The Immortal Game (book 1) (37 page)

Adelpha shook her head, her two black braids swinging with the motion. “I’m determined to go back, to reincarnate and start over.”

Ruby nodded and lowered herself further into the ground. Adelpha handed her the silver bow and the quiver of arrows. Ruby slung them over her back in the limited space.

The steps were uneven and littered with large chunks of broken rock. Going down was slow and unsteady work made worse by less and less light as the hole above her got smaller and smaller.

She made a vain wish for Eros’s torch, or even a less significant one, but Ares had all their supplies: the torch, the winged sandals, Pan’s pipes, and the water. Ruby couldn’t bring herself to think about the water. How long since she drank from the skins in Ares’s bag? Before Sisyphus or after?

Her stomach growled and she thought of what they had sacrificed to Cerberus, all their food and even the obolus, eaten by the giant dog, though she doubted he’d even noticed.

The stairs seemed to go on forever and she had a flash of fear that she might be headed back down to Tartarus. She strained to listen in the black muffled space, wondering if she would hear the fiery river Phlegethon, but there was nothing except her own small scraping sounds and the labored breathing in her dry throat.

What if this abandoned stairway led nowhere? Time meant nothing here and now she had been robbed of the one sense that could give her the most information, her sight. It was in the midst of these unnerving thoughts that Ruby heard the first rattle of pebbles hitting stone.

She stopped dead and listened with every cell in her body. The noise was hard to localize. Above? Below? Near? Far? Her fear told her to run. Her mind told her to hold still. She didn’t want to meet anything that would make this place its home.

Her heart was loud in hear ears until a voice broke through. A whisper in the dark. “Ruby?”

Her heart beat faster, almost stopped, and then leapt. “Adelpha?”

“Ruby?” The whisper came again, now with recognition. “Wait. I’m not going back to yet. I’m coming with you.”

Thank you, thank you!
Relief flooded her. She swallowed what little moisture she had in her mouth. “What changed your mind?”

Adelpha was close to her now. Ruby could feel skittering sprays of dirt on her skin. “I’ve been in Hades for two millennia,” she said. “And on the day I decide to return to the mortal realms, a human girl asks me to help her save the god of war. What would you do?”

Ruby laughed. It was a strange sound in the dark pit. “Do you think this is right? Do you think we’re headed to the dungeon?”

“I know we are,” Adelpha said, next to her. Ruby felt Adelpha’s arm brush hers as the shade passed her on the stairs.

They continued down. A damp chill crept into Ruby’s bones. Her knees ached. She thought of standing, but the loose rocks would surely trip her. She almost set her hand on a jagged rock, but pulled it away before the rock cut her. She jerked. “Adelpha?” she asked in a whisper. “Can you see?”

“Maybe.” Then a pause. “I think so.”

Ruby slowed, trying to avoid knocking loose stones or creating more noise than she had to. If they were near a light, they might be near shades, or guards, or who knew what.
Ares?

The distinction between grays became more pronounced. Ruby’s hands became dark lumps. Adelpha’s dim shape stopped below her. “There’s a wall,” the shade said.

Ruby heard a dull thud and then a sharper crack. Muted, dancing light flooded into the stairway, making Ruby squint.

They were at the bottom of the old broken stairs. Adelpha had pushed through a thin screen of rotting boards that blocked it off from use. Ice picks stabbed at Ruby’s contracted muscles as she rose from all fours. They were in a short stone hallway that turned to the right or left at the end.

They peered around the corner in turns and found yet another corridor. The gray rock walls were cylindrical, made by tunneling through the rock with some large boring instrument. The second passage ran in both directions and was brighter. Lit torches in sconces ran the length in each direction.

The sconces made Ruby flinch. It was the Sphinx, shrunk down to the size of something a celebrity might stick in her purse back on Earth. Her black eyes and pointed scorpion’s tail looked like the real thing.

“Heph,” Ruby said under her breath. Homesickness replaced her fear. She thought of her friends on Olympus and wondered what they were going through. Was a war that she had ignited tearing apart the gods at that very moment?

Adelpha turned right again and they were soon peering around another corner similar to the last. They followed it to the next, and the next. They were in a network of corridors that led on and on with no doors or rooms. A maze.

Ruby was so turned around she didn’t think she could find her way back to the stone steps, and there was nothing of promise before them. Her head ached. Her throat was dry.

Adelpha peered around the next corner. Ruby set to follow when the shade’s head snapped back, almost hitting Ruby in the nose. Adelpha turned. Her eyes were wide with panic. She shook her head and motioned back to the last corridor that they had come out of.

“A guard. A Chimera.” She breathed into Ruby’s ear. “Lion’s head, lizard body, and a snake for a tail. It’s not just a hallway, though. He’s guarding a room.”

The blood rushed into Ruby’s head. “Good. We’re getting close.”

…

Ruby’s plan was dangerous. Not for her, but for Adelpha. Chimeras tolerated shades, but neither she nor Adelpha knew what their reaction would be to a shade in Hades’s dungeon.

“I’ll do it,” Adelpha said with a curt nod.

Ruby fought back tears and hugged her new friend. Adelpha pulled away and looked her in the eye. “Find Ares,” she said with a smile. “Marry him and be happy.”

Ruby nodded and Adelpha walked, without ceremony, into the corridor with the Chimeras. Ruby hadn’t known Adelpha for long, but she felt a strong connection to this woman from another time. A time that felt closer to Ares.

Ruby leaned her back against the rough rock wall. She closed her eyes and waited to hear what would happen.

“What are you doing here?” A slow guttural roar came from the Chimera.

Adelpha, who might have been an actress in her former life, said, “Where am I? I was in the garden. I came inside for just a moment.”

“You have to leave. Go now,” the Chimera roared.

“I don’t know the way,” Adelpha answered and Ruby pictured her dark braids swinging as she looked in all directions. “Do you have any of those little quiches? I love the spinach ones.”

“Leave!” the guard roared.

Ruby held her breath but Adelpha answered in a calm voice, “So many rights and lefts. How can I possibly choose?”

“Just choose a wall. Follow it to the end,” the Chimera said, with obvious annoyance at this distraction. “You’ll eventually get out.”

“That sounds silly,” Adelpha laughed like a tipsy twenty-year-old.

There was silence from around the bend and Ruby almost ventured a look, but if the guard saw Ruby, or worse, smelled her, her quest for Ares would be over.

Finally Ruby heard the guard speak. The venom was barely contained in his voice. “This way.” Then she heard the lizard’s tail scrape against the stone floor of the passage. She shuddered when she realized that the sound was coming closer to her.

“That can’t be the way,” Adelpha said. “I’ve just come from there.”

“It’s all the same,” the guard grunted. “This is the center of the maze.”

“Let’s go another way. I’ve seen all that already.” Ruby smiled at how incompetent Adelpha sounded. “How do you know how to get out if it’s all the same?” the shade asked.

Ruby heard the scraping head in the opposite direction. She stole a brave look around the corner and saw Adelpha, the Chimera, and a large archway behind them.

“Follow me.” The Chimera pointed to the right with a spear held loosely in his lizard claw. Ruby ducked back before the snake tail whipped around to face her.

When they were gone Ruby stepped into the corridor and walked to the edge of the archway the Chimera had been guarding. She hesitated before entering the room. What might she find? Disturbing images flashed through her mind; Ares tied up, Ares being tortured, Ares unconscious, Hecatonchires, some crazy cousin of Cerberus, or even Hades himself with his full attention aimed at Ares.

She knew she didn’t have much time before the guard came back or another one replaced him. She closed her eyes and pictured Ares happy and whole. She held the image close. She pulled Artemis’s bow off her back and peered around the corner.

Inside the room were none of the horrors she had imagined. There was only a giant spherical rock, the size of a large house. The huge rock sat in an enormous stone basin of water. The room was round too and just bigger than the stone itself, massive. The room had several other arched entrances like the one she was peering in from.

From her vantage point she could see three guards, one at each of the entrances adjacent to hers. They stood like statues and stared out into the hallways before them. She knew there must be more archways and more guards on the other side of the stone.

She looked at the smooth rock and wondered what it was. With all these guards it had to have something to do with Ares.

She nocked an arrow and took her aim at the first guard to the left, a lion-man in a yellow and red tunic. A soft
thunk
was the only sound as she let go the string and the arrow found its mark. The Chimera crumpled in a heap but Ruby barely saw. She had already nocked the next arrow, had already aimed at her next target.

In quick succession she dispatched the first two guards. The third turned to her and she shot him as he realized what was happening.

Two guards came around from the far side of the stone. One was a lizard-man. The other had a bird’s body and a man’s head. The bird-man lifted off the ground to come at her. His wild half-human eyes stared at her. The lizard-man ran at her with a spear. She reached for another arrow, nocked it, shot, and repeated.
Thunk
,
thunk
. Both guards dropped in quick succession.

Ruby’s blood ran hot in her body. Her mind was crystal clear, hunger, thirst, and fatigue were forgotten in the pure rush of adrenaline.

The Chimeras weren’t mortal. Ruby knew they would rouse themselves soon. She needed to be gone by then.

Her bow was nocked with her last arrow as she checked the entrances for more guards and found none. She retrieved her arrows from the limp bodies of the Chimeras and wiped the blood on their clothes as she had seen Ares do.

She looked to the massive stone.

It was dark granite, at least thirty feet high and perched on a basin of water twenty feet in diameter. The stone tickled something in the back of her mind. She had seen something like it before. But where? When?

She focused on the details and tried to drag the memory in. The stone she was thinking of was smaller, still big, but Ruby had been little herself at the time. Yes! That was it. A school trip to the science center. There had been a stone like this.

She remembered touching the cool wet surface with her small hands and pushing. After she got some momentum going the giant rock had rolled in its stone base. The thousands of pounds of granite had been
floating
in the water and even a little girl could move it. But this stone was so much bigger than that one, bigger than her house on Earth.
There was no way she could move this one
.

Still, she put both hands on the cold wet stone and pushed up with all her might. Nothing. She tried again. And again.

Her shoulders slumped in frustration. It had to be something else. But this stone was the key. Why else would the Chimeras be guarding it?

She got lower and braced her feet against the floor. She placed her hands beneath the fine sheet of water. Her palms found more purchase at this new angle then they had before. She heaved up with every fiber of her being. Her legs tensed, then her abs, then her shoulders.

Her body lengthened forward. Had it moved?
She repositioned her hands lower, regained good contact with the rock, and pushed again. Yes.
It was moving. Not much, but a little.

When her strength gave out she stepped back to look at the stone again. She walked the perimeter, hoping that something about the rock had changed.

The bird-man that had flown at her rolled over and let out a groan. She looked at him then turned back to the stone, unwilling to give up a second of her precious time.

Then she saw it.

A black square in the rock. A cutout. She could only see the corner of it. She put her bow down, curled her fingers around the edge, and pulled up with all her might. This time the stone moved more easily with her better grip. She pulled and strained, alternating between pushing on the outside of the rock and pulling up on the edge of the cut out.

Soon the black square was at thigh level. She peered inside. Toward the back of the cut out, to the left, was another space. She peered in and tried to see around the bend.

The bird-man grunted. A lion-man was getting to his knees. He was facing away from her, but he would turn around in the next second.

Panicked, she grabbed Artemis’s bow from the rocky ground and scrambled into the small space of the stone.

TWENTY EIGHT

Ruby crouched in the small space and felt the stone slide beneath her weight. The cutout in the rock now faced the bottom of the basin, out of the sight of the guards. She was hidden and she felt safe until the true nature of her situation dawned on her. She was trapped.

She would rather face the guards and Hades than die in the suffocating closeness of the sphere. She pushed on the wall of the cramped space and tried to get the rock to move, but it wouldn’t budge.

She focused on her breathing and tried to calm down.

It should have been dark, she realized, but she could see. The light was dim and diffuse. It came from above her. She looked up and saw a shelf. It was the corner she had seen when she first looked inside the cutout of the rock. She put her hands on the ledge, pushed off the bottom of the basin with her feet, and worked herself into the new space of the shelf.