Gifts of the Gods Part Five Pythia

Pain.

That was the overwhelming sensation which greeted his return to consciousness. A deep seated, sickening pain, one that he could neither escape or suppress. There was a white-hot point of it centred in his shoulder, but from there it washed right through him, pulsing outwards in slow persistent waves of protest.

"Ohhh," he groaned, instinctively arching up, trying to lift his weight away from the throbbing source of torment. The movement was a mistake. Nausea followed it, along with a wave of desperate dizziness. He fell back, his body lying limp and shivering against the uneven surface which supported it.

Where am I?

There was an odd, greenish tint to the light, which was dim and filled with shadows. The air was heavy, moist and tainted with the peculiar vinegarish scent which had been his last conscious impression of the world. He seemed to be lying on something soft, although, whatever it was, it had a lumpy, rumpled feel to it - like a crumpled blanket or a pile of rags. He was also staring at a low, uneven ceiling, which was no more than four feet overhead. That seemed to be both dark and light in uneven patches, a rough texture of rock encrusted with a spattering of lichen and moss. Both of which were glowing softly.

Not Elysium - or anywhere else in the underworld, he concluded, with a slight sense of relief. He'd visited his Uncle's kingdom enough times to recognise its particular ambience - and this place, wherever it was - lacked the subtle signs of otherworldliness that haunted the halls of Limbo, Asphodel and Tarterus.

So. Hercules drew in a cautious breath, trying to quell the queasiness in his stomach. Not dead. Not yet …

He felt as if he ought to be. He wasn't a man who suffered much from pain or illness; his divine heritage shielded him from much of the suffering that haunted the world. Broken bones or damaged flesh would hurt when they happened, but they tended to heal quickly and with few lingering effects. This wound was different. It burned; burned with a nagging fire that sucked away his strength and left him cold and shaking, inside and out.

Poison, he remembered, and shuddered.

"Mister?"

The voice was soft, a trembling, tentative sound, delivered almost in a whisper. Hercules turned his head, looking for the source of it, and found the boy crouched only a few feet away. He matched his mother's description perfectly - although his face was streaked with dirt and tears, his hair was mussed and his tunic was torn.

"Timeon?" He gasped the name, fighting away the wave of dizziness that had washed over his instinctive attempt to sit up. The boy's eyes widened and he moved a little closer.

"You know me? Who are you? I thought you were dead." The phrases cascaded out at breakneck speed, the boy's voice breaking on the final word. Hercules found him what he hoped was a reassuring smile.

"Not yet," he murmered, tackling the three issues in reverse order. "Hi. I'm Hercules. Your mother sent me to find you."

"Herc… Mother?" The boy inched even closer. His words tumbled out, full of alarm and fear. "Is she all right? Those things – they killed Buttercup. Mother was alone with the baby …"

Hercules put up his hand to halt the frantic babble, finding that even that simple a movement required an effort that set his head spinning. "Ssh," he soothed, "it’s okay. Your mother’s fine." I hope, he added quietly to himself. He didn’t know what might have happened after he lost consciousness; there was a real possibility that the armoured monster which had carried him away might have gone back for further prey. As long as it was roaming the countryside nobody was truly safe. "I left her back at your cottage – said I’d look out for you." He assayed a warm grin, needing to do something about the panic that lurked in the boy’s eyes. "Looks like you and I ran into the same trouble, huh? Well – I killed one of them, so that’s one less to worry about, right?"

Timeon simply stared at him.

"Right?" Hercules asked a second time, not liking the look he was getting. The boy slowly shook his head, his eyes wide with fear and his lip quivering with threatened tears. "There’s more?" The warrior’s heart sank as the question ellicited a wary nod. "More than two?" Another nod, this one quick and fearful. "How many more?"

Timeon lifted his hand and pointed a trembling finger; Hercules, gritting his teeth and summoning every ounce of strength he currently possessed, pushed himself up and round, finding support for his shoulders in the rough rock surface which had lain to his left. The effort left him dizzy and sweating. The image of the boy wavered in front of him, fracturing into a whole pattern of anxious, fearful faces before he managed to regain his focus. Fire cascaded down his shoulder and arm, numbing his right hand and making him bite back a scream.

Gods, he cursed to himself, carefully resting his weight against the rock and taking long slow breaths to calm the pounding of his heart. Something tells me I’m in real trouble here …

He closed his eyes for a moment, letting the pain and the nausea settle, and then opened them again, looking out over the boy’s head to determine where ‘here’ might be. A few scant feet away the world opened out into a cavern, as dimly lit as the narrow cranny in which he and the child were sitting. Shadows shifted in its depths, and – for a disconcerted moment – he wondered if the poison had affected his eyes. The floor seemed to be moving. A white, amorphous mass appeared to be squirming across it, movement rippling all the way from the edge of the main wall, some four, five feet below him, to the far side of the cavern, where it was lost in the dimness. He blinked, fighting for a sense of scale and a point of focus.

"Where are we?" he wondered, muttering the words in an effort filled gasp. A shadowed shape scuttled past in the distance – one of the armoured monsters, carrying something in its shear like jaws – and suddenly everything swam into horrifying clarity. The floor was moving – or rather, the creatures that covered it were moving; fat, maggoty bodies, some as long as the boy was tall, squirmed and wriggled below him with blind determination. He hadn’t just been dragged to some monster’s lair – he was in a nest. A vast, underground nest, populated by hundreds of potentially monstrous warriors. A number of the angled, armoured creatures were depositing burdens at the edges of the cave – a few carried shiny white egg cases, although most held food – huge hunks of fungus and dripping pieces of meat - brought in to feed the ghastly nursery. Some pieces were being laid down, to be immediately covered with an eager squirm of glistening white bodies. Others were being gently placed in niches along the walls, stacked in with the gleam of fresh eggs.

Carefully, not really wanting to look, but knowing he had too – Hercules turned his head. Sure enough, there were half a dozen of the smooth coated, rubbery eggs laid along the back wall behind him. He and the boy hadn’t been brought here as prisoners.

They were lunch.

"I still think this is a bad idea." The preist – whose name had turned out to be Ettian – hovered at the edge of the trampled grass, casting anxious glances across the rest of the untouched meadow. Iolaus nodded abstractedly, waving him and the others to keep back while he got a good look at the ground. Lathius watched intently as the hunter paced along the length of the disturbed area; Theodorus simply stood and gaped at the grotesque corpse which lay sprawled amongst the bloody remains of the cow.

So what happened here? Iolaus frowned, trying to pick out event from the scuffed, blood soaked ground and the crushed grass which covered it. The cow had clearly been tethered in the meadow for some time; a large patch of the grass had been cropped down to ankle height or lower, and there were a number of cow pats scattered around, of which only one or two were semi-fresh. Flies were eagerly buzzing around what little remained of the animal and he raised little smoky clouds of them as his shadow fell over their feast.

There were two sets of human footprints, the first little more than light indentations in the relatively untouched ground at the edge of the open space. The boy had been there, and only a couple of hours earlier, since the marks were still relatively fresh. Iolaus frowned as he tracked the prints out of the longer grass; they led in to the trampled area, but there was no sign of them leading out.

The hunter crouched down to take a closer look at the ground. The other set of footprints were deeper and they told an eloquent if puzzling story. Hercules had had time to stalk cautiously around the edge of the area before he walked out into it. He hadn’t been charging to the rescue, since his steps were even and unhurried, and yet, in places, his steps lay over the distinctively angular marks which matched the angled feet of the dead creature in the middle of the clearing.

Was it here when he arrived?

Iolaus doubted it. Had the monster been there, chewing down on either the cow or the boy, the son of Zeus wouldn’t have paused to take stock or pace his way around the trampled area. He reached down, thoughtfully measuring the size of the nearest angular print with his fingers, then crabbed a few paces sideways and repeated the exercise, matching the span against the fresher print that had pierced his partner’s earlier imprint.

The second print was larger by at least a finger joint

There were two of them ,,,

He stood up, finally turning his attention to the tangle of angled limbs and bulbous body pieces that occupied the centre of the disturbance. A wary frown creased his features as he studied the limp sprawl of the corpse. He knew Hercules’ handiwork when he saw it, and it wasn’t hard to picture the titanic struggle that had ensued when man and monster met. This particular creature had not walked away from the encounter – but, going by the pattern of the tracks, neither had its conqueror.

So where was he?

And what had the second such monster been doing while all of that was going on?

"What is that thing?" Ettian demanded from somewhere on the sidelines.

Good question …

The hunter moved towards it warily, stepping carefully so as to avoid scuffing the evidence of events. It looked dead, but you couldn’t always be sure in cases like this. It also looked naggingly familiar.

"It’s - an ant."

Theodorus’ gulp of disbelieving recognition turned three heads in his direction. The entertainer hadn’t moved, although he’d dragged his hat from his head and was currently involved in nervously crushing it between his hands. Without the hat, the man looked more like Joxer than ever. Iolaus had absolutely no idea why he was standing there, since he’d had every opportunity to stay behind with the farmers had he wanted too. He looked decidedly tense and edgy, which the hunter could hardly blame him for; this situation wasn’t exactly safe for him – and he knew what he was doing.

He hoped.

"An ant?" he echoed, glancing back at the dead creature. It did have certain similarities …

"That’s impossible," Ettian announced, delivering his verdict with a decided snap. "Ants are tiny, inconsequential creatures. This thing is almost as big as a cow. No – its, ah – some monster or other, sent to plague us."

"It’s that all right," Iolaus decided, closing the rest of the distance and hunkering down next to the contorted corpse. "But I think Theodorus is right. It is an ant. A giant one. Hey," he went on, forestalling the priest’s forthcoming protest. "I’ve dealt with giant things before. Serpents. Eels. Chickens. Now ants. No big deal. It could be a lot worse."

"How?" Lathius asked worriedly. The hunter threw him a confident grin.

"Oh," he considered off-handedly, "it could have been some magical creature. You know – one of those things that can only be killed by some artefact or other. Those can be a real pain. Hydras for instance. You have to know their weak spot. But this?" His grin took on a wry twist. "This thing’s neck is broken. Nothing complicated about that."

Not if you’re Hercules, anyway …

The grin was mostly for show. Inside he was being eaten up with worry. Hercules may have vanquished the monster, but something had happened to him afterwards. Something bad. Every instinct was insisting on it - along with the tracks, which said he’d walked into the arena, but showed no sign of him walking out again.

"Ah – " Theodorus ventured nervously, " I uh – I don’t want to worry anyone, but – "

"But what?" Ettian demanded impatiently. The priest was more than nervous. He looked almost – guilty?

The entertainer had gone a little white. "Well, uh," he grimaced. "You don’t ever get just one ant."

Iolaus stood up, looking out across the billow of meadow grass towards the line of forest at the edge of the cultivate area. "There were two, at least," he said, identifying the faint line of disturbance which marked the path the ants had followed. "The one left went off in that direction." Carrying something heavy, he added to himself. He had a nagging suspicion as to what that might have been and he didn’t like what it implied. "The trail leads into the woods." He paused to throw Theodorus a worried look. "You implying there might be more of these things out there? Six, eight – a dozen?"

The juggler shook his head, glancing around with fearful eyes. "Uhuh," he denied. "When you get ants? You get thousands …"