Winter of the Gods

by Jordanna Max Brodsky

  The Pater had also mentioned the “propitious” sites of the first two rituals. It seemed they’d been carefully chosen to reflect the victim’s domain. The God of the Underworld—and Wealth—died on Wall Street. That makes sense. The Rainbow Room held a less obvious connection until Theo remembered that 30 Rockefeller Plaza housed all the news studios for NBC and its affiliates. Fox News was just across the street. A cynic might see that as the site of “war mongering.” Another location might have a more obvious connection to soldiers—like the National Guard Armory on Lexington Avenue—but Theo suspected the sacrificial locations had another requirement: They had to be major New York landmarks. Why else would the Mithraists go to such lengths to perform secret rites in incredibly public locations? They must be drawing some extra mojo from the power of the site itself.

  The Pater hadn’t described the site for the Procession of the Heliodromus, the Sun-Runner, but he had implied that Apollo sought to “move the heavens on their axes.” What landmark location would have a connection to astronomy?

  It was suddenly so obvious he nearly groaned aloud. He patted his hip instinctively for his cell phone, ready to share his findings. But of course, his clothes and phone were gone, and there’d be no reception underground anyway.

  Good thing Flint had foreseen exactly that.

  The Miles had left Theo his glasses.

  He reached up to rub his eyes beneath the lenses, then removed his frames entirely as if to get better access. He had no doubt the Mithraists had cameras in the cell. He looked down at his frames, twisting them this way and that as if examining them for damage. He peered at them myopically until he found the tiny black dot that Flint had affixed to the inside of the left temple. He placed his thumbnail on it and tapped out a message, trying to look casual. He didn’t know Morse code, so he and Flint had settled on a simple cipher using the Greek alphabet. If the Mithraists happened to pick up his transmission, hopefully they’d be too obsessed with Latin to figure it out. He tapped sixteen times in a row to indicate the sixteenth letter of the alphabet, then eleven, one, thirteen: π λ α ν. So far, that only spelled out “plan.”

  He kept going. It took him fifteen minutes to tap out the whole phrase, and he was pretty sure he’d lost count a few times and probably sent the wrong letter entirely. Hopefully, Flint still had enough characters to transliterate it properly into English:

  Plan B. Call the cops. Planetarium. Tonight.

  Flint had assured him that the tiny device transmitted super low frequency waves that would pass through any walls or earth and be picked up by his own receiver. He constantly monitored seismic vibrations that traveled thousands of miles underground—something to do with his status as the Roman Vulcan, the God of Volcanoes—so hopefully he knew what he was doing.

  Theo considered telling Flint about Minh Loi—she could help them hide somewhere in the planetarium to make their ambush more effective. But considering how loath the astronomer had been to help Theo with his questions, he knew she’d never agree to assist in a break-in. Gabi, on the other hand, would have no such qualms. He added her name and number to his transmission, and then regretted it nearly instantly. Sure, as a Natural History employee, she knew her way around the planetarium, but if she insisted on sticking around herself (and knowing Gabi, she would), she could be in great danger. He added her to his mental picture—his best friend, black curls awry, staring wide-eyed at the Pater’s blade as it curved toward her heart.

  Theo buried his face in his hands, suddenly wishing the Pater would send him flashbacks of his past as he had for Selene and Paul. Anything would be better than his own visions of the future.

  Chapter 34

  INTERMISSIO: THE HYAENA

  The Hyaena knelt on the floor of the Templo, her eyes fixed on the sacred tauroctony before her. The meditation circled like a rosary. Eyes, mind, and soul in concert.

  First the Dog.

  “Let me be as obedient as a hound, leaping to his master’s will,” she murmured. Even as she looked upon the Dog’s marble form, her mind traced the trailing stars of the constellation Canis.

  Then the sculpted Scorpion and Snake.

  “Let me face death unafraid,” she prayed, “that I might be reborn.” She imagined their searing poison flooding her veins as she pictured the stars of Scorpius and Hydra.

  The Crow followed, with Corvus’s bright square: “Let his dark wings lift me high above this mortal world.”

  Next, the Bull and the starry horns of Taurus. Neck thrown back, ready and willing to accept the knife.

  “Let me not fear the sacrifice, for it is through death that life begins again.” This Age would end, as all Ages ended.

  Finally, she gazed upon the God Himself, His golden face so bright it brought tears to her eyes. “Mithras and not Mithras. Son and Sun. Ruler of the Cosmos, who brings the next Age into being. Let Him heal the world.”

  She finished the prayer and started again. Around and around, just as the heavens orbited the earth, just as the Ages spun on the wheel of time. A whirling vortex to suck her mind into emptiness that she might better contemplate the glory of the god she served.

  Seven times she completed the prayer, once for each rank in the Host. Then, a final silent prayer for herself—a rank never publicly acknowledged by the ancients, created for a woman who remained an anomaly in a society of men.

  Today, for the first time, another woman had stepped inside the Templo. Diana. The Hyaena had fought against the sudden sense of kinship that she felt with the Pretender. She could not allow her loyalties to waver, not now.

  Yet when Schultz had held Diana in his arms, his skin singed red from the flames, hers pale as snow from the water’s chill, the Hyaena had to look away. Their love burned bright and pure, like the face of Mithras himself. What sort of god would command his servants to sever such a bond?

  What sort of god would let the innocents on the Staten Island Ferry die? Or those killed in the riots the night of Mars’s sacrifice? Or Apollo’s young lover, who’d fought off the syndexioi until her nails were bloody before they put her down with a bullet to the brain? Yet they all must die. The Pater had ordained it, and the Pater was never wrong.

  It’s my doing, the Hyaena knew. My doing that the Praenuntius has helped us. My doing that we discovered Diana after all this time. She’d said she was proud of her role. No other syndexios had done so much to help the Host fulfill its destiny. And yet, the same thought kept circling through her brain, more insistent than the prayer: I bring death, not life. I bring hatred, not love. How can that be the work of the ever-merciful God?

  She pushed herself off the ground. Her knees cracked. She was not a young woman anymore, to spend hours prostrate before the tauroctony, losing herself in its glory. She looked again at Mithras, and her doubts dissolved in the warmth of His gaze.

  Tonight, she reminded herself as she left the Templo, the moon will set, and a woman will die. It is the will of the God. There can be no rebirth without destruction. When Diana turned her face to the Pater’s sickle, the Hyaena knew she would feel compelled to interfere—to save a woman she’d admired for so long, a woman who reminded her of all the best parts of herself. But she would not.

  She would stand aside and do nothing—even if it meant betraying her own heart. Because that, too, was the will of the God.

  Chapter 35

  KHAOS

  Selene had never thought much about the birth of the universe until death stared her in the face. Now, standing at the top of the Cosmic Pathway that spiraled through the Earth and Space Center, where men had so carefully explained their own understanding of creation, she closed her eyes and recited the version she knew, as if remembering her origins might help her understand her destination.

  First there was Khaos. Then came Gaia the Earth and Ouranos the Sky, and from their union sprang the Titans: Kronos and Rhea, who bore Zeus and his siblings. To be king, Kronos sliced the manhood from Ouranos with his curved sickle, and Zeus usurped his fa
ther’s crown in turn, ushering in the Age of Olympians.

  It was a simple story. Only four generations until she herself sprang into existence. As for the science behind it, she’d never examined it too closely. She suspected she shared such willful ignorance with most mortals. To each person, the universe was only as old as his own perception of it. It would end when he did.

  When the legionary at her side prodded her in the ribs, Selene opened her eyes. The sign to her left read, “13 billion years ago: The Big Bang.” As the two soldiers led her down the spiral pathway, another exhibit placard caught her eye. “Each step you take,” it read, “is 100 million years.” If only that were true, she thought. Instead, I have fewer than one hundred minutes left on earth.

  She slowed her steps; if these were her final moments, she might as well make them last.

  She couldn’t help feeling like the exhibition had been meant for her alone, a belated lesson in her own insignificance. She wondered if the Pater ordered her down the pathway as an essential component of his ritual, or just to further weaken her will to live. For so long, she’d stubbornly believed that man’s Big Bang and the gods’ creation myth could exist in conjunction. Now, she felt the two realities collide like the crashing galaxies shown on a nearby panel, exploding with a burst of light too bright to bear.

  She’d taken thirty-six steps before reaching the sign that read, “Disk of Our Milky Way Galaxy Appears.” It took thirty-seven more before “Microscopic Life Forms on Earth.”

  Does Paul feel as small as I do? she wondered. He’d already completed his procession and now stood at the ramp’s base with the Pater and the two initiates in red robes and silk masks—one of them the hawk-faced man. Like his companion, he carried a whip at his side, but he also bore Paul’s bow and a quiver of silver arrows slung across his back.

  While the guards had given Selene back her flannel shirt and leather jacket, they’d traded Paul’s modest toga and laurel wreath for his full regalia as Phoebus, the Bright One—a brilliant tunic that glowed with each successive color of the sunrise: yellow, orange, red, and purple, interwoven with strips of bright magenta like clouds illuminated by the dawning sun. On his head perched a golden seven-rayed crown. In his youth, he’d worn a similar diadem with ease; now it pressed heavily on his brow. His head hung down, his shoulders slumped beneath the draped fabric of his tunic. He wouldn’t look at her.

  Theo walked somewhere behind her, escorted by another pair of men, one in a crow’s mask and the other veiled. He might understand how science and myth can coexist, she thought. How my old life may be a paradox, but it’s still real to me. Yet as she neared the base of the ramp, she wondered if she was fooling herself. The Age of Dinosaurs lay only a dozen feet from the end, a faded painting of a Tyrannosaurus rex battling a velociraptor that covered a mere four feet of the three-hundred-foot-long path. At first, she didn’t even see where humans fit into the timeline. But there, at the very end: “History of Human Art and Creativity.” All within the width of the single human hair displayed in a tiny glass case.

  She knew, despite the genealogy she’d grown up with, that Artemis the goddess could not have existed until mankind dreamed her up. If the entire history of human civilization was only a hairsbreadth, what did it matter that she’d lived for three millennia? Why was her own death more important than anyone else’s? In the greater scheme of the cosmos, they’d all existed for less than the blink of an eye. The thought was oddly comforting.

  Her guards brought her to stand before the Pater in his robes of white silk and mask of beaten gold. “This is the Procession of the Sun-Runner,” he announced in Latin. “The Sun bows before the Almighty.” He turned to the hawk-faced man and his red-robed companion. “Heliodromus Primus. Heliodromus Secundus. You may begin.”

  They guided Paul to the base of the ramp they had just descended. Selene tensed. Then the hawk-faced man—the Heliodromus Primus—pulled a silver arrow from the quiver.

  “What are you doing?” she shouted. She spoke in English, unwilling to dignify their ritual by using their sacred language. “You said he’s not to be harmed.”

  The Pater shook his head. “He is not to be killed. But the Sun-Runner pursues the Sun. From the Host’s beginnings, so it has been. If you try to stop us, we’re happy to kill your twin, no matter what our arrangement.”

  Selene could do nothing as the Heliodromus Primus prodded Paul in the back with one of his own arrows.

  “Run, Phoebus,” he growled. Paul did not respond. The other Heliodromus cracked his whip across Paul’s spine. A single line of scarlet sliced through the gleaming tunic—another cloud at sunset. As one, the twins cried out in anguish. Then Paul began to run.

  The two Heliodromi chased him, but Paul could outrun any mortal. Yet the whip licked toward him, its black tongue striping his back, his calves, his arms. Up the ramp he went, rolling back time. No more humans, no dinosaurs, no primordial ooze. No earth. No Sun itself. How then could Phoebus Apollo exist? Yet still he ran. No Milky Way. No universe. No great burst of radiation and energy.

  Only a singularity, smaller than the smallest atom, yet containing the energy of infinite suns.

  Finally, Paul could go no further. He crouched at the top of the ramp, barely visible from where his twin stood below. The mortals who stood over him had no need to strike him further. She could hear his tears.

  At the center of the spiral ramp stood the massive white sphere of the planetarium itself, representing the sun. The other planets hung in a ring around the cavernous hall, forever in orbit around the center of the solar system.

  Yet the man who’d always been Selene’s Sun now cowered before mortals, the center of nothing.

  From the back of the crowd, Theo could barely see what occurred on the ramp above him, but he could hear the crack of the whip and Paul’s tortured weeping. He searched the darkened corners of the hall for any sign of Gabi, Flint, or Captain Hansen and her police officers. Nothing.

  He raised his bound hands to his temple as if scratching an itch and tapped out “planetarium” on the side of his glasses for the fourth time since the syndexioi had led him out of the mithraeum—blindfolded, gagged, and handcuffed—and through a series of what he assumed were abandoned subway tunnels.

  The crowd parted for the two Heliodromi who descended the ramp, dragging Paul’s bloody body between them. The Pater nodded his approval, then led the procession into the great orb of the planetarium.

  Plush seats ringed the space. A hemispherical ceiling arched far overhead, empty and white. He watched three of the higher-ranked syndexioi take their seats in the innermost ring like students on a demented field trip. Each bore a divine item that corresponded to his tutelary planet. The Perses in his Phrygian cap carried symbols of the moon: Selene’s bow and the quiver they’d stolen from her in Central Park, now holding seven gold arrows. The Heliodromus from the ice skating rink held Apollo’s silver weapon in homage to the sun. The Pater stood before them with Saturn’s sickle, its curved blade glinting. Only the lion-masked man—the Leo Primus, Theo had heard him called—bore a weapon that didn’t correspond to his planet. Rather than Jupiter’s thunderbolt, he carried Neptune’s trident.

  After what Selene said about the earthquake, I’d rather deal with the lightning, Theo decided.

  The Hyaena stood with the lower-ranked men. If she felt any sympathy for the only other woman in the room, her grinning mask hid it well.

  “Ave, Syndexioi Secundi,” the Pater hailed his followers. Four of the men, including one of the Milites and the unfamiliar Heliodromus, snapped to attention and saluted their leader.

  “Ave, Syndexioi Primi.” The remaining men saluted, one of each rank, each holding a divine item.

  The Corvus guarding Theo drew a gilded, snake-twined caduceus from his robe. At least the winged cap is safe with Dash, Theo thought. How dangerous can a herald’s staff be? The veiled man, who had first met Theo at the mithraeum’s entrance, carried a bronze hand mirror, symbol of Ven
us. The others referred to him as the Nymphus, the “male bride.” The burly Miles beside Selene carried Mars’s golden spear, its shaft a full foot longer than the regular one held by the other legionary.

  The Pater nodded in acknowledgment of his syndexioi’s salute and ordered the two Milites to lead Selene to the center of the room. When the initiates laid Paul’s limp body at her feet, she ripped free of her guards’ grip and knelt beside her brother. Both Milites went after her, but the Pater waved them away.

  Selene dragged Paul’s body onto her lap, one arm under his neck, the other clasping his chest. Blood dripped from his back to pool onto the floor around them. Selene looked like the Virgin Mary—a mother cradling her crucified son. A Pietà in a temple to science, a Christian image among pagans.

  A lion-masked Leo headed over to the planetarium’s control booth. The ceiling dimmed to a deep twilight blue. As it darkened still further, pinpricks of light popped into view. Soon, the entire sky glittered with stars.

  Music began, a minimalist tick tock between discordant notes, like the breathing of an old man, or the sound of his plodding footsteps. Theo recognized the track: the fifth movement of Holst’s The Planets: “Saturn, Bringer of Old Age.” A fitting tribute to the sickle-bearing Pater. The constellations moved across the sky with the same deliberate rhythm. Theo watched Orion rise, eternally chased by Scorpius for his sins against womankind. Then Ursa Major, the nymph metamorphosed into a bear as punishment for breaking her vows of chastity. Corvus the Crow, its feathers turned black for its crimes. All placed in the heavens by the wrath of Artemis, the Long-Cloaked Marshal of the Stars. A deity light-years away from Selene, who still huddled on the ground, holding her bleeding brother in her arms, looking as powerless as any mortal woman trapped in grief’s grip.