YOU CAN NEVER GO HOME AGAIN
Christopher had only met Marcius three times. Never in the flesh, yet Christopher trusted to his judgment of the god’s character as projected into his dreams and hallucinations. In retrospect, that might not be wholly justified.
On the other hand the god was the source of his power. Power he still needed, for a short while longer at least. Discovering that the elves were the enemies of that source put him in a difficult position.
Alaine had warned him never to thank her. The elves did what they did for themselves.
Yet they were clearly White. Their actions had to be directed toward the greater good for all, or else everything he’d learned about this world was wrong.
And everything he’d learned in his own world had taught him that unrestrained power was the enemy of good. To be held accountable was the flesh and blood of morality. Maggie had approached her work as a holy mission to uncover truth and assign responsibility. What people did with their money never bothered her; what mattered is that they admit, to themselves and the world, where the money went. This was a surprisingly unpopular position, and Maggie had become accustomed to frank discussions with CEOs and millionaires. It was also one of the things he loved about her.
If no one held the gods accountable, then they could not be moral. It was as simple as that, and Marcius had confessed that no one had the authority to make Hordur follow the rules. And if they were not moral, they could never be Team Good. Tools, perhaps; allies or friends, even; but not principals.
It was a conundrum. Christopher decided he didn’t really have to deal with it, though. As soon as they got off this infernal plane and revived his wife he could afford to take a dispassionate view. There was still room in Johm’s shop for another engineer.
Getting off the plane was a nontrivial problem. They could see winged forms approaching, sensing the vacuum in the current power structure. Richard renewed his climbing spell, and the jeep plunged down the cliff face, dangling them all from their seat belts. Driving up the cliff had been strange; driving down it was terrifying.
“Pump the brakes, sweetie, or you’ll burn them out.” Richard spoke with the trepidation of any man telling his girlfriend how to drive, but also with the apprehension of a man hurtling down a five-hundred-foot drop. Where the engine had struggled to pull them up, the axles now squealed with the effort of letting them down slowly.
Not too slowly, however, as Lalania and everyone else watched the demon host arriving out of the corner of their eyes.
“They can catch fire?” Lalania looked with concern at the floorboard, worried that her foot might suffer.
Richard slapped himself on the forehead. “Of course. Why didn’t I think of that?” He handed the lyre back to Christopher so his hands were free to cast the energy-shielding spell on the jeep.
Christopher now had to keep the dead Maggie, the unconscious Kennet, and the irreplaceable lyre from falling out. It kept his mind off the approaching demons.
The squealing lessened, and the brakes held. They rolled down onto the plain with only brutal bumping and jostling. Lalania stepped on the gas.
Alaine used the machine gun liberally, firing at long range. She was less interested in killing than in keeping foes at bay while the party returned to the spot they had entered from. Richard had made noises about how the plane of Hel was “tidally locked.” They could not locate the gates at will; instead, each opening had to correspond to a location on Prime. The problem was that Hel was small and Prime was huge. Missing by a single mile would dump them thousands of miles away from the kingdom. Given that they had two legendary spell-casters, an elf, and a machine gun, that probably wouldn’t be fatal, but it would be inconvenient. Especially if the gate opened in the middle of an ocean.
“Trouble,” Lalania announced. The plain in front of them rose up, and for a moment he thought the ground was erupting. The truth was hardly less terrible. A cloud of insects a hundred feet tall and a mile wide swarmed into the air.
“Ignore them,” Alaine ordered. “Do not so much as swat.” She cast, touching each of them. “Take care not to crush one by accident with your body, lest the spell be undone for all of us.”
“Dark take it,” Richard said. “I hope it’s not cockroaches. I bloody hate cockroaches.”
They entered the swarm at high speed. Giant insects splattered against the windshield with sickening thumps, the wipers gamely throwing their corpses off but leaving the window smeared in ugly colors of green, brown, and black. Alaine hunkered down, mostly protected by the gunnery frame. Christopher ducked his head.
The cabin of the jeep began to fill up with bugs as large as his hand. Hideous wasps with three-inch-long stingers, weird black beetles that dripped acid, some alien worm-like things with three wings that looked entirely impractical. They began crawling on him.
It took a supreme act of will not to knock the creatures away. When he realized they must be on Maggie’s body, he almost panicked. He closed his eyes. It was the only way he could remain still.
The jeep swerved back and forth, implying that Lalania was still steering. He could hear a thin keening and realized the bard was screaming with her mouth closed. It had the character of disgust rather than pain, so that was okay.
Eventually, they outran the cloud. He discovered this when cold water gushed over his head, which seemed inappropriate for the plane they were on. Alaine was washing out the jeep with the bronze water bottle, careful not to injure any of the insects in the process.
“That was creepy,” Richard said. There was a many-legged winged centipede on the dash in front of him. He raised his foot but stopped and looked to Alaine for permission.
The elf carefully turned the unconscious Kennet over, looking underneath. “It’s the last one,” she said.
Richard’s boot descended in a wet, pulpy squelch.
Lalania was breathlessly issuing a steady stream of obscenities, her hands in a white-knuckled death grip on the steering wheel. Richard leaned over and kissed her. The swearing stopped as she breathed in great gulps.
Alaine issued instructions, and the jeep plunged into the narrow river channel. Christopher assumed it was the same one as before, although there were no tire tracks. Something had erased all obvious signs of their passage. His direction spell was useless now; it could lead to the way in but not to the arbitrary and unmarked way out. They would have to rely on the elf’s skills.
The jeep sped along the dry riverbed, racing toward giant moving figures in the distance. Above his head, the machine gun barked again and again, but the figures did not fall.
“This will take more ammunition than I have left,” Alaine shouted at him.
They were close enough now that Christopher could see the dinosaurs were already dead, rotting flesh hanging from exposed and weathered bones. Destroying the hulking corpses with a machine gun would be like carving a turkey with a pistol: slow, messy, and surprisingly ineffective. He stood up, clinging to the gun frame for support, and began to chant.
Marcius’s power was weak here, and the monsters were huge pools of dark energy. The jeep raced forward, hurtling directly into a T-rex that lowered its massive jaw to scoop them up. Lalania apparently expected Christopher to make the thing go away. He chanted, pouring out energy, until it exploded into a shower of black leathery bits just in time to let the jeep pass through. After that Lalania swerved to and fro, trying to avoid the beasts.
He destroyed three more and she dodged half a dozen, but the riverbed was simply too narrow. As she curved around a stegosaur, its massive spiked tail swung down in front of the jeep. Lalania locked up the brakes, but in the sand they had no grip. Christopher looked up for that heart-stopping instant when it was obvious they would crash. And then they did.
He picked himself up out of the sand. His tael was sufficient that a mere high-speed automobile accident was not terribly discomfiting. His companions were almost as durable. They were already rising from the ground where they had been scattered.
The jeep, however, was done for. It was bent at a ninety-degree angle and upside down. Alaine staggered out from underneath it, carrying Maggie’s body.
Richard fired off a spell, sending sparkling bolts lancing into the dinosaur that had wrecked them. Christopher thought it was pointless to seek revenge against a dead thing. Then he realized the dead thing was stalking toward them. Richard repeated his spell three more times before it sank to the ground and stopped moving.
“I can’t do that again,” the wizard said, with only the slightest strain of tension. A few hundred feet away, another dozen dinosaurs trundled toward them, making the ground shake.
The group had drawn together, coalescing to Lalania’s position where Kennet leaned on her shoulder and raved incoherently. The boy had miraculously survived with nothing worse than a broken leg. Christopher healed him and asked, “Anyone else?”
“I’ll live,” Lanalia said, her eyes on the dinosaurs. “At least until those things get here.”
There were too many to destroy. Christopher cast a simple spell, making himself and his companions invisible to the soul-trapped abominations. He would have done it before except it wouldn’t have hidden the jeep.
The monsters thundered past. Christopher knelt and picked up his wife’s body from where Alaine had lain it, hefting it over his shoulders in an undignified pose. Kennet collapsed again, having endured too much in one day. Richard lifted the naked man in the same fireman’s carry. It didn’t look nice, but it was the only way to carry a body long distances.
“I am out of spells,” Richard said casually.
“We could fly now,” Lalania suggested to Christopher. “We are close.”
Christopher could not stop himself from growling. Lalania raised her eyebrows.
“Not I,” he had to say. He could turn them to mist, and they could flee easily. But a cloud could not carry Maggie’s dead body.
The smell of gasoline wafted over him. Alaine was emptying a jerrican over the jeep.
“I would leave as little as possible for our enemy to study,” she explained.
“There are thermite charges in the right locker,” Richard said. “Hot enough to melt steel.”
Alaine tore the locker open and started placing fist-sized white packages under the jeep in strategic locations. She wasted precious time trying to detach the machine gun from its mount, but the frame was bent and would not release. In the end, she strapped a charge on the barrel with a look that was suspiciously close to regret.
Richard turned and began walking toward the forest in the distance, Kennet over his shoulders. Lalania picked up the bronze water bottle and the lyre and followed him. Christopher hustled to catch up, dodging the blindly lumbering dead dinosaurs. Two steps forward, one step back, trying to get across the river without getting squashed. It reminded him of something, but he couldn’t remember what.
Behind them a fireball blossomed, sending a thick column of smoke into the air. The fire burned so brightly that Christopher didn’t need night vision to see until he reached the edge of the forest. Alaine was waiting for them there, the grenade launcher in her hands, her eyes scanning for any threats following them.
“Unfortunately, an effective signal flare,” she said. “We should hurry.”
There were corpses in the woods, but only man-sized. Christopher knocked them down with a wave of his hand. Alaine slung the grenade launcher over her back as she used her sword to chop up two of the triple-jawed hellcats, an exercise that left her bleeding real blood. He converted his flying mist spell to heal her. After that the retreat seemed to be going well until they entered a small clearing and found a bevinget waiting for them, its black-eyed fanged face smiling at them.
Christopher had no magic left, save for the one high-ranking spell for the gate. He could convert it into healing and hurt the demon, but then they would have to wait twenty-four hours for their spells to recharge before they could go home. That did not seem likely to end well.
The monster opened its mouth to roar, and Alaine shot it with the grenade launcher, straight down its throat. It hiccupped twice and then exploded from the inside out.
“Here is close enough,” she said. “Open the way.”
He chanted while she stabbed the dead demon with the royal sword. He could hear wings beating behind him, getting closer, but the gate could not be hurried. Alaine raised the grenade launcher and began firing into the distance.
The rift opened. Richard and Lalania sprinted through. Christopher spent precious seconds lifting Maggie’s body before following. Alaine came through last.
Instantly, he shut the gate behind them.
“You could have let one through,” Alaine complained. “We could have taken one more. I still have the launcher.”
Richard was not amused. “Bloodthirsty much?”
They were standing in the beech wood where Christopher had fought the hjerne-spica. Christopher decided to have it cut down and turned into a parking lot. He had developed an aversion to the place.
“I don’t even have a message spell,” he said. “We’ll have to walk.”
Halfway to the city, a kind farmer paused his wagon, silently offering them a ride without taking his pipe out of his mouth. The party looked a sight, covered in blood of different colors, dirt, decayed moss, various burn marks, and carrying two naked bodies. The old man shrugged silently as if adventurers were too common to remark on. He spoke only to his mules, telling them to get along now with amiable authority.
Christopher wrapped his magic cloak around Maggie, trying not to notice all the scrapes, burns, and broken bones her body had suffered. He did run his thumb over her eyes, checking. The lack of black should have been comforting. Instead, the dry, lifeless corneas stabbed at his heart. She had never seemed truly dead to him until that moment.
Alaine stretched out on the load of straw, relaxing. “A good trip. The huldrene were profitable, and we bagged a bevinget at the end.”
“You don’t regret the loss of Hordur’s tael?” Richard asked.
“Of course. And yet his destruction is prize enough to make me smile for many years.”
“Speaking of profit,” Lalania said while trying to clean her boots with a handful of the farmer’s straw, “what you captured in that sword does not belong to you alone.” The straw started smoking after coming into contact with a green discoloration on her boot, and she threw it overboard. The farmer frowned around his pipe. Lalania stripped her boots off and considered tossing them, too.
Alaine took the contaminated boot from the bard and inspected it. She shrugged and handed it back, dismissing it as no longer dangerous. “True enough. Yet there are debts to be paid.”
“You can take my share,” Richard said. “And his. But Ell earned hers.”
“And he?” Alaine pointed to Kennet, where he mumbled and shivered in the wagon. “As a company he is entitled to a single share to our many, and yet that alone will make him a minor lord. Is this also your desire?”
Lalania began looking around for something to cover the naked man. “That’s up to Christopher. He disburses his company’s portion.”
“Don’t we get to deduct the price of the jeep as an expense?” Richard asked.
Christopher’s heart punched him in the chest. He put his hand on his favorite accountant’s cold body and tried not to weep.
“Such picayune details are beneath our dignity,” Alaine replied. She held her hand below the pommel of the great sword and whispered. A tangerine-sized ball of purple flowed into her hand.
The elf handed the treasure to the bard. Lalania stared at it, eyes wide. At the last minute, she turned to Christopher. “May I?” Technically, she still worked for him without a share or salary.
Christopher could think of nothing less important right now. He shrugged, utterly indifferent.
She swallowed the tael, hiding it behind her hand. “To think I have eclipsed the Skald without ever even holding her rank.”
“My share also goes to the Directorate,” Alaine said. “Technically, I should turn over these as well, but as I said some details are too small to obsess over.” The elf displayed the two large dull purple daggers that Hordur’s puppet had fought with. “They are adamantine, so we elves would only be discomfited by them. You might appreciate them as souvenirs.”
“Go on,” Richard said to Lalania as he took one. “We’ll have a matching set to remind us of our first date.”
Lalania took the other one, admiring it. It was harder than steel and sharper than a razor. “What makes you think I want to be reminded? The service was terrible, and the ambience left much to be desired.”
The wagon rattled up to the city gates. The guard leapt into action, summoning a proper carriage and finding clothes for Kennet. They still called Christopher “Lord,” which was nice. It had been less than a day, but he had already come to think of Krellyan as the ruler.
He had slept only through force of will. The royal suite felt like a stranger’s room. Maggie’s body lay on a couch, covered by a velvet cloak, and for once he was glad of the cold.
He washed, dressed, and ate like an automaton, waiting for the moment when his spells would recharge. He slipped into the meditative trance instantly, seeking the relief of abstraction. When he opened his eyes, his room was full of people.
Lalania bowed. “Forgive us,” she said, “but we have become very much attached to the Lady Mary in the short while we were privileged to know her.”
Most of his court had crowded in. Alaine was not there, but then she wasn’t really his. Faren and Krellyan were looking at him more than at the body. Gregor, Torme, and Fae stood silently in the rear. Richard was behind Lalania, half his attention on her instead, but even half of his formidable intellect was like a physical pressure.
They were here for him despite Lalania’s words. They were worried about him.
“It will work,” he told them. “There’s no one left to oppose me.”
“A concept that boggles the mind,” Krellyan said with a shake of his head. “Divine avatars are occasionally defeated on our plane. This is an inconvenience to the god in question. Yet to destroy one on its own plane is a true death. To dissolve one into the void is incomprehensible. To do so to an Elder god defies description.”
Richard smiled wickedly. “The Mouth is still where I left it. I think I need a new employer now. And as I understand the color scheme, there are at least two more you could do without.”
“More than that,” Krellyan said. “The Elders have their hosts of aspects, and the list of mortals who have ascended to demi-godhood is as long as the myths of our bards.”
“Richard Falconer, god-killer for hire. I like it.” He grinned at his own wit. “Ironically, it’s not even the first time I’ve held the title. I wrote a book once that was denounced in much the same terms.”
“Merely to jest of deicide makes my knees tremble,” Krellyan said. “Surely we are not so exalted. Lady Mary will return, and we will go back to our lives, reaping wheat and brewing beer. The sun will rise and fall, and time will work its will upon our fates. As it always has. As it always shall.”
Christopher found the Saint’s words comforting. He could think of nothing more appealing than growing old with Maggie. Watching the children they would have play with Karl’s. Teaching the kingdom how to live a better life, fueled by science and magic and the one quality that Maggie had that always eluded him. Patience.
Lalania handed him a silver vial. In it he found a nugget of tael, not the vast sums he had been used to dealing in, but still enough to power a spell. He said the words and touched her cold, white corpse.
Nothing happened.
He bent his head to her in grief. Dimly, he heard Saint Krellyan repeating the spell. Through a fog he perceived its failure, the shock through the assembled company, and voices raised in consternation.
A terrible suspicion bloomed in his mind, and he lifted his gaze, heavy and dreadful as a basilisk, to where Richard stood.
“I didn’t see you kill him.”
The words hung in the air, silencing all else.
Lalania spoke. “I did. I saw it. I saw everything.”
Her words washed off him without effect. Christopher stood, his sword hanging loose and ready at his side. “How do I know you are not Hordur in disguise?”
Richard scratched his chin. “I am uncertain myself. How would I know I am not?”
“There is only one test,” Christopher said, dredging from his memories. They felt old and deep, as if from the bottom of a vast gloomy pit. “I cut your head off and measure the tael that comes out.”
Lalania stepped in front of Richard, tears running down her face. “No. I saw. I saw.”
Richard put his hand on her shoulder, comfortingly. “Okay. That’s fair. As long as you put it back on afterward, obviously.”
It was such a Richard answer that Christopher felt his anger slide away. Hordur, ancient and cruel, could never have responded to a threat with a logical proposal.
“No,” Christopher said. “I know who is to blame.” He walked through the crowd, oblivious at their parting before him. Down the winding stairs and into the throne room, the castle suddenly empty before him, servants and soldiers hiding in doorways and alcoves at his approach.
Entering the great hall, he threw aside a spell. The doors sprung to life at his command and barred themselves, leaving him alone in front of the throne. He summoned Marcius, but this time he used the gate spell. He applied the syllables he had omitted before, and this time the target of his spell was compelled to step across the threshold as soon as it opened.
Marcius stood before him, in the flesh, unarmed save for a short oaken baton.