She got out of bed, slowly, feeling the stab of a nerve in her back pressing down, like a red-hot filament, into her hip and shooting down her right leg. Their bed had always been a compromise between his culture and hers; it was low to the ground, and had a thin mattress, but it was still a platform bed. She stiffly pulled on a robe, and turned on the light. In seven years of his undercover work, she hadn’t changed a single thing in the house. But after coming home from Carthage, she’d very carefully, and with Masako, Himi, and Bodi’s help, put all of Kanmi’s belongings into boxes, and moved them to the attic. Not his books; those were too valuable to be put into storage. But she’d covered his shelves with sheets, so she couldn’t look at them. Thus, his side of their bedroom was . . . empty. She knew she should put some of her things on that side. Reclaim the space. She knew that she should do a lot of things.
Min did her best not to blame Adam for sending Kanmi on the job. They’d all talked about it. They’d all agreed to it. But the brief and bitter jags of anger still needed to be directed at someone, and most of the time, she directed them at Kanmi himself, for . . . not letting her join him. For keeping her back from the blast that had immolated him.
But the spikes of anger were less frequent these days. She simply had too much to keep her busy. She had Masako’s little daughter, Shiori. She was head of the tiny technomancy school at the university. And there was the fact that the world seemed to be coming apart at the seams. She spent two or three hours a day answering messages from ley-mages and sorcerers all over the world on her studies of how seismology interacted with magic. But while she had very real concerns about the entire Ring of Fire region at the moment, Europa and Africa dominated the messages left for her. There were mountain ranges in northern Europa that were under severe strain, and eruptions occurred whenever mad gods burrowed into the earth and lit up the ley-lines. Greenland and Iceland were bastions of the Valhallan gods, and were, for the moment, geologically stable, only trembling periodically in reaction to tremors elsewhere. But the volcanic island of Beerenberg had been spewing ash and lava non-stop for the past six months. The Haruj volcanic field in North Africa, southeast of the city of Oea, was home to a hundred and fifty volcanoes, and most of them had been active in the last two years. All the carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere was a greenhouse gas, but the ashes entering the heavens also helped block sunlight, preventing insolation. So weather patterns were growing a little odder, but holding in an odd, fragile equilibrium, for the moment.
There was a gentle knock at her door. “Mother?” Masako called through it. “I was awake feeding Shiori, and listening to the news. I think you should hear this.” Masako had been staying with her, on and off, while Solinus had been sent to the Germanian border, for a change; he’d been stationed here in Jerusalem for about nine months, and then turned around and sent back out again. God-born and spirit-born were simply too valuable not to use in that fashion. Masako was, at least, in a training position to finish out her military commitments. But in the meantime, an infant in its first year really needed more than one person to help with it, and that meant that Minori frequently had house-guests.
She shuffled out of her bedroom, and reached up and took Shiori in practiced hands, as the baby fussed uncomfortably on Masako’s shoulder. “She never seems to settle down for me,” Masako said, glumly.
“She’s got a little touch of colic, I think. Lassair would know.”
“Lassair is an expert, but Solinus and I sort of want Shiori to be ours.” Masako made a face. “Not that I think she’d steal her or anything crazy like that. But . . . .”
Minori chuckled, and patted the baby lightly on the back, and settled down in the living room, watching the far-viewer. And then, immediately, her stomach twisted as she realized that she was looking at Edo. She could see Fujiyama in the background, and realized that smoke was coming from the snow-clad peak. “Oh . . . oh, no,” she said, quietly. “The last time Fuji erupted was . . . 1663, I think.”
She tried to do the math in her head, and fuzzily realized that Nippon was six hours or so ahead of her here in Jerusalem. Which made it . . . midmorning at her parents’ home in Hokkaido. Minori handed the baby back to her daughter, and dialed the number from memory. She and her mother had gotten into the habit of weekly phone calls, as they’d worked to repair a rift that hadn’t really been anyone’s fault. After seven rings, her mother finally picked up. “Hello?”
“Mother! Are you and Father all right?”
“Minori-chan, we’re nine hundred miles away from Fujiyama.”
Minori set her teeth for a moment. “There are at least sixty volcanoes on Hokkaido,” she reminded her mother, keeping her voice mild. “Are any of them showing any signs of erupting?”
“One, yes. Asahi-dake. But that’s very far to the west of here, as well.” Her mother’s tone was dismissive; one couldn’t live in such a volcanic region for decades and retain the sort of fear that outsiders had. There was respect for the volcanoes, and their power, but also . . . a certain amount of comfort born of familiarity.
Minori came to an instant decision. “Mother, I would very much like it if you and Father would consider coming here to visit. Masako is staying with me, with the baby for the time. You would like to see your great-grandchild, would you not?”
“Oh, it’s a very long way to travel,” her mother said, hesitantly. “I do not know if your father is quite prepared to make such a journey. He is ninety-four this year, you will remember.”
Her father had outlived his first wife, and had, about ten years ago, married her mother, which wasn’t really required of him; she was, after all, his official concubine, and had been for years. All of the estates and trusts had been set up and ready to go for years, and he was, by his own report, enjoying his retirement, getting up early every morning to go for long walks so as to enjoy the beauty of nature. His will was indomitable, his body remarkably indefatigable, and Minori wasn’t sure she could pry him out of Hokkaido with a crowbar. And just as clearly, her mother did not wish to tell her no. Minori pressed, delicately, “I would be pleased to have you both in my home. If you could persuade him, I think it would be very good for all of us. You may even extend the invitation to my father’s other children, if you think it appropriate.” She made a face on her end of the line, and Masako gave her a dubious look. Her various half-siblings hadn’t spoken to her much when she’d brought Kanmi to Hokkaido for their marriage, and not at all, since. The problem wasn’t that he was a foreigner; after nine hundred years of trade with Rome and Qin and many other places throughout the world, intermarriage was a fact of life in Nippon, though not as much among the nobility as the lower classes. No, the problem was Minori herself. Battle-sorcery, housed in very much the wrong body. And that her daughter had the self-same skills? Even more dubious.
“I will ask your father,” her mother told her, choosing her words with evident care. “But I must admit that I suspect he will prefer to remain here.”
Minori lifted a finger, and changed the channels on the far-viewer without leaving her seat. This channel had a far more in-depth report, showing fumaroles on Mount Tarumae venting steam. Yes, her family was in one of the least volcanic areas of the island. On the other hand . . . Mount Chūbetsu, Mount Meakan, Mount Raiden . . . the list went on and on. Many hadn’t erupted in hundreds of years, and now, according to this report, all were showing signs of seismic activity. “Where is the pressure coming from?” she muttered to herself, in Latin, and then apologized hastily in Nipponese, adding, “Would it help if I came to you and made all the arrangements?”
“Mother!” Masako hissed over the now-sleeping baby’s head. “That is not a good idea.”
Minori made a quick, dismissive gesture—probably picked up from Kanmi—and continued to try to persuade her mother, eventually hanging up and saying, “It will be far more difficult for my parents to tell me no after I’ve traveled all the way there. If I can get one of them out, I might be able to get both of th
em out.” Her expression remained, however, taut. “I don’t understand where the extra energy is coming from that’s lighting off these volcanoes, however. I haven’t heard a single report about kami dying. Or mad godlings in the area.”
Winnowing through her old contact list from the seismology and ley-line studies crowd in the next twenty-four hours told her a slightly different story. Many of the people outside of Rome’s borders were hesitant to speak, but she could hear whole tales in the pauses on the other end of phone lines. There were records of quakes in Qin and India . . . not a surprise, really, given that the Hindu-Kush lay between them. An eruption occurred, twelve hours into her research spree, at Changbai Mountain, on the border between Qin and Korea; the Manchu and Koreans considered the mountain holy, she knew, and had worshipped it as an ancestral site for thousands of years. Oh, gods, she thought, quietly. Adam was right. The pattern of predation is continuing. There are mad ones in the Ring of Fire. And the governments there aren’t broadcasting their presence for fear of being perceived as weak, I suppose. Or to avoid creating panic.
There were, literally, thousands of kami venerated in Nippon, and just as many in Korea. The mudang, or shamans, of Korea—always female, and dedicated to intervening between humanity and the spirits and gods—were inclusive, rather than exclusive in their worship, just as Shintoism and Taoism were. If a god or a spirit required veneration, they were venerated. There were adherents of Confucian philosophy all through Qin, Korea, and a dozen other smaller nations in the area, but that was philosophy, a way of living, not a belief structure. There were millions of people who followed Buddhism, and that was a religion . . . but one centered on a man who had supposedly been perfected through cycle after cycle of rebirth, rather than being a god-born or a spirit-touched. Buddha had also taught, firmly, that there was no intermediary between humanity and the divine, though any number of god-born had begged to differ over the centuries. Buddha had also taught that gods were subject to karma, and existed in a decaying realm, and that there was a divine essence beyond them, which was his goal to join.
There was a dialectic that had been written on this conundrum written in the seventh century AC, by a Nipponese sennin. The author claimed to have overheard a conversation between a spirit once, summoned by a Shinto summoner, and a Buddhist monk, and proceeded to recount it in his work
The spirit had been . . . puzzled. Where I am from, there is no consequence. One can never learn. Never grow. One can only be what one is, caught in an eternal moment, either devoured, or devouring. Making allies, enemies, or fleeing. There is no duration, so whatever has happened, has always happened. What we know, we have always known.
“Never dying, never being reborn,” the monk had supposedly told the spirit. “You have freedom from the wheel, but . . . still strife. And yet, you also have transcendence. Why do you come to this place?”
We do not die, but we might be devoured. But we can never actually die, so we might well be devoured, again and again, eternally. We come here so that we may learn. So that we may experience things, even suffering, and grow from them. There is risk. We might die. But we also might grow.
“There is no such thing as suffering. It is merely a mental construct.”
I disagree. I have experienced suffering. I am not human. I have no capacity for imagination or invention, as you do.
“Experience is also an illusion. There is nothing in this world that is truly ours, not even the fleeting sensations that our bodies translate.”
I respectfully disagree. What I have experienced in this world has changed me, over centuries. I am not now what I was, even decades ago. And yet, when I return to the Veil, I will always have been what I am now.
“And there you will devour, or be devoured, yes? It is a shame to spend eternity so. If you are capable of change, you should consider embracing peace. Tranquility. Non-violence.”
I left the Veil for that I was continuously consumed when I was there. I was weak. Now, I am stronger. I might not choose to consume others, but I will not permit myself to be consumed any more.
“But if you cannot die there, what difference does it make?”
Being devoured creates intense suffering.
“Suffering is a mental construct—”
Yes. You have said that before. I suggest that you allow yourself to be devoured, and tell me how much of the pain was invented by your imagination when you have passed through a tiger’s gullet.
Minori thought that the Awakened One might well be deified now, after centuries of what was, effectively, a form of ancestor worship. But she had yet to meet anyone who could substantively claim that the Buddha had spoken to them or performed a miracle. It would rather go against his ethos, after all. She couldn’t say so in public while on Roman soil, due to the Edict of Diocletian, but she couldn’t fathom the entire religious system. The fact that there were no god-born of Buddha worried her, these days. Technically, there were no god-born of the god of Abraham, either, but Judeans were far more foreign to her than her erstwhile Qin and Indian neighbors. The thought of over a billion people, world-wide, who might have absolutely nothing standing between them and the mad gods besides the sennin who were sealed to the Hindu and Qin gods . . . kept her up at night.
The Qin god-born mostly included the direct descendants of the Emperor Shaohao. Shaohao had been one of the Five Celestial Emperors, said to be the descendant of a weaver fairy and the planet Venus, and who had ruled an empire of birds, and who now helped regulate the sunset. That sounded very much like a spirit-born or god-born ruler who had either ascended, like the valkyrie Eir, or Heracles. Or he could have been a spirit who’d taken an avatar to rule, temporarily, as Mamaquilla had done in Tawantinsuyu. In the end, the vast majority of Qin god-born were of the Imperial line. Most of them stayed in the Forbidden City, and did not venture out among normal mortals; that task was left for sorcerers and summoners and the more recent ley-mages, who were usually western-educated. So . . . Qin had gods. And spirits. And they were mostly worshipped by Taoists, and the ancient god-emperors were venerated, so there were . . . loci of belief. But again, those god-born rarely ventured out of the Forbidden City. And in India, the god-born only belonged to the upper castes, as well.
That didn’t leave a lot of god-born to try to get in the path of the mad godlings. There were thousands of competent sorcerers and summoners in both countries, many in their armed forces. But some of their sorcerers and summoners were dedicated pacifists. Minori wasn’t sure if they’d stand and fight, even seeing something as inimical as a mad godling bearing down on them. Then again, there was no way of telling if an ordinary sorcerer actually could do much against a godling. They could stand against ghul. Fighting the dead shouldn’t actually go against anyone’s morals . . . should it?
Standing in one place and refusing to be moved won’t be enough. Passive resistance is too passive. We saw that in Chaldea. Where the godling killed ten thousand people at once, and turned them into ghul. Used the power of their lives to fuel the ghul transformation. And then unleashed them on the rest of the city, to devour for it. It was weakened . . . just enough for Zhi to fight it. And Zhi is as potent a destructive force as any. Maybe a god like Shiva might have a chance against these things. Destruction vs. destruction. A purely generative god . . . technically, opposite forces should cancel one another out. And yet, I cannot see a spirit like Lassair doing anything against a godling. She would try. She would stand, she would fight, she would unleash all her power against it . . . but I think she would be devoured. Hence why she is not on the front lines. Not like Sigrun. Not like so many of Lassair’s own children.
Minori looked at the map again, and stared at India, as well, and resolved to give Adam ben Maor a call on the subject. He’d lived there for two years, after all. But it seemed to her, that Tawantinsuyu, with its thousands of small gods, was a . . . test-case, of sorts, for the entirety of Asia. They’d fallen. Rapidly, and almost unremarked by their own people, until the larger,
more powerful gods began to fall silent, too.
Adam, on the phone, agreed with her assessment of the situation. “That’s what a few people in Judean Intelligence have been saying, too. The biggest question will be answered when the mad gods start attacking India. If they’ve been avoiding India because the Buddha is at least as . . . present . . . as our god here in Judea, it’s one thing. Not to mention Rama, Shiva, Kali, and all the other Hindu gods. But if they’ve just been picking off low-hanging fruit first, and now that they’re stronger . . . .”
“Adam,” Minori interrupted, her tone apologetic, “Judging from the seismology reports, I think they’re already there, and in Qin. Siam, too. I think the various governments aren’t publicizing the attacks, for the much the same reason that the government of Nahautl didn’t publicize the death of Tlaloc in 1955. They don’t want to cause a panic, to have people lose faith in the gods.”
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