John Wright - Titans of Chaos

"I left them. I knew you could follow me; I knew you could not follow them. So they are safe."

"You must have arranged some system of rendezvous, or exchange of messages? Dropboxes, letters to the Times signed in code, colored smoke signals, that sort of thing... ?"

"You and your people can erase memories. Why not read minds? I thought it would be safer if I didn't leave myself any way to reach them."

"But they can reach you, one supposes?"

"I promised Colin I would have sex with him."

"Hphfnah? I mean, I beg your pardon... ?" Disgust, and even anger, broke in his voice. The noise he made was like the snort a large black bull makes when a younger bull comes nosing around his harem. The contemptuous blow of a bull lowering its head to gore an insolent opponent.

"It is like my promise to you. An oath. Colin and Quentin can use it to find me."

"Miss Windrose, sometimes I just wonder what on Earth goes on in that head of yours. Did you actually promise an amorous liaison with... Oh, it boggles the mind! With Mr. mac FirBolg?"

"What's so wrong about that?"

"What's so wrong? What's so wrong? Did I really teach you so poorly, Miss Windrose? Have you no sense of propriety, no sense of pride, no sense of self-esteem? Have you no sense? What about taste? Have you no taste?"

I looked at him with my eyes half-closed. "You don't think he's good enough for me."

"I assume, with the natural perversity of teenagers, this will merely recommend him to your favor.

But, as a mental exercise, envision a delicate and graceful rose, the fairest bloom of the fairest spring. Now picture a slug dropped on it, leaving a trail of ooze. I am aghast."

"Do you not like Colin so much?" I said, my voice light and airy.

"Mr. mac FirBolg has no capacity to apply himself, and, were he not graced with dangerous supernatural powers, would have no doubt found a satisfactory life as a fast-food-restaurant clerk, or a heroin salesman. But you, you, Miss Windrose, whether born a princess or goddess, common or mortal, you could make of your world what you will of it. You are much too fine a creature for a dull-eyed sluggard like Mr. mac FirBolg. What of your Mr. Triumph?"

"Victor... ?"

"Of course, Victor. That he is the only fit man for you, a blind monkey could perceive from half a mile off on a foggy day."

"I really think my private life is none of your damn business, if you don't mind my saying so, Headmaster."

He spread his hands, and "Your promise is a nullity in any case. Promises of marital favors are meaningless outside of marriage, which is a sacred institution. The Great Queen Hera Basilissa established the rules of the universe along these lines, and the rules of magic follow them."

I snapped, "We've gotten a bit off the topic, and you owe me at least three questions! I have a turn coming as well, you know!"

"Not true at all, Miss Windrose! I have been keeping a careful, that is as much as to say, an exact count of questions. Yours, of course, have been remarkably unimaginative, consisting of inquires such as, 'What's so wrong about that?' and 'Do you not like Colin?' and, a brief question, thus:

'Victor... ?' You have asked an abundance, indeed, a superfluity of questions, Miss Windrose, and I have answered them all."

"You haven't answered anything yet! What about Lamia's question?"

He looked insouciant. "What about it?"

"Why did you train us to use our powers? You intended to use us to fight your wars. Right?"

"That aspect of it was not entirely beyond my imagination, I admit. However, it was with some care that I took pains to make it appear to the other Olympians that I was not mollycoddling you.

Had I placed you in foster homes, for example, and assigned certain of us to be your parents and kin, naturally the ones who got to play at being your parents would be regarded with deepest suspicion by the others."

"So you couldn't afford to treat us nicely as we were being raised?"

"Do not be overly sentimental, Miss Windrose. It ill becomes a woman of your intelligence and character. You were raised perfectly well, better than most. If you feel that the world has treated you unfairly, you have achieved a state of mind well known to all teenagers, but maintained only by adults of a more shrill and self-absorbed type."

I said, 'Tell me about your parents."

He tilted his head to one side, his eyes narrowing. But he shrugged and said, "If you will. I was raised by Eos, the Lady of the Dawn, who, while a kindly mother, was somewhat heedless as a woman, and she awarded me numerous bastard half brothers. My father, Astreus, was given a fine rack of horns, and he was, as you might well imagine, quite remote. You should find little ground for envy."

"Would you have preferred to be raised by strangers? Enemies?" I could not keep the bitterness out of my voice. I was thinking of all the birthdays my mother never saw, my first steps, first words, first dance, first infatuation.

"For the isolation of your youth, I am deeply sorry, Miss Windrose, but that was a matter out of my hands. There is a war, you know, between Cosmos and Chaos, between order and entropy, between reason and unreason. This forms the fundamental basis of existence; I do not see how any victory or lasting peace is possible. The most one can hope for is temporary compromises, temporary armistice. You are not the first victim of this terrible conflict."

Strange. I remember Victor saying something of this sort back when we were all aboard the Silvery Ship: that no victory was lasting, no solution perfect.

I asked, "I don't understand how this whole situation arose: Hermes and Dionysus and Athena conspire to overthrow Zeus, and enlist the aid of Chaos: they succeed, and Zeus is killed by Typhon, right? But then Dionysus and Athena turn on Hermes, and someone else shoots him-I forget who-"

Boreas said, "It was the Huntress. The Lady Phoebe of the Moon. We stood on the plains of Vigrid, where the brink of Chaos roared, and the Gates of the World's End had been torn from their hinges, and lay stretched for miles along the plain. To one side reared all the armies of a united Chaos: a fearsome sight." And now his eyes grew haunted with old memory. "I saw phantasmagorical dream-legions from outer realms of eternal night, sons of Morpheus and Nepenthe; I saw fallen spirits from the Abyss, armed and armored with incontestable magic; above them and below, a hundred miles or more in length, the soulless monsters from the Void, with all their engines and molecular alchemies of matter and energy; above and beyond them, nigh-impossible to see or to imagine, were your people, Miss Windrose, creatures too perfect to be threatened or deterred: the uncreated thousand-dimensional superbeings from the unthinkable primordial prereality, before the geometry of space-time was drawn. A sight to stir the soul, I assure you, to look upon those beings, some brilliant with the splendor of eternal night; some wretched and lightning-scarred, yet smoldering with the burned remnants of angelic majesty; others yet with no souls at all, implacable and cold; others far too strange and wondrous ever to be allowed inside a sane universe, too large by far for space itself to hold.