Achilles turns to leave, grabbing the sputtering god of artifice by his metal-bubble arm and pulling him around, away from the unformed mass looming above them.
“HALT!… ACHILLES, FALSE SON OF PELEUS, TRUE SON OF ZEUS, WOULD-BE AUTHOR OF DEICIDE AND PATRICIDE. WAIT.”
Achilles stops, turns back, and waits with Hephaestus. The Oceanids are cowering, covering their heads as if from hot ashfall.
“I SHALL SUMMON THE TITANS FROM THEIR CREVICES AND CAVES, BRING THEM FORTH FROM THEIR COWERING CORNERS. I SHALL COMMAND THE IMMORTAL HOURS TO BRING THEM FORTH.”
With a sound that makes all the other unbearable sounds seem small, the rocks around Demogorgon’s throne cleave in the purple night, the lava glow grows deeper and broader, a rainbow of impossible colors arches through Tartarus’ gloom, and chariots the size of mountains appear from nowhere, drawn by gigantic steeds that are not horses—nothing like horses, not even remotely like horses—some being whipped on by wild-eyed charioteers that are not men or gods, other steeds staring behind them with burning eyes filled with fear. The charioteers themselves are almost impossible for mortal eyes to look upon, so Achilles averts his gaze. He thinks that it would be unwise to vomit again while sealed behind this thermskin facemask.
“THESE ARE THE IMMORTAL HOURS WHICH THOU DIDST DEMAND HEAR THY CASE,” booms the Demogorgon. “THEY SHALL BRING KRONOS AND HIS ILK HERE TO THIS PLACE.”
The air implodes with a series of sonic booms, the Oceanids scream in fright, and the huge chariots disappear in circles of flame.
“Well …” says Hephaestus over the suit radio and does not go on.
“Now we wait,” says Achilles, setting his sword in his belt and slinging his shield.
“Not for long,” says Hephaestus.
The air is filling with circles of fire again. The giant chariots are returning by the hundreds—no, by the thousands—each one filled with a giant form, some human-looking, many not.
“BEHOLD!” says the Demogorgon.
“It’s hard not to,” says Achilles. He braces himself and slides his great and beautiful shield across his forearm.
The Titans’ chariots come on.
72
Moira was gone when Harman awoke. The day was gray and cold and it was raining hard. The sea far above was churning and whitecapped, but not the violent surge of liquid mountain ranges he’d watched by lightning flash the night before. Harman hadn’t slept well—his dreams had been urgent and ominous.
He rolled up the silk-thin sleeping bag—it would dry by itself, he knew—and set it into his rucksack, leaving his clothes in the waterproof bag, taking out only his socks and boots to wear over his thermskin.
They’d had a campfire the last night before the storm began—no weenies and marshmallows, of course, Harman only knew what those were through the books he’d absorbed at the Taj—but he’d eaten the second half of his tasteless food bar and sipped water while they sat by the flickering flames.
Now the ashes were drenched and gray, the Breach floor between the rocks and coral had turned to mud, and Harman realized that he was walking in circles around their campsite, looking for some last sign of Moira… a note perhaps.
There was nothing.
He hitched the rucksack higher, pulled the thermskin cowl lower so that the goggles were properly lined up, wiped the rain from them, and began hiking west.
Instead of growing lighter as the day progressed, the skies grew darker, the rain came down more heavily, and the walls of water on either side grew taller and more oppressive. He’d gotten used to the trick of perspective where it was never the ocean bottom going down, but always the vertical walls of water on either side growing taller. Harman trudged on. The Breach descended through path-blasted ridges of black rock, passed over deep crevasses on narrow, slippery black iron bridges with no railings, and climbed steeply up more rock ridges. Even though high ridges made the walls of water on each side lower—the ocean was no more than two hundred feet deep here, Harman guessed—the climbing was exhausting and even more claustrophobic than before, with the rock walls on either side of the narrow path making him feel as if there were walls within walls closing in on him.
By midday—which only his internal time-function announced since the sun was completely absent and the rain was falling so fiercely that he considered pulling down his osmosis mask over his nose and mouth—the Breach path had come out of the underwater mountainous country and stretched flat and straight ahead. That was something and it helped improve Harman’s dark mood—but only a little.
He welcomed the rocky or coral sections of path now, since the ocean-floor bottom, which had a nice consistency of packed soil on the dry days, was become a squelching avenue of mud. Eventually he grew tired of walking—it was after noon at whatever local time it was there south of England—so he sat on a low boulder emerging from the forcefield-contained northern ocean and took out his daily food bar to munch on, while sipping cool water from the hydrator tube.
The food bars—one a day—left him hungry. And they tasted like he imagined sawdust must taste. And there were only four left. What Prospero and Moira expected him to do when the food bars ran out—assuming he had another seventy or eighty days of hiking ahead of him—he had no idea. Would the gun really work underwater? If it did, would it kill a big fish and could he haul it through the forcefield wall into the Breach? The dried seaweed and driftwood thrown down here from the sea above was already getting scarcer… how was he supposed to cook this theoretical fish? The lighter was in his pack, part of the sharp flip-knife, spoon, fork, multi-thingee, and he had a metal bowl he could morph into a pan by touching it in the right places, but was he really supposed to spend hours of his time each day fishing for…
Harman noticed another rock half a mile or so to the west. The thing was huge—the size of some of the more jagged ridges he’d passed through—and it protruded from the north wall of the Atlantic just before the dry bottom of the Breach dipped into another deep trench, but this rock or coral reef was strangely shaped. Instead of crossing the Breach with a path cut through it, this rock appeared to slant down from the water, disappearing in the sand and loam of the Breach itself. More than that, it looked strangely rounded, smoother than the volcanic basalt he’d been hiking through the last three days.
He’d learned how to activate the telescopic and magnification controls of his thermskin goggles and he did so now.
It was no rock. Some sort of gigantic, man-made device was protruding from the north wall of the Breach, its snout sunk into the dirt. The thing was huge, widening back from a bottle-nosed-dolphin bow—crumpled metal, exposed girders—to sinuous curves that widened like a woman’s thigh and disappeared through the forcefield.
Harman put away the last of his food bar, pulled out the gun and attached it to the stik-tite patch on the belt of his thermskin, and began walking toward the sunken ship.
Harman stood under the mass of the thing—much larger than he imagined from almost a mile away—and guessed it had been some sort of submarine. The bow was shattered, exposed girders looked to be rusted by rainfall rather than the sea, but the bulk of the smooth, almost rubbery-looking hull appeared more or less intact as it angled back up through the forcefield and into the ocean’s midday darkness. He could make out the silhouette of the thing for another ten yards or so in the ocean, but nothing more.
Harman stared at the large breach in the hull near the bow—a breach within a Breach, he thought stupidly, rain pounding down on his cowl and goggles—and was sure he could get into the submarine through that opening. He was equally sure that it would be pure idiocy to do so. His job was not to explore two-thousand-year-old sunken wrecks, but to get his ass back to Ardis, or at least to another old-style community, as quickly as he could—seventy-five days, a hundred days, three hundred days—it didn’t matter. His only job was to continue walking west. He didn’t know what was in this damned Lost Era machine, but something in there could kill him and he didn’t see how anything in there could enlighten him any further than he’d been enlightened by his drowning in the crystal cabinet.