Two lies, Lu noted. To know the boy’s aspect, he must know the boy. Must know what conviction had set the boy to do this. And so, he tried again: A boy kills his father, without knowledge of what he does.
Another vibration, a single lie.
A boy kills his father, knowingly and purposefully, using knowledge he attained at whim. Mysticism.
Another vibration. Another error.
The boy knew of and had learned of the magic long before this murder. He killed his father in full knowledge, having learned the skill on his own, without any teacher.
There were no vibrations; the residues accepted this story as fact. Now he knew the events, but not the reason. He needed the boy’s reason.
From their encounter, Lu knew something of the boy’s motivations. The girl. The father. Lu took a stab in the dark.
He killed his father to get revenge. Lu had to force the thought into the residues, a bad sign, for the claim was so wrong the residues fought against it. I need to be more vague, Lu thought. He would have to start small, at a place the birthright could not deny.
He killed his father to… to make things right. The thought slid into the heart. The concept was an easy thing to understand, or rather, an easy thing for old Lu to understand. New Lu knew that there was not a way to make things ‘right.’ Correctness was or wasn’t, or it was neither or both, but it could not be ‘made’ – unless, of course, the maker was Lu.
He killed his father because he needed to, Lu tried. The heart accepted this probing. He needed to protect her, Lu continued. A resounding no. He needed to be rid of his father. The heart struggled, the threads of light shivering, wrapping tighter around the core. Another no, and a violent one.
Lu thought back to his meeting with the boy. Who lied to who, he reminded himself. Yes, that is it.
The boy killed his father to hide from some truth. The heart hummed, and the threads loosened, slow and cautious, snaking toward him. The birthright was attracted to itself, to the source – the aspect – that had released it. He killed his father to hide from himself. From the crimes he had committed.
The threads snaked from the orb, thrashing like a knot of snakes. They wrapped his arms, his legs, and then his torso, dragging the heart ever closer to Lu’s chest. Lu waited as the heart hovered toward him. He had done it. He knew why the boy had acted.
As the heart surrounded him, Lu could feel the flames of weeks past, saw the burning home, the boy sitting against the sign with the girl beside him. He felt the father’s pain as he died, crying for help, but unable to move, this very heart of magic pinning Deacon Indaht Trask in place with his own blanket, a gag of vellum stuffed into his mouth.
One conspirator dead, and I didn’t even have to ask. Three to go.
Lu giggled and the heart recoiled, he snagged it with a fist and pulled it closer. Liar, he told the heart. Vengeance was not a piece? The boy had let his father feel the pain. Liar… Lu contemplated. Yes, the boy is a liar, but that is not what this one tastes of. Lies, deceit, they are in his aspect, but they are not the whole. There is something deeper. Something… more familiar.
Lu glared at the heart, forcing it against the hem of his collar. And you are confused, he told it. You lie as he does, but there is no reason to lie to me. I am Lu, and you shall be too. You will be everything you desire, for I am the biggest lie of all, and you shall be a part of me.
The heart echoed, tickling his palms, as it whispered agreement. It slipped through his fingers and dove into his chest, drowning his scent in the boy’s. Lu chuckled; he did not know the boy, and he still did not understand the boy’s scent, but it would serve his needs – which happened to be unnecessary.
It was time for his plan. One of them, at least.
How do you hide a god in plain sight? Lu thought. By making it too obvious that you want him to be seen. The key to making them ignore Jem, was in making them think that Lu wanted them to notice… And by putting them at one another’s throats, but mostly that was just good fun.
Scanning his memories for an apt destination, the glint from a full moon caught Lu’s eye. Yes, the perfect place, but which moon first? Big or little? Little moon, it is murky and gray. No. No, the big moon, it was bigger. A nod. Yes, Big moon. Big moon? Another nod. Big moon. Only a wretch, a cretin, a villain – Fate or that rascal Godahn! – would choose the little moon. The big moon was for the righteous, and Lu was always righteous, so the big moon was always the right choice.
A trick of perception made Lu doubt his choice. He was always righteous, except when he wasn’t, because ‘always’ was often wrong. How could he choose the choice that was always right if he could not trust ‘always?’ Therefore, he must choose the small moon, for surely it would be the proper choice, the choice that was never. Lu grew frustrated. He liked the big moon, for it had always been his favorite, but ‘always’ was a liar, unlike ‘never,’ who was a true friend, always.
Lu sniffed. The nature of Lu was an annoying thing, and it required him to choose the path of ‘never.’ The small moon was never the right choice, and therefore, his only choice. He always had to adhere to his aspect for to do otherwise would be sacrilege. It had to be the small moon.
And thus, Lu cut a hole to the big moon.
The portal hovered before him, a red-rimmed doorway – the shape he preferred – which framed an empty landscape. The cut was scarring, painful, and the power oozed from the red scar in tendrils similar to the boy’s residues. Lu’s knees nearly buckled with the wrongness of the feeling, as if he’d cut into the world’s soul. He had not expected this response – indeed, he finally understood why the Mother would have forbidden this. Lu would have gagged, but knew he must hurry if he did not want to become terminally sick.
As he studied his beautiful creation, Lu remembered a woman who’d cut a similar hole and had entered a place without breathing. Her death had been… unpleasant. Cautious, Lu pressed his face to the portal and sucked air through pouting lips. A gentle breeze and a quiet hiss brushed his hat back till it rested on the hinds of his ears. The air was palatable, heavier in some way he didn’t understand, but breathable. Confident that this was a place he could enter without suffocating, he stepped through the portal and let it close behind him. The wrongness vanished, and the world’s soul felt whole again. Lu relaxed his muscles, only now realizing how tense he’d been.
The world he stepped onto was barren, a desert of gray dirt and rocks that stretched as far as he could see in every direction. His first thought was that he should have gone to the small moon, because the big moon was awful and ugly, and then he looked up into the sky. The world above was magnificent, a beautiful crescent hovering over the horizon. He had never thought of the world from which he’d come as a crescent – he’d assumed a circle or a cube, or preferably, a flat, endless plain – but a crescent of blue and white and green stood stark on a field of black emptiness.
Lu took off his hat and reached inside, pulling out a chair. The first he retrieved was a long garden chair, built for reclining. To get it out, he had to tilt over his hat and bang on the end, until the chair fell out in a clatter of broken wood. The legs had been snapped off at one end, and the entire chair had been split in half down the center. Lu frowned. What was the point of stranding Ivan’s favorite chair on the moon if it had already been broken? A shame. Lu reached into his hat and pulled out another chair, this one chosen at random; a white chair slatted on the back and on the sides, made of a soft, but firm material he didn’t recognize. He set it down, replaced his hat, and sat back to admire the world, as stunning and beautiful as his wedding day. That time he had been wed to Quill, not that time he had been married to Galina.
Me? he asked. Yes me, he answered.
Lu sat for a time, taking in the world’s beauty, trying to find his home. He could see several landmasses. One, which looked to be a circle of green and tan, ran along the center, east of the outermost point of the crescent’s dome. Below that, and to the west, another landmass i
ntersected with the world’s edge, and he knew that this landmass must be the continent of Lendal. He searched for Trel, but could not find it. He knew the shape of the Trellish peninsula, and he knew it should be east of Lendal, but he could not find his home. There was a continent there, but it was not as it should be. Perhaps it is somewhere else in this empty abyss.
His eyes wandered the sky until he found the sun. He could see the sun from Trel, so he did not think that Trel could be inside of it. Glancing at his home, he jumped up from his chair. The black abyss in which the world sat was growing, and the crescent narrowing. The world was going to die, swallowed up by emptiness! Lu knew that he had to do something. Cutting open the hole – to another feeling of violation – he rushed back into the village of Vale and found himself in darkness.
Understanding swept through him with a giggle. Not a crescent, a disk with phases of light, just like the moons. The shadow that devoured Trel was not a malicious beast, it was the night! To test his theory, he thought of a statement that would gather his power. The world must be flat, he guessed, and was pleased when the birthright came to him.
Pointing a finger into the sky, Lu fed the magic into a sphere of light and fired it into the air. Running through the portal and onto the moon, he searched his home world for the light. Nothing. He could feel the sphere, down on that other world, but there was nothing visible before him. So, he fed more energy into it, forcing it to grow larger and larger. For several minutes there was nothing, until finally he saw it in the southeast corner, on the very edge of the shadows. With the light as a guide, he could finally see Trellahn’s coastline, hanging at the bottom of the massive continent on the eastern edge of the crescent. Lu marveled at the world’s size. Trellahn was a speck compared to the world, a measly speck. And this is only half, he told himself. When the small orb on his staff lit up, he knew he was right.
Lu let the blue sphere die and the portal close. Lu, Lu swore, we are insignificant. The Whore did not do this. She couldn’t have. Except, he was pretty sure he’d already known that… But who did that leave? Lu’s doubts were short-lived. Me, he answered, I am the magnificent creator of everything. The thought did not soothe him as it should, for he knew it was a lie, just as he always had. Lu was the creator of nothing.
Shocked that he had wasted so much time, Lu collected himself and then… stood doing nothing. What am I doing here? He had completely forgotten. He flashed through his memories. Absentminded fool, he chided. Chapel, the Godswall at Gellin, – this time he stayed in place as he listed – Taunted boy. Ah yes, the boy.
The portal should be enough to draw Just, he would have felt the bleeding of the world’s soul, the feeling of imperfection and error, just as Lu had. He would go to Vale, he would feel the aura’s scent, and that would be enough to upset Fate; though, all of that might take several days. Long enough, hopefully, for the boy to kill Taehrn Andren. Lu had time to spare.
Small moon? Yes of course, he must go to the small moon! The small moon was the world for brilliant heroes and glorious, upstanding men who had never done anything wrong at all. The big moon was a villainous, and ungodly cesspit of boredom, a place for demons and evildoers, which Lu was not, which was why he had to leave.
I am a villain, he thought, who plots the world’s destruction, and was relieved when the birthright came. It was an old standard that he often used to satisfy the honing; the day it didn’t work would be the day he feared his own existence. But that was the trouble with Lu’s role, never could turn to always and no could become yes.
Small moon, he reminded himself. His eyes drifted to the murky, cloudy disk that was his destination. With the birthright accessible, Lu set to opening another portal.
But with the odds so astronomically out of his favor, he could only get lucky once.
The hole opened a fraction and then flashed in a vibrant and blinding light, followed by a bang and a wave of force – like a wall of wind – that thrust him into the air and off his feet. But the backlash was brief, and as quickly as he’d been thrust backward, so was he pulled in. The doorway had widened, and taken on the shape of a disk: an eye opened to a vortex of flame that tugged at him like the winds of a blizzard. Almost losing his hat, Lu shot his hands to the brim and held firm. He tried to force himself to the ground but couldn’t, the winds were too strong, too eager, and they carried him closer and closer to his death. Through the tunnel of flame, he could see the tops of trees, and then the fires took them, absorbing all in a swirl of yellows, oranges, and blues. With each second, the tear grew wider.
Panicked, Lu opened another portal in his path, and the force of the winds shot him through and into the streets of Vale. He closed the hole immediately. Lying face down on the gravel road, he rolled over to stare into the sky. He could see his mistake, a circle of red, small like a single spark in a tuft of smoke, spreading outward and growing rapidly on the smaller moon’s face.
“Eeeeesh,” he moaned.
Lu, he swore, what have I done?
“Wasn’t me,” he muttered. “Not Lu, someone else. Not Lu.”
A foot stirred the gravel above his head and he saw only the tip of the hammer as it swung down toward his skull. He owned that hammer, it was in his forge at home. Me? Lu asked. Yes, m-
His hammer struck and there was nothing.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“Mother, how does it fly?”
Her daughter’s eyes were as beautiful as they were piercing, a black pupil, perfectly round and surrounded by a whitish-gold iris. Of course, the owl shape had been a foolish attempt, for it hadn’t solved Sybil’s problem.
The change was slightly better than the original, for this world was darker than Trel, but it did little better at piercing this world’s fog-like air, and the large surface area left the eye exposed to this world’s many irritants. She had not done these experiments on her children of course, but on herself, many years ago. In the end, she had tried other methods; changing the eyes to see the colors outside the usual spectrum, the colors of heat and temperature, which had been a surprising and miraculous success. She had left the owl’s light exposure and iris, but narrowed the lids, making the eye itself flatter, and then curved the lids up at the outward ends. These changes had been necessary, a clever way to fit the extra eyelid, a transparent film independent from the other.
Sybil met Iri’s stare, and smiled. “I have told you already dear, about airflows and currents, and how the wings push the air down, and the bird up.”
“Yes,” Iri frowned, her lips a gray charcoal against her silver flesh. “I know, Mother, but Tin and I already tried to make wings, so that we could fly, and it did not work.” She pointed at the tiny hummingbird accusingly, her frown deepening to a scowl. “Why does it work for them, but not for us?”
“They are lighter in proportion to their mass, the bones less dense, and their wings stronger and faster than you could manage.”
“Oh,” Iri said, her mouth left framing an ‘O’ as her outer lid blinked and then squinted. It was still a shock to see her own expressions on her daughters’ faces.
“How do we do that?” Iri asked.
“You cannot. You are too heavy and the winds will not carry you.”
“But you said that the birthright could be made to do anything. How do I make it do that?”
It was Sybil’s turn to blink before she let her eyes wander over Iri’s form. With the changes to the skin, it was difficult to tell her daughter’s age – in retrospect she should have built some device to measure time, but to be frank, she had never cared enough to do so – but by her stature and girth, Sybil assumed her daughters must be around ten years. If this were Trel, her daughters would be apprenticed soon. Iri would likely have chosen Sybil herself, or maybe that Fifth – Tinker? – the young man who played with the internal mechanisms of windmills and waterwheels. Tin… Tin was, well, odd. She was the adventurous sort that enjoyed exploring the world around her. She might’ve chosen Harvest, or maybe that Sailor
girl Tyrena was so fond of.
“Well,” Sybil considered. She could tell her daughter it might be done, she might even be able to do it herself, but she wasn’t certain she wanted to reinforce such a dangerous idea. Body manipulation was gruesome, painful or deadly if done incorrectly, and she didn’t want her daughters dabbling in such things until they were older and wiser. “I think there are better ways to fly, Iri. Perhaps if we think on it, we can find them together.”
Iri’s face brightened and her pupils widened, the translucent film looking as smooth as her daughter’s skin.
“Where is your sister?” Sybil asked. She hadn’t seen Tin this morning, which was not out of the ordinary, but normally when she disappeared, Iri was at her side.
Iri shrugged, “I don’t know, Mother. I saw her heading for the swamp, but I don’t know where she was going.”
“She did not ask you to go with her?”
Iri shook her head, her lips pouting. “She said that I would slow her down.”
Sybil supposed that she should not be surprised. She and Galina had grown apart at about the same age, their interests diverging to follow different paths. Sybil wanted as much for her daughters as she had with Galina, a bond stronger than family, but independence as well; she only wished that Tin’s desire for individuality did not require her to embark into a world devoid of people.
“Let us find her,” Sybil suggested. With Iri at her heels, she rose from the patio chair and stepped off the wooden deck. As she stood and passed the birdfeeder, the hummingbird fluttered away into the fog, its blues and yellows fading to red heat. The lack of sunlight made this a cold world, and even the heat from a creature the size of her special hummingbirds was like a flare on a moonless night.
Death's Merchant: Common Among Gods - Book One Page 51