Apollo stood. “I don’t—I don’t know.”
Tracy wondered which question he was answering. “Something happened. Don’t tell me all that light and stuff was nothing. Where is he?” she demanded, suddenly furious that she might have thrown away their chance entirely and screwed everything up.
Apollo paced the temple, eyes glowing as he looked about. “You may not like the answer. It’s entirely possible that the Fates did actually mean for you to be the one to make the sacrifice. Using my blood may have had unintended consequences.”
“Don’t tell me we pulled up some other dead god or something.”
“No, I don’t think—” Apollo stopped in his tracks. “Uh-oh.”
“No saying ‘uh-oh’ without immediate elaboration! What’s going—?”
Three rifts appeared around them as reality parted like an opening gate to deposit three new figures into their midst. Tracy recognized two of them from pictures. The third she’d met personally a few days before. Ares, Hades, and Hermes now stood with them in the temple. Hermes held captive by the arm a decidedly unhappy Thalia.
“—on?” Tracy finished.
“The hour of time we had before full gods could get near the temple would seem to be up.”
“Yeah,” Tracy sighed, “I figured.”
Hades raised both arms to send a pulse of godly power skyward. What remained of the force field crackled into sight and then burned off like a dissipating fog. The Erinyes swooped down into the temple with all of their usual shrieking charm.
“Hello, everyone,” said Hermes. “Nice day for upsetting the balance of the cosmos, isn’t it? You’ve been busy.”
Precisely three moments prior (give or take a few)—in a rented flat just outside of London that served as the ad hoc English headquarters of the Neo-Christian Movement of America—Richard Kindgood, Gabriel Stout, and a small panel of experts sat around a humble wooden table. At the table’s center waited the nine cans stolen from Sidgwick’s Antique Shoppe in Swindon.
The theft had gone remarkably well. The shop’s single alarm was no match for a highly trained group of Ninjas Templar (nor too much of a problem for the moderately trained group they’d actually sent), and no other security measures were to be found. In and out, the entire operation took eleven minutes and six seconds. Kindgood had no idea that all seven ninjas would have met their doom at the claws of the Orthlaelapsian wraith had they shown up a day earlier, but as they didn’t, it’s hardly even worth mentioning.
The cans themselves were made of brass, each perfectly sized for soup containment, and covered in ornately carved pictures and distinctly un-American lettering. Phineas Rand, the NCMA’s premiere mythological scholar, was busy translating the script while they all waited. He had assured them that the lettering was an obscure variant of ancient Greek. The confiscated parchment of Brittany Simons (a.k.a. Wynter Nightsorrow, a.k.a. the young woman from Chapters Four, Seven, Twenty, and briefly alluded to in Thirty) alluded that this lettering would detail the “great and powerful secret ritual” required to open the cans. Once known, the NCMA would have a weapon with which to destroy the Olympian false gods, and all would be right with the world.
Rand checked something in a notebook, made another few marks with his pencil, and actually laughed. “The translation is finished.”
All around the table leaned forward, instantly energized.
“Well?” Kindgood asked. “What must we do?”
“How do we open the cans?” added Stout.
Rand chuckled. “In hindsight, it seems rather obvious. You, ah, have my fee?”
“We do this for the glory of God, Professor Rand!” Stout declared.
Kindgood restrained his subordinate’s outburst with an upheld hand. “Certainly the money has been transferred. Rest assured.”
“All right, then. The means of opening each can, as inscribed . . .”
“Yes?”
“I’ve checked this against each of them, you understand.”
“All right?” Everyone leaned farther forward.
“Beyond being in another language, it was also in code, you realize. I had to use a cipher from the Simons parchment to decode it.”
Kindgood acquiesced with a hurried nod. “You did say as much.” They now leaned as far forward as the table would physically permit.
“I just want to be clear. Even after decoding, I verified it, cross- checked it, made sure each one said the same thing, and . . .”
“And?” Kindgood was on his feet by then without realizing it. Stout followed suit and banged his hip on the table’s edge. “For God’s sake, don’t keep us waiting, man!”
“It reads . . .”
Rand paused for emphasis. Had he been writing a book, he probably would have tried ending the chapter at that moment. He swallowed.
Kindgood swallowed.
Stout held his breath.
The others around the table swallowed and held their breath, just to be safe.
Inquisitive minds may be curious as to why, if these cans somehow contained the imprisoned Titans—or at the very least the means to release them—they were lying around in an antique shop, guarded or no, instead of being shut away safely in the gods’ halls on Olympus, where one would assume they ought to be. These inquisitive minds have answered their own question.
After all, why hide something where everyone expects it to be? The world is a large place. If one wishes to hide a needle in a haystack (no one ever does, but one thing at a time here), one does not lay the needle on top of the pile with a signpost pointing to it. (Nor does one, as some myths of the Titans tell, guard it with hundred-handed giants. Hundred-handed giants are as easy to spot as they are costly to feed, and in any case, the myth of such guardians alone is deterrent enough.)
That said, Zeus did keep the cans close to him for quite some time until, perhaps inevitably, he gifted them to a young woman in order to impress her into bed. The seduction was indiscreet, and the poor woman was trampled to death in a cattle stampede soon after. (Hera made sure to have an alibi, but no one could miss her retributive signature.) The woman’s family then sold the cans, and they drifted throughout the world, their true nature unknown. The gods dispatched Hades’s Orthlaelapsian wraith to shepherd them through their anonymous journey, and the cans were believed to be secure.
Though some Olympians initially complained about the situation, Zeus insisted it was the safest course. They need not worry about the cans being opened, he told them. Even in the event that someone found them (unlikely, he counseled), recognized that they could be opened (highly unlikely, he insisted), and somehow evaded the unerring guardianship of the wraith (practically unthinkable, Hades claimed)― the cans were constructed in such a way that none but the wisest, most patient, most intellectually capable people could comprehend the highly arcane method of doing so. All Olympians eventually agreed that anyone that wise would know how foolhardy it would be to open the cans at all, and they finally stopped bothering about it in order to observe the Renaissance.
Now that those inquisitive types are placated, we return you to the London flat.
Rand checked his notes one more time. Calmly, he read: “‘Push down . . . and turn.’”
Silence took the room, broken finally by Kindgood. “Push down and turn?” he demanded. “That’s it? We paid you how much?”
“We do this for the glory of God!” Stout declared again.
Rand shrugged. “As I said, I’ve double-checked it. I’m certain that’s what it says on each one. There’s nothing more.”
Kindgood spared a few moments to take the temperature of the room. None of his subordinates appeared willing to take lead. “All right, then, if you’re certain. If it is to be done, best that it be done quickly.” With no further preamble, he snatched up the top can, pushed down the lid, and turned.
It didn’t budge.
Kindgood shrugged, pushed down again, and turned the other way. Again, nothing. He strained, he twisted, he shook and
forced the lid, he wrenched it, he gripped it until his hands were slick with sweat and slipped across the brass. He tried turning it again in both directions, to no avail.
Frowning at last, he tossed it to Stout. The man possessed the forearms of a professional baseball player, after all. “You try.”
“For the glory of God,” Stout answered. “But you loosened it for me, sir.”
“Just shut up and try it.”
Stout’s superior strength proved no more helpful. Frustrating, thought Kindgood, but at least his pride was salvaged.
The group tried further methods. Each of the seven Ninjas Templar who’d captured the cans took a chance, with no success. Special can openers, lock-wrenches, vice grips—all failed to budge the lids in any fashion at all. It was after hours of trying―when frustrations were high and talk was bandied about that perhaps Rand didn’t deserve his fee after all―that Rand offered another suggestion.
“It’s entirely possible the cans may only be opened in the same land in which they were sealed,” he said. “Bear in mind that my specialty is language, but from what I’ve learned of these sorts of things in the past year since the gods came back—”
“False gods!” Stout corrected.
“—it’s a fair assumption. You may have more luck if you take the cans to Greece.”
Kindgood pondered this a moment. “All right. We go to Greece.”
He prayed to God they spoke English there.
PART FOUR:
THE STYX HITS THE FAN
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
“Zeus was god of law, of justice, and of lightning. He was not merely the king of the gods but also the master of the sky and an unrepentant philanderer. As Zeus is now dead (a fact checked numerous times before we included that ‘unrepentant philanderer’ bit), mentioning him at all in the temples of other Olympians—Poseidon’s and Hera’s especially—is exceedingly unwise, and that’s pretty much all the time we’ll waste on him here.”
—A Mortal’s Guidebook to the Olympians’ Return
THE NIGHT WAS HUMID.
That was his first thought. It was also his only thought for another ten minutes. Immortal or not, when one wakes up after being dead for the greater part of a year, a little disorientation is natural. Of course, being dead when one is supposedly immortal isn’t natural at all, but neither is being immortal in the first place, so there’s no point in getting priggish.
After a while Zeus became aware of lying on his back in a field of tall grass located—judging by the visible stars—somewhere in the northern hemisphere. He struggled to sit up and found he could not. Yet he could feel strength begin to stir in his limbs, as surely as memory trickled its way into his thoughts.
The last thing he remembered was . . . what? A present left unopened, Aphrodite, an amulet that both annoyed him and gave him hope; all of these images floated through his mind, trying to sort themselves out and not having much luck. Something was important, but Zeus couldn’t put his mighty finger on it. (At least his fingers were still mighty. Somehow that comforted him.) He concentrated and willed it all back. He’d been watching someone on the big screen, hadn’t he? Someone hiking . . .
Tracy!
Zeus lunged to his feet as the memories flooded in. The amulet, the god-killer, Tracy . . . and the two millennia-old prophecy he was now certain he’d misinterpreted. He cursed his mistakes even as he praised his foresight in preparing the amulet. And he was alive! Tracy— his child, his champion, his ace in the hole—must have completed the ritual to return him to life, and with incomplete instructions on top of it all!
Pride swelled him to bursting. If he’d known daughters were so useful, he’d have sired more than one in the past four thousand years.
And then there was the other side of that, the reason he’d needed Tracy at all: Someone had dared to murder him! Him! Their rightful king, perhaps even their father!
Fury exploded through him at the very thought. Wrath tore its way out in a bellow. Lightning erupted from his palms, his mouth, his eyes―scorching the entire field, blasting it apart in showers of soil, and streaking up to the sky in barely controlled arcs. In his rage Zeus unleashed an electrical storm of such power that it would have driven Nikola Tesla mad, were he able to somehow get close enough to witness the display and survive (a hypothetical situation perhaps rendered moot by the fact that Tesla was already dead, but there it is).
By the time Zeus regained control, he’d carved a crater out of the field. The god’s hands remained clenched as he surveyed the destruction, his breath still ragged. Cathartic as such violence was, it might well attract attention. He could ill afford to be so foolish. The others might come to investigate and force a confrontation before he was ready.
“So now must I hide?” he grumbled to himself. The idea stung nearly as much as the blow of the god-killing weapon itself. Yet Zeus, no blustering fool like Ares, was smart enough to realize the truth of the situation.
“Murderers!” he screamed in an aftershock, unable to stop himself. He seized an unearthed boulder, poured his surplus rage into chucking it up to the stars, and then, somewhat more calm for it, took to the sky himself.
In hindsight Zeus hoped he’d given the boulder enough of a kick to get it out of the atmosphere; if it wound up landing on some innocent mortal somewhere, he’d feel rather bad about it. Was there time to track it and see? Should he even bother? Should he try to get his money back from those anger management classes he secretly took in the nineties?
Zeus pushed the questions aside. There were far more important things to deal with. He’d been dead for more than nine months; that much he could sense. What transpired in that time? Who stole the god-killer and used it on him? Who would stand with him now that he’d returned? And a more immediate concern: why in the dryads’ armpits had he woken up in a field instead of one of his temples, (up) on an altar?
Come to think of it, Tracy ought to be around too. Or so he thought, anyway.
It was his first resurrection, after all.
On the plus side, while he did not wake in his own temple, neither did he wake surrounded by murderous fellows who might seek to instantly recommit their original crime. Their absence also indicated that they didn’t know where he’d appeared. Or, he supposed, they were unaware how vulnerable he would be immediately following his resurrection. Whatever the reason, now safely away from the immediate area, he had time to get his bearings.
He knew the other gods couldn’t locate him by the usual means. A god could be sensed by only those of an elder generation, and after the Titan War, none of Zeus’s elders were a factor. For the moment, Zeus was both back and hidden. Things had actually worked out for the best. All the same, Zeus hoped his resurrection was at least felt by the others.
He had no experience in such things, of course. No Olympian god before him had been murdered and reborn, but it stood to reason that the other Olympians should sense such a rebirth. Besides, he was the almighty Zeus! That they could be ignorant of his return offended his ego. They’d darned well better know! Let them tremble!
When he first learned someone had stolen the UnMaking Nexus, that cursed god-killer, he’d planned to find the culprit, learn his or her intentions, and inflict punishment accordingly. Creating the amulet had served only as a contingency plan should his suspicions prove true and the worst happened. Now that it had, any punishment he might have given before his death paled in comparison to what the murder (murderers?) would suffer. He would inflict such terrible justice upon them that the Titans themselves, imprisoned in their dark nothingness, would hear of the murderers’ fate and thank their defeated hides that they’d been spared his full fury!
All right, calm down, you godly stud. Intelligence-gathering first, wrath later.
His first order of business was to do some searching of his own. In his flight from the field, he’d passed into mountains. Recognizing the slate mines, the lakes, and the single rack-and-pinion railway that identified the highest peak as
Mt. Snowdon in Wales, Zeus landed on the windy mountaintop to choose his next move. Eyes closed, he stretched out his senses and took stock of the locations of every greater Olympian within his power to feel. Aphrodite, his favorite: the Great Hall on Olympus. Ares: also in the Great Hall on Olympus. No surprises yet. Artemis, Athena, Hephaestus: all also on Olympus. No doubt there was some sort of meeting going on about his rebirth, but he kept going.
Dionysus: top floor of the Dionysian Hotel and Casino?
What the Styx? He made a mental note to look into that later. Continuing, he found Hermes also on Olympus. As for Apollo . . .
Zeus opened his eyes, frowned, and tried again. Once more he came up empty. Where was Apollo? Two possibilities came to mind immediately: either the rest of the Dodekatheon found Apollo guilty of Zeus’s murder and banished him to Tartarus (or simply turned the god-killer on him); or Apollo stood up for justice on Zeus’s side and was struck down himself by Zeus’s enemies. Zeus forced himself to not jump to conclusions. In any case he wasn’t going to learn much sitting alone on a mountaintop.
Again he took to the sky.
For the most part, catching up with the mortal perspective on the past nine months proved elementary. A combination of mortal interrogation, Internet searches, and perusal of a book called A Mortal’s Guidebook to the Olympians’ Return brought him up to date. He snooped around the White House, 10 Downing Street, the Kremlin, and (for old times’ sake) the office of the Prime Minister of Greece to see how governments had reacted (predictably, as it turned out).
The most difficult part of it all was keeping his anger in check at everything he learned: Ares had taken credit for the murder. The claim was suspect, knowing Ares, yet deserving of wrath for its sheer boldness. Poseidon had seized his throne in a traitorous instant—Zeus blasted another couple of craters after reading that—and Hera had the nerve to marry him after all of two hours of mourning! (Two hours? Was he not Zeus the Unforgettable? That the faithless harpy was Poseidon’s problem now was scant succor to his ego.)
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