99 Gods: War

by Randall Farmer

  Dr. Horton reached into her purse and retrieved a flat black silk bag, about three inches square. She put down her purse, opened the bag, and took out a coin. Outside of the bag, the coin screamed in Atlanta’s mind, carrying bad with it in a way that highly annoyed several of her extra Godly senses. Well, whatever this was from, the so-called Angelic Host liked it no more than the Indigo did. Dr. Horton gave the coin, a warped penny, to Dana, for examination.

  “You aren’t going to explain, are you?” Dana said, holding up the warped penny to the light, to illuminate a pinhole an eighth of an inch above the coin’s distorted date. Something had twisted the penny in a warped spiral fashion, centered on the tiny hole. The mathematics of the twisting planer distortion was obvious, and the energy behind the twist minor in the 99 Gods scheme of things, but to the Indigo, and their trained version of no-power supernatural, it was immense.

  “Never,” Dr. Horton said. “There is no rational explanation. I carry this as a reminder of what I’ve witnessed.”

  Oh. Atlanta almost face-palmed herself, and she turned to Dr. Horton, then to Lara, to make sure her realization was correct before she spoke. “You want Dr. Horton divinely enhanced.”

  “Made into a Supported? Yes,” Lara said, using Jan’s coined term nobody else used. “If it’s not impossible, or otherwise politically unwise.” The Indigo’s idea of a price, or perhaps alliance.

  Atlanta met Dr. Horton’s gaze. “There is political risk, and a legitimate fear of what attention might bring. However, I’m not at all opposed to this.”

  “I accept the risk,” she said. “Given all I’ve seen, I can’t do otherwise.”

  20. (John)

  John put down his old rosary beads and stood, his flesh now more baggy than flabby. He shook and swayed, dizzy, as it should be. Night, but he didn’t bother with any illumination save a few dim night-lights. Cold rain pattered on the roof, the late October reminding him of his ancient homeland of Pomerania.

  The way to God, through fasting and meditation, was slow if you started out grossly overweight, and your subconscious mind wielded annoyingly powerful magic wedded to the idea of self-preservation. After nearly two weeks of full time meditation and fasting, while living away from the world in a cold vacation rental on Wisconsin’s Beaver Lake, John had not yet succeeded. He wondered if he should return to the small flat he maintained in Milwaukee, four blocks away from Marquette University, and give up on his fast as a waste of time. The drive would be less than an hour, unless he got caught in rush hour traffic.

  Perhaps he should skip drinking water and use this harsher abstinence to bring the Virgin, as all else had failed.

  “I am always here, John, my beloved. It’s that you cannot normally see or hear me.” John turned to the voice and found the Virgin at his side, dressed in layers of hand-woven woolens, her patterned clothes died blood red and aqua. She spoke in Aramaic, as always.

  “Mother Mary,” he said, also in Aramaic, kneeling and averting his eyes. “Thank you for appearing, and as always, I am humbled by your countenance.” He paused, to order his mind. “I face a dilemma, and because of it, I am filled with fear and hesitation.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I met Dubuque again, and he isn’t what I thought,” John said. “Unlike his aura, Dubuque’s actual power did not have the holy feel to it God’s grace does when working through a real saint. Instead, Dubuque’s power was something else, something new, and something Dubuque himself generated. Compared to the other unnatural powers I have sensed over the centuries, Dubuque’s power resembled only one thing, my own magic.” He paused, but the Virgin didn’t comment. “This makes the Living Saint’s name a lie. Dubuque is a God, a magician God.”

  John took a deep breath. “He sensed my magic, and my ancient deeds done in darker times, condemned me for it, and killed me. When I recovered from whatever minimal death he imposed on me, I found my mission activated, to oppose him as if he was a corrupted magician, enslaved by infernal forces. I didn’t understand, and fled. Later, while speaking with a trusted Telepath, the Telepath told me that if I wished to continue my mission I must either renounce my vows and become a magician again, or one or more of the 99 Gods would capture me, control me, and force me to become a magician against my will and serve them.” He buried his head in his hands. “This is all wrong. I cannot renounce my vows, or allow myself to be enslaved. I know not what to do.”

  Had God called him to release his magic and become a magician in order to oppose Dubuque? Corruption would then be merely the price necessary to achieve God’s will. He feared he was simply rationalizing, though, tempted by his desire to survive. He feared that if he freed himself from his vow and became again a magician, he would lose his moral authority to oppose Dubuque. By becoming a magician again, he would cast away centuries of iron self-control, and leap on a path he knew led into the darkness and evil. He would become that which he had considered his enemy all his life. He would submit to God’s will and do this, if required. His life and his soul were at God’s service.

  If God required a magician, an evil magician…John would become one.

  He couldn’t believe, though, that this was God’s will.

  “You are mistaken,” the Virgin said. John took his head from his hands and looked up in hope. Mother Mary’s eyes were sad. The scents of the Holy Land, including what had to be myrrh, surrounded him and steadied him.

  “Thank you, thank you,” he said. He prayed thanks to God in his mind, but stopped short, when Mother Mary’s face turned hard.

  “You are mistaken about what activated your mission. Draw water, and I will show you.”

  As always, the Virgin never explained. She showed. Explanation, he feared, was too much of a divine imposition on mortal free will. When the Virgin told him to do something, she always couched it in choice, never as an order.

  He stood, unsteady, and drew a basin of water. Whatever his magic allowed, as it worked on its own or it interacted with God’s will, it often involved water. John didn’t fight it, but embraced it. Whenever possible, he lived near water. Water was his friend.

  He bowed and placed the basin before Mother Mary. She did not look at the basin, but at him. “Observe. Understand what your deeper mind realized.”

  He looked at the water, which now showed a scene from his recent past, a moving picture of his conversation with Dubuque.

  “My only paying jobs have been in the service of the Lord,” Dubuque said. “I helped manage charities and did their bookkeeping. My background was about as mainstream Protestant, and as boring, as it could be.” Looking on the conversation from the perspective of an outsider John realized several things. First, Dubuque’s control, his bending of other minds to his will, was pervasive and omnipresent; it wasn’t what he was doing, but what he was. Second, John almost shrank back in horror at himself; the ravages of old age on his body were manifestly more wrong than he had realized. Instead of his usual priestly aura of command, he looked like the American Father Christmas, a jolly figure worthy of disdain. “However, from the Angelic Host, I’ve learned to broaden my understanding of God, and to listen to those of faith, as they pray.” In the basin vision he leaned back, eyebrows up in surprise, before he went back to focusing his gaze on Dubuque. John shook his head, understanding now what he had missed in person. “Some might say I’m not as Christian as I used to be,” Dubuque said, “after being confronted with…”

  John, angry, waved his hands over the vision in the basin, and it vanished. “Mother Mary, I am a fool.”

  “Dubuque fooled you, yes, by not allowing you to sense what you would have normally sensed,” Mother Mary said. “Tell me what you have sensed, now.”

  “Dubuque is listening to those at prayer because they are praying to him,” John said, filled with righteous anger, the wrath of God Almighty himself. “He is being worshipped, and he is encouraging it. I am doubly a fool, because Portland, when I met her, warned me that some of the 99 were encouraging worship,
and I dismissed her worries as improbable, if not impossible. For why would God Almighty allow such beings to be created in His name in such a way as to be capable of being worshipped?”

  “You know the answer to such questions already,” Mother Mary said.

  He did, and he should have remembered those teachings when Portland made her comment. Foolish mortals were able to worship anything, he knew quite well, and worship could warp the mind of any being with free will, from mouse to godling. The problem leapt from personal damnation to disaster when a supernaturally active being received worship; because doing so opened the doorway to corruption. “I am sorry, and I apologize,” he said. “Too much time has passed since I last dealt with this issue. I should have remembered, but didn’t.”

  “Tell me. What do you now believe?”

  “Dubuque is a worshipped God, and his worshipped nature is what triggered my mission.”

  “I cannot tell you whether or not to free your magic, beloved. Neither I, nor God, can make this decision for you.”

  “I understand,” John said. “But how can I even contemplate this? I can do so much harm, not to myself, for I would sacrifice my soul to serve God, but to those around me.”

  “Look again at the basin. Again visit your past, if you choose.”

  John did, and he saw himself, and another old man. He recognized the location, the village of Winterthur, in modern-day Switzerland, and the event, a talk with a magician recently come to his power, and the approximate date, in the last decade of the 16th century. He didn’t remember the details of the conversation, though, so he listened.

  “…and have I done evil? I would never do evil,” the old man said, huddled in his soot-blackened cloak.

  “You have not done evil yet, but you will,” John said, in the vision. He wore a friar’s cassock, his body young, tall and commanding, and only slightly obese. They spoke in the provincial French of the day. “It is inevitable. The Devil’s voices are too strong.”

  “I am begging you to give me enough time to save my family from this insane war against the Hell-born,” the old man said. “A month! Two at the most. I will finish them off, and all will be well.”

  “You will want more.”

  “Since you said you don’t have the power to protect us against the Hell-demons, make it so I still do,” the old man said. “Please. I beg you. Is there any way you can make it so?”

  John, in the basin, cupped his chin in his hand and thought. “I cannot, but you can make it so. Your story moves me, and I understand your needs and motivations. I can withhold my hand as long as you do no evil, yet I cannot shadow you forever.”

  “What must I do?”

  “Pledge to the Lord you will not undo the following magical binding, and bind yourself with your magic to cease being a magician two months from now. You are strong enough to rid yourself of your magic, but not so strong your own magic would prevent you from so acting.” John had tried the same, in his youth, and found his magic too strong. He wasn’t able to rid himself of his own magic.

  “I can do that,” the old man said. “But I fear you are right. Whatever I can pledge with my magic, I can undo later.”

  “True, but if you disavow a pledge to the Lord, then you have done evil. Do so, and I will appear, and I will take magicianhood away from you.” His basin-self didn’t say, but John remembered pledging to join up with the magician’s minions in the fight against the grotesque walking-eyeball demons, which he did. He had, several days before the vision, learned that his ability to remove magic had only minor and temporary effects on the nightmarish Hell-demons. He was present when the last of them fell, and, alas, present when the old man broke his vow to rid himself of his magic.

  John waved his hands over the basin again, and the vision vanished. “My situation is different,” he said, to Mother Mary.

  “Not entirely,” the Virgin said. “You will have allies who would turn on you if you broke a holy pledge, and you are aged.”

  Oh. Of course. “Thank you, Blessed Mother,” John said. Now he understood, and his moral agony vanished.

  John broke his fast and went out to the porch of the rental lakeside cottage, where he watched the lake. Behind him, behind the cottage, the sky lightened as the sun crept toward day through streams of flat narrow clouds. He ignored the distant traffic sounds, the sounds of the first people to wake for the day and make their way toward their jobs in Milwaukee.

  “God, and Jesus, and Mary: witness,” John said. “I pledge before you, and to you, that when this body dies, I die as well. I pledge before you, and to you, not to extend the health of my body beyond that of two years, or the end of the worship of the 99 Gods, whichever comes first.

  The Lord did not intervene, or send any sign to stop him. The late season frog chorus continued, as did the sounds of early morning birds and distant automobiles.

  John concentrated, and for the first time ever revoked the old chains holding the bulk of his magic in check. The loosed power flowed through him, sickening him morally and physically until he consciously grabbed its reins. Now he felt good. Now he felt strong, stronger than he expected. The infernal voices of damnation came quickly into his mind, but his age aided him in this as well, as Ken had predicted, and he banished them with ease.

  For now.

  “I’m risking my own damnation with this idiocy, God,” John said, his voice matching the frog chorus’s croaking. He had once been a magician, centuries ago, before locking his own magic away, save the magic to let him undo the magic of others. In the following centuries he had studied the magic of those he hunted, a passionate study giving him the knowledge needed to keep himself alive. In his studies, he had become the world’s foremost expert on magic, what magic was able to do, and how it corrupted. If there were any others with his strength of magic, he had never met them. The evil he might do, if he gave in to the infernal voices, terrified him. “I hope to hell this is worth it.”

  God didn’t strike him down for his whine, which was at least something.

  He flexed his magical will, and examined the world around him, alive in a way he hadn’t experienced in far too long. He knew what he had done to himself, and the countdown he had started. Worse, he knew he would never be able to redo the pledge to lock his magic away and become a magician hunter again.

  He couldn’t turn back.

  Now, for once, time was of the essence.

  He stood and willed his body healed and healthy.

  It became so.

  “Time to get to work,” John said. He flew over to his car, summoned his toiletries, and drove off.

  21. (Dave)

  “I’m so sorry,” Dr. Greuter said through the speaker on Dave’s phone. Dave inhaled in shock, unable to respond. After a long pause, Dr. Greuter continued. “Although the Hopkins’ test results don’t indicate any possible new treatment strategies, Mr. Estrada, there are several palliative programs we might try. We’d like you to come in for another consultation.”

  “Sure,” Dave said, shaking. He asked Dr. Greuter to email the test results to him and made an appointment for later in the week before hitting the end button.

  Untreatable. Untreatable and progressing faster. Dave understood now why Dr. Greuter had been so reluctant to hold this discussion over the phone instead of in person.

  Dr. Greuter didn’t say terminal, but he didn’t need to.

  “Why the hell am I even bothering to search for clients?” Dave said. He sat on his Dallas hotel bed and waited until the test results arrived, as an email attachment. He checked through them quickly, stopping only when he spotted an unfamiliar term he had to look up. The test results were as bad as Dr. Greuter had said, and he suspected one reason Dr. Greuter wanted to keep caring for him was to figure out why he, Dave, was still alive and still walking on two feet. Dave tried to steady himself by breathing deeply, and stretching, but neither worked.

  He had two more meetings with potential clients in the Dallas metro area. His mind in a fo
g, he made the plane reservations for his trip back to Denver after he finished with those.

  “Why us?” Steve asked. Mirabelle nodded, quizzical as well. Hospitable as always, she set down a cheese plate with crackers on the coffee table in her living room, to join the chips and soft drinks.

  “I’d hoped to brace all of you” his chamber music group “at once, but Roger wasn’t interested.” Roger, as antisocial as ever, had bailed when he squeezed enough hints out of Dave to realize this wouldn’t be a practice session.

  “You look like hell,” Mirabelle said. “Tell us.”

  Dave nodded and went through the test results and the medical consensus that he had exhausted all his options.

  “Shit,” Steve said. He stood and gave Dave a careful hug. Mirabelle did the same. “Whatever you need, we’ll be here for you.” Dave nodded, biting his upper lip and staring at the farthest wall.

  Mirabelle settled into a high backed chair by the window, facing him. “How’s Tiffany doing?” she said.

  Dave shrugged, but couldn’t speak for a few moments. “I haven’t told Tiff,” he said, when he got control of himself again. “I’m not sure I want to.”

  “You need to tell her,” Steve said. “Not only can she help, she deserves to know.”

  “I don’t want her pity,” Dave said. “Or her veiled annoyance with my medical problems, something else to mess up her precious work schedule.”

  Steve muffled a sigh. Dave refused to acknowledge it and turned to Mirabelle.

  “You need to set up some counseling for the two of you,” Mirabelle said. Her frown told Dave she thought his attitude about Tiff’s work-first lifestyle as much a problem as Tiff’s own attitude. “I can help if you want.”

  “It’s worth considering,” Dave said, dodging the issue, and wondering why he would bother. He rubbed his hands together to warm them, and leaned back on Mirabelle’s leather couch. “I’m having a hard time convincing myself to keep going.”