‘Did you find out what the Terastu is?’ said Proteus suddenly.’
Everyone turned to stare coldly at him.
‘Oh, as if you were not all wondering the same thing,’ said Proteus sharply.
Denny shook his head. And Tamar for one did not believe him, but now was not the time to push it, she decided.
‘So …’ began Tamar. ‘This next part of the quest …?’
‘You can do it,’ said Denny firmly. ‘Since when did you ever believe there was anything you couldn’t do anyway?’ he asked with a laugh.
‘Since I learned that I’m not quite invincible,’ she said dryly. ‘Even the Djinn …’ she stopped and shook her head. ‘What was Apollo thinking?’ she said. ‘No one … certainly no mortal could possibly …’
‘But only a mortal would try,’ said Denny.
‘And die in the attempt,’ said Tamar truculently.
‘Not necessarily,’ said Denny. ‘There is a way.’
‘I don’t think we should put that kind of power into Apollo’s hands,’ said Tamar.
‘Then don’t,’ said Denny indifferently. ‘Keep it.’
‘Keep what?’ snapped Proteus, now thoroughly fed up with this. ‘What kind of power? – What’s going on?’
‘The stone of creation,’ said Tamar. ‘It’s held by the king of the winter who stole it from the …’
‘I know, I know,’ said Proteus testily. ‘What a lot of nonsense. Surely no one believes in that sort of thing anymore.’
Tamar burst out laughing. The idea of an ancient Greek god saying such a thing was incongruous at best. How many wise and learned men had said exactly the same thing of him and his brethren, she wondered.
‘It’s as real as you are,’ she said, keeping a creditably straight face in the circumstances. And Denny winked at her so roguishly that she had to look away. Proteus, however, did not appear to notice anything untoward.
‘So how are we to retrieve it then?’ he said in perfect seriousness.
‘We?’ said Tamar. ‘Oh, of course, I was forgetting what an invaluable contribution you have made so far’ she added caustically. ‘Go on then, she continued acerbically. ‘What do you think we should do? Dazzle us with your insights.’ There was an awkward silence.
‘Thought not,’ said Tamar. ‘We indeed.’ and she gave an impressive snort.
‘Tam,’ said Denny warningly. Now was not the time to get the gods offside. Pretty soon, the whole reason they had joined forces with them would be put to the proof – he knew this even if she did not as yet. In fact, it all depended on what she did when she found the Terastu. And even he could not see that although, knowing her as he did, he had a pretty good idea.
In the meantime …
‘The stone is …’ he began, and Tamar interrupted him impatiently. ‘It’s not really a stone at all,’ she said. ‘At least …’
‘You have to think of it as a stone,’ said Denny. ‘It’s what a mortal would do and that’s your only chance at retrieving it.’
‘A mortal wouldn’t know any better,’ said Tamar.
‘Exactly.’ said Denny. ‘What you believe is all that counts remember.’
Tamar stared at him. ‘It’s an actual stone,’ she repeated like a lesson. ‘It’s an actual stone,’ she took a deep breath. ‘And now I know exactly how to get it.’ She grinned.
Denny grinned back at her. ‘I knew you would,’ he said.
‘Fairy tales, fables and legends,’ she said like a mantra. ‘It’s under the clouds and above the mountains, beneath the earth and above the sky within the air and at the bottom of the ocean.’
‘Is it a riddle?’ asked Aphrodite sotto voce.
Hephaestus shrugged, but Tamar had heard her. ‘It’s a set of directions,’ she said. ‘That’s how a mortal would read it.’
‘It describes the place where the stone resides,’ explained Hecate who was beginning to understand. Tamar glanced approvingly at her.
‘A description,’ she agreed. Then she gave them a wicked glance. ‘Ever seen a dragon’s lair?’ she asked. She pulled a wry face. ‘Didn’t I say it would be dragons?’ she added.
‘Ah but which Dragon?’ said Nemesis nastily.
Tamar thought for a moment. ‘Tiamat,’ she said decisively and Denny smiled. He had known she would figure it out.
‘Tiamat is not a real dragon,’ said Nemesis.
‘I know,’ said Tamar. ‘But try telling the superstitious villagers around here that, and see how far it gets you.’
‘What is Tiamat then?’ asked Hecate curiously.
‘The earth, under your feet, the sky above you, the sea and the mountains,’ said Tamar. ‘And also, apparently, a bloody great big dragon.’
‘Hmmm, gonna need a staff,’ she muttered. ‘A staff is always impressive. I guess a mortal would use a witch or something, but I reckon I can do it myself …’ She caught Denny’s eye he was shaking his head.
‘Oh bugger,’ she said. ‘You can take a thing to far,’ she said. ‘I’m not actually a mortal you know.’
‘I feel her,’ said Hecate suddenly ‘Beneath my feet, above my heart. The Dragon of the Earth. Her heartbeat is the slow rhythm of the seasons, her breath the creeping fog of the winter, the fire of her belly the sunshine of the summer.’ Suddenly she slammed a staff into the ground – yet she was not holding a staff – the ground shook and split open. ‘AWAKE!’ she cried. And a slow creeping fog began drifting up from below the ground. Again the staff crashed into the earth ‘AWAKE!’ And again. ‘AWAKE!’
Slowly the fog coalesced into a recognizable shape that rose high above them into the air. It solidified into a pretty unmistakable dragon. Huge and scaly and seriously pissed off.
‘Bloody hell.’ said Tamar impressed.
‘Cool,’ said Denny – well it was all right for him, he was already dead.
Others did not find it at all cool, quite the reverse, in fact, particularly when a thermic lance of white hot flame hit the ground from above turning the pretty woodland into a blasted heath within a matter of microseconds.
Only Tamar stood her ground. She narrowed her eyes. – surely no mortal could survive against this, she thought and was tempted to manifest a twelve foot sword and start swinging. She resisted the temptation. There was a way for a mortal to defeat Tiamat – Denny had said so.
No he hadn’t, she realised. He had only said there was a way to retrieve the stone, which, from the directions, she had surmised was in the dragon’s belly.
So how …? And then she realised it did not matter. A mortal would almost certainly be dead by now anyway. Retrieving the stone was not – had never been – the point of this one. Dying was.
Well she had no intention of dying, but the upshot of dying was a trip to the underworld. ‘And that I can manage.’ she thought.
She vanished – then she reappeared. ‘Are you lot coming then?’ she said and vanished again.
~ Chapter Fifteen ~
The blonde was in trouble thought Tamar, but her antennae were telling her that the blonde was almost certainly a witch. So maybe she was pretty well equipped to get herself out of trouble again, as long as Barry did not decide to use Tamar herself against her. What she had yet to figure out was what on Earth she was doing here in Barry’s “office”
‘I know you took it,’ the blonde was saying to Barry. ‘Nothing else makes any sense. It had to be you. Personally I think you should give it back.’
‘Give it back?’ blustered Barry. ‘I’m the one who sto… acquired it in the first place.’
‘He’s afraid,’ thought Tamar. ‘I wonder why?’
‘How do you even know about it?’ asked Barry eyeing the blonde nervously.
‘I just know,’ said the blonde. ‘I know a lot of things about you Barry Malcolm Evans,’
Barry seemed to hesitate for a moment and then came to a decision.
‘Oh all right then,’ he said to Tamar’s surprise and then she began to laugh softly to herself.
‘I suppose I always knew this day would come,’ grumbled Barry. ‘I’ve had a pretty good run of it all things considered. It’s in the back. I’ll just go and get it.’
‘Good,’ said the blonde. ‘And don’t even think about slipping out that secret back door of yours with it.’
Barry threw the blonde a terrified look. ‘I wasn’t thinking any such thing,’ he protested.
The blonde merely raised a sceptical eyebrow, and Barry scuttled into the back room without another word.
* * *
Unlike hell, the Grecian version of the underworld was cool and dark and quite a refreshing change after the scorched ground and fiery air of the earth where they had left Tiamat venting spleen – not to mention noxious gasses.
An arm snaked around Tamar’s waist, and she was about to turn and strike when she realised it was Denny. Here of course, he had substance; he could touch things. He belonged here. There was pain in this idea of course but oh, to feel his hand on her face again … his cold, dead, grey hand … she shrunk back involuntarily. This was wrong.
‘I can fight here at least,’ he said. He did not seem in the least bit hurt or troubled at her reaction, ‘if necessary,’ he added. ‘If you were also dead,’ he explained to her. ‘I would seem more alive to you. Isn’t that ironic? Now it’s you who doesn’t belong.’
‘We just can’t catch a break can we?’ she said ruefully.
‘I believe we already covered that,’ he said. ‘But at least this is the end of the quest.’
With a start, Tamar realised he was right. It was the seventh and final task.
She turned to Nemesis. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘What is it this time?’
Nemesis sulked. ‘Ironically,’ she said, ‘it’s to steal the Helmet of Invisibility from Hades.’
‘Hades is dead,’ said Tamar.
‘There’s a lot of it about,’ said Nemesis sourly.
‘So that means … oh for God’s … for the sake of … the helmet is mine anyway,’ she said. ‘I am the ruler of the dead – pro tem anyway.’
She summoned the helmet and stood with it in her hand looking disgruntled. ‘What’s this supposed to prove anyway?’ she said eventually.
‘I know that Hades used it to walk unseen among the dead spreading fear and wonder etc. But what the hell do I need it for? I can spread fear without props.’
‘And wonder,’ put in Denny.
Nemesis sighed. ‘Put it on,’ she said. ‘And you’ll see. The helmet does more than make you invisible.’
Gingerly Tamar raised the helmet and then, after a moment’s hesitation, she rammed it decisively onto her head.
Immediately everything changed. It was as if she had spent her whole life half blind, and now she could see.
She took it off. ‘No god made this,’ she said. ‘This is a product of the mainframe.’ And she gave Hephaestus a stern look. ‘And you took credit for this?’ she said.
‘I forged it,’ he said. ‘But its powers came otherwise. And none, not even Zeus, know from whence.’
‘What’s the deal?’ asked Denny curiously.
‘Not sure really,’ she said. ‘It’s a very weird frequency. I can see the unseen though. That’s pretty interesting’
‘Code breaker,’ said Denny. ‘The clerks use ’em to decipher broken algorithms in the mainframe. They take you out of phase. Never seen one that looks like that though.’
Tamar handed it to him. ‘Well it’s supposed to be a dead mortal that uses it,’ she said, ‘according to the rules of the quest. See what you make of it.’
Behind them, they heard Nemesis swear softly. She was just too good at this; she should never have worked that out – she was not supposed to have got this far at all, in fact.
Denny put the helmet on. After a few seconds he said. ‘Nothing’s happening. It’s not working for me.’
Then he vanished.
‘Bugger,’ said Tamar.
‘What?’ said Hecate puzzled. From her point of view, and that of the other gods, Denny had vanished from sight the moment he had put the helmet on. Only Tamar, for some reason (no doubt because she was lord over the dead and the owner of the helmet) had still been able to see him.
Instead of wasting time explaining, Tamar closed her eyes, and after a second or two she also vanished.
‘I wish she would stop doing that,’ said Aphrodite. ‘It’s very disconcerting.’
* * *
‘Okay,’ said Tamar out of the gloom, ‘What is this place?’
‘You don’t recognise it?’ said Denny. ‘It’s the cavern of the Fates – you’ve been here before.’
‘Must have redecorated,’ said Tamar.
‘This is a different part of it,’ said Denny. ‘This is where the wheel is kept.’
‘The wheel?’ said Tamar and then it struck her. ‘You mean the wheel is what we have been after the whole time? We went through all that for nothing? This is where we bloody well started from.’
‘I know,’ said Denny with a wry smile. ‘Ironic isn’t it?’
‘You knew? You bugger, you knew all the time didn’t you?’ yelled Tamar half furious, half laughing.
‘Not all the time.’ he said, laughing too.
‘But you did know?’ she insisted, ‘at least for a while.’
‘Yes, I knew,’ he said. ‘Apollo wanted a mortal to have the chance to change the fate of the gods – if anything should go wrong and the prophecy were to be fulfilled. He figured if they were all slated to die anyway then he had nothing to lose.’
‘I can see that,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t counting on me then, was he?’
‘He didn’t realise at the time, that the fate of the gods had already been changed,’ said Denny. ‘And that anyone taking the quest would be doing so in order to change it back.’
‘That’s what I said,’ said Tamar happily.
She frowned. ‘Why did the prophecy say “it will only exist for a limited time”?’ she said. ‘I mean it’s the Wheel of Fortune, it’s not suddenly going to vanish is it?’
‘Because someone did the translation badly,’ said Arachne appearing as if from nowhere like a pantomime demon, as befits a hideous monster in a dingy cavern.
‘Figures,’ said Tamar with a laugh. Then she frowned again. ‘So what should it have said?’ she asked – she had a bad feeling about this suddenly.
‘A one-time offer,’ said Arachne. ‘You only get one chance to spin the wheel – choose wisely.’
Tamar looked at Denny in anguish.
‘Don’t,’ he warned her. ‘Do what you came here for. I will be restored anyway – once the time-line is put back on track.’
‘What if it doesn’t work though?’ she said.
‘Tamar – it could all end right now,’ he said. ‘This is better than any chance we will ever get. If you change the fate of the gods back to what it should have been all along – then this is over – right now. This was what was supposed to happen, and it’s the only way. Just do it will you?’
Tamar looked at him in an agony of indecision.
He took her by the shoulders. ‘Tamar,’ he said gently. ‘Spin the damn wheel and finish this so we can go home.’
‘If I spin the wheel and it doesn’t bring you back …’ she began.
‘It will,’ he insisted, ‘because none of this will have ever happened.’
‘So many things could go wrong,’ she insisted. ‘There are too many variables.’
‘Bollocks,’ said Denny impatiently. ‘If the gods die on schedule then we will never have been here in the first place.’
‘A paradox,’ said Tamar. ‘No I can’t risk it.
‘At least this way I can be certain of getting you back – even if we do end up stuck here for the rest of our lives.’
; Denny sighed – he had known it would come to this. Tamar was impatient, impulsive and volatile. She made mistakes all the time, but because of her conscience she rarely made foolish choices out of mere selfishness. This time it was different though. And he knew that there was no point in trying to change her mind.
Arachne came forward a sinister smile on her face that made even the deceased Denny shudder. She was obscenely pleased at the way things had turned out – that was clear. It filled Denny with forebodings.
‘Spin,’ said Arachne and indicated the wheel.
Without even the merest hesitation, without even a flicker of uncertainty Tamar spun the wheel.
Denny closed his eyes, and for the first and last time in his entire existence – he prayed.
Why are we still in the underworld?’ was the first thing he said when he opened his eyes. ‘Didn’t it work?’
But one look at Tamar’s shining eyes was enough to tell him it had worked. Besides, he could feel his heart beating.
There was a moment of silence that seemed to stretch out into forever and then they were in each others arms clinging to one another as if they would never let each other go until the world’s end.
They finally broke apart at the sound of Arachne’s low laughter.
‘Well you have got what you wanted,’ she said. ‘You have changed the fate of one mere man. And may it make you very happy, for you have lost your chance to ever to defeat the gods. A foolish choice as your lover tried to warn you.’
‘No,’ said Denny surprisingly. ‘I was wrong, it was the right choice.’
Even Tamar raised her eyebrows at this – she looked questioningly at him.
‘We are stronger together,’ he said. ‘How can a choice made out of love ever be the wrong choice?’ he added. ‘I see that now.’
Tamar gazed wonderingly at him for a moment, all the love light of years shining in her eyes and then: ‘Well aren’t you a soppy git,’ she said. And the world returned to normal again.
‘Well,’ said Denny laughing. ‘Don’t we have a war to get on with?’
Pantheon (The Tamar Black Saga) Page 20