The Goddess Denied (The Saga of Edda-Earth Book 2)

by Deborah Davitt

  Another woman, with white hair, and leaf-green eyes and the ears of a wolf poking through her hair, nodded. Let me see what I can do for your servants who have had physical changes. Sister, will you aid me?

  Gladly, Saraid. We might not be able to help them all, but . . . it is good to know that mortals can be taken through the Veil. It may prove very helpful in the future. Lives can be saved this way. Perhaps even Emberstone’s.

  A few days later, Zaya and her siblings were taken across town. The neighborhood where all these strange people lived was not one into which she’d been taken before. She stared around her, wide-eyed. One of the houses was completely covered in vines. Flowers, grapes, everything. It was just a mound of green that happened to have doors and windows. “The neighbors must love you,” her mother told the huge man who came to the door. He wore some sort of a blue-and-green checked kilt, and had markings all over his flesh. Zaya remembered him, dimly, as Athim’s summoning master. She still shrank back from him. The memory of all the writing all over the Immortal’s bodies was too fresh.

  There were, however, dozens of people around. Many of them children, and all delighted to make the acquaintance of other spirit-born, especially ones their own age. “Oh, this is wonderful. It won’t just be our family at the school anymore,” one of the older girls said.

  Zaya left her brothers and sisters to play with all the other children, feeling out of place, as usual. She sat down on the front porch, behind a curtain of ivy, pulled her legs to her chest, and stared out at the rest of the houses morosely. Her father was missing—maybe even dead, though her heart didn’t believe it, not yet, anyway—they were in a strange city, her home had just been overrun, and everyone in her family fit in here, except for her.

  Her eyes tracked from side to side. Most of the other houses here looked pretty normal. Until she saw a giant wolf with a sort of linen smock over its white coat trot past, and turn up a driveway two houses down the road, and then shimmer and shift into a giant man, before unlocking the garage door and lifting it up with one hand. “I’m home!” he shouted into the garage, in Latin, and stepped inside, letting the door roll down behind him. Zaya’s mouth fell open, and now she began to look around more carefully. The house directly next door? Looked totally normal, again. Tile roof, old stone construction. Except that the chimney and gutters had slash marks scraped into the stone and metal. Parallel slashes, at that. “What could reach up there?” she asked, out loud, craning her neck.

  Aunt Sig’s dragon. The words were a whisper in her mind, and sounded like a boy.

  She turned her head, and a white wolf puppy—a normal-sized one—wearing a smock and a leather collar scampered over to her, and promptly stuck his nose in her ear. You smell nice.

  “What . . . what are you?”

  That’s an impolite question, isn’t it? The puppy sat down and panted at her. Shouldn’t it be obvious that I’m a wolf right now? And shouldn’t the question be who are you?

  Zaya’s lips worked. “All right. Who are you?”

  I’m Maccis Matrugena. Nice to meet you. He offered her a paw. Zaya stared at it. What, people don’t paw-clasp where you’re from?

  “Are you . . . are you one of the . . . the giant wolves?” Zaya pointed vaguely down the road. “Wait. Did you say dragon?”

  No, I’m not a fenris. I can be a lot of things. Want to see? I never get to show anyone new my tricks. His tone was a little plaintive. I can be a deinonychus, too. Well, sort of. I can’t get the balance right. I think it has to do with the tail length and the leg structure. It’s harder to make animals that you can’t see for real. And yes, I did say a dragon.

  Zaya almost swallowed her tongue. “Can . . . can you be human, too?”

  Yes. I have to be, at school. I don’t like to stand out at school, if I can help it.

  “Can . . . you be human, now?”

  If it makes you more comfortable. His form shifted, and he became a boy almost exactly her age, with white hair and flame-blue eyes. His linen shift cut off at mid-thigh, and his leather collar hung loosely around his neck now. “I need to go inside and get a kilt, this way, though,” he said, in a long-suffering tone. “People are so stupid about that. Everyone’s naked under their clothes.” He paused, and stuck out his hand again. “So, what’s your name?”

  Zaya accepted the wrist-clasp, and found herself hauled to her feet. “Zaya Lelayn.”

  “Nice to meet you. Let me ask my mom and dad if I can show you around the neighborhood. Nobody will bother you with a wolf at your heel.”

  Martius 15, 1987 AC

  A circle of bowed heads, covered in white hoods, around a brazier heaped high with coals, in the middle of the African desert. The light midnight breeze lifted sand, and rattled it off the fabric of their clothing, and fine grains slid in through the neck holes, finding places to lodge and chafe. “It’s wonderful,” one of the men in the group murmured. “Rome is fighting an endless war, bogged down in Chaldea and Media. Djinn rage through the skies to take down Judean jets and helicopters. Immortals on the ground, fighting the damnable jotun. And, in the western hemisphere, martial law in Quecha and Nahautl, erupting into daily violence. The legions can’t leave Caesaria Australis until order is restored there. Reinforcements can’t be sent from Germania and Gaul; they’re all bogged down trying to keep the mad giants out of the rest of Europa. Reinforcements and fresh troops have to come from Nova Germania and Novo Gaul, even though they’re reinforcing their southern borders. Three wars. Five fronts. And us.”

  Riots in Carthage and Mauritania had escalated into guerilla warfare throughout the deserts of North Africa. The Carthaginian Liberation Party lived among the Numidian nomads, sometimes called Berbers, for the most part, shifting training grounds with every season. They traveled by camel, like their ancestors had, and launched rapid-fire strikes in places like Mauritania, Hippo Regius, and Rusicade, before vanishing back into the desert. They had few summoners, and the few they had were tied up maintaining the increasingly intricate web of bindings and wards around the idols of Baal-Hamon and Baal-Samem into which the gods had permitted themselves to be bound, twenty years ago. What they did have was technomancy, rifles looted from Roman supply dumps, raw sorcery, and the support of a moderately rebellious populace.

  “I have often dreamed,” another voice said, a quiet, contemplative murmur on the desert, wind, “of what the world would be like without Roman armies everywhere, Roman ideas in our minds, Roman words in our mouth, and Roman coins in our pockets.” He’d said those words before, as a younger man, with one caveat: I served Rome willingly and loyally.

  Kanmi Eshmunazar knew he was wavering. He was sixty-three years old, and at the peak of his power as a sorcerer, but he’d been undercover for seven damned years. He’d had Baal-Hamon pressing in on his thoughts, unctuously sliding into every neuron, for six of those years. And in order to survive, he had to believe, at least a little bit, in what they wanted him to believe. That Rome was evil. That the Carthaginian people had been wrongly oppressed, for centuries, their culture effaced. He knew, in the corners of his mind, that it wasn’t true. They still spoke Carthaginian—Phoenician, really, with heavy borrowings from Berber languages and Latin itself. They still worshipped their own gods—sure, there were public altars for Jupiter and Mars, but they were polytheists. You could give a nod to any god or goddess on their feast day, and no one was offended. But he had to cling to the young, rebellious thoughts in his mind, and make sure they were always at the fore. And there was truth in them. The world would be a different place, without Rome’s ubiquitous presence. The course of history would have been different if the empire had fallen two thousand or fifteen hundred years ago, but Kanmi couldn’t even imagine what a map of the world would look like without Rome. A mosaic of tiny, petty kingdoms, all squabbling for scraps to survive, he thought, and buried the thought.

  His rearmost molars ached. The rebels didn’t precisely offer medical and dental. The last time he’d seen Minori, she’d
had to turn her face aside from the smell of decay on his breath, and he’d apologized, profusely. She had looked into his mouth and told him that one of them was going to turn into an abscess if he didn’t get it fixed. “I know, but at the moment, I’m a wanted man. I’ll tell them to get us a dentist, and hopefully they can manage that without kidnapping some poor bastard out of his home in the middle of the night.”

  “I’ll clean out the decay. I can put something in there to fill the tooth itself, but I can’t help the abscess . . . .”

  Allow me, Lassair had murmured, and Kanmi hadn’t been in any mood to disagree. A break from the constant grinding pain had been wonderful, but he knew now that there were at least two more abscesses forming. It didn’t sweeten his disposition any.

  His visits with Minori were his only respite from living the lie. The only truth in his life. “I don’t see what you see in that Nipponese whore,” one of the other technomancers in the CLP had told him. “I mean, pretty enough, but why keep going back to her? Patterns are dangerous.”

  “She reminds me of my wife.”

  “Thirty years younger,” another man had cut in, with a lecherous chuckle.

  “There is that.” Kanmi had kept his tone noncommittal. You bastards have no idea that she can tear the skin from your flesh with a cold-edged wind. And I must admit to looking forward to watching her do so.

  Oh, do you now? Baal-Hamon had mumbled at the back of his head. Kanmi had gritted his aching teeth, and tried to shelter his thoughts from the god. Impossible, of course. Intolerable invasion of his privacy. Lassair had always spoken to him this way, had always been listening, at least somewhat, in terms of emotional content. But she’d never taken up residence in his head, either. Baal-Hamon had no such compunctions. I could make you fight your dear wife, you know. Better yet, I should require you to sacrifice her to me, as a mark of your devotion.

  You want willing service, not slaves, though, Kanmi shot back. Slaves never do their best, or at least, only do exactly what their master wants, out of fear of punishment. A servant, self-motivated, can innovate. Can do better than a slave.

  The god’s amused response had been swift. Ah, but while you are not a willing servant at all, Emberstone . . . you do understand my needs. And this makes you valuable to me.

  Great. I’m employee of the month again. Let me find a place in my tent for the plaque.

  Baal-Hamon’s laughter had oozed through his head like slow, churning mud. I will give you this much, servant. Your wife worships the kami, particularly Amaterasu. I will not court war with them at the same time as the gods of Rome.

  What, because that would be suicide? What else do you think this whole ‘sacrifice to change the world’ bit is, anyway?

  Ah, but I will be re-integrated. Just because I cannot see it, does not mean that it won’t happen. I can never quite see what I will be, after a resurrection. Because I will not be quite the same . . . entity . . . as I was before. Baal-Hamon’s tone was placid.

  You’ve done this before?

  When I absorbed the shattered fragments of Tammuz, almost eighteen hundred years ago, yes. His remnants had been kept in an ancient idol, and I partook of his essence, and he became me, and I became him.

  Kanmi tried to ignore the muttering and questions at the back of his head, but some days, he just needed to let the god in. At least, there was one entity in the world that he wasn’t lying to. And that, in itself, was a help.

  His reverie, as he stared into the fire, was broken, as one of the other men spoke. “It is almost time. Brother Tyre, you and the other nineteen will be fully brought into the service of our god at the spring equinox. I made my final sacrifice to our god twenty years ago this month. Now, the rest of you must, as well. Only when all of you are perfectly consecrated to him, will we be . . . perfect vessels.”

  Brother Tyre meant Kanmi; they all used code-names, even in the camps. It had made it almost impossible for Kanmi to tell the Praetorians who these people were, even once they’d stopped putting the hood over his head when he met them . . . but Lassair had leached the images out of his mind, and he knew the spirit had had to fight Baal-Hamon’s influence every step of the way for it. The splitting migraines he’d suffered for a week as the god exacted vengeance, not to mention the rash of boils that had broken out on his body, had been worth it. All of the conspirators now had composite sketches posted in every Praetorian office in the Empire.

  And he still wasn’t sure why Baal-Hamon continued to permit him to live.

  Kanmi had enough time to analyze the situation. Interesting. I thought for years that I was the last to be fully hooked in. Damnation. But they have all been ahead of me, I know that much . . . . “Perfect vessels?” he ventured, out loud, as the fire popped. “What manner of sacrifice is necessary?”

  You already know the answer, Emberstone, the god whispered in his mind. A forbidden one.

  “Your first-born, of course. A son, by preference.” The leader’s voice was calm, and Kanmi could see all the others around him nodding almost placidly. The tendrils of control had infiltrated so deeply into his mind, he almost nodded with them. He resisted. He had to resist, or he wouldn’t be himself.

  “That will be problematic,” Kanmi told the others, calmly. He focused on the pain in his jaws. Sometimes, that was a trick that worked. Sometimes, it was picturing Min’s face. Old or young, didn’t matter, though he sometimes just defaulted to her as he’d first known her. Fiery, fighting him tooth and nail on the subject of her research. Sometimes picturing his children worked. “You see, my first-born is thirty-eight years old. A doctor. And also not much in the habit of receiving visits or phone calls from me. I don’t even know his phone number these days.”

  “Then we encourage you to call your wife, and reconcile with your family. Say whatever you need to say, to get your first-born to come here. He is, unfortunately, far too old to be placed within the fiery mouth of the idol in the sacred tophet ground, but all you will really need to do is kill him with your own hand, and place his heart in the god’s mouth.”

  Kanmi resisted. Exhaled around his teeth, the sensation of his own breath sending a singing, jarring note of pain down the exposed nerves. “Then I will call my wife, Brother Carthage,” he told the leader, lowering his head slightly. But not for your purposes. I will warn them.

  Do you really think I will permit that? I require you to be bound to me, Emberstone.

  Kanmi walked away from the campfire, his fists clenched inside his long sleeves. He couldn’t even have an unsupervised phone call with Minori. They’d be listening to every word he said. And so would Baal-Hamon. His only chance was to convince the god that it was in Baal-Hamon’s best interest to let Kanmi do what Kanmi . . . needed to do. He stopped, and stared up at the stars. Ben Maor, you’re the one who should be doing this, he thought, grimly. You could talk the sun out of the sky, given enough time. “Look,” he said out loud, to the night wind. There was no one within fifty yards of him, in any direction. He could vent his spleen to the god without anyone hearing. “I’m already bound. You don’t need me bound any further. I’m not going to kill my son. Not for you. Not for anyone. He’s not a cherished possession to be cast into a fire, he’s not my energy to bargain with. He’s his own person. You want something from me in sacrifice? You take my life. Not my son’s. You understand me?”

  How very interesting. This is a true bargain? You offer yourself, your life, freely and willingly, to be my servant, and your son will be safe?

  Kanmi swore. Trennus, too, would have been a better choice. The summoner understood the tricks of spirits, and what was a god but an over-inflated spirit, anyway? “You don’t touch my friends or my family. And I will serve you, as a servant should. Keeping his master’s best interests in mind.”

  Done. It will require blood, of course. These things always do.

  Kanmi covered his eyes with one hand. He couldn’t believe he was going to do this. But he couldn’t kill Himi. He couldn’t kill Bodi. O
r Masako. Or Min. Why not myself? he thought, grimly. Certainly easier. Certainly better. If Trennus could manage it in Tawantinsuyu, why not me? He pulled out the knife he carried in his boot these days, and dropped down to kneel in the moonlit sands. “Before I do this, please. Hear me. I beg you. The others have not bargained with you in good faith. The leader—he might have re-invigorated you twenty years ago—” Back when Loki was sacrificing himself, a drop at a time, to try to save his people, Kanmi thought, with a certain amount of bitterness. Why I couldn’t have been born a Goth? That’s real self-sacrifice from a god, not this . . . reincarnation bullshit . . . . “by sacrificing his own son. I get that. I really do. But they have been binding you with calculi-generated spells. It’s the most complex magical structure I’ve ever seen in my life, and that’s because it’s been added to, every day. They’ve got you in your statue, just like the idols shattered by Akhenaten and the namtar-demons, back in the day. All they need is one spirit-touched weapon, or one god-born with enough power, and when that idol is broken, you are not going to fragment out all over the land. You’re going to be split off into them. Gods. You’re going to be split off into me. They’re going to have and hold all of your power, except they’re kidding themselves. I don’t care how many binding spells they create. I saw what happened to the Sapa Inca, when he tried to swallow gods, bound them into his flesh. They drove him mad. He couldn’t control his own actions, let alone the power inside of him. And power is nothing without control.”