The Drake, meanwhile, was skimming her pale hands over a hand-held interface device connected to her hoard down in the caves. She didn’t have a plate in front of her. While Dragons could eat in human form, Greyblade had heard it was complicated and not as enjoyable as it was with a full suite of senses.
“The Genetic Drift Act of 2559,” she said suddenly. “It was condemned as a tool of ethnic cleansing during the Meganesian Reformation, but then rebranded as a health care initiative when the genocides were averted. But it was still enshrined in law, and it’s practically a Damorak commandment.”
“Thou Shalt Not Kill,” Gabriel said, sawing at his steak with his knife. “Asterisk,” he added bitterly.
In the reflective silence that followed this, Greyblade raised his visor and took a mouthful of meat he’d carved off his steak. He chewed, enjoying the flavour, and made sure to dab his lower jaw and fixtures with a napkin since he was somewhat lacking in the lip-seal-and-suction department. If the Dragon and the Archangel found his visage shocking, they didn’t let on. He supposed that was only polite, after he hadn’t made a big deal of their deviations from the aesthetic norm.
“You know, when Sir Greyblade speaks of small changes we never notice and then seem incredible to miss when they are pointed out by an outsider many years later,” the Drake said after a few moments, “it calls to mind you, Archangel. You and your, ah–”
“My species,” Gabriel said, just a fraction too quickly. The Drake smiled oddly, but that might have just been her face leaving her no recourse. “I know. Evolution happened, and you can tell when I stand next to a modern human, but if I had a day-to-day journal it’d wind up pretty empty. No woke up this morning to find everyone else’s arms fifteen centimetres shorter and now I look a complete tit…”
Greyblade glanced at the Drake, who was still smiling but whose face remained a challenge to read. Then he looked at Gabriel, who could be read like … well, not a book. A clay tablet, perhaps. A series of handprints outlined in ochre paint on a cave wall. Gabriel took another bite of steak and chewed it, squinting at Greyblade.
“One day I’m going to get both of you drunk and find out how that sentence of hers was actually going to end,” Greyblade threatened the Archangel, pointing at the Drake.
The two full-time humanoids ate in silence for a time while the temporary humanoid alternatively watched them and skimmed through her still-growing data block with corresponding alarm.
“Is the beef as-advertised, Sir Knight?” the Drake asked, clearly trying to distract herself.
“It’s very good,” Greyblade said. “I could be smarmy and say it’s the best cow I’ve ever had, but this is tasty by any standard.”
The Drake seemed satisfied with this reply, and went back to her interface. Silence resumed, punctuated by chewing and the clinking of cutlery.
“This knowledge can’t leave Earth,” Gabriel said eventually. “If the Brotherhood finds out, we won’t need to worry about soul-waste destroying the world, or inquisitive humans tinkering with a new veil. It’ll be Atlantis all over again, only with an infested flatworld instead of an infested continent.”
Greyblade nodded and finished his mouthful. This was safe and incontestable fact. “Which leaves us taking on a Damorak religion, and possibly an actual resident Damorak God,” he summarised once he’d wiped his cheeks once more. “All by ourselves.”
“And you didn’t even bring a gun,” Gabriel remarked. “Moron.”
“I am afraid the information is pointing at this being more than just a cult, Sir Knight,” the Drake said, looking up from her device. “I am almost certain, from the indicators and interpretative data you’ve given me, that we are dealing with a Divine interloper.”
“Great,” Gabriel growled. “So I guess that answers it. Gods can basically come and go anywhere, but to enter the sovereign territory of a rival God requires … well, for that God not to be paying attention. Consciously not paying attention.”
“Even better,” Greyblade added, “a God is an intangible target to any means available to us. Not only does the technologically-imposed Interdict mean nothing, but none of our weapons would either. Whatever we do, It could just duck into the Divine plane and then come back. Once there’s a path trodden between Earth and whichever realm this God calls home–”
“The Dark Realms,” the Drake said abruptly.
Greyblade hadn’t been expecting the Dragon to arrive at this conclusion quite so fast, but the Drake was clearly a phenomenon when it came to information. Her affinity, as she put it, elevated her to a level that rivalled that of a fully-integrated Burning Knight.
“You’re sure?” Greyblade leaned forward.
“Safe bet in any case,” Gabriel pointed out. “The Dark Realms are the centre of a ton of different faiths all across the Master Races Alliance, and it’s not like they haven’t got history down here.”
“It narrows down the number of Damorak Gods we could be talking about, though,” Greyblade replied. “A little.”
“It also means that the God we’re dealing with is probably a big one,” Gabriel said.
“There is no doubt,” the Drake concluded, raising her interface. “These intersection points–”
“You have a name?” Gabriel pressed.
“Karl,” the Drake said, as Greyblade had known she would. “It’s Karl the Bloody-Handed.”
LAPGOD
For the overwhelming majority of the urverse’s history the Nemesis Infinite, the Ghåålus Nnal, had been locked away in a series of prisons. On three occasions, however, He had been unleashed upon the Corporation – and upon the cold, dark infinity-upon-infinity of universes Beyond the Walls, as well.
These periods were known as Nnal’s First, Second and Third Dominions respectively, and that was about all that was known about them. Some historical events were estimated to have taken place during one or another of the Dominions – the human race, for example, had risen to near-sentience during the Third. Gabriel, presumably, had been glorified and had become an Angel of the Pinian God sometime during the Third Dominion as well. And many of the Firstmades had lost at least one incarnation to each of Nnal’s conquests. It was something of a badge of honour to have an end so horrific among your darkest memories.
Not even Nnal, in all His infinite power, could really destroy a Firstmade entity. Firstmades were of a strange and primordial order of life, formed by the Ghååla as one of Their first acts of creation, and as a result they stood on the uncertain ground between the Infinites and the first ‘real’ mortal species. They could not be unmade – because, it was said, they had been created before anyone realised the necessity of such a capacity.
Any Firstmade God or Disciple that Nnal killed would live again in new flesh sooner or later.12 But He could do a lot of creative and horrible things that came close, and often made His victims wish for an end before He was done.
For the most part, the Dominions of Nnal were vaguely-outlined chapters of fear and chaos in the history books, and mortal beings endeavoured – indeed, on a practically genetic level – to forget that their ancestors had ever swum or crawled or knelt through them. Nnal, to the majority of Corporate species, existed only because there were ten Ghååla in common wisdom, and nine of Them were identifiable by name and role. He was a shadow, a nightmare curled deep in the mortal mass-genome, His shape discernible only by a hole in the story of the urverse – a hole into which no scholar, mortal or immortal, dared to venture.
When Nnal ruled, whole empires were swept away at a grotesque whim. Entire species perished, and worlds burned like plains of dry grass in a firestorm. Others still turned in desperation to worship of the Nemesis Infinite and His philosophies of atrocity and destruction. Countless trillions of fear-maddened life-forms attempted to find common cause with a fundamental force of nature Whose very purpose was the unmaking of reality and unreality alike.
They found it a difficult path to follow. You could never really serve Nnal. You could not b
ow down before Him and hope He would spare you as a reward for your loyalty. You might as well bow down before the raging fires of a rogue sun.
Other species, foremost among them the Elder Races of Time Destroyer and Damorak, had long since dedicated their civilisations to the worship of Nnal, insofar as it was even possible to worship an Infinite of such brutal ideology. Whether He was imprisoned or free they acted as His agents, either in the hope of being useful enough to be preserved until the very final crumbling days of the dying urverse, or because they actually believed in His dark and terrible purpose. First among Nnal’s acts at the commencement of each of His Dominions was to show His displeasure at the imperfect manner of their service, and yet they persisted. It was better than the alternatives, although whether that was just a coincidence was impossible to establish.
The same went for Gods – and for much the same reasons. Many dark and terrible immortals, both Firstmade and otherwise, declared for Nnal during the Dominions, and the Divine plane rearranged itself around Him whenever He stepped back into the arena. Some survived, and others perished, but wherever Gods went, mortals were compelled to follow.13
Among these power-hungry multitudes, ten stood supreme. Ten lieutenants to mirror the ten Infinites. They ruled Nnal’s empire, commanded Nnal’s followers both mortal and immortal, in His absence – and unlike every other non-Infinite entity in the urverse, seemed to hold the secret of how to stand by the Nemesis Infinite’s side during His Dominions, without being casually swept away.
They weren’t all Gods, although they were sometimes referred to as Lapgods by their enemies. There were always those who would try to take away the power of something fearsome by laughing at it. They were also called the Henchthings, or the Infinite’s Disciples, or the Dread Lieutenants or the Black Lieutenants. And whether Divine or not, the power the Lapgods of Nnal wielded over Gods of technically far greater power within the Pantheon was formidable.
Leviathan and Nnal’s Imp. Skrorg and the Forgottenfiend. Munitz, Cope and Latherid. The Kharnastai and the King of Hell. And Karl the Bloody-Handed.
It was a poorly-kept secret that Karl the Bloody-Handed had been a mortal Damorak, once upon a time. He’d been elevated to the Divine plane by a procedure long since outlawed by the Corporation, for His work in hunting down and eradicating emergent species of converging-strain mutants in the wake of the Aactur Plague. Of course, cutting off loose subspecies-threads and severing frayed genetic edges was something of a Damorak pastime anyway, but Karl was good at it. It was His work in the slaughter that had earned Him the title Bloody-Handed. Then, later still, He’d been initiated as one of the Dread Lieutenants.
It was an even more poorly-kept secret that Karl had been a mutant before His elevation to the Godhead. It took a special kind of aberrant Damorak to declare war on fellow aberrations, and to be so good at it as to become a Damorak God. And it said strange things about the Damoraks that, in their unique and awful way, they adored Him. He was the black steel claw that purged flaws from their kind, He was their self-loathing and shame, He was their avenging fury and their own punishment, all rolled into one. He was a personification of their quest for perfection, and a symbol of its unattainable nature. He was the flawless end-state that did not exist, an end-state that was an illusion and a trick of broken mortal thinking.
The idea of having even a mid-level Damorak God on the loose on Earth was terrifying. The idea that It was one of the Dread Lieutenants was …
It was, Greyblade was forced to admit, actually rather exciting. He’d been thinking, after all, about how he was supposed to go out at the top of his game.
And now he had his answer.
GOD-EATER
They finished their meal in thoughtful silence, and when the Drake asked them if a brief blessing of thanks would be a wildly inappropriate thing for her to deliver, both the Archangel and the Burning Knight agreed it would be entirely appropriate.
“It would normally be the duty of the highest-ranking member of the Pinian church to deliver a blessing,” Greyblade said, “but since neither Gabriel nor I have ever really cleared up which of us outranks the other, I think it might as well be our gracious host.”
“Agreed,” Gabriel said gruffly. “But for the record I definitely outrank you. I’m an Archangel.”
“You’re not even part of the Archangelic court,” Greyblade said in amusement. “I’m Commander of the most senior unit of the armed forces–”
“You’re retired.”
Greyblade laughed. “You see,” he said to the Drake. “You might as well go ahead.”
The Drake nodded, and sat for a moment, apparently deep in thought.
“Never could there be the possibility of new life, before the sparkling waters did emerge from the deep.
“Never was there wisdom, without the testing of the limits of knowledge.
“Never was there a beat, without first the presence of a drum.
“Wherever joy, the revered Pinians. And them we thank.”
“And them we thank,” Greyblade murmured.
“And HarvCorp gets honourable mention as well,” Gabriel added.
“Agreed,” the Drake said with another of her unsettling grins. Then she grew serious. “What do you intend to do?”
Greyblade and Gabriel exchanged a glance, and Greyblade picked up the wine bottle and poured himself a glass.
“Can’t go to the Disciples about it,” he said. “Jalah will take this place apart. Jalah may have a reputation for being more easy-going than the Pinian God’s previous incarnation, but…”
“And there’s no point going higher,” Gabriel said. “The Infinites don’t care about little things like a world being subverted by an invading God.”
“I wasn’t thinking about bringing the Infinites into this,” the Drake said. “To be honest, even Gods are above my pay grade. You both have far more experience with Gods than I do. Can we even talk about this without Them … smiting us?”
Gabriel chuckled and reached out easily to grab the wine bottle. “It doesn’t work like that,” he told her. “Gods are orders of magnitude more powerful and interwoven into the urverse than mortals are, but only the Ghååla are truly omni-anything. Gods … yes, They see a lot, and the motives and actions and secrets of mortals are pretty much completely transparent to Them. But They don’t see everything, or care about what They do see. There’s too much. Too many voices, too much desperation and need. It’s complicated, but there’s a balance to be struck between maintaining authority and micromanaging, and most Corporate Gods are good at it.”
“And the pointless mutterings about killing Gods tend to get drowned out by the prayers anyway,” Greyblade added.
“And then there’s the wider Pantheon to consider,” Gabriel agreed. “The relationships between Gods, Demigods, High Gods … They all sort of block one another, create a patchwork of jurisdictions and blind spots and bottlenecks of worship. They can’t see into each other’s business, and as soon as one of Them starts answering prayers all the others will too. The contracts and accords They have make the Treaty of Mumbai look like a bet scrawled on a bar napkin.”
“Does that not make this between Jalah and Karl?” the Drake asked.
“Sure,” Gabriel said, “keeping in mind the collateral damage and fallout that a confrontation between Gods can cause is worse than anything mortals could accomplish. Even a full-scale war…”
“If Jalah could see Karl’s presence here, it would have come to a head by now,” Greyblade said, “so we probably don’t need to worry about attention from that quarter.”
The Drake leaned forward. “And Karl’s senses?”
“Similarly blocked by the effort of existing here in secret,” Gabriel said before Greyblade could answer, “or so I’d guess.”
“That’s not to say that either Jalah or Karl, or both of Them, or some other God entirely, couldn’t just stumble on this conversation,” Greyblade warned. “They might be watching from the Divine plane
right now. There’s nothing much any of us can do about it. You have to just go on with your life like a God might be watching, and could appear and squash you with a single finger at any moment. It’s just vanishingly unlikely to actually happen, so factoring it into your plans is a bit…”
“Arrogant,” Gabriel concluded.
“I was going to say ‘defeatist’, but okay,” Greyblade replied.
“So we can’t go to the Gods,” the Drake summarised, “as if that was ever an option to begin with. Do we attempt to take on the organisations that have been subverted? Face not the God, but the mortal agents of the God?”
“The more I think about it, the more I think it might be easier for Greyblade to just walk up to Karl and stick that sword into Him,” Gabriel said, rubbing his face with a weary, leathery rasp. “If the cult of Karl the Bloody-Handed has infiltrated all the main branches of human religion … there’s dozens of big variants, and thousands of small ones. Some of them are pure Pinian worship, others have layers of the exile religions over the top, and others still are resurrections of the pre-veil philosophies. Still Pinian, but I gave up trying to keep track of the different ways humans interpreted this stuff long before the Brotherhood did,” he shook his head. “It’s hard enough to uproot a random dumb idea from a single group of humans. A whole network of basically invisible ideas, from a significant portion of the entire population…”
“What about the other Angels?” Greyblade asked. He remembered Gabriel had mentioned them, or at least that they had apartments here in the alien quarter, but the Archangel had also said they weren’t here right now.
“Aside from me, there are nine other Angels on Earth,” Gabriel said, “in accordance with the Treaty. Ten Angels, same as there’s ten of every other important symbolic thing,” he gave a humourless laugh. “Or nine and a vaguely elevated tenth one. I remember we tried to argue them into ten Angels and an Archangel, like The Centre and the Inner Ten Dimensions, but–”
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