When she came to the Adyton chamber at the heart of the temple, it was nearly night-dark. Marble likenesses of Poseidon, Zeus, the Fates and Apollo himself glared down at her, uplit by the eldritch gloom of the sconces. She almost flinched when she saw two “statues,” which were in fact more of the dark-garbed sentries. But more disconcerting was the slumped figure that sat on a three-legged stool in the center of the chamber. She was draped in a long white gown and strings of beads, her wreathed head lolling, lost in the pillars of scented smoke rising from glowing pots set on the tiled floor around her.
Kassandra peered at the Oracle, hatred building in her heart. Perhaps there would be no answers here, but there could be resolution of some sort: for the guards had been foolish enough to let her enter with her weapons. Now the snake-woman would pay for the cursed words that had shattered her life and . . . Her spiraling thoughts ground to a halt when the woman’s head rolled back. She was young—years younger than Kassandra—not an old hag as tradition dictated. She actually reminded her of an adolescent Phoibe. The hatred ebbed quickly. The Oracle who had dictated the bleak demands all those years ago was now long dead, it seemed.
“Enter into the light of Apollo, the light that illuminates shadow.” The girl sighed throatily, gesturing to the gentle glow of the burning pots. “What do you wish to know, traveler?”
“I . . . I seek the truth about my past. Perhaps my future too. I want to know of my parents, their whereabouts.”
The Oracle’s swaying head slowed a little. “Who asks Apollo for such wisdom?” she boomed, belying her small frame.
Kassandra stared at the seeress, knowing how foolish this was, sickened that she would have no answers nor even the satisfaction of revenge now. “I was born in the land of Sparta. My brother was cast from the mountains and so was I. Now, I have nobody, nothing.”
The Oracle stopped swaying altogether. Her eyes rolled up to meet Kassandra’s. She seemed different now, as if wakened. But when her eyes flicked toward the nearest guard, she lapsed back into that trancelike state, head swaying again. “You will find your parents . . . on the other side of the river.”
Kassandra’s senses sharpened. Her mind spun with what little knowledge she had of this region. The River Pleistos ran near here. Her parents were there?
“When your days draw to an end and you pay Charon the Ferryman to cross the Styx, you will be reunited with them on the far banks.”
Kassandra’s heart plunged as hope crumbled away. A silence passed. The guards shuffled impatiently. “Your time is up,” one grunted.
“I bid you farewell,” she said to the Oracle.
Just as she turned to leave, a shout echoed through the temple from outside, and the sound of a smashing vase.
“Trouble!” a guard’s voice grunted from out there. The two in here looked at one another, then rushed outside.
Kassandra made to follow them, when a voice stopped her.
“Wait,” the Oracle whispered.
For a moment Kassandra did not recognize her voice—weak, frightened, shorn of the affected and theatrical tones of a moment ago.
“They hunt the child who fell from the mountain . . .” the Oracle whispered.
Kassandra’s flesh crept. She stepped back toward the Oracle. “What did you say?”
“The Cult hunt the she-child who fell.”
Kassandra’s mind reeled. She grabbed the Oracle by the shoulders and shook her. “Who, where are they?” She saw the tears in the girl’s eyes now, and realized all was very much not well here. She let go of the girl’s shoulders. “I can help you if you help me.”
“I cannot be helped,” the Oracle croaked. Her eyes grew moon-wide as the clatter of footsteps sounded behind Kassandra. “They’re coming back. You must go.”
“You, get back,” one of the guards snarled.
“The Cult plan to meet tonight, in the Cave of Gaia,” the Oracle started as Kassandra backed away a half step. “There, you may find the answers you seek.”
“I said get back!” One guard grabbed Kassandra’s shoulders and hauled her away toward the entrance. She did not struggle. Another seized the Oracle and dragged her into the shadows at the rear of the temple.
Kassandra winced as the stark light of day fell upon her again. “The Oracle is finished for today,” the guard boomed over her head as he shoved her outside. A great groan arose from the queue. As the noise settled, Kassandra heard a rhythmic yelp, and spotted the tall, horn-voiced man who had mocked Barnabas in the queue. He was now pinned to the ground by one temple guard while a second tirelessly volleyed him in the groin over and over. The poor fellow’s eyes and tongue were bulging from his face.
“Burst the other one and then we’re done.” The guard pinning the man chuckled evilly.
“Seems the clumsy oaf smashed a votive amphora,” Herodotos said, sidling up next to Kassandra and guiding her away. “Tsk!” he added with a mischievous glint in his eye.
She looked from Herodotos to the pinned man to the smashed amphora and back to Herodotos again. “He . . . no, you—”
“Yes, yes, keep your voice down. I am allowed the occasional lie—I am no Persian, after all. I smashed that vase because I thought it might give you a chance to talk plainly with the Oracle.”
She noticed how he glanced at her spear again, and once again she covered it up with her cloak.
“The priests and protectors in there have a reputation for interfering and chanting and generally getting in the way,” Herodotos continued.
Kassandra’s brow furrowed. “Priests, protectors? There were none. Just those beetle-black temple guards.”
Herodotos’s face drained of color. “Go on.”
“The Oracle spoke mindless, trite platitudes and vague possibilities until the guards left to deal with the commotion, and then she began to tell me things that seemed significant.”
“Began?”
“Before she was finished, the guards came back in and hauled her from her stool, dragged her like a slave into the temple’s recesses.”
Herodotos’s face sagged until he looked more like a man of seventy summers. “Then the rumors are true. They do have the Oracle under their control.”
“They?” she asked.
“I told you I came here in search of truth,” he said. “Well, I have found it, and it is a black truth. Do you not understand? All Hellas pivots around the word of the Oracle. Sparta and its hundreds of allies in the Peloponnesian League. Athens and its many supporters in the Delian League. Every single neutral city-state. All do as the Oracle advises. War might rage between the two great powers, but if they are in control of the Oracle, then they will be the victors. Imagine what power they will have if they control the words that come from her mouth.”
“Herodotos, for the favor of all the Gods, please tell me who they are?”
His eyes darted to check nobody was too close. “The Cult of Kosmos,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper.
A shiver shot up her spine as if stroked by cold, dead hands. “The Cult.”
“They are like shadows. Nobody knows who the members are, for they meet in secret and wear masks to protect their identities. I have only seen a Cultist once, and on a dark night. In his mask he looked like a fiend and—” His face fell agape when he saw Kassandra pulling from her leather bag Elpenor’s wicked-looking wooden theater mask, the nose hooked and sharp, the eyebrows bent in a scowl, the mouth locked in a sinister grin. “Apollo walks!” he hissed, shoving the mask back into her bag and glancing around once again. “Where did you get that?”
“I think I have already met a Cultist,” Kassandra said. “And I need to meet the others. The Oracle told me only fragments of information.” Her mind spun, then she clicked her fingers. “She said the Cult are to meet tonight, in the Cave of Gaia. Where in all Hellas is that?”
Herodotos looped an
arm through hers and steered her away from the temple, down the steps and along the long, winding path leading from the plateau. “The Cave of Gaia lies somewhere underneath this very temple mount—which is riddled with a honeycomb of natural caverns, vast and mazelike.”
“Then I will come back here tonight,” Kassandra said, seeing the dozen or more small, dark openings in the mountainside. “All I ask is that you keep watch for me while I’m in there.”
Herodotos sighed deeply. “Very well. But you must promise me one thing: that you will come out of there alive. I like you, Child of Nowhere. Do not make me regret this.”
SIX
Crickets sang in the cool night air. Somewhere in the wooded parts of the high valley, bears grumbled and boars foraged. The valley floor was nearly deserted. The many thousands of pilgrims had dispersed and just a few remained, camped and singing gently around fires. Up on the temple mount, slaves and attendants shuffled around quietly, cleaning, sweeping and tidying in the torchlight. Dozens of black-armored guards strode to and fro watchfully.
Kassandra levered herself up onto a small shelf of rock, and then threw a rope down to Herodotos. The man belied earlier complaints about having a bad back to pick his way up onto the shelf beside her. They turned to the low cave opening in the rock face. Inside was just pure blackness. “This has to be a way in,” she mused, then twisted to Herodotos. “Don’t you think?”
The historian shrugged. “It is a honeycomb in there, Misthios, that is all I know.”
She weighed the leather bag holding robe and mask. If this tunnel did lead to the Cave of Gaia then she would have to wear them in there if she was to remain anonymous. Her bow, spear and bracers would be too conspicuous, she realized. Grudgingly, she peeled off her bracers and belt and slid her bow and quiver from her back, feeling naked without the equipment. Herodotos took her bow without fuss, but when she gave him her spear, he gulped, refused to touch it—holding out a leather bag of his own instead and having her drop it in.
She said nothing of it. “If I’m not back by dawn, you leave, yes? And tell Barnabas to leave too, and to forget about me.”
Herodotos nodded and Kassandra ducked to scuttle inside the tunnel. It was a cramped space and so she bent double, but even then, hanging stalactites scraped her back. It became warren-like after a while, forcing her to worm along on her belly. No way of turning back. Very little air. For a moment, she imagined Herodotos gaily strolling back down to Kirrha to sell her spear while she wriggled into a dark grave. Then, without warning, the floor fell away and she slid down a pile of scree. She found herself at the edges of a bubble of orange light, and heard the guttural echoes of many strong and confident voices. Shadows moved, somewhere beyond a natural column of stone. She hurriedly threw Elpenor’s embroidered cloak around her shoulders and slid the mask on, just as a pair of figures walked past. It looked as if they were floating, thanks to their trailing robes.
“Do not tarry over there,” said one, his mask—exactly like Elpenor’s—staring foully at her. “The artifact has been brought out. Hurry, or you will miss your chance to hold it.”
“I would not miss this chance for anything,” she replied, her voice muffled behind the identical mask’s mouth slit.
The pair glided on past her, chattering about hiring regiments and placing mercenaries for the work that lay ahead. She let them walk on for a while, before following them through a stony corridor. Torches crackled and spat and every so often she passed chambers that had been hewn from the bedrock. Some bore beds or furniture, but all were empty. Until, from the doorway of one just ahead, a puff of steam spat out, along with a scream that twisted her stomach into a tight knot. She slowed, certain she did not want to see what had caused the scream, but as she edged past she could not help but look. A brute of a Cultist was in there, his breathing heavy behind his mask, his shoulders bulging from his sleeveless robe and his arms thick with black, curly hairs. In one meaty hand, he held a poker over a crackling brazier until it glowed white at the tip. Before him was a withered, broken wretch tied to a vertical frame, head hanging forward, a patter of fluid dripping from his hidden face. “We hired you to kill Phidias of Athens,” drawled the masked brute. “We paid you well. You botched your work and nearly ended up in the stinking Athenian jail for it. Well you would have been better off in there, you fool,” he said, grabbing the tied man’s hair and yanking his head back to reveal a face half-ruined: the right side a mess of bloody runnels, the eye socket a gaping black hole. The brute lifted the poker and moved the white tip toward the man’s remaining eye. The man’s eye bulged and darted as if trying to escape his head, but there was no escape. With a sizzle and a stink of charring flesh and then a pop, the eye burst in a splash of white liquid and blood that sprayed across the room and showered Kassandra in the doorway. It took everything she had not to flinch or retch. The masked brute turned to see her and shouted over the tortured man’s screams: “Apologies. I will saw off this bastard’s head and then I will have one of my slaves clean your robes.”
“Very good,” she said, “but be quick—the artifact is on show.”
Pleased with her composure, she shuffled on down the rocky corridor until it opened up into a wide chamber, the stone floor polished and etched with symbols. A few Cultists stood here, all with those identical and wicked-looking theater masks, deep in discussion. She dared not break up a group of them. But there, kneeling alone before a stone altar at one end of the room, was one with long black hair and a distinctive white streak.
Approaching and watching, she nearly leapt from her skin when a voice spoke behind her shoulder. “Do not be shy: pray with Chrysis,” said the beanpole masked man. “She does not mind company.”
Kassandra nodded her thanks then mimicked the gestures of the one called Chrysis, kneeling and bowing at the altar beside her, hands clasped across her chest.
“Ah, yes, you feel it too?” the female Cultist said huskily from behind the mask. “All we have achieved pleases the Gods. We have won so much control. Prayer is tradition. Tradition is control. The masses bow their heads in prayer to a higher power . . . and we are that higher power. Does it not make you feel proud?”
As Chrysis spoke, the rasping of a saw and a final wet scream sounded from the brute’s torture chamber, some way behind, followed by the dull thud of an object landing on the ground.
“My pride flows over,” Kassandra purred, finding that the only way she could hope to be believed was to act as they did, to pretend the horrors going on in the torture chamber were not real.
“The Oracle is our key to greatness,” Chrysis continued. “For generations now, her voice has been ours.”
The words pealed through Kassandra’s mind like the song of a bell struck with a hammer. The order to throw my baby brother from the mountain came not from the seeress . . . but from these bastards.
“Through her we have gained so much,” Chrysis continued. “Soon, we will control all Hellas. Let the two sides have their war, while we rule them both. Yet the Oracle is nothing compared to”—she paused, shuddering as if touched by the hand of an invisible lover—“the artifact.”
“The sacred artifact,” said three masked passersby who had overheard.
“The sacred artifact,” chanted Kassandra dutifully.
“And our champion will be here soon,” said another, “the one who can unlock its power—to see past, present, future.”
“It will be a fine moment,” Kassandra said, then rose and walked slowly across the room, trying to discern some sense from the seven or eight chattering voices. Two were bickering passionately, a man and a woman. She picked up their names quickly: Silanos and Diona.
“Forget the mother,” Diona said, swiping a hand through the air. “She is old and useless now.”
“But I almost have the mother in my grasp,” scoffed Silanos. “It must be her we focus on.”
Silanos’s mask swung
to pin Kassandra. “You. What do you think? Should we hunt for our champion’s mother or his sister?”
Kassandra’s throat turned as dry as sand. “I . . .” she croaked.
“Pah, the answer is neither,” said a third, somewhere behind her. “Both are elusive. Perikles of Athens is not—he wanders around wearing his plumed helm like an archer’s target. Let us cut out his heart and cripple the Athenians and their chaotic and orderless ways. Or perhaps install a leader in his place who more suits our aims.”
These three now began arguing among themselves, and Kassandra slipped away.
On she went, passing through a doorway that led into an antechamber. The rock of the far wall had been hewn into a glorious and terrifying form of a hooded horned snake, rising from the ground, mouth open and fangs bared, its niche-eyes picked out by two glowing candles. A masked man stood before it. Kassandra edged closer to see what he was doing, then trapped a gasp as she saw him lifting his wrists to the fangs and running the skin across the tips. Blood coated his skin and dribbled into a stone trough under the snake’s mouth and the man tilted his head back and gasped in pleasure. His euphoria slid away and his head rolled around toward Kassandra. His eyes—one dark and the other misted—darted behind the mask’s eyeholes, searching her. “Do not let the fangs grow dry, go on, give offering,” he said stepping back, bandaging the two jagged cuts on his wrists.
“Not today,” she said firmly.
“Go on, and give thanks that it is only blood we must offer. Deimos will be demanding we cut off our hands next. The sooner we capture the rest of his bloodline, the sooner we can dispense with our champion and his chaotic, crude ways.”
Kassandra’s silence seemed to evoke suspicion.
“You had best not be thinking of telling Deimos,” he said, stepping closer. “If he knew, he would turn completely to his animal side. He is a living weapon. A fiery steed that cannot be tamed. Power and chaos in one body. He is everything the Cult needs and everything it stands against. If he knew we were about to capture his mother . . .” He trailed off with a dark chuckle. “Well, let’s just say I do not wish for my nightmares to come to life.”
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