Five affirmatives.
"Though for a moment there…" said Hyperion, his voice raspy with emotion. "Ladies, Oceanus and I owe you big-time."
"Let's go and take a look," Sam said. "Confirm the kills. Then we get ourselves the hell out of here."
They congregated around the three bodies. Each Gorgon had a glossy scaly hide and each was identical to its sisters in every respect except colouring — one was greenish, one greyish, one brownish. All three lay still, apart from the slender little snakes which sprouted from their scalps in thick profusion. These were twitching in their death throes. Now and then their tiny mouths gaped in spasms of soundless, shuddering, fang-baring agony.
"Jeez-us," breathed Hyperion. "Those are about three of the most hideous things I've ever clapped eyes on."
"Shouldn't be allowed to exist," agreed Rhea.
"Abominations," Phoebe added, her German accent tripping slightly over the word.
"Well, they're dead now," said Oceanus, "and good sodding riddance, I say."
Sam peered down at the monsters, and for some reason the man-lion from her dream flitted into her thoughts.
"What are they?" she wondered aloud. "Where did they come from? I don't believe they're supernatural beings. Did someone make them? Were they people once?"
"Does it matter?" said Hyperion.
"Quite," said Oceanus. "They're killable. That's all we need to know."
"But they're intelligent," said Sam. "They're more than just animals. And that — "
She was cut short by an abrupt loud yelp from Hyperion. "Whoa! Its eyes are open! Motherfucker's still alive!"
One of the Gorgons, the greyish one, was staring up at the surrounding Titans. Its lips parted in a snarl. Its eyes blazed with hatred.
Sam was closest to it. She knew she had just a matter of heartbeats in which to act. She didn't go for her gun. Her response was instinctual, visceral, a convulsion of disgust. She raised a leg and brought her foot down on the Gorgon's face, stamping with servomotor-augmented strength. Her boot went straight through the monster's head, crushing the midsection of it flat as easily as if she had been stamping on a watermelon. Blood spurted everywhere. The crunch was horrendous but also, at some deep, primal gut level, exhilarating.
"Well," said Hyperion, scanning the mess Sam had made. He took off a gauntlet and wiped blood drips from his visor. "Yeah. Motherfucker was still alive. But I think it's safe to say, not any more."
30. BRUGES
T hen came Bruges.
And the Titans' second casualty.
The elegant little Belgian city had endured a French attempt at annexation in the 14th century and, more recently, Nazi occupation, as well as lengthy periods of impoverishment when the canals that connected it to the coast silted up, meaning the arteries which carried its lifeblood, commerce, were blocked. It had survived all these hardships with its medieval architecture more or less intact and its air of resilience undiminished. Bruges sat in the midst of farmed flatlands like a well-preserved lesson in the art of quietly getting on with business and hoping for a brighter tomorrow.
Except… the good burghers of Bruges had slipped up lately. They'd forgotten their history — neglected the tradition of passive, sedate stoicism that had served them so well in the past. The city had become the hub of a youth movement that was prevalent throughout Europe and particularly in the Benelux: the Agonides, the Children of Struggle.
They were teenagers, mostly, who had grown up knowing little other than the Pantheonic rule and who chafed under the yoke of this unasked-for, quasi-divine governance. They were rebels, as passionate in their beliefs as only young people could be. They refused to accede to the Olympians' authority. They would not bend the knee the way all the older folks seemed to, especially the ones in positions of political power. They took it upon themselves to resist by mocking and denouncing the so-called gods at every turn.
They'd become famous — notorious — for their art stunts, graffiti sloganeering, and internet pranks such as a Trojan horse virus, called the "Trojan Horse," which embedded a subroutine in operating systems so that whenever the name or image of an Olympian appeared onscreen, a tiny wooden horse would pop up and disgorge a band of even tinier animated hoplites armed with mops and brushes who would set about scrubbing the word or picture out of existence. Millions of PCs and Macs were infected worldwide before All-Moderator Argus managed to expunge the virus from the Web. The Agonides were also responsible for a number of skilfully organised flashmob events that saw dozens of random strangers flock to some open public space and allow themselves to be arranged, through a cunning piece of mobile-phone GPS trickery, into a pattern that could be best seen by nearby surveillance cameras. They'd remain in place for as long as it took to guarantee the pattern had been recorded on CCTV, but no more than 30 seconds, before dispersing. On one occasion a reasonable likeness of Zeus's face was formed, showing the king of the Pantheon with eyes crossed and tongue sticking out. On another, a hundred or so bodies aligned to spell out the words FUCK THE GODS. Most often, though, the flashmobs adopted the official symbol of the Agonides, a circle representing the letter O — for Olympian — surrounded by a larger circle with a line slashing across it diagonally.
The movement had arisen in the genteel backstreets of Bruges. That was where its spiritual heart lay. Accordingly, Bruges was where the Olympians had chosen to site one of their vilest monsters. If the presence of the Lamia in their midst couldn't deter the Agonides from their adolescent shenanigans, then nothing could.
The Lamia was a vampiric thing, half woman, half snake, that seemed quite at home among the towering spires and torpid canals of the town. Night and day it swam and lolled in the water, lurking under bridges or crawling onto jetties to bask in the sun. Its preferred prey was small children, and as a consequence there were no small children to be found anywhere in Bruges. Everyone under the age of twelve had been evacuated into the surrounding countryside or found temporary lodgings in Brussels and Ghent. The Lamia was partial to the odd adult as well, but its attacks on mature victims were seldom fatal, whereas its attacks on minors almost always were. It was a question of blood volume. The Lamia sucked three or four pints at a single sitting, never any more. Most adults could survive that level of blood loss and the attendant shock, just, if given immediate medical treatment and an on-the-spot transfusion. Small children could not.
The inhabitants of Bruges tried to go about their daily lives as normal, acting as if the Lamia wasn't there. It wasn't easy, though. They could feel their city slowly dying around them. The empty playgrounds, the lack of high-pitched voices yelling, the toy shops, kindergartens and primary schools that had "Closed Until Further Notice" signs in the window — nobody had realised, until they were gone, quite how much children added to a community and quite how great a void was left by their absence. Without them, there was no tangible evidence of a future, no visible sense of continuum. There were just glum parents, missing their offspring terribly, and the elderly, feeling the cold wind of mortality more keenly than ever.
Also, tourists had stopped coming. Bruges's principal source of income these days were the visitors who were drawn in their droves to the "Venice of the north" thanks to its art treasures and its stately basilicas with their Gothic and neo-Gothic stylings. But the Lamia had put paid to that. Now the horse-drawn carriages stood idle in the Markt, the cobbles of the Burg were untroubled by the soles of sightseeing and coach-party crowds, and open-topped tour boats sat at their moorings with tarpaulins stretched over them and green slime accumulating on their hulls.
Then, one spring night, a rare event. A group of outsiders did arrive in town, unbeknownst to the residents. Although they had come to explore the place and their visit would ultimately be beneficial to the Brugesian economy, they were hardly tourists. Their reason for being there was, as one of them put it, to "find that motherfucking leech and blow it to bits."