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I stopped dead in front of the nearest one.
There was a mural on the wall inside the frame, giving it the look of a gigantic painting. It wasn’t completed; a third of the space was still smooth white plaster with a few pale sketch marks on it. But what it did show—
“That’s not how it happened!” I said. The painter looked down from his ladder—a vamp, despite it being the middle of the day, so not low-ranking. Still, he got down swiftly and bowed to Caedmon. But he was looking at me, and seemed concerned by what I’d said.
“I was instructed to show the grandeur of battle—”
“Grandeur?” I stared at him. “There was no grandeur! It was mud and blood and fear and—”
I stopped, because I got hit with a flashback hard enough to stagger me. For a second, I was back in that hell of butchered men and dying horses. Thunder boomed in my ears, loud as cannon fire; lightning flashed overhead like nuclear blasts; rain hit me in the face, all but blinding me; while blood and panicked sweat and the metallic taste of spent magic clogged my throat, threatening to choke me.
The little scene cut out as abruptly as it had come, leaving me clinging to Caedmon, who had put a hand under my arm, and staring instead at the heroic scene on the wall, which showed the final battle with Ares. The one I’d been refighting in my head ever since it happened. Only, no, that was what it should have shown. But what the artist had actually painted was . . . it was . . .
I didn’t have words, but it felt like a violation.
A golden warrior—Caedmon, I guessed, since he was glowing like a lantern—stood on a hill, lightning wreathing his head and a staff in his hand that more lightning was spilling out of in all directions. It would have been laughable if I’d been in a different mood, because he hadn’t looked anything like that. He’d been down in the mud with the rest of us, dirty and bloody and soaking wet from the storm raging overhead—which hadn’t made the cut for the painting, either.
But at least there was some truth there, just greatly exaggerated. The real lie wasn’t Caedmon—or the too perfect battlefield, with no panicked men or blood or entrails or feces. Or Caedmon’s blackened and smoking arm after Ares destroyed his staff with barely a glance.
No, the real lie was me.
Because, instead of being huddled in a washerman’s tent, dirty, wet and frightened out of my mind, I was on another hill, opposite Caedmon. I had something in my hand, too, but I wasn’t sure what it was supposed to be. It was bright green and shaped like another lightning bolt, and I was doing something with it—
Oh.
I was ripping open the sky, I realized, like I’d taken a knife to its belly. Only instead of blood and guts spilling out, there was only a cascade of pale white light, illuminating half of the battle going on below. Which I suppose was meant to stand in for the ghost of Apollo.
He’d been stuck in a spirit realm known as the Badlands after a previous encounter with Pritkin and me left him mostly dead and without the power to leave it. Yet as soon as I released him, he hadn’t gone after me as I’d half expected. Instead, he’d flown straight at Ares, the most potent source of godly power around.
He’d been trying to absorb enough energy to live again, and then to battle Ares for control of the world they both coveted. He hadn’t succeeded, but the threat of another god on the battlefield had done what nothing else could. It had pulled Ares’ attention away from our side at a crucial moment, giving us a chance to kill them both.
So the painting told the truth, but embellished it so much that it almost didn’t matter. Instead of two gods battling it out in the sky while the rest of us scurried around like frightened ants, we had . . . this. Whatever the hell this was!
The figure who was supposed to be me had a banner of blond hair streaming out behind her almost as long as she was tall, mirroring Caedmon’s heroic cape on the other side of the painting. She had a fierce, proud expression that I had worn exactly never, and certainly not that night! And, for the final insult, she was wearing a flowy gown that made me look like my mother, instead of the filthy dancer’s outfit I’d actually been running around in, torn and tawdry and not at all camera ready.
It was Hollywood’s version of war, and so wrong it left me breathless, far more so than the children’s innocent drawings back at Dante’s had done. Those had been weirdly cute, if gruesomely bloody, and an understandable reaction to the months of fear and confusion they’d recently experienced. I’d felt proud and not a little awed that they saw me as their protector, and determined to live up to their expectations. But this . . .
This just made me furious.
It made it look so easy, when it had been nothing of the kind! We’d pulled out a victory through a lucky break and because all of us had given everything we had down in the trenches. We hadn’t been lording it up on a hill somewhere, looking faintly bored! We’d been screaming and crying and praying and cursing and—
“It’s a lie!” I said, rounding on the man.
The artist looked taken aback; I guess because he’d expected praise. “I was assured that the main events of the battle are correct—” he began stiffly.
“You were assured wrong!”
“—by a number of people who have studied the old sources—”
“They weren’t there!”
“—and as for the minor details, well. The artistic mind fills in the gaps,” I was told loftily, with more than a hint of a sneer, because all artists are gods in their own minds.
Of course, some of them actually deserve the title, I thought, catching sight of a familiar figure coming down the hall.
“Rafe!”
I suddenly forgot all about my quarrel with the would-be artist and ran to meet one worthy of the term—and then some. To the rest of the world, the man with the head of dark curls now hurrying down the hall to meet me was the great Renaissance master Raphael. To me, he was the closest thing I’d had to a father growing up.
