The Goddess Denied

by Deborah Davitt

  “You think it’ll work?”

  “There are at least two massive presences in that tower,” Trennus replied, grimacing. “I wouldn’t, personally, try anything like this without the entire Pacifica Ocean around me. Maybe on Rapa Nui Island, where all the moai statues are.” He considered it. “No, not even then.”

  “There is a great deal of seiðr at work here,” Sigrun supplied, suddenly. Adam’s head snapped towards her in surprise, and watched her shoulders move, in clear discomfort. “The air sings with it. They are using less technology this time, I think, or at least, less in the way of brute mechanical methods, and far more spell-craft.”

  In their paddling, they’d finally made it to a massive, overturned crane, sunk on its side in the water. They slipped out of the boat, and Sigrun wedged it into the crane operator’s enclosure so that it wouldn’t float away. Over the top of the overturned machine, Adam could see various men wading out into the copper-toned water, and spotted Kanmi, leading “Himi.” Each man led his son out into the waters, it seemed, and the children moved with drugged docility, and ranged in age from adolescents to toddlers. Two men actually carried infants over their shoulders. Adam’s stomach twisted. How in god’s name are we going to stop this without the children being killed?

  “Guards are heading out this way,” Trennus reported, tersely. “It’s, what, fifteen till eleven?”

  “Our reinforcements aren’t going to make it in time,” Sigrun returned. “And I see no signs of Minori.”

  Truthsayer is in a tent to the south of here, Lassair answered. She has just removed her bindings and her gag. There are guards between her and the site.

  “Go to her,” Adam said, quickly. “Tren, can you pull Sari here for your protection?”

  I am already here, Saraid responded, and Trennus’ form shimmered for a moment, as Lassair left him, taking her phoenix form before de-manifesting once again . . . and now Trennus looked a strange mix of deer and wolf, ethereal ivy-twined antlers emerging from his forehead as the quiet forest-spirit instilled in him her protections.

  Adam drew Inti’s weapon, checked the clip that the weapon now had, and thumbed off the safety. “Is that the leader?” He pointed, ignoring, for the moment, the patrol of guards coming their way, indicating a man who was, unfortunately, outside of pistol range. He stood inside the binding lines, atop one of the smaller salt pyramids, and had his arms raised now, as if giving a rousing speech.

  Sigrun squinted. “I cannot tell at this range,” she admitted, softly. “But he’s wrapped in seiðr.” She paused. “The guards are getting closer.”

  “Trennus? They’re inside sixty feet. We can’t afford noise.” Adam hated asking this, but . . . it was necessary. And Trennus had only gotten more powerful with time, as most magic-users did.

  Trennus nodded, and raised a hand, palm up, and then snapped his fingers closed, and jerked his arm down, as if pulling something. In the distance, just visible around the edge of the peeling, yellow-painted crane, Adam could see as all three guards were suddenly sucked down into the silt. There was some thrashing, but only for a second or two, and then just a little foam on the surface, and some disturbed sand, still swirling. “In the ground?” Adam asked, his stomach tight.

  “The salt pan under the water is very loose,” Trennus replied, his tone distant. “Hardly any resistance to overcome before burying them.”

  On the other side of the tower, Minori had slipped out of her restraints. Kanmi had tied the soft rope very gently, and the gag had been for show. She grabbed batteries and pieces of wire out of her husband’s duffle bag, and found the solar-powered calculator he’d left for her there, too, and kissed it, briefly, before peeking out of the tent-flap. Guards. Damn it.

  They will be quite distracted in a moment, Lassair told her calmly, as the phoenix manifested, twenty feet in front of Kanmi’s tent. The guards shouted and began to fire on the bird, which lit up incandescently, and Minori hastily got out of the tent and moved to the left, ducking into the shelter of a salt-ridge, and looking up, warily, in time to see someone’s boot heel move just past her head. Don’t look down, don’t look down, she thought, looking up at the guard who’d leveled his RPG tube at the phoenix, and who now hesitated as the firebird coalesced into the naked and glorious body of Lassair at her finest.

  There was a notable moment of complete silence as all the men in the vicinity ceased firing and simply gaped at a vision that rivaled Aphrodite fresh-sprung from the foam, and Minori scuttled away as quickly as she could, her heart beating far too quickly in her chest and ears for her liking. She was fifty-seven years old now, damn it all. She found a salt hummock to hide behind, and then another, as various men left their posts to go investigate the strange and beautiful apparition in their midst. Sloppy. Undisciplined. And thank the gods for it. She now had a very good view of the area north of the tower, where twenty sorcerers, their bodies all heavily warded with their own magic, were knee-deep in the water. Some of them holding their sons by the arm, and some of them carrying infants over their shoulders. Her heart faltered for a moment when she found Kanmi and Rig at the center of the pack, and then she dismissed her misgivings. I suppose there’s a reason for the gender-bias in the CLP, Minori thought, distantly. I’m not going to say it’s impossible for a woman to murder her own child—plenty of examples of it in the news these days—but that’s usually . . . a snap of temper, or long-term abuse. For a mother with enough discipline in her mind to be a good enough sorcerer to be recruited for this little project . . . and for that kind of woman to kill her own child for power or gain . . . it’s not impossible. But far easier to find men who can achieve the necessary mental distance, I suppose. She could see one summoner on each hilltop where gold had been poured into incised lines in the earth. Continuous incantations, invocations of greater and lesser Names poured out of their lips as they struggled to keep everything that they’d bound, tied together. All right. Where are the others, and what can I do to help here?

  A glance to the south showed her that Lassair was leading the various guards on a merry chase back through their own camp. A few, however, were starting to recall duty, and shifting back towards their watch posts. You don’t need those weapons. In fact . . . yes. Let me help you with that. Minori formed her first spell as she leaned against the gritty surface of the salt hummock, and reached out for the rocket-propelled grenade launcher held by the closest returning guard. He was carrying it over his shoulder, pointed at the sky, and it took only a whisper of power to bend the tube inwards. The grenade would never leave the weapon. It would explode in his face, instead.

  Minori had been preaching to her students for years the value of subtlety in magic. The person who won a battle was not always the person who could make the biggest explosion; sometimes, it was just a matter of putting exactly the right amount of weight in the right place to trigger an avalanche. Working quickly, she replicated the same effect on the other RPGs in sight. Pistols. Blunderbusses. If it was a firearm, and inside her sixty-foot range, Minori rigged it to backfire, painfully, on its owner. Each time, it required only a whisper of power. One that the other technomancers out there would barely detect over all the rapid oscillations of each other’s shields, and the enormous quantities of magic already seething in the air. Twenty years’ worth, if Kanmi’s right. Twenty years of daily preparation. They’ve been far more careful than the people from whom they took the idea. Far more patient. But in the end . . . gold is gold. It’s a very soft metal.

  With that thought in mind, Minori took one more careful look around, and focused her attention on the gold inside the binding lines. She exhaled, and increased local heat on the metal in one small area. A two-thousand-degree increase would be noticeable, but she didn’t need to do it on a wide scale. The salt crystals around the gold liquefied, first, seeping down into the rock all around and beneath itself . . . and then her focal point, an inch-wide slice of the gold, followed suit, dripping down into the rocky, gravelly area beneath its curre
nt location. Lassair? Please tell the others that the bindings have been weakened, at least a little.

  Passing the message. Steelsoul recommends that you keep your head down and remain on shore. Flamesower believes that the water will be an unhealthy location for humans shortly, and I agree with him.

  Minori looked over her shoulder, apprehensively, and reinforced her own shields and barrier spells now. The guards couldn’t be distracted by Lassair forever . . . and ahead of her, at the base of the temple structure, she saw Salicar Germelqart raise his hands and begin an invocation to the assembled crowd. “Brethren!” he called out, in Carthaginian, which Minori understood poorly. Then she felt Lassair circle back around, and then the spirit slipped through and into her, and her understanding coalesced, even as her shields were reinforced by Lassair’s will.

  “Today, we take our final step towards liberating our people from the tyranny of Rome! Today, we will finally know what it means to breathe free air. Today, we will remake the world. Baal-Hamon stands ready to be torn apart, and through his sacrifice and transubstantiation, the earth will be renewed. Baal-Samem stands ready to assist us in maintaining order in the turbulent time, until Baal-Hamon can return to us.” The patent insincerity in the man’s voice galled Minori. He’s not even trying anymore, is he? The sorcerer paused. “I call on our brother of Tyre to be the first to give his son in sacrifice.”

  To the north, Adam clicked his satellite phone off in some frustration. “They’re pushing their vehicles to their top speed, and are still a half hour away from us.” he told the others.

  “In a half hour, half the sacrifices will have been made,” Trennus said, sharply. “Kanmi was just called up to make the first sacrifice.”

  “That . . . gives us a little stall time,” Adam muttered. “Rig can compose some pretty damned convincing illusions these days.”

  “Five, ten minutes, at the most,” Sigrun said, quietly. “Kanmi will have to pretend to kill Himi, pretend to dig out the heart, present the heart to the idol inside the tower . . . burn it, I assume . . . drag the ‘body’ out. And then the next sacrifice will be called.” She looked at Adam. “There is something that will delay the sacrifices a good deal more.”

  “You want to call Nith?”

  “I would prefer to hold off. I would rather not be the cause of a war among the gods.” She glanced at Trennus, overlain by Saraid. “Can you tell Rig to make an illusion of Nith? He can hear you, even if you can’t sense him, correct?”

  He has been able to hear us in times past, Saraid replied, calmly.

  Good idea, Adam thought, and nodded. “Let’s try for distraction and subterfuge before we commit to anything else,” he agreed. “Pass it along, Sari.” He crouched lower behind the crane, and watched the scene.

  Kanmi had already begun propelling the young man disguised as his son forwards towards the stairs, splashing through the water. “We need a delay,” he muttered under his breath. Anything that slows the ritual down, gives our people a chance to get in position to do . . . whatever they’re going to do . . . .

  Baal-Hamon, in his mind, predictably querulous and capricious, muttered, And I will have no sacrifices at all today.

  Yes, but you might get out of this alive. Kanmi had no time for the god’s recalcitrance at the moment, and shoved Rig to the ground, trying to make it look as if the ‘drugged’ young man had slipped. He leaned down to haul his apparent son back upright, and his hand closed on . . . air. Kanmi’s eyes widened, but there was just enough resistance present for him to handle the limb, and he did his best to look only at the illusion in front of him. I hate being the only person without a script.

  The illusionary Himi kept moving, just as a vast shadow darkened the sky, as if a cloud had just passed before the sun. Kanmi looked up, and ‘Himi’ paused in mid-step, stumbling. Shouts of terror and panic rose all around him, and however drugged the children were, some of them still screamed as the vast form of a black-silver dragon soared through the air, and landed on the ground beside the salt pyramid with an impact that shook the ground. Kanmi missed a step; it was the tremor that convinced him that this was, in fact, Sigrun’s damned pet.

  Ten feet away, Rig’s eyes were half-closed as he crouched in the warm water, feeling the heat of the sun on his face, reflected off its surface. He was bending light away from his body; seen from precisely the right angle, his body would have been still visible, but would have appeared a prism’s shimmer, and nothing more. He was maintaining three separate illusions at once: his invisibility, the shell of the Himi clone, and the splendor that was Niðhoggr. He couldn’t have imagined doing this ten years ago. Now, Rig understood his powers better, and had grown into them . . . but even so, one of these figments was going to have to go. Himi’s form dropped into the water, and, sinking in, vanished. In the confusion, no one but Kanmi probably noticed, and that gave Rig the freedom to concentrate on Nith. He’d coordinated touch-down with Saraid, and Trennus had created a small, localized earthquake to make the illusion that much more concrete, and by now, people should have been running.

  Instead, all of the sorcerers were casting, and Rig swore under his breath. Had the first three fireballs simply appear to bounce off Nith’s hide, but they were, in actuality, going through the illusion, and touching down inside the camp itself . . . sending the people in the tents running and screaming at the fires that sprang up there. A couple of the guards on the west side of the tower tried to fire their RPGs at the enormous illusion, only to have them backfire and explode in their faces, adding their screams to the cacophony around Rig. He was used to maintaining his illusions under fire these days, but he needed to have Nith react to the attacks. He’d counterattack, but they’re not going to feel anything . . . . Rig gritted his teeth and had the dragon roar, and Trennus helpfully made the ground shake again.

  Loki’s son glanced off to his left, and saw the various summoners all raising their hands and incanting, furiously. Great. Summoning something big. With my luck, an efreet. Probably won’t be someone helpful, like Zhi, either.

  Rig felt an enormous surge of power, as the various sorcerers stopped throwing hodge-podge, reflexive attacks at his dragon, ones that he was having Nith ‘dodge’ or be unaffected by, in turn. Instead, they all reached out and pulled on the god that they were bound to . . . and slammed the figmentary construct with a united thrust.

  “Illusion!” one of them shouted, as Rig’s grip on his creation failed. He had no idea what to simulate in response to that raw wave of force, but from inside the tower, there came an unearthly roar of anger. Oh, didn’t like having them pull on your power? Rig thought, sheltering himself in his invisibility field, still, and ducking out of the way of one sorcerer who jogged past him, looking for a fleeing son.

  Taking advantage of the confusion, Rig stepped forwards, invisible, and slammed one of the nearby sorcerers under the chin with his fist, stepped in, and took the baby right off the man’s shoulder, deftly finishing by tripping the man into the water. Rig didn’t dare stay in place and do what he really wanted to do, which would have been to hold the man’s head under the briny water till he stopped struggling. But not with a child in his arms, and not while there were so many damned others to try to save.

  Kanmi incanted as rapidly as the other sorcerers, but relied solely on his own strength of will . . . and did little things to subvert the others, as subtly as he could, draining energy out of their spells and cannibalizing it for himself. Charging the batteries in his pockets, redirecting energy here and there . . . until they all, as one, reached for their links to Baal-Hamon. He felt the god scream in outrage inside his mind, and Kanmi dropped to his knees, holding his head. How the others weren’t affected, he couldn’t understand . . . No. They really are using Baal-Samem as a mask. A way to protect themselves from Baal-Hamon. I was right. I must be the only one who’s not insulated from him. Because I chose to give myself completely to this capricious, powerful being. Damn it all.

  I will not be used in
this way! I will give my power when I am ready. I will not be suckled on like a sow with too many piglets! Kanmi reeled at the voice, and could feel Baal-Hamon pulling back against all the others.

  In and around all the screaming and shouting, Kanmi could hear the sonorous chanting of the summoners. Invoking one Name, over and over again. They’d been incanting in that fashion since they’d first seen the illusory dragon’s form—and they were caught in the summoning. Once this kind of binding was begun, once attention had been attained, you couldn’t stop and tell the being “Nevermind.” So as the illusion winked out, the summoners’ chanting sounded more and more agitated, and Kanmi, on his knees, turned his head in time to see Germelqart ‘s face turn cheese-white. “Stop!” the man shouted. “It was a trick! An illusion! Don’t summon him!”

  “Dagon!” the summoners cried out, as one. “Dagon, Dagon, Dagon!”

  Oh gods, no. Not him. That’s a really bad idea! Kanmi looked around, and staggered back to his feet, and ran forward a couple of steps, and picked up and threw the closest summoner out of the binding circle. In the chaos, it wasn’t even noticed, other than by the summoner himself, who landed on his back in the water and struggled to sit up, panicking.