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shocking after the solemnity that had gone before.
Jeremy's borrowed memory understood and recognized the quotation.
The impression came across that this avatar of Hades/Pluto had forgotten what
it was like to be human really believed, now, that he had never been anything
but a god, tragically mistaken.
Apollo remembered differently. He knew exactly how human this avatar of Hades
was, or had been
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Fred Saberhagen - The Book of the Gods 1 - The Face of Apollo before his
humanity had gradually eroded away. The details of the man's name and face lay
buried in the depths of memory where Jeremy was still afraid to tread, but he
considered that they were probably not important anyway.
The two beings moved closer together, began to stalk each other, Jeremy with
an arrow nocked and his bow drawn. He had to summon up all his courage to keep
from opposing Apollo's will to advance and fight.
Darkness enveloped them, and silence, save for a distant drip of water. Out of
unbreathing silence and darkness, a hurled rock bigger than Jeremy's head came
at him relatively slowly, affording the youthful target body plenty of time to
dodge. The missile crashed away behind him, wreaking destruction among the
stalagmites. Not a truly hard blow, probably intended not so much to kill him
as to render him overconfident.
When he had worked a little closer, it became possible for Jeremy/Apollo to
get a somewhat better look at his archenemy. The boy had expected a gigantic
figure, but what he saw was small, no taller than the body he was sharing, and
the surprise was somehow disturbing. Then he understood that the visible shape
before him, the body in which his Enemy lived, had once been purely human,
too.
Again an arrow darted from the bow in Apollo's hands, as true to its target as
the previous shots had been but Jeremy could not see that this one had any
effect. Blackness in a blurred shape simply swallowed the darting shaft. To
this Enemy, an ordinary arrow from an ordinary bow might well be no more than
a toothpick.
The Lord of the Underworld unleashed a horrible bellowing, threat and warning
no less frightful for being wordless.
Apollo had heard it all before and was not particularly impressed. Urgently he
tried to recall what additional weapons Hades might have at his disposal.
A lurching of the rocks, great house-size slabs coming together to trap and
crush the Lord of Light between them. Again Apollo danced to safety in the
quick young body he had borrowed. Certain sounds and smells suggested to him
that somewhere, deep down, an effort was under way to bring up molten rock.
Hades was given no time to bring that effort to fruition. Apollo, with first a
blow of his fist and then a kick, shattered a rock wall and sent a lance of
reflected sunlight deep into the Cave. And of course shot more arrows at his
enemy.
It was impossible to know whether any of his clumsy wooden shafts or the
faster, straighter beams of light he now employed had inflicted serious
damage. The Lord of the Underworld was keeping his own heart shielded behind
heavy rock. The arrows and the sun fire of Apollo pained and wounded but did
not kill.
Bellowing Hades fought back, somehow causing darkness to well up like a thick
liquid out of the Cave's floor, to slow Jeremy's feet and drag against his
spirit. He had the sensation of a giant suction working on his entire body,
and had he been no more than human he must have yielded to it and been drawn
into the earth.
Yet something told Jeremy that Hades, like Apollo, was now weaker than on the
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occasion of their previous fight. The Lord of the Underworld was also working
in close league with some human mind and body, and that human, like Jeremy,
would be drained and eventually used up in heavy conflict.
Apollo could not remember who the human was who had last put on the Face of
Hades or Jeremy could
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