by M. C. Planck
In the jeep, Kennet had staggered to his feet. He was fooling around with the machine gun again. Christopher doubted the gun was strong enough to hurt Hordur, and in any case, the risk of hitting Alaine seemed too great. It didn’t matter, however, because Kennet was pointing the gun downrange to where the other human statues stood.
Human no longer; they were growing wings and fangs, their skin changing to different hues and tones, long forked tails whipping around them as they stretched and moved. Still naked and attractive if you were into that sort of thing. Kennet started shooting them.
The Hordur puppet was pushing its way toward Richard’s exposed back. Alaine took several dagger blows moving to intercept it. Christopher realized he needed to change tactics.
“Hold,” he commanded, using the smallest offensive spell he possessed, the one that froze people like statues. It didn’t work. He tried again, putting the power of his rank into it.
“Hold. Hold. Hold.” He chanted, burning through spells, as he moved to put his body between the puppet and Richard. Over his head streaked rounds of tracer fire as Kennet machine-gunned the winged demons ahead.
“HOLD,” Hordur’s voice boomed. “YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU DO. YOU CAN BE A GOD AND KEEP THE WOMAN FOR YOURSELF. EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED. LIVE FOREVER. HOLD.”
“Hold!” Christopher commanded, and this time it stuck. The puppet froze. Alaine decapitated it in a single stroke. The body fell to the ground, a lifeless bag of bones. Above them wings stretched, the demonesses charging through the air. They went for Kennet first. He destroyed two more before they got him, shredding his naked defenseless body like hamburger with their razor claws.
Christopher and Alaine took advantage of the fact that the flyers had to land to maul Kennet’s body. They struck from behind, cutting off wings and limbs with each stroke. The creatures clawed back, maddened and vicious, but his armor and tael held. Halfway through the battle, the female demons began screeching in terrible agony.
Richard strolled over and waved his hand. A dozen sparkling bolts lanced out, stabbing the last demon and stilling it. He spoke almost casually. “I’m thinking we should go. The sooner the better.”
“Oh thank the gods,” Christopher gasped. “You won.”
“What?” Richard put his hand to his ear. He turned and caught Lalania’s eye, signaling her to stop playing. She put the lyre down and burst into tears.
“Sorry, could you repeat that? I had Ell turn off my hearing. Figured it would be one less distraction.”
Christopher said it again, but his mind was already moving on.
Alaine was stabbing the corpses of the demons with the royal sword, harvesting their tael. Christopher had to ask her for some of it.
“Stop. Dying,” he ordered Kennet’s mutilated corpse, putting it back together again with another revival spell. The boy sat up, reaching for something, and then fell over, completely spent.
“We are all in the bard’s debt,” Alaine said to Richard. “Hordur offered to make you a god. She chose not to let you hear that.”
“Don’t tell him!” Lalania cried out. “Why would you tell him?”
Alaine looked surprised. “It was a compliment.”
“Hmm,” Richard said.
“Few mortals would have refused such an offer.” Alaine apologized, but to Richard, not Lalania. “I am glad we did not have to find out whether you were one of them.”
Richard cocked an eyebrow. “Are you glad we did not have to find out if Ell was one of them?”
“I am. And yet, it was unlikely to be an issue. No one ever thinks of the support staff.”
Christopher wanted to go comfort Lalania. He didn’t. It wasn’t his place anymore. “Behind every great wizard is a great bard,” he said, paraphrasing a joke to amuse her.
“That’s not how the saying goes,” Lalania said, wiping her face. She quoted the correct form. “‘Behind every great wizard is an apprentice waiting to kill him.’”
“Well, then,” Richard said, carefully walking over to her. “I shan’t get an apprentice.” He held his arms open in invitation.
“Fae will be displeased.” The bard was trying to make the conversation light.
Richard was not helping. “Mistress Fae’s pleasure is no longer my concern.”
He kept advancing. She stood perfectly still until he touched her. Then she collapsed into his embrace, whispering apologies. He silenced her with a kiss.
“He is not wrong,” Alaine said, ignoring the unfolding romantic drama. “We should go. The destruction of a god cannot fail to have unfathomable fallout. As much as I would like to profit from it, I do not care to face a swarm of hungry bevinget on the wing. They will seek either revenge or glory, or perhaps merely the tael they assume we have won.”
“Was it true?” Christopher asked, his voice held low. “Was the offer real?”
Alaine looked at him. “Of course. As was everything Hordur said. The history of a billion lives are snuffed out as if they had never existed. All that was left of them was tael, and now that is gone. They can never be reclaimed.”
He looked to where the sphere hung in the air, still swallowing the wind. “What if he had put Maggie in there?”
“Then she too would be lost to all time. Yet he did not. Nor could he; to do so would have surrendered the only leverage he had over you. Though I do not know why the god of death desired to have leverage over a mortal in the first place, so do not ask.”
Richard was pressing Lalania into the driver’s seat, trying to untangle himself from her grasp.
“What else does it mean? The god of death is dead. Isn’t that going to . . . change things?”
Alaine climbed back into the gunnery frame, an ammunition box in her hands. “Probably not. It has always been elven philosophy that the gods are unnecessary, mere ornaments encrusted on the proper shape of the world. Now all will see if we were right.”
Christopher took his place, careful to buckle in. He leaned over and strapped Maggie’s cold, dead body into her seat. Richard held the lyre rather than disturb him by trying to put it back into its box. Lalania started the jeep’s engine.
“You don’t seem too worried,” Christopher said to Alaine.
“I trust the wisdom of our sages. It is having to explain all of this to my daughter that I fear. The young are ever in a hurry.”
“Why would the death of a god make Kalani impatient?”
Alaine smiled down at him, having finished reloading the machine gun. “Because she will be eager to slay the rest.”
26
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. Rich
ard 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.