“The discs will be counted by each of the candidate’s two sponsors. When all the sponsors are in agreement on the number, the body of voters will be called into the hall and the results will be read.”
Ysalane swept her proud, decisive gaze across the room. “The vote of the people will be final. Let no one dispute it or the penalty will be exile.” Some halfwit in the middle of the room cheered. He was heckled and shushed by everyone around him.
Ysalane handed Aerander the privilege of speaking. A flurry of clapping and hurrahs broke out. Aerander stood up in his blue chiton and short cape and waited patiently for the room’s enthusiastic clamor to ebb.
“My friends, we know each other. From the august days of the Panegyris. From the rebellion at the prisoner camp where we won our freedom. From the hollow wake of the evacuation, when our world was torn from us, and there were no words to describe the agony of losing so many people we loved. We have been each other’s comfort, and we have persevered.
“I ask for your vote because our country needs a leader. The way ahead for us will be hard. We will need courage. We will need hope. We will need each other. I do not want tyranny. I want us united. If you believe that we are better together, beneath one standard for two hundred, I ask you to place a black coin in the box. I will lead us ahead, and I promise that I will see that every one of us returns to the country of our birth. We will see the sun and gaze upon the stars. We will gather our dead for the rites of burial. And we will build homes of lumber and plow fields and gather snippings of the vine in the season of springtide so that our world may start anew.”
An outburst of cheers and pounding came from the tables. Three-quarters of the room took to their feet. From the front bench, Lys and Dardy chanted Aerander’s name. Dam joined in. The boys from the middle-houses joined in, and the freed prisoners cheered as well. Soon, the hall filled with chorus of voices for Aerander and his slogan, “one standard for two hundred.” Dam shouted until his throat was hoarse and dry. The commotion dwindled. Aerander retook his seat. It was Calyiches’ turn to speak.
The handsome, golden-haired boy stood and scratched at his beard as though Aerander’s speech warranted thoughtful rectification. Some jeers broke out around the room, but they were hushed down.
“It was pretty, wasn’t it? A rousing speech from our country’s hero.” He turned to his rival. “We know each other as well, don’t we? ‘From the august days of the Panegyris.’ When little romances bloom in boy’s hearts.” He looked back at the hall. “He has forever been a sweet speechmaker and a generous sweetheart.”
A gust of laughter fluttered through the hall. Dam stared Calyiches down. He meant to make an issue of Aerander’s honor? Lys, who stood across from the candidate’s table, looked like he was ready to launch at Calyiches with his fists.
“I cannot claim the great deeds of Aerander,” Calyiches said. “As we have all heard, many times, it was by his will that the way was cleared for us to leave our country, taking refuge in this dark and barren world, at the mercy of a foreign race. I cannot stand before you and vow that when we return, our sacred lands, bequeathed in trust by Poseidon to his sons, will be parceled up to each of you like spoils of war.” His face turned hard as granite. “This is not what our fathers would have wanted. This is not what the people of Atlantis would have wanted. This is treason.”
Murmurs of disbelief warbled around the room. Dardy, Evandros, and every boy from House Gadir shot up to their feet hurling curses at Calyiches like a hetaroi defending their general. Aerander glanced over them, urging forbearance. The fracas calmed. Calyiches resumed his speech.
“What do we truly know about what happened when Aerander disappeared from the Panegyris on a supposed mission to clear the way for our evacuation? We know that an alliance was forged between him and these people’s warrior queen. We have yet to understand what promises were exchanged. We do not even know the cause of our country’s downfall. It is told to us as a consequence of their magical artifact being retaken from our world.” Calyiches looked over the hall gravely. “This is a place of dark magic. These barbaric people, by their own account, were banished from the earth in a hail of fire from the gods. They tell us that they are our saviors. But this tale does not stand to reason. These are a people damned to a sunless, craven existence. I say what is far more plausible is that they used their sorcery to wash our world clean so they can take it as their own. This is the pact they have made with Aerander. This is his betrayal.”
Voices roared to declaim him. Lys swaggered toward Calyiches like a charging bull. It took four of his friends to hold him back. For a moment, Dam wished they would let Lys at Calyiches. Dam would have happily given the boy a kick to his face and his ribs after he was pummeled down to the floor. But by the riot Calyiches had created, Dam gradually recognized that this was not a candidate’s speech intended to persuade and gain him votes. Calyiches was like a prisoner at the gallows taunting a mob.
“Who shall you be led by?” Calyiches shouted. “A deserter who sold our country to barbarians? A man whose only supporters are shells of men who would bargain their own fathers to hold on to their wasted lives for another day?”
The prisoners stood and chanted “Slander” to overwhelm him.
Calyiches lashed out at them. “I am Calyiches of the honorable House Mneseus. I stand for tradition. I stand for justice.”
Dam joined in with the prisoners’ chant to defy him. He glanced around the hall. All the boys and the women had taken to their feet. They were an army, riled up to take the battlefield.
Calyiches strained to be heard. “This vote is a sham. You can have your traitorous leader. I will not bear it. I leave tonight to make my own way. Let any man who stands for tradition join me. The rest of you shall perish when Poseidon’s mighty fist brings thundering justice to this wretched place.”
He looked to Oleon and Leo. They stood up from the table and followed him down the aisle. Mesokantes, Perdikkas, Boros, and a half dozen boys from House Mneseus fumbled through the crowd to follow Calyiches. Those were his only supporters. Even Koz stayed back. The crowd booed Calyiches while he made his way to the doors.
As soon as the group left the room, a triumphant cheer swelled up in the hall. Lys and Dardy rushed up to Aerander and hoisted him on their shoulders. Dam ran over to him too. Soon, a sea of people surrounded his cousin and hollered to proclaim the new leader of their people. The vote was over before it had begun.
Chapter Eleven
Everyone stayed at the hall to celebrate. Ysalane called for a banquet to be brought in, and warriors showed up with kettledrums. While a group of them played the instruments, others did a fighting dance with iron batons atop the room’s head tables. The boys wove a choreia through the promenade, and they broke out with verses they had been taught at the Panegyris.
Dam pushed Hephad along to the front of the hall to watch Hanhau performing with the dancers. The troupe was made up with war paints on their faces, arms, and legs. Their only other covering was thigh-length kilts. They showed off martial stances and leaps and airborne somersaults. Dam could have watched the performance for hours, but plenty more was going on with the celebration. He grabbed Hephad by the hand and pulled him into the dancing circle. They went galloping and swinging their arms along with the others.
When the circle split off for food and drink, Dam searched for his cousin. Earlier, Aerander had been paraded around and swung around the choreia, and Dam had lost track of him. Winding through the crowd, Dam spotted Aerander in a cluster of boys.
Dam gained up on his cousin, hugged him, and lifted him off his feet. “You did it.”
Aerander grinned. “You did it too. We all did it.”
Dardy pushed a goblet of water into Dam’s hands. “Wine would be better, but what the hell?” Dardy said. He launched his goblet above his head. “To the new king.”
There was a hearty “Hear, hear,” and they all swigged down some water.
Then Lys lifted his cup
. “To Calyiches, stumbling his way into a den of fire scorpions.”
Evandros piped in, “Or getting his head blasted off by niterbats.”
They all laughed. Lys glanced at Dam grimly. “You don’t know how much I wanted to murder him. Twisting things around, as though we didn’t risk our lives getting the Oomphalos so people like him wouldn’t be taken prisoner by the snakes.”
Worries crept back to Dam. “What do you suppose he’s going to do?”
Dardy snorted. “Besides skulking away in defeat? What else can he do?”
Dam glanced over his cousin and the others. A dreadful feeling had suddenly sunk into his bones. “He was awfully angry, and he’s been awfully private lately.” Dam told them about seeing Calyiches and the others washing that suspicious black dust from their hands and faces earlier that day.
Dardy scoffed. “How would they know how to use that stuff? They suddenly think they’re alchemists?”
Lys locked eyes with Dam. “No,” Lys said. “But Leo and Koz would.”
“Where’s Koz?” Dam said.
They all craned their necks to look around the hall. There were so many people, and they were dispersed helter-skelter. Dam stared at Lys. If anyone had an account of the boy, it should be him.
A blood-curdling blast shattered the commotion in the room. The floor shuddered beneath their feet and sent people cowering into each other. Something had happened outside the hall. It was as though Calyiches’ threat had come true: Poseidon’s fist of justice thundering from the sky through leagues of rock to demolish the underworld.
*
Dam pushed through the startled crowd to get to the gates of the hall. Aerander, Lys and Dardy, and Evandros followed close behind. They were like minnows fighting through an eddying stream. People shifted in all directions. Some stood immobilized by shock. Others pressed toward the doors from either side of the room, creating a bottleneck. Dam spotted the warriors ahead of him, though he couldn’t distinguish Hanhau in the crowd.
A low bass horn resounded from outside. Dam had never heard it before, but it had to be a call to arms for the Old Ones, probably coming from the top of the Oomphalos Tower. Dam managed to push and squeeze his way into the vestibule and onward to the gates of the hall. Out in the open air, the sharp smolder of saltpeter filled his sinuses.
He ran down the stairs to the square. The fountain pool was a dusty void. Its underground lamps had been squelched, and many of the streetlamps surrounding it had disappeared as well. It was a dark and disorienting sight, but Dam gradually saw the pool must have cleaved and buckled from an underground explosion. He halted to get his bearings. Across the darkened expanse, a swarm of warriors headed toward the tower. Aerander grabbed Dam’s shoulder. They stood together, judging the situation.
“I don’t think anyone was hurt,” Aerander said. “We were all inside the hall.”
“Why would he blow up the pool?” Dam said. He, of course, was Calyiches. No one else could have been responsible. He tasted bitter bile in the back of his mouth. Holes ate through Dam’s heart. He should have tried to stop Calyiches. He should have insisted they confront him days ago.
At the base of the tower, there was an ear-splitting crack of bedrock and a fiery flash of light. Black columns of smoke belched from the ground. Dam jumped into Aerander. He ducked his head and covered his ears, which were throbbing from the blast. Everything was muted, as though he had been plunged underwater.
He regained his balance and stared at the tower. At its foot, the lighted guard post was gone, and the yard was a smoky lake, concealing the extent of the explosion. A silhouette of the tower rose up from the smoke. Mercifully, it still stood. But the warriors had been headed into the blast. Hanhau might have been among them.
Aerander turned Dam by his shoulder. Lys and Dardy had caught up with them, and Aerander was mouthing something. For the first time in his life, Dam felt his father’s blood coursing in his veins. His father had shown no fear rushing into a burning house to save his family, so Dam would lead a charge toward the explosion. Another blast could happen, engulfing anyone who had been hurt by the last one.
Dam sorted out an approach across the square with Aerander, Lys and Dardy close behind him. Now Dam understood the point of destroying the pool. Calyiches had ruptured the shelf between the hall and the tower to delay anyone trying to intervene. He jogged through spaces where the ground was even, climbed over buckled rock, and stepped carefully over jagged fractures in the square. The smoke and dust was choking. Still, Dam cried out hoarsely for Hanhau. He prayed that Hanhau hadn’t been part of the first wave of warriors who had tried to reinforce the tower watch.
They made their way to a bleak scene. Bodies were strewn on the buckled ground. Dam raced to one of the fallen warriors. His friends spread out to check on others. How many could they drag to safety? How quickly?
Dam recognized Backlum. The mightiest of the warriors had been thrown onto his back from the explosion. Dam knelt down and investigated him gingerly. As a novice priest, he had been taught the basics of healing. A head injury would be the worst. Dam didn’t see any blood. Backlum winced and strained his shoulders to lift himself from the floor.
The warrior might have injured his back, paralyzing him, or he might have been crippled by shock. If he had broken bones, his injuries could be worsened if Dam displaced him, but Dam didn’t have time to take a careful account. Dam couldn’t let Backlum lie there, waiting to be thrown or swallowed by another underground explosion.
He shuffled behind Backlum’s head and wedged his hands beneath the man’s shoulders. “I’m going to help you,” he told him.
Backlum grasped his arm with unexpected force. “The tower,” he sputtered.
“It’s all right,” Dam said. “We’ve got to get you out of here.”
That strength in the warrior’s hand was a good sign. Dam heaved Backlum up from beneath his arms so that his back was upright. He released the warrior and Backlum held his posture, just slumping a bit. Dam came around to pull him up to his feet. With his arm slung around Dam’s neck, Backlum was able to limp a bit. Dam helped him toward the borders of the square.
“Was Hanhau with you?”
Backlum didn’t answer.
That didn’t mean one thing or the other, Dam told himself. All of Backlum’s concentration was focused on withstanding the pain that racked his body. They made it some fifty paces from the tower. That seemed like a safe distance. Hanhau could be among the many others lying helpless from the blast.
As though he had read Dam’s mind, Backlum’s arm sloughed free from his shoulder. “Go.” The warrior limped forward at a snail’s pace, but he was making his way on his own.
Dam started toward the tower.
He felt a rumble underground before the most horrifying sound that Dam had ever heard, like the solid curtain of the world had been split open by an axe. The floor around the tower erupted in a hail of stone. The massive shadow of the tower budged to one side—clinging to its majesty for a moment—and then it slid downward into its lacerated foundation. Dam’s breath halted in his throat. The solid flanks of the sacred monument shed from its core as it declined. Beneath, the angry crater stretched wider, swallowing hillocks of ruptured bedrock and everything else in its circumference.
Aerander. Lys. Dardy. Hanhau.
The tower crumbled away to its pinnacle gallery. In the dust cloud of its wake, the crater settled, bearing the weight of the tons of stone that had collapsed inside it. Red light diffused through the dense screen of smoke. A familiar rhythmic energy thrummed through Dam. If he hadn’t known that it was the Oomphalos, he would have reckoned it was the very heart of the tower, shucked from its shell to bleed in brilliant color onto the square.
Dam coughed out the dust that he had inhaled and pulled up the collar of his shift over his nose and mouth. Smoke and pumice still hung in the air. His eyes burned, and everything was a cloudy blur. Dam staggered toward the center of the eruption. He was still much bette
r off than a lot of people, and those people needed help.
He heard a distant cry. Dam’s heart leapt from his chest. That voice was Hanhau’s. Dam’s legs took on new life. Hanhau sounded strong, in charge. Dam stumbled, nearly blindly, to the lip of the cratered tower yard. He couldn’t decipher what Hanhau was shouting about, but Dam had to reach him so Hanhau would know that he had made it through the catastrophe as well.
Hanhau’s cry roused more shouts of alarm. Dam scouted the valley of rubble beneath him. Illuminated in the ethereal red glow of the Oomphalos, he saw a band of hooded boys climbing down into the wreckage. They were making their way to the remains of the pinnacle tower where the Oomphalos lay reefed and unprotected. A group of warriors fought through the crevices of boulders to intercept them from the other side, but they had too much ground to cover.
Attalos and Heron came up behind Dam, bringing torches to help locate survivors. But now that the tower had been razed, the Oomphalos illuminated their dire surroundings in watery, crimson light.
Dam turned back to the wreckage pit, and all three boys stared at the thieves closing in on the prize they had brought down from the tower. Dam and the others were stuck at the lip of the tower crater. It was a ten-yard drop to get down there, and even if they sorted out a better place to descend, they had no time to close the space to the Oomphalos shelf. So they shouted at the thieves. Attalos and Heron took up stones from the ground and tried to pelt the boys from an archer’s distance. Below, warriors scrambled through rocks and ditches to try to overtake the bandits. One of the thieves grasped the gleaming artifact and stuffed it in a satchel.
Darkness engulfed the crater. No one could stop the thieves from making their way into the shadows of the besieged city with the Oomphalos cached in their bag. Their only hope was that the robbers would be stopped by the guards at the tunnel to the lava fields. Dam was torn by an impulse to rush after them in that direction and a duty to attend to the many people who had been thrown and possibly buried by the explosion of the tower.
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