In her Nika manifestation, Dhrun wore the same black lungi and scale armor vest that she had on the beach; however, these vestments now covered shapely hips, two small breasts, and four muscular but distinctly feminine arms. Her eyes were wide, long lashed, very dark.
When composing her divinity complex, Dhrun had chosen not to light an aura around her body to announce her divinity; her four arms achieved the same feat without increasing her visibility during more covert activities.
Presently Dhrun bowed her head and pressed her hand to her heart in the custom of the Cloud Culture. Absently, Leandra realized that Holokai’s crew, all of whom were Sea People, would find Dhrun an excellent sailing companion given that she was of all three cultures and could help the ship fulfill the Trinity Mandate, which required all official Ixonian endeavors to involve at least one member of each of the archipelago’s three cultures.
“My friend,” Leandra said while pressing her own hand to her heart, “would you step closer?”
Dhrun did so, curiosity plain on her face.
“You have been in my service for a year now?” Leandra asked.
“A little less.”
“And how do you find it?”
“It suits me well.”
“Is there any reason why you would be dissatisfied?”
Dhrun’s smile never wavered. “I should like a little more time in the wrestling arena. A goddess does like to be worshiped, after all. And I am second in your esteem after Holokai. I should like to be first; given my requisites, I am a bit competitive.”
“I’ve already warned you about baiting Holokai.”
Dhrun smiled. “I thought you hated how much your parents pun.”
“Pun?”
“Baiting Holokai, given his … other incarnation. I thought you were punning.”
“Oh Creator, no, not intentionally. I mean that I can’t have you and Holokai fighting.”
“Why do you doubt my satisfaction in your service?”
Leandra considered the goddess’s face. “You are the only neodemon I’ve ever known who converted herself.”
Dhrun’s smile brightened. “Ah, my conversion. It wasn’t easy, you know, breaking into your bedroom chamber like that.”
“If it were easy, I suppose you wouldn’t have done it.”
“I wouldn’t have,” she agreed before stepping beside Leandra. With her lower arms, Dhrun took Leandra by the elbow and led her to the portside hull, where they could better watch the whitemoon’s reflection. Walking made Leandra’s knees ache, but now they stood together like two friends. It was a comforting feeling.
Just then Leandra realized that many of her future selves felt almost nothing, or bursts of nonsensical emotion. She tensed, wondering what strange catastrophe would happen in the next hour. Some magical attack? Maybe her disease flare would worsen and expand her perception to a maddening degree? Or maybe … Suddenly she laughed.
“What is it, my lady?” Dhrun asked.
“An hour from now, I will likely be asleep and dreaming. I can feel it. It’s a strange sensation.”
The goddess frowned.
Leandra continued in a more serious tone, “We were talking about your conversion, its suspicious nature.”
Dhrun snorted. “You’re suspicious only because, when you finally discovered me in your bedroom, you had to admit that I looked better in your blue Lornish dress than you do.”
“It does look better on you,” Leandra grumbled, enjoying the banter. It was nice having another woman to talk to, even if Dhrun wasn’t always a woman. “Won’t you tell me why you decided to arrange your own conversion? You were a successful neodemon. You could have avoided detection for years.”
Dhrun only smiled. “Didn’t we agree that we would never discuss what came before?”
“Your crimes were that great?”
The goddess’s smile faltered by a degree. “That would be telling.”
Leandra laughed. “I will give you more time in the wrestling arena if you can answer a rather difficult question.”
“You know I can’t resist a challenge.”
“Why would I want to kill you tomorrow morning?”
“Because you realized that the green Spirish dress also looks better on me?”
Leandra smiled but then looked directly into Dhrun’s eyes.
“Oh,” the goddess said, “you are serious?”
“I am.”
Farther aft, the lieutenant called for the sails to be brought down and for all sailors to take up positions along the hulls to paddle into Keyway Island.
Dhrun cleared her throat. “You speak like one who has received a prophecy.”
“Through the godspell I bought from the smuggler.”
“I don’t mean to doubt you, but is it a … strong prophecy?”
“I inherited my mother’s ability to comprehend the possibilities of the future. I do not have her gift for seeing the landscape of time, but I am a good enough judge. I foresaw that I cannot escape the choice between killing someone I love sometime early tomorrow morning or dying myself. Hence, goddess, my challenge to you.”
Dhrun nodded. “Then … I suppose you might dispose of me if my death would advance our cause significantly—say by eviscerating me to make one of those godspells you are buying from the smuggler.”
“Well played,” Leandra said softly. “Here I thought I was interrogating you. You know, for a young divinity, you are impressively shrewd.”
“Oh the boys are young, but Nika—like most everything in the Cloud Culture—has been around forever. I was first incarnated when the Cloud People were still a seafaring tribe on the western Spirish coast. I have some hazy memories of the Spirish tribes destroying our cities and exiling us to the sea. There were decades of wandering before we fought the outer islands away from the Lotus People.”
“Maybe you should stop playing with the boys so much and write some of it down, for posterity.”
“There’s no glory in posterity. Victory begets posterity, not the other way around. But to answer your question, my lady, if you were to kill me tomorrow, it would be to deconstruct me and sell some part of my text to that smuggler we just met.”
Leandra met the goddess’s eyes. “You know I am dealing with the smuggler to discover how to stop his kind.”
“My lady, I am two thirds a wrestler,” Dhrun said. As she spoke the arm interlaced with Leandra’s became thicker, hairier.
When Leandra looked up at Dhrun’s face, the divinity had manifested Dhrunarman: dark eyes, strong jaw covered by a scrim of a youthful beard. Dhrun’s voice, so suddenly male, was low. “Learning an illegal hold helps one escape it, but it also increases the temptation to use it.”
“Dhru, do you think me that ruthless?”
He looked at her with a young man’s face but through the eyes of an ancient soul. “Most divinity complexes I’ve encountered are a fixed mixture of the beings that fused to create them. There are very few who, like me, can shift within the bounds of our incarnations. Would you agree?”
Leandra said that she would.
“When you can change so fast—from male to female, from young to old—you can see how fast everyone else changes but doesn’t realize it simply because the color of their hair or skin or what’s between their legs is constant. It seems to me that every soul—human or divine—is far more flexible than it ever supposes.”
Leandra paused to think about this and looked aft. She was supposed to be watching for whatever Holokai might have seen flying between the Standing Islands. Seeing nothing but moonlit limestone, she turned back to divinity complex.
“So, you think that under the right circumstances—perhaps if deconstructing you would benefit our cause—I could become that ruthless?”
Dhrun took both of her shoulders in his upper hands and looked into her eyes. “I know what our cause means to you. I know how much you have suffered.” He paused. “And, given how much I believe in our cause, part of me hopes that, if it would m
ean victory, you would be that cold and calculating. So if I may, I’ll turn the question around: Do you think you could be that ruthless?”
Leandra made her expression as blank as her heart felt.
Slowly, he nodded. “I thought so.”
CHAPTER FOUR
There was only one problem with Nicodemus’s metaspell: Wherever he cast it, prayers were answered.
Literally.
In league kingdoms, five thousand or so humans praying about a specific need incarnated a deity dedicated to that need’s resolution. The goals that helped answer those prayers became a deity’s “requisites.” Satisfying such requisites caused prayerful text to be cast from ark stones to deities, bestowing power and pleasure.
As a result, Nicodemus’s metaspells created disciplined armies led by war goddesses, artisans trained by sly deities of skill, crops protected by jovial—if not always sober—harvest gods, and so on. The “divine mob” or “god mob,” as they were called when tongues were in cheeks, had made the league as powerful as the empire. The problem was that some human prayers, and therefore some gods of the mob, were malignant. The problem was the proliferation of neodemons.
And it was one hell of a problem.
Neodemons were far weaker than the true demons of the Ancient Continent, but they could nonetheless manifest all the malicious potentials of the human heart. And thirty years of hunting neodemons had lead Nicodemus to believe that such potentials were nearly infinite in variety and ingenuity.
* * *
Nicodemus opened the doorflap and stood amid a dark camp—round tents, a cooking fire gone to ash and embers. On three sides, nightblack jungle climbed up to starry groves of sky. Just beyond the camp, a sandy riverbank formed a cove where five river barges had been moored. A gap stood between the first and the third boat like a missing tooth.
Roughly sixty yards out on the mile-wide river floated the stolen barge. Three stranger vessels—a riverboat and two canoes—were lashed to the barge. Several figures moved between them: humans, or at least humanoids, probably piratical devotees of the River Thief.
Nicodemus groaned. After arriving in Chandralu twenty days ago, he had learned that Leandra had failed for a year to dispatch two neodemons—one a monkey goddess of brigands, attacking caravans south and east of the city; the other, a water god known as the River Thief, was stealing cargo from the Matrunda River merchants between Chandralu and the ancient Lotus capital of Matrupor.
None of the merchants had realized they were the River Thief’s victims until they docked in Chandralu and discovered their merchandise had been replaced with river stones. The merchants had tried setting guards, changing routes, employing mercenary divinities, but nothing deterred the River Thief. More disconcerting, Leandra had twice led investigations to Matrupor without uncovering a clue as to how the pirate god achieved such spectacular larceny.
Hearing this, Nicodemus had suspected one of Leandra’s officers was corrupt and informing the River Thief. So Nicodemus had told both Leandra and the Sacred Regent of Ixos he would hunt the monkey neodemon when, in fact, he had secretly led several barges filled with Lornish steel up river to Matrupor, hoping that the River Thief would mistake him for a merchant and strike.
But the journey had been uneventful. Under the guidance of Magistra Doria Kokalas, his envoy from the hydromancers, Nicodemus had sold his cargo in the ancient Lotus capital for a modest profit and filled his barges with rice, silk, jade. Wondering if the black market would attract the River Thief’s attention, Nicodemus had hidden contraband opium in each of his barges.
Four days ago the party had embarked from Matrupor, hopeful of being burgled. But last night Nicodemus had fallen asleep with expectations of failure; they were only a day’s journey from the Bay of Standing Islands. And yet here he was, swatting mosquitoes and watching one of his barges being looted.
He studied the river currents and the lapping shoreline waves. The water seemed mundane, but on the sandy bank two of his watchmen lay unmoving. No simple achievement considering that both were master spellwrights. Whatever kind of neodemon the River Thief turned out to be, he clearly was what Nicodemus considered a “subtle” deity.
An ominous sign.
Most young neodemons were blunt minded: fire-breathing attacks on the village walls, tidal waves hurled against merchant ships, hypnotic songs inducing love, madness, or—given the similarity of the two states—both. That sort of thing.
A neodemon whose attack hid his nature was either experienced or an incarnation of guile; a dangerous opponent either way. In fact, the short but colorful list of neodemonic characteristics Nicodemus considered more dangerous than “subtlety” included such qualities as “sustained by the prayers of more than fifty thousand,” “an incarnation of lightning or pestilence,” and “is presently eating my still-beating heart.”
Although subtle neodemons made perilous enemies, they could also be made into powerful allies. Nicodemus had to try to convert the River Thief into a god of the league’s pantheon.
After a last look at the stolen barge, Nicodemus crawled to the next tent and pulled back its flap. Before he could whisper, the entryway was filled with a brutish face—wiry white hair, bulbous nose, horsey teeth. Magister John of Starhaven, once Nicodemus’s childhood companion and now his personal secretary. The big man’s small brown eyes mashed shut, opened wide. “Nico, what—”
Nicodemus held up a hand. “Who’s in there with you?”
“Just … Rory.”
Rory of Calad was Nicodemus’s envoy from the druids of Dral and an excellent choice for an infiltration game; however, on this journey, Rory had made a rival of Sir Claude DeFral, the new envoy from the highsmiths of Lorn. Favoring one man might cause trouble. “Where’s Sir Claude?”
John blinked. “Next tent over.”
“Good. Wake Rory up, quietly.”
When John crawled back into the tent, Nicodemus rose just far enough to see the river. Neither the barge nor the strangers had moved. If the River Thief fled, Nicodemus could do little more than rouse his party and pursue. The chances of catching a riparian god on a nocturnal river chase were minuscule. Nicodemus had to hope that after unloading his present prize, the River Thief would loot another barge.
“Nico!” John whispered from his tent. “Nico, I can’t wake Rory.”
“Dead?”
“Still breathing; he pulls his hands back when I pinch his nailbeds. But there’s something…” John held a hand to his mouth. “There’s something funny about how I’m thinking. It’s like I’m feverish or … back in Starhaven.”
Nicodemus frowned. “Starhaven?”
“I can’t seem to think of … some things.”
“Dammit,” Nicodemus whispered as he realized what the River Thief had done.
When John had been a boy, the demon Typhon had cursed his mind to induce a stereotype of retardation. The demon had then placed John among Starhaven’s cacographers to unwittingly spy on Nicodemus. During Nicodemus’s initial confrontation with Typhon, John had escaped the curse and regained his natural intellect. However, the struggle had separated John and Nicodemus for a decade.
That John felt as he had in Starhaven suggested he might have a curse locked around his mind. The River Thief might have cast an incapacitating godspell on the whole party. Only he and John would be resistant; Nicodemus because his cacography would misspell the text, John because his childhood spent battling such a spell had given him some inherent immunity. “John, drag Rory to me.”
“Why—”
“Just do it quickly and … well … here, let’s free you completely.” Nicodemus peeled a tattooed disspell from his neck. The luminous violet sentences folded into a tight cage.
Nicodemus had learned this violet language from the kobolds of the Pinnacle Mountains. It was one of the few magical languages with a structure logical enough to resist his cacography; however, it was sensitive to sunlight and would deconstruct in anything brighter than two moonlight.
With a wrist flick, Nicodemus cast the disspell against John’s forehead. The violet prose sprang around John’s head before sinking into his skull. The luminous sentences flickered as they deconstructed the River Thief’s spell.
The big man’s head bobbed backward. He flinched, grimaced, wrinkled his nose, sneezed. “Flaming hells, Nico, it feels like you just filled your mouth with snow and started licking my brain.”
“What an expressive image you’ve come up with,” Nicodemus said dryly. John had never lost his puerile fascination with vulgar imagery. As a child, Nicodemus had gotten into many Jejune wordfights with the big man. Now, it was less amusing.
“You could have warned me.” John groaned.
“Somehow the River Thief has obtunded our party and is stealing our cargo. That’s why you’ve agreed to haul, with particular care and haste, Rory out here.”
Nicodemus could not pull the druid from the tent as his touch misspelled the Language Prime texts in almost any living creature, thereby cursing them with mortal cankers. His wife and daughter, being partially textual, were among the few who could survive his touch. This immunity had been a great comfort to him years ago when his family had still been close together, physically and emotionally.
John disappeared into the tent and after some rustling pulled a limp Rory of Calad into the moonlight.
The druid was maybe six feet tall, dressed in white robes, broad shouldered, in possession of long glossy auburn locks. His freckles and slight chubbiness gave him a disarmingly youthful air that belied his fifty years.
Nicodemus cast a disspell onto the druid’s head. As the sentences contracted, Rory’s eyes fluttered. Then the violet sentences crushed the godspell around his mind. Rory convulsed once, opened his eyes, rolled over, vomited.
Nicodemus grimaced sympathetically. “John, quietly as you can, haul Sir Claude over here. Stay low. Rory, can you hear me?”
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