The Haunting of Guaritori Diolco, Part 43
The Last Hope
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I did the only thing I could—I stared at the spinning fragments of my mind, hoping to receive another vision that might give us a way to save this plane.
I saw nothing.
“We must ready ourselves to fight Typhoeus,” said Poseidon. “Gaia can release him to reduce the continuing pressure on her, and we will restrain him. We have the Titans on our side, and the Hecatoncheires will be back on Olympus right now, ready to join the fight. Surely, we will prevail.”
Zeus shuddered, perhaps recalling that Cronus had cut his throat during the last joint Olympian-Titan venture. “I suppose we may have to—but there is no guarantee of success. Gaia has told us he is getting more powerful as time goes on.”
“All the more reason to act now,” said Poseidon, shifting his trident from one hand to the other. Some of the Titans looked as eager to take on Typhoeus as the lord of the sea was—an unsettling enthusiasm, given that they had betrayed us in a battle with Typhoeus before. They were oath-bound now, but I couldn’t help worrying about their sudden zeal.
“I’ve got something,” I said, still staring into the maelstrom that used to be my mind. “The connection between my mind and Hermes’s magic is completely severed—and yet my body still lives.”
“Obviously,” said Poseidon, waving the trident dismissively.
“It’s obvious he lives, but you are missing the significance of his survival,” said Hecate. “It is, as the mortals like to say, a game changer. We’ve had to resort to such complicated methods to extract the magic from Garth because we believed a more direct approach would kill him. Since the magic is now separated from him, we can quickly reunite it with Hermes’s body. That should be enough to keep it from dying every time Hermes’s soul tries to reinhabit it.”
Zeus nodded. “Hermes’s death was the first obvious sign that the natural order on this plane was deteriorating. Restoring him to life may help reverse the decay. Proceed at once!”
As I looked again at my mind, I could see that the frenzied spinning of its fragments had acted like a centrifuge, separating the magics of Hermes and Hecate from an otherwise disorganized mass. Removing the Hermetic part, rainbow hued because of the diversity of his power, was child’s play for Hecate and Hermes. Once out of me, it returned naturally to Hermes without much effort on anyone else’s part. Hermes’s soul left my body and returned to its own, which started breathing immediately.
For once, I had been right.
Unfortunately, I’d been right about something else, too. It was partly the presence of Hermes’s soul that kept my own body going. Though still out of my body, I could suddenly feel my breath sputtering, my heart beating erratically. The Philosopher’s Stone should have been able to keep me alive, but it appeared to be confused by a soulless body and didn’t react as I might have hoped. In fact, it was almost completely inert.
Mateo realized what was happening and laid his hands upon me, radiating whatever healing energy he could scrape together. But his healing power also seemed to expect a soul to be in the body. His power flickered indecisively instead of flinging itself into me and stabilizing my life signs.
He looked up quickly, his eyes finding Hecate’s. “I know why this isn’t working. Both the Philosopher’s Stone and curanderismo are designed to heal a living body—with a soul. The lack of one confuses them.”
Despite Mateo’s attempt at a clinical tone, a little bit of his fear came through in an almost imperceptible tremor running through his words.
“The power that grows vegetation needs no soul,” said Demeter. “Persephone is keeping the body of Zeus from dying at the moment, so perhaps I can help Garth.”
Her touch was warm, and the fact that I could feel it was a good sign. But evidently, Zeus’s body was more self-sustaining than Demeter had realized. The same power that had kept Zeus going seemed insufficient to do the same for me. My vital signs continued to weaken.
“I have potions that might help,” said Medea. “But I’d have to return to our plane—”
“You’ll never get back in time,” said Hecate, shoving her way to my side and placing her colder hands on me. I felt her dark power, and my body shuddered. She was a versatile caster, but healing wasn’t one of her specialties. She might be able to keep me alive—or she might inadvertently make me undead instead. Being an animated corpse was not what I wanted.
To no one’s great surprise, Death loomed over me. I hadn’t seen Thanatos follow us through Iskios’s portal, but he must have.
“A body without a soul is—” Thantos began in his usual, toneless voice.
“Stay back!” said Hecate. “Stay back or face my wrath!”
Hecate was just powerful enough to make Thanatos hesitate, though what she might be able to do to him, I had no idea. His momentary stillness gave Zeus a chance to slip between him and my body. Poseidon followed his example, as did the other present Olympians and, much to my surprise, the Titans. Having been forced into a pact with Zeus, maybe they didn’t want to see their compromise rendered pointless.
Iskios also interposed himself, flashing a more drastic version of his light show. “I am the elder power that rules this place, and I say you cannot pass.”
“You are nothing of the kind, and I shall pass,” said Thanatos, sounding angry despite the flatness of his tone.
I remembered the way the original Tartarus had made darkness press down on me like a slow-moving landslide. Iskios must have tried a similar strategy, but it didn’t work against someone with no physical body.
It might not matter whether Thanatos formalized my death or not. The motley combination of magic from Mateo, Demeter, and Hecate had somehow kept my body alive, but my heart was barely beating now. My situation was so precarious that Thanatos probably only needed to look cross-eyed at me to kill me.
“Let him have me,” I said. I had to force the words out, and they sounded more like a whisper than the mental messages I’d been sending. “We don’t want to risk damaging the plane still further.”
“The plane is starting to heal,” said Hermes, his voice firm and strong as when I first met him. Being back in his body clearly agreed with him. “Garth was right that bringing me back was a necessary step. But we may not be done, Thanatos.”
“Whether you are done or not is irrelevant. There is no soul in this body. Demeter may make him a vegetable. Hecate may make him a home for restless spirits. But neither of them can provide a soul. Nor can the old curandero.
“What if I can get my soul back into my body?” asked Zeus. “Would you accept my orders then?”
“I would,” replied Thanatos. “But you could never do that in time.”
“Don’t be too sure,” said Zeus, stepping away from me and then running toward his body, over which Persephone was still bent. “I have the sickle and the Telchine’s knowledge of how it was made. With that, I can undo what has been done.”
He pushed some kind of watery Telchine magic into the weapon, then held it over the wound and moved it in the direction opposite the original cut, dribbling magic as it moved.
Nothing happened.
“Who among you will oppose Death?” asked Thanatos, taking a step forward. He must have been radiating fear because everyone, former gods and Titans included, trembled. Mateo’s hands on me were shaking so badly that magic stopped flowing through them.
But none of them got out of Death’s way, not even Mateo, who was by far the most fragile being in Thanatos’s path. Surrounded by Thanatos’s magic, Mateo looked older than he ever had before, more like eighty than the sixty or so he actually was. His face seemed more wrinkled, his eyes dull and sunken, his hair thinner, his back hunched.
He shook—but he didn’t flee.
Thanatos tried to step right through those standing in his way. All of those he passed through shuddered as if feeling the full weight of winter smashing into them like a gigantic chunk of ice. But Iskios and Hecate, both of whom apparently had some magic to counter immaterial beings, slowed his approach with shadowy barriers.
I doubted they could hold him permanently at bay, and Zeus continued to have no luck healing his body’s injuries. All I could do was stare into the fragments of my mind, hoping I could pull some other piece of information out of the knowledge Hermes had given me.
It wasn’t likely, though, with Hermes himself here, that I could come up with anything unique from that source. It would have to be something so obscure that Hermes hadn’t thought of it—and if that were the case, how would I ever find one obscure fact in the shattered remains of my mind?
The fragments spun so fast that they blurred into one undifferentiated mass. From that mass, I got nothing—until a momentary vision flickered past me.
“I have it!” I yelled. “I know how my mind can be made whole.”
But at that moment, Thanatos broke through the shadowy barriers holding him back and touched me. The mark of death slashed into my body like a tattoo that, instead of being confined to the outer layer of skin, drilled down into bone. Descending on me like an executioner’s axe, the mark cut me off from my body and what was left of my mind. No longer anchored to the living world, I plunged into what seemed like endless darkness.
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