“Now that’s just not fair,” I leveled at Medea as I stood up and got into an attack position. But before I could think of anything smarmy to say, the pair of Ghilan closed in on me from both sides. They were covering ground at a frightening speed. I took a half step back with my left foot to avoid the left-hand Ghilan’s collision and swung my left sword in a wide arc at about waist level, right to left, then down toward the ground. I used the momentum from the attack to tuck into a roll and prepare for the second Ghilan.
The first Ghilan landed some ten feet away, and its body tumbled in two different directions. The second one closed in on me from behind simultaneously, but I was expecting it. It was committed to an airborne attack but had aimed for me while I was still standing. I came out of my roll sideways and raised my right sword to impale the creature as it tackled me. I used the momentum to roll us farther behind Medea just in case she was readying an attack.
The speared Ghilan was scrabbling to stop our movement and unpin itself when I punched it with my left fist, sword still in hand, in the side of its bulbous head. Something in its skull cracked, but all types of ghouls can take an enormous amount of physical punishment. The thing screeched and pulled free of my sword, swinging its long, sinewy arms wildly. I broke focus for less than a second—always a major no-no in combat—to relocate Medea, and the Ghilan nailed me across the chest with its claws in a blow that nearly took my breath away.
I reacted before its swing was complete, bringing the hilt of my right sword down on the other side of its skull with a heavy thud. The blow disoriented the creature just enough, and I pulled my left sword up through its midsection. My blade traveled up and out just beside the screaming beast’s head. The howling stopped instantly.
When I returned my attention to Medea, she was hurriedly directing the last few mobile humanoids to grab the massive stone box, and then I caught more movement to my right. The ogre was barreling down on me, swinging its tree-trunk club over its head. The damned thing probably had spikes sticking off it, too. Ogres were so cliché.
I set my feet, readying myself to deflect the impact of the makeshift club, when the monstrous creature fell with a yowl as something impaled it from behind. It skidded and slid headfirst through the dirt and leaf litter.
I took advantage of the situation and turned my attention back to Medea. The air around me began to crackle with motes of energy, which I took as a sign she was about to unleash hell on me. Without thinking, I hurled my right sword at her as hard as I could, just as one of the humanoid creatures dragging the chest crossed between us. The blade caught the creature square in the back, causing it, and then the others, to drop the box with a jarring thunk. The container remained sealed. The impaled being tumbled into Medea, and the energy dissipated as quickly as it had appeared.
“Damn you, Diomedes,” came Medea’s curse as she shoved the dying form away. The witch held her right hand out in my direction, fingers splayed widely, and I could see and feel the field of bloody red energy pop to life just beyond her reach. In my peripheral vision, I could see the ogre getting to its feet to my right.
“Diomedes, watch out!” Gali screamed from somewhere well behind me.
Medea was levitating a twisted piece of wreckage. She sent it flying in my direction. I dove straight ahead, landing hard on the remains of several of the humanoid creatures I’d shot and hacked. A thunderous crack from somewhere in front of me made me duck my head instinctively, delaying my recovery just another second, but I scrambled to my feet to face Medea again. I got my feet under me just in time to see her stepping into a dark, fire-lit cavern that had somehow appeared at the edge of the wreckage. She disappeared the second she stepped through it. It was as if someone flashed a picture on a screen and simply walked into it, and then the screen shut off. I didn’t even have enough time to think about following her before the portal closed.
The stone case sat, cracked open like an egg, where she’d been standing moments before. Its otherworldly aura had vanished, and it was empty.
CHAPTER 30
A sharp, pained grunt came from behind me. The ogre was impaled in its chest by the piece of wreckage Medea had thrown at me. Disappointed but relieved, I walked over and pulled my sword free from the back of the creature I’d unintentionally speared, and then I went back to the ogre, whose right leg was seeping black, thick, smelly blood. A long, slender green stone dagger protruded through its leg from just behind the knee. The ogre spat a gobbet of black goo in my direction and unsuccessfully tried to shift himself. Behind him, Gali peered down into the crater from its edge.
“Don’t go anywhere, ugly,” I said to the ogre.
I met Gali at the rim of the crater and followed her intent gaze down a good seventy-five feet into the stinking, burning wreckage, dozens of charred bodies… and at least twenty golden coffers full of treasures in some kind of massive cavern ripped open by the plane’s crash. That explained why the impact crater was so much deeper than it should have been.
Along with the coffers, within the cavern were all manner of jewels, jewelry, trinkets, weapons, armor, and gold and silver coins scattered about by the crash. Some of it had a faint magical aura, but most did not. One thing was for sure: there was a lot of it.
“There are at least fifty more chests down there. I do not know this trove of riches. It should not be here,” Gali said, her brow furrowed.
I approached the ogre. “What is this cache?”
He just sneered, black blood coating his lips and the one protruding tusk. He coughed a few times as he tried to laugh, spitting up more stinky black slime.
“Sure you don’t want to answer?” I asked, dragging my sword along the piece of wreckage that impaled him, watching as the supernaturally fine edge peeled the metal in curls.
The creature flinched but not much. I thought about heading back to my team and leading an attack on Medea right then, but for the moment, I knew where she was. I had a live prisoner of war, and I was hoping he might give me some insight into the witch’s plans. At worst, it would cost me a few minutes of time.
“I can make this end faster if you’ll just answer the question.”
“No,” came Gali’s voice from behind me. “Targoviste will not be made to suffer any longer, and you will not threaten him with torture.”
I took this to mean she was going to help the smelly ogre. My mistake. She took her stone dagger from his leg and slit his throat as calmly as if she were slicing a piece of meat for dinner.
“Well, now how am I supposed to find out what this is and what Medea is up to?” I said, irritated and surprised, gesturing at all the chests around us.
“You will leave now,” she said, without any tone or inflection in her voice as she wiped the black goo from her blade with some leaves. “I will find out what this is and report to Athena. She will report it to you if she deems it knowledge necessary for your current situation.”
“Oh, I will leave now?” This fairy chick was really starting to piss me off. “Really? Look, Gali, I appreciate your help with the ogre earlier—really, I do—but I need to know what this is and exactly what Medea is up to. And our one and only living accomplice is now no longer living. Granted, I would have done the same thing, eventually, but at least I would have had some information before I killed him.”
As I railed a bit, something shifted in the wreckage behind me. For a brief second, I thought maybe there were survivors from the crash. The sound was coming from one of the humanoids who wasn’t quite dead yet. Gali noticed it too and followed me over.
“Whoa. If you kill this one, you and I are going to have serious issues, Gali,” I said, walking up to get a better view of the misshapen dying form.
“This one is only human. You may do to it what you wish,” she said in the same annoying toneless voice. “I simply will not allow a human to torture one of the fae, Unseelie or othe
rwise. Regardless of the reason.” She was practically glaring down her nose at me, which was hard, because she was easily a foot and a half shorter than me.
“What? Look, you green twit, on a battlefield, I do not discriminate, and I treat all opponents the same, human or nonhuman.”
“Your actions and behaviors on the field of battle are well known to me, Tydides. Indeed, they are well known to us all.” She stared directly at me, chin slightly elevated in defiance, as she put her blade away.
“Well known?” She made it sound like it was a bad thing.
I hung my head for a moment, trying to figure out her point, but then the more primitive part of my brain kicked in. “Just kiss my ass, you hoity-toity little wench,” I practically spat. I walked over to get in her face, and she met my gaze unflinchingly.
“You may want to spend your time questioning that,” she said, pointing at the dying form beside us, “rather than waste your breath on me. You will not sway my opinion of you.”
I was just about ready to take her head clean off, but she was right. The thing she called human that was lying at my feet was in bad shape. I bent down to get a look at it. It was so badly deformed that I couldn’t immediately tell its gender, but since nothing on it appeared overtly feminine, I made the assumption it was male.
He didn’t have a magical aura, nor did he give off the feel of one of the fae, or any other Paranthropoi, for that matter. He had human features so grossly distorted that he resembled something I’d expect to see in Tartarus, ripping apart those doomed to an eternity of pain. One of the creature’s arms was at least twice as long as the other, and twice as muscular. His legs were human enough, but his feet were misshapen and only bore three giant toes each. His torso was thick but lopsided, increasing in bulk as it reached the larger arm. He was also incredibly hunchbacked and had no neck, just a stumpy bald head set right onto his shoulders. His face was distorted, but his eyes were very human. He had two bullet holes in his muscular upper chest and a deep gash across his abdomen from my swords, and he lay in a widening pool of blood.
“Who are you?” I asked as his eyes opened slowly and fixed on me.
He responded in Farsi, but I couldn’t understand him as he tried to talk through the blood in his throat.
“What were you doing here?” I asked in Farsi.
I pitied the person—not because he was dying or because I had been the one to injure him. My pity stemmed from the fact that his life to this point could not have been easy or anything close to normal, and not just because of his deformities. Somehow, Medea had gotten to him, and whatever she’d done to him had to outweigh the burden of his twisted features.
He tried to laugh and then began to speak. I could only make out a few words here and there, but the strain eventually proved too great, and he died. All I got was something about a queen, chaos, and the names Perses and Croesus.
I drew a hasty conclusion that the queen he spoke of was Medea, and as for chaos, well, I knew that was part of her plan. What I didn’t know was how the names were connected. The only Perses I knew of was a Protogenoi that was known as a destructive Titan in Greek myths, but the name Croesus, on the other hand, explained a lot. This treasure trove had to be King Croesus’s fabled fortune, the Qarun Treasure—the real one, not the one sitting in a museum in Turkey embroiled in a legal battle between countries.
Croesus was a king during the fifth century BC who was renowned for his wealth, which consisted of not just gold and jewels but also items considered magical in nature and supernatural in origin. Apollo helped him hide his treasure by keeping it in perpetual motion far beneath the surface of the Earth. Supposedly, there was no way to predict when or where it would appear. By today’s standards it would be worth billions, with some artifacts probably classified as priceless relics.
I had no interest in the treasure or in the magical artifacts that it might contain. I had lost and gained many fortunes in my lifetime, and none of it ever mattered to me. Gali would inform Athena about the cache, and she could deal with it. I knew Athena would distribute the wealth among various nonpolitical causes worldwide—poverty, disease, hunger, and the like—and that was good enough for me.
As I contemplated what all this meant, the steady sound of a helicopter in the near distance rose over the forest. I tried to locate Gali, but she was gone. I needed to follow her lead, and fast.
I took one last look at one of the greatest treasures in the world as I secured my swords, and then I grabbed my SIG Sauer from where I’d thrown it down and bolted back the way I had come.
CHAPTER 31
As I entered my shack back on Andros, everyone was at the table, talking and eating cracked conch and lobster salad. They hadn’t even set a plate for me. To make matters worse, they’d put all my fly-tying stuff in a heap in the corner.
Sarah was the first to notice that my shirt was partly shredded around my vest and that I was covered in blood. “Yikes! Did you piss off a lion?” she asked, suddenly getting to her feet.
That pretty much got everyone’s attention.
“No. Ghoul. Well, two ghouls, a dozen mutated human things, and an ogre, to be exact. Oh, and Medea herself.”
“What?” Duma replied, stunned. “Where did you run off to so fast?”
A chorus followed. “A ghoul?” said Sarah.
“Really? A real live ghoul and an ogre?” said Geek.
“Sounds like something knocked the chickens loose from your henhouse, Chief,” said Frigate.
“Hey, hey, HEY!” I shouted over the din, staring hard at Frigate for his comment about my sanity.
I took the next few minutes to explain what had happened and what I’d discovered, while I cleaned and dressed my wounds with Sarah’s help. I was so engrossed with explaining my theory about how everything fit, from the bombing to the Cup and now the treasure, that I didn’t notice she was helping me until Duma winked at me and gave me a slight nod with a broad shit-eating grin plastered across his face.
I completely lost my train of thought and could feel myself flush with embarrassment. It took me a minute to recompose myself. I got strange looks from Frigate and Geek. Duma left the shanty stifling his laughter. Ab sat stoically, seeming not to notice any of it.
“Why’d she need the Cup to find the chain, Chief?” asked Frigate. “Surely, something else might have helped her do that. Maybe even that kid who found you.”
“Fakhri is a claircognizant,” I replied shaking my head. “She only knows the past and the present. She can’t see the future. Besides, I’m not sure if Medea even knew about her abilities. Also, other than the Cup of Jamshid, I don’t really know of any crystal ball-type artifacts that would be powerful enough to pierce Apollo’s enchantment on the Qarun Treasure.”
“Well, why crash a plane to get to it?” Geek asked as he opened a small folding dish antenna and connected it to a laptop. “Certainly there are more covert ways to go about it—excavation equipment, hell, even dynamite. The plane crash is already all over the global news.”
“Her timetable is truncated.” I shook my head again. “She just stole the Cup, and I took it back, and she got it back only a few days ago. And she knows we’re on to her. No time to set up an excavation. Plus, from what I saw, the caverns where the treasure was at the time of the crash were under dozens of feet of rock and sediment. Even a major excavation would have taken days. A hijacked plane full of explosives pushed into a full-on kamikaze nosedive did the trick in seconds.”
“Not to mention if her intention is to create more chaos, hijacking and crashing a plane is a good way to do it. Especially in light of what the world thinks happened in New York,” Ab said matter-of-factly while staring down at the floor, his massive forearms resting on his knees.
I arched my eyebrows at him. I hadn’t thought about that. Leave it to a Peri to understand how to incite terror
and panic.
Through the entire conversation, Geek typed furiously on his laptop. Finally, he looked back at me and rubbed his face and shook his head.
“What?” I asked him, wondering what had him so concerned.
“I’ve been looking for information on the Qarun Treasure and Perses, cross-referencing every related key word I could think of. I got nothing that connects the two to explain why that thing mentioned the name Perses.”
I stood up and began to pace, trying to figure out why the deformed minion would have mentioned him. Maybe I’d misheard him.
“Hey, did you know Perses was a Titan and a God of Destruction?” Geek asked after tapping on his keyboard again. Geek’s fingers flew across the keyboard in a series of clicks and clacks that would have made a machine gun jealous. He only paused long enough to curse the slow response time of his satellite receiver while he muttered to himself about various permutations of the terms he searched and which databases he should be hacking.
“Yes, yes I did,” I said. “He is a nasty bastard but pretty much long resigned to his native realm, as far as I know.”
“Bugger,” came Geek’s response over the top of his screen. “But did you know he had a daughter?” He squinted, clearly hoping to stump me.
“No, I didn’t.”
“Ha! Yes, he did,” he said, pleased with himself. “Hecate, Goddess of—”
“Witchcraft,” Duma said, walking back in to the shanty.
I really didn’t like that connection. Medea had been the chief priestess of Hecate thousands of years ago, and according to Fakhri, the Old One was still helping her. While Hecate was never that powerful a Protogenoi, her help would still make Medea much stronger than she would be on her own—the way Athena strengthens me. Throw Hecate’s father—a Protogenoi known for causing destruction for kicks—into the mix, and things go from bad to worse.
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