The Face of Apollo Page 30

  "Sir? .. . Yes, sir. Ready."

  "Since we don't know where my brother is being taken, it would be pointless to attempt any pursuit." He faced the Moun­tain's cloud-wreathed summit and extended an arm in that direction. "We are going up there."

  "Yes sir." The major reacted automatically to the voice of con­fident command.

  Sergeant Ferrante was soon relieved to discover that his pro­motion in the field was apparently going to stick.

  Meanwhile, down in the Cave, Jeremy was interrogating the latest victim of Apollo's archery.

  Before the arrow-pierced soldier-priest of Hades had breathed his last, he had confirmed Jeremy's worst fears regarding Katy. She had been grabbed by the Gatekeeper's crew, who were always on the lookout for salable young people. Not understanding what was going on, she had been simple enough to approach them and pay them to have some purification ceremony per­formed.

  Still Jeremy dared to hope that she might be still alive. Be­cause if she was not, the world would have become more than he could handle.

  Inside his whirling head, plans of stunning grandeur, regard­ing the seizure of the Oracle from Hades, contended with the fears and hopes of a frightened child—and which of the two was himself? He could no longer feel sure of that.

  When you got deep enough into the Cave, far enough away from the wind and the warm sun, the air moved only very gently, and it became dry and cool, independent of what conditions on the surface might be. The Intruder's memory supplied the informa­tion that day and night, summer and winter, would all be much the same in here.

  After walking steadily for another ten minutes or so, Jerry/Apollo paused to listen, at a spot well down inside the Cave. Here the visual and auditory evidence was unmistakable— once more some ghastly entity was approaching, dragging itself up from the frightening depths below. The presence that had been detected by Apollo's senses when he stood near the entrance was now a great deal closer. The glow was definitely brighter in Jeremy's left eye, and he could distinguish details in the sound of the approaching footsteps.

  At one point the audible steps changed into sounds suggesting the dragging of a giant serpent's coils. Apollo's memory con­firmed that Hades, as well as Coyote, could really change his shape, as well as render himself invisible. It was a power pos­sessed to some degree by many gods—whether or not Apollo was included was not something Jeremy wanted to examine at the moment.

  Still, Apollo surely recognized the other as it drew nearer. Even invisibility was not certain protection. This time Pluto himself was now gasping, fumbling, and mumbling near, coming up from somewhere deep down in the earth. Hades, "the one who never pities or yields."

  The thing from far down in the earth approached erratically, but it approached.

  Once more a dim shape, vaguely human, but of uncertain size, came rising out of the depths into partial view. What Jeremy could see of it, hardly more than suggestions of a massive shaggy head and shoulders, killed any curiosity that might have prompted him to try to see more.

  The voice of Hades now sounded deeper and stronger than on his previous appearance—all dark tones filled with echoes. Je­remy was reminded of cold water running, a shifting of red lava, and cold granite, far under the earth. "So you are determined to try my strength again."

  Jeremy waited to hear what words might issue from his own throat; he himself couldn't think of any at the moment, and it ap­peared that Apollo also had nothing to say.

  Hades waited a polite interval before he added: "Lord of Light, I tell you this—the sun is great, but the darkness is greater still."

  And Jeremy, with the feeling that this time the words, if not the voice, were all his own, said suddenly: "My sun is great indeed. Compared to it, your Cave is pitifully small."

  The shape of darkness accepted the answer as coming from the god. "I need no pity, Sun God, even as I grant none. This Cave is but a little room, but for this world it is big enough." A gesture, movement black on black, a shifting of the blurs of deeper darkness that must be the figure's arms. "My whole do­main is infinitely more. What is your sun? It may dazzle one who gets too close, but it is lost in the Great Dark. Look at the night sky if you do not believe me."

  "I have seen the night sky," Apollo said. And Jeremy, suddenly remembering, broke in, in his own voice: "And I have also seen the stars!"

  The Lord of the Underworld seemed to ignore both answers.

  A dark blob of a hand played with the dark chain that he seemed to be wearing round his neck as a decoration. "You will not abandon war? Then abandon hope, Far-Worker. O herder of flocks and fertilizer of orchards! 'Abandon all hope, ye who enter here!' " There followed a wild peal of maniacal laughter, shock­ing after the solemnity that had gone before.

  Jeremy's borrowed memory understood and recognized the quotation.

  The impression came across that this avatar of Hades/Pluto had forgotten what it was like to be human—really believed, now, that he had never been anything but a god, tragically mis­taken.

  Apollo remembered differently. He knew exactly how human this avatar of Hades was, or had been before his humanity had gradually eroded away. The details of the man's name and face lay buried in the depths of memory where Jeremy was still afraid to tread, but he considered that they were probably not impor­tant anyway.

  The two beings moved closer together, began to stalk each other, Jeremy with an arrow nocked and his bow drawn. He had to summon up all his courage to keep from opposing Apollo's will to advance and fight.

  Darkness enveloped them, and silence, save for a distant drip of water. Out of unbreathing silence and darkness, a hurled rock bigger than Jeremy's head came at him relatively slowly, afford­ing the youthful target body plenty of time to dodge. The missile crashed away behind him, wreaking destruction among the sta­lagmites. Not a truly hard blow, probably intended not so much to kill him as to render him overconfident.

  When he had worked a little closer, it became possible for Je­remy/Apollo to get a somewhat better look at his archenemy. The boy had expected a gigantic figure, but what he saw was small, no taller than the body he was sharing, and the surprise was somehow disturbing. Then he understood that the visible shape before him, the body in which his Enemy lived, had once been purely human, too.

  Again an arrow darted from the bow in Apollo's hands, as true to its target as the previous shots had been—but Jeremy could not see that this one had any effect. Blackness in a blurred shape simply swallowed the darting shaft. To this Enemy, an or­dinary arrow from an ordinary bow might well be no more than a toothpick.

  The Lord of the Underworld unleashed a horrible bellowing, threat and warning no less frightful for being wordless.

  Apollo had heard it all before and was not particularly im­pressed. Urgently he tried to recall what additional weapons Hades might have at his disposal.

  A lurching of the rocks, great house-size slabs coming together to trap and crush the Lord of Light between them. Again Apollo danced to safety in the quick young body he had borrowed. Cer­tain sounds and smells suggested to him that somewhere, deep down, an effort was under way to bring up molten rock.

  Hades was given no time to bring that effort to fruition. Apollo, with first a blow of his fist and then a kick, shattered a rock wall and sent a lance of reflected sunlight deep into the Cave. And of course shot more arrows at his enemy.

  It was impossible to know whether any of his clumsy wooden shafts or the faster, straighter beams of light he now employed had inflicted serious damage. The Lord of the Underworld was keeping his own heart shielded behind heavy rock. The arrows and the sun fire of Apollo pained and wounded but did not kill.

  Bellowing Hades fought back, somehow causing darkness to well up like a thick liquid out of the Cave's floor, to slow Je­remy's feet and drag against his spirit. He had the sensation of a giant suction working on his entire body, and had he been no more than human he must have yielded to it and been drawn into the earth.

  Yet somet
hing told Jeremy that Hades, like Apollo, was now weaker than on the occasion of their previous fight. The Lord of the Underworld was also working in close league with some human mind and body, and that human, like Jeremy, would be drained and eventually used up in heavy conflict.

  Apollo could not remember who the human was who had last put on the Face of Hades—or Jeremy could not dig deeply enough into the available memory to find out. But it seemed cer­tain that he or she was gradually being destroyed by the part­nership.

  From the mad certainty of Hades's utterances it seemed that the man who had become the Dark God now labored under the delusion that he had never been anything less than a god and that he was truly immortal—the Lord of the Underworld rejected bitterly, as some enchantment of his enemies, any memory he might still have of existing in a state of mere humanity.

  A corollary of this delusion seemed to be that Hades gen­uinely believed that Apollo, too, was purely a deity, as perhaps were all the others who had put on Faces.

  Hades, limping away in retreat, had once more broken off com­bat rather than risk an all-out direct attack. But he turned his head and shouted threats as he withdrew, promising to send a de­stroyer after Apollo.

  "I have patience, Far-Worker, great patience. You will come to me again, and I will kill you. Next time with finality."

  Jeremy stood panting, getting his breath back, listening. His clothing was ripped and torn. His body, even though it had been strengthened and toughened magically, ached in every muscle, and his heart was pounding at a fantastic rate.

  The echoes took a long time to die away.

  Twenty-Eight

  It was now obvious to Jeremy why his other self had made sure of having a bow in hand, and arrows, before entering the Cave. Such weapons would doubtless be hard to obtain by any means once inside—the advantage of any bow was that it killed at a distance; it would not be the armament chosen by most warriors doing duty in the cramped spaces of a cave.

  Now Jeremy's strides were carrying him and his onboard part­ner ever farther away from the sun and into confinement in a cramped space, bounded by walls of massive rock. This was the home territory of the Far-Worker's chief Enemy, his very oppo­nent.

  When Jeremy came to another branching of the subterranean path, Apollo's memory, when called upon, readily provided him with a partial plan of the underground network, a whole intricate system of interconnections. The Lord of the Underworld had just retreated on the wider trail, headed down; the narrower branch took another turning and kept going more or less on the same level.

  Jeremy had more than half expected the Intruder to force him, willy-nilly, into a continued descent, but such was not the case. Vast experience within his memory assured him that the down­ward passage would lead to a trap, down at some depth where no sunlight could be brought in.

  It seemed that the god dwelling in Jeremy's head had reluc­tantly conceded that their shared body must gain strength before he could finally defeat his chief enemy.

  And only now did Jeremy notice that he had suffered a slight wound in the most recent passage of arms. Some missile he had not even seen—memory supplied the image of one possibility, a special kind of dart—had torn the flesh on the back of his left arm, a little above the elbow. The pain was growing in intensity, despite the fact that Apollo must be diminishing its force.

  Apollo's memory immediately raised the disturbing possibility of poison—

  —and almost simultaneously assured the human partner that the injury would not be fatal in itself, to a body wherein Apollo dwelt. But it certainly was going to complicate matters.

  The wound was bleeding freely, and Jeremy let it bleed, hop­ing that poison, if there was any, would be washed out. Any real treatment would have to wait. But the fact of the wound presented another argument, and a telling one, against an im­mediate advance. For the time being, it would be the summit of the Mountain and not the depths beneath it that lay ahead of him.

  Once more Jeremy's thoughts became focused on his search for Katy, and he resented the time that had been spent in argu­ing and skirmishing with his and Apollo's common enemy. The boy found himself angry with her for being so incautious as to let herself be caught. But he could picture, in unnerving detail, any number of plausible scenarios in which she had been caught.

  Driven by a need whose intensity surprised even himself, he began to shout Katy's name as he descended. Through one after another of a series of chambers, his cries evoked great echoes, re­minding him of Hades's voice. On he stalked, holding an arrow ready at the bow, three fingers curved to hold a gentle tautness in the string.

  Jeremy had counted five large chambers down into the earth and estimated that he was more than a hundred feet below the level of the main entrance before he came upon what he had hoped and dreaded that he would find.

  The glow he had detected from a distance was not intruding sun but faint torchlight. As he advanced, the illumination be­came somewhat brighter. But he would be unable to focus and magnify torchlight as he could sunlight.

  This room was more artificially modified than those that had come before, a rounded, almost perfectly circular chamber, the most elaborately decorated though by no means the largest he had encountered so far. Some ten paces in diameter, and a domed ceiling four or five yards high. There were four entrances, spaced at irregular intervals around the curving wall.

  And there, raised on a platform of rock that had long ago been laboriously flattened, one more cage was waiting—the door of this one stood open, but it was not empty.

  Suddenly aware of his heart beating wildly, the boy called out something incoherent and went stumbling hastily forward—it was left to the senior partner to look keenly to see if any traps had been set for would-be rescuers.

  A motionless figure, its unclothed skin painted for purposes of magic in multicolored patches, was sprawled facedown on the floor inside the cage. She was able to raise her head and call back, but only feebly.

  "Katy." Jeremy spoke her name, once and quietly, as he came within arm's length of the open cage.

  And in a moment he could be sure that this was Kate indeed, though she had been changed. The colors black and red, the in­signia of Hades, were dominant in the painting of her body. Something had been done to her hair as well, adding to the dif­ficulty of recognition.

  The round room was not in deep darkness but dim in the light of only three guttering torches, fixed in sconces spaced evenly around the walls.

  There came a whisper of wings above, and Jeremy realized that there were three furies in attendance. They were not going to touch the sacrifice, who was reserved for a mightier power. They had been drawn by the scent of death to scavenge the bodies of those recently slain by Apollo's not-so-painless arrows.

  A triumphant joy surged up in him, blending with his anger—renewed anger when he saw what had been done to her.

  One of the winged creatures came, with the compulsive stupidity of its race, to attack the intruder, and meanwhile the others escaped to spread the word of Apollo's intrusion into the Cave.

  The door of this cage had been left standing open, evi­dently on the assumption that the prisoner would be too drugged, too weak, to try to get away. For a few more seconds, with all the paint, he could not be absolutely sure that he had found Katherine, but when her eyes at last looked straight at him, he knew.

  Apollo, looking into those eyes, knew that the victim had been drugged, as well as ritually abused. At first she didn't recognize her rescuer when he appeared. For a moment Jeremy had won­dered if he himself could possibly have been so changed in the brief time since she'd seen him last.

  But with the first touch of Apollo's hand, she began to emerge from her state of stupefaction.

  "Jerry? Are you—am I imagining you, too?" The last words were dragged out in an utterly despairing voice.

  "I'm here. I'm real." He wanted to say something important, tremendous—but there were no words. "Thank Apollo, and ... thank the gods y
ou're still alive."

  With the borrowed strength of Apollo in his fingers Jeremy snapped whatever bonds were constraining her wrists and ankles. Then for a long moment he held her, fiercely, tightly.

  Then one of their inhuman enemies, a fury flapping into the chamber near its roof, tried to douse the remaining torch, knock­ing it from its high sconce—but it still burned fitfully as it lay on the Cave floor.

  And then in a soft rush through the thickened darkness there came the sudden charge of a squad of fanatical humans. There were half a dozen of them. Once they were seen they abandoned secrecy and came on howling, swinging, and thrusting with a va­riety of weapons.

  They came on so boldly that they might have been expecting to encounter an Apollo already drastically weakened and worn down by a poisoned wound—or they might have been drugged themselves or hypnotized into a fanatical certainty of victory. In any case, they were fatally mistaken.

  A vicious struggle surged in near-darkness around the broken cage while the girl, still weak and helpless, cowered. One or two of Hades's folk went howling in retreat. The last man standing was too slow, and Apollo seized him by the neck and wiped away his screaming, bubbling face against a rough outcropping of rock.

  Then with his two strong hands the Lord of Light undertook a further splintering of the wrecked cage, the object this time being to gain another weapon, for use when the arrows should all be gone. The action also served as a symbolic wrecking, a weak­ening of Hades's magic, all his powers in this chamber. Darkness or not, Apollo meant to have this Cave and all its prophecies all to himself one day. And then, with flint and steel taken from one of the dead soldiers, he set fire to the wreckage, so that for a little while an artificial light flared up.