The Afterlife Series Omnibus: Heaven, Hell, Earth, Wasteland, War, Stones

by Mur Lafferty

  He didn’t answer. Kate sighed and glanced back once at the vineyard, shriveling in the morning sun, and bit her lip.

  “I’ll be back, Daniel. I promise. I just have to get this crybaby back to his temple.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Meridian shone in the early morning light, the buildings glinting and swaying in the light wind. It seemed to have survived the improbability storm much better than Daniel had. Daniel, who currently sat in a cage like an animal, trapped in his coyote form.

  When Kate had left him, he went for Sam, heading in the direction from where the net had come. He had tried, briefly, to manipulate some matter around him, but the cloak had stifled him. Unlike Kate, he figured it out right away and dropped it, braving the storm’s dangers.

  He slipped into coyote form, and immediately found himself somewhere else. He sat in a room full of coyotes, each representing a different trickster god. Hermes was a tail-wagging dark red coyote, Loki was closer to black, and watched him with no humor in his eyes. Daniel didn’t recognize all of the gods there, but he could taste their power as similar to his own. He sat on a dais in the middle of the room, and they surrounded him.

  Am I on trial?

  Daniel whipped his head around, looking for an exit to the room. Guys, I’d be glad to talk about this any other time than now, but it’s not really a good time. I’m kinda trying to stop a guy who’s hunting me. How’s next week? Guys?

  The barks and howls that greeted him indicated that they were not on board with the next week plan.

  Coyote, the original, paced in front of him, grinning. She opened her mouth to speak, but at that moment Daniel felt burning ropes surround him. The courtroom dissolved around him and he struggled under a blue net that surrounded him. He tried to shape-change but couldn’t; he tried to bite the ropes and was rewarded with a burnt tongue. Whatever blue substance the net was laced with had not only incapacitated him, it was also draining his strength. He struggled and fell on his side, growling. He snarled at the grinning man who approached him as the storm whirled around them.

  It was only as he lost consciousness that he realized that the storm didn’t seem to be bugging Sam at all.

  * * * * *

  Trapped like a bad stray dog. I was even caught with a big net like on the cartoons. Sheesh.

  Daniel paced his cage as well as he could, which consisted of two steps in either direction. It looked like simple wood, about twice as high and long as he was. Something he should easily be able to break out of, but thin blue wire glowed from where it had been pressed into the wood, and he eyed it warily. As he was unable to use his shape-change ability here, it was pretty clear that whatever current ran through that wire carried the same power as the net.

  Why is it so easy to catch a god in this place? Either we’re still really ineffective in the whole god department, or there are some pretty fucking amazing power sources.

  He’d thought only a god — Fabrique, goddess of clockwork, for instance — could create a device to trap a god. She had trapped him quite well when he had broken into her House of Mysteries. But apparently anyone good at tinkering could harness this stuff.

  He sniffed at the wire and shook his head in disgust. It filled his canine nose with acrid, sharp, overwhelming smells. His mind filled with a sense of something very large distilled into something small and concentrated, a power with no rhyme or reason, a power like a storm, throwing tornadoes and lightning at one house and not another. But if you could harness and focus a storm’s power, you’d be pretty damn difficult to stop.

  Daniel wondered offhand if there were weather gods here.

  The room beyond his cage was rather large. He guessed, with the vats and barrels that surrounded him, that he was in the winery. Beyond the smell of the wire, which now dominated his senses, he could faintly sense an alcoholic odor. On the far wall, up high, was a tiny window. That, plus the cool, heavy, dank air made him think he was in a basement.

  Of course, I could be in full sunlight on a roof and I couldn’t get out of this cage. He amended the thought with the realization that his friends could find him if he were in full sunlight; down here, no one could see him.

  The urge to lie down and put his head on his paws and pout was a strong one. He couldn’t break out, contact his friends, or hell, even form human words to talk himself out of this situation. Some trickster god.

  Oh, shut the fuck up. He thought angrily. You’ve done the feeling-sorry-for-yourself thing. Got you nowhere. You are a god, for Christ’s sake. Screw Christ, actually. You’re a god for YOUR sake!

  He remembered with a start the trickster gods that had distracted him sufficiently enough for Sam to get the net around him. Why had they done that? Had it actually been a trial? And how had they done that, if they were all back in heaven?

  Coyote had led him through the Wasteland to learn about his power, making it possible for him to bring Kate back to life after her sacrifice to defend heaven. The trickster god clearly wasn’t trapped, or if she was, she wasn’t without power.

  Like me.

  He thought of what he had at his disposal. He paced the perimeter of the cage, sniffing at the floor, the bars, the joints between them, looking for a weakness. The bars were narrowly spaced; he could only shove his snout through, not the rest of his head.

  No weakness found, he flopped down and put his head on his paws. But despair wasn’t on his mind. He closed his eye and breathed deeply, attempting to hit a trance, some sort of state of being to get inspiration, bring Coyote back, even welcome back the trial.

  The other tricksters remained absent and silent. But a plan began to form in his mind, a plan worthy of a trapped animal. The human part of Daniel winced and wondered at the logic of it, but the coyote part of him nodded in cold certainty.

  He opened his eyes and regarded his left front paw. Daniel couldn’t bring himself to do it, so he consciously retreated and allowed the animal part of him to settle down and begin to gnaw.

  * * * * *

  I really am not looking forward to being human again.

  Daniel lay on his right side, panting. His left paw lay beside him, gnawed clean off by his strong jaws. The bone had been the worst part, but he had broken it clearly, desire to be free stronger than the maelstrom of pain that engulfed his leg.

  The animal had almost completely taken over, ignoring the pain to heave himself to three legs. He held the left leg high, blood still dripping. He took his paw in his jaws and flung it through the bars. It soared through them without touching and landed with a wet plot about six feet beyond the cage, slightly behind a wine vat. He lay down again, not minding the tacky blood on the floor of the cage that got in his thick coat. He could only hope now.

  He was licking his wound when Sam finally came to visit him.

  “One god is lost, one god is gained. I am not sure I made out good on that,” the big man said conversationally, not looking at Daniel. He checked on the vat closest to the door and adjusted a knob. “And I got the weak cripple. Do you know what we did with cripples in Leviathan City?”

  Daniel didn’t pay attention to him, just kept licking. The wound had stopped bleeding, and it was more to comfort than clean.

  “We tossed them out the airlock and watched them drown,” Sam continued, checking a figure on a clipboard. “You need strength to live under the sea, and the weak could have caused problems. It’s why my parents were exiled, see. I wanted three gods, and I’m stuck with the worst one. And you can’t even talk — by Ishmael’s lost foreskin; what happened here?”

  He had finally looked in the cage and noticed Daniel lying in a pool of his own blood, licking his stump. Daniel regarded him calmly, then went back to licking.

  “You idiot!” Sam raged, bringing both hands down on the cage in a mighty thump. “I really did get the worst god. You don’t even know enough to realize that chewing off a leg doesn’t get you anything in a cage like this! You’re thinking about a bear trap! Oh, you fool! Now my god is even m
ore of a cripple! What am I going to do with you now?”

  Daniel’s heart leapt. Weak? Worst? Stupid? Words that once would have hurt him now bolstered him. If Sam thought he was these things, he would underestimate Daniel. And that’s what Daniel wanted.

  He opened his mouth and panted, giving a doggy smile with blood coating his muzzle.

  Sam groaned and turned his back, holding his head in his hands. “I’ve lost Prosper, my vines are dead; what am I going to do?”

  He stopped groaning and turned, his eyes narrowing as he regarded the cage. “You may be an idiot, but you’re still made of godstuff.”

  Daniel forced himself to keep casually licking, but he didn’t like the new focus in Sam’s voice. “And there is godstuff all over the floor of that cage.”

  Daniel looked down at the blood that still coated the wooden floor of the cage. He realized Sam was right. His paw, his blood, maybe even his piss, were all divine, and would have power outside this divine-stultifying cage.

  Sam ran from the room and returned with a wooden board. Blue wires ran around the board and connected to what looked like a battery case on one end, and the whole thing glowed. Daniel bared his teeth and backed into the corner of the cage.

  “At least you know enough to stay away from this,” Sam said, opening the door to the cage and inserting the board in first. Daniel would have to push against the board to get out, now, and he obediently held back.

  With his left hand, he held Daniel at bay with the board, and with his right, he carefully mopped up Daniel’s blood with a rag. “Got a scientist, Melissa Hutchins, who will know what to do with this,” he said. “Powerful stuff, I’m sure.”

  He pulled the rag and the board out of the cage, slamming the door quickly, and sat back on his heels. His eyes narrowed again.

  “Wait a moment. If you gnawed your foot off, where did it end up? Did you swallow it?”

  Crap, thought Daniel.

  The big man dropped the board and stood, stashing the rag in his back pocket. He looked on the floor around the cage and then further into the room. Daniel held his breath as Sam went behind the barrel where he’d thrown the paw.

  Sam got to his hands and knees and pulled out the rag. Daniel whined low in his throat. Sam did something with the rag and put it back in his pocket.

  “Well, broken god, I will see what I can do with this. But I will find that paw before I’m done. At worst, it looks like I might be able to cut you up and sell the parts to a tinker. You’ve got to be as powerful as chaos energy.”

  With that he slammed the door, and Daniel heard a key turn in the lock.

  Now what?

  “What” turned out to be a movement that caught his eye. A shadow danced on the wall beyond the wine vats, the dark sibling to a sunbeam peeking through the trees. It took a humanoid form and skipped around the wall, playing with light, hiding, teasing, and having a grand time leaping in and out of shadows. It twisted and contorted, actually making a series of shadow puppets that had Daniel amused even as he was annoyed.

  Yeah. That’s definitely part of me.

  Daniel barked once, relieved, and wagged his tail. Let Sam think he was an idiot. His plan was working.

  As the shadow cavorted, Daniel realized he had no control over it. It hadn’t been his idea for a piece of him to turn into a playful shadow; he hadn’t known what would happen.

  Odin knew there was power in the loss of a body part, he reflected. This has got to work.

  The shadow danced around the room until it got to the heavy wooden door. There it paused, then collapsed into a circle. It quivered for a moment as if gathering energy, then it burst from the wall and landed on the floor, a three-dimensional shadow, a dark imp that stood about six inches high.

  Daniel limped to the door of his cage and stood expectantly. But the imp paid him no attention and instead pranced forward, still leaping and dancing, until it stood in front of the wine vat in the back corner of the room.

  It paused briefly, then leapt up and slid underneath a seam as if it were a wide doorway. The vat shuddered on its stand and then rocked back and forth once. The faucet then flew off with incredible force and the green, bubbly wine spewed into the room.

  The wine gushed toward Daniel’s cage, but had turned into a slow trickle by the time it lapped at the edge.

  What is it doing?

  The shadow imp had ridden the torrent out gleefully like a kid at a water park. It hit the floor, stood carefully, then skipped to the next vat, and then the next, forcing each to belch out its contents onto the floor. The hundreds of gallons of wine were creating a green, bubbly lake on the floor that rose steadily, getting into Daniel’s cage at last and coating his paws in the wine.

  The blood that still stained the wood floor mixed in with the wine, causing little black rivulets to swirl around Daniel’s paws. It spread out like a spider web; instead of dissipating in the wine, it seemed to get stronger. It stretched out to the bars of the cage where it wrapped around, sliding up and out of the wine. Like the shadow imp, it sank into the wood and Daniel heard the distinct “BZZT” of an electrical short.

  The effect was instantaneous. Daniel could feel his divine power returning to him, the dampening power of the weird blue wires no longer holding him back. He walked through the bars as if they were made of smoke, and shook himself. With a thought, he reclaimed his human form and staggered back as the pain of his bloody stump hit him. He stumbled back and fell into the wine.

  The shadow that had been his severed paw was finishing draining the last of the Cmar wine. It staggered toward him, and through his red pain haze Daniel thought, The thing is drunk!

  He stared at it dumbly as it leaned against his knee. His ruined arm rested on his thigh. The imp waved feebly at him and then flowed into his arm.

  The pain ended immediately, and Daniel stared in wonder as his hand reformed, fingers flexing. After a moment, he couldn’t even see the scar where he’d gnawed.

  “Goddamn,” he murmured, as the waves of pain were replaced by waves of drunkenness. “How much did my hand drink?”

  With a bit of effort, still treating his new hand gingerly, he managed to get to his feet just as the door flew open, shoving a wave of green wine toward Daniel, which rebounded quickly and rushed out to soak Sam’s boots.

  The big man’s face had time to register shock and fury at the draining of his last supply of wine, and then the escaped god, before Daniel narrowed his eye and flexed his divine, drunken will once again.

  CHAPTER SIX

  It was not a triumphant entrance, but it certainly stopped everyone in their tracks.

  Kate, Barris, Fabrique, and Gamma were talking intently to the head priestess, discussing the details of landscape below to determine a good way to search for Daniel. Barris didn’t see him, but with the system of caves and Sam’s winery, that wasn’t a surprise.

  “Look, I say we just go straight into the house,” Gamma said. She stood while the others were seated, bouncing from foot to foot. She made Kate tired.

  “If he had something to trap Daniel, who’s to say he can’t trap us?” Kate said. “The scientists down there create robes to squash our power; we might as well be mortal.”

  Fabrique pulled at a copper curl. “But that wasn’t their goal, correct? The scientist created the robe to protect from the improbability storm. Did it do that?”

  Kate shrugged. “For the most part.”

  “This implies that the power that we have as gods, and the power of the improbability storms, are the same energy.”

  Kate stared at her. “That’s … obvious. Why didn’t we see it before? Why didn’t you see it before? You are the one to work with the energy!”

  The goddess stiffened. “When you’re imprisoned for years and years, your mind turns to how to use energy to release yourself, not from where it comes.”

  “Well , if it’s the same divine energy that we have, what god generates it?”

  They were silent.

&
nbsp; Kate slammed her hands on the table. “Well, that’s just great.”

  “Can we focus on the task at hand?” Gamma asked. “Trading one god for another wasn’t the deal. And why didn’t you take us?”

  Kate sighed. “I told you. We were trying to figure out who in the hell that flying fire guy was. No one around here has seen him before. Got caught in the improbability storm, then got the lead on Prosper.” She ran a hand through her tangled hair. She really wanted a bath and a nap. “How is he, anyway?” she asked the priestess.

  “His priests are looking after him. They were … nonplussed to receive him.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  The woman didn’t look at Kate. “He is unwell. He is weeping, asking to be returned to captivity, and apparently in great pain. The high priest, Deacon Walthers, is feeding him wine to placate him.”

  “Great,” she muttered. “Now he’ll be drunk and whiny.”

  “I could stand a drink, but make it beer,” came a voice from the doorway.

  Daniel stood there, covered in blood and a sticky green substance. He leaned against the doorway of the temple, holding a large urn in his arms.

  Kate threw herself at him immediately. He dropped the urn to receive her, and staggered backward. “Are you okay? We were just trying to figure out how to rescue you? What happened?” she said into his ear.

  He hugged her back tightly and then gently pushed her back. The urn had fallen over and was making muffled complaining noises.

  “I’ll tell you everything in a bit. For now, I need to sit down. It was kind of hard to get him here.”

  Kate looked closer at the jug, about half her height. It was massive, with white clay vineyards twining around it. It was sealed tightly. She smiled. “He’s in there? Like Ares?”

  Daniel gave a tired smile. “I learned from the best.”