“I assume you are headed for Erimos?” she asked in my head. I nodded. She yawned.
“Unfortunately, my tether to you will not work once you are in the city. I must stay with you now.”
“Oh.” I didn’t really know if I wanted her with me or not. She hadn’t exactly been friendly or helpful so far. But she did know more than me, and I supposed her presence couldn’t hurt. I looked up at Ares. “She’s coming with us to Erimos,” I told him.
Ares snarled. “You are not welcome, spy,” he hissed at Zeeva. I didn’t hear her reply to him, but he looked pissed as he stamped a leather boot, then turned and resumed his march, his delicious back somehow radiating anger.
“Well, you managed to piss him off again,” I said to the cat. She didn’t bother to answer me, just sauntered after him.
“So, you were going to tell me about Erimos,” I prompted when I caught up with them. I was getting hot, but I hadn’t brought any water, only tequila, which on reflection wasn’t very helpful in a desert.
“It is a run by a particularly brutal king. There are fighting pits all over my realm, and he has the largest, and the most, gambling establishments. Erimos has money. Many come here to enjoy drink and women.” Ares barked the words, a hum of anger still rolling from him.
“Lovely,” I said. “What’s a fighting pit?”
“A gladiator ring, in your world,” Zeeva’s voice sounded in my head, at the same time Ares shook his head.
“You are clueless,” he muttered.
“You don’t think that’s where Joshua has been taken, do you?” All misplaced sexual thoughts about Ares vanished as images of Joshua chained up and forced to fight gladiators filled my mind.
Ares just shrugged. “If a demon has been spotted in my realm, someone in Erimos will know about it,” he said. “That is why we are going there.”
Anxiety pulsed through me, the reality check sharpening my focus.
“Your friend is a Guardian, not a fighter. It is unlikely he would have been taken to the pits,” Zeeva said a long few moments later. I looked at her gratefully, but she didn’t turn to me.
“How do I talk back to you in my head?” I asked her.
“Just concentrate on projecting the words to me alone. But I’d really rather you didn’t. You’re annoying enough already.”
“Charming,” I muttered. Even in Olympus, nobody fucking liked me, not even my own damned cat.
I could kind of see their point though, I thought glumly as we walked across the sand, the vista around us still void of anything except the odd scrubby bush or pile of rocks. I just wasn’t good at staying still, or relaxing. I put people on edge, irritated them. And that was the best-case scenario. I’d lost many friends just through the kind of trouble I seemed to attract. Or more honestly, I lost them when they saw my reaction to the kind of trouble I attracted. I couldn’t walk away from a fight. I couldn’t back down when challenged. I couldn’t just work out what was best for me and make a smart decision. I ran on pure impulse and energy. And it scared people. Hell, sometimes it scared me.
“We are here. I know it will be hard but try to keep your mouth closed and let me speak,” Ares said abruptly, turning away.
I frowned around us at the endless sand. “Erm, is the city invisible?”
Ares looked at me like I was mental. “Invisible? And you have the nerve to call me an oaf.” He shook his head yet again, then frightened the living shit out of me by bellowing so loudly I thought he’d been stabbed or something.
“What in the name of-” I started, but my shout was drowned out instantly by the sound of roaring wind, and my hair whipped up into my face as the sand around us began to spin into peaked tornadoes. Within seconds I could see nothing but the beige of the sand whirling around us, and even though there seemed to be a pocket of clear air surrounding the three of us, panic surged through me, instinct taking over. But as fast as the sandstorm had started, it stopped. The sand didn’t fall back to earth like it should though, spinning off into the sky and disappearing into clouds instead. I looked back down to see that the sand had left a massive sunken clearing in its place, filled with the most magnificent walled city I could have possibly imagined.
My immediate impression was that it looked like Agrabah from the Disney movie Aladdin. But as I looked closer at the jewel encrusted walls that surrounded the shining metropolis before us, I began to notice the darker details. Skulls were set between the pale stone and the jewels, and the bulbous spires on the buildings that peaked high above the walls were decorated with swirling carvings of weapons. Swords and flails and axes and hammers were all intricately entwined in huge patterns across the impressive architecture.
From our elevated position I could see that the grand spired towers were mostly in the middle of the square city, and the further toward the walls I looked, the smaller the buildings became. But they were all made of the same stone, and they all glittered in the sun, as though wealth was built into the structures themselves. Broad courtyards filled with fabric marquees occupied the spaces between the buildings, and I could just make out figures bustling around. Surrounding the city, beyond the walls, were six or seven sunken pits lined with rows of stepped benches, with circular stages in the center. The fighting pits, I realized with a pang of morbid curiosity. Between the pits were hundreds of brightly colored tents in clusters and I frowned at them.
“Why are they outside the city?” I asked, pointing at the tents.
“You must pay to enter Erimos. The people who live in those tents can’t afford to go inside the walls.” Ares stamped down the sandy dune, and I followed him.
“I’m guessing you have money?” I asked, suddenly aware of how penniless I was. Ares just grunted.
“They use drachma here.” I looked down at Zeeva, the cat seeming to almost float across the sand, effortlessly graceful.
“Right. Good to know,” I said, even though it meant nothing to me at all. But I would take any and all of the information offered to me. Eventually some of it would surely be useful.
When we got to the bottom of the dune, the gates of Erimos loomed large and imposing in front of us. Up close I could make out lots of bones embedded in the stone walls, not just the skulls visible from further away. Diamonds glittered amongst femurs, sapphires glinted against ribs, and amethysts shone around collarbones. It was creepy as hell, but I burned to explore a city such as this. It called to me.
But when he reached the intricate iron gates and the two armor-clad guards collecting coins from the trickle of folk moving through them, Ares turned left sharply, walking instead along the outside of the wall.
“Why aren’t we going in?” I asked, walking fast to keep pace with him. The sounds of people calling out, selling wares and greeting each other died out as we moved further along the wall.
“We may be able to get the information we need without entering the city.”
“But I want to enter the city!”
“I don’t care what you want.”
“Clearly,” I snapped.
“He is avoiding the King of Erimos,” offered Zeeva.
“Why?”
“Ask him.”