Black Harvest

by M. C. Planck

  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.”

  28

  HMS VIGILANT

  Becoming a minor deity was less transformative than one would expect. He still ate, bathed, and put his pants on one leg at a time. On the other hand he ate a lot. Despite his mood, his body put away huge quantities of food, he sprinted up and down stairs, and he slept deeper but shorter than before. He was no longer young merely in appearance. The cold no longer bothered him. He was uncertain whether that was because he was immune or simply the hardiness of youth.

  He also did not have to pray to the animated suit of armor for his spells. He could just take them off a shelf in his mind. Surprisingly, he still had limits, although they were multiples of his previous restraints. He could now cast seven gates a day if he wanted to, which was an absurd quantity of power, and yet far from infinite.

  He saw auras around everyone, all the time. Their morality and their emotions flickered in a corona wreathing their bodies. In the past, he had tried to avoid spying on his companions. Now he could not help it.

  The change hit Torme hardest of all. The man came to him the day after with an ashen face, flanked by Gregor and Cardinal Faren.

  “I can no longer renew spells,” Torme explained. “I have no divine connection. Nothing appears when I meditate.”

  Gregor nodded agreement. “The same for me. I know my first-rank magic is not terribly important, but I have become quite accustomed to it.”

  “I wonder how many other priests he left in the lurch,” Christopher mused. Marcius had skipped out on his job and left other people to pick up the pieces. It seemed rather dishonorable.

  “But you have taken his rank,” Torme said.

  Christopher stared at the man, trying to follow what he was getting at.

  Faren chuckled, although his humor sounded hollow these days. Acts of deicide made the old man dizzy, it seemed. “You must speak your mind. He is too dense to guess.”

  “You could grant me spells,” Torme explained. “I can pledge to you.”

  “No,” Christopher said instantly.

  “Then I am returned to a career as a knight, and a poor one at that. All I have left is my vitality.” The man said it with such an air of acceptance that Christopher was stung to the core.

  “It’s not my place to pay Marcius’s debts,” he said defensively.

  “I rather think it is,” Faren answered. “Rank carries privilege but also obligation.”

  Despite being a god, there were still battles he could not win. In the end, he grit his teeth while Torme and Gregor knelt before him, reciting words of devotion.

  Afterward, he could see Torme and Gregor’s auras even when they weren’t in the room, as if the intervening stone walls were irrelevant.

  “Aiee,” Gregor moaned the next day. “It unnerves me to hear your voice coming out of an empty suit of armor.”

  “There are probably other benefits of your new rank,” Torme said. “Though they may require you to increase the size of your flock. In sheer point of fact, I had selected out a dozen novices who I thought adequate to the rank of Pater. I was going to broach the topic, but things became somewhat unsettled.”

  If Christopher had not returned from his adventures, Torme wouldn’t have needed to. He would have been the head of the Church of Marcius, and the decision would have been his. Christopher could not fault the man for ambition. He was only doing what he thought was right.

  Relentlessly, Torme carried on. “Now I approach you in a different guise, although the issue remains the same. I am, I believe, the head of the Church of Christopher. I wish to present candidates for the priesthood.”

  “Are you sure that’s wise?” he tried to argue. “What if I die? Then even more people are left in the lurch.”

  Torme stared at him frankly. “You have already outlived the aspect of an Elder god.”

  In the end, he got away with only three because they couldn’t afford any more promotions. Tael was in short supply. Every grain from Marcius’s multiple deaths had been required to elevate Christopher; the diamond in the sword was empty.

  The sword was another annoyance. It had remained transformed, constantly glowing and obviously supremely enchanted. Christopher would have preferred Marcius leave him a fresh rod of life as a divine icon. In any case, he had taken Travel as his domain, rather than the War, Luck, and Strength that Marcius had represented. As a minor deity, he was only entitled to one. A pair of flying boots would seem more appropriate, in addition to making him happier than a bloody sword.

  The blade was a chain. It reminded him that he was still playing Marcius’s game.

  On the plus side, court duties went quickly. He could usually tell at a glance who was guilty and who was repentant. People stared at the glow coming from his sword and didn’t
even try to shade the truth.

  He wanted to spend his time in a dull haze where pain could not reach him. He failed. His mind, sharp and agile, prodded him to help Richard during the day. His body, hungry and virile, disturbed his sleep every night. It was good that Lalania spent all of her time with Richard now. It was good that Richard was of sufficient rank and selfesteem that he lowered his brows in warning whenever Christopher stood too close to the bard for too long.

  Christopher reminded himself that the wizard had already killed an elder god for far less provocation and stepped back.

  “I want my wife,” Christopher said. As he did a thousand times a day, although only a few times out loud.

  “I want all the gold in your kingdom,” Richard answered. “Print more paper and pass a law forbidding the use of coin. It will be more convenient and give you better control over the economy. Gold should only be used for foreign exchange.”

  Christopher did as he was bid. Because the kingdom had no foreign contacts, the gold piled up in his vault. There was a lot more of it than he expected. How this planet avoided massive heavy-metal poisoning was a conundrum that Christopher did not care about. There were other mysteries to solve.

  Lalania turned out to be the key to one of those mysteries. Her new rank gave her insights she had not been able to access before. The songs and legends she had studied revealed new facts. Richard assured her that this was a mystical process, not the product of clever study, and thus she bore no fault for not having seen before. Christopher bit his tongue to watch the man shelter the bard’s pride. He bit it harder, watching her glow under his words.

  “You are certain he said them in that order? Earth first and fire last?” Richard asked.

  Christopher lowered his eyebrows at being questioned like a wayward pupil. “Yes. I am certain.”

  “Those are the elemental planes,” Lalania said. “I am surprised there is no mention of light and darkness. But then, Hel is normally equated with Dark. And we know that is a false lure.”

  “I don’t care about some tourist itinerary,” Christopher said. “Get me to the center. Where the gods really live.”

  “Of course,” Richard exclaimed. “The center. Why didn’t I see it before?”

  Christopher glared at him. “You did. You’re pretending I gave you the idea just now because you want me to feel like I am contributing.”

  “Thank god we can dispense with social niceties,” Richard said. “Literally, in this case.” He chuckled. “That joke will never get old.”

  Christopher remembered that Richard might have been a god in his place and said nothing.

  “Hel is indeed fake,” the wizard lectured. His years in front of a classroom were obvious now. “So are the Halls of Light and the other four Elder planes. They are all actually located on Prime. This can be deduced once you realize the dimensional keys to each of those planes are symbolic rather than sympathetic. To go to Aelfhiem, you need something from Aelfhiem; to get to Hel, you need an act of theater.”

  “How do you hide Heaven on Earth?” Christopher asked, genuinely curious. He had never been to the Halls of Light and had no intention of going now, but they sounded nice. Surely their neighbors would have noticed. Presumably Hel was equally remarkable to whoever lived next to it.

  “This place is much larger than home,” Richard said. “Ten times the size, in fact. You can’t tell because they went to great lengths to conceal the fact that its round at all. There’s an illusion that makes the sun look like it’s directly overhead, no matter what latitude you are at. It must break down at the poles, but that still leaves plenty of places to hide a continent as small as Hel. A little magic, a thousand miles of ocean without a sextant, and Bob’s your uncle.”

  Ten times the diameter worked out to something like a hundred times the surface area. Richard was right; room to hide a whole planet if you wanted to. “Hold on,” Christopher said, thinking it through. “How can this planet be that big and still have normal gravity?”

  Richard smiled at him, and Christopher felt sympathy for Lalania. In the face of that beaming approval, anyone would melt.

  “That is a fine question indeed,” the physicist turned wizard said. “The answer is that the planet is hollow; otherwise we would be crushed by the sheer quantity of gravity from its center. It’s a bloody Dyson sphere, except we’re on the outside. Probably because they screwed the inside up, not understanding physics or biology. They started over on the outside once they discovered other planets and saw how it was supposed to work.”

  “So below us is a mirror of here,” Christopher said. “Earth, then water; air; and . . . a tiny sun?”

  “A fake sun, purely magical,” Richard said. “In their vanity, they thought they should be the light of the world. To be fair, I’m not convinced the one up there is real either. It might be an illusion; I’d need to do more observations.”

  Christopher didn’t care about the sun he could see. He cared about the one below his feet. “And inside this false sun?”

  “Tael,” Richard said with a grin. “Thousands of miles of it. If you were an Elder god, where else would you live?”

  Layers of a planetary lollipop. With a creamy god-infested center.

  Richard wasn’t finished. “The gravity here is only about ninetyseven percent Earth standard. Aelfhiem was slightly less; the elves must hate it here. This brings up an even more fascinating question. Of the four planets I have been to, all of them were close to one G. How the Dark is that for a coincidence?”

  “How could you breathe on all of them?” Christopher asked.

  “Also interesting, although less so. Carbon-oxygen bindings are self-selective for complex life. Maybe one G is too; we don’t know. But maybe somebody did.”

  Lalania pouted. “I don’t understand what you are talking about.”

  For once, Christopher did the explaining. “He’s saying that the universe looks intentional. Somebody set it up so that there were lots of planets with the same chemistry and physics. Because they wanted everybody to share common ground.”

  “Of course,” Lalania said. “The gods created the world for us.”

  Both men spat an obscenity at the same time.

  The bard blanched. “Your blasphemies were amusing when you were mortal. Now I find them unsettling.”

  “The gods created Prime,” Richard conceded. “I’ll give them that. Their fingerprints are all over this place. But the rest of the universe? No. Nothing I can stuff into a portable black hole can make a quasar.”

  “So there might be a real god at the center of all this,” Christopher mused. “I mean, God. The Creator.”

  “Not anymore.” Richard shrugged. “The universe might be designed, but it obviously isn’t maintained. Whatever laid the ground rules for the Big Bang is long gone, consumed and disordered by the process. We can only mess around with the machinery; we can’t change the fundamental rules. It turns out there’s more machinery than we thought, but still. No spell will change Planck’s Constant.”

  Christopher discovered that he had exhausted his interest in both theology and theoretical physics. “And you found the main control panel. Now tell me how to get there.”

  Richard put his hands together. “I have an idea, if you are willing to borrow a few more toys from Her Majesty’s Government.”

  “Borrow?” Christopher said. The jeep they had stolen was a pile of slag on an alien planet. It wasn’t going to be returned.

  “When you open a permanent gate and extend magic to Earth,” Richard said with sincerity, “no one is going to be complaining about the cost. Least of all the Queen. She knows full well the value of being the first to establish colonies in a new world.”

  Thus it was that Christopher found himself hovering above the river west of Kingsrock, casting a gate spell of epic proportions. Richard had given him a name and, more importantly, an excuse. He needed to compel the crossing, and he needed a reason to do so. Richard swore that his own brother would not
resent being summoned to his side. It would be a violation of the man’s will but for a good cause. Christopher bit his lip and hoped it would be good enough.

  Not that there was anyone left to censure him. His powers no longer depended on the approval of another.

  He chanted the words. The rift in reality opened up, spilling forth a deluge. Seawater shot out, flooding the banks and sweeping downstream, a gash the size of a building in a waterskin the size of a mountain. Borne on the waves came fishes, seaweed, and the long gray steel hull of a Vanguard-class submarine.

  Christopher rose up to avoid being crushed and closed the gate behind it. The vessel settled in the dwindling waters, lying in the river like an orchid in a too-small pot. It listed to the left about fifteen degrees but stopped before falling over. He drifted down to the conning tower and waited.

  Eventually, a hatch opened and a human face appeared. Christopher was surprised to see it was female and immediately chagrined at his surprise. Richard flew up from the banks and waved to the woman.

  “Ask Captain Falconer to pop up for a moment, would you luv?” Richard said, his accent suddenly thick.

  She produced a submachine gun and began shooting at Richard. Apparently the angle of the ship disturbed her aim because she missed. He flew behind Christopher, sheltering behind his cloak.

  “We mean you no harm,” Christopher tried to say. He didn’t feel shouting would be dignified, so he had to wait until her magazine was empty to continue.

  “Please summon your captain. His brother would like to speak to him.”

  The woman spoke incredulously. “Dr. Falconer?”

  “Aye, that’s myself,” Richard said, floating out from behind Christopher. “How’s Bob holding up these days?”

  The woman fainted.

  “Maybe we should go in,” Richard suggested. “But you first. I don’t particularly want a face full of nine-millimeter slugs.”

  By the time they reached the hatchway, unseen hands had drawn the woman inside. Christopher realized he shouldn’t have worn his sword. It wasn’t very welcoming. They dropped to the decking and clung to railings. More faces over gun barrels stared out of the hatch at them.