Summoned to Defend

by C L Walker

  Their words were seared into my mind, though no sound came from the burning orbs.

  “You are breaking the pact,” the blue glowing elder god said. “You know how important the equilibrium of this world is.”

  “You two can play your game elsewhere,” Erindis said, standing and facing the might of her siblings. “I have tamed this world where you would let it run wild. I have created a place where the one you refuse to name can never win.”

  “Foolish,” the red god said. It moved closer as though to inspect her and I shied away from the heat pulsing off it. “You’ve become human.”

  “I am myself,” she replied. “I choose this.”

  I fought the heat and the fear, raising my sword to defend my wife. The gods didn’t notice, and didn’t care.

  “This stops tonight,” the red one said.

  “You don’t have the power to stop me,” Erindis replied. She was defiant until the end.

  “As with all else,” the blue one said. “You are wrong.”

  They vanished and the world came unstuck. The rebels screamed as their flesh burned, all eyes on them and none on the empty throne at my side.

  The cleric stood beside me, his voice in my ear, his fetid breath in my nose.

  “Only you can save her, Agmundr.”

  I spun to face him, ignoring the oblivious courtiers. “How?”

  “You must go to the high mountain,” he said. “They have taken her to the very top.”

  I didn’t wait for an explanation, if the cleric even had one. I rushed through the throne room and to the stables, freed my finest steed, and began to ride.

  Now I was running through grass that reached my chest. The mountain rose before me, the only thing we’d left to mar the beauty of the plain. I was irrational, unthinking. I had to get to her, to save her, or I was lost.

  I ran out of strength at the base of the mountain and fell to the ground as my horse had done hours earlier. Somehow, the cleric was there.

  “You are running out of time, Agmundr.”

  “You will address me as my lord,” I said, but there was no strength left in my voice.

  I dragged myself up and kept running, forcing my muscles to do the impossible. There were paths leading to the top, I knew, but they were long and arduous. It didn’t matter; I would make it.

  “Tragic,” Seng said.

  His voice broke the spell of the dream, bringing me back to myself. I stopped and looked around, my sword at the ready.

  “Show yourself, trickster,” I said.

  “Whatever you wish, my lord.” Seng stepped out of the air before me. He now looked like the assistant from the rooftop, bedecked in his ceremonial armor.

  “Why are you here?” I said.

  “You stole something that belongs to me.”

  “It belongs to me now.” I attacked, driving my sword into Seng. The blade passed through him like smoke.

  He looked down and scratched his face, unimpressed.

  “I know what you’re planning, Agmundr.”

  “Get out of my head.”

  “You want the power for yourself, don’t you?” Seng seemed amused at the idea.

  “I have more right to it than you,” I said. I wasn’t sure how to escape the dream and I didn’t want to follow it up the mountain, but I couldn’t think of anything else. I continued the ascent.

  “Is this where she dies?” Seng said from somewhere nearby. I refused to turn and find him.

  “This is where I am born.”

  The cleric would be waiting for me at the summit, beside the blood of my love. He would tell me I had taken too long and in my grief I wouldn’t question how he got there before me. He would offer me a deal, a way of saving her, and I would take it.

  “You can’t devour the souls in that hell,” Seng said, his voice as close to my ear as the cleric’s had been. “The rules of that afterlife forbid it.”

  “Nobody forbids me.”

  The journey in the dream was compressed and soon I stood atop the summit. An open platform had been blasted from the rock and the cleric stood there, waiting for me.

  “You failed, Agmundr,” he said. He pointed to the blood pooled around his feet. “They took her to the void and they ended her with her father’s dagger.”

  I fell to my knees. My sword clattered to the rock at my side. I couldn’t cry, didn’t have the capacity to do so, but I understood why others did.

  “I have an offer for you,” the cleric said. I looked up at him with a glimmer of hope in my heart.

  “So very tragic,” Seng said. He stood where the cleric had been, admiring the blood around him. “This is what he etched onto your skin? This is the source of your tattoos?”

  “He said it would give her life, in exchange for my freedom.”

  “And you jumped at the chance.” Seng chuckled. “If only I had been as brave as you when my woman’s time came.”

  I got to my feet and closed my eyes, desperate for the dream to end. This was the last moment I’d been a man, my final hours of freedom. It had taken the cleric a day to finish painting me with the blood of my wife, which burned hotter than the lava I knew waited below the mountain. It had been agony but I endured it, for her. And when he was done he’d taken her locket and bound me to it.

  As I entered my prison for the first time I’d seen her, as he promised. And as he promised she’d been alive. Confused and hurt, but alive, somewhere in a far off land.

  “I think you can walk through the gates without a key, can’t you?” Seng’s voice broke my reverie again, and I wanted to thank him for it.

  “The power beyond that gate is mine for the taking.”

  “Knowledge never was your strong suite, was it, Agmundr?”

  “What do you mean?”

  The god sat on a rock at the edge of the blasted area, his clothes soaking up the blood there.

  “I could have found another way in, had I thought it would help me. I found a way into the heavens to free the angels. The seals you placed on the gates are failing.”

  “Then why do you need the key?”

  He pointed at me. “That’s how you think, barbarian. Question everything. Keep doing it and you might be less of a joke.”

  “Do not toy with me, Seng.”

  “Oh, do shut up, won’t you?” He stood and walked over to me, unafraid in the face of my anger. “I need the key because you can’t sample the souls in that hell without first letting them out. It’s the same as the heaven I used to come back to life; the rules of that afterlife aren’t going to let you simply steal its residents.”

  “So you need to let them out first.”

  “And when they are no longer bound by their eternal torment, they are ours for the taking.”

  “Ours?”

  I didn’t trust him. He hated me and I wasn’t fond of him, but if he had a deal to offer I was listening. I’d made deals with worse than him.

  “Bring me what I need and I will share with you. There is more there than I can contain. We can have our fill and part ways, and then do battle again as equals.”

  “The city will burn,” I said.

  He looked confused, like I’d told him something incongruous. Like the notion was alien to him.

  “I suppose,” he said at last. “We’ll have to find another place to fight, I guess. What of it?”

  “You will kill a lot of people, for your power.”

  He laughed and almost put his hands on me as though we were friends. He stopped short, not yet that delusional.

  “You care about these mortals, don’t you?”

  “I don’t, but I have grown to like their world.”

  He pondered my words, letting the silence of the mountaintop drag on as he tried to understand me. When he came to a decision he shook his head and chuckled.

  “Then destroy the fragment you have and stop me. You have all the power, and there is nothing I can do. But if you do it you too will lose. That’s your choice to make.”

 
I began to speak, to mock him for baiting me, but he was gone. A moment later so was the mountain and the blood of my wife, and then the world.

  Chapter 30

  “I have to face him,” I said to my companions.

  We were in the tiny living room of the apartment Merikh used when he was in the city. Roman had gone home, too tired to care when Bec threatened him if he left. Bec, Merikh, and Mr. Jones had shared the space with me, though they’d given me the only bedroom while they slept on the couch and on blow-up mattresses.

  “Just destroy the thing,” Merikh said, getting straight to the heart of my problem. “If he doesn’t have it then he can’t get in.”

  He was right, of course, but I couldn’t do it. Upon waking I’d sat with the fragment of stone mask in my hands for an hour, always on the verge of crushing it to dust. My arms had ached with the effort of not destroying it.

  But destroying it meant losing my chance to be reborn. When this was over I would return to the locket and the next time I was summoned I would be as I had been this time: powerless, human. I would not be able to help Erindis, who I was sure was still alive.

  So I had to lie. I was good with words, had learned the ways to get what I wanted without coming out and saying it directly. Bec watched me from her spot in the single seater at the back of the room, but I was sure I could trick her.

  “He has other ways in,” I said. “He entered the heaven in the first place, and that follows the same rules. I believe this key is his easy way in, but it isn’t the only way for him.”

  “So you’re going to give it to him,” Bec said, her voice calm, measured. She hadn’t reacted as a normal person would.

  “I am going to use it to get close to him. When I am standing near enough to attack I can destroy it before him.” I said I could destroy it, not I would. They didn’t notice.

  “Have you got enough power?” Merikh said.

  “There will be more there for me when I arrive. I have enough remaining to take what I need.”

  “We can’t go with him,” Mr. Jones said. He looked uncomfortable, leaning against the wall beside the front door. He didn’t like the enclosed space.

  “No,” Merikh agreed. Secretly I was pleased with the statement, but I offered him a questioning look anyway. “We can’t use magic, so we can’t go through the gate to the heaven.”

  That took one difficulty out of the situation. I was relieved; I hadn’t worked out how to keep them from helping me without lying in front of, and to, Bec.

  Silence swallowed the conversation as everyone went through my next actions in their heads. They all wanted me to succeed, without knowing what they were agreeing to. It felt wrong, in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

  “Alright,” Bec said, coming to her decision. “What should I bring?”

  “You aren’t coming,” I said, quickly. “There is no reason, and you will be in danger. I cannot act as I must if you are there.”

  “I don’t care. I’m coming anyway. There’s no way I’m passing this up, and I can be helpful. I can shoot.”

  “No, Rebecca, you’re not.” My words echoed her father in the exact way I intended. It, too, made me feel bad.

  “Listen, Agmundr,” she said, standing and stomping across the room toward me. “I had a life here before you turned up. Contacts, plans. And then you waltzed in and destroyed everything. Now I only have you, and I’m going to see this through, whether you like it or not. You can’t stop me from coming.”

  I stood as well, towering over her, my head brushing the ceiling. “Girl, you are a fool. If you come with me you will die, which means I cannot take you with me. And if I must wait out here with you then I cannot stop Seng from doing what he plans, and everyone in the city will die.”

  “That doesn’t have to be true,” she began. She glared at me, showing the only emotion she regularly shared.

  “That is the choice you are making. Have your way because you are spoiled and cannot see reason, in which case millions die. Or sit here and wait for me to return. The choice seems simple.”

  I spoke the words without thinking and while she pondered what I’d said I went through them to make sure nothing was a lie. Everything I’d said was true, depending on how you cut up the words.

  Her face went calm again, like that of a hollow man, all emotion gone.

  “Fine. Do what you have to do.”

  “You are wise beyond your years.”

  She accepted my condescension without changing her expression. She returned to her chair and sat, and again I wondered what she would have done if I’d been given to her under different circumstances. She appeared to have no guide to her thoughts, no need to consider her actions in the light of her emotions. I had been made to do evil things under masters like her.

  “When do you have to go?” Merikh said.

  “Seng will be there already, using his alternate way in now that I have the final part of his key. We should leave as soon as possible.”

  Bec nodded and Mr. Jones left the apartment to escape us. Merikh was watching me in a way I didn’t like, as though trying to read me, or see through my deception. That was probably my guilt coloring my perception, and I dismissed it; it was almost too late for him to stop me anyway.

  I fetched the bag from beneath the bed as Bec’s phone rang. When I came back she looked sick, the phone held loose in her hands beside her face.

  “What has happened?” I said.

  “A man says he has Roman. He wants the key.”

  Why would Seng do this? He knew I was going to take him up on his offer and he thought he could stop me from double-crossing him. Did he want extra insurance, or was he simply toying with me?

  “He will be fine once I am done with Seng,” I said. I would miss Roman. I nodded to Merikh. “Are you ready to go?”

  “Agmundr,” Bec said. “Find Roman and save him. Bring him to me.”

  Her words were more powerful than anything to me, and I had to comply.

  “We have no way of knowing where he is,” I said. “Are you sure?”

  She nodded, and I felt something strange come over me: relief. I would have left Roman to die in order to get what I wanted but now I had no choice. I had to rescue him, and I was pleased.

  “I can help,” Merikh said. “I’ve got nothing better to do.”

  “Leave Mr. Jones here to protect Bec,” I replied. “I can’t take her with me and I can’t leave her in danger.”

  Merikh laughed. “He will be so pleased.”

  Chapter 31

  We pulled up outside Roman’s apartment. Merikh had me move out of sight while he waited by the door and tried to charm someone into letting us inside. I didn’t think it would work but he seemed confident. I couldn’t imagine someone letting a stranger into their building if they didn’t have to.

  He called me over a few minutes later. An old lady was walking away, a smile on her face.

  “This world is too trusting,” I said.

  “It’s nice,” Merikh replied, leading the way inside. “We spend a lot of time fighting. I like knowing the rest of the world is basically alright.”

  I followed him upstairs and we approached the door. We didn’t think anyone would be there; there would be signs of a struggle and Merikh hoped to spot some clues, but I doubted there’d be even that.

  “Stop,” I said softly. The tattoos were checking ahead of us, searching the rooms for any sign of danger. They’d found something.

  “What’s up?”

  “There’s a hollow man in the apartment.” I could practically see him through the walls, a vague shape with power emanating from it.

  “Shouldn’t be a problem,” Merikh said. By the look on his face I could tell the tattoos on my face were glowing.

  We stood before the door and Merikh started working out a plan of attack. I decided we didn’t need one.

  The tattoos on my leg warmed up in a moment and I kicked the door. It flew from its hinges and crossed the room beyond, col
liding with the hollow man. He brushed it aside with ease as I entered.

  Roman wasn’t visible, but I hadn’t expected them to keep him in his apartment. The hollow man was alone, ready to fight with an ornate dagger in his hand.

  “I don’t want to kill you,” I said, still surprised at my sincerity. “Tell us where you took him and we’ll let you go.”

  “I am sorry, Agmundr.” The angel’s voice was breaking and I realized he was scared. This was smart, given his situation. “I have orders.”

  “Just don’t follow them,” I said. I moved into the room and stood a few feet from him. Merikh kept his distance.

  “We are angels, and Seng is the only god we have.”

  I was going to talk to him, convince him he didn’t need to follow the trickster’s orders if he didn’t want to, but instead he attacked. He closed the distance between us in a moment, his dagger slashing through the air at my face.

  I grabbed his arm and punched him in the chest. The tattoos burned with the effort, fighting the immense strength of the angel, but they managed it. I wondered how much of the stolen power I had wasted on this misguided being.

  The hollow man fell to the ground but I still had his arm. I wrenched the dagger from his hand and held it to his throat.

  “Where is Roman?”

  “I am sorry,” the angel replied.

  He twisted against my grip, dislocating his shoulder but gaining an angle on me. His fist smashed into my face a moment after the tattoos brought up a magical barrier. I heard the bones in his hand break.

  I grabbed his other arm as well and bent them both behind his back. He was healing already, the shoulder joint making sucking sounds as it tried to pop back into place.

  “Where did you take him?” I said. I was beyond caring about his wellbeing; he was pissing me off enough to break through my new humanity.

  “They didn’t tell me,” he said, groaning as I twisted his arms further. The hollow men wore the dead as their bodies, but they still felt pain. “I am supposed to keep you occupied.”