99 Gods: Betrayer

by Randall Farmer

  Ankara confused Dave. The restaurants apologized for not serving alcohol, some city ordinance not many years old. Yet the place crawled with heavily advertised bars, as well as billboards hawking whiskey, beer and raki (the local aniseed-flavored brew of choice). A sign at the edge of one of the parks they had passed proclaimed ‘consuming alcohol is forbidden’ in four languages. A high percentage of the women dressed Western style but there were women in chadors, not something Dave expected to see in Turkey.

  Stressed social system, he concluded, although Dave wasn’t sure if the stress came from the 99 Gods or from the Islamic resurgence of the past decades.

  Anything to keep his mind off Elorie and what had happened earlier in the evening. Otherwise his head would burst.

  Jack and Georgia turned into a place labeled the ‘New York Bar’. Said ‘New York Bar’ blared fifty year old Motown music into the street, of all things.

  The cramped interior of the ‘New York Bar’ suffered from terminal ambiguity, made worse by the dance floor taking up most of the floorspace. A dozen small restaurant style tables of the cigarette burned Formica variety surrounded the dance floor, all with chairs more appropriate for a Vegas casino.

  The entire crew, save Osham, who begged off to catch some extra sleep, came with Jack and Georgia. Dave immediately turned down a pick-up by a short ivory-skinned woman, dressed subcontinent style with a white scarf over her head, who switched back and forth between English and a language Dave suspected to be Urdu. A Pakistani. Her makeup looked professionally applied.

  The Pakistani princess immediately made for Darrel, who didn’t turn down the pick-up. Dave, one ear overhearing, switched his mental picture of the Pakistani woman when she admitted to being a US educated PhD chemical engineer. She and Darrel talked shop as they eyed each other with bright bedroom thoughts.

  Ankara bent his mind.

  “You holding up okay?” Elorie said.

  “Not sure,” Dave said. Elorie – his wife, right? He repressed the urge to give way to a temper tantrum. “Sorry.” Perhaps he had grown too old for this marriage thing. First Tiff, and now this.

  “I’m surprised you haven’t had a screaming fit.”

  “Me, too. The urge is there, but I’m fighting it.”

  She took his arm and sat him down at a table as far from the dance floor as possible. She leaned close so she didn’t have to shout over the thumping music. “You’ve got to have been thinking I was about to dump you, the way I’ve been treating you the past two days.” She sighed. “That’s me when I go into workaholic mode…and don’t you dare say a thing about any resemblances to your former wife!” He held his hands up in mock surrender. “Then I go and practically die on you.”

  “I’m not sure there was a ‘practically’ involved, El.”

  She nodded.

  “You seem far too chipper yourself, considering.”

  “Well, I’m numb,” she said. “Can’t say much else. Numb. Too much living on borrowed time. I’m not scared of death anymore.” She paused and gave his hand a squeeze. “You think about the odds? I mean, we’ve spent less than fifteen minutes together in the past two and a half days, and I luck out and have my stroke right in front of you, right where you can save me.”

  “This does sound insane.”

  “This sounds like the work of the 99 Gods, in specific, Dubuque,” Elorie said. “Which, of course, bothers me. I owe him one, and I don’t like owing him anything. I’m not sure I wouldn’t rather be dead. Death is so damned peaceful.”

  He had the urge to yell at Elorie, anything to get her out of this mood, but he decided that if he did, all he would buy would be a few more minutes, and a depressed Elorie afterwards who might be far harder to handle.

  “You haven’t said anything about the end of the Siege of Dubuque and his speech afterwards,” Dave said. After she recovered from her half hour of healing while apparently dead, she had watched the cable news, eyes wide open.

  “Is this something you need to talk about?”

  He shrugged. “I’d expected at least an ‘I told you so’.”

  “Hmm?”

  Dave waited her out, but she didn’t elaborate. Dubuque’s speech troubled him. He didn’t like the idea of Dubuque starting his own religion. Still, if anyone had the right to start up a new religion, who else but a Living Saint?

  “I’d expected you to ask me about Persona’s comment about why I’m difficult to heal,” Elorie said. The music grew even louder and she hunched closer.

  “I was waiting for the appropriate moment.” Elorie had decided to wiggle out of giving any reaction at all to the defeat of Portland’s minions and Dubuque’s screwy victory speech. She wanted him to keep his eyes open. Perhaps that’s all she really wanted.

  “You want to know what I found out? It’s amusing.”

  “Alright,” Dave said. “Amuse me.”

  “Remember when Lorenzi gave me the amulet, back in the lakeside cabin, and the damned thing fell apart in my hands?” Dave nodded. “Well, I looked it up on the internet. Turns out there are a small percentage of people who are immune to magic. Some group of crazy busybodies in England has codified these immunities – there are several types – and my version is Class E, which turns out to be ‘totally immune to Magicians, partly immune to Divine magic’. Which is why Persona’s patch jobs don’t take and why I suspect I might not actually be curable.” Elorie wiped her left eye as fast as she could. “I guess I’ll find out when I find out.”

  “Oh,” Dave said. His wife, he decided, wasn’t made of iron. Nope. Titanium. He, on the other hand, was more of a rubbery sort, both body and mind. He doubted their paired foibles had been a coincidence. “Um…”

  “Live for the moment,” Elorie said, apropos of nothing. “Only way through.” She laughed, the laugh of the wild woman Elorie was when she let her hair down. “At least most of the time. I’ll clue you in if I have any more spells where I can’t cope.”

  “Okay,” Dave said.

  Georgia sat down at their table, finished off her glass of red wine in a huge unwomanly gulp, and got a twinkle in her eye. “Time to dance, Estrada,” she said, grabbed Dave’s arm, and yanked him on to the dance floor.

  “You’re supposed to send me back for the slow dances,” Dave said. Georgia hadn’t. For someone so outwardly standoffish and intellectual, she danced like a dream. Now, she hung on him like an old lover.

  She snorted. “You dance better than I expected,” she said. “I’ve dated geologists before. Nine out of ten of your peers would be plastered by now.”

  “True,” Dave said. “Something came up or I’d have studiously followed the rule.”

  Another snort. “I can’t figure you out.”

  “Uh?” Wouldn’t be the first time for this group.

  “The rest of the crew think you and Elorie are lovers, but I can tell you’re having problems. Unconsummated?”

  “I’d rather not talk about…”

  “I didn’t ask your permission,” Georgia said. “You saved Elorie’s life tonight. Why? Aren’t you supposed to be on the other side, cheering on Dubuque’s victory?”

  “How did you find out about this?”

  “Gossip. Eavesdropping. Intuition. The usual feminine wiles.”

  Dave gave Georgia a sidelong glance. If Georgia had any feminine wiles, Dave hadn’t found them yet.

  “I think what we’re doing, chasing down Lorenzi’s lost cult, is important, important for all of the 99 Gods as well as Mr. Lorenzi,” Dave said. “Our mission is an important piece of the puzzle, about everything going on with the 99 Gods. I’m going to be disappointed if this turns out to be less than Earth-shattering.”

  “I see,” Georgia said. She looked over Dave’s shoulder, and when the dance let him look where Georgia had stared, he realized she watched Jack. Jack had left the group’s table to stand six feet away and he gazed, ramrod straight, at the two of them. Dave decided not to smile.

  Okay, feminine wiles at work,
Dave thought. She’s just slicker than most. Under different circumstances, Georgia would meet his criteria as date material, save for one thing: she reminded him far too much of a younger version of Tiff.

  “You love her?” Georgia said.

  “It comes and goes. Mostly yes, and mostly a lot. There’s too much going on for me to understand my own heart, unfortunately.”

  “You think too much.”

  “Funny, that statement coming from you.”

  Georgia laughed. “I’m the expert at ‘thinking too much’, Dave, and if you could find my heart, you would find little more than scattered hunks of hamburger. The detritus of my love life makes critiquing others so much easier.”

  Dave grunted. He suspected he didn’t meet Georgia’s criteria for date material, not at all.

  “So, since you seem to know everything, have you ever heard of any myths or legends of a Daughter of Light, or perhaps a Woman of Brilliance? A Child of Morning or Twilight? A Father of Darkness or Man of Night?” Georgia said. She pressed against him for a moment. “Our lost Ecumenists had been looking for references to these in their old records, what they called the ‘hidden redemptive prophesies’, but the best they had been able to come up with was that they referred to the waning moon, the waxing moon and the dark of the moon, which seems spurious to me.”

  His head spun with the sudden change of topic. “Doesn’t ring a bell. It certainly wasn’t in any of those Book of Enoch translations you gave me, even the ones in German. Nor in Lorenzi’s letters.”

  Georgia sighed. “I’m positive the Ecumenists thought this to be supremely important, some sort of legend of the fallen angels. I’m half convinced that some of the ceiling symbols might refer to these people, if they are people, and I want to crack those symbols.” He could hear the frustration in her voice. “The Ecumenists’ deep knowledge is terra incognita to me.”

  “This whole escapade’s terra incognita for the lot of us,” Dave said.

  “I think Jack’s ready to kill you,” Elorie said. After Georgia had let him out of her tight and sweaty clutches, Elorie, who had been reluctant to dance, suggested dancing as soon as he sat back down. The fact he dripped sweat out of his belly button didn’t bother her a bit.

  Jack, of course, danced elegantly with Georgia, about four paces away. His eyes never landed on Dave. “My heart bleeds for his pain,” Dave said. Another slow dance, and he enjoyed the warmth of Elorie in his arms.

  “I will say that your dancing with Georgia proved a bit more intimate than I expected.”

  “She’s full of surprises, our Georgia. She says I’m a stud and she can’t keep her hands off of…”

  Elorie stomped on his instep. “Hah hah. Only I get to call you a stud.”

  “You need a new pair of glasses.”

  “I don’t wear glasses.”

  “Point made.”

  “You’re impossible,” Elorie said.

  “I’ve been told that, but of course I’ve never noticed,” Dave said. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t be impossible.”

  Elorie laughed. “Okay, Mr. Impossible, while I was sitting there alone watching you and Georgia all but make love on the dance floor, I had an idea.”

  “An idea?”

  “Yes. It’s been awhile since I’ve had an idea along these lines, but you told me that if I ever got another one, not to hold back.”

  Oh. One of those ideas. Dave raised his eyebrows. “You don’t need to ask my permission.”

  “This time I do. It’s a bit abnormal.”

  “Abnormal? How?”

  Elorie shrugged. The song ended, and when the next one started, he held her tight.

  Dave had the urge to purr.

  However, Elorie never answered his question. “So, tell me.”

  “Nope. I’m going to be stretching the boundaries of decorum again, and so I’m warning you ahead of time.”

  Dave shook his head, remembering with trepidation his initiation-by-way-of-one-night-together, Elorie’s last bit of decorum stretching. He put his queasiness aside and forced out a perfectly normal sounding “Okay.”

  “Good,” Elorie said. She dragged his ear down to her mouth level. “Consider how insane it is that you’re supposedly a world-class mind-shielded Psychic, immune to the highest end telepathy, and I’m one of these immune-to-magic people, and apparently a rather potent one.” He hadn’t expected this subject change. Although he had already followed this chain of logic to its inevitable end. “Odds are that there aren’t any individuals on Earth who have both of these immunities at the level we do. Not enough people.”

  “With the Recruiter on the case, there are no coincidences.”

  “Uh huh,” Elorie said. “I think I’m more scared of Alt than I am of either Portland or Dubuque.”

  “So, any hints about this decorum stretcher?”

  “Sure,” Elorie said, whispered sarcasm. “It involves a bed.”

  “The blindfold’s part of it,” Elorie said.

  “Blindfold?”

  “Use your imagination.”

  Dave grunted and sat down. Elorie blindfolded him, took him by hand and led him to the bed. “Sit.”

  He sat.

  While seated, she slowly stripped off his clothes, slowly and carefully. Dave began to breathe heavily. She gently lowered him on to the bed, on his back. “Skootch up.”

  He did. Then Elorie took his right hand and bound it to the bedpost.

  “Should I scream and struggle?”

  “Shut up and be serious, or I’m going to go after you with an ice cube,” Elorie said, her voice breathy. “After I gag you.” She bound his other hand…and then his feet. Dave stayed quiet.

  By the time she bound him, he had a pretty good idea why she played this game. He didn’t care.

  She ran a delicate hand up from his hip, along his torso, to a small, tight nipple, and then, equally delicate, down the other side. She leaned over him and let her satin blouse tickle his bare skin.

  “Unbutton my blouse with your teeth.”

  “Should I say ‘yes, ma’am’?”

  “Don’t bother,” Elorie said. Then she remembered her fierceness. “Just do it. And mind your manners. Let’s keep those teeth working on the blouse buttons and nothing else.”

  Anticipation. He breathed the smell of her own growing heat as he struggled with the contrary buttons.

  “Now take the blouse off,” she said, a long, long time later. She rubbed against him as he tugged at the unbuttoned blouse with his teeth. Her heart beat against his skin, tha-thump, tha-thump, intense and aroused.

  “Next, my skirt. Start with the zipper. No, I don’t want to hear anything about why you can’t.”

  A stinging, metallic taste and a much richer scent, down here by the zipper of her skirt. He took a little extra time, just to enjoy the fragrance, and then started on the skirt’s two buttons. She batted him on the side of the head.

  “Hold your horses,” Elorie said, her voice hoarse. Then she laughed a throaty laugh and nuzzled him along his neck and ear. He growled deep in his chest and she nipped at his earlobe. “Now you can go after the skirt buttons.”

  The skirt buttons were more difficult than the blouse buttons, but also much sweeter. He licked her lean tummy as he nibbled the buttons, and tasted the salty tang of her sweat. If she asked him to remove her pantyhose, he suspected he wouldn’t survive such richness.

  “The hose, now.”

  The edge of survival was another world, a heaven, or hell, of heat, anticipation, and a tension that wound him into an ever-tightening ache.

  By the time he got to the panties, he wasn’t sure he had survived and he didn’t care.

  Then, so sudden and at the same time so slowly, the heat, the flowing wetness, the love, came down and impaled herself on him and he moved beyond survival into heaven itself.

  “So, I get to stay tied up all night?” Dave said. They had done it, they were off the schneid. The tension hadn’t broken, though. He didn’t want to
say the it word. He didn’t even want to think.

  “Perhaps,” Elorie said. Her voice lowered. “I could leave you tied up if you want.”

  “Would you rather be tied up?”

  “I’m asking you.”

  “Well, then, no,” Dave said. “I wouldn’t mind being able to move next time.”

  She stroked him and giggled. “Next time? How old are you, anyway?”

  “Not that old.”

  She started to untie him. “I had to be in control this first time,” she said, after she untied his feet. He had figured that out when she had tied his wrist. “Nothing personal. I’m more the other way, normally.”

  “I understand,” Dave said. “I think you can be in control even without tying me up.” And he had thought Tiff was a control freak. Hmph. Shows what he knew.

  “You know what?” Elorie eyes twinkled.

  “What?”

  “Until the last of the shipments arrive, I think we’re going to spend some time acting like disgusting newlyweds.”

  Heh. Dave smiled, lost in Elorie’s beauty. He just wished he was closer to twenty than sixty.

  28. (War)

  “Quiet from here on in,” War whispered. Her Dubuque projection handled the sense-defenses while Dana’s projection slowly and carefully flew them the last three blocks and up to the observation deck level of the Empire State building. Change and Freedom, laden down by Inventor’s magic items, were in charge of the breaking and entering as well as the freeing of the various enslaved Ideological and Practical Gods in the Seven Suits employ.

  They had cracked the secret of the Suits: they handled the complexity of their corporate empire by employing lots of enslaved Gods. War had first figured out their trick in the Place of Time, but to preserve her secret source of knowledge, she had planted clues in front of Change until Change figured out the trick himself.

  None of them knew how many enslaved Gods the Suits had, other than ‘too many’. At least a dozen. Their task, today, was to free as many as possible, without having to utilize any of the Territorial Gods’ direct help. None of the Territorials possessed enough Mission strength to interfere.