She raced to Danny and they held Gull between them, hurrying toward Ceridwen. As they half-dragged the mage up the hill, Eve saw Ceridwen’s eyes begin to glow blue. A weird kind of steam issued from them, and then Ceridwen raised both of her hands. Eve felt a wave of frigid air blast past her and the screams of the disembodied gods were silenced. She glanced behind her and saw several of the giant, armored corpses freeze, ice forming upon them. One tumbled and shattered in the black dust.
Nigel Gull, still staggering along with her and Danny’s aid, began to chuckle dryly. When he spoke, his voice was a tortured rasp.
"We’ll all buggered now," he said. "They’ll take us one by one. No way any of us are getting out of here. It’s too far."
Eve fought the urge to shatter his chest with her fist and rip his heart out. She glanced over at Danny past the burden they shared and saw in his eyes that the words had cut him deeply. They did not slow him down, however. The demon boy hurried Gull along more quickly.
They had almost reached Ceridwen when the Fey sorceress pointed down the hill past them. She shouted something, but the howl of dead voices had returned and Eve could not hear her. Spirits spun around her again. Danny lashed out at one but his claws passed right through it. Eve was less interested in these things than in whatever had drawn Ceridwen’s attention.
She turned again.
The dead gods were marching after them up the hill, gathering nearer together now, an army of brokenhearted myths out to take vengeance for the spilled blood of one of their own. They trod upon the shattered-ice bones of their fallen comrades and upon the skulls and helms of others still trying to drag themselves from the ground. Most of them were minor gods and demigods, certainly, but she suspected that among them were some of the children of Zeus, the royalty of Olympus, withered and deteriorated until they were impossible to tell from their lesser relations.
Sad, dead, murderous things.
But it was not the gods that had caught Ceridwen’s attention so completely. Beyond them, fire had burst up through the chest of Hades’ corpse. Broken bits of the god’s rib cage jutted from the hole the fire had made and flames danced around the bone, charring it, sending swirls of smoke skyward.
Rising up through that blazing wound in a sphere of crackling flame was Arthur Conan Doyle. And he was not alone.
"Sanguedolce," Eve snarled, and the name was a curse upon her lips.
The master sorcerer and his former pupil hovered in the air within that fiery sphere and between them was an enormous metal cauldron filled with gold-and-orange fire — the purest fire she had ever seen.
Ceridwen took several steps back down the hill, crackling with power, her eyes leaking that same frigid blue mist. As she passed them, Danny, Eve, and Gull all turned with her, staring at the sphere of fire as it rose up above the corpse of Hades as though it were the sun in this ever-night world. Even the shades of the dead gods down on that black field turned and looked up at them as the sphere began to move, burning the air around it. It hurtled toward the place where Eve and the others stood.
Beside her, she heard Gull mutter under her breath. "Ah, now I see, Lorenzo. I’ve been your fool."
"What’s that?" Danny Ferrick demanded.
Gull snickered. "Sweetblood told me what I needed to break Medusa’s curse, but he never worried if I would succeed. It didn’t matter. I used Conan Doyle and all of you as my distraction to slip past Cerberus into the Underworld. Lorenzo used us all to focus the gods’ attention so that he could claim the Forge of Hephaestus. Mad, brilliant bastard."
"So, basically, he fucked you over the way you fucked everyone else," Danny snarled. "Swell."
Eve was only half listening by then. She wanted to know more about the Forge of Hephaestus, about exactly what was going on here, but there wasn’t time. The dead of Olympus were distracted for the moment, but it would not last.
The shrieking ghosts tore through the air, converging on that flaming sphere. They darted at it, battering themselves against it with a crackle and pop like insects swarming around a light. Spectral hands tore at the fabric of the thing, tearing strips of flame away with a ravenous frenzy.
"That can’t be good," Eve whispered.
Beneath her feet the ground began to tremble, and then to shake. It buckled and heaved and Eve was thrown down, tumbling once end over end on the slope before stopping herself. The entire hill rocked and she looked around, finally overwhelmed by her frustration and fear. Rage overcame her once more, bloodlust taking her heart, fangs extruding sharply and hands hooking into claws. She glanced around and saw Danny had also fallen and was crouched on the hill like an animal. Ceridwen floated on air currents that she drew around her, cloak whipping around her.
Nigel Gull was unmoved. Purple-black light coiled around him like a nest of ebon serpents and held him aloft. His nose still bled and his hideous countenance was distorted by a look of such malice that Eve shuddered. How much of his disorientation had been an act she did not know, but he had recovered.
"What now?" Danny roared.
Sweetblood and Conan Doyle hit the ground nearby with such force that she felt sure they would be killed. The fiery sphere was like a meteor, burning right into the soil of this hellish landscape. But when the black dust settled and the glow of the fire dimmed, the two of them stood on either side of the Forge, unharmed. It was enormous, at least five feet high and six wide. There was no way to remove it from here without magic, and yet the two mages seemed prepared to lift it.
"Ceridwen!" Conan Doyle shouted. "Come here! Quickly!"
Under other circumstances, the Fey would have snapped his neck for speaking to her like that. But now Ceridwen raced across the still-trembling ground toward her lover and the Forge. The hill heaved again and this time Ceridwen did fall.
There came a thunderous crack unlike anything they had heard before and Eve whipped her head around to look down the hill once more. The dead gods were on the march again, most of them managing to stay on their feet despite the buckling and shaking of the ground. Then, in their midst, the black soil erupted with a giant, skeletal fist easily as large as the Forge of Hephaestus. Parts of that broad, hellish plain collapsed and minor gods disappeared into the yawning maw that appeared in the earth.
The gigantic, withered corpse that drew itself from the ground then still had some flesh attached to its face, and white whiskers on its chin. Its eye sockets were dark, empty holes out of which squirming white things tumbled as it rose, maggots the size of men. When its other arm burst up out of the earth, Eve saw that it had an axe in its hand whose double-edged blade was the length of an automobile.
Eve had felt true fear, terror for herself, only a handful of times since she had become immortal. After what she had suffered, few things could frighten her. Now a single bloody tear raced down her cheek and she shook her head, speechless. She wiped the tear from her face and stumbled across the shaking ground to grab Danny by the shoulder and propel him after Ceridwen.
"What now, Eve?" he shouted. "What do we do now?"
"I don’t know!" she snapped.
Danny stared for a moment at the gigantic corpse. Eve could not help doing the same. Beyond the first one, another head had begun to emerge, a cracked skull with one eye still intact, gleaming golden in the shadowed land. The dead gods that had attacked them thus far were only the foot soldiers. These others… they were the children of Titans.
Eve ran with Danny, the two of them rolling from side to side as though they were aboard a ship. Gull followed, whisking through the air, though now the blood flowed even more freely from his nose and she could see the strain even this minimal magic was placing upon him.
Ceridwen was already at the Forge, and she was shouting at Sanguedolce. "I can’t do it! Never with so many, and not here. My magick isn’t the same! This place isn’t the same."