Christopher leaned over to make an aside to Alaine. “Tremendous courage, that. To assume we’re doing our part instead of having been vaporized.”
“THEY WILL FAIL. YOU TRICKED THEM INTO ATTACKING TOO SOON. THEIR ARMIES WILL BE CRUSHED. THEIR ALLIANCES SHATTERED. THEY WILL NEVER RECOVER THE STRENGTH THEY SQUANDER TODAY.”
“They don’t have to win,” Christopher said. “They just have to make you fight.”
The screens that looked into the void were flaring with lights, like a thousand Christmas trees on Christmas Eve. Every blink was a spell being cast.
Hordur laughed. “THE BATTLE IS EASY. THE ELVES USE NO MAGIC. THEIR DEFEAT WILL TAKE BUT MOMENTS.”
“They’re not using magic because Richard told them not to. Again, may I say, an act of incredible trust. Your followers are using magic, though. Just tossing the stuff around like there’s no tomorrow. Meanwhile, the rest of you gods, you’re just experiencing the normal requests for spells, right? Nothing out of the ordinary.”
Computers whirred on the bridge, analyzing the data from the cameras. Christopher looked around. The rest of his crew were as still and silent as department store mannequins.
A bell chimed. The computers had reached a conclusion. Seven green lights lit up on the control board. A red button started glowing, pregnant with menace. It would launch his own harvest of black, although excision would seem to be a more appropriate verb. It would reshape the world on a fundamental level and make room for real change.
Christopher reached forward. His hand stopped inches away as paralysis seized him. He invoked the special dispensation of a god of Travel that freed him from all restraints.
Nothing happened.
“YOU ACCUSE US OF STOLEN LIVES. HOW MANY ARE IN YOUR HEAD?”
The weight of those he had consumed crushed him. Here, in the source of tael, his ill-gotten gains counted against him. It was a leash the gods could use against any ranked person. They understood it intimately because they had created the entire system of ranks in the first place. They were, after all, merely ranks without a person underneath.
Only heroes of legend could ever win their way to the abode of the gods through the layers of defense that surrounded it. Once there, they could do nothing without the gods’ consent.
Karl stepped forward, pure and unsullied, unranked despite every plot Christopher had laid to elevate him. The red god raised his ax threateningly; the yellow one took off her mask and revealed a beautiful woman whose eyes begged for Karl’s attention.
Silently, Christopher laughed. Fear and lust were perhaps the least effective weapons to deploy against Karl Treyingson.
“WE WILL MAKE YOU A GOD,” Hordur tried.
If he could have rolled his eyes, Christopher would have rolled them right out of his head. There was only one thing less likely to move the young stalwart than an ax or a pretty face, and that was a promotion.
Karl pushed the button in contemptuous silence.
The ship shuddered. The screens flared out, overwhelmed by the glare. When they faded back in, they displayed seven blazing lights streaking away from the ship. The lights winked out, one by one, as the rocket engines did their job and shut off.
“WHAT HAPPENS. SPEAK, FLEDGLING. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE.”
Christopher’s mouth worked, although it was not entirely under his control. If it was, he would have remained silent, following Karl’s aweinspiring example. “The missiles are ballistic. I can’t call them back, and you can’t affect them; they’re cloaked in anti-magic spheres. Although I’m guessing that wasn’t actually necessary? You have no power here except through our ranks. Even so, probably Richard or I could have cast spells to interrupt. So it’s good that’s off the table.”
Ostara shook her head in misery. “What does this accomplish?”
“Tael is real. You are a complex network made out of tael. The missiles are nuclear warheads; when they explode, they will destroy trillions of units of tael. We can’t reprogram the network, but we can still smash it. Richard figured he could excise Hordur from the network or at least enough of him that he can’t maintain consciousness. He gambled everything on Hordur being spatially localized, although as you can see he was prepared for a certain amount of distribution.”
She stared at him, aghast. “And if it fails?”
“We’ve got nine missiles left. I imagine Karl will start blowing stuff up at random.”
“SAVE ME. IF I FALL YOU WILL ALL FALL. WITHOUT THE BALANCE WE WILL ALL FALL.” Hordur, the god of death, begged his fellow gods for life.
The screens flared to solid white, the light of an artificial sun temporarily blinding them. The gods assembled before him seemed paler and less substantial in the harsh illumination.
“The fledging has beaten you in combat,” the red god said. “Far be it from me to rescue a weakling.” He vanished into nothingness.
Another two flares as more missiles reached their target. The cameras struggled to recover.
The golden jester’s face changed again. Now it was a man’s face, old and lined and full of judgment. “Who will provide for our priests when we are gone?”
“Your networks are still physically there. Even if you disassociate, the spells can still be drawn upon. Hordur, not so much. His followers will find themselves cut off from most divine magic. That will tilt the balance in favor of the elves, who already play the game without divinity.” By the time Christopher finished speaking, the gold man was gone.
“If I must die, I die for love.” The green woman smiled and was gone.
The screens turned white again. The cameras gave up, saturated to exhaustion.
“The thing is fairly done.” The blue armor bowed and winked out.
Hordur was disappearing by parts with each detonation. A chunk of his shoulder, a leg, his left arm. He jerked and staggered as if aware of what was happening. Then the rest of him dissolved, leaving behind only the remnants of his cloak to collapse on the floor. It turned to smoke and dissipated, wafting up to the whirring fans of the sub’s environmental controls.
“Thank you,” Ostara whispered. “Although you have earned more than just words.” She did not disappear; instead, she transformed. The woman wearing the white lace dress was now a beautiful redhead with wide green eyes and lovely lips pursed in shock. Images and metaphors melted away from him, leaving only a man coming home to his wife after a long and unplanned absence.
Christopher stood up from the command chair, a grateful smile curling onto his lips, absent-mindedly laying aside his sword. He stepped forward, and Maggie leapt into his arms.
“Chris,” she moaned breathlessly. “What the hell just happened?”
“It’s a long story,” he said, holding her close. “But we’ve got time now.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to everyone who came along on this journey, which took so much longer than I dreamed and went to places I never anticipated. Special thanks to Sara, for making me rewrite chapter twenty until it worked, and to Rene, for giving me the courage to go where the story led. I have waited fifteen years to write that line about the second apple, and now that it is done, i find myself missing Christopher and Karl and the families they have built. But their future stretches out beyond mortal imagining, and mine lies here with all of you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Author photo by dennis Creasy
M. C. Planck is the author of the World of Prime series and The Kassa Gambit. After a nearly transient childhood, he hitchhiked across the country and ran out of money in Arizona. So he stayed there for thirty years, raising dogs, getting a degree in philosophy, and founding a scientific instrument company. Having read virtually everything by the old masters of SF&F, he decided he was ready to write. A decade later, with a little help from the Critters online critique group, he was actually ready. He was relieved to find that writing novels is easier than writing software, as a single punctuation error won’t cause your audience to explode and die. When he ran out of dogs,
he moved to Australia to raise his daughter with kangaroos.
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