The Haunting of Guaritori Diolco, Part 24
The Dying King
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Instead of trying to retaliate against Cronus, Zeus fell back, clutching his throat. For any mortal, such a wound would have been fatal. We could only hope that Zeus hadn’t become like Hermes—and able to die.
I froze momentarily, unsure whether to attack Cronus or help Zeus. Fortunately, the Olympians were far more decisive. With a deafening battle cry, Poseidon struck with his trident at Cronus. The dethroned king blocked with his sickle, but the force of the trident blow knocked him backward. Hera, every bit as determined and focused as Poseidon, flung a curse at Cronus. The spell was so malignant that the very air screamed out in protest. Cronus managed to summersault out of the way, but the magic followed him, giving him no choice but to retreat.
The other Titans had shifted their attention away from Typhoeus, who was badly enough wounded that he was no longer an immediate threat, and they now turned their combined magic upon us. The brilliant light of Hyperion sought to blind us. Coeus sought to dizzy us. Crius sought to steal our power to reason. Iapetus sought to terrify us—and ultimately, to kill us if, like Zeus, the other Olympians proved capable of dying.
Pallas rained a torrent of spears down on us, striking even more vigorously than he had with Typhoeus. Astraeus showered us with meteors. Perses blasted us with sheer destructive force. As for Atlas, he hurled himself downward to come to the aid of Cronus, still frantically scrambling away from Hera’s curse.
We should have fallen then. The collective might of the Titans warring against us, combined with the fact that Zeus was unable to retaliate with lightning, should have led to our inevitable doom.
But if the Titans thought that victory was in their grasp, they reckoned without the determination of the Olympians. Looking around me, I didn’t see the quarrelsome and sometimes shallow beings portrayed in the myths. I saw a family that would do anything to save all its members.
Hecate poured all she had into protective magic, raising a barrier that deflected most of the Titans’ magic, at least for the moment. She also stopped the bulk of the spears and meteors. But I felt her burning through magic at a much faster rate than any individual Titan. Given the chance, they could outlast her.
Cronus was nearly out of sight, but I could still see Hera’s curse pursuing him, despite the valiant efforts of Atlas to deflect the threat. I couldn’t guess what the curse did, but even from a distance, its power felt enormous.
Cronus’s retreat gave Poseidon and Hades an opening to attack the Titans who were bombarding us. Though outnumbered, Zeus’s brothers were still a formidable pair.
“Guaritori, we need your help!” said Hestia, grabbing me by the hand. I realized I’d become so lost in the horrors that surrounded me that I’d not done a thing to stop them.
Hestia pulled me toward the spot where the goddesses had pooled their efforts to save Zeus. Well, all of them but Hera, who lay next to her husband, unwounded but clearly drained. She had thrown everything she had at Cronus.
Demeter and Persephone were trying desperately to stop Zeus from bleeding out. The ichor spattered all over them suggested they had not had an easy time of it, though the blood was flowing more slowly now.
“If he dies, who knows what will happen?” said Hestia. “We must save him.”
I knew what she wanted—the healing power of the stone. Unfortunately, the stone’s power had been pulled mostly into defending me against the various magics of the Titans. But I was a little further from them now, and they were more focused on Poseidon and Hades. Even so, I had to claw back enough power to be of any use to Zeus. The stone didn’t want to reduce the speed at which it was regenerating me, and I felt my body take damage as I poured healing into the Zeus. I had to balance healing the king of the former gods with preventing too much necrosis in my own tissues.
Having delivered me to the scene, Hestia continued an effort to cauterize Zeus’s throat wound. Demeter and Persephone poured life energy into him. I kept willing the stone to heal his injuries.
All of that power should have been enough, especially since I could feel Gaia contributing magic to the effort. She might have done more, but she also seemed to be restraining Typhoeus, at whom the Hecatoncheires continued to chop. Incredibly, the monster was down but still not out.
I forced myself to ignore Typhoeus—and the rest of the battle. I focused on Zeus as if he were the only thing in the universe.
There was no wound that the stone couldn’t heal—or so I thought. But Zeus’s sliced throat wound refused to close. The blood vessels also refused to knit themselves back together.
“It is the sickle,” said Demeter, her face almost as grim as that of Hades. “Uranus never healed from the wound Cronus inflicted on him—but that wound was not fatal. This one is.”
“No!” Hera protested hoarsely. “It cannot be.” She managed to stand, though she looked as if she might fall back to the ground at any moment.
“The magic of the Telchines,” muttered Persephone. “I never understood how powerful it was—until now.”
Hera gripped Zeus’s hand hard, as if she could keep him alive by sheer force of will. But even if she had been able to generate life force in the way the earthier goddesses could, even if she had gifts of healing as great as those of Apollo, she was spent. I could feel barely any magic from her.
Nor was she the only one. Hecate’s magical defenses had started to falter as she neared exhaustion. I wasn’t sure where Poseidon and Hades were, but they hadn’t succeeded in stopping or even slowing the Titans’ attacks upon us.
“Is Zeus like Hermes now?” I asked Demeter. “Can he die?”
“I see no sign he has lost his immunity to death,” she replied. “But no one has ever been given a potentially fatal wound by Cronus’s sickle. It is possible that it could always have killed one of us. And with the plane as disrupted as it is, who knows what might happen?”
“He must not die,” said Hestia. “If he dies now, Olympus will have no ruler, for the scepter cannot move backward to Cronus, and there is no designated heir. Who knows what fresh disaster an empty throne will bring upon us?”
I had a sudden—and probably stupid—idea. But we seemed doomed unless we tried something.
“I have carried Hermes’s soul inside of me. What would happen if I carried Zeus’s? Would that keep him technically alive, so that you have more time to figure out a way to save him?”
“Hades would know better than I,” said Persephone. “We don’t really know whether we could have successfully put Hermes back into his body. Anyway, his problem was different from Zeus’s. His body was undamaged. Zeus’s is not.”
“We must try something,” muttered Hera.
“Some kinds of spells can only be undone by the caster,” said Demeter. “I wonder if the Telchines forged a similar control into the power of the sickle. If they did, then Cronus might be able to undo the damage.”
“That’s unlikely—” began Demeter.
“It is worth a try!” said Hera, her voice commanding despite the fatigue its quiet hoarseness revealed.
“Persephone and I can keep Zeus’s body from dying as long as Gaia keeps feeding us power,” said Demeter slowly. “But know this—Zeus’s soul would be even harder to contain in a mortal body than Hermes’s was. Even your…unique nature might not be up to the task.”
No matter which way I turned, I always ended up facing death.
I didn’t reply to Demeter. Instead, I reached out to Zeus using a variation of Hermes’s psychopomp power. Since he wasn’t yet dead, his soul might not heed my call, but I didn’t know what else to try.
“Zeus, I don’t know if you have heard the conversation, but I offer you my body as a refuge until yours can be fully repaired.”
“As you did with Hermes?” he asked.
“Yes, exactly the same way.”
Zeus looked unconscious, but his soul, clearly aware, followed the call of my Hermes power. I felt it settle into me like a great weight. The sensation reminded me of the solid shadows of Tartarus pressing down on me. But it was endurable—at least for a while.
Before Zeus had settled completely, I felt Hecate’s shields collapsing. Our only possible way to fend off the Titans now was to use Zeus’s thunderbolts—but could my body channel that much power, even with the help of the Philosopher’s Stone?
I was about to find out.
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