I gave her what I hoped was a reassuring glance. “The Remus thinks that finding out how the wall got put up around us will be the most important part in figuring out who did it.”
“Cross Numa off the list,” Tony said. “Nothing in his stories is suggestive of this. And also, it’s a bit like accusing a vegetarian of cannibalism. It’s possible, but it goes so against their values that they probably didn’t do it.”
“Anna, too,” Pradip added, with what actually sounded like interest. I counted that as a victory. “The closest her myths get to any of this is drowning in a river.”
Tony gave him a flat look. “And also becoming a river goddess. Though, yes, I agree her House is not the best suspect.”
“So we’re back to Aeneas and Hercules,” I stated. The Remus had known what he was talking about after all. Guess I should have put a little more faith in him.
“Makes sense,” Pradip said, finally deigning to join us by shoving Hayley out of his armchair so he could reclaim it. “Of all the local legend communities, those two are the most militant.”
Oh. Why hadn’t that occurred to me?
“Aeneas did go down into the underworld, if we’re looking for a connection with Pluto,” Tony offered.
“But so did Hercules,” Luca pointed out.
Pradip let out a frustrated grunt. “None of the Houses have any myths directly pointing to building invisible walls.”
“Okay, then how about this?” I suggested. “Let’s think instead about how each House would go about constructing a wall out of invisible blocks.” I hesitated a moment. It was foolish, and the guys had probably already discounted it. But I shouldn’t take anything for granted. “None of the nearby Houses have telekinesis, do they?”
Pradip and Tony both looked at me like they couldn’t believe the words had come out of my mouth. Hey, it had been worth a shot.
“Nothing special comes to mind for Aeneas,” Pradip finally said. “But Hercules had superhuman strength. The members of his House could lift those blocks without any difficulty.”
Tony frowned at him. “You’re suggesting that they physically put in place every one of those blocks.”
“That sounds pretty tedious,” Hayley commented, dubious. “The wall was absolutely huge.”
Pradip shook his head. “The Twelve Labors that Hercules had to endure were tedious. He drove a herd of cattle back to Greece from Spain. He spent a year chasing the Golden Hind. He manually dammed rivers, or diverted their flow. Laboring towards a goal is considered a positive quality.” He shrugged. “Also, I can’t think of anything else.”
“So you think they put every block in place by hand,” I said. “That’s ridiculous. Why would anyone do that? I mean, you guys saw how big that wall was.”
“Come on,” he grumbled, an irritated jut to his jaw. “How long have you been living in Italy, after growing up in a completely different country? Get with the program. It’s a different culture. They have different ideas of what is and isn’t worth their time.” Wow, he was getting really wound up. “You think I know why Hayley gets excited over minuscule details about these particles that are too small to see?”
Hayley raised her hand to about shoulder level. “They’re molecules, actually—”
“Shut up.” Pradip glared at her, before returning to his rant. Hayley visibly shifted away from him, taken aback. “You think I know why Carter thinks it’s fun to dodge venomous reptiles?”
Carter looked like he wanted to say something, but I guess he’d learned from Hayley’s failure. He kept quiet.
And Pradip kept going. “And Tony, with his ridiculous fascination of obscure details from other cultures, things that don’t even matter on a practical level? Do you think I understand any of that? No, I don’t. But you guys still act that way, and I realize that you’re going to do things that I think don’t make sense. It’s not about understanding what would make someone want to behave that way. It’s accepting that they’re going to behave how they’re going to behave, whether you get it or not.”
There was a long pause, while we all wondered if Pradip was done. He crossed his arms and cast a vicious look at us. Looked like we weren’t smart enough for him. Still, he had a point. Yeah, it was ridiculous. But it was ridiculous that someone had used a chimera to try to assassinate us in the first place. Of course the people responsible for something like that were capable of doing something equally nonsensical, from my perspective.
“Okay,” I said, holding my hands out in a placating gesture. “We get it. They have different priorities.” Which didn’t necessarily mean they would put up a giant brick wall to trap us with a predator they somehow knew would be there, but that argument wasn’t getting us anywhere. And however I thought about it, someone had to have done just that. “They had a few hours to do it in, and as many members of their House as they wanted to use.”
“The blocks were invisible, but how did we not see the people holding them, while they were putting them in place?” Hayley asked.
This time, I was the one shaking my head. “No. These people were capable of figuring out how to do something as novel as transmitting the helmet’s power to a large number of other objects. Using it in the more traditional sense, to make a person invisible, wouldn’t be that big of a deal.”
“So we think it’s the House of Hercules?” Luca cut in. Not one for the theorizing, apparently. He was definitely in the wrong company.
“They’re the only ones we have a working theory for,” I amended.
“Wait,” Tony said. “The House of Aeneas also has preternatural strength. Not to Hercules levels, but to just above peak physical condition for humans. And they have more manpower.”
“But physical strength is a much less common power in the House of Aeneas than in the House of Hercules,” Pradip argued. “So the numbers don’t actually work in their favor. And the House of Aeneas doesn’t have the same focus on effort, culturally. It isn’t their style. If they were going to kill people and make it look like a legimal did it, they would probably have snapped your necks and left your bodies for the strixes to tear apart.”
I was not the only person to gape at Pradip in horror at that mental image. Oddly, Tony was the first to recover. “But the House of Hercules could have just crushed our skulls and done the same.”
“Can we please not have this conversation?” Hayley asked. “I don’t want to picture all the gruesome ways my friends could have died.”
That, and it didn’t look like that line of thinking was going anywhere. “Let’s focus on the other parts. The how, not the why. Both Houses could have put up the wall. How about everything else?”
“The flood,” Pradip said. “The House of Aeneas has a strong tradition of sailing, but no actual water powers whatsoever, as far as I know. But the House of Hercules does.”
“What, Hercules caused a flood?” Carter asked. He’d been quiet up to now, probably because he knew the least about the ancient sources out of all of us.
“Not quite,” Pradip answered. I liked him better when he was working out a problem than when he was using that intelligence to think up ways to insult us. “But like I mentioned before, he’s diverted rivers. Most famously, in order to clean stables.”
“Why would you divert a—” Carter cut himself off. “You know, I don’t even care.”
Pradip glowered at him. “Anyway, it was one of his labors, to clean the stables of King Augeas. The only other Houses in the area that definitely have water powers are Remus and Anna.”
The picture was becoming clearer, and the House of Hercules was becoming more likely as a suspect. The flood Carter and I escaped could have happened by magically diverting the Tiber River. The river was right next to the area we were in.
Tony slapped a hand against his forehead. “I’m so thick. Hercules is a descendant of Perseus, and Perseus was the one to use the helmet of invisibility to kill Medusa.”
“Wait, Hercules is a descendant of Perseus?” I hadn’t
ever come across anything like that. Granted, I focused on the references that pertained to zoology, not genealogy, but still. “I thought they were both sons of Zeus?”
“Through his mother,” Tony said with exasperation. “Don’t you read?”
Well, excuse me, then. What were the chances of Zeus randomly selecting a lover from his own lineage, anyway?
For now, I turned my attention to the theories we’d laid out. Something about them just didn’t fit. “That is really, really complicated. How did they even know there would be a chimera for them to trap us with?” Did they have one hiding in their basement? “And we still haven’t adequately explained why they hadn’t just...” I hesitated before saying it out loud. “You know, snapped our necks, and stuff.”
“No, no, no.” Pradip sounded annoyed. “Haven’t you people been listening? Effort is a sign of honor in the House of Hercules.”
“It’s true that the youths of the House are often assigned difficult tasks as a sort of trial,” Tony added. “The harder the trial, the more the youth is considered to have proven his or herself. So the ones with the greatest potential, and especially the ones who might be considered candidates for the position of Hercules, would get extremely difficult trials.”
Seriously?
“The Hercules destroyed another House of legends,” Tony continued. “Another recent youth traveled to the Black Sea to hunt Stymphalian birds. Someone else single-handedly diverted an aqueduct. It takes months, sometimes years. And clearly, the strategy is perfect for throwing people off track.”
Alright, fine. If they could do that, then maybe putting up a brick wall didn’t seem like such a big deal. In comparison.
Pradip nodded. “If we tried to present this as evidence to any other humans, they’d think we were conspiracy theorists. Even plenty of the other legends, who don’t always pay attention to the rituals that have developed in other Houses, would think we were absurd.”
“I think you’re absurd, for what it’s worth,” I let him know.
“Exactly,” Pradip said, as if I had proved his point. Who was this new, non-temperamental person, and where did he come from?
Hayley let out a gleeful chuckle. “I love it. Throwing everybody off by doing something no one could possibly expect.”
“So this is really it?” I asked. “We don’t know where the House of Hercules could have pulled a chimera out from, but other than that, no one sees any problems with this theory?”
They all shook their heads.
Then that was that. It was an almost impossible scenario, but we’d actually managed to come up with a plausible explanation of how some of it might have gone down.
No matter how preposterous the plan seemed, clearly someone had done it. And the House of Hercules was the only House with powers that could explain both the invisible wall and the flood, as far as our imaginations could tell. They had the only culture that even remotely explained why they would make such a weird plan. The more I thought about it, the more it made a messed up kind of sense. Their names kept popping up. They were at the top of Remus’ list.
This was big. These people may very well have tried to kill us, and we needed to know for sure. We needed to do something about it. After all, we couldn’t let it stay like this, them trying to kill us again and again until they finally succeeded.
Something had to change. And for the first time, it was our move.
PRADIP MAY HAVE EXPECTED people to react to our theory with skepticism, but the Remus and Dr. Berti, at least, regarded it as credible. “It is certainly worth looking into, and doesn’t appear to be drastically out of character for the House of Hercules,” Dr. Berti mused.
“But even if we suspect them,” I said. “How would we stop them from trying to kill us again?”
“The best deterrent would be to have the other legends intervene,” the Remus stated. “Eliminating any of your people could start a war between the legends and the humans. This is not generally considered a desirable outcome. I believe the only reason the House of Hercules would have attempted this in the first place was if they thought they could make it appear accidental.”
“By making it look like the animals we were studying killed us,” Luca finished. Which was exactly what everyone would have concluded if we didn’t survive to tell anyone about the wall. It could have been taken down as quickly as it was set up, not that it had to be. It’s possible we wouldn’t have been missed for the whole day, if Hayley hadn’t been so paranoid.
“So what we need is evidence,” I concluded.
Dr. Berti gave a small shrug. “Confront them,” she suggested.
What kind of plan was that?
She must have caught my expression, because she elaborated. “It’s possible they will reveal some information, accidentally.” Dr. Berti looked all of us over. “This would be a volunteer-only project, of course. Anyone participating would be wearing wires.”
No, they wouldn’t be, because this was ridiculous. We weren’t trained for this. And I was definitely not raised to go visit monsters in their den and have tea, or something, all the while wondering if they were going to try to kill me anytime soon.
“Confront them,” Tony repeated, flatly, clearly unconvinced. But Dr. Berti didn’t reply, instead letting us think it over.
I considered my team, trying to figure out if I’d have to talk anyone away from that ledge. Most of them seemed surprised. No way Hayley, Tony, or Pradip would ever consider something like this. Of them, Tony was the only one who even bothered going out into the field, and everyone knew how he felt about it.
Carter was the most likely. He even looked mildly interested, though the fact that he hadn’t said anything yet let me know he was still skeptical. I knew he had the most to lose, out of all of us. He’d never want to stop going out into the field—that was his entire reason for being here, and it was something he loved.
Luca, on the other hand, was a bit of a wild card. I still had no idea how to guess what he would or wouldn’t do. I had thought he was just in it for a bit of extra cash, and wouldn’t do anything too over the top. But that was before his daring rescue of Tony from a chimera. He was the only one I couldn’t detect any apprehension from, at the idea—rather, he seemed mildly surprised, but composed. That didn’t give me nearly enough information to gauge what he’d do.
But no one had accepted yet, and it didn’t look like anyone was itching to do so. Even Carter didn’t like the idea. Which meant it wasn’t happening, and I had to start thinking about alternatives.
This was the only proposal we had on the table about how to get any tangible proof that the House of Hercules was involved. We needed something else besides this non-option. And frankly, I couldn’t think of anything. But if we couldn’t get any evidence pointing to the Hercules’ involvement, then his House would keep trying to kill us. We would only be able to keep going for so long. Either we’d have to stop going out into the field, or die.
If we stopped going out into the field, our research was over. I’d have to start over on a completely different project, redo the last three years. But I would be alive.
And Italy wouldn’t get any better. It might even get worse, without any research to help us keep pace with the consequences of the Boom. There wouldn’t be any unification, no new land available for settling. No new policies for allowing immigration. My family would never be able to join me here. They’d be stranded in an increasingly more dangerous place, which most people were trying to escape.
Oh, damn it.
If I wore wires, I might be able to get them to back off if they admitted to something. Because then we’d have proof. More aggression would make things worse for them, and they’d been smart enough to try to make it look like an accident in the first place.
I was about to do something incredibly asinine, wasn’t I? I couldn’t believe that I’d managed to think myself into the worst idea ever. But I knew I had to do something, and couldn’t think of another option.
&n
bsp; I held onto the moment before I committed myself to this, the last bit of comfort I’d get until it was over. Then I sighed, and forced the words out. “I’ll do it.”
Silence, as everyone stared at me. Carter was the only one whose gaze felt more contemplative than distraught. I wondered if I’d accidentally pulled him up over the edge with me.
“Jordan,” Hayley stated quietly.
“I know.”
“Me too,” Carter chimed in. “I’ve got a pretty strong stake in this.”
“No,” I responded immediately. I wasn’t kidding about stopping my teammates from volunteering. “I’m doing this alone.”
That was probably not the best thing to say, if Luca’s sudden start was any indication. “None of you should be going,” he said. “But if any of you decide to take that risk, at least let me back you up.” For a minute there, I thought that he’d accepted that he wasn’t seasoned enough to rely on yet. I resisted the urge to roll my eyes, wondering when we’d get the reasonable version of Luca back.
Turning my attention to our fearless leaders, I tried to determine how they were taking this. Dr. Berti’s expression remained pleasantly impartial—even when I was doing what she wanted against my own best judgment, I still couldn’t get a look of approval from her. It figured. Still, she had to be satisfied, given that it was her proposal. In contrast to Dr. Berti’s studied neutrality, the Remus just looked tired.
“Hold on a minute,” Hayley interrupted. “Are you seriously considering this? We’re talking about confronting remorseless killers.”
“They’ll keep trying anyway,” Carter said. “At least this way we have a shot.”
“I can’t believe I’m saying this,” Tony began. “But we do have to do this. I have to do this. I’ll be going with Jordan.”
With that one sentence, all of my preconceptions about the world crashed and burned. This was Tony, and he didn’t do stuff like that without tangible benefit for his research.
Hayley frowned at him. “Tony, you can’t be serious.”
Tony’s eyes darkened as he turned to her. “You weren’t there, okay? It was...and then they tried to go after Jordan and Carter, again. They’re not going to stop unless we make them. And they aren’t going to care what we think. They might not even care what any human in the country thinks. What they will care about is what the other legends think.”
Terrestrial Magic (Jordan Sanders, #1) Page 14