Worldshaker

by J. F. Lewis

  My peace?

  “My peace.” Wylant crossed to the nearest cannon and walked out on its round steel surface until she stood at the muzzle. Aern drew back a step when she appeared, but not a single Dwarf reacted to her presence.

  “I’ve been thinking about this the wrong way,” she told Vax and Clemency. “He is conflict and I am resolution.”

  Surely you already knew that, Mother, Vax thought.

  Yes, we already—

  “I’m chasing him around while he draws power from the conflict and breathes new life into its embers when the flames dim.” Wylant drew in a deep breath, reaching out with her Aeromancy, shaping the air, prepping it to amplify her voice. The very essence of being a Thunder Speaker combined with the power of a goddess.

  I don’t have to fight him to combat him.

  “Enough!” she shouted, the wind carrying her voice so far that miles away it could still be dimly heard. She dropped into the midst of the mob, pushing all away from her with a circle of air. “Only one of the gods wants this fighting, and in the Guild Cities his worshippers are limited largely to the city of Warfare.”

  Interesting. Clemency unfolded her helm, flattening it across the front and back of her torso and along her shoulders where the multiple crystals which served as the warsuit’s eyes sparkled like jewels.

  I didn’t know you could do that, Wylant thought to the warsuit.

  I could not do so until now.

  Why?

  I am uncertain. Then as an aside only to Wylant, Vax was not surprised.

  “Followers of the Harvester, your deity has been restored.” Wylant’s flaming tresses brightened and dimmed as she spoke, increases in illumination accompanying stressed words or syllables, with an equal and opposite reaction whenever she paused. “You know as well as I that he wants no fighting on his behalf. As always, he does not command nor request his followers worship him in any way. His only guidance for those who wish to make him happy or to act on his behalf is to aid their fellow mortals, to make life easier for one another.”

  “What about Aldo?” several voices cried.

  “Another Aern took his place. The Aern are going to conquer the land of the gods, take their places, and devour all save the Dwarves!” a soldier in blood-stained armor argued. “It’s the end of Barrone! It’s—”

  That’s Dienox, Vax and Clemency said as one.

  “Dienox!” Wylant shouted, boosting the volume with Aeromancy. “Gods are supposed to make things better for people, not worse. You are out of balance and—”

  “You need not shout, Wylant.” Stepping forward, the soldier smiled, the tattoo of Dienox that covered his own features moving of its own accord. “You already had my attention.”

  Or . . . oh. A God Speaker, Vax and Clemency announced.

  Sorry, Mom, Vax thought. I’d never seen one before.

  We were not intentionally misleading, Clemency thought.

  “Hush,” Wylant whispered. “I know that.”

  “Then why did you shout?” The lips of the God Speaker remained tightly shut, all sound coming from the moving lips of the tattoo he bore.

  Could he really be that self-centered? Any Aern would have realized she was speaking to the warsuit she wore, or that she was speaking private thoughts aloud to keep them from bleeding across as overheard thoughts.

  “If you’re so great, why did you murder Nomi?” one of crowd yelled.

  “Because she wasn’t keeping Dienox in check,” Wylant growled.

  “And you have me very much under control?” Dienox asked. “I believe I liked you more when you were my champion. Your hair was so beautiful, and when it was soaked with sweat and spattered with blood, I could—”

  Vander says if you kill the God Speaker, Clemency thought, it won’t affect Dienox at all.

  Vander?! Wylant thought. Is Kholster watching, too?

  No, ma’am. Clemency’s thoughts were muted for a moment. He is traveling east from Fort Sunder to the remains of Port Ammond at Scarsguard’s most eastern point.

  Scarsguard? Wylant thought. Do you know where he is all the time?

  Harvester does, Mom, Vax thought. They are still a little connected. Vander knows, too, but Clemency tracks him through Harvester. And we don’t know if Rae’en is really going to call it Scarsguard or not, but that’s what the people you rescued are calling the area around Fort Sunder.

  “Kholster’s mouth never hangs open like that when he’s conversing with his armor.” Dienox’s image scratched its chin. “It makes you look stupid.”

  Dienox’s image winced at Wylant’s scowl.

  “He was made for it, and he’s had more practice.” Wylant drew Vax, willing him into a utilitarian sword. “I’ll work on it after you’re dead.”

  “And you wonder—” Dienox smiled, arms crossing, a movement echoed by the God Speaker whose tattoos served as the medium for his current discussion. “—why I prefer to speak to you via proxy?”

  “You’re afraid,” Wylant spat.

  “Afraid?” Dienox laughed. “No, Wylant. What I am is busy. Besides. You can’t kill me as you are now. You are peace. We are linked.”

  “Bird squirt,” Wylant scoffed. Willing Vax to a longsword, Wylant touched him to the God Speaker’s throat. A thin line of blood welled along the blade, but the man himself stood still. No longer in control of his own body perhaps?

  “It’s true,” the tattoo said. “War never ends. War springs from everything: it is waged in sorrow, it is waged in anger. War is waged to defend, to seize, to control, and to set free. You cannot end war. Even peace itself is merely a war against the natural state of conflict that exists between all sentients at every level.”

  If he gets you to believe that, it will be true, Vax thought, but it is not the natural order of things. His will ends where yours begins.

  “There may always be war.” Wylant pulled the blade away as if to concede the point, continuing the motion and adding pivot, her speed increasing as she struck the opposite side of the God Speaker’s throat. “But not Dienox.”

  Rolling back to avoid the blow, tattooed image and body drew a two-handed greatsword, seemingly out of nothing. Unlike the tales she’d heard, both the tattoo’s blade and that wielded by the mortal appeared distinct from one another.

  Either blade can cut you, Clemency offered. Dienox is cheating. You should be prepared for him to grant the God Speaker Justicar status in the midst of the fight if Dienox thinks doing so will let him win.

  Harvester says Dienox is using his armory to allow himself access to other weapons and resupply. An array of weapons in spectral blue manifested in her mind’s eye, hanging suspended in the air at waist height. Describing the circumference of the circle created when Wylant had pushed the mortals aside, they lay ready, awaiting the war god’s call. Do you want Clemency and me to make them visible to you?

  I can already see them. Wylant took the God Speaker’s measure with a few easily blocked strikes. Quick with the blade and also on his feet, the God Speaker kept his range, refusing to advance or let her close the gap between them. She could already tell she was the faster of the two, even the stronger . . . though his skill was akin to one of the One Hundred, if not Zhan or Kholster.

  “Nice.” She spoke and he moved, thrusting with the tip of the blade, trying for a wound at her shoulder. She turned it aside and tried to close, only to find Dienox moving to close as well. Their swords locked, each countering the other. Vax shortened as she moved for a sweep and found Dienox already attempting one over which she barely managed to jump. Reversing her grip as Vax changed, Wylant slashed at Dienox’s back, but he was no longer within range, his movements faster.

  Justicar, Clemency verified.

  Aeromancer, Wylant thought back.

  “Dienox!” She spake lightning from a cloudless sky, once, twice, three times, marveling as he dodged the first strike . . . glad that she had gone for what she had thought to be overkill.

  “Hardly sporting.” The God Spe
aker’s lips jerked in erratic spasms, his eyes wild, limbs flailing, as his greatsword flew into the crowd, spearing an unlucky observer in torn finery. The leather beneath his plate began to smoke, and he tore it from his body with desperate lurches, growing more controlled by the second. One eye was milky, the other unfocused. After a swift stripping, he stood before Wylant in his breeches, the lines of his nerves etched in red blisters along his skin. Black bruises and burns outlined the bones of his right arm and hand.

  Even as she watched, his wounds healed.

  She stopped watching, removing both head and heart out of an abundance of care. She dropped the head to her left and the heart to her right, where it beat a few more times, then lay lifeless in the street.

  “There will be no more fighting,” she roared at the top of her lungs. “This is foolish beyond words. Torgrimm doesn’t want your deaths in his name, and I don’t want them on my conscience out of some misguided confusion. The only god who wants this carnage is Dienox, because he loves it and cares not one—”

  “Of course I care,” came the god’s voice, this time from the lips of a young woman with a spear in her hands, her armor an unusual array of enameled horn plates sewn together in rows. Dienox’s form shone through despite the material’s opacity, though his armor had changed to match. “Each death in battle, each casualty, whether a soldier, milkmaid, or suckling babe is sacred to me, as sacred as their souls are to the Harvester or his irritable wife.”

  “How many God Speakers do you have lying about?” Wylant growled. Sweat trickled down her spine, until with a thought she made her skin once more comfortable and dry.

  Sorry, ma’am, Clemency intoned. I’m still adjusting to working with an Aiannai and I keep expecting you to remember not to sweat, since . . .

  Since I don’t have to, right.

  “I would hardly call them layabouts.” Dienox laughed, his voice and the warm sulky tones of his current host mixing in a disconcerting unity. “But if you mean in the Guild Cities . . . then hundreds. I am very popular in Warfare, and my physical requirements are a bit easier to meet than the spiritual state some of the other gods require. Exercise is easy compared to purity of heart and righteousness of soul.”

  Arrows rained down, and only the rapid deployment of Clemency’s helm prevented Wylant from being skewered, the points of other arrows clinking as they struck the warsuit and fell at her feet.

  “Saved by the helm.” Dienox’s current host, the pale eyebrows visible despite her helm, hinting at blonde hair beneath, raised her spear into the air waving off further fire. “If you hadn’t had your son’s warsuit, I’d have had you that time. She’s a clever thing.”

  “Am I going to have to kill every last one of your God Speakers to end this war?” Wylant asked.

  “You would, too, if you could.” Dienox voice came out half awe and half outrage. “And I’m not certain you can, because that is expressly forbidden by the rules. Ask Aldo, or, well, ask that Aern who has taken his place.”

  Ask Vander about the rules, Wylant thought at Clemency.

  He says that there actually aren’t any, Clemency replied after a moment. The instructions to which Aldo kept referring were a message from the Artificer to the deities in whose care he entrusted the Last World.

  What did it say?

  “Be kind. Love them. Care for them. Be the parents to them that I could not be to you. Let them flourish and protect them from all external harm, even undue influence from yourselves or your fellow deities,” Clemency quoted. “Let them learn from their mistakes. Guide, but never rule. Be stern, but never cruel. They have been through too much at my hands already. Do not seek me, for I am already within you and you will not find me without.”

  And he didn’t tell them? Wylant asked. What do they think it says?

  Aldo wrote down all the rules he invented, Clemency relayed. Vander says the volumes would fill whole buildings. Apparently, Aldo did try to tell the other gods at first, but they wouldn’t believe him. Being the god of fact and fiction, when the first did not serve he defaulted to the second. He “admitted” it was a joke and started fabricating rules as they were needed. He appears to have tried to keep the strictures thematically compatible with the Arbiter’s initial instructions, but the more complicated the rule system became, the harder it was to preserve the spirit of the message.

  “Just a moment.” Wylant held out a hand. “I am conferring.”

  “Take your time.” Dienox’s smile was echoed on his God Speaker’s lips. “The battle may have paused here at the gate, but it continues in the rest of the city.” Turning her head to face the spreading fire, the God Speaker sighed contentedly. “Is it not glorious?”

  He is insane, Wylant thought to Clemency and Vax.

  He is an unbalanced deity, Clemency and Vax answered.

  “I can’t just kill every Dienox follower in the city,” Wylant hissed.

  “No.” Dienox’s tattooed lips moved over the closed lips of his young priestess. “You could not.”

  Certainly you could, Clemency thought.

  No, Vax thought. Not just. Not either. Not only. Every follower.

  Vax . . . Wylant’s blood ran cold.

  He is conflict. Vax’s thoughts held no horror at the suggestion. He thought it could be won. Most battles can only be lost . . . By one side or the other . . . And always, at least to a small degree, by both.

  You are resolution. Vax’s thoughts blended with the pictures in his mind and, as his words reached her, the illustration came, too. Conflicts can be resolved with a hug, a kind word, a punishment, a scolding. She saw Kholster hugging Rae’en after she’d forged Testament, Kholster leaning over an aged woman to let her spit in his face, having Rae’en fetch him water so she could try again when the first gob fell short. My father’s war with the Eldrennai was resolved with the death of thousands and the sacrifice of thousands more. Elves lined up to be slain or scarred or banished.

  The resolution to a spark in dry grass can be a hunter rushing to put it out, hopefully the wiser for his brush with catastrophe . . . Or it can resolved by the catastrophe itself. She saw herself forging Vax in Uled’s blood upon the Life Forge before destroying the Life Forge with the weaponized body of her son. He tried to show her an image echoing his words, but that one scene reverberated, not from her point of view, from his. He’d felt it. Every blow. No blame came with it, but when he reached for an image of the greatest pain he could imagine, none other could take its place. A forest of ashes to bring forth new life.

  A wave of nausea struck Wylant; the world seeming to blink and judder before her eyes, then return to normal, almost as if her perceptions had sped up to match the speed of Vax’s thoughts, enabling the mental conversation to take place in the space of a few breaths. She had not noticed the change, focused as she was on the exchange itself, but the reversion was impossible to miss. Wylant wondered if Aern did that sort of thing in the midst of combat without even noticing.

  “You want me to destroy,” Wylant whispered, fighting off the nausea, willing herself not to tear up, for Vax’s sake, and (gods curse me) because she could not take her attention off of Dienox. Any weakness displayed he would exploit. You want me to kill all of his followers?

  You can do it, Mom. Vax’s thoughts surged with confidence. The Life Forge exploded under Vax, shards of it penetrating him, wounding his soul, his form, infecting him, until Kholster had repaired him, never mentioning what he’d found wrong with their son, what he’d had to undo. Or destroy the Guild Cities. I know you have it in you; you destroyed the Life Forge. That killed far more people. And you liked them.

  My son is pouring out his heart to me, Wylant thought, and I cannot give him my full attention. What’s worse: he would expect nothing different.

  Two sounds increased in volume, picked out and amplified by Clemency even as they were displayed at the edges of Wylant’s field of vision. An attempted ambush.

  “No.” Wylant parried a dagger blow from her right, Vax
as longsword, cutting through the axe of a second of Dienox’s God Speakers while she caught the wrist of a third with her left hand and knew what it would take to get Dienox to face her or be diminished to a degree his ego would not be able to accept. “Not his followers.”

  “His temples.” She hurled the dagger-wielding youth at the female God Speaker, decapitating the axeman without breaking Dienox’s gaze.

  Taking to the air, the goddess of resolution flew for Warfare, the war god’s sacred city.

  CHAPTER 8

  KEEP YOUR EYE ON THE ENDGAME

  Vander watched Wylant fly, observing her quarry as the war god concentrated his powers to confront her. The Overwatch-turned-god-of-knowledge saw Dienox as a stylized sword, a symbol less personified than all of the gods except Torgrimm had been in centuries. Ties of power, some trickling, others like rushing torrents, raged between the natures of the two beings . . . The power, as they drew nearer to one another, a shared pool from which they both pulled.

  The thought to inform Kholster about the progress on this front melted away like dew before the second sun as he spied web-like connections between Wylant and Clemency. Curious, he followed the tangle through the magical fields that drove the warsuit and gave it life, expecting to find the source centered in the warsuit’s spirit. Hard to follow even for all his power, however, Vander traced a tenuous wisp reaching beyond Clemency. Like a trap line, the strand of power ran all the way back to Vax.

  Did you want me, Uncle? Vax thought at him.

  Kholster, Vander thought, even as he considered how to answer, Wylant has decided to lure Dienox out by attacking the city of Warfare. Then to Vax, Just keeping an eye on things, Vax.

  We’re not going to hurt my mother, Vax thought. Vander relayed the thoughts to Kholster, too, letting him hear the conversation, but leaving him a mute participant.