The Brass God

by K. M. McKinley

  Ellany affected the fastest service of her career. She returned with the wine immediately, pouring three bottles with shaking hands into another of Eliturion’s vessels. The room had turned sweltering, and her face was pink with the heat of the duke. She handed the pot to her tormentor, and stepped back, her eyes wide with terror.

  “Thank you,” The duke kept yellow eyes fixed on Eliturion’s face as he drank. The wine in the flagon bubbled.

  “Not bad,” said the duke.

  “Now you can go,” said Eliturion to Ellany.

  “No, you stay,” said the duke. He caught her wrist, making her wince. “We need service still.”

  “You should have gone when I told you,” said Eliturion.

  “You knew this was going to happen!” said Ellany.

  “He always does, this old fool,” said the duke, waving his claws at Eliturion. “He thinks he knows everything.”

  “Why didn’t you warn me?”

  “I tried to.” Eliturion said.

  “Your friend here is bound by laws he did not write,” said the duke. “He goes against what he is meant to be.”

  Eliturion looked up sharply. “Meant to be? We are a perversion of what was meant to be. These forms we wear and destinies we tread are not those given to us! What would the One say if he saw us now?”

  “I recall we had no choice in the matter,” said the duke. He set his steaming flagon down.

  “Choice or not, we accepted the role gladly enough,” said Eliturion angrily. “We all did.”

  “You too?” asked the Duke.

  “Me too.”

  “I had a visit from a shapeless thing given form. A servant of the Dark Lady who says he now serves Omnus. He brought news.” The duke leaned in closely. “They are coming back. Our brothers and sisters, the gods, will return.”

  “So you have decided which side you are on.”

  “What?” said the duke. “You thought I might stand with you? I have let you be, Eliturion, for you and I are alone in the world. When I went into the wreck of the Godhome the shades there told me what you had done. I almost came to kill you then. You had no right to do what you did.”

  “You don’t understand. None of you do,” said Eliturion in anguish. “We were being changed further. We would have destroyed everything. We had no will of our own.”

  The duke shook his head. “You are a fool to deny what we are now. Omnus is right in wanting you dead. We can never be what we were again. Spirits of air and light.” He shook his horned head. “Never again.”

  “We had to go,” said Eliturion, “to save those who tried to remain pure.”

  “None of the Y Dvar can lay claim to purity. We squandered that. It does not mean we should be extinguished.” The duke tapped the table in thought. “You know I am going to kill you? If I am lucky, when Omnus returns, I will be forgiven for not having ended you earlier. You are a traitor, and the slayer of our siblings as surely as if you had cast the spells yourself. You cannot stop me.”

  “I have no intention of doing so,” said Eliturion softly.

  Ellany took her chance and scrambled for the door.

  The duke lunged to his feet with a roar, grasping the table as he rose and flipping it over as if it were made of card. It broke in half with an agonised creak, half falling back down onto Eliturion’s legs, the other upended and blocking the main door, stopping Ellany’s escape. Eliturion lifted his drink instinctively as the table was torn away, cradling the pot to his chest.

  “Pathetic,” snarled the duke at Eliturion’s blinking, fish-belly white face.

  Fires kindled around the duke’s fists, blue tongues that curled around his fingers like the brandy flame on a midwinter pudding. As they grew, the Nelly Bold’s fire died down. The flames from the hearth were sucked away and stolen to garland the duke’s hands. Candles guttered and the glimmer lamps, the pride of the tavern, gave out with violent bangs. In the dark, the duke was demonic. He changed, his body moving further from the human toward the animal. Floorboards combusted around him.

  “I am going to hit you now,” said the duke. The fires roared out banners behind his fists as he swung, and punched Eliturion on the cheek. The god of wine and drama’s ample jowls rippled with the impact. He fell sprawling from his black wooden throne. His precious wine flew from his hands. The pot, a gift from an artist who was the toast of her century, shattered against the wall, leaving a dark purple stain.

  “Get up,” said the duke.

  “Leave him be!” shouted Ellany. “He’s done no harm to no one.”

  “Oh, he has, he has done a great deal of harm,” snarled the duke.

  Eliturion pulled himself onto his hands and knees. He turned his haunted expression upon the last landlady of the Nelly Bold. Blood, luminous with inner light, dripped from his lips and glowed upon the floor.

  “Run!” he whispered.

  “Get up!” roared the duke. He swelled in size, his fine coat splitting and falling from straining muscles. His trousers burst apart and slid from him in rags that ignited and burned as they fell. “Get up!” He said, and his voice was bestial, and full of rage.

  Eilturion attempted to rise, but his efforts only angered the duke, and he kicked his fellow god hard in the ribs, flipping him over. Eliturion flailed against the legs of his seat, and pulled himself around it.

  “Where are you clever stories now, you treacherous bastard?” said the duke.

  “You are evil! You willingly serve the Dark Lady. How could I betray you?” Eliturion said.

  The duke grabbed the throne with both hands. The smell of burnt wood and polish filled the bar as his fingers charred through its carvings, and he tore it into splintered halves that ignited violently. He cast them aside into the corners of the room where they burned with unnatural heat. Fire leapt from them, catching on everything it touched. The curtains burned. The benches burned. Ellany screamed. Gathering her wits, she made for the kitchen, and the door onto the alley round the back.

  “We were the same, once. We were brothers,” the duke said. “Made of the same numinous matter, sculpted from the flesh of the One.”

  “And what is left of those beings?” cried Eliturion. “Nothing! Do you know why we two alone remained?”

  “You betrayed us, it was your price. I have never understood why I was spared.”

  “I was willing to go! I wanted to die. But you see, you and I are alike. We embraced our stories! We allowed ourselves to become these things,” Eliturion said. “We allowed ourselves to be pulled from the air, and remade. Res Iapetus did not banish us, because he could not. Do you not see? We are more real than our brothers and sisters were. We are as we are now, Eliturion, god of wine and drama, and you, the nameless, Infernal Duke, whose need for love is a poor disguise for evil. We have become our stories! We never fought against what the mortals made us.”

  “The thing told me our original forms could be won again. I did not believe him.”

  Eliturion laughed, and it became a sob. “We are all traitors to the One, but you and I are the worst, my friend.” He looked up, eyes wet. “We embraced what happened to us. I was too much of a coward to end it myself. It is time to rectify the mistake.”

  “Fight me!”

  “No.”

  “You will die anyway.” The duke kicked Eliturion hard in the chest, branding him with a smoking hoof mark. So powerful was the blow that the god crashed through the facade of the Nelly Bold, taking glass and stone with him into the street.

  Eliturion staggered upright. The duke roared and leapt through the air, knocking him down again. He stood over his fallen brother with his flaming fists clenched.

  “Magic is a story we tell the world so compelling it becomes the truth,” said Eliturion. “We have no power any more. This is not our world. We’ve lost it. How could you bear it? How can you bear what you have become?’

  “I cannot.”

  “Then why did you remain?”

  “Why did you?”

  “B
ecause I had a story to tell,” says Eliturion with a bloodied smile. “It doesn’t have to end this way.”

  “The children of the water kin are coming back,” said the duke. “The Draathis return. The Morfaan move. This is the only way if we of the air are not to die out completely.”

  “It is not. You can defy them all. You can defy this nature foisted upon you, go into the dark. Leave it all behind.”

  The duke’s hands clenched and unclenched. “I do not have the courage for that. I want to live.”

  “Then I am sorry that we both have to die.”

  Five pillars of burning white light shot up around the street, illuminating the scene as mercilessly as theatre limelights. A voice boomed from the foremost.

  “Raen Jalong of the Soaring Air, we name thee for thy true self.”

  The duke reared back and howled in pain. The spear of his ancient name sank deep into his spirit, and snagged there.

  “What? Them? You told them I was coming!” He staggered back from Eliturion.

  “I am forbidden to know what will happen next,” said Eliturion, panting words through froths of glowing blood. “My gift is to know the story of everything that has been, and everything that is, but never what will be.” He laughed weakly. “But I have been known to cheat. Sometimes, I skip ahead.”

  “They can’t save you.”

  “I don’t want them to,” said Eliturion. He pushed himself upright with a groan and sat down heavily on the road. “I said I have no more stories left to tell.”

  “Raen Jalong, we name you!” the voice boomed from the lead pillar of light. The duke threw up his hand to shield his face and roared with pain.

  “Raen Jalong! Begone from here, we command you, as the lords of the five, first children of the One.”

  The Infernal Duke steadied himself, and he leant hard on his knees.

  “You can wound me, you can hurt me, but you can never kill me! That name is only a painful memory.” The duke thrust out his chest, and clenched his fists, whose fires burned brightly again. “I am no longer Raen Jalong. I am the Infernal Duke, no other. You cannot abjure me with that naming.”

  “Raen Jalong, we—”

  “Oh do be quiet!” The Infernal Duke held out his hand, and a lance of fire burst from his palm. It struck against an invisible shield surrounding the leftmost column of light. He leaned in and pushed, joining a second stream of flame from his other hand to the first. The pillars uttered hurried cantrips in consternation. The light of fire and the light of the stars battled in the street. The duke screamed out two centuries of frustration, loneliness and anger. His lances of fire shoved hard against the shields of light, piercing them and wreathing one of the columns in devilish flames.

  A horrific scream issued from the engulfed column. The brilliant light went out. The remaining four retreated under roaring blasts of fire. The duke threw up his hands. A circle of flame walled he and Eliturion off from the street.

  “You will stop!” the voice said.

  “I will not! Who is the mightier now?” the Infernal Duke shouted. “You seek to arrest change to survive in the world you corrupted. I accept corruption, and so have form you cannot match!”

  “You cannot beat them,” said Eliturion. “They will quench your fire.”

  “Maybe they will,” said the duke, turning on the other god, “but I will kill you before they can stop me.”

  Roaring, the Infernal Duke punched down hard, his burning fists knocking Eliturion’s head into the paving with terrible impact. He got down on his knees and followed the first blow with a second, then a third, pummelling away and snarling incoherent curses until the god of wine and drama’s head was a smoking mess.

  ELLANY RAN, FLINGING open the back door onto the alley. The Off Parade had been changed greatly by Per Allian’s redesign of the city, but around such venerable buildings as the Nelly Bold a few of the old ways remained, fragments of the warrens of yesteryear.

  The alley opened directly onto the main street that had cut it in half. Ellany exited via a new arch whose stonework had yet to be stained black by Karsa City’s smogs.

  She screamed at the sight of Eliturion’s giant body lying in the road. The light from the inferno consuming the Nelly Bold danced across a hellish scene; the duke, naked and wreathed in fires of his own, the dead god, his caved in head outlined by a pool of glowing blood. Pillars of light advanced on a wall of fire surrounding the duke, their light so bright her eyes streamed when she looked at them.

  Ellany tried to see what was within the columns, her vision swam and stung and she had to quickly look away, but she had a glimpse of a tall, four-armed being. Half-blinded by the light, she staggered away to raise the alarm.

  The Off Parade was equipped with all modern amenities: piped water, expansive sewers and glimmer lighting among them. Her need was for the alarm post, a globe of glass encased in copper fretting atop an iron stand. Sluggish glimmer light moved within the globe. A small metal mallet hung by a chain from the side. In the fretting was a round hole that exposed a large enough portion of the glass to strike. This she did, her first blow cracking the glass, the second shattering it. Magister’s marks engraved into the copper flared into life. The released glimmer light shot up with sudden intensity, making a beacon of itself that lit up the clouds. The bell on the firehouse six streets away started ringing.

  There was a moment of relief. She turned back to the creatures occupying the street. There were no other people but her out. A happening of this magnitude in Karsa would ordinarily draw crowds, no matter how dangerous, but the road was like a stage; empty but for the principal players.

  She saw poorly thanks to the afterimages the columns of light had imprinted on her vision. The beings of light surrounded the Infernal Duke, their harsh illumination turning him into a shadow puppet devil.

  Ellany could not believe what she saw, not even after years of her association with a god. She had come to see Eliturion as a big, fat uncle. Now it was as if a myth unfolded before her.

  She crept closer, realising she saw something important, something no one else was seeing. The descendants of Bold Nelly lived up to her reputation. There was not a coward among them.

  A battle of fire and light raged in the street. Bursts of starlight and lashes of fire enwrapped each other. The air trembled to the snap of unleashed power. Still no one came forth from their homes.

  The pillars boxed the duke in. A cage of light linked them, angled bars springing into being between the columns, until the duke was imprisoned between the four.

  “You force us into this, Raen Jalong,” said a thunderous, inhuman voice. “You force us to kill you, and so we of the Tyn Y Dvar become fewer, and the pure state of the World of Will is put further from recovery.”

  Fetters of light wrapped themselves around the duke’s wrists, waist, neck and ankles.

  “Purity is lost, there is only what there is. I intend to live within the constraints of reality as it is presented to me!” shouted the duke.

  “When the One returns, you shall be judged.”

  “He will never return! And if he does, he will find me alive, and you extinct.”

  The duke let out a shout of tremendous effort, and yanked his limbs inward. The columns were dragged toward him, and he threw up his arms. A cloud of fire billowed around him, sending the columns spinning aside, and sundering their bars of light.

  When the fire had gone, so had the duke.

  A quiet snap of an iron catch saw the lead column of light extinguished, and a small, elderly creature take its place. The others followed, their lights going out, their earthly forms reimposed upon reality as they replaced the iron collars about their necks.

  Ellany stifled a gasp. In place of the beings of light, were the bowed, small shapes of Greater Tyn.

  Two of the Tyn went to the crumpled shape on the ground—a fifth Tyn, its clothes smoking.

  “He lives,” said one of the two. “Just.”

  The leader was a female.
She adjusted her iron collar, and covered it with a colourful scarf.

  “Take him. We go now, before humans come and see their god dead in the street, and Tyn all about him. They see the truth they will, and take inappropriate actions.”

  “We are fine, the spell holds. No one comes. We leave unnoticed,” said a male.

  “Never sure of that,” said the female. “Always, there is a thorn beneath the berry.”

  “Tyn Lydar my lady, if Tyn Fruin dies she will be the second of the Five to fall in as many years.”

  “More can be appointed,” said Tyn Lydar.

  “But you are the last of the ancients. First of the Five. What if you die? You cannot be replaced like he.”

  “We shall pray to the One it does not come to that,” she said.

  The night swirled around them, concealing them in folds of dark. They snuck away unseen as the first of the fire watch arrived, and bewildered people poured out of doors and looked out of windows onto the aftermath of a conflict they had somehow missed.

  Unseen, that is, by anyone but Ellany.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  A Difficult Decision

  DAYS TURNED TO weeks. The pulse of the tide beat against the stony shores of the Sotherwinter. The Great Tide filled the bay to overtopping, further shattering the wall of ice across the sea and floating fantastically sculpted pieces of it onto the stony shore. Low Tides dropped the level dramatically, revealing the bay to be as steep as a glacial corrie, with wet, stratified cliffs full of secret caverns and odd tunnels that boomed and sang in the surf when the water was right.

  A watch was set upon the top of the great rock near Antoninan’s stores. Ilona took her turns upon it like the rest of the marines. Two were there at all times. One watching the sea for the Prince Alfra, the other staring fixedly at the column of vapour climbing from the Draathis advance. Ardovani fixed staves into the rock’s top to measure their progress, and the thickness of the column. For a long while, the cloud they generated grew no nearer. Then, one day, it began to move.