The Immortal Game (book 1) (36 page)

Her stomach growled painfully, as if to add another tick to the list of her problems. She looked at the plates of food on long tables. A dark whisper of a thought filled her mind:
just eat something.

The thought horrified her, but her eyes darted to more plates of food. How would she do it? How would she seal her fate of being trapped in Hades forever? With one of the bacon wrapped meaty things, a wedge of brie, a slice of cake?

The whisper returned:
eat one, and you can eat it all
. She pictured Ares bloodied and bruised, being carried away by the beasts of Tartarus.

No, she wouldn’t give up. She was not like Persephone, willing to forgive every transgression. She wouldn’t stop fighting for her own life. Thoughts of Ares, and love, and friends, and honest-to-goodness sunshine filled her mind.

She imagined Ares holding her. She felt his energy flow into her, giving her strength and dulling her hunger. Her pain faded, as though thoughts could be sustenance.

She nodded at no one, her focus renewed. She had to find Ares.

She had to save him.

TWENTY SEVEN

Persephone wouldn’t stay in the Underworld for long. She had been happy to reunite with Hades, but she had told Ruby things would be back to normal soon and she would be going to her mother. Ruby didn’t think the desolate Hades she had seen in the throne room, picking at the loose threads of his robes, would have fortitude to imprison his wife again.

At least she and Ares had done what they came to do. The Earth would be saved from eternal winter. Now the flowers would bloom on far away Mount Olympus. Ruby and Ares’s wedding plans would finally be falling into place, minus the bride and groom.

Without Persephone, Hades would have more time to attend to his prisoner. Ruby stood outside the palace and looked up to the ceiling of the Fields of Asphodel. Both flags, black and white, hung there, Persephone’s no longer at half-staff. She hadn’t left for Olympus yet.

Ruby thought of the way Hades had looked at his wife, the way he touched her, with one thing on his mind. She grimaced at the thought of them being romantic, but then she brightened.

This was her window to save Ares.

She walked in a slow zigzag through the courtyard with the three kings, and into the quieter second garden space. She wandered toward the palace steps and wondered where Hades would keep Ares. Was he still inside the palace?

She jolted when she saw two guards at the base of the stairs. Chimeras. One was a lion-man, the other had the body of a man but the head of an eagle.

The eagle lifted his yellow beak and made a high-pitched noise when he saw her. The lion-man’s shaggy head jerked to look her way. His expressive nose twitched, smelling her. He took a step forward, his iron-tipped spear in his hand, but eagle-man held him back by the arm.

Hades had dismissed her, but what did that mean for the Chimeras who, like their larger cousin Cerberus, desired human flesh? Was she a target for these creatures? Or was Hades’s declaration that she be sent to the Fields of Asphodel also protection? Was she to stay there unharmed?

Ruby walked away from them, deeper into the garden courtyard and watched from a distance. Her horror at the lion-man’s sniffing ebbed into hope. There hadn’t been guards outside the palace before she and Ares showed up. If there were guards outside, Ares was still inside.

…

Ruby sat in a small grove of apple trees in the garden courtyard outside Hades’s palace. She thought she had been watching the palace for hours, but it could have easily been days. The only thing that marked time was her hunger which, she realized, was now fading. Did that mean that she was closer to starvation? People who froze to death stopped feeling cold just before hypothermia overtook them. Was it the same with hunger?

She looked to the palace entrance for the millionth time and again she saw the lion-man and the eagle-man standing there, one on each side of the closest entrance. Her eyes scanned the length of the building. The long obsidian wall stretched on until it met the solid rock of the Underworld. There were only a few windows on this side and three narrow entrances. Each entrance had a set of mixed-up animals guarding it. As far as Ruby could tell no one had come in or out.

The Chimeras’ eyes scanned the courtyard in tireless sweeps. They responded to slight sounds with a twitching golden ear or a raised head. A lizard man stood at the last entrance, his forked tongue lashing out at intervals.

Shades wandered about. Ruby scanned them. She watched as they lolled in the grass and picked ripe fruit from the trees. One woman walked toward the back of the palace with a determined expression on her face.

Ruby sat upright. Her eyes shifted back to the guards but they weren’t paying attention to the woman. Ruby refocused on her. She was in her mid-forties. Her black hair sat on the top of her head in an elaborate bun with two braids hanging down in loops on either side, and she wore a simple white peplos. She looked like she had just arrived from Olympus.

Ruby stood and walked toward her.

The woman didn’t glance at the garden. She kept her eyes forward. Not a new shade, Ruby decided. This woman knew where she was going. But where was she headed? There was only the black wall of the palace and the rough gray rock of Hades. Then, abruptly, the woman was gone.

It took Ruby a minute to realize what had happened. The move the woman had made was subtle. And where had she done it? Near the end of the wall? Ruby followed, staying as far from the guards as she could.

She scanned the smooth black surface of the palace and looked for a doorway or a set of stairs. She didn’t want to miss the place where the woman had disappeared. Even more she didn’t want to miss the woman coming back out. A shade who had been in Hades a long time, and knew its secrets, was a shade she needed to meet.

Ruby neared the end of the obsidian, but still there was no sign of the woman. She backtracked, thinking she must have missed something.

When Ruby reached the end of the palace she saw that the two walls didn’t actually meet. It was like the fissure through which she and Persephone had come up out of Tartarus. From a distance the rocks appeared to be a solid jagged face but there was a narrow opening between them.

The gap was as tall as the palace, as tall as Hades itself. A small river ran there, not black like the Styx, or fiery like the Phlegethon, but crystal clear, like a glass ribbon, like Oceanus. The water didn’t babble or make any sound at all. It was completely silent.

Ruby took a tentative step behind the palace. Her foot gave way on the loose soil and she nearly fell into the stream. She grabbed for the smooth wall out of instinct and righted herself after a few panic-stricken, wobbly seconds.

“Careful,” a quiet female voice said. “Don’t want to end up in the Lethe before it’s time.”

Ruby looked up to see the woman in the peplos standing ten feet in front of her. She faced the river, which widened as it went along into a basin. There was an island in the middle of the basin and on the island stood a lone tree. The tree was old and twisted. Large deep-red fruit grew in clusters like giant raspberries. The air smelled clean, like fresh grass and new leaves. The smell reminded her of early spring.

Ruby looked back to the water, still dangerously close to the edge. The Lethe. The River of Forgetfulness. It was the river shades waded through to reach the Tree of Life, to forget their former selves, to reincarnate.

“Are you making a journey back?” the woman asked Ruby.

Somewhere between seeing the laugh lines around her mouth and her bright violet eyes Ruby decided that this woman would help her. “No,” Ruby said.

“I’ve been thinking about it for a while.” The woman looked to the island and at the tree. “It’s probably time to go.” She said it to herself as much as to Ruby.

“Do you just walk across?” Ruby didn’t think she’d get very far pretending she knew more than she did.

The woman laughed. Her eyes sparkled. “I figured you were a new shade. Barely dead at all. You still have the whiff of life about you.”

Ruby ignored the comment. “I saw you come this way. I was curious.”

She thought of the other thing Ares told her about reincarnating; your life had to have been stolen from you. This woman had been murdered. Ruby scanned her up and down for some obvious injury but the woman looked the same as any other shade.

“This isn’t for you.” The woman glanced at her. “You should go back.”

Desperation tightened around Ruby. “I need your help,” she blurted.

“Go back to the party,” the woman nodded her head toward the Fields of Asphodel. “This spot is the only thing that could be trouble for you.”

“I need help finding a way into the palace.” What would she do if this woman wouldn’t help her? Where would she go? “I
need
to get inside, but I can’t go past the guards.”

The woman looked at her for a long second with narrowed purple eyes. “Child, why do you want to get into the palace? Everything you need is in the garden.”

Ruby’s shoulders dropped, as the weight of everything settled on her.

The woman looked back at the river. “What you need is to leave this place. If a drop of the Lethe falls on you, you’ll forget everything you’ve ever known.” There was fear and desire mixed in her voice. “The only other way in is not an easy way for a young shade to go, or an old shade either.” The woman shrugged. “It only goes to the dungeon, anyway.”

Ruby brightened. “A dungeon?”

…

The woman wasn’t from Olympus, of course, she was from the ancient world itself. Adelpha was her name. She’d been killed during one of the many Roman-Persian wars near the height of the Roman Empire. Ruby had not seen shades as old as her before.

“Hades is infinite,” Adelpha explained. “The walls and size are an illusion. If you kept walking you’d find that you could walk forever. Every rock face would open somewhere new and Hades would continue.”

Ruby explained about her love for Ares and the wedding, and Zeus and Persephone. “Zeus hates me,” she said. “Hades doesn’t care about me, and Persephone, who
could
help me, won’t.”

“I see,” Adelpha said with less sarcasm than she was entitled to.

Ruby thought that she might even believe her.

“Then you’re on your own, I suppose,” the shade said.

“Unless you’ll help me.”

“I can show you the way. It’s not hard to find.” Adelpha turned in the opposite direction Ruby expected her to, away from the courtyard, and farther down behind the palace.

Ruby followed her. Her left foot skirted the unstable banks of the Lethe and her right shoulder scraped along the black obsidian of Hades’s palace. The bank widened and soon Ruby could walk with no fear of falling in. The walls of the palace and the Underworld towered high above. They seemed to curve inward and join together at the top.

“It’s right around here somewhere,” Adelpha said. She looked at the ground beneath her sandaled feet. Ruby looked too but all she saw was soft, grassy riverbank.

“You’ve been here before?” Ruby asked.

“Not in a long time.”

Ruby felt a stone of desperation form in her stomach. This couldn’t be it. There was no sign of life. No footprints in the soft dirt at the river’s edge.
No one
had been here in a long time.

Fear and hunger worked at her mind. Had Adelpha made up the dungeon? Was she stalling? Did she work for Hades?

Adelpha pounded on the ground with her foot. It produced a dull thud, like something hollow. “Yes. Here it is,” she said. “Looks like they stopped using it.”

At the bottom of the wall, very close to where the palace met the grass, Ruby saw that the dirt was concave. Adelpha stooped and began pulling the grass and soil away with her hands.

Ruby joined her. She put her hand into the empty space between the wall and the ground and pulled away handfuls of dirt. The stone of desperation in Ruby’s stomach lifted high up in her chest and began to feel like hope.

They dug for several inches, until they hit upon something solid. “The door is in the ground. It lifts up like a root cellar,” Adelpha said.

The edge of the wooden door was rotted. It was easy to break it up and make the hole bigger. Adelpha saw what Ruby was doing and moved to the other side of the opening to help.

When the hole was big enough Ruby lay on the ground and reached into it with her dirt-covered hands. A musty, closed-in smell came out of the hole and she yelled in surprise when her knuckles hit something hard and rough. Steps, she realized as she touched one and then another further down. Stone steps.

Ruby looked at Adelpha. “Are you sure this leads to the dungeon?”

“This is the main entrance.” Adelpha looked around. “Well, it used to be.”

Ruby looked into the hole and then back to Adelpha. Her eagerness to find Ares was matched only by her fear of what lay at the bottom of those steps. But there was nothing to do and nowhere to go but down.

“Thank you,” Ruby said and looked into Adelpha’s eyes once more. “Do you know anything else about the dungeon? Anything that can help me find Ares?”

“I only know about the entrance because I’ve spent so much time on the banks of the Lethe.” She glanced at the ground where the door was now covered with dirt. “I think Persephone stored things in it mostly. Tributes and gifts maybe.”

Ruby blinked. Hades was imprisoning Ares in the queen of the Underworld’s extra storage? She didn’t want to worry about the foolishness of Hades and Persephone. But the thought reminded her that she didn’t have much time. Persephone would be heading back to Olympus soon, leaving Hades six months to deal with Ares before she returned to distract him again.

If Ruby didn’t pluck up her courage now, she would have an eternity to stare at that hole.

…

Ruby eased her legs into the fathomless darkness of Hades’s dungeon and felt for the stone steps. She found them with a sharp kick. She got her footing and backed down into the abyss.

She looked up at Adelpha. “You won’t come?” she asked again, though the shade had already refused once.