Summoned to Die

by C L Walker

  She arrived, and the ground beneath our feet leapt a foot in the air in response. The demon tasked with stopping entries from the gate slammed his hand down on her and she was unprepared. His hand ended flat on the ground.

  He squealed his pain as his hand burned. He snatched it away and Erindis rose from the ground to glare at him. She raised her hand. A moment later he was torn to shreds by the invisible force she sent his way. What was left of his body tumbled across the dry, blasted plain.

  “Agmundr,” she called, shaking the heaven. “I will have what I need.”

  She didn’t think she could complete whatever ritual she was working on, or she wouldn’t have been chasing me. That was the good news. The bad was that she was more powerful than anyone I could stand in front of her and she wanted to kill me.

  “Send your men to the battlefield,” I told the demon. “I will take care of her for as long as I can.”

  “You have a plan?”

  “I do, but I don’t have time. Neither do you. I’ll lead her away. Go destroy her army.”

  “We will finish this discussion when you return,” the demon said.

  He ran away from the settlement and the gate I needed him to use, but so did every other demon I could see. Their footfalls made the ground shake and keep shaking, a rolling tremor that followed them as they converged and waited for Erindis to chase me.

  She hovered in the air, glaring at me from a mile away. She didn’t want to leave her army, but she didn’t really need them, not if she could catch me.

  “I never knew what a coward you were,” she said. Her words so closely echoed Bec’s that they had no power over me; I’d already accepted the insult.

  “I thought you were a queen,” I replied. I didn’t raise my voice, but I knew she’d hear me anyway. “Not this. You’re no better than the mad men who sacked your father’s kingdom.”

  She launched toward me, flashing through the air and leaving the gate unguarded. She raised her hands as she approached, screaming her rage.

  I was lifted from the ground and thrown away, tossed in the current of her endless power and sent spinning through the sky. The tattoos erected shields and went to work on counter spells, but she was too much, too powerful. I couldn’t see where I was or what was happening, let alone work out how to find my feet.

  I hit the ground hard and kept rolling, pushed by her fury and sent tumbling. Bones broke and were repaired instantly, but the damage was mounting and I had a limited supply of magic to bring to bear.

  The attacking flood of power slowed and stopped, and I was left broken and beaten on the blasted plain. I lifted my head to see her arrive above me and slowly settle to the ground.

  No. This couldn’t be the end, not after everything. If she drew more blood from my skin she could complete her ritual, and then everything was done for. I would be dead, but the pain I felt was more for my friends.

  She held out the locket for me to see. It twinkled in the dim light of the strange heaven.

  “I’m going to kill everyone you know before I finish my transformation.” She crouched, five feet too far away for me to try and attack her. “And when I am a god I will bring them back and do it again, and again, for eternity.”

  “You’re a child,” I replied, barely able to speak around the pain in my chest. “You never had to grow up. You’re—”

  “Agmundr, return.” Her smile was a thing of evil, a statement of intent whether she meant it to be or not.

  Nothing happened. No darkening world, no imprisonment. Nothing.

  “What did you do?” she said, rising and stepping back, glaring at the locket as though I might have broken it.

  The tattoos were healing me quickly, fixing the things that I needed to run or fight and leaving everything else for last. But I couldn’t face her when I was healthy, so it would all be for nothing.

  “I don’t need this thing,” she said, tossing the locket to the ground and stalking toward me.

  I smiled and she froze for a moment. And then a demon’s hand wrapped around her from behind and lifted her into the air, crushing her with all his strength.

  It was Seng. He’d taken control of the body of the killed demon, stitching it back together enough to make his move. I got to my feet and ran, looking over my shoulder as the dead god battled with the new god.

  He was a trickster and his power came from illusions and mind games. A dozen demons appeared around them standing over a dozen versions of me. Erindis brought lightning from the sky and burnt them to a crisp, but they were back a moment later, all scrambling to get their hands on her. She screamed and a shockwave erupted from her, disintegrating them all.

  They were back before she hit the ground, squealing and stomping, grabbing and spitting.

  I made it to a gate and stepped through before I saw what happened next. I had to find a small heaven, something that wouldn’t hurt the fabric of the cosmos, and I had to do it quick.

  The tattoos sped me up and I ran through the shortcuts across the heavens, searching for a place to die.

  Chapter 30

  I ran through the heavens as fast I ever had. Still, I couldn’t miss the changes underway.

  The heavens were almost all centered around water in some way. Except for the HND I had never seen a heaven that didn’t have flowing water in it somewhere. It was the one constant in a dazzling array of endless change.

  The water in the first five heavens I ran through was drying up or stagnating. The ground was cracking and the plants were dying. Souls stood in shock, staring at landscapes that hadn’t changed in thousands of years, now becoming unrecognizable.

  Erindis was doing it, warping things to match her perspective. It would have to be sudden, a change she willed into being due to the influence of what was happening around her. When she stepped into the HND she’d sent out a ripple through the nearby heavens, distorting them and making them conform to what she was seeing.

  I was spending my stored power of keeping up my pace, but I willed the tattoos to work on a shield that might keep me in one piece when she caught up to me. It wouldn’t help for long, but I didn’t need it to.

  The changes became less pronounced the more I ran. One heaven was a collection of boats traveling in an ocean current. I landed on the deck of one and jumped to another to find the shortcut to the next gate. The ocean water wasn’t as blue as it should have been and the current wasn’t flowing as quickly. The sailors were worried, watching their constant ocean change before their eyes.

  It would change even more, I knew, when Erindis defeated Seng and started chasing me.

  I kept running. I was looking for a certain type of heaven, one with only a few inhabitants. What I planned to do would ruin their afterlives and I wanted to keep the damage to a minimum. I’d destroyed too much of the cosmos already and I didn’t want my final act to be a repeat of what I’d been forced to do before.

  As I moved further from earth the heavens began to shrink. Where they’d started with populations measuring in the millions they shrank now to the tens of thousands, then the thousands. As the worlds began to move by so quickly that they were little more than a flickering light around me I thought I’d managed to evade her long enough.

  The gate before me slammed shut and I passed through the space it had once occupied. I skidded to a halt and hunted the heaven around me for the cause. It was a tundra heaven, another plain, but this time formed of endless snow and ice.

  Erindis was there, waiting in the sky for me.

  “These are my heavens,” she said. “My worlds.”

  The ice cracked beneath my feet. A canyon slowly tore through the ground and I ran to stay away from it. I closed my eyes and searched for another gate.

  “You can’t get away,” she screamed, tearing the sky apart and letting the void enter the afterlife.

  I found another gate and stepped through. The heaven was a mirror of the last one, though animals roamed this tundra. Erindis appeared in the sky above me; apparent
ly she no longer needed the gates.

  “I can see you, husband. Wherever you go I can see you.”

  I hit the next gate, and the next, blindly racing to try and find the afterlife I was looking for. I didn’t head in any particular direction, jumping through the first gate I found in each heaven, using the easiest shortcuts to reach.

  She was always there, as constant as the water had been, or the sun in the sky. She held her position as the worlds flew by in a flickering light.

  “Where are you running to? Where do you think you can go?”

  I found the heaven I wanted and stopped running. It was instinctive, a skill I’d learned quickly when Invehl had sent me out to hunt for his heartstones. He’d wanted to destroy the heavens and use their power to elevate himself, and I now suspected it had originally been Erindis who had given him the idea.

  She flashed in the sky above me and disappeared. I had moments before she turned back.

  I closed my eyes and sought out the heartstone, feeling for the unique presence it had in the heaven. The realm was a rock pool on a grand scale. The soul who lived there had shrunk himself down to the size of plankton and lived in a hut made of seaweed latched to the side of a boulder two hundred feet tall. He was crawling across the rock face when I arrived and he didn’t notice me standing in the ocean swell below.

  The heartstone was in a small cave at the base of the enormous cliffs. I leapt across the water, jumping from outcrop to outcrop until I stood before the opening.

  Erindis appeared overhead and the thunder rolled across the sky. I was out of time.

  I dove into the water and swam into the cave as she descended from the heavens. She was laughing, cackling really, not worried that I knew where she was. She thought I was trying to escape, that I didn’t have a goal or a plan. She didn’t know me very well.

  The heartstone was a fishhook the size of a car. It was rusted and bent, and had become lodged in the wall. I grabbed it and the tattoos on my arms glowed bright. I tore it from the wall and held it before me like a shield as she entered the cave, hovering above the water.

  “I remember seeing the world through Ohm’s eyes,” Erindis said as she came to rest in the mouth of the cave. “I remember being amazed at first, when the two of you traveled the world and remade it. Everything was awesome in scale, every act greater than the last.”

  “You’re wasting what little time you have left,” I said. I braced myself to break the hook in two.

  “And then I was horrified,” she continued, oblivious to what I was planning. “She loved you. She lay with you and enjoyed it. She behaved as though you had worth in a world where she was the ultimate authority. She bowed to you. You, a pathetic human warrior.”

  I bent the hook in half and bent it back, weakening the rusty metal. Bend, unbend, over and over as she spoke, weakening it to the point where I would be able to tear it in two.

  “Those were your best times, weren’t they?” She floated closer, staring at me and not comprehending what was about to happen. “They were my worst. I hated you then more than ever before, more than the night my father gave me to you as a prize in his stupid contest. More than the day you let my kingdom fall.”

  I tore the fishhook in half and dropped it to the ground. I crossed my arms and waited for her to notice. Maybe she wouldn’t, and she’d be trapped in the heaven with me.

  She felt the change, detecting something beyond my ability. Her eyes focused, finally noticing what I’d done.

  “You’ve set this place free,” she said, angry. “You coward. You can’t escape me that easily.”

  She raised her hands to destroy me but I was ready. The tattoos had built a shield strong enough to withstand her and I deployed it. When her wave of energy came it was deflected from me, turning the rock of the cave molten in moments.

  “You don’t have the strength to maintain this,” she called, grinning her manic grin. “I’ll get through eventually.”

  “I don’t have to,” I said, grimacing as the heat cooked my flesh. I just had to keep her busy long enough for the heaven to float away from the others, untethered and bound for the void. Then she could destroy my shield and me too; I would welcome it.

  She vanished, her magic disappearing a heartbeat later.

  I lowered the shield but had the tattoos keep it ready. I sent them out to search the small heaven, looking for any sign of her. She was gone.

  I had destroyed the heartstone and set the heaven adrift. I was safe, and in a few moments everyone else would be too.

  It was time to finally die.

  Chapter 31

  The first time I’d used a master’s words against him and struck out on my own had been a thousand years after I was first chained to the locket. It had been exhilarating, seeing the world without the fear that any moment I would be told to destroy it.

  The feeling hadn’t lasted, and the tattoos had forced me to return to the crazy man who summoned me. But I remembered the feeling well, and walking the many paths crisscrossing the face of the rock in the small heaven was the same.

  I was free, for the first time since Ohm had died. Since I’d stood on the mountaintop and allowed the cleric to etch runes into my skin to bring Erindis back to life. Since I’d sold my soul for a woman who hated me.

  The wind blowing off the gigantic ocean was strong, but the soul who lived there had attached metal poles to the rock and strung a chain between them. They were sturdy and I used them to reach the highest point in the heaven, taking my time and enjoying the moment.

  At the top I had to climb a short way without the help of a prepared path. I didn’t think the inhabitant of the heaven went to the top of the rocks very often, and there were no easy paths up. I persevered, trying not to use the power stored in the tattoos. I wanted to do it as a man.

  I didn’t want to die. I was exploring and sightseeing, delaying the moment when I ended my long life. I was being the coward Erindis and Bec had accused me of being, and for a few minutes I was alright with that. A few minutes wouldn’t change the course of the war, and I’d taken myself out of the equation as far as her godhood was concerned. It was up to my people now.

  When she returned they would throw everything they had at her. That was the plan, to look for some sign that I had ended my life and made her vulnerable. I hoped they’d take her appearing in the skies above them as the sign.

  I couldn’t know what would happen, and there was nothing I could do about it anymore. The heaven was floating in the void now, and all the gates were closed.

  The top of the rock showed the size of the heaven, and I knew why the soul would never climb up; beyond the two boulders and the ocean crashing between them there was nothing. An endless shallow ocean with no life, and the two boulders sticking up incongruously in the middle of nowhere.

  It was a lonely heaven before I disconnected it from the web of afterlives, and I had only made it lonelier.

  I sat and crossed my legs, breathing in the salty air and enjoying the sun on my face. I took out the dagger and held it in my lap, not looking at it, like I was afraid it would act on its own and stab me.

  This was my end. Not in glorious battle or facing unbelievable odds, but sitting quietly on a cliff and watching the ocean. I’d pictured many options for the end of my life, most of them revolving around Erindis ending the world, but not all. I had never seen my end being peaceful.

  The soul was an old woman, slowly making her way from one end of the rock to the other. From my vantage I couldn’t see her very well, but she seemed happy, whistling a tune as she inched her way forward. I wondered how long the heaven would drift, and if it would ever end. By untethering it, had I saved this woman from a future where Erindis won, or had I condemned her to a slow death? I couldn’t know.

  I had to do it soon. The knife seemed to grow warm in my hands, the way the tattoos did before I used them. I still couldn’t look at it, knowing what I planned on doing with it.

  I’d killed a lot of people u
nder orders from my masters over the millennia. Good people, bad people, supernatural people and regular people. And for a long time I hadn’t cared, hadn’t even thought of them as alive. I had wished for death and dispensed it just as easily.

  I looked down at the blade. Her blood was still on it, from the night she’d been killed eons ago. It mixed with my blood now, from Nikolette removing the tattoos and setting me free. My blood would clump and dry and flake off, in time, but I didn’t know what would happen to hers. If I was successful she would die, and then her blood – which had remained fresh on the blade the entire time – might also die and disappear.

  It felt too heavy in my hands, too important for me to hold. It had killed an elder-god, and to think I could use it to kill myself was too great a thing to consider.

  She’d be getting back to the heaven of the fish-people statues soon. Buddy would see her arrive and he’d marshal the remaining troops, and he’d send them at her all at once. Peter was dead and she would be overwhelmed.

  I was stalling, thinking of things I could do nothing about. I was afraid and looking for excuses or daydreams.

  I cut my leg with the blade, to make sure my suspicions were correct. The wound remained, and stung like hell, and there was nothing the tattoos could do to repair it. They glowed around the blood, but the wound was impervious.

  I positioned the dagger, gripping it in both hands and aiming the blade at my heart. One quick pull and it would pierce the breastbone and plunge into the muscle. The tattoos would fight and squirm, but I would be dead before it bothered me.

  “Stop screwing around,” I said. “Be a man.”

  “Or don’t,” the angel of the heaven said. She stood behind me, the weather-beaten figurehead of a ship come to life. Her wooden hair somehow shifted in the breeze as she looked down on me.

  “Hello, angel,” I said.

  “Agmundr.” Her voice was perfect, despite her wooden body, gentle and warm, with a hint of melancholy. “You can kill yourself, if you want, but there’s no point.”