Journey Into Nyx (2 page)

She waited too long to speak, and Anax knew what she was thinking.

“If my brother wanted to challenge me, he would call me
between the pillars
,” Anax insisted. “There is no honor in leaving bloody tokens scattered around my home. There’s nothing to be gained for him in doing that.”

Except your increasing instability. Except your self-doubt, Cymede thought. Just a few months earlier, Anax let a self-proclaimed oracle convince him that a fiery sky meant that the minotaurs were marching to war on the city. With no evidence but the charlatan’s word, the king had expelled the foreigners and made ready for war—and nothing happened. It had eroded the populace’s confidence in their king.

“Yes, of course,” Cymede agreed. “Perhaps you should implore Iroas for answers. Better yet, beseech him for action. The Silence of the gods has gone on long enough.”

Anax nodded in agreement. “We’ll hold a game this afternoon in the stadium. I will summon all the soldiers to exalt the glory of Iroas.”

“You should,” Cymede said. “Although there’s a storm coming in.”

Sure enough, clouds darkened the horizon. Usually Cymede would have attributed them to the worried brow of Keranos. But without his presence in the world, the oncoming storm felt wilder and more ominous. Cymede felt like something very dangerous lay hidden beyond those clouds.

“Rain?” Anax asked. “What of it? Since when does rain stop the pankration?”

“Of course not,” Cymede said. So the spectacle would be half-naked men brawling in the mud for the glory of an absent god. Well, at least it would keep Anax from brooding all afternoon.

“Will you come?” Anax asked.

“Perhaps I will be there for the finale,” Cymede said. “I need to take care of some issues with the supplies.”

“Of course,” he said. He kissed her cheek. “I’ll see you soon.”

She waited until he left the chamber, and then she bolted the door. There was little chance she would be back in time for the finale. And she was tired of waiting for others to find answers. She needed to find them herself. Although she could hear god-speak, Cymede had never proclaimed herself an oracle or let any god claim her as their own. But if there were any god that she would devote herself to, it would be Keranos. She related to his impatient destructiveness. She had closely controlled these qualities in herself, but she could happily worship one who doled out death strikes and divine insight in equal measure.

She removed her purple gown and the decorative bronze accoutrements. She put on a simple black dress, leggings, and a cloak. With her hair hidden under a black scarf, she could pass through the shadowy corridors of the fortress without notice. Cymede hurried down the servants’ steps to the lower levels beneath the fortress. She ducked into one of the winter supply rooms and waited behind crates in the nearly complete darkness. When she was sure she hadn’t been followed, she pulled the hidden lever that led to the secret tunnels below the catacombs. Following the tunnel would take her down through the earth to the Deyda River two hundred feet below. This exit was one of the best-kept secrets of the Kolophon. Only the king and his advisors were to ever know, and the knowledge was only to be passed down from man to man. But Cymede had a habit of listening at doors. She didn’t agree with men having a monopoly on anything, and she used the tunnels more than any royal before her.

Cymede had secretly explored every inch of the tunnels and was surprised to find that, over the ages, people had left graffiti. Most were just names of people long dead. But some forgotten king had used the walls to write an enemy list with corresponding tally marks—although what he was counting was lost to the ages. Cymede had discovered that there were exits at two different heights above the raging river. The lowest door opened about ten feet above the water. A rope ladder could be lowered onto a narrow rocky beach during the dry season. During rainy season, the water rushed just below the doorway, and not even a triton could have navigated those treacherous currents.

The higher exit opened into midair a hundred feet above the water, and this was the one she liked to use. Perhaps there had been a rope bridge stretching across the gorge at one time, but there was nothing left of it now. No matter, she thought, as she flung open the heavy wooden door.
The storm had moved directly over the city, and the air felt like it was bruised and weeping. A furious wind howled up the gorge and battered against her. Below, the waters of the Deyda crested like ocean waves, and the air crackled with energy. This was no god-storm. It was the natural world reasserting itself in the absence of the god’s control. Keranos’s domain was storms, and they were running wild without him. Cymede liked it. The primal energy of the wind and rain made her feel more powerful than ever.

She stepped off the edge.

The water rushed up at her as she fell. Before impact, she manipulated a wave to crest beneath her, and she used the energy to propel her into the air again. Simultaneously, she magically tore shards of stone from the cliff and placed them like steps ascending the slope of the sweeping wave. Each stone hovered briefly before her then fell away and splashed into the water below. This was how she walked the river gorge. Commanding water and earth, she trod upon the peaks and valleys of the waves. Thunder and lightning was like music in her ears as Cymede shaped the world to her pleasure. No one—not even King Anax—knew she could make the elements bow before her.

After a short distance, she let the wave set her down on the opposite side of the gorge. The storm raged while she followed a little-known path up the mountainside to Keranos’s divine observatory. Let the men at their games and shows of athletic prowess. She would pray to the god of quiet insight and careless destruction, Keranos. It made her smile to think how furious he would be that a storm existed without his permission.

But if the gods had gone silent, then the world would fill the space.

When she reached the top of the cliff, the winds seemed to die down. She stood before the bronze observatory with its gleaming orb roof and perfect span of archways. Lightning
played across its surface as it absorbed the energy of the storm. She’d been here many times before. Although she had never looked upon Keranos when he took the form of a man, she could feel his presence whenever he was near. With the Silence, she felt his absence like the cracked, dry earth cries out for rain.

The door of the observatory was slightly open, and the tiles of the foyer were slick from the storm. She pushed the heavy door open wider and walked inside. Torches lit the way, but they burned with a mystical fire that rain couldn’t touch. The emptiness echoed around her. There were no priests who watched the observatory for the God of Storms. Keranos didn’t have many oracles. He was particular and arrogant and believed few mortals were worthy of him. Cymede was one he wanted, but Cymede rebuffed his attempts to claim her. She had no interest in being owned by anyone.

Now she needed Keranos’s guidance. He would know who—or what—was tormenting her husband. Their oracles couldn’t discern it. She needed the voice of a god. She knelt on the stone floor under the opening in the roof. The sky above was still gray, but the black clouds had blown away. It was twilight, and the first stars of Nyx dotted the heavens, but no god-forms revealed themselves amid the chaos.

“I need you, Keranos,” she said. “I miss your presence.”

There was no answer except the rushing sound of the wind through the opening in the roof. In the past, she might have thought it was an answer. But now, who controlled the winds? She let the quiet fill her up until she couldn’t stand waiting anymore. She hurried out of the temple, slammed open the door, and stepped into the rain-washed night. Nyx was brilliant, but only with patterns and nebulae. No celestial creatures dashed across the heavens, and she found no answers in the jumble of stars. Furious at the lack of response, she lashed out with stones. She carved off the
edges of the mountaintop and hurled them at Nyx. They just arched into the sky and cascaded lazily back into the gorge. So she battered the observatory with her fury, but the divine bronze of the building wouldn’t bend to a mortal assault.

“Keranos!” she demanded. “Give me answers.”

She heard a rustling noise as a gust transformed into a small whirlwind and slammed into her. She tumbled backward and cracked her head against a stone. She lost consciousness briefly, and when she came to, she was lying flat on her back staring up into Nyx.

In the heavens, she saw a vision. Instead of god-forms, this vision was formed by the blackness between the stars. She perceived hulking creatures with the exaggerated horns of a minotaur. Then one became two, which in turn became four. The creatures multiplied exponentially until there were hundreds of their distorted forms. They lurched out of an open door from inside a burning room in an endless line, one behind another. The vision shifted, and the burning room became like a howling mouth. The face shifted incomprehensibly, until finally its features came to rest. And Cymede recognized that it was a satyr’s face. A satyr was behind it all.

Cymede sat up. There was dried blood on the back of her head, but she felt strangely satisfied. Keranos had sent the vision to her eyes alone. To the rest of the mortals, the sky had only revealed incomprehensible splashes of color and pinpoints of light. She started back down the path for the gorge.

So some gods, like Keranos, were cheating the Silence. That surprised her not at all.

X
enagos had restored Skola Valley after Nylea’s fury. Since the Silence, the emerald grass had grown over the bare dirt of the revel ground, and the stream was flowing through the heart of Xenagos’s domain. He’d repaired the rift in the ground to hide the caverns where his forges burned constantly. These were no mundane forges built to make bronze swords or iron ploughshares. These were divine forges constructed by Petros, the kidnapped artisan of Purphoros. A Nyxborn man, Petros himself had been created in the image of the God of the Forge, and he knew all the secrets of divine creation.

And now Petros was owned by Xenagos.

Xenagos clucked his tongue in mock pity as he watched his stolen artisan. He didn’t actually feel sorry for Petros. The satyr never felt pity for anyone, nor did he feel remorse or sympathy. Even before his spark ignited, Xenagos had little emotion when it came to the welfare of things other than himself. If someone was in pain, well, he just couldn’t bring himself to care. He could pretend, though. He was very good at making people
think
he cared. He knew the value of a sympathetic arm around a troubled “friend.” He excelled at loud protestations about the injustice of the world. Xenagos skillfully created a shell of deceit around himself, and even without magic it worked ridiculously
well. He was beloved by the satyrs in the Skola, which was crucial when you needed someone to do something for you.

“You don’t have friends, do you?” he asked Petros. “You don’t feel anything but the heat of that forge.”

In response, Petros hit the anvil in precise rhythm, again and again. An unfriendly creation, but Xenagos couldn’t argue with his work ethic.

“I’m going to bring the world to its knees,” Xenagos said. He wanted to impress someone. The satyrs of the valley wandered around gilt headed after the constant reveling. At this point, they were impressed by a shiny rock.

“The Great Revel is nearly upon us,” Xenagos told him. “It will make your master weep.”

Clang. Clang. Clang
. Petros’s hammer never missed a beat.

“As an artist you know that things don’t turn out perfectly every time,” Xenagos said. “I’m sure you’ve seen Purphoros toss many beautiful works into the fires because they just weren’t exquisite enough. I consider my past endeavors useful … but merely practice for what’s to come.”

There was a momentary silence as Petros adjusted the slab of bronze. Then the rhythmic clanging began again.

Xenagos wasn’t going to win Petros over, but it didn’t matter. Everyone else was going to be mesmerized by him. The satyr’s mystically charged revels had amassed intense power—enough to alter the fundamental nature of Nyx. He’d created gaping voids in the god’s domains and the sight of the oracles. Then, incredibly, the gods had shipped themselves off to Nyx with very little interference from him. It was all so ideal, except that business with the strange woman and Purphoros’s Sword. He knew her name, but he just didn’t like to use it. He thumped his chest on the raw skin that had healed over Nylea’s arrowhead. Pain reverberated through his body. As it subsided, he felt as hyperaware as if he’d created the world and knew every inch of it intimately. He liked that he kept a piece of Nylea inside
of him. It was proof that he was better than her. Better than all of the gods. They tried to kill him, and couldn’t.

“Petros, I must say you are one of the most faultless things I’ve ever laid eyes on,” Xenagos said. He might as well try to flatter the hammer as the Nyxborn man, but sometimes he missed the days before he’d amassed so much power. These days, he could simply make someone do what he wanted with very little effort or expenditure of his ever-growing mystical resources. Constructing the web of lies, the false friendships, the well-placed rumors, made him feel superior in a way that blatant mind-altering magic didn’t. He missed the old days of simple tongue-twisting manipulation.