But didn’t.
There was no roaring. There was worse. It was the sound of thousands of years of crackling, white-hot flame and the hiss of steam hot enough to boil your flesh from your bones. They were crouched until they were almost doubled over, backs curved into sharp, unnatural peaks. That didn’t keep them from moving fast, scuttling sideways like crabs. Their hands matched—a thumb and a thick extension of flesh, four fingers fused into one. Each, thumb and the rest, had a single talon each. Longer than the hand itself and of a gleaming metal that would score rock as easily as the bulldozer teeth.
The single eye was fire. Red, orange, yellow, white, it burned. Every single eye burned and the pale flesh around it was scorched and blackened. But fire could see, or Hephaestus could see through the fire. I wondered if the fire burned in their brains too. Were the roars not roars but screams of long years of agony? Was the sound of flames and corrosive steam their way of screaming?
Burn.
I burn.
We burn.
I didn’t know and I didn’t have the luxury of caring. They were here to butcher us, and whether putting them down was self-defense or a mercy killing, the end was the same. “Cyclops,” I heard Kalakos say, incredulous. He said he hunted the unclean, but he hadn’t hunted anything close to this. With the Auphe-bae, these, and Janus all in two days, he might hang up his sword.
“Welcome to the big time.” I slid down the ladder to stop at the last rung and step carefully into the minefield of metal and broken concrete. At this level I could see that the hunched backs of the Cyclops stood about five feet tall. If they could’ve stood upright, they would’ve been tall. NBA recruitment material, but not literal giants, as Niko had taught in mythology when I was a kid. I told Goodfellow so.
“Work twenty-four/seven in a small cave and smaller tunnels mining ore and it will take barely a hundred years to take you from giant to this.” Robin had gone down his ladder simultaneous with me, but I heard him from the other side of the vat over the Cyclops venting Hephaestus’s rage. “But they’re no less dangerous for it. They are wholly pissed and they do not care who they take it out on.”
The one closest to me moved sideways a step, head rocking back and forth, soot stains coloring its misshapen chin, but with the eye always on me. It had moved less than a foot, but that was enough for me to see in the cloudy, weak light that it had silver painted in swirls all over its sunless body. I thought it was a tattoo. I was wrong. It wasn’t a tattoo and it wasn’t silver; it was more like mercury. It flowed. And it wasn’t on its body; it was in it—channels eaten into its moon-slug flesh. But where mercury was poisonous, it didn’t burn. These coiled channels were lined on each side with thin ribbons of black. I could smell the flesh burning. I could see the wisps of smoke rising. If there was pain, that I didn’t see.
I did see the scuttle and lunge through the air, the madly grinding teeth aimed at my heart, the mechanically thrashing hands and claws aimed at my gut. Not good. I put two rounds directly in the furnace of an eye.
I hadn’t been solely tattoo watching after I reached the bottom of the ladder. I’d switched the xiphos to my other hand and drawn my Glock. As Goodfellow had said, if you’re going after a Cyclops, guessing where to start isn’t a problem. If they couldn’t play “I spy with my one Cyclopian eye” because I sent a bullet through it, that put them at a disadvantage. If it passed through to their brain and killed them as well as blinded them, that was a bonus.
If bullets worked on an eye made of fire. If their brain was high-functioning enough to be bothered by losing half out of the hole blown in the back of their skulls.
This one did have a problem with it. He threw back his head and the hiss and crackle became a real scream, deep and hoarse and full of fury. The eye flickered but didn’t go out, not until he staggered backward, with each step impaling or slicing his legs with metal, and finally fell. His crushing hands grasping nothing but air, he screamed one last time. No fear, no despair, only unfulfilled rage.
Then he was still, his eye a dead black socket and the quicksilver running out of the curving, carved canals that covered him to disappear into the concrete and metal beneath the body. I studied my gun, the body again, and shrugged.
Okay. Cyclops. Not that big a deal.
I kept thinking that as I saw Nik with his back to the wall strike, his sword in the eye of another Cyclops. I thought it right up until I was gauging who was the nearest and next in line. I was looking in the wrong direction. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Nik disappear, the ground opening up beneath him. He was swallowed, the teeth of broken concrete and discarded metal chewing at him as he went. I knew it because I smelled it: the too familiar tang of his blood, bright and healthy as it came—when it was inside his body instead of out.
I ran. I wasn’t as agile as Nik at dodging the minefield of a floor, but I didn’t care and I could move close to as fast as a purebred and faster than any half-breed except Grimm. Who didn’t matter now. As the pain didn’t matter. There was no pain. There was the empty space where my brother had stood. That was all.
I reached it a second behind Kalakos. He’d been closer to Niko, close enough that he reached down and yanked him up and out, hands to wrists, before the Cyclops below Nik had a chance to turn him into the flesh-and- blood version of ore, a crushed pulp of bleeding tissue and shattered bone. I came to a stop between the hole in the floor and Nik and Kalakos. Seeing the eye, a miniature sun, below in the dark, I fired. The scream, maddened, was the same—as was the eye extinguished to the darkness of death.
Feeling my first Vayash impulse—to spit on the body packed tightly in the earth below—I instead growled and turned to look Nik up and down. He was bloody from being pulled through the floor, an inanimate monster all its own, but aside from scrapes, cuts, and abrasions, he’d live. He’d be sore for a while, but he wasn’t going to bleed out.
Kalakos had come to the same conclusion and had his sword back up for the next charge. “You don’t have to thank me,” he said, “either of you.”
“You think I would?” I snapped, and fired at another Cyclops across the foundry.
“No, because I know now it’s something a father must do instead of supposed to do and should’ve been doing since the day his son was born. I see now.” The rushing Cyclops came low, his eye down. Kalakos half removed his head from the thick neck, slammed it backward with the flat of his sword to bring the target in view, and quenched the flame. “Gratitude for that would be no different from gratitude for breathing. The Vayash have a duty. I’ve learned I have more than one.”
He moved away then. He didn’t wait for a comment. The fight was only warming up. There was blood to be spilled, lives—our own—to be saved, answers to be wrenched from an insane god.
“I hate him more now than I did before,” I muttered. “Sanctimonious ass.” Whether he meant it or not, it was too late.
“Perhaps he meant it and we should take it at face value, but that window of opportunity has unfortunately long closed.” He added, “And he managed to get the last word.” His clothes were saturated with blood. I could feel the warmth of it against my back as I did my best to press him hard enough against the wall to pin him, leaving no room for him to be sucked down again. That meant there was no avoiding feeling his blood, all but seeing the cloud of bright copper in the air floating around us.
“Unfortunately,” he’d said, which meant regret, and my brother deserved much more than regret, thanks to that Vayash son of a bitch.
“Last word. That’s the worst.” No—regret was. “
“Other than your crushing me into what I’m beginning to think is a piggyback position, I’m all right. Fully functional, certainly not slow, and definitely not your papoose.” I felt his hand urge me away; he was ready to rejoin the battle. I thought about stalling, but this was Niko and he was right. He’d have to lose half the blood in his body to slow down.
As I began to move, I heard a groan from above. The beams that had shaken earlier at Hephaestus’s voice were moving again…and Hephaestus wasn’t talking. They were wrenching free of their mounting and joining together over our heads, booming as they struck. The movement…it wasn’t falling. Not falling down, but moving fast and inevitably, as if they were falling sideways. Tinkertoys would puzzle him, Robin had said. I didn’t think so. I was looking at the most badass set of Tinkertoys on the planet, and Hephaestus wasn’t stopping there. Metal hit metal and was held in place with the sudden intense red, then white glow of a forge I didn’t see.
