The Face of Apollo Page 19

  Breath sawing in his lungs, he pounded on. Directly ahead of him, a steep and almost barren hillside loomed, with no obvious way to get around it. He must decide whether to turn right or left—

  And now, just as Jeremy had abandoned any hope of aid from the Intruder, there came evidence that his silent partner was not entirely inactive after all. Maybe his onboard god fragment had been busy making plans or just staying out of Je­remy's way until the proper opportunity arose. Because now the boy's left eye, which ever since the ambush had been refusing to provide him with guidance of any kind, suddenly displayed a tiny spot of crystalline brightness, almost dazzling, lodged in a gravel bank just ahead. The spark of brightness was high up toward the top of the bank, where the hillside steepened into a cliff, just below the place where it grew into an overhang im­possible to climb.

  So, he had to reach that spot at all costs, before a sword thrust came to kill or cripple him from behind.

  And still the pursuer himself had breath enough to yell. "Give me your Face—I mean the magic thing the woman gave you, you bloody idiot—and I will let you live!"

  Oh no. What you told me before was true—you'll have to peel my head. Jeremy wasted no breath in trying to reply but only launched himself at the bank and scrambled up.

  In desperation, exhausting his last reserves of wind and en­ergy, seeking something, anything, to use in self-defense, like a rock small enough to throw and big enough to kill, Jeremy sped up the hill as fast as he could go, a final lunge carrying him to within an arm's length of the dazzling spot.

  Grabbing swiftly with his right hand, he scooped up the radi­ant little nugget, along with a small handful of surrounding gravel. Spinning awkwardly on the steep slope, he spent his last strength in a great swing of his arm, hurling his fistful of pebbles at his enemy, who was now but little more than an arm's length away.

  The impact was amazing, as successful a stroke as he'd hoped for but had scarcely dared to expect. It was as if Jeremy had clubbed the masked man with a heavy weapon, stopping him in his tracks. His sword clattered to the ground, and in the next moment he clapped both hands to his masked face, uttered a choked cry, and toppled backward. The impact of his heavy body and its hardware on the steep hillside provoked a substan­tial avalanche. Bouncing and sliding down amid a hundredweight or two of gravel, Jeremy's fallen foe came to a stop at the very bottom. There he lay without moving, both brawny arms out-flung. The cheap mask had come partly loose from his upturned face, enough to show a spiderweb of welling blood. Meanwhile the bandit's helmet and sword had come rolling and sliding down the slope to join their owner.

  Standing ten yards or so above his fallen foe, with the gravelly slope slowly giving way under his weight, Jeremy swayed on trembling legs, blood roaring in his ears, on the verge of fainting from the exertion and terror of the pursuit. But it was over now. That fall had been too genuine to allow for any suspicion of trickery.

  Death's claim on him having been denied for the moment, Je­remy's quivering legs allowed themselves to collapse under him. His sitting automatically launched his own minor landslide. He was borne toward the bottom only a little more slowly than his enemy had gone.

  Gradually he ceased to gasp, to hear the thudding of his pulse, as it slowed down to normal. Looking keenly about him amid settling dust, he made sure that he and his assailant still had the immediate vicinity to themselves. Now Jeremy saw with dull sur­prise that the face beneath the mask was ... No, it was really no surprise at all. But he'd have to get closer to be sure.

  Near the bottom Jeremy's private avalanche slowed to a trickle, and the boy regained his feet to walk the last few yards, to stand over the body of the first man he'd ever killed—who'd come within an inch of killing him.

  Bending for a closer look, Jerry saw that he man had been hit in the right eye with some sharp-pointed object, for bright blood was trickling out in thin streams over the dead face.

  Jeremy reached out to pull the cheap mask away to reveal the features of Scholar Tamarack. His left eye limned them in a pe­culiar, sickly glow.

  And then he recoiled, not understanding. The human counte­nance revealed was undergoing a rapid succession of changes.

  For a moment or two that face was no more than a grinning skull. But it, too, was recognizable; he'd seen the same counte­nance, or something very like it, on a certain statue. And it had grinned at him, beneath a jaunty salute, when he had raised his eyes from the body of the murdered Professor Alexander.

  Thanatos. Jeremy stood staring stupidly. His astonishment was not that Thanatos/Tamarack should be here, but that Death should be dead. It seemed that, with a pebble hurled in despera­tion, he'd somehow accomplished a miraculous victory. For a moment a mad suggestion flared: Did that mean that no one could ever die again? . . . but that was ridiculous, the craziest idea that'd ever crossed his mind.

  And now, before Jeremy's half-believing eyes, the fallen body also was contorting, even changing its size and shape to some de­gree. When it settled into final death, it lay shrunken inside cloth­ing that had become somewhat too large. It was only the corpse of some middle-aged Academic, almost anonymously ordinary. The face was still Tamarack's, or very nearly, but Jeremy could not remember ever laying eyes on this man before.

  Slowly the boy straightened. He glanced briefly at the cheap, mundane mask he was still holding—it was quite an ordinary thing, and he tossed it aside.

  The meaning, the implications, of what had just happened were beyond his ability to calculate.

  In his left eye's gaze, the fatal missile was still marked by the luminous halo that had originally drawn Jerry's attention when its source lay embedded in the gravel bank. The boy's right eye told him meanwhile that he was looking at nothing but a dull black, oddly pointed pebble.

  Objectively, the weapon he had wielded with such fatal skill and force was less than two inches long, a dark flake of razor-thin obsidian—an ancient arrowhead, Jeremy realized. It had struck point-first—more than luck had to be involved in that— and with all the force of Jeremy's lean body behind it.

  The bandit—whether he should be truly called Thanatos or Scholar Tamarack—was quite dead, no longer even twitching. His head lay at an odd angle, and Jeremy supposed his neck might well be broken, after a fall like that. During the past half-year he'd seen enough dead folk to have no doubts about this one.

  And now came shattering revelation, though as soon as Je­remy saw it he realized it ought not to have been a surprise at all. With a faint hissing and crackling sound, a Face fragment, su­perficially much like Jeremy's in appearance, was coming out of the bandit's head.

  The boy watched with a sick fascination as the small translu­cent shape came first oozing and then popping out. Jeremy watched intently, holding his breath. What he had momentarily thought was the dead man's own proper skull, inexplicably start­ing to show through, now revealed itself as a portion of a Face fragment. The countenance of which this fragment was a part was very different from Apollo's Face—in fact, it was the bone-bare countenance of Death. A mere translucent cheekbone filled with rippling light, a lipless grin, a pair of holes where nostrils might have fitted.

  It seemed that it was Apollo who reached out a hand, a pow­erful right hand that had once been only Jeremy's, and for the second time peeled a mask-like thing away from the dead face. Holding it up, Jeremy saw how like his own morsel of divinity it was—one-eyed, one-eared, the same slightly jagged edges, its translucent thickness marked by a mysterious inner current.

  The touch of it brought no pleasure to the fingers. I will not put on the Mask of Death. The Lord of Light and Jeremy Redthorn both rebelled against the very thought—and if any final assur­ance were needed, the Intruder's memory supplied it. No human could ever be avatar of more than one god.

  Over the past year Jeremy had become only too familiar with the sight of death—but this was the first time he had killed any­one. So far the realization carried little emotional impact. The thought
now crossed his mind, bringing little emotional content with it, that this would probably not be the last fellow human he ever killed.

  If the being whose life he had just snuffed out was really a fel­low human at all. But then he realized it must be so—only an­other human, wearing a fragment of another Face.

  There was a calculating quality in the way he noted that bit of information, distinctly alien to Jeremy's usual modes of thought. He took it as evidence that he was now seeing some things from the viewpoint of the alien dweller inside his skull.

  We killed him with an arrowhead. But that—he thought—was only Jeremy Redthorn's voice.

  He also thought that, if he tried, he could imagine pretty well what the Intruder might be, ought to be, saying to him now:

  Ah, if only I/we had had the Silver Bow and proper Arrows! Then there would have been none of this pusillanimous running away, only to turn and strike out desperately when cornered.

  An ordinary bow and arrow, or even an arrow alone, would have made an enormous difference to an avatar of the Far-Slayer, thought Jeremy with sudden insight. Had there been time, I might have pulled a useful shaft from the body of one of the fallen soldiers back at the ambush site. . . .

  Meanwhile, Jeremy didn't know what to do with the object he had almost unwillingly picked up, the thing that had somehow turned a middle-aged Academic into the God of Death. If the feelings that rose up in him were any clue, Apollo regarded it with repugnance. Jeremy considered trying to destroy it on the spot, by hacking at it with his newly captured sword, but Apollo gently and voicelessly let him know that he would be wasting his efforts.

  "All right, all right! What then? What do we do with it?"

  Even as he tried to relax and wait for guidance, his right arm drew back and hurled the thing away. It went into a handy stream, the almost transparent object vanishing as soon as it fell below the surface. The flow of water was going to wash it away, somewhere, until... Suddenly the boy was reluctant to dig into memory for the knowledge of what would most likely happen next.

  Jeremy, still surprised by what his own right arm had done, throwing the Face of Death into a stream, had to assume that the Intruder knew what he was doing. Dipping hastily into acquired memory, the boy uncovered certain facts concerning running water. The fact that the stream where he had hurled the Face of Death, or the larger stream it emptied into, soon vanished un­derground made it all the better a hiding place. Now the frag­ment would be hard for even a god to find.

  Only when his hand went unconsciously to the empty belt sheath did the boy fully realize that he had lost Sal's knife. Now clearly he remembered the feel of the impact when it had been knocked out of his hand, and he felt the deprivation keenly, on an emotional as well as a practical level.

  With some vague idea of compensating himself for the loss, Je­remy picked up the fallen bandit's sword, before turning his back on him. The weapon was finely made, but it sat in his hand much more awkwardly than had the stone arrowhead. The thought that he should take belt and scabbard to accompany the blade and make it easier to carry never crossed the boy's mind. He had no idea of how to use a sword, beyond the obvious basic one of cutting or thrusting at the enemy. The previous owner, in his one-eyed contemplation of the sky, offered him no guidance. Nor did the silent partner lodged in Jeremy's own head have anything to say on the matter; still, being able to swing a dangerous blade at the end of his right arm made the boy feel minimally more se­cure.

  For a long moment he stood listening, sweeping the trees and hillocks before him with his own gaze and the Intruder's. The sword he had just taken up felt strange and clumsy in his hand. He could hear no sounds of combat. He supposed he might have run half a mile trying to get away from the masked man.

  It seemed he had indeed escaped this latest batch of enemies; no other pursuers were in sight. Deciding there was no point in standing around waiting for them, he chose a direction, again heading generally downhill, and started moving. The idea of try­ing to find the place where he had lost Sal's knife and then re­cover it crossed his mind, but he pushed it aside as impractical.

  The thing to do now, Jeremy assured himself, was get back as fast as he could walk, or run, to Lord John and his four hundred men and then guide them in hunting down the damned bandits and see if they had taken Arnobius and the others hostage in­stead of killing them.

  Lord John and the main body of lancers must have seen what had happened, and riders must be speeding even now back to Lord Victor with word of the disaster. As soon as John could get his four hundred men on the right side of the river gorge, they would all be on the trail of the ambushers.

  And now, as Jeremy was trying to decide what to do next, a sick­eningly familiar ring of bandits came pouring out from behind trees and underbrush, with their weapons in hand, to surround him.

  And now again, just when Jeremy thought he most desper­ately needed whatever strength and cunning the Intruder might contribute, he was being given no help at all.

  Nineteen

  When Hades learned of the death of his henchman Thanatos, at the hands of Apollo reborn, the first con­cern of the Lord of the Underworld was for the Face fragment that the right hand of Jeremy Redthorn had thrown into a stream.

  The God of the Underworld had a fair idea of where a Face frag­ment thrown into that stream was likely to reappear, and his helpers were soon dispatched to search for it. The Face of Death was only of secondary power, and Hades felt no need to concern himself as to which of them might put it on.

  Meanwhile, Hades pondered who this new avatar of his great enemy might be—not one of the so-called worthy ones of the Sun God's cult of worshipers; they were all being kept under observa­tion.

  No, the answer appeared to be that this was a mere lad, chosen accidentally by Fate—

  Or possibly the choice of Apollo himself?

  Now the bandits, as they marched Jeremy back to the site of the ambush, were grumbling and swearing because their leader and employer seemed to have deserted them. They were upset, but at the same time their behavior conveyed a strong undercurrent of relief.

  "If I'm going to take orders from someone, I want him to be strong. But not crazy." It seemed that Tamarack had never re­vealed to these followers, or had never succeeded in convincing them, that he was indeed the God of Death.

  This time, when a dozen or so bandits came at Jeremy in a group, casually surrounding him, calling him sharply to throw down his weapon—laughing at the way he was holding his borrowed sword—it was plain to him that trying to fight was useless.

  One of them grabbed up the weapon as soon as he had cast it down. "Where'd ye get this?"

  Even before Jeremy's answer left his mouth, he could feel, up-welling in him, the sense that something was about to happen, an event after which his world would never be quite the same. And then he surprised himself by what he said, the words coming out in a flat, cold tone of challenge: "I met a man back there who paid a good price for me to take it off his hands."

  He saw eyebrows rising on the faces in front of him, expres­sions changing. What was going to happen now had a whole lot to do with Jeremy's silent partner, though at the moment the In­truder was sending no gem sparkles to brighten Jeremy's left eye's field of vision. And at the same time sharp in Jeremy's memory was the image of Sal lying dead. She'd been killed with terrifying ease, by enemies no more formidable than these folk were, and the Face shard of Apollo had given her no help. Of course Sal hadn't been carrying it inside her head.

  But in a moment the bandits' laughter burst. It was plain that whatever had happened to Professor Tamarack wasn't going to lose them any sleep.

  The moment of tension among the bandits had passed. This time the Intruder's challenge was going to be ignored, rather than accepted.

  The men (there were no women among them) who now sur­rounded Jeremy and tied his hands behind him treated him al­most tenderly; the arguments he had started to practice, to the effect that he was someone worth
ransoming, proved to be un­necessary. With his hands bound, they brought him back to a place near the site of the original ambush, where the main band of bandits were now gathered with their other prisoners.

  "A servant of the Lugard family! Likely they'll pay something to get him back."

  As soon as they reassured Jeremy that he was in no immediate danger, the interior upwelling of—what was it? power?—what­ever it had been receded, so the boy once again knew himself to be no more than a tired and frightened stripling. He knew that if they were to continue their questioning, the next answer he gave them was going to be a very meek and timid one.

  The boy felt a greater relief than he would have expected to see that Andy Ferrante had survived the ambush without serious in­jury, as had Arnobius. Ferrante was plainly steaming; had his hands been free, he would probably have done something to get himself killed. His face had some new bruises, and he had a crazy look about him. Evidently everyone else in the party was dead or had escaped.

  Both of Jeremy's fellow prisoners were glad to see him alive, sorry that he had not got away. Soon they were all three seated to­gether, all with their wrists tied behind them.

  Arnobius informed the latest arrival that the bandits had evi­dently known all along that he was Lord Victor's son. "I think we're safe for the moment, Jonathan. They know who I am, and they plan on holding us all for ransom. My father will pay— since he really has no choice." Arnobius was taking care to sound confident on that point, on the theory that at least one of the bandits must be listening. "He'll negotiate some reasonable amount. What I wonder is how did they know me so quickly? Were they expecting me here?"