inordinately beautiful — stood at the rear, along with her husband Hephaestus, a stunted dwarf of a man who held onto her shoulder for support. His left leg was a twisted, crippled thing encased in a brace and an orthopaedic shoe.
All fourteen members of the Pantheon stared straight into the camera, and the anger radiating off them, even off loving Aphrodite, was palpable.
They remained like this for several seconds, stern parents letting their children know the severity of the trouble they were in.
Then white-bearded, dark-eyed Zeus — Zeus the Wide-Seeing, Zeus the Master Of The Bright Lightning — spoke.
'Mortals,' he said, 'how dare you. How dare you! Such great things we have done on your behalf, and all we have asked in return is for you to stay peaceable and abide by our governance. It seems, however, that even that is too much for some among you.'
A pause, then he continued: 'It has come to our attention that a number of our beasts — those custodians of your wellbeing, guardians of your good conscience — have been foully and cruelly slain. I refer to the Sphinx, the Griffin, the Chimera and the Hydra. It is our belief, moreover, that the supposed accident which took the life of the Cyclops was not, in fact, an accident at all. These five deaths having occurred within the space of a single month leads us to one conclusion and one only. There is a concerted effort being undertaken to kill our loyal creatures. We are facing a co-ordinated series of attacks by persons unknown. A conspiracy has been hatched.'
'And here was I thinking Landesman was long-winded,' muttered Barrington. 'This fella could teach you a thing or two, Regis.'
Landesman shot him a sharp look.
'This cannot stand,' said Zeus, his voice lowering to a menacing rumble. 'This will not stand. Harming innocent beasts who are simply doing the tasks they have been instructed to do is a craven act. Only a coward would kill the watchman's dog but not the watchman. If you wish to attack Olympians, then by all means attack us. See how far it gets you. To go after our vassals achieves nothing… other than arousing our ire.'
Hera, at his side, nodded in vehement agreement. She, keeper of the monsters, was doubtless feeling a sharper grief than any of her fellow Olympians. Her eyes gleamed with imperious indignation.
'We do not know who you are, you butchers, you murderers,' Zeus said, 'but rest assured, we will find out, and once we know your names and where you live, we will come for you and we will pinch you out like match flames. In the meantime, you must learn that your actions have consequences, if not immediately for you then for others. A show of our displeasure is in order. World, prepare yourself. See, once again, what it means to incur the wrath of your divine guardians.'
Zeus directed a grave, searching stare into the camera. Blue-white light crackled in his eyes.
Then the transmission from Olympus ended, the screen went blank, and a moment later the BBC studio reappeared. The newscaster and the Pantheonic Affairs correspondent were looking at each other with expressions that were, frankly, alarmed.
'Well, that's… That's certainly…' said the newscaster, and groped for a description.
'A worrisome turn of events,' the correspondent said. 'Zeus sounding there like he means business.'
The newscaster collected herself. 'What, in your view, will the 'consequences' he just mentioned be, Tom?'
'No idea, Julia. But I expect it won't be long before we find out, and I, for one, am not looking forward to it.'
'Oh God.'
'Indeed. Oh God.'
26. REPERCUSSIONS
L andesman ordered the screen switched off. A hubbub broke out among the Titans and the technicians, a dozen voices speaking at once. Landesman requested, and got, silence.
'Let's just take a moment, shall we?' he said. 'Think things through calmly and rationally. We knew something like this was going to happen. It was inevitable. There was no way the Olympians weren't going to react once they twigged what we're up to. All we can hope for is that the fallout is relatively mild.'
'People are going to die,' said Sondergaard.
'We don't know that yet,' said Landesman. 'We'll have to wait and see.'
'I signed up to stop the Olympians,' said Tsang. 'I didn't sign up to provoke them into attacking civilians.'
'What did you think they were going to do, Fred?' Landesman asked with some asperity. 'Sit back and take it? What have they ever done when they've felt threatened? Lashed out. It's their way. We need to be grown-up about this. We need to accept that there will, alas, be unavoidable by-products of our campaign. There will be — that ugly euphemism — collateral damage. It simply can't be helped. Sam, you'll back me up here, won't you?'
'I hate it,' Sam said. 'I'm sure you hate it too, Mr Landesman. We all do. But…' She couldn't see a way around it. Landesman was right. The Olympians were bound to strike back. That had been their policy from the very start: let no insult or protest go unpunished. 'We are at war now. We started it. The Olympians are taking it to the next level. How could they not? And it will keep on escalating if we carry on, that's obvious. So what do we do? Do we stop? We could, and then whatever repercussions the Olympians have in mind right now will be the end of it. War over. Titanomachy II dribbles to a halt. I don't know about any of you but that seems pretty ignominious to me. It'd make everything we've done so far a waste. Soleil's death — pointless.
'The alternative is to forge on in the full and frank knowledge that non-combatants are going to suffer. We have to weigh that against what we're hoping to accomplish. Is it worth it? Is it a good trade-off? I don't know. I'd like to think so. I don't have much stomach for watching the Olympians penalise others for what we've done, but equally, every death they cause in our name, every life they take as retribution, is one more reason to keep fighting against them, one further incentive to topple the bastards. That's the only consolation I can see, but I think it counts for something.'
A 'Hear! Hear!' came from Ramsay, and was echoed by Mahmoud, Barrington and Chisholm. If the others were less convinced by her argument, none of them showed it.
'Well said, Sam,' said Landesman. 'Couldn't have put it better myself.'
After that it was simply a question of waiting — waiting to find out what the Olympians were going to do and how bad it was going to be. Landesman had BBC News put back up on the screen, along with a number of rolling- news channels including CNN, Al-Jazeera and the Nippon News Network in inset windows. Zeus's message was being played and replayed across the world, translated or subtitled in every known language, spreading to the farthest corners of the globe, reaching places where it was midnight or later and few were awake to hear and heed. Landesman viewed it over and over, scowling hard. To Sam it seemed as though he was scrutinising the speech, analysing Zeus's every word, every nuance, in the hope of gleaning some insight from it, some clue as to what the Pantheon had in mind.
Perhaps, she thought, it would be only a lenient rebuke, a token gesture, a slap on the wrist. Some destruction of property, a handful of deaths, no more.
She didn't really believe that, though. If she knew anything about the Olympians, it was that they rarely did things by halves.
27. LOST LANDMARKS
I t began in Paris.
A breezy spring morning in the City of Light. Tourists milled beneath the Eiffel Tower, queuing for tickets to travel up in the lifts or posing for photographs with the mighty metal structure behind them. The first hint any of them had that something was awry was a deep, resonant groan like the creak of some immense door easing open
