Separated from Yourselves

by Bill Hiatt

  “I can hear you, Gym Rat!” thought Magnus, followed by a stream of epithets that would have made a hardened mercenary blush.

  “Magnus, I got this!” I thought loudly. “Shut up!” Then I looked at Shar and thought, “He saved my life.”

  Shar seemed unable to process the idea that Magnus might actually be the hero.

  “Are you sure?”

  “He’s out of his body because he’s inside mine. He helped me multitask so I could beat the shadow monsters. Didn’t you hear Erebus complaining about his presence?”

  “Yeah,” admitted Shar, “but I figured he was in there trying to steal your body or something.”

  “Well, he wasn’t. He didn’t even try that. Now stand down and let me get his mind back in his body.”

  “So now it’s OK for him to have Robin’s body?”

  “Of course not! He’s bound by a tynged to return the body eventually. I’d like that to be right now, but once we solve our other problems, I’ll help him make a version of the duplication spell that works on something other than living bodies. Succeed or fail, he’ll have to release Robin’s body then. Satisfied?”

  Shar nodded, though the last thing he looked like at this point was satisfied. He did sheathe Zom, though, and I managed to get Magnus back into his body without any further incident. Some of the others actually looked relieved. Magnus was still no angel, but I thought it was getting more and more obvious that at least he wasn’t the devil, either.

  We returned to Arianrhod’s tower to make preparations. We excused ourselves while she darkened her throne room to permit the shadow assassins to collect the gold, then returned, first to rest from the combat that had drained all of us, then to make plans for our rescue attempt in Tartarus.

  After we’d slept and eaten, Magnus said, “I’m going to have to make myself scarce again. Nicneven could easily be on Olympus.”

  “I have an idea about that,” I said. “I can’t explain it to you, though. Oh, and we’ll have to put you to sleep to do what I need to do.”

  “As long as you don’t let Gym Rat or Dead Kid skewer me while I’m out, I’m cool with that,” said Magnus.

  “You really need to stop with those nicknames,” said Gordy. Shar’s jaw clenched, but he said nothing. Magnus lay down on the floor, and I put him to sleep—a very easy thing to do with a willing subject.

  “Why put him to sleep?” asked Carlos.

  “Nicneven’s tynged doesn’t just require him to follow her orders. It binds him not to act against her. It didn’t seem to block his running off to some place where she couldn’t find him, but I was afraid if he actually agreed to a spell intended to thwart her control, the tynged would prevent him from cooperating.”

  “If he’s that tied to her, what good is a spell going to do?” Shar asked, clearly mistrusting anything that had to do with Magnus.

  “Between what I can remember of her, and particularly the way her magic felt, and what I can extract from Magnus’s memories, I think I can set up a spell that will trigger if she is nearby or tries to use mental communication with him from a distance. In either case, the spell makes him unconscious, so she won’t be able to issue new orders to him.”

  “A most ambitious idea,” said Arianrhod, “but I have never heard of such a thing being done. Can you truly achieve it?”

  “It will take a few hours,” I replied, “but yes, I think I can.”

  “Is it worth the effort?” asked Shar. “It would be safer for him to just stay as far away from her as possible.”

  “I was just reminded of how useful he could be in battle,” I said. “You know, the saving my life thing. He’s as powerful and skillful as I am. If we can get some use out of him, it’s worth the risk. Anyway, Nicneven was definitely on Olympus at one point to free Hecate, but she has so much else going on I don’t think she’s just hanging around there.”

  “A spell that makes Magnus shut down, potentially in the middle of combat, puts him at risk without his being aware of it,” Stan pointed out.

  “That bothers me, too,” I said, “but I can’t ask him without setting off his tynged. We’d have to protect him if he did shut down, but we’ve had plenty of practice shielding a fallen comrade.”

  “If he can’t act against Nicneven, how can he fight allies of hers like Hecate?” asked Gordy.

  “That’s tricky,” I admitted. “However, Nicneven has never actually told him that Hecate or any of the others are her allies. We’re assuming they are, and we’re probably right, but as long as he doesn’t have instructions to that effect, I think he can act.”

  “And if you’re wrong, then what? He freezes up on the battlefield because he can’t act, and then we’re stuck with defending him from the very beginning,” said Shar.

  I had to admit he made a good point. Wouldn’t it just be better to keep him away from anywhere Nicneven might be? Maybe, but hiding him somewhere also increased the likelihood we’d lose.

  “The benefits outweigh the risks,” I said. “We’re going to at least try it.”

  Shar scowled, and some of the others looked uneasy, but they didn’t argue anymore—at least not at first. Achieving what I wanted actually took about a day and a half, Annwn time (though only four and a half hours back on Earth). Shar did quite a bit of muttering about wasted time, but finally I had a spell I thought would do what I wanted. I woke up Magnus, then tested the trigger by simulating Nicneven’s style of magic, and he passed out immediately.

  When I revived him, my conscience was gnawing me enough to ask if he was willing to put himself at risk for the cause. Tellingly, he looked at Eva before responding.

  “Not helping is probably just as big a risk, so yeah, I’m willing.” That was good enough for me at this point. I couldn’t be more specific than that, but at least I had general acknowledgment on his part.

  “Something’s different,” he said, looking at me with a raised eyebrow.

  “You’re right, but I can’t tell you exactly what. Let’s say you don’t have to go hide somewhere, and leave it at that.”

  Much to my surprise, Magnus accepted my vague reassurance. If the situation were reversed, I certainly wouldn’t have been that trusting.

  Now that Magnus’s situation was fixed as well as it could be, we were just left with equipment issues, but they were significant.

  Going into a battle more dangerous than any we had ever faced required arming and protecting everyone as well as we could. Magnus would play the lyre of Orpheus, so he didn’t have much use for a sword, but he definitely needed armor. He had continued wearing my dragon armor, since the spell that had wrenched me away from Tal Twelve had somehow replicated that armor. Perhaps Magnus and Atlante, while weaving the spell, visualized me in that armor. Unfortunately, the spell evidently couldn’t really create dragon armor, because at some point after I took off the duplicate to prepare for the shadow battle, it had disintegrated. I wanted to reclaim the original, and Magnus was uncharacteristically willing to part with it. We couldn’t leave him unprotected, though. Nor was he the only party member short on gear.

  Gabriela would be using magic, so she didn’t need a weapon, either, but she too needed some kind of armor. So did Jimmie, Eva, Lucas, and Michael. Michael also needed a weapon. I’d have said Lucas needed a weapon, too, but he insisted he was better at hand-to-hand combat, which he probably was. It was also likely he’d be pulled into the rhythm once Magnus started playing, and probably whatever extra magic he generated would be worth more than what he could accomplish with sword strikes.

  Coming up with six sets of armor was high priority. Fortunately, Arianrhod could be of some help. She gave two of her gowns to Gabriela and Eva. Their silvery fabric was not as strong as dragon armor, but Arianrhod assured us she had used them in battle and had never been badly wounded.

  For Jimmie, Magnus, Michael, and Lucas, she found some spare suits of armor. They were faerie plate, so lighter weight than normal, but still clunkier than dragon armor. For Michael,
who had no real arms training, that might not matter as much, but Jimmie would be somewhat impeded by it. I told him to put it on anyway and try to get used to it.

  Magnus, however, needed freer arm movement to play effectively. Arianrhod, ever resourceful, found a tunic woven from starlight, a garment that was supposed to be both harder than diamond yet lighter than silk, and that had the added benefit of dazzling opponents if they looked at it too long, sending them into hypnotic trances. Shar offered to test it by trying to stab Magnus through the heart, but Magnus tried his own test and said the garment performed exactly as advertised.

  Unfortunately, Arianrhod had only one such tunic, and Lucas tried and failed to do effective capoeira moves in full armor. He might have been able to learn how to adapt to the armor, but we didn’t have the time.

  “I may know of something that could work,” said Gabriela. “It is said that the legendary capoeirista and fighter for justice known as Besouro Manganga had a patuá, a stone amulet of protection. As long as he wore it and kept the proper state of mind, neither bullets nor knives could touch him. An enemy stole the patuá and managed to have Besouro killed.”

  “That sounds perfect!” said Lucas. “Where is the patuá?”

  “It has been lost since Besouro’s death in 1924,” she replied, smiling slyly at me.

  I took the hint, and Lucas, Gabriela, and I took what I hoped would be a quick side trip into the Valley of Lost Things to find the legendary patuá. From the vortex we emerged in what Gabriela told us was the Brazilian state of Bahia, where Besouro had lived. It didn’t take me long to sense the patuá, which someone had evidently thrown into the Bay of All Saints to keep Besouro from finding it. Gabriela helped out by giving me the ability to breathe underwater, and I made myself invisible to avoid the attention of sailors and tourists in that busy area. I had to do some digging in the sand at the bottom of the bay, since the patuá had been there for decades, but eventually I unearthed it, returned to the surface, and rejoined Lucas and Gabriela. Then we were back in Arianrhod’s tower almost at once. Lucas tried on the amulet and meditated a little, and the guys helped him test it. The patuá did not disappoint him. It might not shield him from something like Poseidon’s trident, but even magic swords bounced off. Whether it would stand up to prolonged attack by magic weapons was difficult to say, but we didn’t fully understand how much punishment dragon armor could take, either. He was as protected as we could make him for right now.

  The weapon problem was taken care of by a little gear swapping. Alex had both the sword of chaos and Harpe, so he passed the second one to Michael and practiced with him a little. In the short term, Michael wasn’t going to be a swordsman, but Harpe could cut pretty much anything, so if he hit anywhere on an opponent, he could probably do some damage. Again, it was the best we could do on short notice. Anyway, I wasn’t about to put the sword of chaos into his inexperienced hands.

  The one disappointment I had was that the moonstone ring that made it possible to enter and Search the Valley of Lost Things melted away into nothingness just as we finished organizing our equipment.

  “I didn’t realize that had an expiration date.”

  “I have heard navigating the Valley requires great energy,” said Arianrhod. “Especially in a weakened condition, Phul probably gave you as much as he could. All that treasure hunting, and then your recent trip to Brazil, must have used it up. That may be for the best.”

  I must have looked puzzled, because she added, “There really are some lost things that need to stay lost,” an idea very similar to something Phul had said. At this point I had little choice but to accept it. I couldn’t help wishing I could make a few more trips, though (planned ones, not responses to immediate emergencies).

  Aside from that unexpected loss, we were as ready as we were going to be. I couldn’t quite get to feeling happy, but at least I felt less anxious. We still had our share of problems, but now we had a fighting chance to solve them—or so I hoped, anyway.

  Chapter 18: Tartarus Tangle (Eva)

  I doubted we were exactly on the imperator’s list of favorite people right now, so having to cross through the Land of the Shades to get to Tartarus would not have been my first choice—or my hundredth. I understood what Tal was saying about the element of surprise and about not having any way to get into Tartarus through the Underworld without breaking our tynged with Hades. That didn’t mean I had to like the situation.

  Tal had adjusted our eyes to see in the dark again, but even dark vision relies on differences among different kinds of objects. The Land of the Shades was basically black on black: a lightless wilderness inhabited by beings indistinguishable from the scenery. At least we could see one another, which is the only way we could stay together. Knowing the shadow assassins were watching me and being unable to see them was just plain creepy. I imagined great hordes of them focused exclusively on us. Imagining is always worse than knowing.

  Fortunately, the walk through that realm was short. Umbra didn’t need to walk us across the whole length of the place to find a shadow through which she could shift us into Tartarus.

  Unfortunately, Tartarus wasn’t much better, sort of like a vast, bottomless pit, except that there was no one to be offended if we used light, so Tal and Magnus set up a gentle glow so those of us without magical senses could have a rough idea of where we were.

  There was a surface like a cave floor underneath us, but if there were walls, they were too distant to see. The only variation in this bleak landscape were mounds arching up from the floor, black like obsidian, and shiny, like rocks someone had collected and polished lovingly.

  “Any guards?” asked Shar, looking around suspiciously.

  “The way in is guarded,” said Alex, “but there would have been no reason to put guards in this area. Everyone assumed the entry gate was the only way to get here.”

  “I’m also not sensing any magic that would function like an alarm,” said Magnus. “There is a lot of magic in those big stones, though.”

  “They have to be the equivalent of cells, right?” asked Tal. “That’s where we’ll find the Olympians.”

  “But in which ones?” asked Shar. “There are hundreds of them. We don’t want to break out the wrong…beings.”

  “Magnus, Gabriela, let’s pool our psychic energies and see what we can sense,” suggested Tal. “There don’t seem to be barred windows or anything to look through, but maybe we can feel their presence.”

  “Wait!” said Alex. “No need to waste the energy. The stones have writing on them.”

  I don’t know how he noticed that, but as soon as I got close enough to one, I could see he was right: each stone had a Greek inscription.

  That made our job easier, but not as much as we would have liked. Alex told us Tartarus was reserved for the worst offenders against the order of Olympus, ones with godlike power, but the myths would have led us to expect just a few, not the hundreds spread across what looked like acres.

  “I guess there must have been a lot of rebellions over the centuries,” said Alex. “From what we saw the first time we visited, even the human population has a lot of Olympian blood, and it stands to reason the former gods must have had many pure-blooded Olympian children, too. A lot of them may have turned evil.”

  We walked for hours and checked so many cells I lost count. Most of them had unfamiliar names on them, so we left them alone. Tal tried scanning for the unique energy of some of the Olympians, but he sensed nothing.

  “It stands to reason their power would need to be contained,” he said. “That must be why I can’t sense them through the cell walls.”

  “I think we have to address the centaur in the room,” said Magnus. “What happens if they aren’t here?”

  “Where else would Hecate put them?” asked Stan. “Isn’t this the most secure place she has?”

  “She has to have been keeping Zeus, Hera, and Demeter somewhere else, at least to begin with,” Alex pointed out. “Had they been imprisoned
in Tartarus, Hades would have to have known about it.”

  “I suppose it’s possible they are somewhere else, but we won’t know that until we search the whole place,” said Tal, looking around. “We can’t risk giving up too soon.”

  We kept trudging forward because Tal wanted us to, but Magnus’s words weighed heavily upon us. If the friendly Olympians were in fact imprisoned somewhere else, we had no idea where. I didn’t know us much as Tal or Magnus about magic, but even I knew enough to realize we had no chance of winning back Olympus without some high-powered help.

  Just when I felt my morale hitting the basement, we found a very large stone, really a massive boulder, that Alex told us was where the newly captured Olympians were being held.

  There was a door on one side, but it was only barely visible, as if it had grown out of the rock.

  “This looks like stone, but it’s adamantine,” said Alex.

  “That’s Greek for ‘hard to break,’” said Magnus. I could tell from his expression he was kidding.

  “Try impossible—at least by normal means,” said Alex. “Fortunately, we have some abnormal ones.”

  Having heard the stories about the fight with Hades in the Underworld, I knew the guys had gotten good results against him by hitting him with Zom and David’s sword (when wielded by Stan in David mode) at the same time. Unfortunately, what worked on the former ruler of the place did not work on the cell door. The combined hit caused a loud ringing sound and a shower of green-and-white sparks, but it made no visible difference in the door.

  “Zom alone has always worked on magic doors before,” said Shar, looking at the blade as if it were a knockoff and not the real thing.

  Tal put his hands on the door and closed his eyes. After a short time he opened them and said, “The swords had an effect. There are very small fractures, just not visible to the naked eye.”

  “So if we kept hitting it, we’d eventually break it?” asked Stan.

  “I think so,” replied Tal. “The adamantine is tough, but it doesn’t seem to be regenerating. The damage would be cumulative. That approach is going to take a long time, though.”