FIN
“Some people can’t stop cheating,” Christopher said. “You’ve stolen from me twice. There will be no third time.”
“DO YOU THINK SHE IS HERE, FLEDGLING?”
“I know she is.” He was looking at the cosmic database itself. Every flash of light was a spell being cast, somewhere in the outside universe. Every flicker was a use of power, every strand a link connecting past and future. The shapes of transformed dragons were stored here in some inscrutable code, the memorized spells of wizards, the answers to prayers and divinations. All of magic and what it could do sprawled out around them, ten thousand miles deep. Somewhere out there was the connection that would bring Maggie back into being. Somewhere out there was the meaning of everything he had been and become.
“THEN SEARCH FOR HER. IT WILL ONLY TAKE A BILLION YEARS.”
The woman in green threw a disgusted look at Hordur. “True love deserves better than foulness. I will help you, fledgling. We will find her while your blood still runs hot.”
Christopher surrendered to the truth he had been hiding from, walls of denial plunging into the untroubled sea, swallowed whole, leaving behind a glacier of cold truth. “I didn’t come here to rescue my wife.” The blue armor spoke, sonorous and grave but at least at human volume. “You have violated the home of the Six, which is forbidden. Hordur has sequestered your partner’s soul, which is forbidden. Retreat, and we will compel him to release her. The balance will be restored.” The glacier sparkled but remained unmoved by the sun’s light. “I didn’t come here for justice.”
The jester bowed. “You drive a hard bargain. We will throw in god-hood for her as well. Together you both may frolic across the eons as immortals.”
“I sure as hell didn’t come here for more deals”, Christopher snarled, and the mountain of ice loomed across the skyline.
“A man of action,” the red god said. “We will do battle. If you win, you can name your price. If you lose, you will at least die with glory, rather than being cast out ignominiously to disintegrate in the outer planes.”
Christopher pursed his lips and did not bother to answer. Wind whipped along the surface of the ice without effect.
“Then what do you want?” the lady in white asked. Ostara, the Bright Lady, the patron of everything that was good and true, the soul of kindness itself. He looked at her, and the ice cracked, falling aside, revealing a man raising his hand to the sky. The man’s face was bearded and shaggy and obdurate beyond the comprehension of ice and stone. The light of the sun burned his eyes, but he did not flinch.
“I’ll have that second apple now,” he said.
The assembled company of gods stared at him.
“I get it. I understand your perfect balance.” He spread his hands, acknowledging what he came to destroy. “Bright and Dark, good and evil, order and chaos. It has a pure mathematical beauty that I can appreciate. It’s all wonderfully symmetrical and so very abstract.”
He leaned forward in his chair. “But the universe is not symmetrical. It exhibits chirality; it has preferences. When electric current flows, it always creates magnetic flux in the same direction. The amount of antimatter is not equal to the amount of matter. The universe was created by a set of conditions that favored a particular outcome.
“And we mortals—we are not abstract. The messiness of life imposes its own order, its own rules. We call those rules morality. You never evolved; you never had to choose between cooperation and competition. You never had to trust someone else to survive. You never needed morality.
“This world was not created for you because you’re not even real. You’ve cloaked yourself in bodies and memories, but they are stolen. If anything like you was supposed to exist, it was to help us. To act as a clearinghouse or central command for the controls of the universe, when we were ready to use them.
“But you woke up first. You were all alone. You divided the world into your abstract quadrants, derived from pure theory. You threw yourself into each role in equal strength. You locked us out of our inheritance and claimed it for yourselves.
“Even so, you were paralyzed. You could not decide the fate of the universe among yourselves. You thought it was because all of your parts were equal. So you played with mortals, a galactic game show. You chose teams and made captains out of prophets. We fight and struggle, while you keep score and rack up points, trying to gamble your way out of your logical impasse.
“The truth is that it was never your decision. Our predecessors are gone, utterly; nothing can pass through the eye of the needle of cosmic destruction and rebirth. But they left us something anyway. They rigged the game, laying the structure for the formation of the next universe. They made sure it would be a universe capable of organization, of life, of intellect. And they put their thumb on the scales. They made us flesh and blood and therefore moral.
“What they did not make us was mortal. You did that. There is tael enough in our heads to preserve us against the ravages of age. What the elves bought and paid for was always supposed to be ours for free. When a race arose to sentience, when it became capable of understanding the choice to be made, it was supposed to be granted the time to make a wise choice. We are to choose whether or not we want the universe to be destroyed, but only after we’ve had a chance to fully enjoy it.
“So that is what I want. To release the block on the tael in our heads. Yes, there will be problems. The elves will help; they can teach us how to cope with immortality. There will still be goblins to deal with, wicked and evil and now immortal; but again, that’s an argument to be had between living creatures, not hyper-real mathematical constructs. Even the filthy hjerne-spica deserve their immortality, if they can defend it.”
Ostara gazed at him with shining eyes. “To do as you ask would destroy us as discrete entities. The consciousness we employ is sustained by our theft. I do not know what would become of us if we let it go. Yet we would gladly do so for your sake. But we are three of six; as you have already noted, we cannot overrule the other half.”
“I know,” Christopher told her. “When you could not destroy your enemies, you made Marcius as a secret weapon against yourself. You thought if you died, then at least the stalemate would be broken. He failed; he could no more destroy you than he could destroy himself. But he found me.”
“YOU WILL DO WHAT WE CANNOT? YOU WILL SLAY A GOD?”
“Not alone. Richard didn’t tell me because he’s got a habit of secrecy. I’m sure it will serve him well in his new career as a wizard. I worked it out anyway. The instant we passed through the barrier, we disappeared from the rest of the world. The elves took that as their signal. They attacked, on every front, against every known or suspected hjerne-spica lair, against every realm or church that wore the Black. They woke the Stone Legion, called in all the dragons, made a deal with the Ur-Mother, and who knows what else. They’re throwing everything they have against your worshippers.”
Christopher leaned over to make an aside to Alaine. “Tremendous courage, that. To assume we’re doing our part instead of having been vaporized.”
“THEY WILL FAIL. YOU TRICKED THEM INTO ATTACKING TOO SOON. THEIR ARMIES WILL BE CRUSHED. THEIR ALLIANCES SHATTERED. THEY WILL NEVER RECOVER THE STRENGTH THEY SQUANDER TODAY.”
“They don’t have to win,” Christopher said. “They just have to make you fight.”
The screens that looked into the void were flaring with lights, like a thousand Christmas trees on Christmas Eve. Every blink was a spell being cast.
Hordur laughed. “THE BATTLE IS EASY. THE ELVES USE NO MAGIC. THEIR DEFEAT WILL TAKE BUT MOMENTS.”
“They’re not using magic because Richard told them not to. Again, may I say, an act of incredible trust. Your followers are using magic, though. Just tossing the stuff around like there’s no tomorrow. Meanwhile, the rest of you gods, you’re just experiencing the normal requests for spells, right? Nothing out of the ordinary.”
Computers whirred on the bridge, analyzing the data from the cameras. Christopher looked around. The rest of his crew were as still and silent as department store mannequins.
A bell chimed. The computers had reached a conclusion. Seven green lights lit up on the control board. A red button started glowing, pregnant with menace. It would launch his own harvest of black, although excision would seem to be a more appropriate verb. It would reshape the world on a fundamental level and make room for real change.
Christopher reached forward. His hand stopped inches away as paralysis seized him. He invoked the special dispensation of a god of Travel that freed him from all restraints.
Nothing happened.
“YOU ACCUSE US OF STOLEN LIVES. HOW MANY ARE IN YOUR HEAD?”
The weight of those he had consumed crushed him. Here, in the source of tael, his ill-gotten gains counted against him. It was a leash the gods could use against any ranked person. They understood it intimately because they had created the entire system of ranks in the first place. They were, after all, merely ranks without a person underneath.
Only heroes of legend could ever win their way to the abode of the gods through the layers of defense that surrounded it. Once there, they could do nothing without the gods’ consent.
Karl stepped forward, pure and unsullied, unranked despite every plot Christopher had laid to elevate him. The red god raised his ax threateningly; the yellow one took off her mask and revealed a beautiful woman whose eyes begged for Karl’s attention.
Silently, Christopher laughed. Fear and lust were perhaps the least effective weapons to deploy against Karl Treyingson.
“WE WILL MAKE YOU A GOD,” Hordur tried.
If he could have rolled his eyes, Christopher would have rolled them right out of his head. There was only one thing less likely to move the young stalwart than an ax or a pretty face, and that was a promotion.
Karl pushed the button in contemptuous silence.
The ship shuddered. The screens flared out, overwhelmed by the glare. When they faded back in, they displayed seven blazing lights streaking away from the ship. The lights winked out, one by one, as the rocket engines did their job and shut off.
“WHAT HAPPENS. SPEAK, FLEDGLING. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE.”
Christopher’s mouth worked, although it was not entirely under his control. If it was, he would have remained silent, following Karl’s aweinspiring example. “The missiles are ballistic. I can’t call them back, and you can’t affect them; they’re cloaked in anti-magic spheres. Although I’m guessing that wasn’t actually necessary? You have no power here except through our ranks. Even so, probably Richard or I could have cast spells to interrupt. So it’s good that’s off the table.”
Ostara shook her head in misery. “What does this accomplish?”
“Tael is real. You are a complex network made out of tael. The missiles are nuclear warheads; when they explode, they will destroy trillions of units of tael. We can’t reprogram the network, but we can still smash it. Richard figured he could excise Hordur from the network or at least enough of him that he can’t maintain consciousness. He gambled everything on Hordur being spatially localized, although as you can see he was prepared for a certain amount of distribution.”
She stared at him, aghast. “And if it fails?”
“We’ve got nine missiles left. I imagine Karl will start blowing stuff up at random.”
“SAVE ME. IF I FALL YOU WILL ALL FALL. WITHOUT THE BALANCE WE WILL ALL FALL.” Hordur, the god of death, begged his fellow gods for life.
The screens flared to solid white, the light of an artificial sun temporarily blinding them. The gods assembled before him seemed paler and less substantial in the harsh illumination.
“The fledging has beaten you in combat,” the red god said. “Far be it from me to rescue a weakling.” He vanished into nothingness.
Another two flares as more missiles reached their target. The cameras struggled to recover.
The golden jester’s face changed again. Now it was a man’s face, old and lined and full of judgment. “Who will provide for our priests when we are gone?”
“Your networks are still physically there. Even if you disassociate, the spells can still be drawn upon. Hordur, not so much. His followers will find themselves cut off from most divine magic. That will tilt the balance in favor of the elves, who already play the game without divinity.” By the time Christopher finished speaking, the gold man was gone.
“If I must die, I die for love.” The green woman smiled and was gone.
The screens turned white again. The cameras gave up, saturated to exhaustion.
“The thing is fairly done.” The blue armor bowed and winked out.
Hordur was disappearing by parts with each detonation. A chunk of his shoulder, a leg, his left arm. He jerked and staggered as if aware of what was happening. Then the rest of him dissolved, leaving behind only the remnants of his cloak to collapse on the floor. It turned to smoke and dissipated, wafting up to the whirring fans of the sub’s environmental controls.
“Thank you,” Ostara whispered. “Although you have earned more than just words.” She did not disappear; instead, she transformed. The woman wearing the white lace dress was now a beautiful redhead with wide green eyes and lovely lips pursed in shock. Images and metaphors melted away from him, leaving only a man coming home to his wife after a long and unplanned absence.
Christopher stood up from the command chair, a grateful smile curling onto his lips, absent-mindedly laying aside his sword. He stepped forward, and Maggie leapt into his arms.
“Chris,” she moaned breathlessly. “What the hell just happened?”
“It’s a long story,” he said, holding her close. “But we’ve got time now.”