“You are beaten, Brachantes,” I tell him.
“Yes,” he says.
The spear is still in his hand. He drops to the ground, mustering one last reserve of strength, and hurls it. The shaft sails through the air. I dive at it, meaning to deflect it from its course, but the gesture has surprised me, and I strike only empty air.
I hit the ground, roll, and look up to its destination.
Mwonduk stands staring dully at the spear that has pierced his chest. The head protrudes from his back, gobbets of heart muscle hanging from its sharpened tip. The color drains from him as he collapses. Sunasuka runs to his side. The slump of her shoulders confirms it: he is dead, and nothing can be done.
Then I am on Brachantes, knees digging into his ruined chest. I shout at him, stupidly, uselessly repeating the one question that never has an answer. I am asking him why. Why did he have to kill the child?
Blood foams from the outlander’s ruined mouth. “If I can’t have him, no one can.” He says it simply, as if no statement could make more sense. There is no mockery, no gloating in it. He has acted according to his code. Defeat for Brachantes must be defeat for all.
Time stops. There is no one in the world except for me and this creature helpless beneath me. I think of how close we have come to reaching our goal. Of the deaths to come from the firefly plague, which we have lost the means to end. Of the boy, and how he was willing to die for the good of others, but not like this, not pointlessly.
My hands close around the gore-slicked neck.
His wounds could easily prove fatal, even without my intervention. But I want to be the one who kills him. Who squeezes the last breaths from his lungs. Presses shut his windpipe, until his soul flutters from him and departs for whatever hell awaits it.
I consider my own code, which forces upon me the obligations of those I slay. What debts does this man carry, that allowed him to construct his island of cages, to collect so many captive creatures? At this moment, they do not seem so unbearable, not compared to the two life-prices I already pay each day of my life. I will go to his island, I decide. In discharge of his responsibilities I will fling open his cages. Grant freedom to his slaves.
My fingers tighten.
Then relax.
I rise and step back. The Code of Ara is not a trader’s ledger sheet, with costs weighted against gains. The life-price is a punishment for a crime, for breaking the holiest of ancestral edicts.
“Let him die on his own,” I mutter.
Sunasuka calls my name. I turn to see the boy’s body convulsing from within. At first, my heart leaps, as I think him miraculously saved. Then I see that he is coming apart. Brachantes killed him with more than a thrown spear. Some baneful magic now destroys his remains. The sight of it numbs me. Limbs wizen and shrivel. A fissure opens in his chest. The head lolls off.
The pyramid, which stood on the verge of opening before Brachantes appeared, resumes its rumbling. The gap, arrested before, widens. A crimson glow escapes from it, bathing first the canopy directly overhead, then the entire jungle.
From the opening, a vast, blood-red form arises. It is shaped like a firefly, its beetle wings spanning hundreds of feet. The goddess has come to punish our failure.
She hovers above us, the buffeting force of her wings throwing up a cloud of dirt and leaf-dust.
A creature stirs inside Mwonduk’s corpse. It crawls from his torso, leaving the remainder emptied out and hollow.
It too is a crimson firefly, a reduced counterpart to Kitumu, overhead. The insect is at most three feet long, from the tip of its searching feelers to the glowing bulb at the end of its body. It opens up its hard outer shell to reveal the wings hidden beneath. Tentatively, it buzzes them back and forth. It lifts itself into the air and circles around us. The creature stops in front of each of us, starting first with Verkusht. It waves its antennae gently, almost caressingly, at each of us, as if making a farewell. Its circuit ends with me and finally Sunasuka.
Then it spirals down to Brachantes. Now he laughs, but the joke is rueful and aimed at himself. “This is why... wanted him. Not cursed,” he gasps. “A god. A young god. I could have had the power of a...”
With red, segmented legs, the insect that was once a boy seizes Brachantes, piercing down into the outlander’s remaining flesh. Brachantes registers the pain as a soft exhalation. The Mwonduk bug tugs his squirming body up into the air. Straining at his weight, it buzzes up to its mother, Kitumu, who circles above. It flies over her beetle face. Kitumu clicks her mandibles and opens her gullet. Her child drops in the sacrificial offering. Brachantes musters one last wail as he is consumed.
The Mwonduk bug circles its mother as she retreats into the pyramid. Without a gesture of divine gratitude, or the merest acknowledgment of our presence, she vanishes into the temple depths. The smaller insect seems to pause, to flutter wings at us, before following the goddess inside.
The ground rumbles as the temple seals itself up.
As mortals, we have done what was expected of us. We served the goddess. That she slew hundreds of people simply to attract our obedience is of no consequence to her. Mortals are disposable, especially
to nature’s devouring gods. Despite my wounds, my still-spinning head, the sickly feeling of having come too close to an ancient and indifferent divinity, I feel a lightness.
In my marrow, I know it: the plague has ended, and will not return.
“Who can say whether a newborn god remembers his friends?”
Verkusht claps his hands together. “My, my. That went better than expected.” Seeing that no one else shares his jollity, he tries harder. “For example, none of us tried to kill any of the others. Surely that’s a first.”
Without warning, Sunasuka hurls herself at Obai, spitting unintelligible accusations. Arok comes at her from the left and I from the right. We wrest the recovered double monkey club from her grasp. Obai interrupts the spell she’d been preparing.
“Why fight now?” I say. “All is for the best!”
Sunasuka, still struggling to free herself of our combined grip, shouts: “You said the child was accursed!”
“I was not wrong,” Obai says, the contradictory scars on the sides of her mouth frowning and smiling. “The child was accursed.”
Sunasuka looses a stream of profanities, both foreign and Mwangi.
“I grant,” Obai says, “that I was imprecisely informed as to the curse’s true nature.”
Hot tears stream Sunasuka’s cheeks. She can see only the balance priestess. “You had us thinking we’d have to murder the child!”
“Of all of us here, nature priestess, you know that great forces speak to us, but never reveal all. And clearly, the boy was cursed. Rather than a mortal cursed to be devoured, he was a deific being, cursed to eke his first miserable years in mortal form. Much like an actual lightning bug, spending its earliest days as a glowing, toxic worm.”
Sunasuka takes a fresh lunge at the Nethys priestess; the ape and I tighten our hold on her. “The entire journey, my heart has been a cold fist in my chest!”
“We were never going to kill the boy. We were merely instruments of cosmic balance, allowing a god to work her will. And this she did.”
Sunasuka calms herself. We let her storm to a nearby brook, where she splashes water on her face.
A pensive look crosses Katiiwa’s face. “Do you think Mwonduk was born mortal, so that he would understand our fears and cares?”
Obai chuckles, musical and cold. “Nothing so romantic, I’m sure. What does a godling of fireflies care about
mortal existence?”
I gaze upon the pyramid of Kitumu, now closed, and wonder.
About the Author
Robin D. Laws is the author of the Pathfinder Tales novel The Worldwound Gambit and six other novels, as well as various short sto
ries, web serials, and comic books, plus a long list of roleplaying game products. His novels include Pierced Heart, The Rough and the Smooth, and the Angelika Fleischer series for the Black Library. Robin created the classic RPG Feng Shui and such recent titles as Mutant City Blues, Skulduggery, and the newly redesigned HeroQuest 2. Those interested in learning more about Robin are advised to check out his blog.
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