FAVORS
Christopher drew his sword and charged it. The blade shimmered with power, equal now to the royal sword. Sufficient to cut stone or steel or the skin of any supernatural creature otherwise immune to mere reality.
“I did what you wanted. I killed. And killed. And killed. A hjerne-spica. an entire nest. a god. I gave away my throne, raising up my own replacement. I surrendered my special status, summoning a man capable and willing of opening gates to Earth. I did everything you asked, and you still. Won’t. LET. ME. GO.”
He was shouting at the end, his words echoing in the great stone hall.
“No,” Marcius admitted. “We will never let you go. The Formian Queen was only half-wrong. It is our taint lain across your fate. When I saw you in the court of the Bright Lady, I saw into your mind. I saw . . . possibilities. I took your life in hand and cast it like dice across the future.”
Christopher raised the sword to strike, but it would not be enough.
“Why? At least tell me why.”
“Tell you?” Marcius said, and his voice was as sharp as the sword. “How can I tell you a hundred thousand years of experience? I have memories. So many memories. I remember watching my daughters taken by local warlords, my farm instruments dangling from my helpless hands. I remember hammering plows into swords, raising armies, marching on castles. I remember hanging tyrants from battlements. I remember the pain of loss and the thrill of victory and the stabbing truth that one cannot replace the other.”
Marcius looked around the room, his anger still fierce but not aimed at Christopher. “And in those memories, I have green skin, scaly and thick. Or brown fur and clawed hands. Or pink and soft, or black or gray or yellow. I have tails and wings and extra arms and carapaces and hooves. It took me so many years to understand I could not have been all of those things. That I could not have lived all those lives. For eons I searched for the real one, for the memory of my first and mortal life before ascension. For the real memory of the real child I lost, the real injustice that set my life on a path of violence in the service of justice.”
The room fell silent. Even in the depths of his rage, Christopher could not turn off his analytical mind. He answered the unspoken question. “You did not find it.”
“No,” Marcius agreed. “I could not find what did not exist. There was no real memory because there was no real me. I am a construct, a puppet made from whole cloth. I exist to give voice and power to your injustice. But I am not justice. I am a tool. A tool in the form of a living body that exists only to destroy life.”
Christopher still held his glowing sword with its threatening light. “Sometimes killing is necessary.”
“True. But not something you would have known five years ago. Not as you know it now.”
“What has any of this to do with me? What has it to do with my wife?”
Marcius spoke conversationally. “There are real gods, raised up from mortality by the feast of souls. A surprising number of humans, although your kind has not been here terribly long. Other beings of other races. The Ur-Mother of the Formians. The ulvenmen’s terrible demon-dog, who ironically is as trapped here as they are. No elves, obviously. No dragons or hjerne-spica, although the distinction becomes admittedly blurred there. Many of them have their own planes. Most serve their flock, doling out spells and recruiting new worshippers. Some wander the world for adventure, immortal and nigh-unkillable. My fellow aspects of the Bright Lady all have real histories. Imagine my divine grief at discovering I alone was fake.”
If anything could penetrate Christopher’s blanket of anger, it was disgust. “So you want to die. Want to see what death is all about. Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Etc. Etc. Etc.” It was so self-pityingly Gothic, it made his lip curl.
“That is not a desire I am capable of expressing.” Marcius looked at him again. “Self-destruction is outside my design parameters.”
“And yet,” Christopher said.
“Any yet,” Marcius agreed softly.
“You asked me for a favor,” Christopher said. “You promised me one in return. Tell me how to save my wife.”
Marcius shrugged apologetically. “Hordur yet endures. What you did would have obliterated any lesser being, yet the Six are different. Normally deities travel from their own plane to yours via a spell that creates a projection. The destruction of that copy is expensive but not fatal. The countermeasure is to destroy them on their own plane, where you can strike at their real body. Some number of gods have already passed this way. The problem is that Hel is not the originating plane for Hordur. The Six all maintain home planes, exactly as any other divine being, and yet they are not actually on those planes. They merely visit them, as other gods merely visit Prime. This is a fact known to no one other than the Six. I can only tell you this because you already know. I am not even sure I knew it before this moment.”
“So I go somewhere else, and kill him again,” Christopher snarled. “Wheels within wheels.”
“Yes. I cannot tell you where to go because I do not know. I cannot tell you how to kill an Elder because I do not know. I can only say you must pass through all the elemental planes, earth and water and air and fire, to the true and hidden abode of the gods.”
Marcius stepped forward, holding the baton in one hand as an offering, not a threat. “And I can tell you that no mortal can open the way to that place.”
“You are a god of Travel,” Christopher reminded him. “You promised me a pebble to bridge the gap. You can open that door.”
“Self-destruction is outside my design parameters.” The god whispered the words in agony this time, as if he had broached too close to an open flame and been burned.
Christopher wasn’t going to kill Marcius no matter how annoyed he was. He was not a butcher for hire. “You don’t need a favor from me to die,” Christopher said. “Just turn your back on an elf for five minutes.”
“Those elves,” Marcius said, almost as an aside, “know half as much as they think they do. And yet they are not wrong.” He raised the baton and lightly tapped Christopher on the chest. “To slay a god is not lightly done, even when you have tricked him into presenting his true body and not a projection. To haul one through a gate and chop off its head leaves yet a corpse that can be raised, the same as any other. Short of the Mouth of Dissolution, only one method exhausts the possibility of revival.”
“I don’t care,” Christopher said, but the god ignored him.
“A fact you do not seem to know: revival has its limits. Twentyone, to be exact. No being can be recalled more than twenty-one times.”
Christopher cursed under his breath. It turned out he did care. Somebody needed to convince Major Kennet to stop dying heroic deaths before he ran out of return tickets.
Marcius had more stray facts to offer. “I am not always manifest in my armor and sword. I have another function, after the battle, when I get to wield the rod of life. Well, a rod of life. It’s not singular. You could make one, although it’s absurdly expensive.” Even in extremis the White had to tell the whole truth. Marcius prodded Christopher again with the wooden baton.
“I’m not going to kill you,” Christopher stated, shrugging off his annoyance. The rage was still there, underneath, but he was saving it for Hordur.
“You know we are not allowed to lie,” the god gently remonstrated. He stepped forward again, as close as a lover, his voice gentle and intimate. “There are other facts you do not know, other questions you should be asking. Why does Hordur single you out? What prompts an Elder God to dispatch a demon to your home? When did you become a foe worthy of the attention of the Six? Who whispers in Hordur’s ear, bragging of your exploits and promises of more to come? How does Hordur even know your name?”
Ugly suspicions crawled through Christopher’s mind, black chitinous spiders of rage.
“I,” whispered the god. “I am the answer. I played you like a piece in the Great Game. A strategy so obscure no one guessed, played so subtly no one saw my hand adjusting the board. Under the cover of military strategy, I, bound to truth, learned to deceive. I learned cold calculus and the sacrifice of the few to save the many. I learned to strike swiftly without compunction, the better to serve the cause of mercy. I learned to make promises without reckoning the cost, to bind myself to the unthinkable. I learned that I was capable of acts that no one would have believed, least of all myself.”
The god stretched out his arms and raised his chin, exposing his flawless white throat. “And now I stand before you, engineer of your fate and key to your freedom. The only path forward lies through me. The only chance that you will ever see your wife again lies through this door.”
Christopher cracked like a fault line over roaring lava.
He lunged, shoving the glowing blade into the god’s body. Its point entered under the chin and slide out the back of the skull, slathered red. The body dangled from the blade, a bloody puppet on a meat hook. Marcius was of divine rank. It took him a long time to die. Christopher stood with shaking hands wrapped around the hilt, the tsuba crushed against the fine white throat while blood poured around it and showered his fury.
The light went out of the god’s eyes, quite literally. They had been glowing softly, as had the god’s entire body; now it was simply dead flesh. Christopher lowered the sword, and the corpse slid off to lie in a heap on the blood-soaked stone.
There had been another transformation. Christopher’s sword had changed; the blade was of dull purplish metal and had the proper pattern now, although it no longer mattered, as adamantium was already impossibly hard. A diamond was set into the hilt, partially exposed under the cord wrapping the handle. The cord was new, too, replacing the leather Dereth had mistakenly used so many years ago. The blade glowed with a soft white light, and the diamond sparkled with intense purple, reflecting the immensity of tael it now stored.
Christopher bent down and picked up the wooden rod in one hand. He touched it to the corpse, triggering a rebirth. The god coughed and sat up. Christopher brought the glowing blade down and cut from shoulder to breast. He hacked away while the god writhed in pain.
He did it all twenty more times.
Each time the god died easier, as his rank was stripped away. Each time was harder for Christopher, as the man he struck down grew more and more human. In the end, a dead peasant lay at his feet, no different than a thousand others in his fields. The floor was deep in blood. It splashed when he dropped the spent baton, now just a piece of wood. It squelched under his boots as he trudged over to the throne, trying to escape the spreading pool.
The doors went back to sleep, becoming inanimate objects again. They opened, and men entered cautiously. From the courtyard, Gregor and Torme, with swords drawn. From the interior doors, Karl and Lalania, carrying assault rifles. Behind them were Richard and Saint Krellyan, hands raised to cast spells.
“I’m sorry,” Christopher said to the good man in white. “I think I need to use this throne a while longer yet.”