and right now it was focused entirely on Wes and Talbot as they raced headlong toward it.

  Briareus’s sword was not of the Olympian style. It had no energy flowing through it to help slice through the toughened flesh of its enemy like Chiron’s sword. But as the massive Hecatonchires – the last of his kind – swung his ten-foot blade with all the strength he possessed, Wes knew it wouldn’t matter.

  Briareus might only be a third of the size of his enemy, but with fifty arms swinging his weapon, he might have just as well been the giant’s equal. The sword bit deep, wedging two-thirds of the way into the giant’s neck, severing its spine and killing it instantly.

  Wes and Talbot hauled on their reins, watching the giant teeter precariously, a bemused expression upon its face before it slowly fell, crashing down heavily…

  … directly onto the weakened section of the Olympian wall!

  The wall, already strained and cracked from the impact of Kottos, buckled under the tremendous weight of the giant falling on it, collapsing away on either side of the corpse, all the way to the ground, leaving a huge gap through which the invaders could attack.

  Defenders scattered from the battlements as more and more of the wall crumbled. Some Olympians who were too slow to react fell headlong from the broken wall, screaming for a hundred feet until they were dashed on the rubble below.

  “Holy shit,” muttered Talbot beside Wes.

  Wes glanced away from the carnage, unsure if this were the first time he had ever heard the archaeologist swear. “You can say that again, Doc,” he finally managed, looking back at the devastation, and then behind at the surging Titan army.

  The tens-of-thousands of Titan warriors had been waiting for this moment, seemingly strolling along, in no rush while they let the giants breach the walls. But now the fortification was crushed and broken, and the invaders sensed their moment of conquest was nigh.

  Generals began to bark commands and ranks of soldiers instantly snapped into order. The minotaurs gathered at the front of the ranks, and Wes saw something he initially couldn’t believe.

  “We have to get inside, now!” Wes said hoarsely. Talbot nodded, swung his mount around and galloped off through the gap in the wall as the Olympians sought to move temporary barricades into place around the breach.

  Wes looked out at the Titan army once more, seeking another glimpse of the thing which had caused his heart to jolt. Finally he spotted it circling around a hundred feet above the invaders.

  It was a glittering bronze eagle.

  CHAPTER 17

  Talbot spun at the sound of Wes swearing. “What’s wrong, Wes?” he asked, and then glanced at the carnage surrounding them. “I mean besides the obvious.”

  “I just saw that big shiny bird thing flying around above the Titans,” replied Wes. “The same one Prometheus had as a pet.”

  Talbot was shocked. “Could there be another one? Or could it be the same one, but with a new master?”

  “I guess so, but Prometheus was just about humping that thing in Tartarus. I can’t imagine someone else being able to control it so easily. I need to ask Zeus what he knows about Prometheus.”

  “I’ll come with you,” said Talbot.

  The tw
o navigated their way away from the temporary barricades. Briareus had managed to drag the giant clear of the breach, and the barricades were slowly being fitted. Though made from a steel-like substance which looked extremely strong, Talbot could tell they wouldn’t last long against the vast horde clamoring outside the walls.

  They may have taken out the Titans’ strongest weapons in the gryphons and giants, but there were still close to forty thousand warriors on the other side of those temporary barricades. Even the walls at their strongest could have only held out for perhaps a couple of days. The catapults were firing consistently at the army, as were the archers, but that would not hold back the ocean of warriors. Soon the Titans would either scale the Olympian wall or push through the breach. Either way, the result would be the same: the Olympians would be routed and their city would be seized by the invaders.

  But for the moment that hadn’t come to pass, and Talbot had recently come to realize that until something actually happened, hope still remained, no matter how dark and certain the outcome seemed.

  Zeus was organizing troops along the wall with calm efficiency and Talbot guessed it must have been his decision to hurl the Hecatonchires brothers at the final giant. The leader of the Olympians was garbed in full armor, the shining bronze making him look even more like the god of myth. Briareus stood close by, no sign of remorse over the loss of his brothers – at least none Talbot could notice.

  “Hey Zeus,” called Wes, “I need a word with you.”

  “What is it?” asked Zeus calmly, and Talbot marveled at the unruffled composure the leader of the Olympians portrayed.

  “What do you know about Prometheus?” asked Wes without preamble. “I mean, I cut his fucking head off back in Tartarus, but I can see his bird flying around out there.”

  Zeus looked out over the Titan army, shielding his eyes against the dropping red sun and soon spotting the glint of light reflecting from the bird Wes spoke of.