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argument, and a telling one, against an im-mediate advance. For the time being, it would be the summit of
the Mountain and not the depths beneath it that lay ahead of him.
Once more Jeremy's thoughts became focused on his search for Katy, and he resented the time that had
been spent in argu-ing and skirmishing with his and Apollo's common enemy. The boy found himself
angry with her for being so incautious as to let herself be caught. But he could picture, in unnerving detail,
any number of plausible scenarios in which she had been caught.
Driven by a need whose intensity surprised even himself, he began to shout Katy's name as he
descended. Through one after another of a series of chambers, his cries evoked great echoes, re-minding
him of Hades's voice. On he stalked, holding an arrow ready at the bow, three fingers curved to hold a
gentle tautness in the string.
Jeremy had counted five large chambers down into the earth and estimated that he was more than a
hundred feet below the level of the main entrance before he came upon what he had hoped and dreaded
that he would find.
The glow he had detected from a distance was not intruding sun but faint torchlight. As he advanced, the
illumination be-came somewhat brighter. But he would be unable to focus and magnify torchlight as he
could sunlight.
* * *
This room was more artificially modified than those that had come before, a rounded, almost perfectly
circular chamber, the most elaborately decorated though by no means the largest he had encountered so
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far. Some ten paces in diameter, and a domed ceiling four or five yards high. There were four entrances,
spaced at irregular intervals around the curving wall.
And there, raised on a platform of rock that had long ago been laboriously flattened, one more cage was
waiting the door of this one stood open, but it was not empty.
Suddenly aware of his heart beating wildly, the boy called out something incoherent and went stumbling
hastily forward it was left to the senior partner to look keenly to see if any traps had been set for
would-be rescuers.
A motionless figure, its unclothed skin painted for purposes of magic in multicolored patches, was
sprawled facedown on the floor inside the cage. She was able to raise her head and call back, but only
feebly.
"Katy." Jeremy spoke her name, once and quietly, as he came within arm's length of the open cage.
And in a moment he could be sure that this was Kate indeed, though she had been changed. The colors
black and red, the in-signia of Hades, were dominant in the painting of her body. Something had been
done to her hair as well, adding to the dif-ficulty of recognition.
The round room was not in deep darkness but dim in the light of only three guttering torches, fixed in
sconces spaced evenly around the walls.
There came a whisper of wings above, and Jeremy realized that there were three furies in attendance.
They were not going to touch the sacrifice, who was reserved for a mightier power. They had been
drawn by the scent of death to scavenge the bodies of those recently slain by Apollo's not-so-painless
arrows.
A triumphant joy surged up in him, blending with his anger renewed anger when he saw what had been
done to her.
One of the winged creatures came, with the compulsive stupidity of its race, to attack the intruder, and
meanwhile the others escaped to spread the word of Apollo's intrusion into the Cave.
The door of this cage had been left standing open, evi-dently on the assumption that the prisoner would
be too drugged, too weak, to try to get away. For a few more seconds, with all the paint, he could not
be absolutely sure that he had found Katherine, but when her eyes at last looked straight at him, he knew.
Apollo, looking into those eyes, knew that the victim had been drugged, as well as ritually abused. At
first she didn't recognize her rescuer when he appeared. For a moment Jeremy had won-dered if he
himself could possibly have been so changed in the brief time since she'd seen him last.
But with the first touch of Apollo's hand, she began to emerge from her state of stupefaction.
"Jerry? Are you am I imagining you, too?" The last words were dragged out in an utterly despairing
voice.
"I'm here. I'm real." He wanted to say something important, tremendous but there were no words.
"Thank Apollo, and ... thank the gods you're still alive."
With the borrowed strength of Apollo in his fingers Jeremy snapped whatever bonds were constraining
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her wrists and ankles. Then for a long moment he held her, fiercely, tightly. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]