The Haunting of Guaritori Diolco, Part 12
Turning the Tide
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Just as the arrows were about to reach the air shield I’d raised, I felt its power surge. Hecate, always a fast thinker, had seen my magic and intervened to reinforce it. Together, we turned that group of arrows aside.
It didn’t take long for the brothers to launch more arrows at us, and we blew them away as well. However, their adamantine tips made them much harder to deflect than normal arrows. I couldn’t help wondering how many such arrows the brothers had.
Time was not on our side, even if we could hold the brothers where they were. All around them, the normally shadowy ambience of the Underworld faded into something that looked downright sunny. The ground shifted gradually from gray rock to brown soil. Acheron’s water level kept falling, and it flowed more and more slowly. These effects were less pronounced around us, but even where Hades lay, they grew more noticeable by the second.
Let me in.
I knew what Hermes was asking, and I knew how dangerous it might be. He’d warned me himself, and my first experience was his soul in my body had nearly killed me.
On the other hand, the presence of the Philosopher’s Stone made my body much more durable. I was sure I could endure longer now. Perhaps he could come up with a way to save us.
“Come in!”
Despite his weakened condition—or perhaps because of it—he didn’t hesitate as he had before. I felt his presence within me.
“Use the power of the Philosopher’s Stone to keep disrupting their rainbows,” he said. “Let me handle my magic that is within you.”
A migraine was pounding inside my skull hard enough that he didn’t need to ask twice. I handed him the reins, and with little effort, he reinforced our air defenses. No arrow, adamantine-headed or not, was going to get past them, at least for the moment.
However, that didn’t solve the long-term problem of the Underworld gradually disintegrating around us.
“Friends, come to me,” said Hermes. He’d borrowed my mouth without asking, but under the circumstances, I couldn’t complain. Despite having to use my vocal chords, he sounded completely different than I did. The others immediately took notice.
Persephone had healed the wounds inflicted on both Hades and Charon. They raced over to join us, as did Hecate.
“Hermes?” asked Hades. “How is it that you are in this mortal again?”
“He allowed me,” said Hermes. “He is not the evil force you worry he might be. In any case, we must move swiftly, or we will lose this battle.”
“How can we prevail?” asked Charon. “They can block our magic at will and even corrode the Underworld itself. And they have adamantine weapons, so even a physical attack may backfire upon us.”
A small tremor in the ground beneath our feet and another shower of arrows underscored his words.
“Through the Philosopher’s Stone, Garth can change their anti-magic power into magic,” said Hermes. “But he cannot do it fast enough. What we need to do is reinforce his efforts.
“We all have different specialties, but working together, we can disrupt their rainbows, rendering them more vulnerable. Garth, continue converting anti-magic to magic. Hecate, seize the newly created magic before the intruders can get a grip on it and turn it against them. Charon and Hades, bombard them constantly with fear and death. Do not let up, even for a second. Persephone, try to feed earth and water magic into their rainbows, disturbing their balance. You cannot let up either if this is to work. I will sustain our defense against arrows and amplify the air magic in their rainbows.”
“There are too many of them—” I began.
“Focus on the ones closest to us,” replied Hermes. “We must defeat them one group at a time.”
I kept my skepticism to myself. We might as well try his plan. But I knew even former gods could tire, and the Brotherhood seemed capable of drawing reinforcements constantly from somewhere.
My skepticism began to waver when Hermes put his plan into operation. Hecate was adroit at seizing control of nearby raw magic, twisting it into something poisonous and dripping it on the brothers closest at hand. They barely had time to register surprise before they screamed as the poison struck them. I realized the former goddess of witchcraft had done more than just capture raw magic. She’d converted it not to poisonous magic but to physical poison, an approach the brothers had no immediate defense against.
The closest rainbows pulsed widely as the brothers struggled to maintain their coherence in the face of new energy being poured into them. The rainbows twisted like snakes as their composition changed by the second.
As the rainbows became less effective, the consistent bombardment with the malignant energies of Hades and Charon began to take its toll. Some brothers fled screaming from their posts. Others slumped to the ground, unconscious or worse.
But we had only defeated the brothers closest to us. An army still remained, and, though the former gods weren’t exhausted yet, their energy level was declining. I could feel the difference just as easily as see the Acheron’s water level dropping.
“They are drawing energy from elsewhere,” said Hecate, sounding tired. “Somewhere outside this plane, I think.”
I recalled that the inquisitors had been able to draw from a power reserve created by the members of their order. Could this be a similar idea—or even the same reserve? The inquisitors had a different philosophy, but some of their magic was similar, even if they didn’t realize it was magic.
“We have to close the door Garth opened,” said Hermes. Charon gave me an I-told-you-so look intense enough to make food rot.
“How are you to do that?” asked Hecate. “We are hard-pressed just to keep neutralizing the brothers in the immediate area. The doorway has an enormous cluster of them around it and is a distance from here. If you try to move Garth’s body there, he will surely be captured.”
“Which we must avoid at all costs,” said Charon. “Perhaps we should kill him. The invaders would have no more reason to be here and might retreat.”
“Out of the question,” said Hermes before I could respond. “He is a good person, and it is only within his body that my strange malady can be healed.”
“What is your plan, then?” asked Hades. “How can you get close enough to close the door?”
“The area in which the door exists is being protected from any anti-nyv effects, despite the presence of rainbows in and around it,” I said. “And earlier, I felt the influences of the rainbows within actually holding the door open when I tried to close it.”
“How does that help us?” asked Persephone.
“Maybe it doesn’t,” I replied. “But what if, instead of closing the existing door, we opened another one?”
“Why?” asked Hermes, though he also smiled with my face. I guessed he had an idea of where I was going.
“Can you open a door right in front of the current one? When newly-arriving brothers step out of the original one, instead of stepping into the Underworld, they’ll step right through another doorway taking them somewhere else—a remote spot in Earth, maybe.”
“Brilliant!” said Hecate. I tried not to be offended by how surprised she sounded. “Our enemies will realize quickly what you’ve done, but they can only close the second door by flooding the areas with their anti-magic—which will also close the first door.”
“Do it,” said Hades. “And be quick about it.”
Despite the distance involved, Hermes had no trouble opening the new door. The energy designed to keep the first door open actually helped him open the second one. I took a second to savor the irony.
“I’ve locked the two doorways together in such a way that the intruders here can no longer draw on energy from another plane,” said Hermes. There are a lot of them still here, but at least, their magic should begin to run out if we kept pressing them.
I wasn’t sure if the brothers knew what was happening yet, but I could already see the rainbows flickering more, even in the distance. The amount of power needed to maintain such widespread and potent effects must have been enormous.
That didn’t mean dealing with them was going to be easy—particularly in a moral sense.
“Will they retreat now?” I asked, suddenly feeling a little queasy.
Hades looked at me as if my question were beneath contempt. “The solution you proposed blocks them from leaving just as much as it prevents reinforcements from coming through. How could it be otherwise?”
“That is not a problem,” said Charon. “It will take time, but we will kill them all.”
I doubted I could persuade either Hades or Charon to take prisoners. Under the circumstances, I couldn’t blame them. But I didn’t want to be the engineer of senseless slaughter, either.
I didn’t know if Hermes read my thought or simply had a similar concern. “That may not be wise,” he said. “We might be able to learn more from them alive than we could dead. After all, there may be many who are not here and will survive. Unless we learn the nature of their strange magic, we will be vulnerable to another attack.”
“There is wisdom in that,” said Persephone.
“They only reached us here through negligence,” said Charon, glaring at me in a way that made me want to run away screaming.
“The Underworld is difficult to get into,” said Persephone. “But all they need to do to worm their way into some other part of this plane is to find one of our descendants to help them. Once they get in, they could conceivably go anywhere, do anything. They can nullify our magic. They can disintegrate the very territory through which they move.”
“We can take precautions against that,” said Hades.
“Perhaps,” replied Hermes. “But any divine dweller on this plane can open a way for a descendant to enter. Sooner or later, someone will not look closely enough. And once the way is opened, as we have seen, these strange sorcerers have the power to keep it open. Only by knowing their secrets can we be truly safe from them.”
“That may be harder to achieve than you think,” said Charon. “Look!” He pointed toward the brothers closest to us.
Their rainbows had faded enough now for me to be able to see more of what they up to. My heart started beating faster when I noticed that the nearest ones didn’t seem to exist. They were now more like shadows than flesh. As I watched, they vanished completely, and the rainbows in the area winked out. From what I could see of the groups farther away, the same thing was happening quickly.
“We must stop them!” said Persephone.
“No need,” said Hades. “We have plenty of their ghosts to interrogate.”
“Do we?” asked Charon, gesturing to the area behind us. “There were bodies there, but they are gone, perhaps taking their ghosts with them.”
He was right. I could see the damage the brothers had done, but there was no sign of them, not even a single drop of blood nor the palest ghostly flutter.
Hermes flew himself and me clear to the interlocking doorways. By that point, not a single invader remained. Hermes closed the doors, and we flew back, confused and uneasy.
“Perhaps they have orders to kill themselves if they are trapped,” I suggested.
“They were flesh and blood while we fought them,” said Hecate. “I would have sworn it. Even powerful magic could not have dissolved so many bodies so quickly. And there is no way to dissolve a spirit, anyway.”
“Not so long ago, I interacted with one of their leaders,” I said. “He was human as far as I could tell. And when I used the light of the Philosopher’s Stone on some of them, their shadows dissolved. They appeared human beneath them.”
“Perhaps there are some real humans among them,” said Hermes. “But what if the ones who followed you here were not human? What if they were some kind of imitation, creatures of magic who could dissolve themselves at will.”
“Then why didn’t their corpses dissolve at the moment of death?” asked Charon.
“That I cannot answer, but my theory would explain their numbers. There seem to have been thousands here. Even given the strange conditions on Earth caused by the Catastrophe, is it credible to think that so many humans have the kind of power and skill these beings display?”
“Skill, maybe,” I said. “But the power part can be explained by a common pool of magic on which they all draw. They started losing power quickly once they were cut off from it.”
“All of that may be true,” said Hecate. “But it doesn’t explain how they can work with some anti-magic force in a way that restrains all magic but their own.”
“Even they are affected by banestones, the purest type of anti-nyv,” I said.
Hecate nodded. “Yes, I saw them fall victim to their stones. But otherwise, they seem immune. And that raises another question.
“If their bodies were entirely composed of magic, they should have disintegrated if they got too close to banestones. Yet they did not.”
“They must have a fast way to convert magic to flesh and blood, the same way you converted raw magic to poison,” I said.
“Indeed, but creating poison from magic is far less complicated than creating human bodies from it. They can use magic in ways even I cannot fathom. If we could learn their secrets, we could much more easily defeat them.”
“There is nothing we can do about that now,” said Hades, surveying the wreckage they had left behind. Let us focus instead on repairing the damage they have caused.”
Charon pointed at me. “They want him—badly. We could use him as bait to capture one of them!”
I wasn’t sure what was more frightening—that Charon had made a suggestion that caused both Hades and Hecate to nod—or that I might have no choice but to go along with a plan that could very well leave me dead.
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