99 Gods: Odysseia

by Randall Farmer

  “What about Orlando and Columbia?” Nessa said.

  “They should have surrendered when they had the chance,” Patricia said. “If they continue to refuse to join the City of God, I can’t do anything to help them. Yet.”

  Nessa sighed at the God’s twisty ways. “Patricia, you’re too much. We’ll stay for these few days, assuming…” she turned to Uffie “…you don’t object.”

  “Ma’am, I’m not sure you know enough about my kind of people to train us,” Uffie said, eyes downcast as she studied Patricia’s knees.

  “I’d love the time to show you how mistaken you are,” Patricia said. “Don’t forget that Daniel” that is, Boise “is my closest compatriot. He may not have the overwhelming urge to teach, but I do and I always have. I’ve helped Nessa and Ken immensely.”

  Nessa nodded. “Although much of your help fell off when we lost Supported.”

  “Did the training work, though? Even after?”

  Nessa had to nod.

  Uffie nodded as well. “I can’t say we don’t need the training.” She looked at Diana, who stared blankly off into space.

  “Um, Kara doesn’t object, so I’m game,” Diana said. Nessa rolled her eyes. Diana didn’t have a single abnormal trick to her name, and Nessa sat in her mind and could hear all her thoughts, yet she could still communicate verbally and secretly with the absent Godslayer when she needed to. Secretive mutter mutter mutter annoying mutter mutter…

  “Then it’s settled,” Nessa said. She smiled her I’m-edging-into-insanity smile. “Now, Patricia, it’s time you told us what your secret weapon is. The one you won’t let yourself think about.”

  Patricia shook her head and didn’t even raise an eyebrow. “Daughter, I’m going to need a Divine Compact contract on that just to talk about my trick. This must remain secret.”

  “Consider us contracted,” Nessa said, dimpling, being the dutiful daughter. Uffie rolled her eyes, leaking thoughts about what she and Dave called the ‘Nessa Effect’, being amazed that the trick worked even on the top-end Gods. “Spill.”

  Patricia nodded. No Divine Compact contract appeared. “Daniel of Boise’s developed a method by which we can officially send a God back to God Almighty, if they’ve surrendered to us,” she said. “I hesitate to admit this for fear of drowning myself in hubris, but I appear to be the only non-worshipper backed God who has sufficient power to do the trick. Using this on a God for mere political reasons is wrong, but if a God refuses to give up their worshippers…”

  “Damn,” Ken said.

  “Exactly,” Patricia said. She turned to Uffie and Diana. “We’ll start your training at nine o’clock sharp tomorrow morning. Until then, I have work to do.”

  They scooted.

  45. (Dana)

  Dana inspected the gray void again, poking and prodding the gray with her still active Natural Supported abilities. No response, no movement, no anything. Silence deafened.

  Her heart ached, yet she knew she had no heart, no real body. She raised her hand in front of her face and if she concentrated very hard, she could see through her hand to the gray endless void.

  She had died. She didn’t question her death at all. Instead of God and Heaven, though, she remained trapped in this sound-eating lonesome unknown place. Nor did she know how much time had passed. She had already re-lived months of her former life, all very painful and filled with pointless second guessing.

  Why not? She didn’t have anything else to do here. All she had to do was close her fleshless eyes and her former life reappeared around her.

  Lorenzi self-resurrected, though he never once gave any hint about how he did the trick. Was this the task before her? Or did she have a Godslayer-like spirit body? Did she need to figure out how to project herself back to Earth? Would she be first, yet again, in some other appalling manner? First to self-resurrect would be hard to live with. But ‘live’? How could she be dead and still think?

  Yet again her expectations hadn’t been met. She could pitch a fit, throw a tantrum, but in the muffled gray such things didn’t satisfy.

  “Comfortable? One thing about being dead, there aren’t many responsibilities, now are there? Hah hah hah.”

  Dana turned, if turning was the right word. A God had joined her, black and female. “Atlanta?”

  “Bwah hah hah hah. So you wish. You know who I am.” The black goddess looked taken aback by Dana’s choice in name for a moment, before scooting forward through the gray void to tower over Dana. Dana stood about thumb-high to the annoying God.

  “Bitch.” Just what she didn’t need: Betrayer. Well, this answered the question of whether she had landed in heaven or hell.

  “Speaking, whore.” Pause. “I can get you resurrected. For a price.” Betrayer’s voice turned to a purr. “A nice price.”

  “Yes!” Dana said. Anything but this gray void and the endless reliving of her former life. “Uh, let me amend that to ‘perhaps’.” Such enthusiasm in front of Betrayer might be eternally deadly. Dana’s soul was not for sale, she hoped and prayed. “What’s this price you’re talking about?”

  Betrayer boomed laughter. “Your life is mine to do with what I want, little one. Why should I tell you anything!”

  Yup, that ‘yes’ had been a mistake, a big one. “Forget the agreement, then,” Dana said. “I’ll stay here in this benighted hell, thank you very much.”

  “It’s called Limbo, bimbo.” Betrayer vanished.

  Dana sighed. That hadn’t gone well.

  More unmarked time passed. Dana relived her entire teen years and all of her arguments with her parents. At first, her disgust at the way her parents behaved made her angry, but as time went on, she connected her experiences as Bob’s mother to what her parents had gone through, and realized that instead of her parents being always wrong, it had been a case of inevitable cultural differences. Dana had grown up American. They hadn’t.

  Dana missed the world of her life so badly it hurt. She hadn’t finished living; she had just started loving. She missed the green fields and forests, missed other people, her friends and allies, missed even the Gods. She wished for one more go at the imponderable projection space, which she had enjoyed but never fully figured out.

  “God, it’s got to be boring in here,” Betrayer said, appearing from nowhere again. “Sure you don’t want to be resurrected?”

  Dana hadn’t missed Betrayer, though. “Tell me the price and we’ll discuss things like rational beings.”

  “You seem to think you’re the one with the upper hand, nitwit.” Bwah hah hah.

  “Yes, I do,” Dana said. She looked up and dragged her mind over to Betrayer’s apparition. “I can smell your sweat.” If you didn’t appear giant-sized your sweat wouldn’t be so overwhelming, Dana thought but pointedly didn’t say.

  “When you finish reviewing your life, you’ll go to Heaven, no turning back,” Betrayer said. “Your husband needs you. So does the Godslayer, who is helping me now. Bwah hah hah.”

  “Oh, I’m sure.” She did miss Richard. “I’m not going to betray my friends, though. Go home and shave your armpits with a fresh razor!”

  “Bitch!” Betrayer vanished again.

  Dana smiled and went back to her life-review.

  Casually remembering her time in graduate school, Dana had predicted those days would be the worst part of her life-review, endless tedium with only a minor reward at the end. When she relived the period, though, she found she enjoyed her later university years so much she slowed down the review to where she lived things real time, instant by instant.

  She had never realized, before, that she liked herself. She found adult Dana a sincerely neat person she would have loved to have as a friend. No angst and second guessing here. Hell, Grad School Dana seemed to be faster at making good decisions than current I-guess-I’m-really-dead Dana did. Tedium had turned to serious fun.

  “Hey, you! Pay attention!”

  Dana came out of her life-reliving, right out of a graduate cou
rse in Econometrics taught by Professor Sprague herself. Betrayer, again.

  “Go away, go away, go away home, oh star of darkness,” Dana said, feeling fey. “I think I like being here. I’ve decided to stay.”

  “Now there’s a new one,” Betrayer said, not going. This time Betrayer appeared Dana-sized and clothed in many dozens of enchantments, ready for battle. The crazy goddess wore a black enchanted cloak over the entire mess, as well as a white Zorro mask. Crazy. “You ought to be ashamed of…”

  Dana felt willpower here! Willpower brought in by Betrayer. Dana muttered three quick spells and Betrayer’s mind vanished, as one of Dana’s spells had been a magical mind-banishment. The other two grabbed the projection’s willpower and made the projection Dana’s own. Betrayer’s projection vanished, blown away by an unreal wind.

  Yum.

  “Okay, now that I’ve probably pissed off Betrayer for good and made a mortal enemy, I’d best either get myself out of this hell and into Heaven right quick. Or resurrect myself,” Dana said. “Or find a way to project back to Earth, Godslayer style, and find out if she’s allied with that crazy bitch.” Perhaps she shouldn’t have stolen Betrayer’s power, but, well, she hadn’t had time to think things through and she had been feeling fey. Betrayer hadn’t belonged here, allowing Dana’s instinctive trick to work. Right?

  Dana tried Heaven first. Nothing; but she only wasted a tiny bit of sequestered willpower before finding out why. Betrayer had been right. To get to Heaven Dana did need to finish reviewing her entire life. “I wonder if I could use the willpower variant that logically must be here?” she said, a low mutter. “I’m going to need this to protect me when Betrayer inevitably returns.”

  She used the rest of the stolen Betrayer willpower to build a suite of analysis tricks. Once finished, she delved into the problem with her normal aplomb and concentration. Yes, she had guessed correctly, there was ample ambient willpower here. Yes, she saw how to manipulate the stuff. Strange willpower, though: dense, deep, sluggish and with many built in restrictions. Such as the fact she couldn’t use this willpower to attack. The local willpower came with moral limitations.

  The restrictions wouldn’t stop her from learning how to use the strange willpower, though. Yet, hadn’t she concluded God encompassed both the light and the darkness, the good and the evil? So why this limitation?

  Pointless to think about now, she decided. Instead, she built a clock from the new willpower, based on how long she guessed a second lasted. She started in on a minimally useful generic detection spell, but found herself interrupted first by a voice saying “We do find you amusing, but one way or another, you are not going to be able to stay here. Even if you do turn this place into a fully furnished American home.”

  The disembodied voice sounded male, middle aged and worn. “Show yourself, please,” Dana said.

  A man showed.

  Dana recognized him. “Weeping for Cordoba,” she said. Not a man, an Angel. She would have preferred the Godslayer, if she was going to have to deal with Angels.

  The Angel bowed. “At your service.”

  “So, I am turning myself into an Angel,” she said, her mind leaping ahead, making dozens of logical connections, based on what she had learned from the 99 Gods and from Kara the Godslayer. She had wondered.

  “I did something similar as a Seer, Dana,” Weeping for Cordoba said. “Dominick, the leader of my Host, appeared to me while I was here in limbo and gave me the necessary hints. He, like you, figured this out all by himself.”

  “Oh.” Shit, she hadn’t expected that. She sighed, annoyed at being labeled a special case even among the Angels. Would it never end? “Is this a good thing or bad thing?”

  “Let us see, you are about as innocent as they come, your only sins were minor rebellions against your parents, and you have an innate feel for the mind of God as expressed through the various forms of reality you term magic. You innately want to do good, so much so that you view God’s inevitable hard choices as evil. You understand love. You abhor violence. Now, what about any of that might be bad?”

  “Well… Okay. How about the fact I didn’t figure this out on my own. If Betrayer hadn’t projected herself here to try and enslave me, I would have gotten nowhere. I cheated.”

  Weeping for Cordoba shrugged. A room appeared around them, a library, something out of history. The library had many open windows, no glass, and outside Dana saw a large medieval Islamic town. A half dozen people occupied the library, including an older duplicate of Weeping for Cordoba. Next to him sat a teen, almost a young man, who glowed with a pulsating complexity that Dana instantly recognized.

  “You’re kidding,” Dana said. “You knew John Lorenzi as a mortal?”

  “I personally saved him from magical self-destruction and made him into a magician hunter, dear Dana,” Weeping for Cordoba said. “I can help you as well.”

  Gulp. “I think I need help. A lot of help.” She sat down at an unoccupied table, gestured, inviting the Angel to sit next to her. Illusory perhaps, but solid to the touch of her fake body. No, Nessa and the Telepaths were right – questions of ‘how’ and ‘why’ just invited madness. “This is Cordoba a thousand years ago, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “You created this from your memories?” Dana couldn’t help but ask. Her question didn’t feel like it invited madness. Too much.

  “From my memories and the memories of many others,” Weeping for Cordoba said. “This is the way of Heaven.”

  Heaven. “Okay,” Dana said. Heaven. Wow. “How can you help me? I’ve gotten myself in way over my head this time.”

  “Dying? One might say that,” Weeping for Cordoba said. “Dana, I want you to go back to Earth, as a mortal. If you don’t corrupt yourself, you now know enough not to fear death. Yes, you’re a prospective Angel; yes, you will be, if uncorrupted, the leader of an Angelic host. Later, we all hope. The one thing you need to avoid is anything to unnaturally prolong your life.”

  Dana made a face. “I can agree.”

  “You have good instincts, trust them.”

  She sighed. “Then tell me this: why do I have the sudden urge to take Betrayer up on her offer?”

  “Because she is going to tell you what her price is in her next visit, which should be just about…”

  Betrayer appeared.

  “Now.”

  “This just gets better and better,” Betrayer said. She whipped off her black cloak and put it over her shoulder, cooler than cool. “Weeping for Cordoba, your interference is not welcome.” Angry, snippy.

  “PMS much?” Dana asked, lifting a phrase from Lydia’s slang vocabulary.

  Betrayer glared.

  “I think you will find you are mistaken this time,” Weeping for Cordoba said. “Your plans are perfect for my needs, although you will not appreciate the final outcome until far later.” Columbia and Portland were right! The Angelic Host wasn’t unified. “In any event, I am not going to stop you from extracting an agreement from Dana about her resurrection. I should warn you, though, that when you bring Dana back to life, she will be able to wield the willpower of an Angel.”

  Oops, Dana thought.

  “Which is worth jack shit on Earth, Weeping, as she won’t be a Warrior Angel.”

  Dana’s false eyes opened much wider. She hadn’t expected Betrayer’s reaction.

  “So you think,” the Angel said. “You will find our holy power quite different in the hands of a mortal, and she won’t be as limited as we Judges are.”

  Judges? How many different types of Angels were there? Which one was she, Dana wondered.

  “Her vaunted holy power won’t be battle magic.”

  “In that you are quite correct.”

  “Then this is a difference that makes no difference. Why should I care? Have you become as addled as the worshipped Gods?” Betrayer stalked around the library, recognized the young illusory Lorenzi, snorted and continued on with her rant. “My Mission’s hard enough as it is without h
aving to play Angel games of jump through the hoop and oh-god-Dana’s-done-the-impossible-again. Just get out of my way and give me the same fair shake all the other Gods have. I don’t have time for this.”

  Weeping for Cordoba shook his head. “Excellent monologue. You are getting into your new imago and persona. For this I commend you.” He didn’t laugh but his whole body chuckled.

  Betrayer put her hands on her hips and glared hotter.

  “Look, Betrayer, why don’t you just tell me what your price is,” Dana said. “Make things easy on all of us for once.”

  “Fine, bitch, we’ll do this the hard way.” Betrayer waved an armored index finger at Dana. “There’s going to be a fight coming up against far more Paladins than you fought before. My price is your life. At some point in that no-win fight I’m going to demand you do something suicidal. You’ll do what I want, and you will die, Angel tricks or not. Whether or not you come back will be based on which side wins, which unless all of my plans succeed, won’t be your side.”

  Dana turned to Weeping for Cordoba. “Is this even possible? To come back twice?” Jan had told her about the ‘only once’ lesson, why the Godslayer was currently unresurrectable. Why didn’t this hold with her?

  “Practice with your Angelic magic and you might be able to resurrect yourself as often as you need,” Weeping for Cordoba said. His eyes practically spoke now, exuding sorrow. “I must warn you, though, Dana. You are following on a track often leading to dissident religious leadership and the founding of new religions.”

  Oh, too much. Dana put her hands on her temples and yodeled a scream loud enough to force Betrayer to cover her ears. “Look, all of you, can you just stop this, please? I’m not worthy. I don’t have a religious thought in my head. I despise organized religions! I can’t even convince myself God isn’t evil! Neither of you need me to save the world or your devious plans, so back off!”