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once a certain height was reached, trees of any kind were fewer and stunted and growing bent and
twisted by the winds that almost never ceased. Jeremy's imagination trans-formed their images into those
of elderly enchanted wizards, their deformed arms frozen in gestures of power that would never be
completed.
The rocks seemed to grow ever sharper and the paths and trails steeper.
Distant mountains, some of them weirdly shaped or colored, were visible from up here, some more than
a hundred miles away.
"Lord Apollo, we approach Olympus." The man's voice was hushed, exalted.
"I suppose we do. I have never been there before." Then Je-remy asked his companion, "How high are
we above the level of the sea?"
"Something like two miles." Here it grew very cold at night, and fires and/or tent shelters at least were
necessary for human survival.
Here, too, Apollo was at least a little closer to the sun and had brighter and less filtered light to work
with, when he set out to burn or to illuminate. And so were his enemies closer, to their dis-advantage.
* * *
And now again, as on the island of Vulcan's workshop, there was snow on the ground, only gradually
being eaten away by di-rect sunlight and persisting in the shade.
And then at last, Jeremy/Apollo and the Scholar, after tramp-ing across a broad meadow covered with
masses of wildflowers, peered over a ridge of rock and saw clearly ahead of them, no more than a
hundred yards above, what they had been expecting, with a mixture of hope and fear, to find. Here the
Mountain and their climb were coming to an end at last.
The House of the Trickster.That was one name, supplied by Apollo's memory, for the sprawling
structure that clung along the crest, its walls surrounding the actual summit. The grander title of Olympus
seemed to apply at a different time in history but again, as often before, memory was confused.
From somewhere far down in memory there floated up an-other name:The House of Mirth.
Echoes of maniacal laughter, perhaps launched by an earlier Trickster's avatar, seemed to haunt the high
rocks, coming and going with the wind.
The structure's low crenellated walls and squat towers were visible from certain places a long way
below.
The closer Apollo came to the building, the stranger it looked. Very strange indeed, as if different deities
had at different times been in charge of its construction which, Jeremy supposed, was actually the case.
The House of the Magician.
Whatever other attributes the strange, half-ruined structure might possess, it provided a kind of
fortification, on the highest ground available, and a comparatively small force ought to be able to hold it
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against a larger army.
At first glance it seemed unlikely that this sunlit scene, the broad, high meadow and the flowers, could
ever form any part of Hades's territory though the idea became less startling when you knew about the
steaming vent that led down secretly to the Underworld again. Steam came rising visibly into the chill air.
Jets of boiling water and scalding mud imperiled the under-ground explorer.
The Trickster had left her/his mark everywhere around the summit, in the form of balanced rocks and
twisted paths and natural-looking stairs of rock leading to blank walls or, without warning, over
precipices.
Apollo's hearing could detect the murmured clash of wide-spread fighting, drifting in and up from miles
away. There were signs that a major battle between human armies was shaping up.
And right now some zombies, their bodies the hue of mush-rooms, were coming out to fight, coming
right up out of a hole in the ground.
THIRTY-FOUR
The naked bodies of the zombies gave no sign of being af-fected by the cold of the high summit but
they recoiled swiftly from direct sunlight. They had emerged from hiding, welling up from various of the
Cave's upper entrances, only a lit-tle below the very summit, when the sun was temporarily hidden by
thick cloud. But they swiftly retreated under the rocks again when the rays of Apollo's heavenly
personification once more pierced the clouds.
Arnobius had not seen such creatures before, and their pres-ence disturbed and frightened him. "What
does it mean?"
Apollo, on the other hand, was quietly elated. "It means that the one I'm looking for can't be very far
away. It means that there still exists a dark tunnel allowing such creatures to come all the way up here to
the crest."
Now the very summit was only about fifty yards above where the two men were standing. Even now, in
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