99 Gods: Betrayer

by Randall Farmer

  Portland would argue with the headsman even after he had cut off her head. She was utterly shameless. “Learn anything?”

  “They are close to declaring John Lorenzi and his magicians anathema, flat out coming out and saying they should be hunted down and shot like dogs,” Portland said. “I’m not sure what to make of their assertions. There’s no logic behind any of them.”

  “I think the Host was divided on the subject of Lorenzi and the magicians, and their position, as a group, is changing,” War said. She would have to look more closely into this mess. She put a trip to the Place of Time to delve into this subject into her mental planning book. “Have they shown such internal divisions before?”

  “Not that I’m aware of,” Portland said. “Boise says otherwise, but he’s always been closer to the Host than I am.” Portland paused. “I don’t like this.”

  War grunted and sat. “This is disturbing but not unwelcome. It means that the Host may be more flexible than our other enemies. I’m not sure Dubuque even knows how to change his mind anymore.”

  Cut out of the conversation, the two less-than-aggressive Supported excused themselves and fled at flank speed.

  “He’s changed his mind an ample number of times, in my experience,” Portland said. Portland, War knew, still communicated with Dubuque on a regular basis. War thought this risky, but if anyone could talk to Dubuque without succumbing to his ever growing bag of charismatic tricks, that person was Portland.

  War shook her head. “Everything he’s done since Miami’s attack is based on his City of God plan; the only things he’s flexible on are things that lie outside of his plan – and timing.”

  “Then we disagree,” Portland said.

  War nodded. Portland saw her own flexibility in everybody else. War suspected all the 99 Gods had the flaw of projecting their strengths and weaknesses on to others, including herself. “What I’m here today to discuss is an idea for our next push against Dubuque. I’ve become convinced that a small squad of Telepaths and a few Supported bodyguards might be able to get into Dubuque’s lair and take him out.”

  Portland frowned. She poked and prodded around the edges of War’s mind, checking her out for foreign willpower and telepathic influences and alerting Boise to War’s suggestion. “How would this be different than what we’ve already tried?”

  “Training,” War said. “For this to work, I need to train the Telepaths and the Supported who go with them in covert approaches and attacks from stealth. Wait – I know this isn’t that simple. To get this to work, I’m going to have to develop quite a few new willpower-based covert tricks and stealth attacks and I’m going to have to release several tricks along those lines I’ve developed and held back on. We’ve never tried true covert. I’m talking about masquerading as Dubuque Supported at a minimum, and being able to physically grab Dubuque before he has a hint about what’s going on.” War had blown this trick already to Dubuque, but nobody else realized, which made this useful for War’s dark plan.

  “How many Gods besides you and Persona would go in on this?”

  “None. Too risky, on too many levels,” War said. “The only projection would be mine, and I wouldn’t be using any divine willpower outside of my projection, unless I can come up with some new covert willpower uses. If I can talk Persona out of going, she won’t be there, either.”

  Portland shook her head. “This is suicidal, War. I don’t see any chance of success. I mean, based on what you’ve already taught us, we here are well defended against such attacks. The active and passive ID system you created can’t be broken. I’m sure Dubuque has something similar.”

  “He doesn’t have me,” War said. “I’m the difference.”

  “This is still suicidal. His worshipper support makes him far too strong. No, don’t do this. It won’t get us anywhere, and I can’t risk Alt and the Telepaths,” Portland said. “They have too many other uses.”

  Exactly, War thought. “Think on it, then, that’s all I ask,” War said.

  She had planted the seed. That was all War needed today.

  The Betrayal was now in motion.

  40. (Dave)

  Dave’s mind wandered.

  The man screamed. The hooded woman reached into the hole in the man’s chest again, and this time brought out the man’s still beating heart. The man expected blood to spurt, but it didn’t. Nothing spurted but pain.

  Somehow, Dave knew the man had once been an Ecumenist.

  “I have your heart, as promised. Didn’t think I would be this literal, did you?” the woman said, in Spanish.

  “I’ll never…” the man responded, also in Spanish. Not yet dead.

  “Never what? Spy for us? Be ours?”

  “Yes. Never. Never any of that. I’ll never serve your evil magic.”

  The cloaked woman shook her head. “Then I’ll enjoy your pain. Whenever the whim strikes me, I’ll relax my magic and stop pumping your blood for you. Then you’ll die for real. Forever. And never go to God.”

  The Ecumenist said the Lord’s Prayer and did something that made him faint. Something unnatural.

  The woman laughed, waved her hand that held the pumping heart in front of the Ecumenist, and brought him back to consciousness.

  “Escape isn’t that easy, man of the Order,” the cloaked woman said, gleeful. “You have other parts I can easily harm, to goad you into our service. Such as these!”

  The man screamed.

  Dave’s mind turned away in horror.

  “I’m dying,” Dave said.

  “I can tell.” Woman’s voice. Unknown. Distant. She spoke with a tight southern accent, African American. “I don’t even know how we’re talking, and I should know such things.” Her voice lowered, almost as if she spoke to someone else, a side comment. “Motherfucking idiot upfucking willpower.”

  A God, he decided, one of the 99. “Save me. Rescue me.”

  “Look, boyo from Mars, not only can’t I heal from that distance, I can’t even find out which part of Eurasia you’re in.”

  “Cappadocia,” Dave tried to say. Think. Send. He wasn’t sure, but he seemed to be somewhere else, a place of yellow streamers, pink clouds and purple lightning. Outside his body. Which made no sense at all.

  “You’re in Cappuccino? Dammit, I’m half sure I’m missing half of what you’re trying to send and I’m making up most of the other half. Hell, if you’ve got the amount of power you seem to, go heal yourself.”

  “I don’t have any power,” Dave sent. “I’m only a Psychic.”

  “You’re a what? No way. This is crazy, insane. All I can tell is that you’re some sort of fucked-up Supported. Cut loose from Dubuque, I think.”

  “Fucked up is right,” Dave said. “Hallucinating as well.”

  “You know, with all the shit going on in my life, this I don’t need.”

  The voice of the woman vanished.

  Dave screamed and the place of purple lighting and orange butterflies vanished from his mind.

  “I didn’t sign up for this, Dave,” Tiff said. “We’re a team. I’m not going to be a stay-at-home mom.”

  “I didn’t imply anything of the sort,” Dave said. He paced their old Five Points house, the one they lived in before they moved out west of Denver. This was an old conversation, years and years old. “What I said was that we might not be able to solve this problem just by throwing money at it. We might need to change our habits as well.”

  “This wouldn’t be a problem if you hadn’t signed up for this ridiculous client travel schedule,” Tiff said. She shifted Stacy – newborn Stacy – to her other breast.

  He hadn’t told Tiff about the deal with Hernandez Industries beforehand. He had thought this would be good news. A pleasant surprise. “I want to get ahead in my career too.”

  “Too?” Tiff sighed. “We coped with Ron and Shannon together when they were newborns. This time, suddenly you’re too busy to take paternity leave. Because of this new deal.”

  “This new
deal just doubled my take home pay,” Dave said. He held out his hands wide. “On top of that, another thirty percent more next year. DPM’s finally taking off. We’re even trolling around for a fourth partner. Tiff, we’re going to be able to do all the things we ever dreamed of doing.”

  “All the things you’ve ever dreamed of doing, you mean,” Tiff said. She stood and stalked from the newborn’s alcove, Stacy now off the teat and squalling.

  Dave shook his head, took several deep breaths, and followed. “I don’t understand, Tiff.”

  “Oh, that’s clear,” Tiff said, a room ahead of him, icy voiced. “I’m not going to forget this, dammit. This isn’t our agreement, the one we made when we agreed we could have both kids and careers.”

  “Look, Tiff, when I’m back in town I’ll be there for you,” the dense-as-a-plug younger Dave said. “There shouldn’t be any problem cutting back to twenty five or thirty hours a week when I’m in Denver.”

  The older Dave winced, understanding instantly what the younger Dave missed.

  “How generous of you,” Tiff said. He found her in the guest bedroom where she had squeezed in a child’s desk. Her office, she called it, and verrry protectively. “Now go away and leave me alone for a while.”

  “Okay, okay,” the younger Dave said. “I’ll go make us some dinner.”

  Tiff grunted and went back to nursing.

  The younger Dave had missed the nuances after he broke the old deal: Tiff’s icy comment and her running away. This had to be Tiff’s first thoughts of divorce. He hadn’t ever ponied up enough to chase those thoughts out of Tiff’s mind. All he had done by playing the money card had been to engage Tiff’s professional-soccer-player-trained ultra-competitiveness.

  Such an idiot.

  He wouldn’t learn any better until he found himself on the edge of death. He hadn’t fully understood until now, shot and hanging upside down. He never had enough ponies, a recurring theme in his, well, now former life.

  Tiff hadn’t forgotten the conversation. Within a year she had found her sixty hour a week job at Donner, on the fast track to management and to financial independence. Already designing the house her way that she later bargained for and won in the divorce. Already scary.

  Too shallow, Dave chided himself. You’re too shallow. You’ve always been too shallow.

  As Madame Xenia had said, not everyone’s hot for money and the luxuries they buy.

  Some people just wanted to win.

  Dave heard someone screaming.

  He recognized his own voice. He didn’t know why the pain gripped him and wouldn’t let go, but it did.

  “Can’t help you,” a man said in Dave’s mind. The man wore an eyeless ivory mask over his face, but yet he could see. “You’re a Mindbound, and I can’t telep Mindbound. So sorry.”

  Dave continued to scream.

  Dave shivered, conscious again, back in his body, his mind barely able to focus coherent thoughts.

  He hadn’t died. He should have. He had long since given up on figuring out why.

  The rough surface of the tufa wall felt like ice against his cheek, and his head had slipped below his feet during his last bout of unconsciousness. The room rumbled again, for the first time since the floor collapsed, the clatter of rock on rock and the scrape of rock on rock scared him, threatening another immanent collapse. Would one of the walls go? Or the doorway? Perhaps the ceiling?

  He flopped his hands around, weak, very weak, but managed to twist himself almost upright. Pain shot through him when the climbing harness shifted as he reached three quarters upright, white lightning from the bullet wound. Dave had been in and out of consciousness many times. He didn’t know how long he had hung here, suspended by the rope attached to the chest harness. Hours, not days. His earlier problems, the hallucinations, the voices, the wracking overwhelming pain, appeared to have ended. He could barely breathe; dust, pain, the wound, the pressure of the chest harness all conspired to cut off his breathing. Even blinking had become impossible, and save for a narrow slit, dust had mixed with tears to weld his eyes shut.

  He died the way all cowards ended: dying over and over and over again.

  Anger raced through him. Who had set them up to fall into this brutal trap? Portland? Dubuque? The Telepaths? Unknown enemies? If an unknown enemy turned murderous, however, there must have been a better way to kill them off than this elaborate death trap. The trap felt like a betrayal. Someone led him sheeplike to the slaughter and only mindless chance and his bullheaded love for Elorie had prevented them from all perishing.

  At any moment, Dave feared the rope would let go and he would fall the rest of the way to the distant floor of the room below, finishing the job. He figured he hung suspended near the former ceiling level of the lower room, which put him 40 feet above the old floor, likely only 35 due to the rubble of the fallen ceiling. More than enough fall to kill him.

  The scrape and clatter of rock continued; Dave decided the sound came from below. That made sense as the floor below him, now weighted down by the rubble from the room’s ceiling, could be overburdened and ready to fall into whatever lay below. Although the scrape and clatter made sense, it did surprise him – he hadn’t expected anything of similar shape and size to be underneath the meeting room.

  The chest pain receded for a moment, and another pain, psychological, grabbed him in its terrible claws, his own sins.

  He shouldn’t have thought of the word ‘betrayal’.

  He had betrayed Tiff, he had betrayed his friends, he had betrayed Elorie. Hell, he had even betrayed Dubuque; he hadn’t followed through with the answer given to his prayer, and at the end, he hadn’t followed Elorie’s lead. No matter how everything eventually turned out, he had betrayed.

  What had this betrayal bought him? The usual nothing. He hadn’t saved Elorie. He prayed she still lived, but to what end, controlled by the evil magic of this place? He hadn’t stopped the evil at all. He had failed.

  “Evil betrayers must die. We must kill them.” Did his former compatriots mean him and Elorie, or someone or something else? The more he thought, the more he suspected their ire led somewhere else.

  What if they had been right? What if he had joined in to help them? Who was the target of their overwhelming anger?

  Dave swore he heard a voice. He concentrated, but now only heard more rock scraping and clattering.

  He had failed. If I get out of this, he thought, I’ll do better. I promise. I promise with all my heart. Just give me a chance! I’ve seen my self-centered failures. I understand them now.

  I’ll do better, God. I’ll change. I’ll fulfill the promise Dubuque, Diana and the Recruiter had seen in him.

  …I couldn’t do worse.

  So, who were the evil betrayers? The 99 Gods? Dave couldn’t turn his idea into a certainty. How did the Ecumenists fit in? Had they gone after the ‘evil betrayers’? If so, they had gone on to die, if Lorenzi had indeed been right and the Ecumenists had indeed died.

  His body twitched as he relaxed, and adrenaline fear of falling turned the twitch into a spasm. His analysis fled his mind, overwhelmed by pain and now choking. Consciousness faded, only to return as he scraped a wheeze past his aching throat. The dust had climbed high again.

  He swore he saw light, something below in the fog of dust.

  Impossible. And yes, he heard a voice.

  People.

  “Help! Here!” Dave said.

  He couldn’t even hear himself speak over the clatter below. He coughed, very bad, raising a death grip of pain, and blacked out.

  When he awoke next, shivery and sweaty, dust clouded the now rock-silent air. Light shown down in the dust cloud, and as always when unconscious, he had shifted to head-below-feet again. Voices echoed below. Definitely voices, men and women, but he couldn’t make out the words or language. They argued.

  Dave tried to speak, and found again that he couldn’t. Dust clogged his throat. If he tried to cough or shout, he would black out. The pain he f
elt as he hung upside down, without moving, nearly consumed him.

  He needed to do something. He had to.

  He shifted his body mostly back to upright, slowly, trying not to get past the balance point that shifted the harness and drove him unconscious. He then kicked at the scarred wall, ripped by the rubble of the falling ceiling. His first kick dislodged a few pebbles. His second kick dislodged more, including at least one fist-sized rock. He tried a third kick, but his foot hit the wall wrong, sending him rocking, enough to lift him past the balance point and shift his harness.

  Pain ripped through him and he bit his tongue. Barely conscious, Dave noticed the voices quiet and the light change, rising from below.

  Impossible.

  Four humanoid figures rose through the dust, first just dim blobs, then as they approached, more distinct human shapes.

  Terror filled Dave at the impossibility of what he saw. Two men and two women, flying free, just flying, levitating with nothing to support them. He tried to scrabble away.

  “Alive,” one of the women said, a big-haired Goth princess with a gun. “Barely.” She spoke English with a Midwest accent, wore a partly shredded veil, a neck corset and a dowdy dress, all black. She had dark red streaks everywhere on her clothing, matching her lipstick, meant to look like blood, which Dave thought ridiculous, even for a Goth. “I saw him move.”

  “Oh, please, can I keep him this time?” the other woman improbably said. She spoke like a Californian, had waist length hair done in a single braid, and she held on to her braid with her hands, as if her hair was a rope, holding her off the floor. Her clothing looked like it had been through a blender before she had put it on today and it too showed blood-colored accents.

  Dave’s terror overwhelmed him and he tried to scrabble away. A ghostly hand lifted him away from the wall and unclipped the rope from his climbing harness. He tried to fight but the ghostly hand held firm. The invisible giant hand turned him toward one of the men, a stern black man who looked like his day had been worse than Dave’s: covered in untreated wounds, clothes shredded and partly burned. Dave realized the black man held him in the giant ghostly hand. Pain pressed at Dave’s temples, and the man frowned.