Powers

by James A. Burton

  Typical god. Life isn’t painful enough, so I’ll invent eternal hell. Can’t escape by dying.

  The path led on, not steep, praise be to Allah, following the slope of the trout stream it tracked, surfaced with stones and roots and gravel mostly, cleared high and wide enough for Fafnir with a fly rod. He glanced out through and over swamp maples, cedars, thickets of laurel, a grove of dark fir here and some tall pines on a knoll over there looking like a Japanese sumi-e ink painting, expressive brushstrokes.

  Something waited, ahead of them. Mel’s winds had sensed it. She hadn’t explored further than the immediate area of the campsite, keeping watch over his sickness. Now he could feel that something, his own power waxing as the Seal’s waned. Neither of them had much clue as to what they felt. That had been part of Solomon’s ancient work, stealing their memories and powers and more than half their skills.

  At least Mel had known she was a goddess, because her people filled in the blanks. They told her what she was.

  Do I want to fix the Seal? Cripple myself again, Mel again, after Mother has set us free?

  Gods invent hells.

  They climbed beside a waterfall, fifty vertical feet of cascade whitewater and rainbowed mist, stepped pools and black mossy rocks and trailing wet ferns, one laurel clump perched on an outcrop in the middle to supervise the whole. Thing looked like it had been built as a Zen gardener’s fish ladder to allow spawning runs upstream. How much of this had Fafnir made, anyway?

  He’d had centuries. He liked fish. He’d helped build Valhalla for gods he didn’t like. Gods who cheated.

  This is the other side of what gods do, if they take the time. None of that six-days-and-rest nonsense. Takes me longer than that to make a decent blade from scratch. Making a good universe, one that passes detail, that takes years. Like, billions of them, what with the geological epochs thrown in for checking up on long-term consequences of this tweak here and that one there.

  Constant tinkering. Not a one-shot deal.

  Albert soaked up the smell of wet moss, clean water, healthy trees and soil. The roar and hiss and boom and chuckle of falling water. Fafnir must have tuned the stream for pitch and timbre. Need a plunge pool over here for the low register.

  Adjust again each spring, as the ice-out and high water changed things, shifted rocks and dumped washed-out trees across the current and gouged new pools. Study the results. Keep the good and adapt the bad to make it good. Life is change.

  Except for us. Can gods change?

  The path crossed side-streams or the main current by stepping stones—Zen spacing, you had to alter your stride and pay attention to balance, live in each step. Be here now. Zen teahouse views—framed to snatch a glimpse of shimmering pool and overhanging laurel or cedar in mid-stride, you only caught it once, from one exact angle. A trout jumped in the middle of one such glimpse, snatching a mayfly or some such glinting morsel at the peak of the leap, then vanished into spreading silver rings of water.

  I’m glad we didn’t have to fight him. Kill him. Guest-law requires him to defend Mother to the death. Once he let her shelter under his roof.

  Damn her, for setting such a trap.

  He’d lagged behind Mel, savoring the place and time. Now he pushed harder to catch up, burning hip and all, panting and sweating with the weight of the pack and the Seal. He could feel the ancient iron dragging at him on the climb. He’d had to tuck his cane into the pack, to free his hands to hold the shotgun ready.

  Dammit.

  “Whatever’s waiting ahead of us, it has to be a trap. That’s the way Mother thinks.”

  She didn’t pause or even glance back, keeping her attention on the trail and any dangers, searching the treetops, the rocks, every clump of shrubbery, the shadows, even the water in case of kraken.

  “You say this like it was some kind of news.”

  Sometimes, paranoia represents an accurate world-view.

  They topped another slope next to another artwork cascade, and the valley opened out in front of them. Water meadows framed by forest, grass and cattails and sedges and the stream snaking deep and dark and cold through it all, perfect for the clean back-cast of fly-fishing, here and there a beaver lodge to harvest the bordering aspens. Across it all, a rise of glacier-carved gray stone much like the cliff that held Fafnir’s cave.

  Another giant’s home? Albert didn’t care. All he cared about was the route ahead looked flat for a while. Mel had been staggering, the morning she’d recovered from her sickness. He’d turned his fish spear into the naginata because she needed the support, not because he thought she knew that weapon.

  He felt like she had looked.

  Well, half dead is better than the whole dish. On the other hand, half a fish is better than none. Metaphors are almost as slippery as eels.

  He shook himself and took one step, then another. If you’re still moving, you’re still alive. Mel had paused and waited while he caught his breath. Now she studied him with narrowed eyes, head cocked to one side.

  “Want to take a break? I’m pretty sure I could scrounge up some lunch around here.”

  Temptation. Get thee behind me, Satan. Except, he didn’t trust her behind his back. Dilemma.

  He pulled up a couple of quotes from the Qur’an and then discarded them for the sake of his hide. She’d told him to stick to Shakespeare. “ ‘ ’Twere well it were done quickly.’ If I sit down, I won’t get up for a day or two.”

  And then, by association and not out loud, By the pricking of my thumbs . . . now that they had a clear view over the water-meadow, he recognized what he felt from the bare stone outcrop ahead of them. “We’re getting closer to one of those gates. Same feeling as the alley outside that old door that wasn’t there.”

  She nodded. “I didn’t want to mention it, in case I was just wishing. Glad to know you feel it too.”

  “I think people like us, gods or whatever, we’re supposed to be able to find the gates. Maybe we even built them in the first place. One of the powers Solomon stole from us. If you believe Mother.”

  They plodded on. Or, she strode and scouted and radiated deadly speed while he plodded. That amount of bustling energy could have aggravated the hell out of him, if he had the strength to spare. Instead he just filed it as a fact, possibly important. Let her take the hard part in the coming battle. Not being a coward, just recognizing reality when it rose up and smacked him in the face. Like the trail kept threatening to do.

  A mile winding around the water-meadows and in and out of aspens and birches, past the gnawed pencil-point stumps that said the beaver lodges were still active, a mile of one foot in front of the other and wishing he dared take a break on one of the long stones placed here and there along the trail—rounded glacial stones with gentle flats or depressions of the correct size and height to receive a giant’s butt for lunch or quiet contemplation of a particular view.

  Glacial stones not placed by any glacier. Fafnir had been working on this for a long time.

  Damn shame I can’t pause and admire his masterpiece. Those vistas. But if I stop moving, it’s gonna take dynamite to get me started again.

  One foot in front of the other. His view narrowed to the trail in front of him, leaving the vistas and any possible threats to Mel. If you’re still moving, you’re still alive.

  He moved into shadow. He looked up into a bulk of vertical gray stone spotted with lichen and the wash of dark and light that rain brought below the lichen, its acids painting or etching the rock. The trail ended at a door, a weathered wooden door of rails and stiles and inset beveled panels that looked a hell of a lot like the one back in that alley, except this didn’t have a cross and shield at the peak of its pointed arch. And just like the alley door, it didn’t offer a knob or handle or other outside hardware. It did have an inscription winding up and over the peak and down.

  He stared at it. He tried to make sense of the Gothic spiky scroll-letters, not really designed for carving into stone, but not in any Germanic language h
e knew, ancient or modern. Then he shifted gears and it clicked into place. Italian. Old Italian. Fafnir’s little joke.

  Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate. He translated, out loud, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

  He blinked and woke up to the fact that he had just about literally banged his nose on the door.

  “No bunker. No defenses.”

  Mel stood leaning on the staff of the naginata, studying him studying the door and inscription. She nodded.

  “No outside defenses. Your old drinking-buddy isn’t worried about riff-raff coming through, and apparently figures that nobody can get at this side without his knowledge and consent.”

  Albert thought about that, slow as molasses in Svalbard. “Lord Fafnir’s lands. The district governor or whatever Mother called him, the guy that sent those trackers, he doesn’t have power here. And the bugs and the mutated malaria or whatever keep all the tourists out.”

  Mel ran her fingers over the wood of the door. “Illusion. No barking guards, this time. Not worried about scaring off street-people. I wonder what’s really here, hiding behind this face . . . ” A pause. “Not locked. Not even latched. Just like the other one.” She looked back at him. “Might be a good idea to click the safety off that shotgun.”

  In one smooth flow of motion, she kicked the door wide and vanished through it. He followed. He didn’t have much choice. He wondered if he should have dug out a flashlight or something before heading into a cave.

  No. Inside matched the other gateway hall—sunlit courtyard surrounded by galleries. To hell with impossibility, those tons of stone overhead. Instead of a fountain, the courtyard held a . . . cactus? Eight feet tall, maybe, and fat. Not spiky—furry brownish green, the kind of tiny barbed spines that practically leapt out at you and burrowed into your flesh and left you with an inflamed rash that lasted weeks. He’d met those spines before.

  And then the cactus opened its eyes. A ring of eyes—blue-green with black cat-slit pupils, he could see four of them on this side and the edges of more around each side. Lumps formed on the fur and extruded into tentacles.

  Forbidden.

  Not a voice, a statement hanging in the air, inside his head. The cactus, the Thing, could write in his mind. In Gothic lettering.

  Tentacles with claws, he’d seen those on octopi and squid, demons from the deep, catch prey and drag it to the crushing beak. They lashed out at Mel. She wasn’t there, wasn’t where they sought, so they stretched toward Albert and he fired the shotgun from the hip, first round birdshot blasting the eyes, second and third buckshot cutting through the tentacles closest to him, avoiding the blur that was Mel dancing in and out with the naginata spinning like a propeller in a deadly baton-twirl of keen hungry steel. Chopped tentacle-bits flew away from her, green blood spurted into the air, but more and more buds formed from the body and the cut ends.

  Hydra.

  Cut off a head, two replaced it.

  Albert clicked on an empty chamber and dropped the shotgun. Emptied two magazines from the pistol, the hollow-point bullets opening gaping holes in the central trunk of the hydra. Holes that lasted seconds only, before closing as if they’d never been. Useless.

  Herakles had used a torch. Seared the hydra’s wounds to prevent regeneration. No torches. Hell, they’d need a flamethrower or napalm for this one, anyway. Too damn fast.

  Albert shrugged the pack off, broke the buckles holding the flap, no time for stupid buckles. Rummaged into it. Pain seared across his face as one of the tentacles whipped past and then dropped to the floor as Mel slashed it off halfway.

  Salt. Heavy bag of kosher salt. He tore it open, grabbed a handful of the coarse crystals, threw them at the closing wound of the tentacle stump.

  The hydra screamed, no sound, pain in his head, white across his eyes. When Albert could see again, that stump still oozed green, no healing, no regeneration.

  More salt, more wounds, he waded into the nest of snakes as Mel cut and cut and cut, now slicing at the body rather than the tentacles, fillets of cactus, of hydra, and each time she cut he flung salt and the green blood oozed. Uncut tentacles grabbed at him. She slashed them as she jerked back and forth herself—the hydra found her by touch, no eyes now, and she had to cut her own body free. Then, a whipping downward slash as she dropped to one knee, the central trunk fell in two halves and Albert dumped salt on both.

  Both shuddered and screamed, a scream in his head that faded and dopplered down as if the hydra fled.

  Silence.

  Green blood oozed.

  The rest of it didn’t move.

  He still had a handful of salt. He stood with it in his palm, waiting for some part of the hydra to twitch, to stir. Nothing.

  Not much structure he could see on the cut halves, tubes for circulation or whatever, layers of fiber. Muscles? Growth rings? The green slime covered anything else. He couldn’t even tell if it was plant or animal or some mix of both.

  To hell with that. He sank to his knees and then his butt on his heels, barely able to stay upright that much. He sucked in a breath, another. Dumped the salt back into the almost-empty bag in his left hand.

  Still breathing.

  Mel leaned on the shaft of the naginata, staring down at green-spattered paving stone. Red blood dripped from her cheek where one of the whipping tentacles had caught her, caught even her. Again, more red on the back of her right hand. If that had broken her hold on the shaft . . .

  Fire burned in both of his own cheeks, his own forehead. He felt warm blood oozing down. That must have lashed across his eye-sockets. Just a touch deeper—blinding him—he couldn’t have seen to throw.

  The hydra had known how to fight. Not just flailing, it had gone for targets. It had thought. It knew weak spots, like those fireflies in the tunnel.

  Mel stirred and looked up. Blinked back into focus. Studied Albert, across the carnage. Took a deep breath.

  She stepped across bits of hydra and pools of ichor to him, reached out, and offered him a hand up. He checked with his knees—would they hold him up if he accepted?

  Provisional agreement. He stood, swaying. “Those words outside. Fafnir would have used runes, not silly Gothic lettering. He’d have quoted the Elder Edda or some such thing, not Dante. That was Mother’s joke.”

  He looked around at the carnage staining the stone flooring. “Probably this, too. Fafnir loves a good party. He wasn’t tricking us with that offer of roast boar and beer. Wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t keep any guard at all on his own personal gate.”

  Mel waved at the slime and chunks of . . . flesh? “What the fuck was that thing? Never seen or heard of anything like it.”

  Albert shook his head. “Some kind of non-Greek hydra. Maybe it came out of the lost myths and mists of ancient Sa’aba, along with Mother. Or maybe she just invented it out of ectoplasm. Whatever. I hope it stays dead.”

  He switched his attention from the hydra, it seemed to offer no present danger, and looked her over. That had been her clean uniform. Red blood and green, chunks of hydra, rips from the clawed tentacles, what looked like powder burns, near-misses from his frenzied shooting. Well, she shouldn’t jump around so much in a fight, dammit.

  Or maybe she was fast enough to dodge bullets.

  Judging by her expression, he didn’t look any better. She reached out and ran a finger though the pain on his left cheek. Pulled back a bloody finger, his blood, and licked it.

  “There. I have drunk your blood. We’re free of that.”

  What the hell is she up to?

  “My words, you idiot. When I didn’t know who or what you were. When I hadn’t seen our fight through your eyes. Self-defense.”

  First time I’ve ever heard of an Afghan tribeswoman, tribesman, letting go of a blood feud. The feud is life and more than life. Give it up and you give up your honor.

  As Snorri Sturluson tells us in the Old Norse of the Prose Edda, “When pigs fly.”

  XXIV

  Adrenaline eb
bed into picking up the pieces. She wiped the blade of her naginata but didn’t sheathe it, her eyes searching the galleries and doors and clear blue sky overhead for any further threat. Now that he had time, nothing trying to kill him Right Now, he could look around.

  Near as he could tell, this place was a twin to the one that had moved them into the firefly tunnel—one “door” in, twenty-seven wooden “doors” out from the same four floors of stucco galleries rising to a red tile roof around the courtyard, pierced marble screenwork railings, marble stairs in the same corner, four single “windows” to the front.

  Only difference was the cactus/hydra instead of a fountain, in the center of the flagstone courtyard. He wondered what that fountain had really been. And why they hadn’t triggered its attack. Perhaps because Mother had been there already, lurking? She’d turned it off, or it had recognized her?

  He found the empty magazines for the pistol and reloaded them from the backpack. Did the same for the shotgun. Neither of the guns seemed to have suffered a scratch, for all that he’d tossed each aside on what looked like worn flagstone pavement.

  Which made him study the flat stone between the two halves of hydra leaking green goo. A line scored the stone, mark of the blade from her final slash. He’d winced when the sparks flew, but he couldn’t fault her intent. Cut that damned thing clear through—no ifs, ands, or buts. And then maybe nuke the corpse, to be sure.

  He took the naginata from her and checked the blade. No visible damage. He ran his fingertip along the flat of the blade, feeling the soul of the steel. No way he was going to test the edge. He knew better.

  The blade told him it was fine, the bindings tight and shaft undamaged. He stared at the line scored into the stone, at the blade, at her. Knelt, and ran his fingertips across the groove in the stone and felt it sharp and fresh under the slimy ichor. He shrugged.

  “Illusions.”

  The hydra’s body had shrunk from when he first saw it—both shorter and less thick, probably bulk lost from extruding those tentacles. Even so, his blade had cut about three inches beyond its own length in splitting the thing. He’d wrought better than he knew. Or Mel had stretched its cut with mana from her Kali avatar.