The Haunting of Guaritori Diolco, Part 28
The Iskios Dilemma
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“What’s wrong?” I asked as I let the lumen naturae fade. “Why did that cause Iskios so much pain?”
“I should have seen this earlier,” said Eros. “Despite appearances, his human form is not so much weak and immature as it is fundamentally different from yours. It generates a small amount of human life force, but mostly, it uses shadow as a substitute for life force. It is the shadows that permeate every cell that support almost all of the body’s functions beyond the most basic. Using light of any kind, even the lumen naturae, in an effort to change the nature of the body will only inflict pain—or worse. You must abandon this project.”
Iskios’s eyes, wide with fright, stared into mine as if I had tortured him deliberately. Once again, I had tried to improve a situation and made it worse.
“The idea of helping Iskios had merit,” said Hecate with surprising gentleness. “But Eros is right. There is no way that it can succeed. We must find another path to win Iskios’s heart.”
I looked away from Iskios’s accusing stare. “His physical body is obviously different from mine, but it still seems weaker than it needs to be. What if we tried strengthening it with shadow instead of light?”
“Make him a stronger enemy?” asked Hecate. “That seems foolish, at best.”
“Darkness doesn’t always have to be evil,” I said. “Of course, you know that,” I added, realizing I shouldn’t be lecturing an Underworld goddess on the nature of shadows. “Nyx is a maternal figure, despite her gloom.”
“Nyx helped me with creation,” said Eros slowly. “She helped balance and light and darkness, but she also demonstrated how closely light and darkness are connected. Though she is Night, she is also the mother of Day and of Aether, the bright, untainted air breathed by the gods upon Olympus. Perhaps she will help us now.”
I waited with steadily growing impatience as Eros communed with Nyx back in the Cave of Night. Just as I thought the waiting would drive me crazy, I heard Nyx’s voice in my mind.
“What you ask will be difficult—but not impossible. However, you must know the risks before we can proceed.”
After a long pause, I asked, “And what are those risks?”
“Eros has already reminded you that Iskios may not thank you for whatever you do. You may just make him a stronger enemy as Hecate fears. But there is also an increased risk to the stability of this plane, for what Eros and I must do requires a much greater amount of the power of creation than would have been spent upon your original request.
“To strengthen Iskios’s body, we would have to strengthen the shadows within him. But if we do that alone, we will have made him just a somewhat fleshier version of Tartarus. Instead of strengthening his body in the long run, that may lead to its eventual withering away as the shadows within him long to join the shadows outside of him. His humanity will die. He might remain hostile to you, or he might become aloof, as his father once was. Either way, he will not join you.”
“I wouldn’t want to kill his humanity, anyway,” I said. “Is there no way to avoid that?”
“There is, but that is why the process demands so much more power. Eros and I must infuse Iskios with both darkness and light, carefully balanced, while at the same time adapting his cells to make use of the light as well as the darkness. If we achieve the proper transformation and equilibrium between the two forces, he will be stronger, and there will be no risk to his humanity. But if we fail, he may well die from our efforts, just as all the siblings of Achilles died from Thetis’s attempt to make them immortal. And even if we succeed, the attempt to balance the opposites within him may push an already shaky reality into inevitable disintegration.”
“Do it!” said Iskios. “Make me stronger. Make me better.”
I looked over at him, shocked that he had heard the thoughts of Eros and Nyx. Hecate also looked, more suspicious than shocked.
“Despite the risks?” asked Nyx, not at all shocked. I wondered if she knew all along that he was listening.
Iskios looked down at his scrawny form. “My father, wise and loving as he was, did not truly understand how human bodies work. As long as I am cloaked in shadow, I am fine, but without it, I can barely move without hurting.”
The pain in his voice sounded genuine, but I wasn’t stupid. He could be conning us, hoping that whatever Eros and Nyx did would destroy the Olympian plane—and Medea and I with it. He would at last have his revenge, even if he perished as well.
“Surely, the risk is too great,” said Hecate.
“According to Nyx’s own prophecy, Iskios must join us,” I said. “And…and now that I think about it, perhaps the balancing of light and darkness within him fulfills one of her other prophecies, the reconciling of paradoxes.”
Nyx hadn’t manifested visibly, but I thought I felt her smile.
“Hecate, as Zeus’s regent, you must speak for the Olympians,” said Eros. “There are, as Nyx has said, many risks. We will not proceed if you do not wish us to.”
“We must find another way. I cannot in good conscience risk rending reality completely,” said Hecate.
“I knew it,” said Iskios, his voice less angry and more sad than it usually was. “No one ever intended to help me. This was all just a cruel joke to make me hurt even more.”
I realized that we hadn’t rechained him while we were strategizing. He’d had access to his magic the whole time, perhaps just waiting for a chance to strike.
I raised what hasty defenses I could. Hecate, who must have had the same thought, did the same.
But as so often seemed to happen to me lately, I was completely wrong.
A dagger made of solidified shadow appeared in Iskios’s hand. But instead of trying to use it against us, he thrust it with surprising strength into his own chest. Red blood with shadows twisting in it poured from his wound, and he slumped to the ground.
Reacting more from instinct than from thought, I ran in his direction. I could heal him. Then we could find another way to help him. We had to find another way.
But despite the fact that the dagger seemed to have missed his heart, the psychopomp senses I had inherited from Hermes tingled within me. Iskios was dying much more rapidly than he should have. Instead of struggling to hang on, his soul was trying to tear its way out of his body.
I looked quickly over my shoulder to make sure the Keres hadn’t appeared yet. Then I grabbed Iskios’s soul with every ounce of psychopomp power I could muster. Since that ability came from Hermes rather than from the Philosopher’s Stone, using it so hard and so fast immediately made a migraine blossom in my skull.
“What are you doing?” asked Hecate, her voice as sharp as a sword’s edge.
“Not letting him die. I can hold onto the soul, but I’ll need your help with the body. Obviously, I can’t heal it with the stone.”
I glanced in her direction. She hadn’t moved an inch.
“Remember, we need him to fulfill one of the prophecies.” The last few words came out more as gasps than articulate speech.
“I’ll have to chain him up first,” said Hecate. “This seeming suicide may be just a ploy to get me to amplify the shadows within.”
In some ways, she was right not to trust Iskios. He’d done absolutely nothing to earn anyone’s trust.
But he was dying. The pool of blood on the floor was disturbingly large.
Moving faster now, Hecate was raising the chains. But Iskios succeeded in freeing himself from his body despite the fact that his heart still had a few beats left in it. Without his soul, the body would likely shut down immediately. I did the only thing I could.
Catching Iskios’s soul off guard, I grabbed it, and with one huge, brain-shattering burst of power, I pulled it into my own body.
That might have been a stupid move. Almost certainly, it was at least reckless. But I knew Iskios wouldn’t technically count as dead if his soul was in a body. That might give Hecate time to heal him, or, if it was already too late, it would allow Eros and Nyx time to create a new body.
All of that assumed, of course, that Hecate didn’t intervene in some drastic way. The rage gripping her facial muscles and the darkness in her eyes made me think she wanted to rip Iskios’s soul out of my body with her bare hands.
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