Ahead, Charon grew still and stretched an arm out, indicating her to do the same. He pointed at something on the ground. Danae crept forward. The plant looked like any of the others they’d passed. Then the stalk bent beneath an invisible weight, and a small patch of air around it shimmered.
Breath held, she leant closer, straining to see through the fog. Then, as though materializing from the misty vapour, a pair of crimson eyes stared back at her. Reptilian pinpricks of red, just like the eyes of a shade.
Danae stretched out a hand, but whatever it was scurried away. As the air shivered she made out a small, lizard-like shape before the creature vanished into the trailing fog.
She looked up at the ferryman. ‘What was that?’
Charon blinked then turned, leaning on his staff as he continued to walk across the plain.
She pursued him. ‘Its eyes and skin were just like yours …’
More silence.
‘Gods be damned, enough! I know you understand me!’
The ferryman paused and his hood twitched as though he might look back. Then he carried on walking.
From some reservoirs deep within her, a swell of anger propelled her forward. She ran, lunged at the shade and brought them both crashing to the earth.
She landed two blows before Charon had her pinned beneath his staff. She squirmed, trying to free herself, but his grip was like a vice. She had been good at this once. OnNaxos she had often bested her brothers in a furious flurry of fists. But now her body was weakened by pain and hunger, and she had become too reliant on the power of her life-threads to win a skirmish.
Charon’s hood had fallen from his head during the scuffle, and at the sight of the iron collar around his neck she stopped fighting.
Unlike the other shades, the ferryman had visible markings upon his skin. Silvery scars sliced through his invisible hide like a patchwork of glass. From these lines she could make out the shape of his nose, his jaw, his mouth.
‘Why are you wearing a collar like mine?’ she rasped.
The ferryman blinked again. Once, twice.
‘Are you a captive?’
Something shifted in Charon’s crimson gaze, and he eased the pressure of his staff across her chest. Then he stretched open his mouth.
Danae flinched.
It was pink and moist, full of creamy square teeth, just like hers. But where a tongue should have been was a scarred stump, severed at the root.
The ferryman closed his mouth and released her, pulling his hood back over his head. He pushed himself up and continued to trudge across the misted earth.
10. The Mists of Mourning
With no moon or sun parading their endless dance across the sky, Danae had nothing to mark the flow of time except her own weariness as they continued to trudge across the fog-bound plain. Her mind still reeled from the sight of Charon’s mutilated tongue and the collar around his neck, but she was too exhausted to attempt to divine what had happened to him.
Her feet were blistered by the time the ferryman stopped in the shadow of a large black rock, rearing out of the ground like a curved claw.
Charon drove his glowing staff into the earth, so it stood tall on its own, then sank down to sit cross-legged on the soil beside it. Danae followed his lead, tugging the length of her dress over her legs. She shivered. She felt so small in this vast sea of earth and mist.
From the folds of his cloak, Charon pulled out the waterskin and another cloth-wrapped parcel. He placed both on the earth and nudged the skin towards Danae. She took it and drank. Charon then passed her a strip of cured meat that tasted like salted beef. She chewed, watching the shade lift a piece to the mouth beneath his hood.
She thought back to a night before she’d joined the Argonauts. She’d broken her journey in a mountain village with Heracles and his crew, where she’d followed a shade carrying the unconscious barkeep’s boy to a cart she now realized had been driven by Charon – or another shade wearing the same charcoal-grey cloak. A cart full of drugged bodies. The Missing, stolen from their families, never to return.
‘I know shades take the Missing. Two years ago, I saw one take a baby from Naxos. Was the child brought here, to the Underworld?’
Her body felt taut as a trapped strand of hair as she waited for a response.
Charon shook his head.
A sip of breath slipped from her lips. ‘Do you know where the shade took him?’
