Orcus continued, “My most sincere apologies. We have had an incident with one of the new inmates, and I was addressing it. Nothing to trouble yourself with, sir.”
Persephone did not appear to have paid Orcus any mind, but was focused on the kobolds. “They do not belong here,” she said. Her voice was melodious, the first happy sound I’d heard since being down here.
“I believe you are right, darling,” Hades said. “Orcus, explain this situation to me.”
“Lord Hades, Lady Persephone,” Orcus said with a slight bow. “Again, my apologies. These creatures were attempting to break out the son of Janus, recently imprisoned here for breaking a promise.”
“Is that so?” Hades asked, arching an eyebrow at Kleep and Jeal. “Tell me, how did you enter my realm?”
“I created a portal,” Jeal said.
Persephone pursed her lips. “You are kobolds, are you not? Your kind are not gifted with gate magic. How is it you have this talent?”
“It was bestowed upon me by Lord Corinthos,” Jeal said.
Hades’s head whipped around to Orcus. He stared at the god of oaths for a moment, gave a quick glance at me, and then turned back to Orcus. “Have you forgotten how to process a new arrival, Orcus? Did you not sever him from his followers?”
“Of course, sir,” Orcus said quickly. “The good doctor did it. I have his report.”
Hades’s cold red gaze held Orcus’s eyes. “If you had, then all the blessings he bestowed upon his followers would have been rescinded.”
“I did, sir, on my honor, I did.”
“Then why do his followers still have his blessings after he broke a promise to them?”
Orcus’s features went a faint shade of green. “Well, the promise wasn’t to his followers,” Orcus mumbled.
Hades’s red eyes momentarily flashed crimson. The demons encircling us took a collective step back. The Lord of the Pit gestured to the demons holding the kobolds. “Return them unharmed to their plane. Note the extradimensional signature of that one” — he gestured to Jeal — “and put a ward in place against it.” To the kobolds, he said, “Your loyalty is commendable. But if you want to help Vincent Corinthos now, the best thing you can do is stay out of Tartarus.” He made a dismissive wave, and the demons carried the struggling kobolds through the door and out into the courtyard. The door slammed shut behind them. “Orcus, you will join me in my chambers. Bring the book. You two,” — he gestured at the demons holding me — “take Vincent back to his cell and guard him until I call for him. He is to receive no visitors. If anyone tries to break him out again, kill them and cut off Vincent’s arms and legs. Clear?”
The demons nodded and hauled me none too gently back to my cell. One of them threw me onto the bed, and the cordlings bit into my flesh mere seconds later. The cordlings’ toxins surged into my system, and this time, the world didn’t fade out, it was more like someone shut it off.
I woke what felt like seconds later as someone hauled me to my feet. It seemed the cordlings hadn’t wanted a round two with me, as I’d been spared a hallucinogenic nightmare. Blinking gritty eyes, I was able to see that one of my demonic jailors had ripped the cordlings free and was about to throw a bucket of water over my head. He paused upon seeing I was awake, then shrugged and dumped the water over me anyway. Coughing, I wiped water from my face. “Asshole,” I growled.
“Never mind him,” Scathiks said to me. The little demon stood in the center of the room, his yellow eyes wide. “You’ve been summoned before Lord Hades,” he whispered. “I don’t know what you’ve done, lad, but he never takes an interest in anyone unless it’s horrible.” He gave a wicked grin. “I do hope I’m allowed to see yer punishment. I bet it’ll be on par with Sisyphus.”
“You’re an asshole, too, Scathiks,” I sighed. “Lead on.”
Scathiks glared at me but turned and led me from the room, the big demons just a few steps behind. We entered an elevator and pressed the down button. Michael Bolton’s “How Can We Be Lovers” played on the speakers. “I hate this song,” I muttered.
“I know,” Scathiks beamed. “So does the elevator. That’s why it picked it.”
And, this being the Pit, I experienced the elevator ride from Hell as it lasted what felt like an hour, with Michael Bolton asking how we can start over when the fighting never ends on a continuous loop.
When the elevator doors finally opened, we stepped into a dark room with an obsidian-tiled floor. The walls were made of the same black stone, with glowing green veins running through it, giving the place light. A blue-skinned demon wearing an earpiece and an Armani suit said something into his lapel, then beckoned me over. Scathiks happily skipped along in my wake, but the Secret Service demon looked down at him and shook his head. Scathiks’s face fell, and he turned without a word and headed back toward the elevator.
I followed the demonic Agent Smith down a hallway and to a set of oak double doors. The demon knocked twice and then opened the door, gesturing me inside, but he did not follow. He swung the doors shut, and I found myself standing in a rather plain office. The floor was a brown linoleum. A small table sat against the far wall with an aquarium containing what looked like devilfish. To my right was a small conference table with metal folding chairs, a couple of filing cabinets, and a desk. Hades sat behind the desk, rapidly banging out a document on an old-fashioned typewriter. “I will be with you in a moment, Corinthos,” he said as he snapped the return bar on the typewriter and banged out another line. He saw me looking at the antiquated piece of office equipment and gave a half-smile. “Dealing with technology is its own form of Hell. Damned computers crash every time I turn around. I might work in Hell, but I’m not going to put myself through it.” He inclined his head at a spot behind me. “Have a seat at the table.”
I settled down in one of the chairs, half expecting it to do some torturous thing to me; fold up on itself with me inside, or maybe shoot spikes from the seat and into my ass. It creaked a bit, the way old metal chairs do, but nothing more than that.
There were photos on the walls, mostly of Hades and Persephone at various exotic locations — by mountains, near waterfalls, at the beach. Anyone just looking around would’ve thought that this was a normal office.
“Not what you were expecting, I take it?” Hades asked as he took the seat across from me.
“Honestly? No. This is so…”
“Mundane?” he finished for me with a smile. “The drama and the theater is for out there.” He waved a hand at the doors to the office. “Here, I work. And the fewer distractions, the better. I’m running one of the most heavily populated planes of existence, so I don’t have time to screw around. Which is why we’re here, Vincent. You pose a bit of a problem for me.”
“It’s a natural talent.”
The corner of Hades’s mouth quirked up. “So Orcus says. The problem I’m referring to is this.” He pulled Orcus’s book of promises from out of nowhere and set it down on the table in front of me. The book automatically opened to the page with my promise to Megan. “When you made this promise,” he asked, “what did Orcus tell you?”
“He told me that I had to keep the promise, and implied that I’d have to keep her fine forever. And that I should learn to keep my mouth shut.”
Hades rubbed his jaw. “That sounds like Orcus. Well, Vincent, did Orcus explain the actual law to you? The Promise Provision?” I shook my head. “It was something we came up with thousands of years ago to keep the gods true to their followers. A god who arbitrarily makes promises to his or her followers and then doesn’t deliver does nothing but create unbelievers. Unbelievers are not helpful to beings whose powers are fueled by prayers. So to prevent Earth’s populous from rejecting us, we instituted the Promise Provision. It states that any god who makes a promise to his or her followers is held to that promise, upon penalty of impriso
nment here.”
“I was told that it was for any promise,” I said.
Hades nodded. “Over the millennia, there have not been many new gods born. The old ones just treated the law as ‘don’t make promises.’ Even Orcus has become a bit rusty in his interpretation. You see, Vincent, once the gods realized this law was in effect, and the first few deities fell to it, the word ‘promise’ all but disappeared from their vocabularies. This book” — he tapped the tome sitting between us — “is still Orcus’s first Promise Ledger. There are less than twenty entries in it.” He turned to a page with my handwriting, in my blood, spelling out the promise I’d made to the Reaper. “Two of the promises in this book are yours. One is a fulfilled promise to the Reaper, the other is to your friend Megan Hayes.” He turned back one page from my first entry and turned the book so I could read it. “Here’s the last promise Orcus had to document before yours.”
I frowned at the page. “What language is that?”
“Your scholars don’t have a name for it. It was lost well over five thousand years ago. That’s the last time any deity made a promise, Corinthos. Five thousand years. You can imagine that, no matter how adept you are at your job, if you don’t deal with a particular situation for over five thousand years, your performance might be a tad below par.”
“Did Orcus make a mistake?” I was starting to feel excitement for the first time in what felt like forever. Maybe there was a way out of this after all.
“I’m going to refer to it as an oversight,” Hades said, raising a finger. “The oversight, Corinthos, is that neither of the beings you made promises to are your followers. That’s why that kobold still had your portal blessing even though you were severed. It also means that, technically, you aren’t bound by the Provision.”
My head spun. “Are you saying I can leave?” This was almost too much to hope for.
“That’s where things get sticky,” Hades said. “Understand Vincent, that Orcus is my right hand here. He is responsible for the enforcement and execution of my laws. He has the respect and the fear of not only the denizens of the Pit, but of all the other pantheons as well.”
I put my face in my hands. “Shit’s about to get political, isn’t it?” I groaned.
“I will let that slide, given that you are under a considerable amount of strain, but I want you to remember that your attitude down here will influence what happens next.”
I hate dealing with Olympians. Just the same, I smoothed my face and apologized.
Hades continued, “Orcus needs to be seen as sharp and infallible. For him to make such a mistake would be seen as a sign of weakness. It would call his other judgments into question, and that would be catastrophic.”
“Are you kidding me?” I demanded. “You’re saying you’re worried that if word got out that Orcus had wrongly imprisoned me, it would damage his rep?”
“His reputation and more,” Hades said, his eyes flaring red. “Do not forget your place, Corinthos. You are not an Olympian. You are not gifted with our privileges. You are a half-blood, and inconsequential. I would be content to let you rot in your cell for all of eternity; it’s genuinely not something that would keep me up at night. In fact, I had planned to do just that, until someone spoke on your behalf.”
“Who?” My mind flashed to Uncle Heph, or maybe Forculus.
“Aphrodite,” Hades responded.
My jaw hit the table.
Hades laughed. “That was my response as well. It’s no secret how much she dislikes you. Virtually ever dinner conversation we have includes derogatory remarks about you at one point or another. Honestly, I often wondered why she didn’t just send Eros down to assassinate you. And yet she argued on your behalf.”
“What did she say?” Aphrodite hated me. Had never once said a kind word to me. Had in fact, gone out of her way to say what a waste of space I was. Repeatedly. And at great length. What can I say? The goddess of love and I had just never hit it off.
“She said that she did not approve of you, and then spent several minutes telling me how she thought you are overconfident, brash, reckless, and juvenile. However, despite all that, she said you make her daughter happy. And she wants Petra to be happy, because so much of Petra’s life has been lonely and empty.” Hades spread his hands. “If Aphrodite liked you, had sung your praises as Hephaestus did, I would have ignored her request. But I know how she feels about you, and I know what it must have cost her to come to me and say what she did. That’s the only reason we’re speaking right now, Corinthos.”
I rubbed my face. “Okay, so help me out here. You’re saying you won’t keep me in Tartarus, but you’re not letting me go, either. Where does that leave me?”
“You need to understand that there have to be consequences for your failing to keep a promise. Orcus will be disciplined for his overzealous interpretation of the law, but privately. I can’t let you go free, though. Your severing was a public affair that many of the denizens witnessed, so you can’t simply walk out of here. So I will make a deal with you. I will bestow a task upon you. If you succeed, I will let you leave Tartarus. If you fail, you’re stuck here.”
“And if I take option three, and don’t take the task and tell everyone down here what happened?”
“I think you’d find that rather difficult to do without a tongue, Corinthos.” Hades gestured to one of the pictures on the wall, where he was holding up a fish he’d caught. Hades was dressed in a red Hawaiian shirt with a pink flamingo pattern. Sunglasses, a bit of zinc oxide on his nose, and a wide-brimmed hat completed his touristy look. Persephone stood next to him, her hair pulled up in a ponytail, a white T-shirt hanging off one bare shoulder. It looked like they were standing on a yacht in the middle of the ocean. The photo animated and zoomed in on the fish. “See that?” he said, pointing at the fish’s mouth. When the fish opened its mouth, its tongue blinked at me.
I recoiled. “What the hell?”
“It’s called a cymothoa exigua, or tongue-eating louse. It’s a little parasite that enters through a fish’s gills and attaches itself to the fish’s tongue. As it grows, it eats the tongue and ultimately replaces it, serving as the fish’s tongue and drawing nutrition when the fish eats.” Hades waved his hand, and the photo returned to its original state. “I was inspired by that creature and created demonic parasites of my own to deal with liars. They not only eat the tongue, but the vocal cords as well. The end result is the host body can only speak when the parasite lets him, and it doesn’t. Everyone in Circle Eight is fitted with one. If you even tried to tell another soul what happened with Orcus, or about our conversation now, I will see to it you receive one as well. Is that clear?”
I swallowed. “Yes.”
“Excellent. Now, would you like to hear my offer, or shall I summon Scathiks and have him return you to your room?”
“I’m listening.”
Hades smiled. “I thought so. Now then, what do you know about celestial phylacteries?” My blank stare was all the answer he needed. “Half-bloods,” he muttered, shaking his head. “Very well then, Corinthos. Let’s start with something easier. Do you know what a phylactery is?”
“Yeah, it’s used to store a person’s soul.”
Hades looked relieved. “Yes. A celestial phylactery operates on the same principle, but on a much larger scale. In addition to storing a soul, a celestial phylactery can also be used to amplify or limit the soul’s innate powers. One of the greatest punishments in the Pit is for a powerful demon or other being to have their physical form destroyed, and their essence placed into a celestial phylactery. The end result is they live out the rest of their existence as mere shadows of their former selves. There have only been a handful of beings to suffer this fate, as it is burdensome to create a celestial phylactery. However, these phylacteries are something everyone fears; any being, regardless of power, could b
e imprisoned in one, and it is impossible to escape from. At least, that’s what we believed.
“Recently, one of our celestial phylacteries… malfunctioned. We aren’t sure of the cause. We know the soul that was imprisoned within it has escaped, and instead of returning here, as it should have, it is now loose upon the mortal world.”
My mouth went dry. “Are you talking about Croatoan?”
Hades raised an eyebrow at me. “Yes. Do you know him?”
“We’re acquainted,” I said. “Caulborn documentation on him is sparse, we didn’t know what he was. But part of the reason I’m here now is because one of my enemies is currently inhabiting Croatoan’s shell. Or, phylactery, I guess.”
“I see,” Hades said, rubbing his beard. “Your enemy would then have access to a certain amount of Croatoan’s powers, because the phylactery tends to absorb a bit of its owner’s essence after a time.” Holy shit, Treggen with Croatoan’s undeath powers? That was beyond bad. Hades waved a hand dismissively before I could ask about that. “That’s not relevant to your current situation, though. Any of your other adversaries are inconsequential if you’re in the Pit, and the phylactery itself is inconsequential to me. So, my deal for you is this. Recover Croatoan, bring him back to the Pit, and I will grant you your freedom.”
It wasn’t like I had a lot of choices here. “How am I supposed to capture him?”
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