Chapter 69: The Other Traitor

  With Artemis in tow we hurried to get back to the pteau that would lead us to Zeus' tholos, the one we'd left the Heroes and the other gods at. The entire time I kept checking around us, holding out for the slightest hint that Ares was coming back. This time he wouldn't be able to put one of those fucking colrs on us but unfortunately this time we also wouldn't be killing him in a single slice.

  As we ran through the bloody streets of Olympus I did my best to catch Syr up to everything that had happened in her absence, our meeting with Wilhelm and the way Melinoe had come through for us.

  Did you honestly suspect her?, Syr asked.

  I didn't want to suspect her, I said, but that's the problem. I like her too much and given the weird situations I keep finding her in I really shouldn't. The only reason I even trusted her enough to handle the situation like that was because Alisha vouched for her.

  And in the end she did exactly what she promised to do.

  She did, I agreed.

  So I guess it's safe to trust her and you should be doing more of it, Syr replied.

  I felt my lips scrunch up in annoyance at the scolding but then paused. You're trying to distract me. What happened?

  Syr swallowed audibly, which was ridiculous given that she was an incorporeal entity inside my mind. Things are bad, Felix.

  How bad?, I asked. 'There's an army of Outsiders about to invade us'-bad?

  I don't think it's quite that bad, she hedged. So what you said about a portal in Zeus' throne room is correct. She is trying to activate it.

  What's stopping her?, I asked, a pit forming in my stomach.

  Time, she said. I'm not entirely sure, she didn't expin the whole process when she briefed Wilhelm.

  Wilhelm is with her?

  Yes, she said. He did tell her about your attack but instead of sending anyone out to attack you she is keeping her followers around to stop you from reaching her and disrupting the spell.

  Can we even do that?, I asked.

  As I understand it the spell to connect our world to another is finished casting but the two worlds are out of phase with each other right now. She has to wait for the stars to align, then the portal will open.

  How long do we have?

  According to her it's still annoyingly far away, Syr said, but she's deeply impatient so 'too long' can mean anything from weeks away to minutes away.

  And then an army of Outsiders invades us, I finished, despair clouding my thoughts.

  No, Syr said sharply and I snapped out of it. She was very clear about that. I don't know why she isn't opening a portal to the Outside, maybe she can't, but the portal does not lead to the Outside, just to another world. But she does have reinforcements waiting there, as well as something or someone she calls 'her destiny'.

  Her destiny?, I asked. Is this like the way she refers to Shub-Niggurath as 'my everything'?

  Something simir, at any rate.

  Fuck.

  But there is an upside to this, she said.

  Oh?

  The worlds are out of phase right now but they won't be in phase forever, Syr said. If we can break the spell or at least fend off what comes out of the portal long enough, the alignment will end.

  So if we manage to stall her long enough we win, I surmised.

  I mean, the stars will align again but yes, once the alignment passes her pn fails. She would need to do all of this again in preparation for the next alignment. Which is why she will do everything within her power to stall us and keep us away.

  Then all we need to do is break through her line of defense and break her stupid spell, I said. We did bring an army for just that reason.

  Let's hope the army is enough.

  **

  As we ran I filled the others in on what Syr had told me and Athena's reaction to it was as entertaining as it was concerning, cursing in a seemingly endless rant involving five different nguages (three of them dead) that made me think of this as exactly the kind of worst-case scenario I had worried it would be.

  But, just as it was clear how bad the situation was, the way to continue from here was clear as well. All we needed to do was reach the pteau, help the gods and Heroes beat back whatever was left, reach the Holy Maiden and disrupt her stupid portal spell.

  And as we rounded the final corner before the light bridge that would take us the pteau it became clear that things weren't going to be that simple.

  When we had left to save Artemis we'd left Hermes, Hestia, Hephaestus, Aphrodite, Poseidon, Albrecht, Atanta, Odysseus and the other Heroes on the pteau to fend off a horde of cultists, Outsiders and more of those weird goat-orcs. And that's what we found, sort of.

  The three Great Heroes were still alive, though each of them looking a little worse for wear. Odysseus had a gash in his chest, the bde having gone clear through his breastpte before biting into his sternum, and I had seen enough battlefield injuries to know that his breastpte had saved his life, even if it didn't look like it had done anything.

  One of Atanta's arms hung limp.

  Albrecht looked bloodied, not as bad as near the end of our fight but pretty damn close.

  Hestia and Aphrodite cowered behind a beaten and bruised Hephaestus.

  Poseidon seemed mostly unharmed but terribly out of breath.

  The reason for this devastation was obvious. The traitor god, the one Ares had fought in Demeter's tholos, stood in front of a severely decimated horde of goat-orcs, Outsiders and cultists, one foot resting on Hermes' chest. Hermes was lying on the ground, beaten and bloody, both of his legs severed and the tiny little wings on his sandals fpping futilely, trying to lift a god who was no longer attached to them. I had no idea how the traitor had managed to catch a god known for being a nuisance faster than the wind.

  “You!” I growled as we approached the scene.

  “No Ares with you?” he taunted, his voice still distorted by the cloak covering his face. The only thing on him that could possibly identify him was the coppery bde he carried and fucked if I knew what god used a weapon like that.

  “The ruse is up, you bastard,” I said. “Ares is a traitor, too. Unfortunately for you, his little gambit failed.”

  “What?” Poseidon snarled.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Ares is a traitor working for the Holy Maiden, just like this fucker. He tried to kill us all by putting one of his sve colrs on me.”

  “And yet, here you are, without a sve colr,” the traitor said. “Did the moron put the colr on himself by accident? He's stupid enough for it.”

  “No, he managed it alright,” I replied. “But we cut his fucking head off and killed his pet Chosen One.”

  “Good riddance,” he said. “I couldn't stand that little weasel. And don't worry, Ares will be back. Wouldn't be his first time dying tonight, after all.”

  “So that wasn't an act? You actually killed him?”

  “Oh yes,” he said. “It was quite cathartic. We may work together for the glory of the Holy Maiden but that doesn't mean I like him. And besides, it's not like death means anything to us.”

  “So there's one thing I don't get,” Selene cut in. “Ares is a traitor, I got that. You are, too, and you can't stand each other. Makes sense. But if he's on your side then why did we find him in a giant ball of Outsider goo? Seems like a terrible idea to stay in a ball like that just to screw over the people who try to save you.” Excellent question.

  “Oh no,” the traitor said, “he didn't stay in his little flesh prison to ambush you. That churning mass was supposed to pull him apart and then put him back together into a being of the Bck Goat. A true god of this world, tainted by the Outside.” I shuddered at the thought.

  “And you really think people wouldn't have noticed that?” I demanded. “I've fought enough of these cultists and it's not hard to notice them.”

  “By the time his transformation was over there would have been nobody left to question it,” he said. “The Olympians would have been nothing more than a bad memory, with only Ares left as a minor Outsider deity, a consort of the Bck Goat.”

  “Is that your pn as well?” I asked.

  “If that's what it takes, sure,” he said. “Now, aren't you going to ask who I am? We've come this far.”

  “Why bother?” I asked. “After Ares revealed himself as the traitor I already knew it was you, Bres.”

  The cloaked god started chuckling, low and deep, and as he did he loosened the knot holding his cloak in pce.

  “Interesting hypothesis,” he said. The piece of cloth was still covering his face but the voice distortion was gone and so I could clearly hear that his voice held a lilting accent I knew all too well. I heard it every time my little elf opened her mouth. “How did you figure it out?” he asked as he drew back his hood and I was face to face with Eochaid Bres, king of the Fomorians and consort to Brigid, head goddess of the Tuatha Dè Danann.

  Bres was, like most gods, quite a handsome fellow. He had red hair and a full beard, though despite those simirities he looked nothing like Ares. His hair was slightly curly and cropped short and his beard had half a dozen braids woven into it, keeping it neat despite its volume. His body was muscur, if not as ridiculous as Ares' and his skin, unlike the bronzed skin of nearly all the Olympians, was pale like a fish's belly. His nose was wide and his eyebrows bushy and from underneath those bushy eyebrows two goat eyes bore into me. They were the piercing blue-gray of a stormy sea and the pupils were a single horizontal bar. They looked disconcertingly like the eyes of every follower of the Bck Goat I'd fought so far except they didn't look bright orange, looked in fact like the por opposite of the Bck Goat's eyes.

  “You really weren't very subtle about it,” I said, trying not to let any shock show on my face. Honestly, I'd been half expecting this all to be a ruse and for our second traitor to be Oceanus after all. But I took a moment to put the pieces together in my head before I spoke: “We found you vioting Demeter. I might have believed that you just fancied her but you went out of your way to poison her cabbages with seawater of all things. That was personal. You were jealous of a goddess of the harvest who doesn't poison everything she touches with the salt and muck of the sea.”

  He snarled at me for that comment, because he knew it was true. Everyone knew. A god of agriculture who was also the king of a race of ocean-dwelling raiders, two utterly incompatible aspects. If Hestia's aspects were confused, Bres was a walking oxymoron, emphasis on the moron.

  Nobody liked this bastard or his kin, especially not his wife. Theirs was a political marriage, a peace treaty sealed by a vow of marriage. They had consummated their marriage, Brigid had given birth in the aftermath, and that was the st physical contact the two of them had had. He was a revolting man, worshiped only on sufferance, just like Ares.

  “Not only that but you actively used water miracles when fighting Ares,” I continued. “At first I thought that meant our traitor was Poseidon.” I could actively feel the god of the ocean's gre on the back of my neck. “But then we found him chained up like the rest of the Olympians. So I thought it might have been Oceanus. He had a motive.” But then I pointed past him, at the 'goat-orcs' standing behind him. “Except you were actually stupid enough to bring fucking Fomorians here.”

  He just shrugged.

  “I didn't think they could be Fomorians at first,” I said. “You were always adamant that despite them being evil, pale goat creatures they weren't actually corrupted by the Bck Goat. And so I thought they were just corrupted orcs, just much farther along the transformation than any I'd met before. Especially because you being the traitor made no sense. We were looking for someone who knew secret passages that led this army to Olympus and there was no way anyone would have shared those secrets with you. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if there were secret escape routes to and from Tír na nóg that Brigid didn't share with you, just in case.”

  He bared his teeth at me.

  “But with Ares being the traitor we had our leak covered,” I continued. “So the only reason it couldn't have been you fell away. And once it did, all the signs were way too fucking obvious to ignore. And so that only leaves me with one question.”

  He raised his eyebrows, telling me without words to ask already.

  “Why?” I asked. “For centuries you've insisted that your kin weren't creatures of the Bck Goat. Was that all bullshit?”

  That made him draw his coppery bde out from the ground as his face contorted with anger but instead of charging at me he took a deep breath and rexed. Then he replied, his voice outwardly calm but with anger bubbling underneath it: “'Everyone hates Bres'.”

  I frowned at him.

  “You think it,” he said, “everyone thinks it. 'Bres and his kin are evil.' 'His kin are corrupted by the Bck Goat.' 'Bres is a terrible harvest god.' You know how tiring that shit gets over the centuries? I give my followers better harvests than Demeter or Freya and all they do is compin about the smell of brackish water. The Fomorians are on a steep decline because I don't let them raid as they will and people still pretend like they can't go near the water for fear of us. And despite my insistence that we are not tainted by the Outside, the accusations keep coming. So you better believe that when the Holy Maiden showed up and offered me a world where me and my kin aren't constantly bmed for shit we didn't do you better believe I jumped at the chance.” He gred, this time not at me but at all the gods assembled around me. “Because when one side treats you like scum and the other treats you like a person it's real fucking easy to realize where your loyalties lie.”

  ChrisLensman