PROLOGUE

To the people who could not escape the Cave, it seemed that the bones of the earth were shaking. The sun and stars, sources of light and courage, were out of sight and very far away.

On and on the murderous struggle raged, filling the underground darkness with reverberating thunder, lancing it through with flares of unnatural light. Two titans fought against each other, each commanding the personal powers of a god and each supported by a squad of merely human allies. Two gods, dueling to the death in the echoing chambers of a vast cavern, came together with profound hatred and full abandon, each committing every scrap of resource, holding nothing in reserve. Here was all-out bitter violence, carried extravagantly beyond the merely human.

When their most powerful weapons had been exhausted, they came at last to grappling hand to hand. The thunder of their battle, the bellowing of their two voices raised in rage and pain, deafened and dazed the few humans—less than two dozen altogether—unlucky enough to have been trapped with the pair inside the Cave of Prophecy. The searing lightning of divine wrath, the flaring blasts of godlike power, came near to blinding human eyes that had earlier grown accustomed to the Cave's deep darkness. Clouds of dust from newly shattered rock, along with the fumes of slagged and burning earth, choked human lungs.

Well before the struggle entered its climactic stage, the two factions of human warriors had ceased trying to accomplish anything beyond their own survival. It was obvious to all of them that nothing they were capable of doing would affect the outcome, and those who were still capable of movement now bent all their efforts on crawling, scrambling, for their lives, concerned only to get out of the way of the pair of monsters wielding superhuman force.

From one second to the next it seemed that the level of fury already reached could not possibly be sustained. And yet that level not only endured but was surpassed, turning the cave into an inferno, shaking the walls of solid rock.

One of the mere humans who was still alive, a lithe young woman with darkish blond hair, had crawled aside, seeking shelter behind a hump of limestone on the Cave's floor. Her clothing was torn, her skin bleeding from half a dozen minor injuries.

Meanwhile the giants' struggle stormed on, its outcome impossible for anyone to know. Now one of the fighters was down and now the other.

Just when it seemed to the cowering human witnesses that there could be no end, that the fight must swallow the whole world and drag on through eternity, there came at last an unexpected lull in violence, a little breathing space in which it was possible for men and women in the Cave to regain the ability to see and hear. Some of them, recovering with amazing speed, tried to raise a chant, the words of which were promptly lost again in the renewed fury of the fight. The lips of the young woman moved, mouthing the words no one could hear:

Apollo, Apollo, Apollo must win.

And across the Cave, in another half-protected niche, another human chanted: Hades, Hades, King of Darkness!

In the next instant the tumult rose up again, reaching its climax in a last burst of violence more cataclysmic than any that had gone before. Once more the bones of earth were set quivering, and high in the rocky wall of one of the Cave's great chambers a rent was torn—letting in a single shaft of sunlight.

The beam of light was sharply outlined in its passage through the dusty air within the Cave.

When the echoes of that splitting rock had died away, there followed an interval of relative near-silence, broken only by shudderings, quivering of the stony walls, receding roarings, and gurglings, where veins of water had been turned to steam in the abused and ravaged earth. Here and there the lesser sound of human sobbing fell on deafened ears, evidence that breath still remained in yet another human body.

Only seven human followers of great Apollo had survived inside the Cave until this moment, close enough to see the fight and yet managing to live through it. The ranking officer among them, a man accustomed to the leadership of a hundred warriors, now counted only six behind him. Their monstrous chief opponent had withdrawn, to do so needing the help of the remnant of his own human army. Apollo's seven were left in possession of the field.

But the retreat of their enemies meant almost nothing when balanced against their loss.

All seven were stunned by the fearful knowledge that their god was dead.

Moved by a common impulse, they crawled and staggered, dragging their wounded, deafened, half-blinded bodies out of their separate hiding places and back into the great Cave room where the climax of the fight had taken place. There the disaster was confirmed.

In their several ways the human survivors vocalized and acted out their grief. One or two of them wondered aloud, and seriously, if the sun was going to come up ever again.

They derived a certain measure of relief, these folk who had served Apollo, simply from seeing that light shine in, however faintly, through the great Cave's newly riven walls. The light of the universe had not been extinguished with Apollo's death. That fact alone was enough to give them strength to carry on.

The filtered light was faint, but it was enough to let their eyes confirm what their ears had already told them, that their master's monstrous opponent, Hades the Pitiless, most hated of all divinities, had withdrawn.

A haggard, bloodstained woman among the seven, her black hair scorched, raised empty hands in a vague gesture. "Damned Hades must be injured, too."

"He's gone to where he may recover—down, far down below." The surviving officer was looking at one of the doorways to the Cave room, a void of black that swallowed the faint wash of sunlight, giving nothing back. Gray clouds of dust still hung thick in the air.

Another man choked out: "May he burn and melt in his own hell!"

"But he will not. He will be back, to eat us all." The tones of the last speaker, another woman, were dull and hopeless. "Our god is dead." In their battle-deafness the seven were almost shouting at each other, though none realized the fact.

"We must not give up hope," said the man who had once commanded a hundred. "Not yet! Apollo is dead. Long live Apollo." He looked round, coughing in clouds of choking dust. "We must have light in here. Someone get me more light. There is Something I must find."

A hush fell over the other six. Presently one of them, guided in near-darkness by the sight of sparks in smoldering wood, located a fragment of what had once been a tool or weapon. The piece had caught part of a bolt of electric force, hurled by one or the other of the chief combatants. Now human lungs blew into sure life the faint seeds of a mundane material fire. Human skill nurtured a small flame into steadiness, giving human eyes light enough to distinguish objects in the deep shadows where the thin shaft of sunlight could not penetrate.

Crude torchlight flaring orange enabled the human survivors to look at one another—only three of them had picked up their weapons again; all of them were smeared with dust and most with blood. None were as old as thirty years, and all of their eyes were desperate.

Around them on the rock floor of the Cave of Prophecy were scattered a score and more of other human bodies, friend and foe commingled, and some of each still breathed. But that could wait. All that could wait.

More light as usual gave courage. First they were compelled to make absolutely sure of the tragedy—their god had perished. They could see all that was left of him—which was not much.

Apollo was dead, but hope was not. Not yet.

The officer was down on his knees, sifting through the rubble with his fingers. "You know what we must find. Help me to look for it."

"Here's something," another remarked after a few moments' search. "That way did Hades go." Now in the crude torchlight the visual evidence was plain. There were marks were someone— or something—had been dragged away, gone dragging and sliding down, into impenetrable darkness.

"Helped by humans. The Bad One was hit so hard that he needed human help, even to crawl away."

"Gravely wounded, then! Is that not blood?"

They all stared at the dark stains on the rocks. It was blood, but whose? No one could tell if it had spilled from divine veins.

"Not dead, though. Hades is not dead, l-l-like, l-l-like—" The words came stuttering and stumbling, in a voice on the point of breaking into wrenching sobs.

Another found a crumb of hope. "It might be that our Enemy will die of his wounds, down there."

"No. Down in the depths he will recover." Several people drew back a step. It was all too easy to imagine the Lord of Darkness returning at any moment and with a single gesture sweeping them all out of existence.

"I fear that the Pitiless One still lives." A voice broke in agony. "But Apollo is dead!"

"Enough of that!" the officer shouted hoarsely. "Long live Apollo!"

And with that he rose to his feet, having found what he had been groping for in the dust, a small object and inconspicuous. With the sound of a sob in his throat, he hastened to wrap his right hand in a fragment of cloth, torn from his own tattered uniform. Only then did he touch his discovery, holding it up in the torchlight for all to see. It was no bigger than the palm of his hand, a thin and ragged-looking object of translucent gray, with a hint of restless movement inside.

"The Face!" another cried.

"We must save it."

Hoarse murmurs echoed that thought. "Until, in time, our god may be reborn."

"Save it, and carry it, to ... who knows the names of worthy folk?"

The people in the Cave exchanged looks expressing ignorance. Finally the leader said, "I can think of only two. Certainly none of us."

There followed a violent shaking of heads. Unanimously the seven counted themselves unworthy even to touch the remnant of Apollo's Face.

"But how can we carry it to safety?" asked the young woman with the dark blond hair. "It's damned unlikely that any of us are ever going to leave the Cave alive."

No one in the small group had much doubt that the human allies of Hades were in command of all the known exits—but the struggle of titans had created some new openings in the rock.

The weight of decision rested on the officer, and he assumed it firmly: "I think our chances are better than that. But we must split up and go in seven different ways. We will draw lots to see which of us carries ... this."

Moments later, the seven had cast lots and the eyes of the other six were all turned upon the young woman with dark blond hair.

In the days that followed, the spreading reports and rumors telling of the fight were in general agreement on the fact that the god Apollo, known also as Lord of Light, Far-Worker, Phoebus, Lord of the Silver Bow, and by an almost uncountable number of other names, was truly dead. But the accounts were by no means unanimous regarding the fate of Hades, the Sun God's dreadful dark opponent. Some said that the two superbeings had annihilated each other. Others insisted that the Dark One, attended by the monster Cerberus, had now dared to emerge into the world and was stalking victoriously about. A third group held that the Lord of the Underworld, the final destroyer of Apollo, had been himself gravely injured in the duel and had retreated deep into the bowels of the earth to nurse his wounds.

And there were many humans now—none of whom had been close to the Mountain and the Cave of the Oracle during the fight—who insisted that all the gods were dead and had been dead for decades or even centuries, if indeed they had ever been more than superstitions.

The full truth turned out to be stranger than any of the stories that were told.