Liesmith

by Alis Franklin

  “Sigmund, I—”

  “You can, can’t you?”

  “Yes! No. Sort of, look, it’s complicated…”

  Lain looked miserable. Sigmund decided to be lenient. For now. “Then you’d better explain,” he said.

  Lain nodded. “We come from the minds of mortals. It’s not that we read them, exactly, it’s just that we feel your thoughts. Because that’s what we are. That’s where we start.”

  “Holy. Shit.” Lain wasn’t speaking. At least, his mouth wasn’t moving. And it wasn’t that the words that appeared in Sigmund’s head had a voice, exactly. They were just…words in his head. If he didn’t know—if he hadn’t been expecting it—he might even have thought they were his own.

  But there was a presence behind the words. Sigmund could feel it now, pressed up against his mind. A vast and terrifying inferno, the unembodied essence of the thing standing before him. He tried to shy away, to get closer, but his mind was paralyzed, and the realization sent a stab of fear deep inside his gut, cold and atavistic.

  The raging maelstrom retreated. “Sorry.” Lain was speaking with his Really Real World words again. “Mortal minds…They’re all about the meat in your head. Gods are not that way at all.”

  Sigmund could feel Lain’s compassion, like the taste of purple or the color sweet. He closed his eyes and sought the presence again, though it had retreated frustratingly far, the only traces of it lingering in the smell of burning pines and the taste of deep, dark earth.

  “That’s you, isn’t it?” Sigmund said. “That…feeling. That’s what you really are.”

  Lain shrugged. “It’s part of me. I can’t turn it off any more than you can stop hearing or feeling.”

  He could close his eyes, Sigmund thought. Except it occurred to him that, even then, he was still technically seeing the inside of his eyelids.

  “Okay,” he said. There was a chair nearby and he fell backward into it. “So you’re an ancient, huge, feathered, pyrokinetic, psychic, flying godmonster. Is there anything else I should know, before I go freak out in the toilet for a while?”

  Lain appeared to give this question serious consideration. “I can cause earthquakes by screaming,” he said finally. “And I’m not too bad at magic.”

  “ ‘Magic’ as distinct from psychic powers and pyrokinesis because of…?”

  Lain frowned, gesturing as he struggled for an explanation. “Because of because,” he finally said. “Like, magic is all runes and chanting and blood. Setting things on fire is just setting them on fire.”

  “Great.”

  Sigmund closed his eyes again and threw his head back, groaning. He wondered if new relationships were always this fraught, or if it was a side effect of his boyfriend being an ancient deity. Dating certainly seemed to be very dramatic, on TV and so forth, so maybe this was all normal. Except maybe normal people relationships were more like, I once slept with your brother, and less like, I’m a personified force of nature. Maybe the latter being so outlandish made it easier to handle. Maybe.

  There was a squeak of leather as Lain sat down in the adjacent seat. When Sigmund looked up, Lain was regarding him, sharp and bright. He was leaning forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped in front. “All a bit much?” he asked.

  Sigmund huffed out a breath and rolled his eyes upward. “I can’t decided whether this is all completely cool or totally freaking me out.” Hale had a proper ceiling up here, no crappy cheap tiles for him. Sigmund wondered if Lain could hear his observation.

  “That’s understandable,” Lain said. “And yes, I feel your derision of the ceiling.” Close enough, and when Sigmund looked back down again, Lain was smiling his scarred smile.

  “Can you do it to anyone?” It still freaked him out—a fair bit, in fact—but he was trying to be tolerant. It wasn’t Lain’s fault he wasn’t human. “Like, can you tell me what Em is thinking right now?”

  Lain shook his head, not fast enough to disguise the roll of his eyes. “I’m meta, not omniscient,” he said. It wasn’t quite a lie.

  They sat in silence for a while, things heavy and awkward in a way that Sigmund didn’t like and wasn’t used to. He wished he’d chosen to freak out on the couch across the other side of the room. At least then they could’ve watched TV. And maybe, like, snuggled or something.

  He winced. “You did not just hear that, incidentally,” he said, pointing a finger at Lain.

  Lain leaned back in his chair, hands held up, placating. “Hear what?” he said, though he was laughing. Then, “It’d be nice though, that thing I didn’t hear.”

  Sigmund was trying not to blush and failing miserably. “Don’t you have, like, work to be doing or something?”

  “Strictly speaking? Travis should’ve been in a board meeting about ten minutes ago.” He didn’t sound too urgent about it.

  “What? You should go! Why are you here?” Babysitting me, Sigmund didn’t say, but he figured Lain heard it, anyway.

  “I want to make sure you’re okay.” That was the truth, and Lain was leaning forward again, watching for Sigmund’s response.

  It was…weird, having someone so unfathomably ancient look at him like that. Have them care about his silly freak-out enough to ignore a whole room of some of the most important people in the country. Weird in a sort of warm, squirmy, pit-of-the-stomach way. Sigmund pushed his glasses up his nose and stared at his sneakers. The holes were still there.

  Lain stood, and Sigmund heard him moving around the room, collecting things off his desk. Soon, shoes appeared next to Sigmund’s on the carpet, shiny and black and hole free, and when Sigmund looked up it was at Travis, not Lain.

  The eyes were the same, Sigmund realized, even if the rest of the details were different. And something about the shape of the face; a strong-but-androgynous Tilda Swinton sort of vibe.

  “You can stay here as long as you want,” said Travis. It was Lain’s voice, too. Though deeper, with a slightly different accent, more Sydney private school. “I’ll log the time so Harrison thinks you’re fixing something.”

  Sigmund tried a grin. Travis was still terrifying in that Time’s-most-influential-Forbes-100 sort of way, even if he technically was the same guy who—

  (grew giant wings and burned down half a parking garage)

  —had played Dungeons and Dragons with them just a few days ago.

  “You’re kind of bad at computers for the head of the world’s biggest technology company,” Sigmund said.

  This earned him a wink and a gun finger. “I just sell ’em, mate. Don’t ask me to use the damn things.”

  Travis turned to go and, before he’d really had time to think about it, Sigmund stood up. “Wait.”

  Travis stopped, shooting a look over his shoulder. He didn’t have the eyebrow ring like Lain did, but the expression was familiar, all the same.

  Sigmund crossed the distance and kissed him. Just quickly, on the lips, hands crushing the sleeves of Travis’s outrageous bespoke suit as he did so. When he pulled back, he received another slightly crooked grin.

  “Have fun, or whatever it is you do,” Sigmund said, pushing his glasses back up his nose and trying not to run his fingers across his mouth. He’d just kissed the third richest man in the world. Technically he’d done it before, but he hadn’t known he’d been doing it then. This time it was, like, legit or something.

  Travis didn’t say anything, just gave Sigmund another promising wink and threw open the doors to his office. Both of them, at once. The flair for the cinematic apparently didn’t change between personas, either.

  Arin was waiting on the other side. She gave Sigmund only the briefest of glances, before saying, “The board has been waiting for—”

  “Fifty years. To die. I know, I know.” This response got him the sigh and the rolled eyes of a long-suffering majordomo. Sigmund watched them both disappear into the elevator—Travis blew him one last kiss as the doors closed—and wondered how much Nicole Arin knew about her boss.

  Th
en they were gone, and Sigmund was alone in Hale’s office. It was, perhaps, not as exciting as it might have been. Mostly, it was just a very, very large, very, very executive office. Couch, chairs, desk, fireplace. Enormous set of doors.

  There was a large glass case above the doors, something hanging inside like a museum exhibit. It looked suspiciously similar to Lain’s tattoo, spread out onto what Sigmund was hoping was tattered cow or sheep leather.

  And now that he’d noticed that, there were other things around the room that started looking suspicious, too. Like a painting next to the TV of a woman in a wafty silk gown, gazing in Rubenesque soft focus at something that might have been an artist’s impression of a falcon. Yellow apples spilled out around her feet, and Sigmund thought it was a phenomenally ugly painting, particularly considering the sleek, modern decor of the rest of the room.

  Also, Sigyn didn’t look like that at all.

  The bowl sitting on the fireplace’s mantel was more worrisome. It was heavy and stone—more like the bottom half of a mortar and pestle than an actual bowl—and the inside was polished to a glassy smoothness. It had grooves on the outside that looked suspiciously like handprints, and a huge crack down one side. Sigmund didn’t want to touch it, didn’t want to…

  (the snake, the bowl…)

  “Jesus…”

  He ran to the window and looked down, nose pressed against the glass, heedless of the drop. Seventy stories below, little more than white dots in a field of black and green, Sigmund could see the weird LB statue. The one outside the main doors that everyone thought was modern art. The one that, from the right angle, looked like the LB company logo. Three upright stone slabs, a hole through the middle of each, strange groove worn into the top.

  Sigmund felt sick. Staggered backward until his knees hit the edge of Hale’s huge leather chair, then he fell into that, too.

  —

  The snake. The bowl. The stones.

  —

  (it’s still exile. still a prison. the scenery is a bit better, but…)

  One thousand years, or thereabouts. Bound to three stone slabs by the enchanted guts of his own son, snake dripping poison into his eyes until the end of time.

  Christ. No wonder Lain’s blood ate through concrete.

  Sigmund sat there, staring out at the sky, for…a while. Trying not to think, to focus on the scenery instead: bright blue sky and the mottled brown of the land below. It was a nice view, nicer than the one from Sigmund’s desk, because of course it was, and he had a sudden flash of Travis, sitting up here, fingers steepled and ankle on one knee, surveying his city. Lokabrenna might be a prison, but Travis was its god king.

  Sigmund wondered if that made him its queen. Some kind of mistress or concubine at the very least.

  He took a photo of the view. It wasn’t a great photo, the light catching Sigmund’s own reflection in the glass, superimposing a ghostly portrait in the sky, right above the shimmer of the lake and the barren gray rise of Golgotha Hill.

  He sent the photo to Wayne, along with the message:

  You were right about Lain. All of it. ‹

  The reply took less than a minute:

  › All of it? :0

  ALL of it, even Option C. I saw horns. And feathers. ‹

  That earned him a selfie in reply, Wayne’s eyes bright and pink and wide and shocked against dark skin.

  Sigmund texted:

  He has enemies. Serious ones. ‹

  Like with magic powers and stuff. ‹

  I’m kinda in the shit. ‹

  › I guess that’s expected :(

  › What are you going to do?

  Sigmund didn’t know, and said as much.

  › Well if you need anyone beaten up give us a yell.

  › Remember I know kung fu!

  Sigmund had to smile at the offer. Wayne was a, well, she was a valkyrie of a woman: nearly as tall as Lain and built out of curves and boobs and muscle. As a girl, men had noticed. So had Wayne’s dad, hence the martial arts lessons. Em called it “victim-blaming rape culture”—putting the onus on a kid to avoid sexual attention, not on the adult men who groped and pursued her—but, on the other hand, Wayne also just really enjoyed beating the shit out of people, and her theory was that doing it in an official tournament setting was better than getting charged with assault.

  It was a debate Sigmund stayed out of, particularly since that one time he’d begged Wayne for a demonstration and she’d karate-chopped him in the solar plexus. It hadn’t even been hard, but it’d knocked the breath out of him for an hour.

  No one messed around with Wayne. Sigmund didn’t know how she’d fare against a god like Baldr, but he wouldn’t be entirely sure who to bet on as the victor, either.

  His phone buzzed again, and when he looked down he saw:

  › Does em know?

  He thought for a moment, then:

  No. Don’t tell her. She’ll flip. ‹

  Then silence for a long time, until:

  › K. Up to you

  Wayne didn’t like it. She didn’t like keeping secrets, and neither did Sigmund. Not from his friends, his only friends, and especially not from Em, who’d been there forever. Ever since their lonely, awkward school days, playing Magic: the Gathering on the grass under the oak trees.

  At one point, Sigmund had been convinced he was going to marry Em. Not for any actual reason, just because neither of them had anyone else. That hadn’t turned out to be the case. Em had started dating at uni, taking her pick of the gamers and nerds who’d flocked around, trying to impress her with their APM and finesse with head shots. Sigmund hadn’t minded, had felt relief even. Em was Em and Sigmund loved her, but…

  But he had to tell her about Lain. And he would. Soon.

  First, he had to figure out how.

  THIRTEEN

  By Tuesday morning, Sigmund still hadn’t figured out what to tell Em. Mostly because if he was being honest, he’d been too busy daydreaming about Lain.

  They hadn’t seen each other again that Monday. Lain sent an apologetic text around lunchtime mentioning he’d been waylaid by VPs wanting to discuss advertising campaigns for the next major PyreOS release. So Sigmund had played video games on the Inferno in Travis’s office for a while, until guilt had started to gnaw and he’d dragged himself back downstairs to do work.

  It hadn’t been easy, and Sigmund was gaining a newfound appreciation for the Basement’s nickname when compared to the light and vistas of the CEO’s suite. He’d picked at the job queues, but it’d seemed so petty all of a sudden. Who the hell cared about a few lost emails when the gods themselves were sharpening knives and heading for war?

  Later, at home, Sigmund’s thoughts had been a whirl of fire and feather. Of bright tattoos and dark, scarred skin.

  Dappled. Lain’s true skin was dappled, little splotches of charcoal markings clustered across his shoulders and down his back, tracing the dips and grooves between the bulges of his muscle.

  He had a lot of that. Muscle. Not bulky, but smooth and sleek and strong. Like a dancer or an acrobat or Nightwing and, wow, that train of thought was both incredibly nerdy and really, really gay. Sigmund was okay with it, though. He thought Lain probably would be as well. Lain seemed like the type to be all over the stage, gyrating to LMFAO, reveling in his own allure. Or standing and grinning while hands ran all over tattooed flesh to have a one-on-one examination of the same.

  Sigmund had a sudden image of Lain, all wings and horns and tail, dancing around like a bird of paradise. Rippling his muscle and fanning his feathers, rolling blank eyes and grinning his stitched-through grin. All for Sigmund’s amusement and…

  And, after that, Sigmund had to have a little quiet time alone. Then he’d come to the conclusion that he was, maybe, just a little bit of a weirdo.

  A lucky weirdo, though. Very, very lucky.

  Point being that, by Tuesday, he was itching to see Lain again. Or Travis. Or whoever he felt like being today. Anyone would be okay, really,
so long as they grinned that too-sharp grin and looked at Sigmund with those too-bright eyes. It was an intense feeling, that desire. Sort of frightening, and Sigmund wondered if it was normal. He wondered who he could ask.

  Today, Lain turned out to be Travis. He was sitting on the floor in the middle of his office, in front of a map of the city—the old-fashioned folding kind that Sigmund had been half convinced no longer existed in the brave new world of GPS and Google. Travis seemed to be inscribing runes onto the paper in his own blood. Sigmund tried not to look.

  “Heya,” he said, going for nonchalance as he walked into the office.

  Travis grinned—

  (score!)

  —as he looked up from…whatever it was he was doing. “Morning.” He was definitely using his own blood. Sigmund could see it pooling like green-black oil in his left hand. He was also using the fingernail of the index finger on his right hand like a pen.

  “Do I want to know what you’re doing?” Sigmund was still trying not to look too hard at the blood-scrawled map. Or to smell the faint stink of melting plastic.

  “Reading the leys,” Travis said, looking back down. “Figure out what Baldr’s planning.”

  “Like divination or something?” Wayne had a bag of cow-bone runes at home. She used to cast them sometimes, until Em had given one too many lectures on how divination was sixty percent confirmation bias, thirty percent hindsight bias, ten percent magical thinking, and one hundred percent bullshit.

  Travis winced, shedding doubt on Em’s conclusions. “Pretty much exactly not like divination, no,” he said. “That’s…dangerous magic. This is just reading what is, not what will be.”

  Sigmund wasn’t sure he understood the distinction, but decided to let it slide. Travis drew one final line, then flicked the remaining blood onto the map with a muttered…something. The map released a puff of dramatic purple-green smoke, then the runes on it started to glow. It almost looked as if they were lifting above the paper, that streets and suburbs themselves were spiraling in front of Sigmund’s eyes, turning into a whirling vortex all centered on—