by Carol A Park
The stranger winced. “Please, Great Father. I must speak with you.”
The bird trilled again, and Zily turned his eyes on Vaughn and Ivana, but they lingered the longest on Ivana. “What are these that you’ve brought here?”
The stranger cleared his throat. “If you would let me explain—”
“Are these mortals?” He didn’t give the stranger a chance to respond, one way or the other. “You’ve gone too far.” He made a gesture in the air, and a half dozen colorfully dressed guards burst through the portico doors. They were human in appearance, but Vaughn doubted they really were.
Vaughn backed up, and Ivana drew her dagger, but neither gesture was of any use. With a cry of pain, Ivana’s dagger fell from her hand, red hot and smoking on the ground, and one of the six guards had wrestled Vaughn into submission with super-human strength before he could even think of a desperate plan. Disarmed, Ivana had fared no better.
As for the stranger, the remaining guards had surrounded him, though they hadn’t laid hands on him.
“You’ll rest in my dungeons for a time,” Zily said to the stranger. “Perhaps that will teach you.”
The stranger’s eyes darted to Vaughn and Ivana. “The mortals,” he said.
Zily considered them for a moment. “Prepare them for sacrifice.”
“No!” Vaughn shouted. “Ziloxchanachi—Great Father—I beg you.” Vaughn’s guard dragged him toward the portico doors. “We came in good faith, seeking your aid.”
Zily ignored him.
“It’s about Danathalt!” Vaughn threw out desperately.
Zily whirled around and held up his hand, staying his guards. “What did you say?”
Vaughn seized on the opportunity and spoke quickly. “He’s working with the Conclave—a religious group in our world—and they’re trying to destroy us—Banebringers, teotontl, your chosen.”
Zily pinned Vaughn with his swirling eyes for a moment, and then he sneered. “Why should I care about the playthings of my children?” He flicked his hand at them. “The sacrifice will be after-dinner entertainment.”
And with that, the guards dragged Vaughn and Ivana away, the stranger walking behind, his shoulders slumped, with his escort.
Vaughn was blindfolded, stripped, dressed in a thin tunic that hung to his knees, and, after a short walk, shoved. He stumbled forward, ripped his blindfold off, and whirled around—but the clang of iron behind him was enough to tell him where he was, even if it hadn’t been pitch black.
Again.
He walked toward the sound of the clang, and his outstretched hands found bars.
“Ivana?” he whispered. Please be here.
“I’m here,” she said.
He moved slowly in the direction of her voice—and almost tripped over her foot. He reached out toward her to regain his balance, and she pushed him away. “Don’t touch me.”
He sighed. All right. So now we’re back to this again.
They hadn’t had the opportunity to talk about last night. Given her reaction just now, he doubted she would talk about it.
He moved around the room, cautiously, feeling for walls, doors, anything.
It confirmed that they were in a small cell, barred on two sides, stone walls on the other two. He felt no objects of any kind, so he found a wall and slid down to the floor.
The sound of dripping came from somewhere.
So. This was how it all ended. After all they’d gone through in their own world to get here, then through the abyss and rescued out of the clutches of his crazy patron—only to be sacrificed to the very god they had set out to find. The irony didn’t escape him.
Well. At least he wouldn’t have to overthrow Airell and subject himself to the misery of being Ri. Being dead was almost better than that.
Almost.
He tried to muster some hope for rescue, but they were being imprisoned by what was likely the most powerful entity in the universe. Their only “friend,” the person who had brought them here, was locked up himself somewhere and obviously didn’t have the power to stop Zily, or surely he would have.
“Is this really how you want to spend our final hours?” he said into the darkness. “Angry at me for something I didn’t do?”
A shuffle, a bump. Then she slid down the wall next to him.
And…silence.
He closed his eyes and listened to the drip, drip, drip of whatever was leaking.
He tried to burn aether to reach out for the water, hoping by some miracle his magic was working again, but nothing happened, as he already knew would be the case. It was too dark.
He sighed and laid his head back against the wall.
“Regret not taking me up on my offer now?” Ivana asked. There was a bitter tang to her voice.
He turned his head toward her, though he couldn’t see anything. “If I had,” he said, “you would have loathed me for all eternity.”
“Yes, probably.”
“And then I’d really not have had a chance when you are in your right mind.”
“How pragmatic,” she said drily. “And here I was about to believe you when you said you’d given up such ways.”
He noted that she didn’t say he didn’t have a chance anyway, or that she already loathed him. Were they making progress? A little late. “Burning skies, woman, I didn’t say I’d sworn myself to celibacy,” he said. “Only that I was trying to avoid casual encounters with random women.”
“I see,” she said. “And I’m neither casual nor random?”
Casual and random? Ivana? She was anything but. So much so, that as much as he wanted her, the prospect of having her also terrified him. He hadn’t meant to imply that. “Not random, anyway,” he muttered.
She made a low noise in her throat, and he was glad he couldn’t see her face. “But as it turns out, all eternity wasn’t going to be very long.”
“Knowledge of that wouldn’t have changed anything,” he said. He shifted. Half of his rear was going numb. “I know you’re determined on principle to hate me, but I’m not that bad of a guy.”
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Determined on principle to hate him?
Once again, Vaughn could not have been more wrong.
She didn’t hate him. In fact, it had been a long while since she had hated him. Oh, he could be irritating from time to time, but then again, so could Aleena.
No. It wasn’t Vaughn she hated. It was herself.
She had hated herself before for the choices that had ruined her life, and then she had been able to bury those feelings.
But they had never gone away, had they? And now she had even more to hate herself for.
Monster.
It would have been better if she had died on her flight to Cadmyr so many years ago, rather than have to suffer this torment for a second time.
And these were the thoughts she had to keep her company in her last hours, alone in the dark. How fitting.
Yet that wasn’t quite right, was it? It had been more than a decade since she had fallen to pieces like she had tonight. More than a decade ago, it had been a regular occurrence.
Every time, she had been utterly alone, and so her pain had fed upon her loneliness and her loneliness upon her pain in a vicious circle until she simply could not take it anymore. Until she had found herself at the point of being willing to do anything, anything, to make it stop.
Tonight…she hadn’t been alone.
She hated that Vaughn had been there to witness the depth of her weakness, and yet at the same time, she had been glad for his silent presence and strong arms.
What difference would that have made, all those years ago?
She would never know. But she didn’t have to be utterly alone now.
Ivana’s voice was strained when she at last spoke. “I don’t hate you.”
Vaughn snorted. “Well, that’s progress. Maybe next time, you could try to sound like it’s not agony to admit that.”
“I’m also not angry at you.”<
br />
He rubbed at a sore spot on his knee from where he had stumbled onto the stone ground of the cell. Should he press? Would she tell him why she had broken down like that? “I don’t suppose you want to tell me what happened after I was escorted out of Chati’s throne room?”
Ivana sighed. “She seemed to think that I had some inside knowledge on how I managed to bypass the rule that only Banebringers can enter the portals. I haven’t the faintest idea, of course. She became angry, and best I can figure, did some god-magic on my mind to attempt to get me to tell her anything I was hiding. Didn’t help her much since I don’t know what she wanted to know, and anything else I wasn’t telling her was far less important than other secrets I hold, apparently.”
Other secrets? “And…this turned you into a complete wreck because…?”
Drip. Drip. Drip.
“She made me literally relive all the worst moments of my life,” Ivana said at last. “And then some.”
The number of times Ivana had woken in the night recently with a cry or in a sweat came to his mind.
She cleared her throat. “Eventually, our erstwhile, if failed, rescuer intervened—I didn’t see him, but I recognized his voice—which is probably the only reason I’m still sane right now.” She paused. “He called her ‘sister.’”
“Interesting,” Vaughn mused. He had guessed that their rescuer might be another of the deities. “Another god?”
“Used loosely, I suppose.”
Vaughn stood up abruptly. That wasn’t Ivana’s voice. In fact, it sounded like…
A dim light flickered into existence, and Vaughn squinted in its direction.
The stranger sat in another cell, sitting on the ground, also leaning against the wall, his arms draped over his knees.
The light was coming from him—literally. His entire body was lined in a whitish glow, making his bronze skin look almost actually metallic, now.
As soon as Vaughn could see clearly, the stranger smiled at him. “Taniqotalin, at your service,” he said. He wiggled his hand in the air and squinted an eye. “Or maybe not so much.”
Vaughn racked his brain. “Taniqotalin…Danton’s patron?” He exchanged a glance with Ivana.
Taniqotalin furrowed his brow. “If you say so.”
Ivana stood up and walked over to the bars of their cell. “Were you sitting there the whole time, listening to us talk?” She sounded affronted.
He shrugged, not at all abashed. “I wanted to understand you better.” He leaned forward. “You understand, you’re the first mortals I’ve talked with in millennia.”
Ivana frowned. “So this was all some sort of grand experiment to you? Perhaps we should have taken our chances with Thaxchatichan.”
He shook his head vigorously. “No. Trust me. Better to be sacrificed to the Great Father than forced into service to Thaxchatichan. She’s crazy.”
“Easy for you to say,” Vaughn said. “You’re just going to be held here for a little while, if what Zily said was true.”
“Zily?” Taniqotalin asked, seeming amused. “I wouldn’t call him that to his face. I doubt he’d appreciate it.”
Ivana was still frowning slightly. “You don’t seem very god-like.”
Taniqotalin snorted. “They used to call us ‘gods.’ Some of your people still do—well, not the ones who look like you, mind you. But some of the others.”
“You’re saying you’re not actually gods?” Vaughn asked.
“Having incredible power and wielding it to force the weak to bow doesn’t make you a god,” Taniqotalin said. “Only a tyrant.”
Ivana took a step closer to the bars. Vaughn recognized that look in her eyes. She was becoming curious. “What are you, then?”
Taniqotalin rubbed his jaw. “What are you?”
“Mortal? Human? Female?” she responded.
“And I am immortal, chitqi, and…” He shrugged. “Whatever.”
Vaughn didn’t know what any of that meant, but a feeling of dread was growing in him. “Wait. Please don’t tell me this means that Yathen and Temoth and Rhianah are the real gods?”
Taniqotalin tilted his head. “I don’t know those names.”
Vaughn frowned. If anyone ought to recognize the names of other…powerful beings…he felt like it ought to be one of the supplanted heretic gods. “Well, this is all fascinating, but why did you rescue us, then?”
“Ah, now we come to it.” He put his hands behind his head. “A fair exchange. Tell me why you went to all the trouble to come to our world to see”—he chuckled—“Zily, and I’ll tell you why I rescued you.”
“Wait, first, can I call you ‘Tani’? You all have really long, complicated names.”
Taniqotalin shrugged. “I’ll take no offense.”
Vaughn glanced at Ivana.
“Don’t see how it matters,” she said, “seeing as how we’re hours away from being executed by the god we were seeking aid from.”
“Good,” Tani said. “You mentioned the Conclave. Some religious group in your land. That they’re working with Danathalt?”
“We think so,” Vaughn said. “They appear to have had control over Danathalt’s Banebringer—er—one of his teotontl, for a little while, anyway. Or at least she was working with them.”
Tani’s eyes narrowed. “One of Danathalt’s teotontl?”
“Yes. The first one we’d ever run across.”
Tani frowned.
“Anyway, for a long time, they’ve used what we call ‘Sedation’ as their method of keeping us Banebringers under control, and recently, we…” He cringed. “We unmasked that they were using our aether to do magic while claiming we were servants of the heretic gods.” He inclined his head. “Uh, sorry.”
Tani waved his hand. “Go on.”
“And now they’ve launched a coup and taken over the capital, have control of the king and, more importantly, the army. And are possibly trying to create an army of bloodbane. And they’re trying to not only take over Setana but systematically eliminate all Banebringers—or at least, keep us as milk cows. So when we learned that once upon a time Banebringers used to come through these portals to visit the gods, we thought, if we could make one work, maybe we could persuade Zily to do something.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Of course, we didn’t realize we’d end up in the abyss and Zily would want absolutely nothing to do with us. To put it mildly.”
Tani sat back. “The Great Father has had nothing to do with anything or anyone for millennia,” he said.
“The curse?” Ivana interjected.
Tani nodded. “After Danathalt tried his little coup, Zily was done with all of us. Flew into a fury. Probably went a little overboard—the curse reeks with, ‘You like fighting? I’ll give you fighting. You can fight till it comes out your nose.’”
“Fighting,” Ivana mused. “We met Xiuheuhtli in the abyss. We would have been torn to shreds right through the portal had it not been for him. He mentioned that you all had to fight. What is that about?”
Tani leaned back again. “For millennia, we fought, but we all fought each other. Oh, it was grand, the games we used to play. We’re immortal, see—so it’s difficult to permanently hurt each other—”
Vaughn raised his hand. “Uh, my patron’s head comes off.”
“I said difficult, not impossible. But it reattaches, right? No permanent damage.”
Gods have mercy. Some other gods. Any other gods.
Tani went on. “Anyway, it was a grand era. Schemes and murder, feasting and drunken orgies—when we weren’t killing each other.”
“Yes. Sounds like a great time,” Ivana said.
“At one point, some of us got bored and figured out how we could reach your world through the portals. We started experimenting with mortals, so they could come visit us—and by ‘visit us,’ mind you, I mean entertain us. Serve us. In return, they received rewards and a measure of our own power and were treated as teoton—demi-gods—in your world. It was a beneficial arrangement for al
l involved.”
He rolled his eyes. “Then Danathalt had to go ruining everything with his little coup. Zily got his knickers in a knot, and now we’re stuck fighting only our most hated rival, all the time, in Danathalt’s realm. Oh, sure, we can take respite here for a while, but it just isn’t the same. Zily even messed with the portals so mortals would end up in the abyss if they tried to come through. They soon learned not to try anymore.”
Vaughn digested all of that. “So there’s no rhyme or reason to why you beings choose Banebringers,” he stated flatly. “It’s all a game to you.”
“Blame Zily for that,” Tani said. “We used to pick mortals who seemed most suited to our affinities, and those who seemed most likely to take us up on our offers.”
So. Probably the greediest and most power-hungry of mortals, then.
“But Zily’s curse broke the whole system. It’s not even under our control anymore. It just happens, like the magic is running rampant in whatever dimension exists between your world and ours, breaking through when your sky burns once a year and the barrier is at its weakest.”
Vaughn felt his heart sink. He didn’t know why. He was going to die anyway. But it was doubly discouraging to know that all of this had always been in vain. “So, not only do you not care what’s happening to us, you can literally do nothing about it because you’re forced to be too busy fighting with each other.”
“That about sums it up.”
Vaughn looked at Ivana. “I’m sorry that I dragged you into this,” he said. “I had no way of knowing it was a pointless trip.”
Tani held up his hands. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let’s not jump to conclusions.”
“You just said—”
“Now we come to the bit where I tell you why I’m interested in you.”
Vaughn fell silent, his ears perking up.
Tani stood up. The light around him brightened. “We—everyone but Zily—are sick of this curse. Some of us have been trying to push Zily to do something, and he’s insisted there’s nothing he can do about it. In cursing us, he also cursed himself, see. He’s locked to Danathalt, only in Zily’s case, by terms of the curse, he removed himself from our doings. So Danathalt can’t do anything, either—including trying to overthrow Zily again.
