“You are fine,” Janus said, reassuring. His voice was soothing, a pleasant sound amidst the fire that deluged his mind. “You are just fine. Lay back. Relax. The pain will pass.”
“It is … not passing,” Marius said with emphasis on every word. This had been going on for years, it felt like.
“It has been two days,” Janus said, accurately predicting Marius’s thoughts. It was an uncanny ability that the man had, and reassuring in its way. When the pain had not been there, it had seemed more reassuring.
“He is fighting me,” Marius said. He could feel the man in his head, ripping about like an angry bull set loose in a town square. It felt as though furious horns were making great rips in his thoughts, shredding their way through him. He could not stand, could not walk.
“He is a strong one,” Janus said, “and full of fury. But I can feel him within you. He will tire, his will to fight will falter given time. He already wearies.”
“I …” Marius dropped the back of his head to the floor once more. They had gone to a town a day’s travel to the south. There they had confronted a man who possessed the power of flight.
Which he had been using to wing away young women from villages for his own ends.
Janus had called the man—Ennias—a monstrosity. Marius had agreed, after they’d spoken with a girl of fifteen who had survived Ennias’s attentions and come stumbling home to her village after a week’s abduction. The story she’d told had inflamed Marius’s rage and even caused his mother’s occasional irritable pronouncements to go silent. What Ennias had done had offended him on every level of decency. The girl had reminded Marius of the only villagers who had actually been kind to him, two teenage girls who had offered him bread every now and again.
It had been easy, pressing his hands against Ennias’s flesh, when Janus held him there for Marius to touch. A simple arrow from Diana’s quiver, shot perfectly by her, dropped him. He had seen Diana’s face when she shot. There was a quiet satisfaction there that told him that the village girl’s story had made an impression on even her.
So Marius drank his soul.
And now he burned in torment.
“You … will … fail …” Marius muttered.
I will not, came the voice of the murderous beast in his mind. You watchman, you fiend, you try and capture me—
“I have … captured you,” Marius said. “You are dead. You are kept from crossing the river by my leave only. Your soul belongs to me, not to Pluto.”
Never, the voice came. Never.
Oh, yes, you will, came another voice, stronger than the weary Ennias.
“Mother?” Marius said, and for but a moment the pain subsided.
“Yes,” Janus said, quiet, solemn, into the silence. “Yes, this is how …”
Marius closed his eyes and found himself in the darkness. It was nearly complete, a world formless and shapeless, and he stood at the point of a triangle in the dark. A woman stood to his right, and Ennias was to his left, looking haggard, his long hair wild and his eyes drooping like a man about to fall into slumber. It was as real as anything he’d ever felt, this place in the darkness. He knew he could reach out and touch Ennias with a hand, could feel the man’s bloodied lip if he held a finger up to it. It was knowledge that came naturally to him, instinctively.
This was his place.
You will fall before the might of my son, his mother said. He had seen her face only in passing, in visions before his waking eyes, and in dreams that were gone when he came back to consciousness. Here, her eyes were fearsome, green as the grass but lit with a hard edge, like an emerald that Janus had once shown him in the firelight. You will fall before my will as well.
I will not, Ennias said, but his voice rang with uncertainty. He bled, and not only from his lip. His soul was in pain, was wounded from the struggle. He stood with his hand bent strangely at his side, broken, the way it had been when Janus had held him down.
His mother looked at him, and her emerald eyes flared with light as she did. You have pushed me down with your will. I have felt the pain you can inflict. You cannot break him on your own, but you could sit upon him as you have me these long years, sit upon him until the end of time yet it will do you no good.
Marius swallowed. “I don’t know what to do,” he said in a voice that broke into the darkness, echoing with power that originated in a place far from where he was. “I need what he has. I need it to survive, to do what we …” he hesitated. “What we need to do.”
His mother nodded, once. Then let us face him together. With your will joined to mine, we will make him suffer in such a way as he has never felt pain before. We will make him scream and beg and cry—