The Haunting of Guaritori Diolco, Part 21
Bloody Reconciliation
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Zeus winced as he asked for suggestions. I imagined he wasn’t often in a position in which he had no idea how to proceed.
“We have unleashed forces of greater magnitude than we can control,” said Hecate. “We need to make time enough to fulfill the three conditions in the prophecy of Nyx. That might save us. But at the rate the reality in this part of the plane is crumbling, it will have collapsed long before.”
“Yet there is a way,” said an unfamiliar voice, rumbling with power, yet tender at the same time.
Gaia had manifested among us as a woman with skin as brown as the soil, hair rippling around her head like waves of grass, and a gown green as early spring.
“We welcome your guidance, Mother,” said Zeus in an attempt at humility. I was pretty sure Gaia saw through it, but if so, she didn’t comment.
“The first step is to persuade Chronos to freeze time in this area.”
“Will he do such a thing?” asked Hades.
“He did it for Cronus—and with far less reason from what I can tell,” replied Gaia. “What we must ask of him now requires far more power, but there is a possibility that he will say yes.
“That is only the first step, for it is not in Chronos’s nature to freeze something forever. He is an embodiment of movement and change. But he might give us the time of which Hecate spoke.”
“None of us can reach him,” said Poseidon.
“Hermes and I reached him earlier,” I said. “Not that it did us much good.”
Most of the others looked shocked by that revelation. But Gaia smiled as if she had already known we had reached Chronos.
“Reality is as soft here as soil after a long rain, and I am closer to Chronos than Hermes is. Some part of me existed when Chaos and Tartarus came into existence, though I did not fully live until Eros brought life. Thus, I will lead the invocation. All the rest of you will support me with every ounce of willpower you have. Only then will we possess even a chance of preserving this plane.
No one objected, and Gaia started her effort immediately. I did what I could to help, projecting the lumen naturae out into the same void into which Gaia’s appeal flowed. The others did what they could, each in his or her own way. The collective power was enormous.
“Who calls?” asked Chronos after a surprisingly short time. His voice lacked the paradoxical, blended tones it had possessed earlier. He sounded…tired. I didn’t see how that could be a good sign.
“We all do,” said Gaia. “We ask you, father of this plane, to preserve it from destruction. Freeze the progression of time in this area until we have the chance to do what must be done to heal the region before its failure can spread.”
“There are problems here that defy even the force of time itself,” said Chronos. “I can do as you ask, but only for a short period. To conserve power, I will freeze the area itself, but not those of you who are here. That will also enable you to do what must be done.”
Reality flickered around me for a second. When it settled, I felt no different. But I could sense an oddness about the environment. The situation was not like before, when the very air had frozen around me, though. As Chronos had promised, we were free to fulfill the conditions of the prophecy.
I tried hard not to think about the fact that one of those conditions was my own death.
“What do we do first, recruit Iskios to join us or reconcile paradoxes?” asked Hestia.
“We don’t know how to do the first, and we don’t know what the second means,” said Hades. “Only the part about Garth’s death is relatively clear.”
“We decided that step would be the last one we would take,” said Hecate.
“Let’s give a shot at changing Iskios’s mind,” I said. “Perhaps the time he’s had to think will have put him in a better mood.”
“Wishful thinking at best,” said Zeus. “Anyway, he’s difficult to reach. Not wanting to put him in Tartarus, we imprisoned him on Olympus—where the Titans undoubtedly are.”
“Yet he is a reasonable starting point,” said Gaia. “I am not without my own prophetic insights. It is possible to move Iskios’s heart, though it can only truly be moved by blood. As for the Titans, I can enable you to travel through the soil and up into Mount Olympus without them being alerted to your presence. After that, I will mediate if the opportunity presents itself, but I have seen the folly of picking sides. I will not support one group of children over another.”
“We accept your decision,” said Zeus, though he sounded skeptical. Without waiting for any other confirmation, Gaia swept us up in her earthy power, shifting us from Tartarus, through gloomy Erebus, through the Underworld, where Charon still labored to repair the earlier damage, and through the lower layers of earth. After that, we rose through Olympus as smoothly as if we were using an elevator. As before, the soil and stone parted to receive us.
Gaia ejected us from the mountain into a chamber that looked like a makeshift prison cell, carved roughly from solid rock. Two globes that filled the room with sunlight looked much more carefully crafted. So did the adamantine chains that held the sole prisoner, Iskios, to the wall.
Born of woman and shadow, he looked unimpressive, even pathetic, when his shadow part was unable to manifest. He was pale and scrawny—but his eyes burned with hatred at the sight of me. He tried to spit on me but couldn’t manage to produce enough saliva to have any luck with that.
“What a promising beginning,” muttered Hades, who I began to suspect had picked up sarcasm from humans at some point.
“I have come to offer you a conditional pardon for your earlier crimes,” said Zeus in his most solemn tone. I wasn’t completely surprised when Iskios, his voice little more than a hoarse whisper, made several anatomically challenging suggestions about exactly what Zeus could do with his pardon.
Zeus’s eyes sparked with fury, but reducing Iskios to ashes wasn’t an option. “You would already have been freed if you had not been so uncooperative. We wish you no harm.”
“But I wish harm to all of you. If I could, I would rip out all your throats with my fingernails!”
With a simple gesture, Hecate warped the air between him and us so that we couldn’t hear him, and he couldn’t hear us.
“We could soften even a heart as hard as his—but not in the time we have left. I question Gaia’s optimism.”
Demeter looked at me. “Didn’t Gaia say something about persuading Iskios by blood. You are his grandfather, aren’t you?”
“His mother was my daughter—In a previous life,” I said. “Biologically, we aren’t blood in this life. If the prophecy is literal, that rules me out. I assume it also rulers out his father, Tartarus, who doesn’t have anything like actual blood. Eriopis, his mother, is the only possibility for a genuine blood relative—or Medea, now that I think of it.”
“Eriopis is as dead-set against us as Iskios is,” said Hecate. “But Medea would help us if we could get her here. Unfortunately, Iskios hates Medea every bit as much as he hates Jason, uh, Garth. Of course, Medea’s divine ancestors are also kin to Iskios, but we have no reason to think that he’d like any of them any better than he does us. Helios would be particularly problematic, as their natures are antithetical to each other.
I wasn’t sure if it was the memories Hermes had left in my mind or just my own instinct, but I suddenly realized what the prophecy could mean, and I shuddered.
“Let me talk to him,” I said, my voice shaky.
Hecate raised an eyebrow, but she also removed the sonic obstruction from the air.
“Iskios—”
“I don’t care what you have to say.”
“Even if I can give you what you truly want?”
“I want you dead!”
“If you agree of your own free will to accept Zeus’s offer and become a law-abiding member of Olympian society, I will die.”
My ego had hoped that someone would protest, but no one did. They must have realized the same truth that had occurred to me.
Prophecies were always ambiguous. When Gaia said that Iskios’s heart could only be moved by blood, she didn’t mean blood relative. She meant bloodshed. Who could doubt in this particular case that the blood in need of shedding was mine?
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