CALL OF THE FALCON
His blood still pulsed with the heat of combat. Pointlessly, since this place was not real, and there was nothing here to fight. Marcius tipped his head. White-haired and yet young, handsome and muscular with sad ancient eyes, wearing chainmail that glittered like a rainbow in the imaginary sunlight, the god spoke with careful neutrality. “You must ask a question.”
“Why.” Christopher said, his voice thick and heavy.
“Because that is how the spell works.”
His jaw was clenched so hard it was hard to speak. “Why can’t I bring my wife back.”
“Ah, that. Stay your avenging hand; understand I did not know until you asked me. My gaze is not always directed upon you, though you are now my highest ranking servant. Congratulations, by the way.” Christopher glared, his lip curling.
Marcius continued, politely ignoring his ill-tempered response. “The Lord of Death, known by your people as Hordur, has personally intervened. He sent the demon, which he could only do because you had met it before. So take a care of who you greet in the future. He now holds your wife’s soul hostage on his own plane of Hel, the Underworld.”
“How do I get her back.”
Marcius quirked one eyebrow. “You don’t wish to know why he has done so?”
“I don’t care. Tell me what I have to do. And this time, be clear. No more games, no more cryptic clues, no more promises. No more deals.”
“With gods,” Marcius said by way of apology, “there are always games.”
Christopher trembled, trying to contain his fury. “I did what you asked. I killed the hjerne-spica. You have no right to jerk me around now.”
“While I can only cheer the destruction of one of those foul creatures, honesty compels me to note that I did not request such a task of you.”
“You said you had something you wanted done,” Christopher said, jabbing his finger in accusation. “You asked me for a favor.”
“I did, and I still do. Yet I cannot intervene directly. Hordur is an elder god, one of the Six. I am a mere aspect, bound by the rules. I would say I lack the authority to make demands of an elder god, but the truth is that no one has such authority.”
Christopher snarled. “I didn’t ask you to intervene. You’ve never done anything for me before, why would I think you would now?” The god had promised him help once, and when called on revealed he hadn’t actually needed any. “I asked you for information. The spell grants me a number of questions, answered truthfully to the best of your knowledge. Tell me how to rescue my wife.”
Marcius looked at him with sympathetic eyes. “You already know. You must travel to Hel and bargain for her release, as in all the stories of your childhood. Although the details will be significantly different.” Of course they would be different since he had no intention of playing any more riddling games with oracular entities. “I’m done with bargains. How do I march my army to Hel?”
“The same spell that delivered your wife will open onto any plane, with the right key. Unique of all the planes, Hel is simple to find. A corpse, freshly slain between the start and end of the chant, will suffice. I concede that for our affiliation, that is not necessarily easy to obtain, but your realm manufactures criminals the same as any other.”
“And then?” Because there had to be more.
“You will find Hel’s defenses formidable. The demon you slew is native to that realm; their numbers are countless, not to mention the lesser forms and varieties. All the armies of Heaven would contend in vain against them on their own turf; we would tremble if they chose to invade ours. Your army will vanish like a raindrop in a volcano.”
Christopher glared, and Marcius sighed. “Instead, you must travel with a small party, evade the majority of demons, and confront Hordur alone. His vanity at least makes this possible because he will want to toy with you and is incapable of feeling fear in the face of anything less than a flock of angels. Ironically, his personal avatar is perhaps the least dangerous of your obstacles, although obviously not to be disregarded. More famously, you must contend with the Mouth of Dissolution. It manifests as a floating sphere of impenetrable dark; whatever goes in does not come back out. Merely to touch it is to be destroyed beyond all magic’s ability to repair, miracles nonwithstanding. And it moves at his command.”
If the speech was intended to dissuade him, it failed. “Tell me how to defeat the Mouth.”
“You must wrest control of it from Hordur in mental combat. Obviously, no mortal can win such a contest.” Marcius hurried to the next part, sensing Christopher’s impatience with this list of impossibilities. “Less obviously, a man of legendary rank does not exactly count as a mortal. Yet you are not up to the task. No offense, but the intellectual gymnastics required are more arcane than divine.”
“So I will need to recruit an ally.”
“Recruit seems like a weak word, given that failure to win this contest inexorably results in utter dissolution. You must find an ally who has nothing left to lose.”
“I have someone in mind,” he said, thinking of Jenny.
Marcius, as always, seemed to exist merely to foil him. “One last constraint: you cannot solve this problem by throwing dragons at it. Hordur would view even a single elder wyrm as a threat worthy of hiding behind his demon horde. Your Jenny is a flock of angels all on its own.”
Christopher breathed out heavily. “So to defeat Hordur, I must first be underestimated, and second perform the impossible.”
The god smiled encouragingly. “Such describes your entire career, does it not?”
“This is bullshit,” Christopher said, shaking his head in denial. “Every part of this is a stupid setup.”
Marcius did not deny it. “There are wheels within wheels. And yet, this is not news to you. You understood the nature of the game. You shaped yourself into the role laid out for you, when you could have gone home.”
He looked at Christopher intensely, compassion and judgment mixed in equal measure. “Instead, you placed your wife on the board as a piece in the game. Are you so very like one of us now?”
Christopher raised his fist and stepped forward, angry enough to strike a god. But his hand did not fall. It was true, terribly true. On some level, he had understood that bringing Maggie over would be the next step in the drama unfolding around him. He had intuitively recognized that he could either get out of the game or play it to its conclusion. What he could not do was sit at the table for amusement.
“I’m not the only one to cross over from Earth. The next victim might have fallen for the hjerne-spica’s plot, and then they would have taken us unaware. My existence is a threat to Earth but also a chance to learn to defend ourselves. I had to try.” Voiced, his defense felt vainglorious, and yet there it was.
“You didn’t have to.”
Christopher growled. “I chose to. I chose to believe that I was a better chance than the next random person. I chose to think more of myself than a name plucked out of a phone book. Or at least, no worse.”
“We are all a product of our choices, and few of them survive rational scrutiny,” Marcius said. “That your humility drove you to the heights of arrogance is not the most surprising facet of this multisplendored world.”
“I will do it,” Christopher said. “I will shove Hordur into his own Mouth. And I don’t care what the consequences of destroying the god of death are. If you or any other gods care, then you get my wife back for me. Right now.”
“I care,” Marcius assured him. “Yet I am bound by the game as much as you. We both must play our hands as best we can and trust to luck.”
“You are a god of Luck,” Christopher said. “Doesn’t that count for anything?”
“I am,” Marcius said with sad resignation, “both more and less than either of us know.” With an enigmatic frown, the god disappeared and the world of mist faded, leaving Christopher on his cold war-torn rooftop.
“What did the god say?” Krellyan asked, his brow troubled.
“Rubbish. As always.” Christopher grunted from the depths of foul temper. “Also, I’m going to Hel.”
He felt strung out, like a rope stretched too tautly between buildings, twin immovable points that nonetheless must somehow converge into a single future. The only way to relieve the tension was to move forward.
The Witch of the Moors stood before him wearing a respectful wariness. She had come quickly at his summons. He noticed that people now leapt to obey his commands with an alacrity that went beyond mere respect for the throne. He strongly suspected that they were afraid of him, but contemplating this fact did not advance his cause. So he didn’t.
“I cannot serve, my lord,” the Witch said. “My magic is arcane in nature, but I am not a wizard. It is a different approach to the same well of power, intuitive and personal rather than rational and academic.”
“That rules out elves, too,” Lalania said unhappily. “They also practice sorcery. Argeous will be no more help than our Lady.”
What he needed was a proper wizard of high rank. He used to have one, but then he had to kill him.
“You could promote your own,” the Witch suggested. She looked meaningfully at Fae, standing off to the side. As his Minister of the Arcane, the young woman was naturally involved in this discussion.
Christopher said nothing, lost in thought. This left it up to Fae to respond.
“I am not worthy.” Fae did not stammer, but it was impossible to miss the reluctance behind the words. “The Wizard of Carrhill demonstrated as much. Even with advanced rank, I will never be the equal of this task.”
Lalania waited a moment for Christopher to say something. When he didn’t, she did. “Do not denigrate yourself, Mistress. This is no ordinary task. Varelous himself would blanch at what our lord asks. Or likely refuse. I have recently reviewed our legends of the plane of Hel, and none of them contains a successful attempt.” Lalania had taken Alaine’s words to heart and now suspected that what she used to think of as merely tales and songs were in fact coded truths about all manner of obscure things, such as demi-planes under the surface. “Indeed, the Mouth is generally presented as an intelligence test. As in, anyone intelligent runs away before they are consumed.”
“You could revive the Wizard,” the Witch said.
“No,” Christopher grunted.
Lalania looked at him with concern before explaining to the Witch. “None of us trusts the man that far. He would turn on our lord in the heat of battle and make a deal with death itself for a promotion.”
Still trying, the Witch offered another name. “You could revive Varleous?”
“No,” Lalania sighed. “He lived a full life. He is beyond the reach of any magic now.”
“I need smart,” Christopher said, thinking out loud. “Not rank.” He had a fistful of tael from the demon, enough to make an Arch-mage out of an onion if he wanted to.
“We can search the kingdom for native talent,” Lalania suggested. “It will take time, but surely an adventure of this magnitude should not be hurried. We can reach out beyond our borders; there must be other human realms, and I suspect Alaine knows where they are.”
Christopher shrugged. “If we’re just looking for the smartest man in the world, I already know his name.”
He stood up and walked out of the room, oblivious to the niceties of court decorum. Lalania dismissed the gathering behind him, mending fences without actually making apologies. She caught up to him just as he was about to close the door to his suite.
“Christopher, you are worrying people. Including me. Please do not do this alone.”
Indifferent, he let her in, shutting the door behind her and invoking his spell, chanting out a name dredged from memory. The doorway now looked into yet another Earth-bound bedroom. Christopher was mystified why everyone seemed to be asleep when he called.
The target in this case was not strictly speaking in bed, nor asleep. A thin and wasted form sat in an electric wheelchair, reading from a tiny screen. The man was middle-aged, although he looked ancient, prematurely aged by the degenerative disease that he had famously battled for twenty years. His eyes raised to Christopher and Lalania. There was shock, of course, and skepticism, and concern. There was also a spark when his gaze fell on the pretty blonde bard, as there would be from most men. Christopher grimaced in satisfaction. He would use that, because he would use everything now.
The man moved two fingers, the only part of his body beneath his eyes still under his conscious control. He tapped at a small pad. After a moment, speech issued from a computer speaker on the wheelchair, ironically in a Southern California dialect.
“If she is a Valkyrie, then you must be Odin.”
“I’m not a god,” Christopher said. “But from your perspective, there isn’t much difference. I cannot cross the threshold, so you need to wheel yourself over here.”
More tapping. Everyone waited patiently. “You want me to participate in my own kidnapping?”
“I want you to participate in something far worse. You’ll probably die. I’ll probably die. But I was told I needed the smartest man in the world. If you are interested in playing chess with a god and winning, get over here before the door closes.”
The man tapped hesitantly, thinking furiously even while he composed a response. Christopher could almost see the gears turning in the man’s head, thanks to his supernatural perception of people’s emotional state.
“I would like a change. Dice is not a particularly satisfying game.”
The wheelchair lurched into motion. Christopher felt a smile crawl onto his face. It was remarkably easy to convince people to do impossibly dangerous things. All it required was a challenge to their pride, a pretty girl, and the complete lack of any other options. Richard Falconer was dying, had been dying for his entire adulthood. It had not stopped him from publishing ground-breaking physics papers or winning Nobel prizes. Now it would not stop him from recklessly rolling into an adventure he could not possibly understand.
Once Falconer crossed the threshold, Christopher knew he had won. There was no need to spell out the terms of their bargain. He strode forward, grabbed Richard’s hand, and pulled him out of the chair. “You won’t need that anymore,” he said, casting the regeneration spell.
Choking, coughing, and trembling, Richard bent double before standing up and spitting something into his hands.
“I didn’t know the British did fillings,” Christopher confessed while he cast the translation spell on Richard. “I thought you people had bad dentistry.”
“Madness, dream, drug-induced hallucination; whatever this is, I didn’t come here for nasty stereotypes.” Richard brushed Christopher’s hands away and turned to Lalania, making a little half-bow. “Richard Falconer, my lady. Tell me how I can be of service.”
Lalania flushed slightly under the force of that gaze. Falconer was a notoriously determined personality. Doctors had written him off as dead a decade ago, but he had hung on through sheer willpower just to prove them wrong.
“You may call me Lalania,” she answered. “You will soon enough have rank of your own, and it shall be I who must bow and call you lord. If you meet my lord’s requirements, that is.”
“Direct and to the point,” Richard said with satisfaction. “Skip on a bit, if you would,” he told Christopher. “It’s been a while, if you know what I mean.”
Christopher backhanded him across the face, hard enough to draw blood from a split lip.
Richard’s eyes flashed with fire. This was not a man who was used to be being abused, wheelchair or no. To his credit, and as Christopher expected, his intellectual curiosity trumped his emotional response.
“Explain.”
“It’s not a dream,” Christopher said. “Sooner or later everybody has to bleed to understand that. I don’t have time to waste waiting for you to figure it out on your own.”
“And if I hit you back?”
“Go ahead,” Christopher shrugged.
Richard did, instantly, and he put his back into it. Christopher did not bleed, of course; his tael saw to that. It hurt, but nothing like the nightly poison Lalania had administered, and in any case no pain could penetrate the shell around his heart. He remained unmoved and watched Richard nurse his bruised knuckles.
“If you want to hit me with a chair, you can,” he told Richard. “I am a Saint; you cannot kill me without considerably more effort than that. I can use magic, like the spell that brought you here and the one that healed you. I am going to make you a wizard. You won’t be as hard to kill as I am, or have as much magic, but you will be capable of falling out of a seven-story window and walking away from it. You will also be able to blow things up, fly, turn invisible, call demons, and make sandals.” Christopher rattled off the things he had seen wizards do without really thinking through the whole list first.
“You expect me to accept all of this on the strength of a bloody lip,” Richard said with completely understandable skepticism.
“I don’t care if you accept it. I care that you do what I need. We are going to Hel, and you have a part to play. Lalania will explain. Once you understand, you will be fed tael, a mystical substance that grants supernatural powers. Fae will teach you the basics of wizardry, although I expect you to surpass her quickly. If you can’t, then you are of no use to me.”
Richard crooked his head. “And if I am of no use to you?”
“Then I’ll find somebody else.”