Ganymede considered the cats cradle wound between his fingers as Hades paced back and forth and used him as a sounding board.
"If Zeus doesn't know about it, then that cup isn't on Mt. Olympus..."
Kicking his legs back and forth on the throne room's central table and holding out his trussed fingers, Ganymede replied, "And if it's not on Mt. Olympus, then it's gotta be in the mortal realm." Hades looped his claws into the cats cradle and took it, pausing only for a moment as Ganymede removed his hands from the nest.
"Where in the mortal world could someone hide something from the gods?" he asked, mostly himself, before glancing back at the kid. "... Shouldn't you be walking the dog or something?" Ganymede shrugged, dipping his fingers into the tangled string, and pulled it into a rope bridge.
"I wanted to be a part of the scheming."
"Fair enough."
He watched Hades as he slunk around the room. Exhausted and deprived of sunlight, his restless patter and non-stop gestures indicated a brain that had been wheeling for thousands of years, spinning ever-faster and ever-hotter in an ever-building desperation to escape. Ganymede was still struggling against the fate that Hades sat at the bottom of - he had been locked in the dark to forever serve Zeus.
Maybe he was lonely. Was Ganymede? Was it possible to be lonely and also wish, fervently and viciously, to be left alone?
His heart rose up to meet a pain he understood, and with his heart came a warmth that had been absent for so long that it was a relief to finally feel it again. For one split second that warmth bled through his fingertips and blocked out all the stress and existential dread that pressed down eternally on top of him, and the corners of his lips twitched into the shadow of a sympathetic smile.
Then he realised what was happening and shoved his heart back down so fast it almost gave him indigestion. His nose ridged with self-disgust and he glanced down at his green, string-covered hands. He wasn't that thankful to the guy for keeping him as blackmail.
Tossing the string aside, he leant back on his palms and threw his hair over his shoulder as if shaking off his minor spell of sentimentality. "Okay, let's rephrase; is there anywhere in the mortal world that the gods can't get to?"
Hades paused. The whirring continued as those millennia-year-old gears suddenly sped to a fresh speed. His eyes lit up. Ganymede's did too.
Clapping his hands together in a whip-crack, he span around and cried, "I've got it! Kid - pack your bags!" Leaping down from the table, Ganymede punched his palm and came to life.
"Alright! Plan time!"
"That's right!" That fang-filled grin returned to Hades' face and he levelled a delighted finger at his forehead. "You're going on a road trip!"
Hades' words rang in Ganymede's ears as he soared over the scrolling landmasses of Greece, straddling a hot-pink flying horse with obvious discomfort.
"The guy's called Dad-ilus," Hades had said to him on their way out, "or Dad-alus, or Daddy-lus. Whatever, he was someone's dad. The important thing is that he's kinda the go-to guy for any big-time project." The jagged horizon of the Isle of Crete rolled over the horizon like a giant turning in its sleep, pale, dirty and yellow against the ocean. "A while back this guy Minos - a real piece of work - found out his wife gave birth to a kid with a bull's head. Obviously not his kid, problem one. Problem two, the kid was a walking hurricane. So Minos - who's the king, by the way - had Daedalus construct a gigantic maze just to keep him in. I tell you, Olympus freaked out when they realised even they couldn't solve it!"
"And you'll just zap us to the middle, right?" Ganymede had asked.
"What? No, don't be an idiot," Hades had replied as he'd stacked him on the back of the horse, "Crete's enemy territory. Sure, I mean, I might be able to get you guys to the palace, but that place has so many other gods running the joint that we can't even look in the Labyrinth, let along go wandering through it."
Those 'other gods', Ganymede had learned, were not Greek. They weren't even gods. The Cretans laboured under the jurisdiction of darker, crueller things.
"But hey!" Hades had said as he'd encouraged them out the front door, "I'm sure you'll do just fine!"
As the flying pink horse circled slowly down to land, the city of Crete arched up to meet them. The limestone here, a dark and sickly sort of colour, had been hewn roughly and stacked too quickly. The flat rooftops balked at odd angles, each window a different size, so that every home seemed hunchbacked and reclusive, and all were engulfed in what little dirty light could seep through the thick canopy of clouds. King Minos' palace, the most crooked building of them all, lurched over the city like a frozen tidal wave.
The horse's hooves set down atop the palace's veranda. Ganymede had barely leapt from its frilly saddle before the whole animal split across the middle. Pain and Panic span back to their original forms as he dusted down the hem of his tunic and grumbled, "Why'd you have to go and pick that form?"
"I dunno," Pain said, his tail flicking as he kicked a sullen rock. "Sometimes a guy just wants to look nice."
"It's not effortless for some of us, you know," Panic added.
Rolling his eyes, Ganymede made his way towards the grand double doors that lead down into - presumably - the upper halls of the palace, dragging his crook behind him. "Whatever," he said, "Just follow my-" Pushing the door open, four spears thrusted themselves at his face. "... Lead."
As armed guards marched Ganymede - and two hastily-transformed children - down into the palace, one worried, golden helmet popped up from behind the gap-toothed balustrades. Hermes blinked in shock to see Zeus' old charity case (that poor kid he'd been so worried about) working for the enemy.
"We demand our rights!" Panic declared, his skinny legs kicking as a pair of soldiers frog-marched him towards the throne room. Behind him, Pain bellowed, "This is a set-up! Check my pockets! I don't have anything on me!" and bringing up the rear, Ganymede walked with his head held high - mainly to avoid slumping against the spear poking into his back. Two more guards heaved open two gigantic doors, and they were swallowed by the darkness of the central chamber.
Their knees hit red carpet. As their eyes adjusted to the candlelight, bronze-cast statues of bulls, half-rams, many-armed snakes and - largest of all - the human king himself flanked them on every side, each one draped in thick and smothering red robes. A thousand candles burned in a hundred brackets, and as they stared up at the throne standing over them, their eyes travelled up and up, following the gold brocade and twisting filigree, until the back of the chair terminated against the vaulted ceiling. Though they couldn't see them, they could hear the mutterings of courtiers and see shadows moving across the walls. Ganymede noticed the smell of rot.
King Minos himself cast a thunderous gaze down upon them. One eye bulged larger than the other, so unbalancing his face that it was impossible to tell whether this was the uncanny structure of his face or an outpouring of his fury - which seemed to push out from every crevice of the walls, floors and his own seated form. His black beard and wild hair, crammed beneath a golden crown, showed no trace of grey, but his physique did not match the virility of his temper. Unlike the gods, his gut and unimpressive shoulders did not live up to the glory of his seat.
"Intruders?" His voice rang through the halls in a clean, cruel bass. "Kill them." The guards thrust their spears up into the air.
"Wait!" Ganymede scuttled forwards, his hand raising in quick compromise, "We're emissaries!" Minos waved a hand for the execution to commence. "We have a message! From Lord-!" A squelch interrupted him, and when he looked down he saw a spear sticking out of his stomach. He sighed and finished irritably, "Hades."
Both of Minos' eyes opened wide as Ganymede turned and smacked the offending guard upside the helmet. He watched as the young man yanked the spear bloodlessly from his middle, snapped it in half over his knee like it had offended him, and threw it to one side while his companions stuck their tongues out. His gold teeth drew back immediately into a smile, though he didn't get up.
"My apologies!" he declared, spreading his arms wide, his teeth reflecting the light. "You should have spoken up sooner! You know, I would never dream of offending the god of the dead!"
Ganymede rubbed his stomach and glared at the gross little man from sunken eyes. He did his best to ignore it, but that smell wafted towards them whenever Minos moved. "Yeah-yeah, forget about it. So can we get into your maze or what?" Minos pulled back in his chair, drawing up his hands in a pantomime of terror and intrigue.
"Lord Hades wants my Labyrinth? What for?"
"That's a need-to-know kinda thing," Panic thrust his hands onto his hips. King Minos' grin remained in place.
"Of course, of course. But I hope you understand -" Suddenly, the king's shadow loomed over them, and that sweltering candlelight passed from his face, leaving him in darkness. "That beast doesn't ever leave my Labyrinth."
Ganymede slapped his hand over Panic's mouth before he started a war. "Of course. " His own grin held no warmth either. "Your majesty."
King Minos waved his hand at his guards. They crossed the room, leaving the path of the red carpet to pass into the gloom of the surrounding chamber. Their reflections wobbled in the polished marble, shadows moving through the reflected world beneath their feet and gathering around them as they crossed to the furthest wall. A pair of red curtains, trimmed with gold, stretched to the ceiling three storeys above them. Each man took hold of a gigantic golden rope and pulled. It took some seconds for the force to meet the top of the fixtures, but then the curtains drew back and the entrance to the Labyrinth was revealed.
The doors were made of iron and seemed to bend with height above their heads. Impossibly, carvings of bulls, of grotesque, crouching faces, of twisting, bitten bodies and great, standing effigies of the king himself adorned them, black and red with metal and rust.
"I was expecting something more like a corn maze," Ganymede muttered. The children behind him nodded dumbly. The doors swung themselves open, groaning with the effort, bending in the middle at the sheer force it took for such huge weights to move.
An army could have charged down the staircase those doors revealed. Hacked into the rock below the palace, its brutal angles ran down into pitch darkness, the red light swallowed by the voluminous space below. As their eyes adjusted, there appeared open bridges and skeletal arcades criss-crossing the black air, paths leading from dead-end to dead-end piling down to abyssal depths; an entire city hiding beneath the earth.
Their eyes adjusted and the maze's impossible architecture faded into focus. Open bridges spanned the air above them, leading from one dead end to another. Skeletal arcades ran down into nothing, waspish tunnels in open rock lead into suffocating, human-sized warrens. Archways revealed open passageways high above their heads, and drops down into holes deeper than the dim light could penetrate. This maze was built like a city, but despite its emptiness it didn't feel abandoned. It felt like a mockery.
Ganymede turned to the guards. "We need a lantern." He was given one. Then the guards took their positions and Hades' three minions took one final gulp before vanishing into the dark.