“What is’t you’ve called me to do, Yahweh?” She floated a few feet closer and reached down to draw one jade fingernail along the line of my jaw. “I believe we have unfinished business between us. The matter o’ your seduction, as I recall.”
The Morrigan smiled: a devastating conflation of lust and mad Gaelic humor.
“Your education in the ways of love are long overdue, my friend. I would remedy your ignorance with fiery kisses and the darkest erotic magicks.”
She drifted downward and pressed her palms against my chest, her hands sliding lower… lower…
“Tonight, Yahweh, while the mummer’s moon rides high above the world… your lessons will begin.”
“Hamanahamanahama…” The Morrigan was really layin’ it down. “Hannibal. I need you to…”
“Ochmagloch er mockenstoch,” she whispered. “He’s smokin’ hot.”
Hannibal flexed, and the sheath of stilltime within which he strained shattered and fell to the ground in glowing tatters.
“I serve no god but me!”
He gripped his sabre and strode forward, the tip of his weapon pointed at Gabriel.
“For the glory of Carthage!”
“Gabriel! Get Pluto! Go!”
Hannibal swung his saber. The energies humming through it were powerful enough to maim an archangel.
“Gabriel! Move!”
The Angel of the Morning vanished a nanosecond before the screaming blade whistled through the space his head had occupied. Hannibal’s momentum whirled him around to face me.
“Your attempts at camouflage are undone, desert god. My percipience has pierced that pathetic shell within which you’ve chosen to squat.”
Around us, time resumed its normal march. The screaming human bystanders staggered away into the chaos. The gathered media moved in closer, cameras hissing.
“I’m going to enjoy murdering you, Yahweh,” Hannibal said. “I’m going to butcher you with such extravagant brutality that the others won’t even think of standing in my way.”
Others?
“Who empowered you, Hannibal? You’re no god; you were dead.”
Hannibal swung his sword in lazy circles, maintaining his distance, for the moment.
“Oh, I’ll be a god soon enough. And when I am I’ll make you watch while I feed your balls to the Midgard Serpent. Although in that body you appear to be sadly deficient in your allotment of manmeat.”
“And what about you, Hannibal Barca,” the Morrigan said. “What’s holdin’ up your codpiece?”
The emerald goddess dropped into the space between us. She’d obviously rearranged the space around her to maximize the effect of her divine charms. She floated, buoyed upon a wave of primaeval sexy, her red tresses streaming in the wind generated by her own hotness. Hannibal’s scimitar dipped ever so slightly, an ugly sneer twisting his wolfish grin into a frown.
“Is this how you battle, desert god? Sending your concubines into the field to distract me?”
“Concubine?” the Morrigan rasped. “Concubine?”
Hannibal laughed, although his eyes roved hungrily up the Morrigan’s body. And when he spun back to face me, his stance was a little less wide.
“You won’t find me such easy pickings, God of the West. I, Hannibal, the Lion of Carthage, invoke the right of Celestial Challenge.”
I was drawing a blank. “Celestial what?”
“Celestial Challenge,” the Morrigan snarled. “It compels a god to fight the challenger or face instant dematerialization. Only true gods even know about Celestial Challenge. Nothing short of a demigod can invoke it.”
“Aye,” Hannibal growled. “I’m hip to it.”
The Morrigan’s beauty devolved into the ugliest of scowls. She floated there, her arms folded across her murderous breasts. I could almost hear the black-Irish rage thrashing around inside the eroticized snake pit that was her mind.
“Did you hear me, desert god?” Hannibal roared. “Fight!”
Usually, at this point I would assume an Aspect and put my enemy to rout. The Great Burning Face in the Sky is perfect for this particular scenario, although Whirling Pillar of Flame always wows ’em at the Conventions. In the seven years since I’d learned the truth of my incarnation I’d fought and won fifteen duels. Recently, not counting Zeus, I’d defeated four other major gods in open combat: Set of the Egyptians; Pele of Polynesia; Loki, Halfgiant/All Bastard of the Norse Pantheon; and Triton, the son of Poseidon. Now Set works as a nightwatchman at Cairo’s Ripley’s Believe It Or Not: Mummy Madness! Pele tends bar at a lesbian brothel located in the shadows of Mount Kilauea. Loki teaches a “comedy traffic school” driver’s education course in Salt Lake City, and Triton lives in the Spongebob Squarepants Bubble Blaster at the bottom of my fishtank. Don’t get it twisted: at the height of my popularity I was a God among gods. Thanks to two thousand years of Holy War, Crusades, witch burnings, slavery, religious genocide, nation building, nation stealing and a pagan-pulping global media campaign that staggers on even into the twenty-first century, I was at the top of the divinity game. But now Hannibal was gunning for me with dismemberment in his eye, and I’d been cut off.
“Man to man then, Hannibal!” I cried. “But look!” I raised my hands, my fingers spread wide. “I’m unarmed.”
Hannibal scowled. “Why not simply draw a weapon from the very air? A simple feat for a true deity.”
A broadsword big enough to abort a baby stegosaurus thudded into the dirt at my feet. It was nearly as long as I was tall. Just looking at it gave me a hernia.
“Fight!”
Hannibal whirled his blade and charged. I gripped the Nubian blade’s hilt and pulled. That was a laugh: I might as well have tried drinking Yankee Stadium; the blade remained firmly buried in the dirt. Hannibal swept in, swinging his sword in a casual beheading motion. I ducked. Seven years spent fighting errant divinities had given me a passing familiarity with defensive tactics. As he swung the blade around and behind his head I dived to my left, hit the ground in a diveroll and sprang to my feet. Hannibal lunged forward, his blade humming with stolen divinity. I danced backward and the sword’s point just missed my right nipple. I dodged left, then feinted right, avoiding Hannibal’s next thrust by a hair.
“Fight, boygod. Come to your doom!”
“Aye. Fight him, my sexy prince.”
The Morrigan offered a mischievous wink, divinity playing about her head like emerald St Elmo’s Fire.
“You have my blessing.”
Sudden strength filled my limbs. The Morrigan’s power surged into my body like a balm in Gilead, and I felt my muscles expanding, my perceptions quickening. I felt as if I could tear into the dirt beneath my feet and uproot the foundations of the Earth. I was invincible again, immortal, the vassal and the vessel of something far greater.
“Fight, my champion. Defend my honor.”
I turned back just in time to see Hannibal’s sword whistling toward my head. I reached up with both hands and stopped the blade between my palms.
Wow. She’s good.
“You can thank me later, Lando Cooper,” the Morrigan replied. “Kick his Carthaginian ass!”
The Goddess had just inducted me into the ranks of the Filail, the superhuman warrior clan that fought alongside the Irish pantheon in that country’s antiquity. They were strong, fast, supremely skilled, and utterly merciless. I shrugged, and ghostly armor, sky blue and gold, coalesced around me.
Hannibal yanked at his blade. I allowed the momentum of his tug to pull me into a forward lunge, dived over his left hip, hit the ground behind him and rolled into a defensive crouch. Hannibal whirled to face me, his arm steady, the blade’s point unwavering. Even considering the Morrigan’s gifts, I had no illusions about who was the more experienced fighter.
Hannibal swept in, swinging his sword in slicing figure eights. I backflipped away as he came on, once, twice, three times, kicking up dust and burning debris, my final leap carrying me over the giant sword still embedded in
the dirt. I reached down, pulled it easily from the ruined earth and landed just in time to block Hannibal’s blade with it. The clash of steel struck sparks, and rang loudly enough to shatter all the unshattered windows in what was left of Rome.
The Morrigan’s blessing filled my body with certainty. I pushed Hannibal back, swept in with a flourish and brought the Nubian blade down toward his head. Hannibal parried easily, sliding my blade along the length of his own, only to spin around at the last moment, stepping past my thrust even as a vicious-looking curved knife appeared in his left fist. I barely got my sword up in time to block a left handed jab that would have opened my belly, and twisted around and under the backhanded return slash from the big scimitar.
Hannibal lunged forward again, his right fist slicing the air with the knife, followed by a left handed sweeping cut with the sword, a parry, a thrust, his blades whirling as he came for me. Then his right elbow connected with a solid blow to my forehead and I saw stars. Dodging, shielded from the worst of the attack by the Morrigan’s blessing, I countered him move for move, planted a shimmering spectral boot in his chest and pushed him back. Then I pressed my attack. I became a whirlwind of motion and magic, thrusting and hacking until Hannibal backed away, unable to break past the wall of coolness that surrounded me.
“You’re not the fighter I’ve read about, Hannibal. I think maybe Hades got the best of you.”
Hannibal roared, countered my strike, lunged, thrust and missed.
“Think about it, HannaBell,” I said, circling him now. “The warrior who fought the Holy Roman Empire to a draw. Then you take poison and Bam! You spend the next two thousand years climbing out of the Roman version of Hell. Even you gotta admit: that’s funny.”
And that’s when the Morrigan’s blazing strength flickered and went out.
CHAPTER VI
HANNIBAL TIME
“Morrigan! What are you doing?”
I ducked, barely avoiding Hannibal’s crosscut with the short sword. The Lion of Carthage gritted his teeth in his lupine grin and came ahead, swinging.
“Morrigan!”
I leaped backward as Hannibal moved in for the kill, risking a glance toward where the Morrigan should have been hovering. But another woman lay sprawled on the ground. Her gorgeous face and figure had been replaced by those of Megan McCool, the Morrigan’s human host. McCool was snoring. I could make out the trail of drool sliding down her chins. Apart from being schizophrenic, McCool was also a narcoleptic: the strain of godly combat had triggered a seizure.
A sizzling band of agony wrapped itself around my neck and yanked me off my feet. I hit the ground face first. Air exploded out of my lungs and the bright stars came back, only this time they were red. I managed to kick myself over onto my back, scrabbling for leverage by digging my heels into the dirt. Behind me, Hannibal clutched the handle of his cat-o’-nine tails: the leather thong was strangling me. The vicegrip around my throat tightened, and Hannibal pulled me across the smoking grass.
“You shouldn’t be doing that.”
The pressure on my throat eased up just enough to allow me to turn my head: Gabriel was gawking at me from over Hannibal’s right shoulder.
“Don’t you know who that is?”
Hannibal yanked me closer, laughing. “I know who he was.”
Gabriel smirked. “He is the Lord Almighty, you dolt. Where have you been for the last two thousand years?”
Hannibal’s eyes flashed. Harm throbbed in the air around him like the fallout cloud over Chernobyl, and Gabriel was smirking at ground zero. “I’ve been in Hell!”
“Gabriel! Get him! Attack!”
“As you command, Lord. This barbarian must be shown the error of his ways, and I intend to do so… with lashings of faith.”
Turning back to Hannibal, he continued. “That pathetic looking human is actually the One. He is the All-Father. The Master of Time.”
Hannibal hawked up a wad of phlegm and spat on the ground at Gabriel’s feet. “And your point?”
Gabriel stepped lightly to one side to avoid the demonic loogie sizzling next to his perfect toes.
“He is the Father of Life, Hannibal Barca. The one true God.”
“Lay waste, Gabriel! Smite him!”
“But…” Gabriel stammered. “Don’t you believe in God?”
Hannibal punched Gabriel. His fist passed through the archangel’s chest and burst through his back, sending golden ichor splattering out at roughly the speed of sound. Gabriel crumpled to the earth, a lifeless manikin.
“I serve no God but me!” Hannibal shouted. “I am He That Follows, as Day follows the long Winter’s Night! I am the Order that Follows Chaos! I am… the Coming!”
Then a huge dark shape emerged from the smoke behind Hannibal, wrapped itself around his waist, lifted him off his feet and smashed him headfirst into the earth with bone shattering force. Hannibal hopped to his feet a second later. His head hung at an obscene angle, dangling from his broken neck. But the Lion of Carthage was undead – even a broken neck couldn’t keep him down for long.
“What treachery is this?” he squeaked.
Persi the quarter-mastodon trumpeted and reared up on both legs, towering over his master, pawing at the air, his great ears extended, his eyes aflame. The light burning in those elephantine orbs looked disturbingly familiar
“For the Trasimene Seven!”
Then Persi headbutted Hannibal. The King of Carthage crumpled beneath the weight of the undead pachyderm’s two-ton skull and flailing feet, compacting beneath that awful strength as Persi rose up and slammed his head down again, and again, and again, until what remained resembled a smashed sack of squirming, unmortal flesh.
Persi sat back on his haunches, his chest heaving. Then he looked over at me.
“Hello! Name’s Persi. Short for Perthon. Have you seen my master? Carthaginian? About so high?”
Persi indicated Hannibal’s approximate height with his trunk. Then he noticed the pulsating meat bag at his feet.
“Oh dear.”
“You don’t remember doing that, do you?” I volunteered.
“No,” Persi said. “I wish I did. I’ll bet it was lovely. But why can’t I remember?”
“Avek plezi.”
I turned to find Baron Samedi standing beside me.
“What’s crackin’, mon frère?”
“Samedi. What are you doing here?”
“Gabriel was looking for Pluto,” the Haitian Loa chimed in his nasal, French creole whine. “But Pluto wasn’t available, so he came and found me.”
Baron Samedi was the death and sex god of the Haitian vodou pantheon. In his function as the head of the Guede Loa, it was his responsibility to guard the entrance to the realm of the dead, and to heal the gravely ill or wounded whose mortal moment had not yet come. He was classically depicted as a tall, cadaverous overly-endowed spectre in tuxedo and top hat with a white skull for a face. At the height of his pantheon’s power, he’d been known to seduce hundreds of mortal lovers in a single night. In his current mortal seeming he was wiry, muscular with a shaved bald head and light golden eyes. He’d found a niche in the modern world as the choreographer for the long-running hit Broadway musical, Vooodoo Nights!
“Similar infernal energies,” Samedi said. “When Gabriel couldn’t find the Roman deathlord he found the next best t’ing.”
“But Hannibal was damned to Hades. That’s the Greek/Roman pantheon.”
Samedi shrugged. High overhead, a vulture shrieked and dropped out of the sky.
“Last I heard, Pluto, he was livin’ in Miami with Persephone and their life partners. They’ve begun a polygamist commune to protest Florida’s stance on…”
“Samedi, you aren’t supposed to do possessions anymore.”
I had recognized Samedi’s distinctive handiwork when Persi attacked Hannibal. But for just a moment I’d suspected other sinister magicks at work. Most of the “dark” gods and devils had agreed to abandon “all powers of supernatural �
�suasion” before Lucifer and I drafted the Covenant. I hadn’t seen Lucifer since.
Are you the Coming, Samedi? Are you working alone?
“Well,” Samedi shrugged. “You clearly needed help.”
“That’s not the point. You could have just stabbed him or something. You didn’t have to possess a sentient being.”
“Oh, I don’t mind,” Persi rumbled. “It was lovely. Like a tiny holiday in my mind; freed from care and inhibition. And the centuries of slavery of course.”
“I did what needed to be done, Yahweh,” Samedi said. He gestured a lit cigar into existence and stuck it between his broad, white teeth. “Besides, I’m a pacifist.”
“You’re the Lord of Black Magic!”
“I was the Lord of Black Magic. But that’s in the past, and you seem to be the only one who can’t let go of the past. You haven’t even said ‘ey, merci for saving my sorry mortal life, Samedi.’ Ou se tres egoyis.”
“I am not selfish. And I’m supposed to be making you feel guilty.”
Samedi swore again, and puffed smoke into a grinning skull, which hovered above us for few seconds before vanishing.
“Come now, Yahweh. You accusing me is like the pot callin’ the kettle a nigga.”
“Samedi…”
“Sorry: African-American. Anyway, it’s a good t’ing I came along, or else you’d be dead, wouldn’t you? And who would you have to blame then?”
I got to my feet. My throat hurt. I needed to take a hit off my inhaler and I was too tired to argue.
“Where am I?”
Megan McCool, the Morrigan’s last High Priestess and current human host, tugged at my elbow.
“Hello, Megan. You’re in Rome.”
Megan McCool was the definitive mousy school marm. She’d taught high school in Cambridge for ten years before her first novel, The Irishman’s Mistress, sold four million copies. Now she lived in a damp Tudor mansion on the outskirts of Boston. On certain nights of the year, she donned the robes of her office and welcomed the Morrigan to enter our world using her mind and body as the conduit. She was also certifiably insane.
“Ooohh that green bitch. What’s she done now?”
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