The Haunting of Guaritori Diolco, Part 27
Family Reunion
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Iskios remained imprisoned and chained in the same way he had been when I last saw him. He eyed me with the same burning hatred as well, but something was different.
“I just came to check on you.” I felt awkward and began to question the wisdom of visiting him right now. “There’s been a destructive battle nearby. I wanted to make sure that you were all right.”
“Or you hoped that I was dead,” he replied, though he sounded more sullen than hostile.
I stifled the thought that his death would make our current peril a little easier to deal with. It wasn’t his fault that his mother had raised him as a weapon rather than a son.
“I would never hope that. I pleaded with my allies to spare your life—and they did.”
“You expect me to be grateful to you for condemning me to endless imprisonment?”
“It doesn’t have to be endless. If you could demonstrate to the Olympians that you will fight with them rather than against them—”
“Which I will never do! They are evil.”
I knew I wasn’t going to win that argument. Years of Eriopis whispering in his ear had left him programmed to mistrust everyone except Tartarus and her. Yet if I didn’t find some way to break through that conditioning, Nyx’s prophecy made it clear that we were all doomed.
“What can I do?” I asked, masking my frustration as best I could. “I’ve already offered my death. Even that didn’t satisfy you. If you’re waiting for a better offer, the Titans have been defeated. They aren’t going to come and hand you everything you want on a silver platter.”
He raised his manacled hands. “Free me. Let me go back to my father.” He said the words so swiftly that I wondered if he had rehearsed them.
“I would if I could,” I replied. “But only Zeus can unlock those chains. And he isn’t going to unless you swear an oath on the Styx never to act against him and the other Olympians.”
“As his regent, I may free you.” I jumped at the sound of Hecate’s unexpected voice behind me. “But Garth is right—I will only do that on the condition that you render yourself harmless to us. I can settle for nothing less.”
I looked at Hecate, but her voice didn’t betray what she might really be thinking. Since she was here, she believed that I had a chance of swaying Iskios. I would have loved to know why, but a private conversation now would just reinforce his suspicion of us.
“I would rather be your captive forever than make any concession to you.”
His words were as unyielding as they had always been, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something had changed.
Looking into his eyes and seeing fear and loneliness as well as hatred, I wondered what could have upset him so much. I’d only seen him show fear once before, when I helped capture him. After that, he didn’t seem to fear captivity or death. Maybe he expected to become a god once his feeble human body died. There was precedent for such a thing.
He hadn’t ever shown loneliness before, either, even after his mother disappeared. Could that have been because—
“You can’t feel Tartarus anymore, can you?” I asked.
“Of course I can,” he said, his tone more defensive than I had ever heard it.
“You should not be able to…with the chains on,” said Hecate, studying him intently. “They are effective at blocking all magic.”
“Iskios is unlike most beings,” I said. “He spent only the briefest time in Eriopis’s womb. Tartarus transplanted him into shadows specially prepared to be a different kind of womb. In a sense, that makes Tartarus father and mother to him. The bond would be both strong and unusual. I imagine that the chains weren’t forged with such a thing in mind.”
“That’s nonsense! I’m not dependent upon some…bond,” said Iskios, but his words sounded hollow. I had hit a nerve. I was sure of it.
Hecate nodded. “In such a case, Iskios wouldn’t be able to communicate with Tartarus but might be able to feel his presence. But think about what’s happening in Tartarus’s realm now.”
Unless Tartarus had succeeded in stopping the decay, his realm was unravelling faster than anything else on this plane.
“He can’t die…can he?” I asked Hecate. Iskios tried unsuccessfully to mask his obvious dismay at the idea.
“He couldn’t die—but at the moment, I cannot say. His soul should be as indestructible as any other. But we know at least one soul that is fading. If the soul is gone, that would certainly be true death.”
“That is why you must become our ally, not our enemy,” I said, looking Iskios in the eye. “This plane is suffering more and more severe disruptions. Your father, one of the eldest powers, would normally continue to exist, no matter what. But his situation is now dire. We can avert further disaster—but according to prophecy, only if you are on our side.”
Giving Iskios that information was a gamble, and Hecate glared at me. Considering the way he’d behaved before, it was conceivable he’d deliberately allow the entire plane to crash and burn just to punish us—punish me, in particular.
I was betting heavily, however, that he would want to save his parents more than he wanted to kill the rest of us.
“You lie!” he said, looking accusingly at both of us. My heart felt like lead in my chest—cold and unmoving.
How could we demonstrate that we were telling the truth?
“In your heart, you know we are not lying,” said Hecate. He spat at her. With remarkable restraint for someone who had once smited mortals for far less, she shifted her attention back to me as if Iskios hadn’t reacted to her at all.
“Time is short,” she said. “I fear we must postpone the rest of this conversation for another time.”
No doubt, we could do something to keep the whole plane from falling apart—but without Iskios, probably not enough.
“Please give me a moment,” I said. She nodded, and I looked back at Iskios, trying to decide what we could possibly do. Hecate could project images of what was happening in Tartarus’s realm or elsewhere, but he would just assume that the images were fake. And taking him down to see Tartarus would be time consuming and dangerous. Tartarus had basically declared war on us. I doubted he would confirm what we were saying. And if he were unreachable, Iskios would assume that we’d done something to him.
Perhaps I needed to look at the problem differently. Iskios wanted all of us destroyed. But what did he need?
Tartarus had ensured that his son had almost godlike power, but he had emphasized that aspect of Iskios’s development to the detriment of everything else, including the development of his human body. Without the shadows with which he had covered himself, his human form was pathetic—pale, scrawny, immature for his age. We couldn’t yet trust him with his magic, but perhaps we could do something for his body.
Taking the risk of strengthening Iskios’s distrust, I motioned for Hecate to follow me outside.
“The only people who have ever given Iskios anything in his whole life have been Tartarus and Eriopis,” I said as soon as I had closed the door.
“You mean, aside from rescuing him from certain death as you did?” asked Hecate.
“I’m not sure he believes I did that. We need something he can’t deny. I’d like to give him a better made human body.”
“Prometheus is still missing,” said Hecate, as if I could have forgotten that.
“I know, but we don’t need to create one from scratch. We already have one, which despite appearances, technically has three-quarters exceptional DNA—uh, if you know what that means.”
“I’ve been cut off from direct contact with Earth for a long time—but I can still watch and listen,” Hecate replied. “So yes, I know what DNA is.”
“Well, Iskios has fifty percent of his heredity from Tartarus, one of the eldest powers. Through Eriopis, he has twenty-five percent from Medea, whose own DNA is derived completely from the gods of this plane. That leaves only twenty-five percent human DNA from Jason—and even he wasn’t entirely human, since he had Hermes, among others, as an ancestor. That’s a pretty exceptional pedigree. The only reason that Iskios is so unimpressive physically is that Tartarus had no experience growing a fetus to maturity.”
“Your analysis has merit,” said Hecate, though she sounded a little reluctant. “But undoing whatever happened in Tartarus’s virtual womb may be more complicated than you imagine. The Philosopher’s Stone can heal. It can change one element to another. It can transform someone spiritually if the person is willing. But can it transform a person physically?”
“It made me better able to contain Hermes—and immortal, or so I’m told.”
“True enough, but as far as I can see, it didn’t change your appearance, increase your muscle mass, that sort of thing. Oh, well, I suppose we won’t lose anything by trying.”
That wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of my idea, but I’d take it. We both walked back into Iskios’s makeshift cell, and I shined the lumen naturae upon him. Since I’d used it before to weaken his shadows, he had a screaming fit when I used it again.
“Can you transform Iskios’s body into something more fully developed?” I asked the stone. It had occasionally communicated with me before, but it picked this critical moment to be totally silent. I took that as a no.
I poured healing into Iskios, repairing some minor injuries. I hoped that the stone might perceive his stunted body as having a deficiency it could correct. But the stone left the basic nature of his body untouched. He stopped screaming after a while, but he continued to look at me as if my efforts were part of an insidious plot to kill him.
I needed a different approach, so I had no choice but to motion Hecate outside again.
“I can’t change Iskios in the way that I want,” I said. “Moving the stone from me to him might initiate a more thorough transformation.”
“I forbid it!” said Hecate with enough force to make Typhoeus cringe. “Even if you could do such a thing, which I doubt, what makes you think the stone won’t simply dissolve within him? He isn’t spiritually ready to receive that gift. But if it would somehow tolerate being in him, what prevents him from turning its power against us? In any case, even with Zeus asleep, I’m not sure your more durable body could hold him without the stone feeding you constant healing.”
She wasn’t wrong. There were many ways my idea could blow up in my face. And I’d certainly made some terrible mistakes when I acted impulsively. But I couldn’t escape the feeling that some variation of my idea was the only way forward.
“Eros,” I said.
Hecate raised an eyebrow. “What about him?”
“He was a key force in the creation of this plane. Couldn’t he recreate…a single body?”
Hecate sighed. “The forces of creation don’t work like that, at least on this plane. Eros’s power now runs along specific channels, like procreation and energizing relevant Olympians. He doesn’t randomly intervene in the way you suggest. Even if he wanted to do so, it is said that such a move might cause unforeseen consequences.”
“Isn’t there a myth about Zeus swallowing Eros?” I asked.
The idea amused Hecate enough for her to give me the ghost of a smile. “Don’t take swallowing too literally. Early on, Zeus did succeed in tapping Eros’s power. There are related myths that say Zeus swallowed the universe and then recreated it. The only truth in that story is that Zeus changed one detail—he symbolically recreated the universe to make himself technically the eldest being. How much good did that do him? None from what I can see.”
“Can we try?” I asked. “If Zeus could reach out to Eros, you, as his regent, must surely be able to do so.”
Hecate sighed. “We really must be leaving soon. Having the Telchines and some of the Titans on the loose is too dangerous. But I will try briefly.
The triple goddess closed her eyes and whispered an incantation in ancient Greek. When her eyes opened, she looked even grimmer than usual.
“Eros is choosing not to respond. We will have to leave the matter of recruiting Iskios until later. Say your good-byes if you’d like a little more abuse, and we will be on our way.”
Reluctantly, I walked back in, wishing that I hadn’t tried to communicate with Iskios in the first place. Hecate followed me in, probably to make sure that I didn’t take too long.
Iskios looked at me as if he wished he could slip out of his chains and strangle me—not that I expected a warmer reception.
But before I could say anything, I heard the voice of Eros in my head.
“What is it you want?” he asked. Somehow, he had sensed that Hecate was trying to reach him on my behalf.
“I hoped you might help me to recreate or repair Iskios’s body so that it will serve him better. I thought that if I gave him something he wanted, he might be more willing to join us.”
“There are grave dangers if I use the power of creation too often or with too much force,” said Eros. “Weak as the fabric of existence now is on this plane, I run the risk of triggering a complete recreation. All beings here or with blood ties to anyone on this plane would cease to exist, and history would begin again—at least for us. That might avert the current crisis, but I cannot say with certainty what else it would do.”
“I’m not asking you for that.”
“I know you are not. But you need to be aware that there is now risk, even in my smallest exertion.”
“The stone changed me. Could you work with it to effect a similar change in Iskios? That way your own power could be used less.”
“A clever proposal! That should be relatively safe. But know this—Iskios may not respond to your gift in the way that you expect.”
“I will take that chance,” I said without really thinking about it. What choice did I have?
“Iskios, I have a gift for you.” Hecate looked at me as if I had gone insane, but I didn’t want to waste time trying to brief her now.
“I don’t want anything from you!” he said. His tone was both angry and sad.
“Wouldn’t you want to be healthier? Stronger?”
“What are you doing?” Hecate’s whisper was like anyone else’s shout.
“Trust me,” I said.
My offer of a gift seemed to have surprised Iskios almost as much as it had surprised Hecate. “Why would you do such a thing? I am your enemy.”
“But whatever you think, I am not yours. If nothing else, the change might make your captivity a little more bearable.”
“Since I lost my shadows, it sometimes hurts to move,” Iskios said. That he would admit such a thing shocked me—and filled me with hope.
“Let’s see if we can’t fix that problem,” I said. I felt the warm power of Eros stir within me, and I felt the stone respond as if they had been created to work together.”
“How is this possible?” asked Hecate, who could evidently see right through my flesh to the power within it.
“Your summons was more potent than we realized,” I replied.
The stone’s power, guided by Eros’s gentle touch, poured out of me and engulfed Iskios. He yelped with fear, though I wasn’t sure why he would be afraid. The power of the stone always felt soothing within me.
I couldn’t clearly see what was happening, but Iskios’s vague shape looked pretty much the same.
“This is going to be more difficult than I thought. The chains are interfering with what must be done.”
“Eros tells me we need to remove the chains,” I told Hecate.
“Not until he swears the oath,” she replied, staring suspiciously at the glow.
“The others are nearby, aren’t they?” I asked. “Between them and us, surely we have enough power to restrain him if needed.”
Hecate looked as if she would rather fight Typhoeus again than Iskios, but she must have known as well as I did that we needed to win him over somehow.
“He goes back into chains as soon as he is transformed,” she said sternly.
“Agreed!”
Hecate only needed to gesture to unlock the chains. The glow around Iskios brightened. I could see him only in silhouette, but he already seemed taller.
I was taken completely by surprise when he started screaming. Worse, I could sense that Eros was just as shocked as I was.
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