“Who made that sense, which, when the winds of Spring in rarest visitation, or the voice of one beloved heard in youth alone,” asks Asia in her crackly, booming voice, “fills the faint eyes with falling tears which dim the radiant looks of unbewailing flowers, and leaves the peopled world a solitude when it returns no more?”
Achilles throws up again. This time it is as an aesthetic statement more than a reaction to optical vertigo. He decides that he will kill the Oceanids first after all. He would like to kill this Asia bitch several times over. He visualizes hollowing out her skull and using it for a house, her eye sockets as round windows.
“MERCIFUL GOD,” intones the Demogorgon.
There is no Greek word for “ditto,” but Achilles thinks that the Demogorgon should coin one. It does not surprise the Achaean in the least that Oceanids and the formless spirit in the murk down here in Tartarus speak his form of Greek to one another. They’re strange creatures, monsters really, but even monsters in Achilles’ experience speak Greek. They’re not barbarians, after all.
“And who made terror, madness, crime, remorse,” continues Asia, her voice as relentless as the babble of a two-year-old who’s just learned how to keep a conversation going with an adult by asking “Why?” a hundred times over. “Which from the links of the great chain of things, to every thought within the mind of man sway and drag heavily, and each one reels under the load toward the pit of death; Abandoned hope, and love that turns to hate, and self-contempt, bitterer to drink than blood. Pain, whose unheeded and familiar speech is howling, and keen shrieks, day after day; and…”
She breaks off.
Achilles hopes that it is some Tartarusian cataclysm that will end their world and swallow up Asia and her two sisters screaming like honey-covered appetizers at a Myrmidon feast, but when he forces his eyes open he sees that it is only a circle of bright light opening, pouring white brilliance into the red gloom.
A Brane Hole.
Something far from human is silhouetted against the light of that hole. It’s shaped roughly like a man, but it is made up of metallic spheres—not only a sphere where the head should be, but spheres for the torso, spheres for the outflung arms, spheres for the staggering legs. Only the feet and hands—wrapped in some lighter-than-bronze metal—look even vaguely manlike.
The thing comes closer and two brilliant lights stab out from the smaller spheres that are its shoulders. A red light, thin as a javelin, leaps from its right hand and plays across the Oceanid Sisters, making their flesh sizzle and pop. The Titanesses stagger backward, wading through lava, evidently unharmed by the red beam but shielding their faces and eyes from the painful white light flowing out of the Brane Hole.
“Goddammit, Achilles, are you just going to lie there?”
It’s Hephaestus. Achilles now sees the iron-sphere bubbles as some sort of protective suit, with iron-shod feet and heavily gauntleted hands emerging from the chain of globes. There is some sort of steaming, burping breathing pack on the back and the top bubble is clear as glass; Achilles can now make out the dwarf-god’s ugly, bearded face in the reflected light from his shoulder searchlights and handheld laser.
Achilles manages a weak squeak.
Hephaestus laughs, the ugly noise amplified by the speakers in his pressure suit. “Don’t like the air and gravity here, eh? All right. Get into this. It’s called a thermskin and it’ll help you breathe.” The god of fire and artifice throws down some impossibly thin garment onto the boulder next to Achilles.
The hero tries to stir, but the air weakens and burns him. All he can do is wiggle and cough and retch.
“Oh, fuck me,” says the crippled god. “I guess I’ll have to dress you like an infant. I was afraid of this. Lie still, quit squirming. Don’t shit on me or puke on me while I’m undressing you and tucking you into this thing.”
Ten minutes later—with a tapestry of Hephaestus’ curses now hanging in the air like glowing smoke from the volcanoes—Achilles is upright on solid rock next to Hephaestus, dressed in a gold thermskin under his armor, breathing easily through the thermskin cowl’s clear membrane—the dwarf-god had called it an osmosis mask—brandishing his acid-etched shield and still-bright sword, staring up at the looming but still indistinct mass called the Demogorgon, and feeling invulnerable again and not a little pissed off. Achilles only hopes that the Oceanid named Asia will start asking one of her endless questions again so he will have an excuse to gut her like a fish.
“Demogorgon,” calls Hephaestus, using the amplifier built into his fishbowl helmet, “we have met once before, more than nineteen hundred years ago during the Olympians’ War with the Giants. I am called Hephaestus…”
“THOU ART THE CRIPPLED ONE,” booms Demogorgon.
“Yes. How nice of you to remember. Achilles and I have come to Tartarus to seek out you and the Titans—Kronos, Rhea, all of the Old Ones—and to ask for your help.”
“DEMOGORGON DOES NOT HELP MERE GODS AND MORTALS.”
“No, of course not,” says Hephaestus, his rasping voice amplified a hundred times by the speakers in his suit. “Shit. Achilles, do you want to take over? Talking to this thing is like talking to your own ass.”
“Can that big mass of nothing hear me?” Achilles asks the little god.
“I HEAR YOU.”
Achilles stares skyward, focusing on the roiling red clouds a little to the side of the featureless, veiled nonface of the nonthing looming above him. “When you say ‘God,’ Demogorgon, do you mean Zeus?”
“WHEN I SAY GOD, I MEAN GOD.”
“You must mean Zeus then, for right now the son of Kronos and Rhea is calling all the surviving gods together on Olympos and is announcing that he—Zeus—is the God of Gods, the Lord of All Creation, the God of This and All Universes.”
“THEN EITHER HE LIETH OR YOU DO, SON OF MAN. GOD REIGNS. BUT NOT ON OLYMPOS.”
“Then Zeus has enslaved all other gods and mortals,” says Achilles, his thermskin-speaker voice and radio broadcast echoing from the vol-cano’s slopes and cinder ridges.
“ALL SPIRITS ARE ENSLAVED WHICH SERVE THINGS EVIL: THOU KNOWEST IF ZEUS BE SUCH OR NOT.”
“I do know,” says Achilles. “Zeus is a greedy immortal son of a bitch—no offense to Rhea if she’s out there in the shadows somewhere listening. I think he’s a coward and a bully. But if you consider him God, then he will reign on Olympos and in the universe forever and forever.”
“I SPOKE BUT AS YE SPEAK, FOR ZEUS IS THE SUPREME OF ALL LIVING THINGS.”
“Who is the master of the slave?” asks Achilles.
“Oh, that’s good,” whisper-hisses Hephaestus. “That’s very good…”
“Shut up,” says Achilles.
The Demogorgon rumbles. It is so loud that at first Achilles thinks the nearest volcano is in full eruption. Then the rumble modulates itself into words.
“IF THE ABYSM COULD VOMIT FORTH ITS SECRETS—BUT A VOICE IS WANTING, THE DEEP TRUTH IS IMAGELESS; FOR WHAT WOULD IT AVAIL TO BID THEE GAZE ON THE REVOLVING WORLD? WHAT TO BID SPEAK ON FATE, TIME, OCCASION, CHANCE, AND CHANGE? TO THESE ALL THINGS ARE SUBJECT BUT ETERNAL LOVE AND THE PERFECTION OF THE QUIET.”
“Whatever you say,” says Achilles. “But as we speak, Zeus is proclaiming himself Lord of All Creation and soon he will demand that all of that creation—not just his little world at the base of Mount Olympos—pay homage to him and him alone. Goodbye, Demogorgon.”