The Haunting of Guaritori Diolco, Part 41
Fragments of Reality
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I should have felt panicked, but I felt nothing at all. I saw myself as if I were floating above my body, looking down at it. It was like dreaming—or dying, though the idea didn’t shock me as it might once have. Whether I was dreaming or not, I felt weightless and drowsy, as if someone had heavily sedated me.
But I was still capable of some thought, and I wondered what had happened to me. Perhaps ripping my mind apart had disrupted me so badly that the disaster had driven my soul out of my body. I’d never heard of such a thing—but only in the last few months had I been forced to accept the reality of other planes of existence, faeries, ancient gods, golems, and magic, among other things. There were doubtless many things I’d never heard of that really existed.
Without a soul, my body couldn’t survive for very long. However, I could feel that it wasn’t quite dead. The Philosopher’s Stone kept the heart beating, the lungs breathing, and other vital functions continuing. How long could it maintain my body that way? I had no idea.
The presence of Hermes in my body, unhindered by the collapse of my mind, might make a difference. Could he function as if he were my soul, keeping my body going indefinitely?
I couldn’t see much point in that unless my mind could be restored, and I could reclaim my body. Maybe it would be better to resign myself to death and let Hermes keep the body. He might well make better use of it than I had.
“Stop that!” said Hermes. “You can’t give up yet!” I felt him gripping me with his psychopomp skill. But having wielded that power myself for a while, I knew how it worked well enough to slip through his grasp.
“It’s time,” I said. Even in the shifting darkness, it was hard for me to miss Thanatos hovering nearby, waiting to make my death official. Though his garments and his skin were as black as the surrounding shadows, it was a glowing blackness, filled with undeniable power.
I was also aware of Iskios, still standing in a nimbus of alternating light and darkness. He looked distraught, though whether because the had heard my conversation with Hermes or spotted Thanatos—or both—I couldn’t tell.
“Not yet!” Hermes told him. “As long as the body lives, you may not have him!”
“It is your job to facilitate death, not to resist it,” said Thanatos. “Is not there enough disorder already?”
Though I felt numb emotionally, his words gave me a momentary twinge of embarrassment at having forgotten about a battle that meant so much to the others…and to my son.
Not that much had happened while I was distracted. Only seconds must have passed. Cronus still held the sickle to Zeus’s borrowed throat. Iskios still hesitated, uncertain how to take Cronus prisoner without killing Zeus.
Seeing this dilemma made me feel a little more like myself. I wanted to help—but how could I? Separated from my body, I had no control over the Philosopher’s Stone. Nor could I access any of my other magic, most of which was hopelessly entangled with the deeply divided powers of Hermes and Hecate.
I had a thought, but it was as wildly implausible as the Easter Bunny appearing and rescuing us. However, it was all I could think of. Any second, Cronus would strike at Zeus, a blow that could damage the stability of this plane beyond repair.
Fearful of someone overhearing the plan before I was ready to execute it, I got as close to Hermes as I could and did the mental equivalent of whispering my plan to him.
“Ridiculous!” he said. “But…but it just might work. You only need to hold on long enough to do one thing.”
“In that case, can you use your grip on my soul to throw it in the right direction?”
Hermes gave me the mental equivalent of a nod and addressed Thanatos. “I need two minutes. If Garth’s soul is not back in his body by then, you may take it.”
Thanatos grudgingly nodded his assent. Hermes tightened his grip on me for a moment, then threw me with all the force he could muster—right at Cronus.
Of course, I couldn’t hope to possess the body of the dethroned king of the former gods. In my current condition, he could brush me aside with no more effort than it would take to swat a fly. But with Hermes’s help, I hit Cronus with just enough force to enter his body. Before he had time to realize I was there, I reached down into his arm and made his hand twitch just enough to put some distance between the sickle and Zeus’s borrowed throat.
Iskios, who must have been watching Cronus like a hawk despite his concern for me, hit that hand with every ounce of power he could muster on short notice. He would have broken every bone in the hand of a lesser being. Cronus’s hand was only numbed, but that was enough to make him drop the sickle, after which Iskios hit Cronus’s entire body with a barrage of both light and darkness fashioned into physical arrows. Cronus let go of Zeus’s current body and fell backwards, ichor pouring from dozens of small wounds.
As Cronus fell, the others turned their magic on Atlas, still locked in a struggle with Poseidon. Shaken by Hera’s battle cry and wounded by Hecate’s lunar magic, sharp as spears, which hit him much as Iskios’s light and darkness had hit Cronus, Atlas fell. Demeter grew vines of surprising toughness from Olympus’s soil and used them to bind the wounded Titans until more permanent arrangements could be made.
Recovering consciousness, Zeus looked down upon his defeated adversaries and managed to smile with his borrowed Telchine lips. “This is the turning point,” he said. “Together, we have defeated the rebellion of the Titans. Now, we can complete our efforts to rebuild this plane.”
“Garth’s soul is still outside his body, and the time Hermes requested has now elapsed,” said Thanatos. “I must place the mark of death upon him.”
I knew without asking that the mark of death would sever whatever connection I still had with my body. Hermes tried to reel me in, and I did what I could to help him. But with my mind still shattered, my soul balked at reentering. It held itself back, firm as adamant, and to my surprise, I couldn’t overcome this involuntary reaction.
“It will require more time to heal him,” said Hermes.
“Time is up,” said Thanatos, his voice as emotionless as always but still somehow chilling it its finality.
“Your appearance here is highly irregular,” said Hermes. “Yes, his soul is outside his body—but his body is still alive. You can see that for yourself.”
Such ancient powers as Death were normally extreme rule enforcers, never rule breakers—and yet here was Thanatos, trying to take me before my body was dead.
“The body should have died, though,” replied Thanatos. “You and I both know this. A living human body without a soul is a gross violation of the rules. Nor is the soul still connected to the body as it should be. The body is being sustained only by unnatural means. No good can come of that.”
“We had a similar argument with the Keres,” said Hermes. “At that point, Garth was mortally wounded, but the Philosopher’s Stone kept him alive. In the end, they agreed to leave him alone.”
“Their agreement is not binding on me, nor are the circumstances the same. Their jurisdiction is violent death; mine is death by natural causes.”
“Then examine him,” said Hermes. “The cause of death here is not physical violence. But it is anything except natural.”
“You make a good point,” said Thanatos, though his voice was so emotionless, I couldn’t tell if he was being sincere. “However, you should have made that argument before. You pledged to let me perform my role after two minutes if his soul were not back in his body. It is not, even though the requested time has elapsed. Therefore, the soul is mine.”
“I didn’t swear by the Styx!” said Hermes, but his desperate tone undercut the force of his words. Knowing him, I was sure guilt was gnawing at him over his hasty words. At the time he spoke them, though, he hadn’t realized my soul wouldn’t be able to reenter my body.
Thanatos’s cold eyes, unblinking, stared down at my body. “In a plane dangerously unbalanced as it is, would you make matters worse by breaking your own pledge? Do you not realize the danger?”
I had been reconciled to death only a minute ago, but now that I faced it, my survival instinct reasserted itself. I didn’t want to leave my friends. I particularly didn’t want to leave the new son I barely knew. And what about all the problems I could still help solve?
“Your devotion to duty is praiseworthy,” said Zeus. “But the circumstances here are special—so special, in fact, that I decree that Garth shall live.”
Thanatos gave Zeus the same unblinking gaze he gave everyone. “A Telchine has no power to decree that or anything else that affects me or my mission,” he said, using a physical voice so that everyone could hear. “I am beyond your jurisdiction.”
“I’m Zeus,” the king of the former gods replied in an irritated tone. “It is my right to make such exceptions as I will in matters of human mortality.”
“That you could—if you really were Zeus,” replied Thanatos. “But being in a Telchine body limits your rights to those a Telchine possesses.”
Zeus’s dead-looking eyes widened. “It is not like you to make up rules as you go along. This situation has never arisen before.”
“That is true,” replied Thanatos. “But I have the power to rule when no precedent exists. Since Olympians are not entirely spiritual beings but have both a body and a soul, I rule that both must be united for their decisions to be binding on me.”
I began to wonder if Thanatos oversaw lawyers as well as death.
Unlike me, Zeus could presumably reenter his body. But though it still lived, it was unlikely, given the severity of his injuries, that he could make it conscious, much less speak through it.
“You have no jurisdiction over gods, since we normally cannot die,” said Zeus.
“I am not claiming any jurisdiction over the death of gods, even when the current disorder leads to such a thing happening,” said Thanatos. “My ruling related only to whether you can issue a decree while out of your body or not. Otherwise, where a god’s soul may be is irrelevant to me.”
“My body and soul are one,” said Persephone. “As wife of Hades, I have from time to time exercised his discretion to allow a soul to return from the Underworld, as I did with Sisyphus.”
“As you were tricked into doing, you mean,” replied Thanatos. I thought I heard a little uncharacteristic smugness in his tone. “In any case, if you wish to send him back after he reaches the Underworld, you may do so, assuming your husband concurs. But you do not have the authority to prevent me from claiming him now. He needs to go through the process before you can grant him a reprieve.”
“You may place the mark of death upon him,” said Hermes through my mouth. “But I am the one who is supposed to take him to the Underworld. What if I do not?”
“Once my job is done, it is done,” replied Thanatos. “Take him or leave him here to wander aimlessly. It matters not to me. Death is my responsibility. The subsequent journey is yours.”
“We need Garth here now,” said Hecate. “We cannot wait for him to do a trip to the Underworld and back.”
I wasn’t sure, but I thought Thanatos shrugged. “That is not my concern—but I see nothing here that would support your position. Your enemies lie before you, bleeding and defeated.”
“Garth’s help may be crucial in resolving some of the problems that have made this plane so unstable,” said Hera. “The death of Hermes, for one.”
“I do not see how,” said Thanatos. “But Hermes’s soul has been separated from his body for some time. Will he be any deader if it takes Garth a while to come back?”
Hera gave Thanatos a stormy frown—but much as I hated to admit it, he had a point. The plane was in bad shape, but it probably wouldn’t get appreciably worse before Hades returned me to the land of the living. Not that the strength of his point mattered much. He was Death, after all. If he was intent on claiming me, the former gods might find ways to delay him, but they couldn’t permanently stop him.
Like the eldest powers, he had no body Zeus could blast to ashes, though I supposed Thanatos could make himself physical if he needed to. But he could also remain only a spirit and walk right through any obstruction the former gods threw in his way. He had stopped to converse with them, perhaps because it was part of his protocol to respond if a god raised an issue. But at any time, he could end the conversation and place the mark of death on me.
Summoning up whatever part of myself wasn’t trembling like pudding in an earthquake, I said, “I’ll go with him. I appreciate all of your efforts, but it’s clear you won’t prevail. The sooner I go, the sooner I can return.”
I wasn’t absolutely sure I would return. If I’d learned one thing since awakening from my coma, it was that a person couldn’t count on anything. Some previously undiscovered problem could cause the whole Underworld to unravel the moment I arrived, leaving me eternally trapped in hopeless anarchy. That wasn’t the likeliest possibility—but how likely was the situation in which I now found itself?
“Even the dead one admits that I am right,” said Thanatos, reaching toward my body to ensure that my soul was no longer connected to it in any way.
“No!”
The new voice echoed up from the ground beneath our feet. I recognized it as Gaia’s, but why would she intervene at this point?
“You have no jurisdiction—” began Thanatos.
“A dire future awaits us if Zeus and Hermes are not immediately restored—and that can only happen with Garth’s help.”
“Why is that?” asked Thanatos. Even he wouldn’t just ignore what sounded ominously like a prophetic warning.
Before Gaia could respond, an earthquake that felt strong enough to be a Titan attack shook the ground. But all the Titans had been overcome. Who could this new menace possibly be?
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