by Carmen Kern
“If only we could hear them,” Persephone whispered.
“Lookie the detail. Shading on rock. The light beams…how they dither off into nothing,” said Kay Te, tracing some of the drawing with the stylus pencil she had picked up. “The wispy feathers…look how they catch what little light comes in,” she whispered.
One of the treelike beings stepped out of the crowd, a blade in his hand.
“Don’t even think about using that blade on him.” Persephone nudged Kay Te with her elbow. “Wait, it’s a cutter.”
The iron cuff around Hades’s wrist fell out of sight.
Persephone leaned in closer. “Where are you, Hades? Is that blood?” she whispered. “So much blood.”
“Lookie there. See what they got?” Kay Te squeezed her fingers together over the moving scene, zooming in. “See?” She turned to Persephone.
Weapons. Swords, hammer, pitchforks, semiautomatic guns and small handguns and cartons of assorted ammo. Boxes with labels in strange languages lined the back wall behind the crowd of beings. Constructs made of scrap parts with wheels and pulleys and gears, tanks on their backs and tracks on their bottoms appeared to sleep, limp and unmoving, until commanded to do otherwise.
“What is this place?” Persephone stared with eyes like a burning fuse. “If Thanatos captured Hades, why would he cut him loose like that? He’s a bastard, but he isn’t stupid.”
“I don’t think these are Thanatos’s creatures. I mean, he created them, his signature is inked all over them, but they is thinking for themselves.”
The crowd of beings parted down the middle to make room for a short, dwarflike woman wearing a patchwork coat of animal skins that dragged on the ground behind her. She appeared not to say anything as she stopped in front of Hades and stripped off an army-green backpack with a red cross stamped on the canvas. The dwarf unfolded the pack. She opened one flap and another, spreading out a large canvas panel with pockets bulging with bandages, vials, and surgical instruments gleaming gold, almost too shiny for the grungy setting.
The perspective of the scene shifted to an eye-level view of the small woman. Strands of fiery red hair escaped from her long, thick braid and curled around her face. Her broad face tensed in concentration. Persephone and Kay Te glanced at each other and then back to the scene.
“A healer,” Persephone whispered.
Scissors flashed in the dwarf’s hand, snipping, slicing the air with an almost tactile sound in a silent movie. They watched the top of the dwarf’s head, her red braid bobbing up and down, the pigeon feather tucked into a leather band wrapped around the thick weave. Pads of soaked bandages flew from her deft hand, landing at the feet of a giant with three eyes.
From the shadows darted a small body. Its head swiveled back and forth, a metal appendage with grabbers for fingers snatched up the dirtied wraps, disposing of them into its unhinged mouth, its inner jaw flexing and snapping shut like a trap. It shot back into the shadows and out of sight.
The healer patted Hades’s arm and stared at him with wide eyes, eyes dark as mud and kinder than most. The stillness lasted only a moment. She nodded, as if having decided something, and spun around to attend to her instruments, tucking and wiping and snapping various pockets.
Kay Te touched Persephone’s arm. “I know you want to see your Mister, but the quicker we get Ferret back here, the quicker we can send ’im back.” She dropped her hand and busied herself, choosing the darkest piece of charcoal in her collection.
Persephone rocked back and forth in her heeled boots, her fingers tangled in the silver chain around her neck, the hound’s tooth warm against her chest. She didn’t say anything. Just nodded.
Working on a clean sheet of paper, Kay Te got to work sketching out an escape route through tunnels constructed of stones and cement, resembling the ones they had seen through Ferret’s eyes, connecting to the Overworld sewer that ran under their hotel and into Blood Alley. She fished through her colored pens with her other hand, snatching up the yellow ochre, and filled in the word “home” at the top of the panel.
Persephone watched the scene tilt. A blur of feet, hooves, and dirt, and Ferret scrambling down from Hades’s shoulder, scurrying through the crowd and up one of the grungy walls. And then, darkness. Occasionally, a dimly lit scrag of brick, a small enclosure of pipe with little room to move, running water, moss and fungus-covered cement reflected on its surface, flashed across the page. Persephone looked at the muse. “How long will it take him to get here?”
Kay Te cast her a quick glance. “Can’t tell. An hour? Two?” The charcoal snapped off between her fingers, and she brushed the smaller piece to the side, a thin black trail skittering across the page. “If nothing slows ’im down.”
Persephone’s phone vibrated in her back pocket. She sidestepped the table and walked to the window. “Persephone here,” she said.
Outside, the night was lit with gas lamps, patio lights, and streetlights, the few that still had working bulbs. The RCMP had managed to keep this street clear of rotters for now, herding them down alternate paths, leading them a few blocks away to the groups of volunteers handing out food and toiletry supplies to those who still cared about such things. “Heph, I’m putting you on speaker.” She tapped a button on her phone.
Hephaestus’s voice boomed out mid-sentence. “—Te said there’s more than one entrance or exit to Thanatos’s world. We can get the djinn in there with dreams, Ferret crawls through the drainage system, but we’ve got no way to get Hades out.” There was a pause, a smothering of the receiver and muffled voices and then, “We’re assuming Hades has little to no powers. Which means he can’t fight his way out. That leaves us with few options.”
“Did Rad stop by?” Persephone asked.
“Hey, it’s Bob.” Something dropped with a crash on the other side of the phone. “Yeah, Rad gave us a play by play of what he saw…but it didn’t help much.” Bob’s voice softened, “Kay Te?”
“I’m here.” She looked up from her drawing, her cheeks blooming pink.
“Is there any way Thanatos could be a link between worlds? I’m wondering how he crosses worlds like he does. If there’s a link to Blood Alley, what is it?”
“I’ve been noodlin’ around with that, too. If he made a twin manhole cover for his world, there’s got to be a reason. The tunnels Ferret found aren’t god sized. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. We just haven’t found ’em.”
“What if we’re looking at this too literally?” Bob said.
Hephaestus spoke quickly, “Maybe we are. But the best way for us to get Hades out is to find out how Thanatos gets here and then backtrack.” The god sighed. “And I’ve got no idea how to do that.”
Persephone glanced at Kay Te. “Then let’s go with what we do know.”
Kay Te nodded. “I’ll call Ferret back, put the cuffs on him, send him back. He had eyes on Mr. Inferno, we saw him. But we’ve got no ears down there—we couldn’t hear anything. I’m not sure Ferret can talk in Mr. Grim’s world, but I’ll figure out what to do.” Kay Te gazed at her sketchpad. “I’ll figure it out,” she whispered.
“If you need anything, just call,” Bob said.
“We will,” Persephone took her phone off speaker and held it up to her ear. “Thank you. Both of you…okay…see you soon. Bye.”
Kay Te pushed around her multicolored pencils and stared at the blank piece of paper.
Persephone rested her hand on the muse’s shoulder. “Let’s get Heph’s shackles into Grim world.”
With that, Kay Te began to draw. And on the other side of her page, a small mammal continued to scurry through darkness and water and garbage, answering the call to come home.
TEN
The beast stirred in its sleep. Multiple limbs twitching with the glory of a dream hunt. It licked the moist air. The scent of wet fur, blood, and the sound of animal screams drew the creature further into marshland and forest. Its hunger drove it faster, it
s feet and hooves flying over the dreamscape until…steaming meat between its teeth. It gnashed and slobbered and sucked at bone marrow. The prey’s screams had died out some time ago, ceasing quickly when the jugular was ripped from their throat. Only then did the creature feed greedily. Until, sated, it grew still and fell deeper into dreamlessness.
Something insistent prodded Hades awake. Poke. Poke. The god of the Underworld opened his eyes to a stone ceiling blanketed with thick moss and an almost fluorescent fungus growing in clumps. The walls dripped with moisture.
Hades tried to lick his dry, cracked lips, but his tongue was sandpaper inside his mouth. He slowly rolled his head to the side and found the nauseousness he had was gone. He pushed up onto his elbow. A sharp pain slashed through his chest and lungs. He eased back and caught his breath.
He remembered falling from the cliff, the wind distorting his face, wiping his hair and then…he’d stopped breathing. He woke sometime later. He bled. Tried to stop it. Crawled across sand and under the thorny bushes. Flashes of the past few weeks, days, hours blurred together in his mind. The caped man. A beast…
A small whiskered face popped up into Hades’s line of sight. “Flames,” he grunted. “You.”
Ferret rubbed his tiny hands together and then pointed to the other side of the room. Hades turned his head to the side, to the beast sprawled on a pallet of mildewed straw. Its wide chest rising and falling in an easy rhythm. One of its hind legs twitched, but its misshapen body was otherwise still. Between them lay a chain severed by Ferret’s razor-sharp teeth. Slowly, Hades raised his hand, the iron handcuffs heavy around his wrists, even with a short length of chain still attached.
Ferret scampered around to Hades’s good side, his whiskers twitching, eyes darting back and forth. He put one tiny hand on Hades pinkie finger and pulled again and again, urging the god to move.
Thanatos! Damn you to Tartarus, Hades silently cursed the god of death. Never get involved with the gods of Olympus—that had been Hades’s motto from the beginning of his immortal life. Yet here he was, insides hammered to a pulp, drained of power, in a room that was much like the very dungeons and hells of his own world, all because one of his colleagues couldn’t keep his shit together and do the job he was born to do.
Hades fixed his eyes on the side wall and rolled onto his uninjured side, clenching his teeth against the pain. He managed to ease onto his elbow and lever himself up without using his other limp arm. Pausing to catch his breath, he had the sense of falling again, the ground speeding up to meet him. He breathed deep, quietly as he could, and squeezed his eyes shut. Inhale, exhale, over and over until the sensation passed.
“Flames,” he whispered, looking around frantically. His jacket lay crumpled beside him. He drew it closer, patting down the pockets, shoving his hands inside only to find that his cigarette and Persephone’s chain was gone. “Cronus’s arse,” came out of his mouth with a hiss.
Quietly, he flipped the jacket, felt along the double lining around the buttonholes. Near the bottom hem, he found it. Two needle prongs jabbed his finger, drawing small dots of blood. Whoever had brought him here had missed the bident, shrunken with the absence of power and pinned into the fabric. It was useless without his god power to wake it up, but it comforted him all the same. It was on the third day crossing the Badlands that Hades had taken his weapon from his pocket and slipped it through the fabric of his jacket for safekeeping. He’d done the same thing many times before, when the occasion demanded that all weapons be left at the door for the sake of diplomacy. Neither was a concept he believed in, diplomacy or parting with his weapons.
He tugged on the jacket, grimacing with pain. It took three tries to gain his feet. They wobbled beneath him, weak from an empty god-power tank and too many days of lying around. Hades glanced over his shoulder at the sleeping giant beside him.
Ferret bounded silently into his line of vision to get his attention.
Hades nodded at the rodent and turned back to follow him. In the center of the room was a ring of rocks around charred wood. Beyond it were three arched tunnels, all the same size, and all drenched in complete darkness. Hades willed his legs to move quicker, but his injured side was reluctant to obey. His leg dragged across the dirt, and Hades had no choice but to slow down, careful to make little noise.
The god followed Ferret as he scurried into the middle tunnel and disappeared into the dark. Once inside, Hades leaned against the wall for support, feeling his way with his hands, skimming over rock and moss and something slimy that gave off the stink of fermented spinach. The sounds of dripping water came from all around, amplified by hard surfaces.
Ferret scurried ahead and paused to wait for the god to catch up. He’d wrap his slender, furry body around Hades’s ankle when he stopped for too long. The pitter-patter of Ferret’s feet led Hades on and on through the darkness. They walked for what seemed like hours. An occasional ray of light would find its way down into the tunnels between openings in iron grates. Ferret’s bushy tail ignited like a red brush fire in the short-lived bursts of daylight.
Hades clung to the walls, fighting his way past crumbling stones and eroded earth swept away by years of flowing rains and sewage, dragging his sorry body forward. If only Pers could see me now, he thought. He managed a partial smile, imagining her face, her lips bunched into a scowl at the state of his matted hair and beard. She would burn his clothes; she’d done it many times when he came back from a hunt or a good day in the torture pits. There was a certain stink of dried blood and intestine juices that never came out of clothes, not fully. At least, that was what Persephone said while setting up a mini pyre and torching his work clothes. It was one of the things he loved about her, the almost violent way she took care of him.
Something brushed against his pants leg, then wrapped itself around his ankle. He’d rested too long, lost in thought. Ferret chirped away, scolding angrily. It didn’t take a translator to understand that they had to keep moving. The sharp stabbing pain in his chest had become a hot constant burn. He didn’t bother looking at the wound. He knew it was infected. And it didn’t change his mission of finding Thanatos and binding his death-bringing ass.
Hades took a few shuffling steps before Ferret unwound himself from the god’s leg. They turned into a shorter tunnel, this one choked with bramble and thickets. A trickle of water ran down a serpentine trench in the middle of the path. Gray light made its way in, filtered by clouds or something else. The rock overhead sloped down, shrinking the tunnel. Hades ducked his head while he trudged along.
A scraping sound resonated down the tunnel behind them. There came a pounding, not just the sound of something heavy—the ground beneath their feet drummed with the force. Boom. Boom. The beats quickened the longer Hades listened.
Ferret chirped louder, chattering and scampering up crags in the wall and back across the path.
“I know,” Hades croaked at his small companion. A dry, hacking cough wracked the god’s body. A spear of pain cut through his chest. He hung onto the wall, doubled over, trying not to fall to knees in fear that he’d never get up. His body clenched with exertion.
Boom, boom, from behind them. The ground shook.
And up ahead, branches snapped and voices whispered like ghostly winds spreading through the shrinking tunnel.
Hades’s cough eased. He straightened his broad shoulders, spat blood, and wiped tears and snot from his face with his filthy hand.
Ferret ran in circles around his feet. There was nothing to do but keep going.
Thorny branches caught on his pants and ripped the skin on his hands and face. Hades wheezed, his breath coming hard and quick. A rattle hummed in his chest. His left leg was numb. He looked down to see if it was still moving, kicking it to the side to loosen the fingers of a dead branch.
Is this what dying feels like, he thought. Ah, then I’d see your face, Thanatos.
Shadows separated from the tunnel walls not a meter in front of him,
the whispers now gone.
A gurgling roar echoed all around. The beast tracking their scent roared, closer this time, closing in on the slowing pair.
There was a moment when Hades thought himself invisible, nonexistent, a mere spirit in the world of the living. And then…dark shapes reached for him, their arms encircling his body, taking his weight. One on each side ducked under his arms and dragged him forward. Knives sliced through his chest. His head bounced off his chest while he passed out and came to. His legs dragged behind, bouncing over rocks and tree roots. His body separated, joint by joint, muscles burned up into ash, blowing away, scattering into the nothingness of the darkness. He was undone.
The smell of vinegar and strong wine pulled Hades from the darkness. His head jerked up off his chest, and he was halfway to his feet when he nearly fell. Strong hands caught him.
“You’re safe.”
“For now.”
The voices came from both sides. Hades turned toward one and then the other. The faces looked the same, as if they were carved and planed from the same trunk of teak wood. Dark grainy lines ran vertically down to a horizontal slit of a mouth with red-painted lips.
“I’m Arle. This is my brother, Kush.” Arle thrust the smooth curve of his chin in his brother’s direction. “We heard a rumor that Hades, god of the Underworld, had dropped into our backyard. And here you are.” A woody smile cracked the man’s face, red lips widening.
A spasm, a spark of electricity, rushed through Hades’s veins and nerves. He closed his eyes, reveling in a jolt of adoration. For a moment, he felt a little like himself. But it wasn’t enough to hold onto, or to store up for a rainy day—it was used up quick as it came. But it was something.
“Can you do that again?” Hades managed the words through the desert wasteland of his mouth.
“You must have questions,” Kush said to Hades. “Don’t you think he has questions?” he asked his brother for acknowledgment.