by Jon Hollins
And Barph started to laugh.
Will wasn’t laughing, though. He was apoplectic. “You … you …” Words seemed to froth out of him. “You arsehole. You absolute, utter, fucking, total shithole.” Obscenity burst from his mouth like blood from an artery. He stalked forward, fists balled with impotent rage.
Afrit was paralyzed, because … because … this was the end, wasn’t it? She had been beaten, bloodied, and bruised, and now she had been betrayed. And she simply had nothing left to give. The only way she’d ever had to defeat Barph was to believe in Will, and Will had killed Quirk. He had killed the best thing in her world. And so she couldn’t believe in him. So she had nothing. This was the end.
“Son.” Barph stopped laughing, rolled Lawl’s word around in his mouth.
Barph looked … different from the way Afrit remembered him. The broad strokes were still the same: an old man, a long tangled beard, long white hair swept back from a high forehead, a wiry frame, hands and feet slightly too large for the body that held them. But in between those features, the details had changed. The sour twist of the mouth. The deep lines etched into his face. The unkempt wrinkles in his clothes. The stains beneath his nails that might have been dirt or blood. The glint in his eyes that made Afrit’s heart stutter and made her far too afraid to get any closer right now.
“I just … Please …” Lawl was going on, the words pouring out of him. “I made a mistake. I was a fool. And you have shown me the error of my ways. I among all of the gods know what an idiot I was. So please, please, please … just … let me back in.”
He seized the hem of Barph’s robe. “Just let me be a god again. I won’t challenge you. You will be king still. I’ll just … I just won’t be mortal. I can’t be mortal. I can’t, Barph. Son. I can’t anymore. I can’t. I can’t.” He was sobbing.
“I will fucking end you!” Will was screaming. Whether it was aimed at Barph or Lawl, Afrit couldn’t tell.
“I brought him to you.” Lawl was almost babbling now as Barph stared into the space above his head. “I brought you Will Fallows. Your challenger. Your tormentor. His companions. I brought you all of them. Tribute. Payment. So please, please … You’ll welcome me back, won’t you? You’ve always been such a good boy.” He pawed pathetically at Barph’s knees, apparently oblivious to the monumentality of the lie contained in that last sentence.
“Son,” Barph said again. His teeth were very evident as he bit out the word. “Father.”
“Please,” Lawl whined.
Barph stood. He was perhaps eight or nine feet tall today, not titanic, but still towering over all of them. Lawl sprawled backward, lay at his feet.
“Forgive me,” he begged.
Barph licked his lips. “Forgive you,” he said. “Forgive you, Father. Welcome you back. Because your suffering is too great to bear …” He stared off into space again.
And would he actually do it? There was, Afrit thought, beneath Barph’s false civility and beyond his savagery, some genuine pain in the god’s voice. Something tremulous, small, and hurt. A son perhaps, abandoned by his father, and left alone in the cold and the dark.
Lawl made it back to his knees. He was … he was actually crying, Afrit realized. Tears were falling down his cheeks. “It’s too much,” he sobbed.
And then, whatever prevarication had raged in Barph’s heart resolved, and he hardened, and he stiffened. The spark in his eyes flared.
Afrit started to step back. Will was still heading recklessly forward, and she wanted to call out to him, but her nerve failed her.
“Eight hundred years!” Barph howled. The words were propelled out of him with enough force to crack the marble tiles around Lawl. The former king of the gods spasmed at his bastard son’s feet. “Eight hundred years as a mortal, Father. And you come to me at eight months? You tell me at eight months that it cannot be borne? That it is too much? Your suffering is but a drop in the ocean of pain you poured upon me. This begging, this pleading. This is mockery, Father.
“Father!” Barph made a sound that was almost laughter, but that was too savage, too wild to deserve that moniker. He kicked Lawl viciously in the head. “And you call me Son. Son. A blasphemy. An insult. A fucking obscenity in your mouth, Father. You who call a fraction of the hate and pain you poured on me a step too far.”
He stooped, picked Lawl up by the throat, dangled him above the floor.
“And when I was ascendant. When I sat in the heavens. When I said how I would see Avarra governed. What did you do then, Father? Did you see the error of your ways? Did you have obeisance in your heart then? Or did you align yourself with my enemies? With those who would drag me down? Tell me, Father, where did your paternal instincts guide you?”
He pointed at Will. “You bring him to me as tribute? Or do you come with an invading army? Do you attach yourself like a leech to those would continue to seek my destruction?”
Lawl couldn’t answer. Barph’s fist was white-knuckled around his throat. Lawl’s lips were turning blue. His legs were twitching and spasming.
“You want my forgiveness?” shouted Barph. “Eight thousand years you shall shuffle and grub in the dirt of Avarra! Eight thousand years shall you be powerless! Eight thousand years of pain I shall visit upon you! Eight thousand years of being nothing and no one! Lawl shall be an insult on the lips of the peasants who watch you, old and gnarled and racked by disease! Then—” Barph leaned in close, his spittle flecking Lawl’s cheeks. “Then you can ask me for forgiveness. Only then will I hear your prayers. Only then can you come crawling to me, on the foul, stinking stump that will be all that remains of your body. Only then can you grovel and beg. And then, then, Father dearest, once that is done, I shall lean down and I shall whisper in your ear.” Cords stood out in Barph’s neck. Lawl’s eyes stared sightless. “And I shall say no, Father. No. Do you hear me?”
He shook Lawl. Lawl flopped limply. “Do you hear me?” Barph roared. Glass cracked in the ceiling above, shards raining down. Afrit screamed and started running, though where she could run to she had no idea.
“Do you hear me?” Barph screamed. Cracks ran through the walls. Wind howled. Afrit was knocked to her knees.
She glanced back. Barph was staring at Lawl. His eyes bulged. His lips were pulled back in something between rage and horror. And in his hands, Lawl lay dead.
69
Daddy Issues
Barph stared at the body in his hands.
The body.
The corpse.
Lawl’s corpse.
Lawl was dead.
No. No, that wasn’t right. He was … mistaken?
No. Barph couldn’t be mistaken. He was god. The god. The one god. The only god.
So Lawl was dead.
Except he did not want Lawl to be dead. And his will was absolute. Now Avarra would bend itself to obey.
Except Lawl was dead.
So … so … so of course he wanted Lawl dead. Lawl was the worst of them. A hypocrite and a liar and a craven mongrel. Lawl deserved nothing but death. Barph had been merciful in granting a death this peaceful.
He had wanted his father dead?
His father?
Lawl had never been much of a father. The name was as much an insult, a taunt, as anything else. And it had been so easy to bridle Lawl. So easy to worm beneath his skin and watch him itch and twitch. Half the reason Barph had started fucking Cois was to show that he could mount hir as easily as Lawl could. Gods, how he had laughed. How they had all laughed. And Lawl had laughed too when the joke was pointed at Toil, or Klink, or even Betra. There had been so much laughter.
And then they had stopped laughing, and they had condemned him to a life of pain.
And he had hurt so much. And he was going to hurt them so much.
And he had. He had had his revenge. And he was god. The god. The one god.
And they …
He had been going to forgive them, hadn’t he? Eventually. Not now. But in eight hundred years perhaps. Once t
he joke grew stale. Once the point had been made.
Hadn’t he?
But now he couldn’t. Because Lawl … Lawl … Because there was a corpse in his hands. A corpse he had made.
He must have wanted to make a corpse.
He hadn’t wanted to.
He must have.
A schism in the church of his mind. A breach to be resolved or descended into never to return.
And no matter all the might-have-beens, all the possibilities … He held a corpse in his hand. The Hallows were gone, and Lawl had been sent to the Void, never to be returned. He was condemned to oblivion. By Barph. And by Barph alone. That was the one truth of events. That was the only way things had turned out.
So there was only one thing he could want: Death. Destruction. Terror and damnation.
So that was what he wanted. Even if he didn’t want it. That was the world he had made. For that was the will of god. And he was god. The one god. The only god.
And so he rained destruction on the world.
70
This Hurts Me as Much as It Hurts You
Gratt’s fist plunged directly into Balur’s face. Balur felt his bones break. He felt his skin rupture. He tasted blood. Pain clenched a fist around his snout and ripped at his face.
Balur had been outclassed in fights before. It wasn’t even that rare. Hippogriffs, griffins, sphinxes, giants, wyverns, and treemen all outweighed him. Some trolls did. Some humans who had trained long and hard enough had more skill than he had ever had the patience to muster. Sometimes he was simply outnumbered. He had faced odds of fifty to one and worse. And when it wasn’t kobolds or goblins or rioting office clerks, that could count for something.
There were ways to prevail when you were outclassed. Balur’s preferred option had always been to fight dirty. He had no qualms about blows placed in very specific spots below the belt. He would happily throw dirt in his opponent’s eyes. The aim of a fight, in Balur’s opinion, was not to demonstrate what an upstanding member of society one was. It was to get some liver on your teeth.
When even dirty tricks failed, there was one other quality that had kept Balur alive through all the years: tenacity. The simple truth was that he often wanted to win more than his opponents. Every fight was, in a way, a fight for his life. Not in the specific blood-gushing-out-of-wounds way, but in a more metaphysical way that Balur had long ago decided to ignore. Fighting was his being. He fought, therefore he was. So even when wounds that should fell him were inflicted, he fought on. He didn’t just eviscerate people literally, he also tore at their will, their hope. And he prevailed.
The problem today was that Gratt was cut from exactly the same cloth. His need to win matched Balur’s pound for pound, just as he matched Balur blow for blow. And his muscles … Well, his muscles were fucking enormous, and Balur just couldn’t compete there.
Balur roared as pain racked him. He tried to sink his teeth into Gratt’s cheek, but his mouth would no longer open all the way, and he had to satisfy himself with sinking his talons deep into Gratt’s chest.
It was a pitiful hold. Gratt seized him by the back of the neck, tore him away, flung him across the room. Balur crashed onto broken tiles. He tried to get up. Gratt was already running across the floor. His foot entered Balur’s gut. Something ruptured internally. Balur flew. He hit the floor again.
Be getting up, he told himself.
His limbs didn’t appear to be listening.
Gratt bent down, seized Balur by his injured snout. Balur sprayed pain around Gratt’s fist.
“Not enough, little lizard,” Gratt said, grinning with his ugly gash of a mouth.
And he was right. Balur simply did not have enough. He was outclassed. He was beaten.
Except Balur thought perhaps he wasn’t. He was not here to win, after all. He was here to buy time. He was here, taking this beating of a lifetime, so that Will and Afrit could get their blood into a font, seize control of this palace, and have it beat the ever-living shit out of Gratt and the dragons and Barph.
How gods-hexed long did it take to get your blood into a font? Open a vein and pour.
Gratt seemed to decide Balur should find this out. The general’s muscles bunched, and he flung Balur through the doors into the font room.
Except, lying dazed on his back, Balur noticed that the room he was now in was not the font room. Apparently it was the Barph-pitching-a-shit-fit room. He casually wondered how they’d made such a catastrophically wrong turn.
Barph was ten feet tall and growing. He was holding Lawl in one hand. Things didn’t look as if they’d gone very well for Lawl. His tongue and eyes were bulging from his abruptly pale face. He appeared to have crapped himself somewhere along the way. Balur could have been warning Barph that would happen if he throttled someone. He was having experience.
That said, the scale of Barph’s tantrum seemed out of proportion to getting a little dead-person shit on his hands. He was smashing at the walls of …
Was it a throne room? How had they been making that mistake?
Barph’s fists smashed into masonry. Stones flew free. Above him windows shattered, and glass rained down. The very air around him seemed to vibrate with rage.
There were others here, Balur noticed. Gratt had followed him in. Afrit was there, heading toward the back of the room at considerable speed. And Will too. Will frozen and in great risk of being hit by a chunk of falling ceiling.
Gratt was hesitating. The general was staring up at Barph just as Balur was. It made for a nice break from him pummeling Balur’s kidneys.
Afrit marked Balur’s violent entrance. She froze, pressed against a wall, looked at him with eyes full of panic.
“Is there a font?” he managed. He wasn’t sure Afrit could hear him. He couldn’t make a lot of noise, and Barph was shouting a lot.
“We have to get out of here!” Afrit screamed back. “He’s lost his mind!”
“I compel you!” Barph was howling, flailing Lawl’s body into the walls. The corpse was little more than a bloody rag in Barph’s hand, most of it smeared over the walls. And yet with each blow the very fabric of the castle seemed to crack and moan. The floor was splitting. The wall behind the throne was starting to collapse.
With great and laborious effort, Balur turned over and started to get to his feet. A massive chunk of ceiling smashed to the floor beside him. Stained glass shrapnel peppered his side. Given the state of his wounds, it didn’t make much difference.
“Will!” he growled as loudly as he could. “Will, get moving! Will, you have to find the font!”
“This is my decree!” Barph howled. Lightning punched through the walls like ballista bolts.
Will glanced back over his shoulder, saw Balur. He blinked, seeming to shake the paralysis off for a moment.
Gratt stepped between them. Balur tensed. He tried to pretend it wasn’t fear he felt. It didn’t go so well.
Gratt wasn’t looking at Balur, though, and he wasn’t looking at Will. The once-dead general’s eyes were fixed on Barph, now towering thirty feet above their heads.
“Child!” Gratt roared. “Infant god. Puerile one. Player of petty games! You have pretended to your grandfather’s throne for too long. You have played at being king, and all you do, all you have done is play with your own shit.” Gratt puffed out his not inconsiderable chest. “Your time is done, child. It is time for a true warrior to take over.”
Barph took a break from screaming madly to stare at Gratt. Confusion and anger mixed on his face. “No,” he said. “Shut up. I do not want to listen to you. That is my decree. That is what I command. And I am god. The one god. The only god. I compel you. Only me. Me alone.”
“Child—” Gratt sneered.
“I COMPEL YOU!” Barph’s words were a wall of sound. They tore through the room, ripping tapestries from the walls, shattering cracked columns, ripping sconces from their settings in the wall. Stones and rubble blasted past Balur, sent him skittering down the room.
; For a moment Gratt weathered the storm, and then Barph stretched out a hand.
Lightning struck.
Where Gratt had stood was a fine red mist. A violent crimson smudge haloed where his feet had touched the floor. Of the rest of the general, there was no sign.
Barph threw back his head and laughed, a shrill, high-pitched sound.
“Fuck,” Afrit said from beside Balur.
The roof of the palace was in full collapse now. Masonry bombarded the room, the sky above peering down as clouds began to clot and the golden light grew dim.
And Balur stared at the stain on the floor that had been Gratt. That had been the creature who had beaten each and every shade of shit imaginable out of him. Dismissed. With a wave of a hand. Become nothing more than meat mist.
His heart was beating fast in his chest.
“What was that?” Barph yelled at the stain that once was Gratt. “I can’t hear you.” He laughed again.
“We have to get the fuck out of here.”
Balur wasn’t really listening to Afrit. The curse was the only reason he really caught the words. It was strange to hear it coming from the academic’s lips. Something inside her seemed to have been damaged by events.
“Will!” Afrit shouted. “Will! Come on!” She was hauling on Balur’s arm now, trying to get him back on his feet.
Will half turned. He didn’t seem to be able to look away from the space that Gratt had occupied either.
The room was continuing to collapse. The walls were caving in. Barph was still growing, his head sticking out through the rent ceiling, exposed, into the heavens. Rain was falling.
Slowly Balur got to his feet.
“Come on!” Afrit shouted again. “This is not the fight we came here for! We can’t win this!”
Will took somnambulistic footsteps toward them. Rubble crashed to the earth around them. The floor shook.