by Liv Savell
It was no great fountain, but it would do. They had only to find Mascen first.
Va’al reached for the shadows, then used them to feel out into the liminal space around him. Maoz was there, fainter than he once would have been, in the height of his power, but still, his magic pulsed through the Shadow Realm, a beacon for Va’al to follow. The Trickster God stepped back into Thloegr on a narrow side street, just to the left of Maoz.
“Maoz, Va’al,” Etienne’s voice erupted suddenly from the sigil beneath their ears, “The path ahead leads to Mascen if Enyo’s last sighting was accurate.”
The Beast God grinned. “It has been too long since we have hunted together. Let us stalk this wayward pup.”
Memories of other hunts sparked a thrill in Va’al’s chest. This was his son, yes, but it still had the taste of battles past, of using his power, of fighting alongside the other Gods.
Then, the walls around them shifted.
A beautifully colorful storefront slid into the street ahead of them with the world-shattering sound of tons of stone scraping stone, and cobblestone rippled out over the space in its wake. The street, once straight, now elbowed sharply to the left.
Va’al looked at Maoz. “Does it ever bother you that you give your children wings but have none of your own?”
The Beast God just grunted and turned down the new street in search of some other path.
༄
“What was that?” Delyth skidded to a stop, one hand on the blood rune Etienne had drawn on her skin, and waited for the mage to answer. Just seconds before, the city had trembled with the force of some collision, the sound of grating rock clearly audible in the quiet of this frightened warren.
“Mascen’s moving things around,” came the answer, hollow as though from a great distance. Of course. The God of Disaster was of Va’al’s ilk. He would find ways to trick and deceive them.
“Am I still on the right path?”
“Yes.”
Delyth flared her wings but refrained from jumping aloft. The buildings were too close for flying among them to be safe, and she remembered all too well how easily Mascen had yanked her from the sky before. Still, she was so blind on the ground.
She took up her easy run once more, her feet slapping against the even cobblestones that blanketed all of Caerthleon’s streets. The Marble City, travelers had called it when they stopped at Glynfford in her youth, and now she understood why. Though the buildings and streets were made of pale limestone rather than marble, all of the city was paved, the buildings stone rather than flammable wood. It must have taken centuries to construct, and it would all fall today if they failed.
Delyth turned around a corner and crashed into a wooden cart. A child screamed. Boxes went tumbling to the street and smashed open with sounds of shattering terracotta. Delyth stumbled back, only just keeping herself from falling atop the sword strapped between her wings.
Two men stood before her, one of them sheltering a young girl behind his body. They looked to have been unloading the cart in some desperate hurry. There were more boxes stacked just inside the open door of a home to Delyth’s left. Her temper was a riptide.
The taller of the two men had several inches on the warrior, but her wings gave her a sense of height and size that intimidated most. He was warm-skinned but had paled considerably at her appearance. “Take what you want,” he told her, his voice shaking only slightly. “But leave my husband and child.”
Delyth rubbed her hand over her eyes. “Your city is under attack by five Gods, and you decide that your goods are more important than protecting your lives? Than protecting your daughter’s life?”
Somewhere deeper within the city, the scream of a building being torn from its foundation filled the air, but the man, red-faced now, tried to argue. “Our lives won’t be worth much if we die of starvation a moon from now! We need these wares.”
“It’s die today or have a moon to figure it out. Get inside. In a basement or cellar if you have one, and shelter any who ask.”
The second man reached out to touch the first, his other hand still holding their daughter behind him, and the tall man deflated at last. “Get Baru,” he told his husband, and together they fled the streets with only what they could carry.
Delyth cursed them for idiots and distractions and continued on.
Chapter XXV
Eleventh Moon, First Quarter, Caerthleon
Blood dribbled down the skin of Enyo’s jaw and throat. It wasn’t from ripping someone else's flesh with her teeth. It was her own. She had managed to grab onto Mascen, who had been evading them all for an hour, but he had swung and punched her in the mouth before she could drag him away. No stranger to combat, Enyo returned the blow, but as Mascen reached for her with his burning touch, fear sprung up in her heart. Her body was no longer mortal, but it remembered the agony of his curse.
Her grip faltered a moment, a breath, and he yanked free, spiriting away while she fumbled to recover. Mascen was swift at manipulating the cobblestone streets, at convincing the very buildings to change their places. He was concocting a maze that stumped the Gods and mage alike.
From a rumble to her left, Enyo deducted that he was too far now to recapture and paused long enough to spit out her own viscera. They were Gods, but so was he. And he had been accruing power for hundreds of years. She hadn’t been adequately worshiped in a lifetime. Three lifetimes, actually. Her new body was powerful, but at times awkward to command; this was a fight she would have won in a matter of seconds before. Now, she was losing.
“Mage!” Enyo spat again, blood and spit oozing down her chin. He had explained that while Etienne could hear and speak to them, they would not hear one another. He was the only one who had the entire picture. “What’s the point of all your schooling if you cannot out think Mascen!? Enough of this chasing, this folly. We are too weak alone. We need each other to face him. Fix this.”
“You aren’t supposed to be facing him on your own, Enyo,” he growled at the Goddess through their connection. “Tell me as soon as you see him, and I’ll give you directions so that you might lead him towards the others.”
Lead Mascen to the others? Laughable, all of their little plans crumbling. Her son wasn’t following them at all. He didn’t care for the bait and instead had the Gods chasing their tails in the maze he made.
When next she heard the mage’s voice, it sounded tight with worry even over the distance. “Go quietly.”
She didn’t need some half-brained human telling her to go quietly! Enyo knew how to hunt. Smothering a growl of frustration, she pressed down the street, cutting through a half-crushed alley and climbing over rubble to arrive on the opposite side of what she thought might be a butchery. The smell of putrified viscera stung her nose and throat.
Good, she thought, the reek will hide my scent.
Closing her eyes, Enyo let her senses roam. Beneath echoes of the earth, still dizzy with Mascen’s manipulation and the breathy sighs of the wind, she heard the rustle of cloth against stone. No mortal would be foolish enough to explore the streets now. Inhaling sharply, the metallic taste of blood and sulfur coated her tongue. Mascen.
The eastern breeze brought her the scent, so Enyo turned left.
She picked her way through the jungle of broken stone, urging each rock and leaf to be quiet. To dampen the sound of her approach. It worked, the next turn she took bringing Mascen into sight again.
Easing back behind the corner, she brushed a finger against the rune at her ear. “Mage, I have found him.”
✶
Etienne breathed a sigh of relief at Enyo’s whisper. He could just make out the form of Mascen fleeing towards the center of the city, its big central courtyard deserted but for the fountain that gurgled there, silent at this distance. Quickly, he turned the Gods in that direction, all but Va'al, who had disappeared from his sight and hearing both. Probably into the Shadow Realms if Etienne had to guess.
He ground his teeth in frustration, willing t
he others to move quickly but silently.
Come on… They were all gaining, Enyo flying on Mascen’s heels and the others eating up ground. Soon it would be three against one, and they might be able to herd Mascen towards the fountain.
And then, with a sound like a rockslide, Mascen brought down an entire building, rubble raining down around Enyo and cutting off Esha and Maoz. Aryus winked into existence behind the nature Goddess, hauling her out of the way before she was crushed, but they might as well be starting over.
“Etienne,” Delyth’s voice startled him in its quiet intensity. “Left towards the sound of the collapse?”
The mage swallowed. Delyth, on the other side, hadn’t been cut off at all. She was perfectly positioned to reach Mascen, either to delay or coax him into following her closer to the fountain.
Perfectly positioned to throw away her life.
“No, to your right. The left path dead-ends in two turns.” He didn’t relax until she turned away, deep into the surrounding buildings.
♨
Mascen yanked up a hunk of the road, stones and dirt scattering. Enyo was gaining on him once more, her cracked-magma face split open by a vicious grin. She could not hurt him, not without Calamity, not in her current state. Still, he could not seem to shake her, and this constant flight was tiresome. He skidded to a stop and turned to face her, lifting his hands, palm-down, to the height of his chest. The city around him answered, rising in a dirt and cobble wave that he sent racing down the street. It picked up momentum as it went, growing with each piece of debris it consumed. In a matter of heartbeats, Mascen could no longer see his mother behind the wave, but oh how he wished he could. He wanted to see her thrown back, crushed by the very land she claimed to have dominion over.
And then, the wave split. Enyo stood framed between the two halves even as they rumbled past her to splash street carnage against buildings or through windows. Her arms were raised, and she panted with effort, but still, she was smiling.
Mascen turned and ran, cursing her, cursing the Vassal that had borne her, and cursing any who aided her. May she find herself back in the Cursed Realms and rot there for the rest of time.
As fixated on the pursuit of Enyo as he was, Mascen realized a moment too late that darkness gathered behind him. He jerked away from the shadows turning towards the next opening, the next street. He would bring half the city down on this sector, let his parents pick through it while he finished the others. He took one step, another, and then a long-fingered hand closed about his shoulder. Mascen spun and lashed out, his hands glowing as they heated to the temperature of a volcano's core. Even that would harm the King of Shadows.
Va'al’s smirk was the only thing left, a glowing white-toothed grimace and quickly fading. Mascen lunged forward, sinking his pale arms elbow deep into the depths from which Va’al attacked. The shifting mass was cold, powder-fragile, and crumbling. He was not made to touch the unplaces. Still, he thrust himself deeper, feeling for something, anything solid. He grinned when he found it. His fingers wrapped around something slippery but real within the depths, and the God grunted as he hauled back, trying to force Va'al into the daylight realm of destruction and pain. No matter how many times he thought he had a grip on the form, it shifted and changed.
With a scream of rage, Mascen watched as the shadows disappeared, Va’al with them. He needed to make the trickster God hurt, needed to tear his new form apart. Va’al deserved it, deserved to spend the next three hundred years in pain as Mascen had done, alone and chained to some solitary rock. Five on one, Mascen couldn’t defeat them. That was why he wasn’t even bothering to try. But one on one or two on one? In their newly minted forms, not fully set nor powered? He should be able to harm them.
With the Gods in retreat, Mascen would then have time to make a proper plan. Amass followers and gather more strength and power. He had once been nearly as popular as his dear mother. He could do it again. And with armies of men and halfbreeds, he could face down Enyo and Va'al and all their little companions and finally rule supreme over Rhosan. Unabated, ultimate, and final.
But first, he’d have to catch one of the snakes —
Mascen looked down. There was something glassy in the curve of his shoulder, somehow moving and still at once. A shadow, small and unassuming, smeared like dirt or blood across his body. Something easily ignored.
Only, he had seen the mark before. Borne it once.
Hissing, he laid his burning hand upon it, but even as his skin bubbled and oozed, magma sealing it up and drying…
“Cursed Realms!” Mascen bellowed. The smudge had not faded. His father, the sly creature, had left his mark. And that meant the others would try to do so as well. They would all ward him, send him back to his island with five magical anchors so that he would not be able to tear himself free for another three hundred years.
Of course, he didn’t know then what he knew now.
The crunch of gravel under heel made Mascen look up. There was Enyo, eyes like fire and face wild. He knew his mother well enough to know she would be proud of Va'al’s pathetic little trick. She was always amused by his father’s meddling.
“Stop fleeing like a coward,” her voice was the thundering of waterfalls. She was trying to bait him into a confrontation, into chasing her.
Mascen smirked. So predictable. With the wink of an eye, he was bounding through the streets again, away from his honored mother.
Faster.
There was the beast at his left, growling and lunging closer. Mascen whipped Maoz back with a lance of wind and bounded onward.
Faster.
Esha careened around a corner, and Mascen laughed. How ridiculous that she should think she could stand a chance against him?! He bowled over her, and the Goddess’s body crashing into the earth could be heard echoing through the alleys for miles.
If he could get to the back of the city, then he would lose them in the sewers and pick them off one by one.
A flap of wings overhead had Mascen ducking between two buildings, too close together for Aryus, the idiot Death God, to fit between. Not with those wings. Instead, Aryus landed in the open street beyond, chortling. Mascen was trapped, cut off by his own maze, and without the time to rearrange the streets again. Enyo would be here in a moment, or Va’al—stepping out of some pocket of shadows like a back-alley whore. Then, he saw the door. Mascen tore through the home of a merchant, ignoring their sniveling cries as they cowered away from his break-neck charge. He was through the next entrance and into the courtyard beyond before the Gods could make use of his blunder. Idiots. They were nowhere to be seen, left in his wake as he finally made it to Caerthleon’s main square. The stalls were empty of vendors, more barren than he had ever seen it, even on the day when he had taken this place for his own. The fountain gurgled away, devoid of wives and their brats. No animals stank or shat next to merchant carts.
Good. The populace showed some common sense.
He was in the city’s center now, nearing the sewer entrance where he might disappear, cloak himself so that he would be better positioned to destroy them.
Aryus landed ahead in a spray of pink petals and street dust, their ungainly, albatross wings spread out to block his path. Mascen changed course and scrambled to a stop once more. Maoz and Esha did not provide so impressive a display as the Death God, but together they presented a blockade. He could not sweep past them. These numbers weren’t terrible. Aryus didn’t fight; why bother? Death always won in the end. Esha certainly didn’t know how to defeat him, and while Maoz was a hunter, he was not a warrior.
Still, the spear the hunter clutched in his grip gave Mascen some pause. Maoz’s weapon could actually hurt Mascen, as could any Companion Weapon.
Like a boar finally in sight of his enemy, Maoz lowered his head and charged, spear clutched loosely in his right hand. He was a bear of a man, tallest of the Gods and broad-shouldered, every ounce of that physical power put into his lunge.
But Mascen was too wily to fa
ce it.
At the last possible second, he stepped clear, kicking at Maoz’s legs to send him sprawling. The Beast God was up in a moment, the square lines of his face tight with anger. “Face me, child,” he said, and Mascen rankled. He would show this brute that he was no child to be dismissed to some island prison.
Not anymore. Not a second time.
Esha, dirty and scraped from the blow he had dealt earlier, threw herself into the fray. Her pale eyes were determined, a sharp contrast from the warm browns of her skin and hair, and in her hands, she held no weapon. Mascen laughed, not even bothering to stop her. What could she possibly do? Hit him like that dark-skinned clanswoman had before they resummoned their bodies? He would hardly feel it if he felt it at all.
And then she was on him, but Esha didn’t try to hit him at all. She just reached out with both hands and held his face, gently as Enyo ever had when he was very small.
Mascen couldn’t move, couldn’t look away. His whole world was the palest of blues.
And then he felt them. Every tormented creature he had slain or injured. Men, women, children, animals. He felt their fear of starvation as their fields burned, felt the townspeople’s dread of death and subjugation. He died with a mother, body thrown over her child. Died again with an old man in his bed. He was a child, body ruined by fire, looking up at the winged priestess, begging her for a relief she offered, swift and dark. He was Illygad herself, crying out for the scars he had left in her skin.
But, no. That wasn’t true at all. He was Mascen, their savior from the old ways and the ignorance of their own paltry existence. He was doing this for them, to lead humanity into a new era beneath his rule. And he would not listen to these lies any longer. He growled, struggling to push himself out of Esha’s control just as she placed a kiss on his brow.
“No!” The cry was torn, harsh and guttural, from his lips and he flung her body away. It made a wet slap against the stone of a nearby building, but he hardly registered it. Mascen had felt the God mark that time, felt it as she added her power to the spell that meant to lock him away. And he would destroy her for it, maim her so severely that it would be centuries before she recovered.