The Haunting of Guaritori Diolco, Part 10
Desperate Times
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Faced with such overwhelming odds, I did the only thing I could do. I cloaked myself in as much concealment as I could manage, and I flew downward as rapidly as I could. Since I had to draw on Hermetic magic for both, it wouldn’t be long before my head felt as if it were splitting open, but I had no choice.
My approach was at least partly successful. Whatever magic had been surging in my direction missed me, though I felt its passage the way I would have seen an enormous dark cloud blocking the sun—if I’d been in some place that had a sun.
However, the farther I traveled from the room I’d been in initially, the less I could tell about what was happening above me, where the Rainbow Brotherhood had been converging. It was logical to assume that they were looking for me, but beyond that, I could be sure of nothing. The fact that they didn’t immediately change course to intercept me suggested that my concealment had been effective, at least in the short term.
I did some breathing exercises to slow my frantic heart rate and maximize my focus. Presumably, the Brotherhood’s magic senses weren’t limited by the rainbows in the same way mine were. That meant that they could potentially spot me from a much greater distance than I could spot them. I couldn’t allow my concealment to falter.
But if I had to keep it up long enough, pain would eventually consume me. I had to do more than just hide. I had to find a way out of here.
Beyond knowing that I was moving downward, however, I had no way to navigate. My magical senses extended no further than my physical vision would have extended in heavy fog. I had no way of knowing how large this place was or if there was any kind of exit point.
My heart skipped a beat when I realized that I was most likely on a different plane of existence from Earth. Without the ability to open a portal, I had no way to get out of here.
Had I been on Earth, I could conceivably have called on the former Greek gods to open a way to Olympus by virtue of my connection to them in a previous life. I’d done it before. But from what little I understood about the planes, the one on which humans lived had ties to the various ones where former gods dwelled. This one might not have any such connections.
I could experiment, but I’d have to lower my concealment for the Olympians to even be aware of me, and that was a risk I couldn’t take.
Come to think of it, there was one other thing I could try. Among other things Hermes had given me, I had some ability as a psychopomp, so I could theoretically open the way into a realm of the dead, specifically the Greek Underworld. It was possible that such an ability might not be blocked by the rainbow energy all around me.
The only problem with that plan was that I’d need a nearby ghost in order to open such a path. I might be able to catch by surprise and kill a member of the Brotherhood. I dismissed that idea with a shudder. Suspicious though I was of their motives, I had no proof beyond the hidden design on their robes. I wasn’t even sure that the average brother knew it was there. No, I wasn’t going to kill someone who might be innocent just to get out of here.
There was one other possibility, though. The ghost of Hermes had been caught in the Brotherhood’s magic when he attempted to answer our call. The only way the Brotherhood could prevent his further intervention was to bring him here.
If I could get close enough to Hermes, his presence would allow me to open a path to the realm of the dead. But he could be thousands of miles away from me, and even something as simple as searching for him might give away my location.
I already had a mild headache, but I tried to ignore it as I sought to modify my concealment so that the dead would be aware of me. They operated on what amounted to a different frequency from the living, even when they were nominally on the same plane. Making myself visible only to the dead might still leave me invisible to the Brotherhood—unless, of course, they were an army of the dead. Occultus was alive, though.
I sometimes had difficulty accessing the knowledge of Hermes, and this situation was no exception, but I did eventually piece together enough information to make myself discoverable only by the dead.
I’d stopped flying to delay a full-blown headache as long as possible. Even so, my head throbbed more noticeably as I made the changes in my concealment. This move had to work. It was my last play—in more ways than one.
Once I was sure the dead could sense me, I reached out cautiously to Hermes, making my magic correspond as closely as possible to ghostly energy, so that if the Brotherhood did detect it, they wouldn’t recognize it as my magic.
“Hermes, come to me!”
He’d asked for my help. If he heard me, I was confident he’d come.
For several minutes, all I heard was silence. All I saw was an increase in rainbow light. Did that mean I’d been detected? Was the increase in rainbows in this area a sign that brothers were now gathering to recapture me?
“Hermes, it’s now or never!”
Taking a bigger chance, I wrapped the message in his own magic. He might be able to sense that even through the interference, particularly since I was still broadcasting in a way only the dead should be aware of. I had to hope that the rainbow power didn’t block that kind of communication, or I was doomed.
In the distance, I saw a silver speck, gradually growing as it got closer. Unless there were other ghosts here, that had to be Hermes. And if I wasn’t mistaken, he was keeping himself visible only to me, who had a special bond with him. The Brotherhood shouldn’t be able to detect him.
They were narrowing down my location, though. I was pretty sure I could make out some of their dark forms in the surrounding shadows. I thought of flying again, but that would move me away from Hermes. I couldn’t risk that.
“He’s nearby.”
The voice was barely a whisper, but I was sure I heard it. I had to hurry. Fortunately, Hermes was now close enough for me to be sure it was him. That meant he was close enough for me to try my escape plan. Drawing him toward me as fast as I could, I invoked a doorway to the realm of the dead.
I could feel its reluctant opening. I could see it, like a cave mouth, a slightly different kind of darkness from that which surrounded it.
Unfortunately, the brothers could sense it as well, though I wasn’t sure they knew what it was. It was an anomaly, though, one they would have had no problem associating with me.
Hermes was close enough for me to pull him right next to me and bind him to me as I used air magic to fling us through the doorway.
Unfortunately, some of the brothers were close enough to react. My momentum faded as they reached out with whatever magic they had to stop me.
Hermes had gifted me with a lot of aggressive magic, but I wasn’t sure how my already aching head would react to such an exertion. That left the Philosopher’s Stone my only recourse. I blasted the brothers with the same lumen naturae effect I had used on Occultus. As before, it ripped away their shadow coatings, surprised them, and momentarily blinded them.
A moment was all I needed to scramble through the doorway with Hermes. Unfortunately, instead of finding myself in the Underworld, I found myself in what looked like a long, dark tunnel. Presumably because I was coming from an unusual place, I couldn’t make the journey in one jump.
Worse, some of my Rainbow Brotherhood pursuers had thrown themselves through the doorway, and a few of them stayed right at the threshold, preventing me from closing the door.
As living beings, they shouldn’t have been able to even enter, but I had no idea how their magic worked, and now wasn’t the time to try to figure it out. I flew down the tunnel, officially promoting my headache to a migraine. My pursuers followed somewhat more slowly. But every second, more of them entered through the doorway I hadn’t been able to close. I still couldn’t close it without risking the possibility of killing some of them.
The only good thing was that their pursuit was slower than I might have expected. Likely, they had no idea what I was doing or where this tunnel led. They wanted to catch me—but perhaps not at the cost of their own lives.
I accelerated, shooting Hermes and me down the tunnel like a cannonball. My pain shifted upward just as rapidly, and I had to invoke the Philosopher’s Stone to give me the ability to endure. It took every ounce of willpower I had not to start screaming nonstop.
If I could get to the Underworld, I hoped the brothers wouldn’t be able to follow me. Even if they did, I was hoping the great powers in the Underworld might come to my aid—or at least, come to the aid of Hermes.
Since I was focused the frequency of the dead, I should have been able to see and hear him clearly, but I heard nothing from him, and I could see him only faintly, just as if he were having a hard time manifesting. But that couldn’t be the case. I was seeing him, not some manifestation on another plane.
Was his soul injured? I would have said such a thing was impossible. Then again, I would have said it was impossible for him to die in the first place.
By now, I was biting my lip to keep from screaming. I had no idea how close we were to the Underworld—or even if we could get there at all. Perhaps opening a doorway from the rainbow realm had been only partly successful, leaving me with an endless tunnel that never connected to its final destination.
Just as I began to lose hope, I saw a grayness in the distance—a sign that the tunnel was going somewhere. I screamed as I gave us one last burst of energy to get us through the doorway and perhaps to safety.
We landed somewhere inside a cavern with no obvious light source and an inexplicable faint gray glow. The ground beneath my feet was rocky and uneven. Nearby a wide river of dark water rushed past us fast enough to make a low, roaring sound.
No one was lined up along the shore, but that was hardly surprising. Not that many of the dead ended up in the Greek Underworld these days. My Hermetic magic made it easy for me to identify the place.
My pain, no longer fueled by the need to fly at great speed, was already declining. I hurried the process along by dropping my concealment, which I hopefully wouldn’t need in the Underworld.
Mortal.
That had to be Hermes trying to communicate, but his voice was so far below a whisper that I only caught that one word. Was he telling me I needed to be cautious to avoid death because I was mortal?
No, I realized as I saw a distant figure approaching. He was trying to remind me that living humans weren’t welcome in the Underworld.
From common sense and from Hermes’s memories, I recognized the approaching being as Charon, the ferryman of the dead. His face was expressionless and pale as flesh from which all the blood had been drained. His eyes were black as the void. His face was framed by unruly gray hair and an equally unruly beard.
He wore rags that revealed much of a body that, though unimaginably ancient, was muscular enough to make him a physical match for all but the strongest of gods. He carried a staff carved long ago, when the world was young. Though it looked deceptively as if it were only minutes away from crumbling into dust, I had no doubt that it could crack the skull of any creature who tried to cross the Acheron River without permission.
The most noticeable thing about him, though, was the aura of power around him. He looked old—a conscious choice, since the former gods could change their forms at will—but he radiated enough power to smash an army into pulp if he wished to.
None of that would have bothered me, for Hermes had seen him often and got along as well with him as anyone ever had.
But he frowned at me, an expression that made me want to run in terror. And I had with me, not the Hermes that Charon would recognize, but only a frail remnant of that Olympian. Who knew what the ferryman would make of that?
“Why do you trespass here?” asked Charon, his voice sounding like a dying man taking his last breath, though it was loud enough to rattle the teeth in my head. “You do not belong here.”
I opened my mouth, but I couldn’t make words come out. I felt as if Charon’s mere presence was enough to make my blood freeze. I wanted to explain. I needed to explain. But I could not.
Charon’s eyes shifted to the faint silver glow next to me. “What—is that Hermes? What have you done to him?”
No, it wasn’t just my blood that had frozen. It was my entire body, held so tightly in the grip of fear that I couldn’t even make my lips move.
Hermes tried to defend me. I could feel his desire to do so. But Charon didn’t seem to be able to hear Hermes’s whisper. Perhaps only I, deeply linked to Hermes as I was, could hear it.
Fortunately for me, the Philosopher’s Stone, which had demonstrated before that it had a mind of its own, released a gentle glow. This was not an attempt to blind Charon—which might have failed, anyway—but an effort to make him see the truth about me.
Charon’s face remained as unmoving as stone. But his eyes betrayed some emotion. Was it curiosity? Surprise? I couldn’t tell. From what little I could scrape from Hermes’s memories, the former god couldn’t interpret that look any better than I could. After all, Charon had felt neither curiosity nor surprise for a long time—if ever.
“You are no mere mortal,” said Charon, looking me in the eye. “You have the power of Hermes, and another kind of power that I have never seen before. But you carry with you the ravaged soul of Hermes. Zeus and Apollo themselves came down here not so long ago to look for it. How could you have it? And how could they not have known that you did?”
I knew if I didn’t speak, sooner or later, Charon would smash me into pulp with his staff and take the soul of Hermes.
“I. . .I. . .don’t. . .I don’t—”
“Speak plainly, and speak now. I have no time for this.”
It looked to me as if Charon literally had all the time in the world, considering his only job was ferrying people across the river, and there was no one to transport now. But that was one thing I knew I couldn’t say to him.
I felt a gentle warmth inside me that must have been Hermes. It certainly wasn’t Charon, who looked about as warm as a glacier.
“The soul of Hermes. . .was captured by a group called the Brotherhood of the Rainbow,” I said. I could barely get the words out, and my voice sounded shaky, even to me.
“I have heard of no such brotherhood,” said Charon. “Nor had I ever heard of a god’s soul separating from his immortal body until Zeus and Apollo came looking for Hermes.”
I wondered how much of the rest of the story Charon knew. With few human souls coming through and Hermes disabled, how would the ferryman have gotten any information about anything beyond the Underworld?
“The circumstances were. . .unusual.”
Charon narrowed his eyes. “And how much were you to blame for those unusual circumstances?”
“I am a victim of them as much as Hermes is,” I replied, hoping my words were true. I couldn’t help thinking about the various prophecies of doom that were in some way connected to me. Coyote had received one, as had Arianrhod—and now, much more recently, Thoth.
“Yet he seems nearly destroyed, and you are far more powerful than a mortal has any business being. You are bloated—with the very power of Hermes himself. Surely, that cannot be a coincidence.
“And then, there is the manner of your arrival, for you have opened a way here and left it open—carelessly or on purpose I cannot say. Even now, other intruders are entering through it.”
My pain had made me forget to close the pathway I had created. I didn’t need to turn around to know that members of the Brotherhood of the Rainbow were now spilling into the Underworld.
They would recapture me and the soul of Hermes—if Charon didn’t kill me first.
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This was SO good!!!