Downfall

by Rob Thurman

  It was one of the better decisions I’d made.

  Niko as Val hadn’t been anything special then except for his determination in the days when in warm weather people wore nothing but desert ocher paint and thought horses were for eating not riding. Yes, a very long time ago. He’d had raw talent, but this was long enough ago that humans hadn’t yet organized murder and they didn’t have a word for war. Nor a concept. There were too few of them, no cities to speak of yet. Wars are not made of fifty men and boys fighting over a cluster of ragged tents.

  In those days, rocks lashed to a thick wooden handle to smash skulls and spears that were no more than stone-sharpened lengths of wood—basically a pointy stick—were the only human options. I kept my paien metal weapons hidden and worked with what was available to Val.

  That’s how it began.

  Finding someone who knew enough to teach you to fight was unheard-of then. The battles hadn’t been large enough. There was a new leader every day with the corpse of the previous one, head crushed, feeding the scavengers. No one would waste their time training you—if there were someone worthy to be a teacher. There was not. Survive one skirmish and that was blind luck. Surviving two made you a wise veteran. I’d not seen anyone make it through a third one in my wanderings. One learned on their own by fighting for their life.

  Until I had come along.

  The first to share food, mare’s milk, and fighting skills.

  Val had been the start of it, and I was teaching him even now. I had found him and his brother every time after their deaths as Val and Kree. Niko had gone on to become among the best of whoever he was with at the time—tribes, nomadic raiders, protector of small clans living in houses built of mud, finally towns and cities, palaces, and temples. Thanks to his first instruction from me, his continued education in each following life, and his innate will to protect.

  In every life I taught him and in every life he improved. I was just now realizing Niko improved too much. He didn’t start with a blank slate in each life. Well, he did, but within weeks he was fighting at a level most would take years to accomplish—in a year, he had the skill of decades of daily battles. I hadn’t thought about that before, more concerned with finding the newly incarnated him and Cal, and then more concerned with trying to convince them to do anything possible to stay alive, the reckless idiots.

  I’d carelessly thought he was unequaled in this life thanks to being descended from Achilles—the most skilled human warrior I’d ever seen, having the genes of an epic warrior passed down from the Rom, generation to generation in the Vayash clan who’d wandered Greece at the wrong time. But it was more—of course with Achilles and reincarnation, he was basically descended from himself—I doubt he enjoyed thinking about that procreational peculiarity. In the other lives, though, without Achilles, he’d gotten better and better, learned more quickly than a human could.

  Cal said the Auphe had racial memory. Perhaps the only difference between them and humans was that the Auphe could mentally access those memories, whereas with humans it was locked away in the subconscious, showing up in instinct and muscle memory. Picking up an old skill in a fraction of the time that it had once taken you long before this new life. It was undeniable Niko couldn’t be the fighter he was in the short number of years he’d had to learn. He was too young. He could be good, but good wouldn’t bring down an Auphe, and Niko had brought down more than one.

  He was all that he’d ever been, accumulating what he gathered in each life into the unbelievable skill he possessed today. He was . . . Achilles, yet impossibly more. It was astonishing. Phenomenal.

  Naturally, I was still better.

  That went without saying. I was Goodfellow.

  But I had also been and remained his instructor, whether he knew it or not, and I was proud of my student. To see him cut an army in half practically on his own. To see what I’d created in him with my teachings. To see the perfect human warrior.

  It wasn’t my fault—no one could say it was—that I hadn’t been able to teach Cal an Ares-blessed thing.

  A teacher is only as good as his student. Cal had invariably wanted the minimum skill to keep him alive, as he needed his other valuable time to drink, get in fights, chase women, sleep, and generally enjoy the hell out of life. I had to respect that if not out-and-out applaud it.

  Cal and I had weaved a decadent path of debauchery and sin across the world throughout history. While Niko could come close to keeping up with me in weapons, Cal came close to keeping up with me in everything else. There’d been a time that when I said, “Orgy,” Cal didn’t freeze up and flee; Cal had said, “Where? And let me grab the two fleetest horses in the camp.”

  Watching him in this life was . . . difficult. In most all others he’d been happy, horny, and human through and through, foulmouthed and laughing—someone who loved life. Now he rarely drank because of his alcoholic mother and Auphe tolerance. He avoided most sexual encounters unless they could be proved beyond all doubt not to produce more Auphe offspring. He fought, but it was with a bitterness that was the opposite of the fun-loving spirit with which he’d gone about it when he was completely human. He’d once fought for the thrill of it and usually everyone staggered home drunken, beaten to Hades and back at the end of the night, but alive. When he was a Viking, I’d been involved in innumerable alcohol-fueled brawls while watching his back every single night. Now when he fought, it was for a reason, not a hobby . . . or a much more vicious hobby than it had been. Cal was the only one to walk away still breathing from fights these days.

  He did still sleep a good deal and thank the God of the Forge that guns had been invented, as those he used with genuine skill. This Cal . . . all his lives had been short as he’d earlier guessed and I cursed that . . . but at the same time, the majority of those limited lives he had reveled in. Not all—not Phelan and Cullen and there were others that ended no better—but most . . . most had been good lives.

  Exceptional lives.

  Mayfly ones, but exceptional yet brief enough to make me think of walking away the next time I found them. Spare myself the pain. I had thought about it, I admitted, as they were so fleeting, but I hadn’t been able to do it.

  I knew I never could.

  “How is Cal?” I questioned Niko as I sat down at the computer, which rested on the desk by a window overlooking Central Park. I opened up my e-mail account I’d set up days ago with dual subjects of “RVs” and “Canada” and swallowed a sigh. When you knew all the tricksters in the world, your network was wide and effective but generated enough e-mails to make your eyes ache.

  I’d clicked on the first e-mail and tried not to groan at the ignorance contained within. I knew Cal was all right. I knew that he was alive, I told myself as I deleted the e-mail.

  If he hadn’t been and the last gate had killed him, Niko wouldn’t bother with warning me to arm myself. He would come for me from behind, honor discarded and nobility tossed aside. He would do whatever it took—there are warriors and then there are berserkers who will do anything it takes, no matter how horrific. Cal knew he was a killer, every life he’d known, whether he excelled or was at best mediocre at it. Niko knew the same, but Niko thought he was in control. Niko had rules and lines not to be crossed and a code, or so he thought. His blind spot was truly extraordinary.

  I’d seen that in the Trojan War. Of all our time, I always thought of that life first . . . always. It had been the best in all the ways until it had been the very worst when Achilles went insane.

  I’d seen him do, Zeus . . . when Patroclus fell and Achilles had charged the field, Death himself would’ve fled the atrocities. Uncountable numbers of soldiers are nothing against the willingness to do essentially anything and everything necessary for vengeance.

  Niko didn’t remember other lives as Cal could. He’d forgotten what he was capable of, but I hadn’t.

  That was how I knew Cal was aliv
e and more or less fine. If he hadn’t been, there’d be a good possibility I’d be reading my e-mails when Niko’s sword buried itself in my back. “Is he sleeping, then?” I went on, not waiting for a response from Niko. He was taking too long to answer, and that wasn’t the most positive of signs. I needed him back to normal. I needed them both back to as close to normal as could be hoped for right now.

  Niko responded with a sharp bite, “Yes, he’s asleep. He gated us to a field where a carnival we once lived at had been. He dropped, covered in blood from his mouth, nose, and ears. Luckily they’d built a motel since then by the road. I checked us in, cleaned him up, and now he won’t wake up.” Niko’s control was wavering, but his anger wasn’t. It was growing. “You told him to do this. To take us away. Now he won’t wake up. Why did you do tell him to do that? He wasn’t healthy enough to gate again. Why did you risk him like this?”

  I had to be careful, as careful as you could be while conning everyone you knew.

  Conning Niko, in addition, took more than being careful. It was beyond dangerous. Niko, who in this life was closest to Achilles than in any other before save the original. I knew how he’d possibly react—not well. Of all his past selves, why Achilles? I hadn’t been able to reach any of them, a staggering one hundred percent failure rate, but Achilles had been my worst mistake. Achilles who seemed to have no fear—who you could believe was half god raised on high, yet had fallen the furthest. He’d had fear and doubt, but hid it away so deeply no one saw it.

  Much like Niko.

  But why would he show those darker emotions or keep them once I’d appeared in their lives? A living all-powerful god had claimed him as brother-in-arms and family closer than blood. He could let it all go, drop the weight from his shoulders. He had his cousin Patroclus to keep whole in battles and war and the Great God Pan at his side to help him do it—with that, how could he possibly lose? He thought that he no longer had anything to risk or capable of being lost.

  Achilles, who I recalled so well. . . .

  Achilles had been a hand’s grasp away from being a god himself.

  Achilles, although entirely human, had been even less than a hand’s grasp away from being a monster, one equal to what Cal now assumed he himself could be.

  I stared blindly at the computer screen and saw only blood.

  When Cal . . . when Patroclus had died, that brutal and bloody death—it was one slow enough for Achilles to run to his side, to see the words bubbling through blood, to watch death come and seize Patroclus in a convulsion that came from a lack of oxygen as his lungs filled with blood.

  “You were to keep him safe.” He’d grasped the edge of my armor, shaking me with all his strength. I thought he’d hoped my neck would snap. “You are the Great God Pan and you swore to keep him safe.” Turning away from me, he’d let go and shoved me back from resting on my knees to hitting the rocky ground hard enough I felt my spine wrench, a rib break, and a concussion flare in red mist behind my eyes when my head hit the hard surface. Achilles gave me a look made of dual sharp blades of disgust and betrayal before he spat blood-tinged saliva onto my chest where my heart beat under the armor.

  I’d played the god game several times before, but I couldn’t bear to again, not after that.

  I struggled to sit up as I told Achilles that I’d tried, never would I have let this happen if I could’ve stopped it. I would’ve taken the blows myself if I had reached him in time. I had sworn to watch over him for Achilles. Swearing oaths in war is the most foolish and heartbreaking of things. It’s futile. They can’t be kept. Sometimes in battle you get separated—as much as you attempt not to. I’d seen Patroclus swept away in a wave of soldiers, Trojan and ours. I worried, but I wasn’t desperate as I fought my way back toward him. He wasn’t like Achilles in skill, but he scraped by enough to survive more battles than he had summers since his birth. He could take care of himself until I made it to his side.

  He shouldn’t have fallen.

  Couldn’t have fallen.

  He should stand up, let me take the blow in his place; I’d told Patroclus the same. That here, watch, I’d remove my armor. I had done so and tossed the breastplate as far across the stone and sand as I could. Slit my throat, puncture my lung, skewer my heart with his sword, I’d demanded, though that wasn’t a mercy I deserved. I told that to empty gray eyes and a blood-drenched body crumpled in death.

  I meant it. But when the blood began to dry on him and he drew not another breath, my frenzy passed. The guilt stayed, but no longer could I fool it with a crazed hope that Patroclus could do what I asked. Patroclus was dead, and the dead did nothing.

  I’d not been fortunate enough in life for any of my bouts of madness to last, mercy that it would’ve been.

  Achilles was not me.

  His mind left him and it did not return.

  His last words to me remained, “. . . you swore to keep him safe.” I’d been surprised he didn’t try to finish what he’d started in killing me. I didn’t know what I’d have done if he had. Handed my sword over to him and let him do his worst? I thought I might very well have. It hadn’t been put to the test. To Achilles I no longer existed. His mind had fallen away to nothing, his sanity washing out and disappearing like the tide. He’d given Patroclus his funeral, kneeling by the pyre as empty and blank as a doll, and then he’d gone into Troy to die. But what he’d done before he died . . . the inhumanity of it, the savagery . . . I hadn’t forgotten. Paien had a much different opinion of right and wrong than humans did, less restrictive, yet even so I’d shut my eyes that night in Troy. I hadn’t wanted to see what Achilles had become.

  Homer was a drunk and a liar and sometimes a coward. In his epic writings, he lied when he didn’t know the truth, and when the truth was more than anyone could bear, Homer left it out altogether.

  Achilles was a hero. Achilles died. No one needed to know what else Achilles could be or what he would be when pushed to the edge.

  I closed my eyes to block the sight of the crimson running down the screen . . . as if it were on the computer and not in my mind and memory, forever engraved. Pucks do denial as well as anyone else when they want.

  “I had to do it. Cal was right. Grimm was here,” I said with the weight of truth on my side. It was convenient when truth actually worked for you. “Cal was hurt. He couldn’t have held his own. Grimm has sworn to him not to touch any of us. It’s only Cal he can tear to shreds if he wants to keep playing that psychotic game the Auphe play.”

  The game of: I make you bleed. You make me bleed and who’s still standing when it’s all over? The Auphe had played it with each other since the dawn of time.

  “He would’ve hurt him or, worse, he would’ve taken him. Gating away was the only option I could think of. I didn’t tell Cal to take me, as I could’ve been the straw that broke the camel’s back.” That was true as well, in its way. If Cal had to gate three people instead of two, his chances of survival would’ve gone down radically.

  The fact that I’d wanted to talk to Grimm alone didn’t make that any less true.

  “How did you get away from Grimm?” Niko asked with suspicion. My boy. I was proud.

  “Retreat is the most valuable skill one can use in a fight. I reminded him of Cal’s promise to blow his own brains out if Grimm killed one of us”—Cal’s family—“and then I ran like a cowardly bat out of hell.” Not at all true, a complete lie, but it had been half a million years at least since I cared between truth and lies or that I’d thought the divergence between them anything more than cosmetic.

  Seizing my attention with several low tones, I opened my eyes to see that several e-mails on my computer appeared worthwhile and I answered them with promises of rewards and a reminder that if the world couldn’t be saved, a single dollar bill would mean nothing to them.

  “Is he gone?”

  I shut down the computer and rubbed a hand down the
leg of a set of finely woven bleached cotton pajamas. I told Ishiah they were my monk-wear, available at all the finest ascetic monasteries. I had preferred to sleep in the nude, but a deceased housekeeper who’d later tried to murder me and Cal and Niko both had all made their preference known that walking about naked in the living room or kitchen while they were around wasn’t acceptable. After the murder attempt, which often makes you stop and reevaluate, I decided this once I might be in the wrong. That was so unlikely, however, me being in the wrong, that I decided to go with the odds: fifty-fifty. Now I slept sometimes in pajamas, and sometimes only in the skin that no god was skilled enough to make, pity them.

  Unless I was drunk. I always slept in the nude when I was drunk.

  “Grimm? From your place, yes. I sent a minion around this morning to check.” I had and was pleasantly surprised not to lose a minion for once, although I had to pay the fee and that was annoying. Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle acted as if street kids and the homeless worked for pennies. That was a laugh. “Does he remain in the city or gate in and out regularly? I have no idea. He must have been wondering all this time why Cal stopped gating again. It is unlikely, although that he knows anything about Cal’s electrocution via serial killer and how that threw him offline, so to speak.”

  I’d given much consideration to asking Niko if we could turn Cal off, then back on again. My tech support hadn’t failed me with that advice yet. Deciding I preferred to live, I didn’t mention it, but I had thought about Grimm and what he was thinking when no gates pinged in his brain woven of barbwire. It wouldn’t be good, I did know that.

  Grimm hated Cal.

  Grimm wanted to be Cal.

  Grimm knew he was better than Cal.

  Grimm knew that Cal was better than him.

  Grimm wanted Cal to be with him, the founders of a new Auphe race.

  Grimm had no idea what he wanted from Cal, but he knew he wanted something.