Hawkins tried to smile to show her that he was not bothered by her words, but he could not quite manage it. Instead he gestured as if to push her again, but she was already turning to forge ahead. The path gradually angled upward as they approached a hill. Eve wondered what new thrills the Underworld had in store for them on the other side.
Calmer, now, she shook off the remnants of the past, summoning the sardonic swagger that had become so much a part of her survival as an immortal. Eve glanced over her shoulder at Gull.
'So, are we there yet? I’m bored.'
Gull was walking with Jezebel, a protective arm around her waist. There was something untoward about the intimacy between them. The mage was not her father, but regardless Jezebel was still only a girl. Even if there was nothing sexual there, still it was troubling. Jezebel was powerful, and with her red hair and green eyes, and her sensuality, stunning. But she was so obviously broken inside, clamoring for Gull’s approval. And he twisted her around with his words just the same way he wrought magick with his contorted fingers.
Throughout their trek, Jezebel had grown quieter and now she appeared to be a little shaky — not really digging the whole bone carpet thing.
'Damn, the girl doesn’t look well. Maybe she’s just realizing what I figured out the second we arrived. This is a place the wandering souls go. The damned, right? I figure we all belong here. It’s like coming home. Can’t be easy on the kid.'
Jezebel shuddered at her words.
'Shut your mouth,' Hawkins barked, but he did not touch her. 'D’we need this, Nigel? Think I liked her better when she couldn’t talk.'
'That will be enough of that, Hawkins,' Gull said casually, as though they were all just taking a pleasant Sunday stroll through the park.
They reached the base of the hill, the bone path leading upward, and Eve again considered what awaited them on the other side. Jezebel stopped to rest for a moment, taking a seat on an enormous skull that could only have belonged to something monstrous.
'In answer to your question, Eve, I would wager that we are close,' the hideous sorcerer said. He stroked Jezebel’s hair as if he were calming a nervous house pet.
She leaned into him, closing her eyes, lost in his attentions. 'I think I would like to go home now,' she whispered in a tiny, little girl’s voice that trembled on the brink of tears.
'There, there, pretty Jez,' Gull comforted, continuing to stroke her fiery red hair. 'It won’t be long now.'
Eve didn’t like the sound of that and wondered where she fit into the mage’s plans. Throughout her time as his prisoner she had fought against the enchantments placed upon her, but she was still incapable of directing her own actions. Eve would be free. Of that, she had no doubt. A moment would come when she would have the opportunity to free herself, and then she would kill them all. She would need patience, however, but Eve had lived almost forever and had learned patience very well indeed.
'Won’t be long until what?' she asked Nigel, as she squatted to the bone floor and retrieved the skull of what could have been a crow. She used its beak to clean away some of the grime that had collected beneath her fingernails — a manicure was definitely in her foreseeable future. She looked up into the sorcerer’s eyes, the only part of his body that hadn’t been twisted by magick. 'C’mon, Gull, the suspense is killing me.'
'We’d best hurry, then. You’ll need to survive at least until we can deliver you.' Gull smiled, and it was wretched to see. The mage hauled a dozy Jezebel from her seat. 'On your feet now, girl,' he commanded, no longer sounding quite so fatherly. 'We have places to be.'
Jezebel did as she was told, hugging her body as if cold.
'Hawkins, see to her,' Gull instructed, and the man moved to stand beside the girl, ushering her gently along.
The sorcerer moved toward Eve, gesturing for her to begin the climb up over the rise. She didn’t care for the implications of his words, but they came as no surprise. He had kidnapped her for some reason, and she doubted that her scintillating conversational skills had anything to do with it.
Eve had difficulty maintaining her footing on the shifting slope, and she used her hands to pull herself along. The pieces of bone were sharp, but the pain kept her focused.
Gull had begun to climb as well, eagerly matching her progress, his breathing becoming labored as they neared the top, perhaps more from anticipation than exertion. Eve found herself increasing her pace, eager to reach the summit before her captor.
'Last one to the top is a deformed fucking freak,' she snarled. 'Aw, too late.' She went up over the rise…
And froze. After all she had seen in her excruciatingly long lifetime, she had never seen anything quite like the sight that greeted them over the top of that hill.
Gull joined her, fury twisting his features all the more horribly. 'There were times when I actually felt a sense of guilt over what I was going to do with you. But now I believe…' Then he, too, stopped and gasped.
'Just when you think you’ve seen it all,' Eve said, eyes riveted to the valley below her.
The body of a giant lay splayed upon the valley floor, so enormous that it covered much of the valley. The corpse was larger than an aircraft carrier, large enough that a small town could have been built atop it. And corpse was the word. The giant was quite dead, of that she had no doubt, and had been dead for some time by the look of him. Desiccated skin hung loose and leathery from its monstrous skeleton. A wispy fog floated above the enormous cadaver, the smell blowing up from the valley on a breeze ripe with the stench of rot.
Jezebel started to cough and gag, the stink of the decaying giant nearly making her sick.
'It all seems to have a certain logic now,' Gull said wistfully, the overwhelming stench seeming to have no effect on him. 'The disorder and degeneration — the chaos.'
'Someone you know?' Eve asked, bringing a hand to her nose. As the mist above the great corpse shifted in the breeze, she began to notice the details of its attire. The giant wore pitted bronze armor, tarnished green with the passage of time.
'In a sense. Think about it, temptress. One of your experience ought to be able to put the pieces together. Who can this be, a god so large that the Underworld itself is almost too small for him?' Gull asked, a hint of awe in his voice.
Eve couldn’t wrap her brain around the concept. How is it even possible? How is it possible for a god to end up this way?
'Hades,' Gull said in a reverent whisper. 'What sad fate has befallen you?'
When Eve began to descend the steep hill toward that extraordinary sight it was not only the voice of Orpheus and Gull’s command that drove her. She had to see it, this magnificent panorama of death, so enormous that she could barely contain the fact of it in her mind.
'So, if the Lord of the Underworld is dead,' she rasped, 'then who’s running the show down here?'
Gull did not look at her as he spoke, his eyes fixed upon the dead god before them. 'Turning and turning in the widening gyre,' he muttered. 'The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.'
'When you start quoting Yeats, I’m guessing that’s code for you don’t have a fucking clue,' she said, careful not to lose her footing on the slippery slope.
The closer they got, the more details she took in. The craftsmanship of the god’s armor was some of the most beautiful and intricate ornamentation she had ever seen. But what would one expect for a lord of the abyss? Hades’ face was a shrieking death mask, the withered flesh pulled tight against his skull. Strange birds whose feathers seemed to glint like metal in the faint light of the Underworld flew out of the god’s gaping maw in a shrieking flock as they approached, but her eyes were drawn to something else.
'Look at his throat,' Eve said, staring at the dry, curling slash that had been cut across the leathery skin of Hades’ neck.
The ground in that valley was a black, fine soil, but on the acreage around the desiccated head of the dead god the earth was stained a deep burgundy. Though there were trees and other plant life familiar to the Underworld growing about the vastness of the deceased, Eve could see that nothing grew where the dead lord’s blood had flowed.
'All of the detritus of Greek myth had retreated here when their era came to a close. It was their only hope at survival,' Gull explained, glancing at an awestruck Hawkins and a giddily grinning Jezebel. 'They ought to have built a paradise down here to rival Olympus. Instead, they died, and the place fell to ruin. Entropy. The center could not
