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The trickle of applause was coming from the pavilion of the gods.
I raised my gaze to the top of the arena’s walls and my heart stopped.
Phobos sat on Ares’ throne. Deimos lounged at his left, thick dark mist pouring out of his right hand, while on his knees before them, was Ares the god of war.
Ares was red faced and fuming as he kneeled, his hair pulled back by Eris who stood behind him with a dagger pressed firmly against his throat.
Phobos clapped. “Well done, Seth. What a show.”
I had no words for the scene before me, but now I knew why the Areopagus was in such turmoil. The attack hadn’t come from without, but within. The guards we’d faced must have been members of the son’s legions. The pall of terror that had been cast over the citadel seemed to be emanating from Deimos, some type of psychological assault born of the arcane.
“I must say, none of us expected you to survive the first challenge, let alone triumph,” Phobos continued, before turning to his brother. “Clearly we chose our champions poorly, Deimos.”
I watched in abject silence, Ares’ bracers gripped in one hand as I contemplated what I should do. Ares, my host and a god, was on his knees about to have his throat cut. I didn’t think such things could kill an immortal being but given it was his sister Eris who held the knife, I was willing to concede that my understanding of immortality was woefully inadequate. Based on Ares’ submission, it seemed likely she knew exactly what she was doing.
Inside every man was a little madness. And that voice was telling me to put on Ares’ bracers. I considered it, but bracers or not, in my current condition, there was no way I could move enough to contend with anyone for long, let alone three gods.
I studied them in silence. Phobos, Deimos, and Eris. Fear, terror, and discord personified. The words of the Oracle of Delphi came flooding back to my mind.
Mighty Ares master of war,
Summoner of champions by the score,
Fear, Discord, and Terror rise,
When his games are fraught with lies.
This was what the Oracle had seen. It was the reason why Apollo was determined to have me compete. Somehow, the prophet had known the treachery that lurked in his brother Ares’ house. But what could I do against this? They had played their hand and won. Ares the god of war was an inch of pressure away from a meteoric decline in station. I didn’t want any part of this. I’d had enough of meddling in the affairs of the Olympians. I wanted to walk away, but I had no way home, and no idea what would happen if I let the scene before me play out.
“My apologies for the disruption,” I called up to the gods. “but as I seem to have interrupted some sort of family matter I’ll just see myself out and leave you to your business.”
I started to slowly back away, a gesture made all the more awkward by my maimed leg.
“Nonsense, Seth. You’re right on time,” Deimos called back. “We will offer you the same deal we offered our champions. Surrender the bracers to us and we will give you anything you want.”
That was a blank check that boggled the mind. Just what favors could a trio of gods grant? While dozens of ridiculous suggestions flooded through my mind, right now I’d have given just about anything I had to make it safely home to Weybridge Manor. I wanted to see my family again, to hold Lara in my arms, to hear Dizzy’s laugh and Murdock’s reproach.
There was also the matter of my leg. That was certainly going to need a healer. My list of demands was growing by the moment, but it didn’t really matter; my hands were tied. If Phobos was willing to kill off his own father, they would think nothing of killing me.
And they would do it the second I surrendered the gauntlets. They wouldn’t want any witnesses of their duplicity. After all, Hera would be back tomorrow and the mother of the gods would likely not respond well to her son being executed in his own home.
The guards massacring the guests made more sense. They were disposing of anyone not loyal to the cause: Phobos and his insurrection. I considered my predicament, searching for a way out. Looking up at Ares, I found his eyes fixed on me, following my every move.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” I called. “You would kill your own father, for what?”
Phobos leaned forward on his throne.
“Our bargain doesn’t come with an explanation, mortal. The reasons are our own and we are doing what must be done.”
I nodded, took half a labored step forward, and dragged my useless leg along the sand behind me. I needed to buy some time while I figured out a plan.
“I get the temptation, I really do,” I called up at Phobos. “My father is a right royal pain in the ass. Hardly a day goes by when I don’t at least wonder what life might be like without him, but this. There is no coming back from this.”
Phobos laughed. “Don’t concern yourself with it, Seth. It is the natural order among our kind. The strong survive, new gods topple the old, and the weak perish. My father has grown bored and weak. Look at this spectacle. He was willing to gift his power to others in a last-ditch attempt to cause conflict and stay relevant. It’s pathetic.”
“And you could do better?” I asked.
Phobos shrugged, seemingly unconcerned with my approaching the pavilion. “Look at the world. Fear and terror reign. Our power is unequaled, our influence universal. We are the future. He is the past.”
“So I give you the gauntlets, you kill off good old Dad, and then you let me and my patrons leave. That’s what you’re offering?”
Phobos went to open his mouth, but I cut him off. “That’s what you’re offering in exchange for the power of the god of war.”
“Yes,” Phobos said as he leaned his chin on his hand.
I turned the bracers over in my hand.
“You know, these are pretty nice,” I called as I edged closer to the pavilion. “Maybe I should keep them.”
“We can always come down there and take them off your corpse,” Deimos said with the confidence of a man who’d killed many times.
I nodded slowly. “You could. But with your father’s bracers and the katana of Hachiman, it might just be putting yourself in a little more danger than you’d like to admit. This is no ordinary sword. I’m willing to bet it could do some real damage even to beings of your kind.”
“You would fight very bravely, and die very quickly, and for what?” Eris called back. “Look how he turns on his own blood. He killed my champion Cora right in front of you. He threw me out of his house. Millennia we have been together, and he turned on me like that.”
Eris snapped the fingers of her left hand and it jerked Ares’ head enough that the knife pricked the skin of his throat. A tiny rivulet of blood ran down his neck, and Ares’ face turned the same color as it.
Eris glared down at me. “He will not reward your loyalty.”
I couldn’t help but agree with her. “You’re probably right. All my life I have been fighting for the underdogs. Maybe today’s a good day to be a joiner.”
I held the bracers out in one hand, Hachiman’s sword clutched tight in the other as it rested across my shoulders.
“I’ll give you that,” I called to Eris. “It wasn’t fair what happened to Cora. She was innocent. At least, she wasn’t the one pulling the strings.”
“What do you mean?” Eris called back. “Ares killed her. You saw that.”
“Yes,” I conceded. “For breaking her guest rights. But I also know that she was just as shocked as everybody else. She may have done it, but she didn’t remember; neither did she do it of her own accord. She was being manipulated.”
“By who?” Eris demanded.
I knew the truth. I knew exactly who had set Cora up to be slaughtered. There was only one problem. They were already dead, and the truth wouldn’t help me here. So I took a little leaf out of her book and sowed some discord.
“You tell me. Who stood to gain the most by her death?”
It wasn’t a lie. The killer certainly gained by her death, but I was looking to cast the blame a little further afield. Fortunately, gods were a little paranoid.
Eris shifted her stance and looked at Phobos and Deimos. They had certainly gained a powerful ally the night Ares had cast her out of the Areopagus.
That was the thing about discord. People had a tendency to believe the worst, and they only needed the slightest of nudges to get there. It was human nature, and apparently we got that from the gods.
Eris raised her dagger and pointed at Phobos’ chest.
“I swear, if a word of this is true,” she began.
She never got to finish her sentence. Ares launched himself to his feet. The back of his head slammed into her jaw with a deafening crack that caused the hairs on my neck to stand on end. Eris went flying backward as Ares rushed forward. Phobos and Deimos went for their weapons, but I was already on the move.
I hurled the bracers up at the pavilion and Ares leapt onto the parapet to meet them. The bracers knew their master, and seemed to seek out his wrists of their own accord. The golden bracers snapped shut, but he was still unarmed.
I remedied that by hurling Hachiman’s sword up to him. As his son’s weapons cleared the scabbard, Ares snatched the katana out of the air, took two strides, and jumped off the wall, running straight at them. Phobos raised his sword, but Ares brought down the katana of Hachiman, striking it just above the hilt and shearing straight through the steel of the blade, leaving Phobos holding nothing more than a handle.
With his other hand, Ares backhanded Phobos hard enough to send him flying back into the throne, which cracked at the impact. Deimos lunged at his father. Ares caught the blow on his own weapon before flicking it away. Darting in close, he punched Deimos in the throat, sending the god of Terror to his knees. Ares shirt-fronted his son and hurled him back at Eris.
The two of them crashed through three thrones before coming to a rest in a crumpled heap.
“You should have known better. I raised you better,” Ares bellowed. “I gave you everything.”
Phobos glared at me and muttered, “What have you done?”
Deimos raised his hand, and arcane power surged through the arena. A bolt of emerald arcana hurtled from his outstretched hand. Ares waved his hand like he was buffing a car and a portal opened between them. The arcana vanished into its depths. The god of war strode past the portal, bearing down on his sons.
He grabbed Phobos by his breastplate and unceremoniously hurled him through the open rift. Eris and Deimos struggled to extricate themselves, but he was upon them. He ripped them to their feet, before tossing them through the portal after Phobos. Eris screamed as she sailed through the open portal, but Ares closed his fist. The portal shut and the screams of the Mistress of Discord was cut short. Ares placed a hand on the parapet and vaulted over it, landing deftly on the floor of the arena.
I feared I was going to be hurled into an abyss or cut down where I stood. Ares certainly had a temper and as the god of war’s shoulders rose and fell with each breath, it seemed a distinct possibility.
He stalked toward me, and I cringed backward. I wasn’t a coward, but there were some reflexes you couldn’t switch off.
When he reached me, he held out the sword. “My thanks for the distraction.”
I took it gingerly. “Couldn’t you have just done all that before and saved me the effort?”
“I awoke with Eris’ knife at my throat. You do not reason with an angry woman holding a knife, Seth. You must wait until it is pointed elsewhere.”
“How did you know she wouldn’t just slit your throat?” I asked as my heartbeat slowly returned to normal.
Ares’ mouth perked up into a smile. “That would have required her to trust my sons, something that goes against her nature.”
“What will happen to them now?” I asked. “Where did you send them?”
“Somewhere quiet to reconsider their life choices,” Ares replied, looking me up and down.
“You’re not going to kill them?” I asked, my voice little more than a whisper.
Ares shook his head. “They are my blood. Besides, if I did, I would have to deal with their mother. Far safer to send them somewhere out of the way and give them time to come to their senses.”
I scratched my head. After seeing him enraged, I’d expected him to cut them down where they stood. “Seems very lenient.”
“One does not kill a god without consequence,” Ares replied. “Nature abhors a vacuum. Their place would be taken by another.”
“One not tied to you by blood,” I mused out loud. “So you gave them a vacation?”
“A most unpleasant one,” he replied as he dropped to one knee to examine my thigh.
Having the god of war kneeling in front of me made me more than a little uncomfortable.
“What are you doing?” I asked, looking down at him.
“It would damage my standing if I let my newest champion die on his first day,” Ares answered, poking at the wound. It was still numb to the touch. “Fae magic is a treacherous thing.”
“Champion?” I muttered, unsure my ears were hearing things correctly.
Ares placed his hand over the wound, and a golden light bathed it. The numb sensation below my waist started to recede and a warmth flowed through my leg before radiating up into the rest of my being, taking with it my fatigue, my stress, and my pain.
“Indeed. I don’t see any other options, do you, Mr. Caldwell?”
“I told you,” a voice called from behind me.
I looked over my shoulder as Edward Knight strolled across the arena, Tan only a step behind him.
“That you did,” Ares replied as he removed his bracers. “Just don’t tell Apollo. He’s insufferable when he’s right.”
“So we have an accord?” Knight asked, his eyes lingering over the bracers.
“As promised. One week.” And with that, Ares handed Edward Knight his prize. The most dangerous human I’d ever met, wielding the power of the god of war. I raised my hand to protest but Ares cut me off. “What was promised cannot be undone. Use them well, Knight. I will come for them in seven days.”
Knight went to speak but Ares waved his hand at him and Tan. The two of them simply vanished, leaving Ares and I alone.
“Hardly seems fair,” I replied. “I risk everything and he gains the reward.”
“You owed him,” Ares replied. “Consider your matter with him concluded.”
“I saved your life,” I protested.
“And you will have your reward,” Ares answered. “I refuse to be in your debt, wizard.”
He reached beneath his armor and pulled out a leather cord that hung from his neck. A gold coin dangled from it like a pendant.
He handed it to me. “Never take it off.”
“What is it?” I asked, examining the coin.
“Enough money for a journey. Should you need it, no other fare will do.”
Ares’ cryptic response only served to heighten my confusion, but I wasn’t going to reject his gift. I took the coin and put it on, fastening the leather thong over my head.
I tucked the coin beneath my shirt. “Can I ask you one more question?”
“Certainly. You’re my champion, after all. What kind of master would I be if I didn’t at least indulge your curiosity?”
I smiled. Finally, I could get some answers. More than any other, one question came to mind. “Why did you try so hard to get me killed?”
Ares looked at me, his steely eyes staring down into mine. I felt like he could see clear to my soul. He smiled, and I could have sworn he knew exactly what I was thinking. He went to open his mouth but closed it and raised his hand.
“No, no, no!” I shouted, raising my hand in protest as he swept his own before me.
In the blink of an eye, the Areopagus vanished and I found myself standing on a gravel driveway. Weybridge Manor stood before me, and a weak winter sun beat down on my neck.
I shouted, shaking my fist at the heavens. Why couldn’t these gods just give me a straight answer?