piercing putty. The Minotaur cried out, loud, then louder still as Artemis yanked the spear out and smartly rammed it home again. This time she got him in the midsection, and as the spear was withdrawn it tugged out a blue-grey tangle of intestines with it. Then the Olympian plunged the sleek silver weapon into the Minotaur's chest once more, hard enough that ribs could be heard splintering.
'How they turned you against us, beast, I don't know,' she said. 'But all living creatures are fair game to Artemis the Untamed. Man, animal, or both, you're mine to hunt and kill.'
The Minotaur met her look of haughty triumph with a contemptuous crimson stare. Blood and drool bubbled around his lips. Then, lowering his horns and planting both feet firmly, he thrust himself toward her. The haft of the spear sank further into him, while the point protruded further out behind. Artemis was too startled to let go of the weapon. She'd thought the Minotaur done for, finished, still standing only because her spear was holding him up. Too late did she understand that the monster, though fatally wounded, had resolved not to die alone or unavenged. Now, pushing himself along the spear, he got to within arm's length of her. His massive black hands seized her by the head, took a firm grip, and clenched. Artemis's scream was high-pitched and unearthly, like steam whistling from a kettle, but, ghastly as this was, it wasn't nearly as ghastly as the sound of her skull being crushed — a ripple of firecracker pops that ended in an abrupt, eruptive squish. Wet pink spongy stuff spewed out over the Minotaur's fingers. Artemis's body twitched, then went limp. The Minotaur dropped her and a moment later himself fell, toppling forwards onto her supine form. Briefly he shuddered, then lay still, with the spear poking up vertically from his back like some hideous, gore-soaked flagpole.
Elsewhere, lightning continued to flicker and explode. Gunfire ripped through the air. There was the heavy kerrump of a grenade going off, followed by the patter of clods of earth raining down. Just by her ear, and yet as though from miles away, Sam heard Hyperion calling anxiously for her, for Tethys. In the midst of all the melee he couldn't see that she was lying not so far off from him, beside the fallen Minotaur and the remains of Artemis, whose head was like a trodden-on pumpkin. She wanted to speak up, tell Hyperion where she was, but a strange and wonderful numbness had set in. Icy fire burned in her belly, licking along her veins, suffusing her with soothing coldness, and with every heartbeat she seemed to grow calmer, more detached, remoter from herself. The ground was like water, something you could float on, and nothing mattered. Life, she saw, was such a small thing. All its strains and efforts were immaterial. It felt good to be able to rest at last. Perhaps that was all she had ever needed, just some rest. A good, long sleep.
Her eyes were on the point of closing when a face hove into view above her, peering down.
Hermes, with his shiny winged helmet, like a cross between a dove and a hubcap.
Sam smiled, then frowned.
Why did Hermes have someone else's features?
Why did he look a lot like — no, exactly like — that twelfth Titan candidate, what was his name, the one who dropped out right at the start? Darren Pugh, that was it. Why was Hermes a dead ringer for him?
She couldn't work it out.
Then Hermes reached down with one arm, and said, in Darren Pugh's voice, 'Time to go,' and clasped her wrist, and next thing Sam knew she was being turned inside out, flipped like a pillowcase, then flipped again, and/
/not Bleaney/
/enclosed, quiet/
/ceiling, not sky/
/where?
Here?
Her?
Er…
61. A VIEW
T hey removed her TITAN suit at some point. Shortly before that, or maybe it was after, someone placed hands on Sam, touching her stomach where Artemis's spear had gone in. This hurt abysmally. The pressure of the hands was almost unendurable. Then something warm and sparkling seemed to flow into her, like liquid summer- night stars, and the pain went away and was replaced by a deep-seated sensation somewhat like a tickle and somewhat like an itch but neither, and better, and worse. Sam prised open her eyelids just enough to catch a glimpse of a woman she had never met but recognised all the same — a woman with unruly hair and plain, outdoorsy looks, her complexion coarse and plum-coloured, her cheeks jowling over her jawline. Demeter.
The Olympian stood up after her ministering was done, and swayed for a moment, as though suddenly emptied of all energy, then tottered out of sight, and Sam tried to track her as she moved away but darkness closed in and she plunged back into unconsciousness, although not before hearing Demeter murmur to someone, curtly, 'She'll live.'
Later, there was food being spooned between her lips. She took it in — some kind of soup — in grateful slurps. Who was feeding her? Was that Zeus himself?
Later still, voices in the room. Hushed. Heated. Arguing over her. About her. Why keep her captive? Why heal her? Why let her live? Why not simply kill her?
'Because it is my will,' was the final, definitive answer to all these questions, and it came from — him again — Zeus.
And then, just like that, Sam found herself fully awake, and alone, and feeling better than she had in ages, refreshed as if after the sleep of a lifetime. She was stretched out on a couch in a bedchamber furnished in the ancient Hellenic style. Drapes billowed. There were urns and amphorae everywhere, patterned in orange and black, some with figures painted on them — warriors, huntsmen, poets with lyres. Repeating zigzag and spiral motifs ran along the top of the walls, and a mosaic by the door depicted… she wasn't sure what, until she inspected it close up and worked out that what she was looking at were scenes from Tartarus, a panorama of the torments of the damned.
Here was Sisyphus, eternally and unsuccessfully pushing that boulder up that hill. Here, Tantalus, unable to slake his thirst from the pool he stood in or eat the grapes that dangled just out of reach overhead. And here, Ixion, strapped to his ever-revolving fiery wheel.
Turning away from this rather charmless piece of decor, Sam went to the window, which was small and unglassed, the source of the thin, cold draught that nudged the drapes. She looked out, already knowing what she would see, just needing it confirmed.
A view from on high.
From a mountaintop, across folds of pine-forested crag and foothill to a far-off, urbanised plain and beyond, in haze, a coastline, the sea.
The view, she knew, from Mount Olympus.
She tortoised her head out of the window. Below her lay a long, straight drop into a deep cleft, whose far side was capped with battlements. Both faces of the cleft were smooth and precipitous. Sam peered hard, but potential handholds and footholds were few and far between. Climbing out of here was simply not an option.
'There is no exit that way,' a voice behind her confirmed.
Sam whirled. Zeus had entered, accompanied by Ares.
'At least,' he added, 'not unless you consider falling to your death an exit. Which you might, but it would be a pity and a waste. How are you, Tethys? Well, I trust?'
'All right.'
'You'll have noticed that your wound, which was a fatal one, is troubling you no more. Gone as if it never was, I think you'll find.'
Sam's hand went to her stomach, reflexively, and stroked it through the cotton of the peplos someone had dressed her in. The skin was perfectly smooth. There was no trace of injury, not even any scar tissue. Nor did she feel any residual internal ache. Nothing.
