by Bill Hiatt
“You have only yourselves to blame, you know,” began Magnus, glaring at each of us in turn. “We were supposed to be allies, but while I was working on Alex, you guys were plotting.” He paused for effect. “It was easy to figure out who Alex was, but I pretended I was still focused on him so I could check up on all of you. What did I find? You trying to figure out how to get rid of me! I rescued you all, and this was how you thanked me.”
“That’s not—” began Carlos.
“Shut up!” snapped Magnus. “I knew then that I had to do something to secure my own position. I can see how you might have thought you could find someone else to help with the Tal problem and make me expendable, so I needed a way to guarantee you wouldn’t make any hostile moves.
“When Jimmie came back with the spirit of Atlante following him, I knew exactly what to do. While I was connected to Atlante through Jimmie, I put Jimmie to sleep. Then I moved his consciousness into me. I didn’t really connect him to my awareness, so I wouldn’t have to worry about him distracting me, but I held him inside so the universe wouldn’t construe him as dead. Then I moved Atlante into Jimmie’s body. We need Atlante’s help. Anyway, he needs a body in order for his magic to interact with the world of the living, and his presence ensures that Jimmie’s body won’t die.”
“I don’t get it,” began Gordy.
“So what else is new?” interrupted Magnus. “It’s simple. With Jimmie folded into me the way he is now, if the blood spell ends and I cease to exist, or if my death causes the spell to end, Jimmie goes with me. Poof! No more Jimmie.”
The guys reached for their weapons again, but I knew this wasn’t the time, though I ached to join them.
“Aren’t you guys listening at all?” asked Magnus. “You can’t risk killing me or disrupting my magic. That’s my little insurance policy in case any of you get any more ideas.”
“Bastard,” muttered Gordy. For once, Magnus ignored him.
“As soon as we’ve gotten Tal back to his present form, and we have satisfied my bargain with Atlante, you’ll get Jimmie back as well.”
“That’s not good enough!” I insisted. “There must be some other way for you to feel safe. With this kind of setup, even if we do everything you ask, you could get killed in battle by someone else, and then we’d lose Jimmie.”
“Which gives you an excellent reason to keep me alive,” replied Magnus with the kind of smile I imagined Satan might have when he knew he had someone trapped.
“Fair Lady,” said Atlante, bowing to me, “I regret these circumstances as much as you do. I pledge to you that I will not remain in your friend’s body a moment longer than necessary. More than that, I will help restore your other friend,” he said, waving a hand at Tal. “In return, all I ask if that your party try to find the soul of Ruggiero, the adopted son I failed, so that I may atone for my failure. Only then can my soul be at peace.”
When he spoke of Ruggiero, his tone was so full of longing that I almost believed him. However, if he was someone Magnus thought would be a good ally, that was already one strike against him.
“I don’t like this at all,” said Gordy, looking as if he wanted to behead Magnus on the spot and be done with it.
“I don’t like it, either,” said Magnus, “and if the rest of you hadn’t tried to betray me, I would never have done something like this.”
Gordy and most of the other guys spent a few more minutes making threats they knew they couldn’t follow through on, and then they grudgingly accepted the reality I had already reluctantly come to terms with: like it or not, we had to remain allies of Magnus.
What that meant in terms of any attempt to rescue Robin Goodfellow I tried not to think about. I knew, though, what I would do if it came to choosing between Jimmie—or Tal, for that matter—and Robin.
Once Magnus was sure of our agreement, he moved quickly to planning for what our next move should be.
“We can’t have very much longer before someone finds us here,” Magnus began. “Our first step needs to be locating a safe place to figure out how to break the spell on Tal and how to locate Ruggiero.”
“Gwynn ap Nudd’s castle?” asked Carlos.
“Remember, Arawn’s ban that prevents Tal from traveling to Annwn applies to me as well,” replied Magnus. “Atlante has never tried moving from realm to realm using someone else’s memories, though we might be able to make that work. It would take time, unfortunately.”
Magnus and Atlante huddled for a while, leaving the rest of us nothing to do for a few minutes. Much as I dreaded talking to Tal again, he looked so sad that I decided I had to try.
“I’m sorry I upset you earlier,” I told him. At first he wouldn’t look at me.
“I know you are, but I don’t want to talk about it anymore, OK?”
“We really should—” I began.
“Later then,” he insisted. “Is Jimmie going to be all right?”
The abrupt change of subject threw me a little. “I hope so. Are you…feeling better about him now?”
Tal tried to laugh but didn’t quite succeed. “I’m still not sure if he is Jimmie…and if he is, he shouldn’t have…you know, but I don’t want to talk about it.”
As with many people who say they don’t want to talk about something, it only took Tal a few seconds to starting talking about Jimmie again. “I’m really mad at him, but…but, I don’t want him to die again, or be lost forever, or…whatever else could happen to him. He asked me if I wasn’t at least a little glad he was alive, and I…I gave him a bad answer.”
Unexpectedly, Tal burst into tears, and before I knew it, I had taken him into my arms, and he was sobbing uncontrollably. The others withdrew to a discreet distance, leaving us at least the illusion of privacy. Based on what had happened earlier, I was pretty sure Magnus would listen in, but that couldn’t be helped.
“I don’t understand anything,” Tal admitted between sobs, his voice not much above a whisper.
“How could you?” I asked, stroking his hair, not like a girlfriend would, but like an older sister. “We’ve all had months to get used to weird things happening, and you’ve had like fifteen minutes. Everybody understands that.”
“I’ve just been embarrassing myself, though, haven’t I? Angry about a break-up I can’t remember but that happened four years ago. Crying like a little girl about it—”
“Tal, when you get your memories back, you’ll see things the way they really are. Nobody here is going to think you’re unmanly for crying. You just risked your life to save me, remember?”
“I didn’t really think about that, though,” Tal admitted. “I just kind of did it.”
“Because you’re brave,” I insisted. “When you were twelve…I mean the first time you were twelve…you were a popular guy for sure. But now you’re a hero. Aside from Atlante, who just met us, and Magnus, who is…a special case, you’ve saved the life of everyone here at least once. You’ve saved hundreds, maybe thousands, of others. You’ve saved the Dagda, who may end up being the high king of all faeries. You’ve saved Olympus.”
“It’s…it’s so hard to believe.”
“But true,” I assured him.
Tal looked around. “You helped, though, I bet. Everybody else helped, too.”
“Yeah, it was a group effort, but you were the leader.”
“I don’t understand about us, though,” said Tal slowly. I wasn’t sure exactly how to navigate that minefield. Should I tell him about how Dan had betrayed him to get me?
“After you were hit by the awakening spell, it took you time to get control of all those memories from previous lives—”
“That other guy…what’s his name, uh, Ascalaphus…did it really fast.”
“He had help, and he only had one set of memories to worry about. You’re different, Tal, because of what happened in one of those previous lives. Among other things, you remembered all of your lives, not just one, and you had no one to help you manage that avalanche of information.
“I didn’t come to see you?” asked Tal, disbelief etched into his face.
“You did, actually, but my parents didn’t tell me about it. They…they thought you were trouble. They didn’t tell me you came, and they told you I didn’t want to see you. I found out the truth only recently.”
“And then you were already with Jimmie?” asked Tal.
“That’s right,” I replied. I hadn’t thought lying to him would be so difficult, but it made me feel lower than dirt to do it. However, he was already having difficulty processing what was happening. Throwing a betrayal by one of his best friends into the mix would just make adjusting harder for him.
“I guess that makes sense,” he admitted. “I only remember Jimmie as a little kid, but I guess he grew up to be a really good person, didn’t he?”
“Yes, he did—thanks to you, Tal. I know the fact that we aren’t together is hard to get your head around, but your life was really wonderful otherwise, and a blessing for everyone else.”
At last he gave me a little smile. “I’ll try to be more adult about the whole thing.” Coming from a twelve-year-old, that was actually funny, but I managed to stifle the urge to laugh.
Well, at least he wasn’t crying anymore, but aside from the one smile, he still looked pretty grim. I would have liked to really cheer him up, but I knew that was probably unrealistic. At least I had him thinking.
I became uncomfortably conscious of all the eyes on us, especially considering I still had my arms around him, though I was sure Jimmie would have understood. I gently let go of him, and he looked even grimmer, but he said nothing.
“Atlante’s magic and mine are different enough that we’re having a hard time doing the kind of memory sharing he’d need to open a portal for us into Annwn,” announced Magnus. “We’ll work it out eventually, but for right now Atlante is going to go off where it’s quiet and try to arrange a…different kind of transportation. Meanwhile, we can attempt to figure out what happened to Tal and the others on Olympus. We’ll need to do that eventually, anyway.”
“How can we do that?” asked Khalid. “Isn’t it too dangerous to go there?”
“Yes, but fortunately we have past Alex still inside Ascalaphus. He isn’t going to remember the events leading up to his own regression, but he may have seen something afterward that could help.”
Magnus wasn’t anywhere near being as moral as Tal, but at least he was as smart. In no time he had a very willing Ascalaphus lying on the sand and was ready to fish around in Alex’s memories.
“I’m going to set this up so you can all see what I’m seeing,” said Magnus.
“You’re not getting into our heads!” declared Gordy very loudly.
“Very superficial connection,” said Magnus. “Notice I’m not using the lyre this time, so I won’t have enough power to take you all out at once. You’d have plenty of time to subdue me if I tried anything.”
After another few minutes of arguing, we all gave in and allowed the connection. Sadly, Magnus had a good point: one of us might catch something he missed, and any detail might conceivably bring us one step closer to restoring Tal to normal.
At first we saw only the red swirls of Alex’s anger as he fought back against Magnus’s probe. He resisted so furiously that Ascalaphus, clearly someone accustomed to pain, groaned over the struggle in his head.
Magnus knew what he was doing, though, and eventually he broke through. Our vision passed from red to gray. We were seeing Alex’s memory of the throne room of Olympus. Far from being the misty but sunny place we remembered, it was much darker and foggier, though Alex had been close enough to the thrones for us to see who was on them.
Friendly Olympians like Apollo and Aphrodite were nowhere to be seen. Instead, at the very center was Hecate, who must have escaped from Tartarus, looking like darkness incarnate, with a triumphant expression that chilled my soul. She was flanked by equally triumphant Ares and Poseidon, though their eyes seemed a bit unfocused. The coup we had risked our lives to prevent had somehow happened anyway. That, however, was not the worst thing we saw.
Standing behind Hecate was a shadowy figure, larger than any of the others. He looked much like an artist’s portrayal of one of the elder gods, except that his face was so obviously evil that he made Magnus look like an angel by comparison. The darkness around him was lit by periodic flashes of lightning. As we watched, it became apparent that they radiated from him.
Could it be that Zeus, long missing, had been found?
No, this couldn’t be him. This was…Dark Zeus.
Nor was an evil clone of Zeus the only shock we got. As Alex turned his head, we got a glimpse of another figure sitting next to Poseidon. The stranger was superficially as young looking as the others but radiated a sense of enormously greater age. He wore a crown that looked as if it had been excavated from an ancient ruin, and he carried an enormous scythe that gleamed evilly in the lightning flashes.
We watched a few more minutes but saw nothing else that could help us. Apparently, Tal and Carla had both been changed before Alex had, and neither one of them were in the throne room. We did catch a glimpse of Nurse Florence, lying on the floor, unmoving. Whether she was still alive Alex didn’t seem to know—or care.
Magnus broke the connection, sparing us any further horrors. He kept up the probe for a few minutes but learned nothing more. However, he seemed satisfied with what he had learned. I couldn’t help noticing, though, that he was more solemn than usual.
“Just as I thought,” he said, but without his usual I-told-you-so attitude. “Vanora is only an instrument of a bigger plot. The visions Coventina showed Tal are coming true. One of those was a great darkness falling on Olympus, and clearly one has. I’d guess that right now Gwynn ap Nudd is being besieged by the armies of other faerie kings, just as those same visions predicted.”
“If that’s true, it means we don’t have any allies left, except Coventina,” said Carlos.
“She’s under siege as well,” replied Magnus. “I’ve tried to communicate with her and can’t. I should have the same privileged position with her Tal has. If I can’t get through, it means Coventina has isolated the Order’s headquarters completely. She would never do that unless she was fearful of being overwhelmed by powerful magic. I’ll check the next time I’m close to freshwater, but I’d bet pretty heavily I can’t travel directly to the lake anymore.”
“So where does that leave us?” asked Gordy.
“Let’s just say it’s a good thing I didn’t succeed in getting Atlante to open a portal to Annwn. It probably isn’t safe there for us now. I know some spots in the extraplanar islands west of Ireland where we might be able to go, places with enough background magic we probably wouldn’t be found right away. If Gwynn is under attack, though, it’s possible sympathetic faerie rulers in that area are also under attack or soon will be—and in that case, someone is going to start checking those islands much more carefully. Anyway, Vanora knows I’ve been in that area. We need to hope Atlante succeeds with his idea, which will probably give us a lot more time before anyone finds us.
“The only good thing is we now know how Tal was transformed.”
“How do we know that?” asked Lucas. “We didn’t see it being done.”
“No,” replied Magnus, “but we did see who did it.” He looked around expectantly, but no one responded.
“Oh, that’s right, Alex is the Greek mythology expert, and he’s…not in a talking mood right now. Aside from Hecate, Poseidon, Ares, a
nd someone who looks like a mutant version of Zeus, we saw Cronus.”
My freshman mythology unit started coming back to me. “But he was overthrown by Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades,” I said.
Magnus gave me an ambiguous smile that could have meant anything from, “Nice try,” to “How could you be so stupid?” What he actually said was, “Yes, and they imprisoned him in Tartarus. When Hecate engineered her jail break, she must have made a deal with him. Regardless of how he got loose, he’s obviously on good terms now with Poseidon and whoever the Zeus wannabe is—and he has great power over, among other things, time.”
“So he’s the one who regressed Tal, Carla, and Alex?” asked Carlos.
“I’m sure of it,” agreed Magnus, again foregoing any kind of dig. “That would explain the power level of the spells, particularly the one on Tal.”
“We can still break it, right?” asked Khalid, sounding more than a little shaky.
“Well, we have my power and the lyre’s power, plus Atlante’s now, and he’s a sorcerer at about Merlin’s level. Now that we know what kind of magic we’re dealing with, yes, I believe we still can break the spells. That’s about the only good news right now, but at least it’s something. Ascalaphus, what’s wrong?”
We all looked in the direction of the Greek warrior, who had his hand on the hilt of the sword of chaos.
“Do you mean to fight against Ares, my father, and against Poseidon, a distant ancestor of my mother?”
“I see your concern, my friend,” said Magnus, smooth as silk, “but were either of them ever allies of Hecate?”
Ascalaphus considered for a moment. “I spoke to Ares little, and to Poseidon not at all, but I have never heard anything of such an alliance.”
“Because there was none, then or now.” As much of a jerk as Magnus could be, he knew how to play it cool. “Did you see the look in their eyes?” Ascalaphus nodded. “I don’t know how she did it, but Hecate is controlling them. Not only that, but she’s freed Cronus, who is the enemy of all his children, and created some shadow parody of Zeus. If we have to take her on, we’d be fighting for your kin, not against them.”