Kanmi leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees, staring at Adam. “I think you’ve done your prep work by now. You can strike all the bridge supports,” he said. “A god is missing, yes?” He paused. “Yours, by chance? I hear rumors that he’s very quiet.”
Adam actually made a rude noise at him. “Still considering conversion?”
“Sounds less attractive now that I live there. Too many rules. And I grade papers every dies Saturni. Your god would interfere with my schedule.”
Adam snorted again. “How long has, say, Tyre, existed?”
“Original founding was somewhere around 2750 BAC,” Kanmi said, slowly. “But we were Phoenician, then. Canaanites, as your people would have called us, or Punics, as the Romans named us.”
“But records go back further than your first city, right? As far back as 3500 BAC, right?”
Kanmi nodded, slowly. “Yes, my people have been around for somewhere around fifty-five hundred years. Our gods have been marinating for a while, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
“Care to take a guess at the number of people who happen to worship the Carthaginian pantheon?” Adam invited.
Kanmi did a little mental math. Damascus, that whole region. Tyre, the whole province of Lebanon. Everything in northern Africa west of Egypt, including densely populated areas like the western coast. Even the Numidians pretty much worshipped Carthaginian gods. “A hundred million, give or take,” he assessed. “All right. I’m ready to hear it. Do we have reason to believe any Carthaginian gods have gone . . . missing?” He grimaced. “Gods. That sounds like I’m about to start an investigation into a kidnapping, or maybe a set of stolen flat-wear.”
“Baal-Hamon and Baal-Samem.” Adam frowned a little. “Why are so many of your gods named Baal anyway?”
“It’s not their name. It’s their title.” Kanmi bared teeth at him. “It means lord. Somewhat the way your people call your god lord, too.”
Adam blinked. Kanmi chuckled under his breath. “We’re both Semitic peoples, my friend. Why so surprised that there are similarities, like the –el ending on everything that’s divine? My personal, private theory—not for distribution outside of this office—is that sometime back in the early Bronze Age, we were all one big happy tribe of wandering shepherds and goat-herders. We all made sacrifices to the gods. Until one day, one tribesman from your side of things decided to make a new bargain. No more human sacrifice, in exchange for your Covenant. Only worshipping one god, and not all of them.”
“Wouldn’t that mean that your god and my god were the same one?” Adam sounded caught between outrage and laughter.
“Not really. We have about a half-dozen of them that we call lord-this or lord-that. Your lot took one of those lord-this-and-thats and made him a lot more powerful by only worshipping him. We didn’t get the ‘no more human sacrifices’ memo until two thousand years later, when Rome came along and beat our heads in on the topic.” Kanmi shrugged. “Could have been worse. My people could have been wiped out so thoroughly that neither our gods nor our language remained.”
“So . . . Baal-Samem. Which one is he?”
“Lord of the night sky. Not much worshipped. But he’s there.”
“And Baal-Hamon is your main god, yes?”
“Correct. If I’m swearing, I’m mainly swearing by him. At him. Something like that. He’s . . . shifted a little, since the Romans put the boot in. He’s become conflated a bit with Tammuz. The old Sumerian god of vegetation and resurrection. Baal-Hamon’s the sun and rebirth, too, so it made sense for some of our priest-types to sit down around 120 AC and adjust a few things. The priests looked at the cult of Mithras, the Unconquered Sun, making inroads into our territory, the loss of human sacrifice . . . and started talking a lot about how Tammuz was ritually torn apart every year to renew the earth. Which lead to the adoption of the symbolic sacrifice of Baal-Hamon every year. You may remember me telling you about how my kids got to rip apart a little man made of bread every year and dunk him in grape-juice and eat him, at the spring equinox? That’s all where it comes from. Keeping the sacrifice, but in a way that Rome couldn’t . . . disapprove of, I suppose.” Kanmi shrugged. It was all academic to him. Yes, he was technically subject to Baal-Hamon, Astarte, and the rest. He hadn’t actually prayed to any of them in . . . years, really. A couple of down-in-the-trenches, I’d-really-prefer-not-to-die-right-now-if-that’s-all-right-with-you prayers didn’t really count, in his opinion. He knew what they were: massively powerful, antique spirits. He respected their power. He just didn’t acknowledge that their power gave them any authority over him. He was a free agent. And if that made him ‘fair game’ and visible to other gods . . . so be it. He’d take his chances. “So . . . you think the chief god of my people’s pantheon has gone missing? How do you figure that?”
“After Loki, apparently the gods of Rome have put the other gods of the Empire on notice. If someone drops out of contact? Tell them.” Adam snorted. “A delegation of the priestesses of Astarte apparently made contact with the temple of Juno last December, ahead of the riots. It’s . . . taken this long to trickle down to me. Mostly because, well, Livorus . . . .”
. . . isn’t here to hold bureaucrats’ hands and walk them through a thought process anymore. Kanmi didn’t say it out loud. “I assume that the priestesses of Astarte suggested that neither Baal-Hamon nor Baal-Samem are answering their phones?”
“Pretty much. This finally got dropped on my desk by Caesarion himself, last week, after he finished arguing with all of his advisors. And in the wake of the riots, and with so many of the CLP being sorcerers . . . .” Adam spread his hands now.
Kanmi shrugged. “So you want me to research this CLP group more intensely?”
Adam closed his eyes. “No. I want you to join them.”
Kanmi froze. “What did you just say?”
“I said earlier that Agent Duilus’ animus for you is an opportunity. Even Himi’s injury . . . Forgive me. It’s an opportunity, too. When was the last time we got ahead of one of these plots, Kanmi? When was the last time we were able to stop a group of mages and god-born from . . . fucking over a large section of the world?” Adam tapped his knuckles against his desk. “We’ve always been following along behind, getting there just out of the nick of time, and picking up the pieces. The Empire will be cleaning up after Loki even after both of us are dead. We can’t afford another Loki, Kanmi.” He exhaled, and Kanmi could see . . . self-loathing in his friend’s face. “So yes. I’m asking you to put your head in the noose, your reputation on the line, your family at risk . . . because almost every time we’ve dealt with this, someone has tried to recruit you. Gratian Xicohtencatl. Mico Cornelius.”
“I’ve spent seventeen years of my life as a Praetorian. I tracked down the members of the Source Initiative who were involved in Nahautl and Tawantinsuyu. No one would believe it—”
“After your son’s been paralyzed by a Roman soldier’s bullet? After a young and ambitious Praetorian has opened an investigation into you? After twenty-five years of friendship with a high-ranking Magus? After taking that Magus’ son as a personal apprentice?” Adam ticked it all off on his fingers. “You look deliciously compromisable right now, Kanmi. And all it requires from you is mouthing off in a few articles and interviews. Being angry. You’re good at that.”
Kanmi gritted his teeth. Why is it always me? Why is it never Matru or you, ben Maor? “We discovered in Tawantinsuyu that I was pretty bad at undercover work.”
“You’re better than you think you are. And Minori can help you. If and when you . . . have to go where the action is? She can be our go-between. So you’ll never be entirely alone out there.”
Kanmi closed his eyes. Every single thing ben Maor had said was true. Damn him. “Let me talk to Min about this,” he said, quietly. “This is going to have a . . . fairly large impact on my family. I . . . can’t even tell my children, can I?” They’re going to think I went crazy.
Adam sighed. “If
we can find a way to safe-guard them from being read by spirits and entities . . .” a sour smile for the old code-word, “and to keep them from being kidnapped or more subtly pumped for information . . . and if they’re good enough actors to give realistic reactions, so they don’t endanger your life? Then you could tell them a little.” Adam rubbed at his face. “Do you want to take that chance?”
So, yes. If I do this, my kids get to think I’ve gone off the deep-end. On the other hand . . . is there really anyone else in the world who can do this?
Unfortunately, he didn’t think so.
So over the next three months, Kanmi began writing and publishing several carefully-worded articles, lifting key phrases almost verbatim from the Carthaginian Liberation Party’s manifesto and supporting literature. Such as potentia ad populum, power to the people—the CPL was suspected to be a philosophical offshoot of that group, whose Red faction had been involved in the crisis unleashed in Fennmark, Gotaland, and Raccia. He added a judicious leavening of phrases like the rights of the common man, the tyranny of the Empire, the injustice of the god-born, and so on. Certain phrases were . . . pass-codes. They were how extremists recognized each other. And Kanmi was signaling, to them, and to others who recognized such terminology, that he was ideologically on the side of a certain faction. Look at me. I’m one of you.
Part of the role demanded that he publically break from his old friends. Agent Duilus actually made this easy for him, though Kanmi thought that ben Maor was going to enjoy telling the young agent, someday, the unvarnished truth: that he’d been used to make a disguise look good. Kanmi and Adam had at least one very loud, very public fight in the middle of the Praetorian headquarters in Judea, on the topic of Roman occupation, which ended with Trennus intervening and escorting Kanmi out of the building. His credentials to visit the headquarters were revoked. Agent Duilus received a warrant to search Kanmi’s house.
Erida had to be brought in, around this point, because Athim was still Kanmi’s apprentice, and had an agile enough political awareness to sense that something was not as it seemed. He contacted his mother, and Erida arrived on her flying carpet, with Zhi and her children in tow. “What’s going on?” Erida hissed at Kanmi.
“Can’t talk about it—”
“I’m soul-bound to Zhi. It would take a major god to read my mind now.”
Not to sound smug, but she is correct. Explain your actions, sorcerer. The efreet had taken a seat and neatly crossed his legs at the ankles, looking entirely pre-possessed and calm.
Ward the study so no one can hear us, Zhi. I’m not taking any chances with my family’s safety.
Neither am I, sorcerer. The efreet snapped his coal-black fingers, and the air formed into a shell around them, deadening sound-waves past ten feet.
Kanmi explained, rapidly, “I haven’t lost my mind. I’m still working for the Praetorians. Past that, you don’t need to know. Athim needs to go to Trennus’ house. I need to be seen as . . . making a break with my Praetorian friends.”
“And your wife?” Erida asked, her yellow eyes sharp. “What about Minori?”
Kanmi grimaced. “We will have several very public arguments shortly, which will result in her moving out for a time.”
Erida was one of the Magi. They had been, for millennia, the information-gathering, scientific, and magical arm of the Persian Empire. It didn’t take her more than five seconds to come to a conclusion. “By the dead gods,” she whispered, and sank into a chair. “They’re setting you up to be recruited by someone. Removing all of your social supports—”
“You’re too good at this, Erida,” Kanmi told her. “Shush. It needs to be done, and . . . I’m the only one who can do it.”
He was interviewed, as the father of the wounded, heroic doctor, Himilico Eshmunazar, and made his opinion about the soldier who had fired on a clearly non-threatening target clear. Himi was furious with his father, telling Kanmi, as he braced himself on a walker, “I will not have you using me as some kind of a . . . wager token . . . in whatever pissing match you have going on with Adam ben Maor right now.”
Kanmi winced, internally, but congratulated himself, bleakly, on a job well done. His eldest son had found an explanation for his behavior, one that he sincerely believed. Himi would now be very convincing in the role of the disaffected son. Bodi was another story. He’d just started courting one of Minori’s prize students, a young nieten whom Kanmi had found while canvassing Little Gothia for people who might have been afflicted with sorcery during the initial wave of Loki’s power. Jykke Ruter had only a few non-human traits: she had vividly blue lindworm scales over forty percent of her body, similar in color to a Malaysian coral snake, and she was mostly able to conceal this mutation with her clothing. That, and sorcery, had been her only changes, and she had written Kanmi a letter once a year since she was fifteen, thanking him for finding her and telling her what the headaches and the colored lights were. Now that she was at the university, Minori had taken her under her wing . . . and just a few months ago, when Bodi had come back from another stint in the northlands, Min had introduced the two, and Bodi had been obviously smitten.
So with those two around, Kanmi had to fight to maintain his surly exterior. Jykke looked up to him. Bodi looked up to him. And he could see pain and confusion in their eyes every time he said something that for them, seemed deeply out of character.
Masako actually wept as she demanded to know what he was doing. “You don’t really think these things!” she told him, tears in her eyes. “I know you don’t! Why are you pretending to be mad at Uncle Adam and Uncle Trennus?”
“Masako,” he told her, as gently as he could. “Sometimes adults put on poses in public. Sometimes, it’s . . . important. Please. Just . . . trust me.”
Three months after that, he and Minori split up, publically. This was probably the most wrenching part of the whole process. Masako’s devastated, betrayed glances. Bodi’s total disbelief; he’d lived through the fights Kanmi and Bastet had had. He knew what it took to get Kanmi to leave a relationship. Himi’s weary disappointment. They all scalded, but kissing and holding Minori, desperately in private, and then watching her pack her bags and Masako’s and move across town to take a set of rooms in Fritti’s house?
It was like watching his life walk away from him.
But it had to be. A recruitable agent had to be three out of four things. Potentially profitable, cut off from social networks, and either ideologically pure, or blackmailable/compromisable in some fashion. Kanmi wasn’t blackmail fodder. He had no debts. Had never cheated on his wife. He had no addictions. And while he’d done plenty of things that probably should never make the front page, he wasn’t ashamed of any of them.
And so, Kanmi was in a very bad mood, indeed, when the first, hesitant contact was made, in a taverna not far from the university, where he’d deliberately cultivated the habit of going, once a week, to eat dinner and drink arak and bitch about the world at large. The contact was little more than a middle-aged businessman, here from Tyre to talk to a buyer about selling electronics components to a firm in Judea. Trying to get into that profitable market niche and bitching about quality control standards cutting into his bottom line. It’s just a way to keep us out of the market. No one needs those to be galvanized, not really.
Kanmi nodded his head sympathetically. And settled in to exchange rants with a seemingly friendly audience. That led to an invitation to the businessman’s summer home in Meggido. A few more chance encounters like this, leading to more invitations. Some didn’t pan out. Some led him . . . deeper. Got him introduced to fellow technomancers. A couple were, infuriatingly, former students. Those made Kanmi twitch, because he wanted to shout at them that he’d taught them better than this. But he persevered. Kept teaching his classes. Met with more and more people in the community, and began dividing them, mentally, between poseurs and people who had real clout. The people with clout, he . . . cultivated. Mostly by allowing them to cultivate him.
&nbs
p; The only respite, really, were his periodic attempts to ‘make up’ with Minori. She’d meet him at the house, which he knew for a fact was now bugged and under periodic observation by his new ‘friends,’ as they decided how deep to bring him, and how quickly. As they attempted to ascertain if his new behavior was a pose, or not. Frantically kissing his wife, touching her face, finding the new lines of stress there, the sadness at having their lives disrupted, no matter in how good a cause. His only link to reality and sanity.
Three months stretched into six. Nine. And then, finally, a curious invitation to a technomancy conference out in Mauretania. Kanmi whispered the details to Minori during one of their ‘reconciliation attempts.’
“You can’t mean to go.”
“I have to. They wouldn’t invite me out that far if they weren’t seriously considering me for . . . a more in-depth membership.”
“It’s too soon. These kinds of groups usually vet people for years.” She rolled over in the sheets, and stroked his face.
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