A Dark and Hungry God Arises

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  “We all need somebody who’s worse off than we are.” He regarded Angus thoughtfully. “Or who can be made worse off.”

  Angus didn’t say anything. At this moment he believed he would have been willing to sell his life for the simple freedom to throw up.

  As if he’d made his point, Milos also fell silent. He appeared relaxed in his chair. Only the passionate intensity with which he smoked revealed his underlying agitation.

  For over an hour while they waited together, he made Angus eat each of his discarded nics in turn. Keeping the room tidy by using Angus as a human ashtray seemed to give him an obscure satisfaction, as if it helped put the moral grime of his circumstances into perspective.

  NICK

  t was too bad, really. She was a lovely creature in her frail, drunken way. She could have done so much more—she might even have been worth his effort—if she hadn’t already spent most of her life pickling her brain. All the alcohol she consumed hadn’t done her body any harm; not yet. Her scant clothing made that obvious. Her breasts were full and taut; the line of her hips was seamless. Nevertheless the blur in her eyes and the slackness of her mouth showed that she’d abandoned herself, not to him, but to numbness.

  That took some of the fun out of what Nick was doing.

  He considered this as he pretended to comfort her distress at the small pain Angus had left on the back of her neck. Women: why was it always a question of women? Wherever he went, whatever he did, they were always the means to his ends—and the reason those ends proved hollow when he gained them.

  Apparently this one was too drunk to care what had happened. The disfocused accessibility on her face was like a glimpse into the future, a precognition that what he got from her would be as hollow as everything else.

  But he didn’t stop; maybe he couldn’t. The forces which drove him were fundamental, almost autonomic. With the fingers of one hand, he massaged her tiny hurt; the knuckles of the other stroked the sweet curve between her breasts; his mouth made consoling noises against her ear. Even if his brain had decided to pull away from her before he became helplessly enmeshed in Angus’ plots, Angus’ betrayals, his body might have remained where it was, delicately stoking her bleary responses until she could no longer control them.

  As always, he would deal with the danger later.

  The danger was real: he knew that. None of his dealings with Milos had given him any reason to trust the former deputy chief of Com-Mine Security. And Angus was treachery personified; so malign that his falseness was virtually metaphysical.

  On the other hand, they were both vulnerable here. The fact that they’d come to Thanatos Minor together in a stolen UMCP ship showed how precarious their position was. In addition—Nick admitted this with professional detachment—Angus’ plan made sense.

  Angus had left a number of interesting details unexplained, such as how exactly he proposed to snatch Davies. Nevertheless his reasoning was irreproachable. Nick didn’t like taking orders from Angus Thermopyle; but he liked the way Angus thought. He wished he hadn’t lost the capacity to think that way himself.

  Well, maybe he hadn’t lost it entirely. He still had ideas; still saw opportunities. But even as incomplete as he sometimes felt, he hadn’t lost his power over women like this. She may have been able to refuse offers or entreaties from the slime on the cruise; but after a few minutes in his company, a few minutes of his touch, her stunned gaze begged him to possess her.

  Simply to build up tension, he postponed the next step. While he murmured vacant descriptions of her beauty and how he felt about it, his fingertips eased under her garments to caress what little they concealed; his grin grew sharper, as if to cut away defenses she no longer had. But he didn’t move to leave the table until she finally breathed in a voice made husky by drink, “Take me somewhere.”

  Humorously avid—and secretly contemptuous—he answered, “I was hoping you would say that.”

  Then he guided her to her feet.

  Unsure of her balance, she leaned against him in a way that urged him to wrap his arm around her as he moved her out of the bar toward the front desk.

  Rooms in Ease-n-Sleaze weren’t expensive by the standards of the cruise. Nevertheless the right to use six twenty-one for a while made a noticeable dent in his small account. He didn’t care, however. If he’d measured his life by his accumulated credit, he would have had to call himself a failure. But he wasn’t a failure, no, nobody except Sorus Chatelaine had ever called him that; and he was going to teach her to think otherwise. His plans against her continued to take shape as he rode the lift to the sixth level. The drunk in his arms nuzzled his neck as if she knew what he wanted, but his mind was far away. After too many distractions—Angus, Milos, Morn herself—he returned to the only subject that really mattered to him.

  Sorus Chatelaine.

  Revenge.

  Thinking about that gave him more real pleasure than the woman he was with.

  When the lift opened, he pulled away from her kisses long enough to locate his room. Supporting her, he walked the unclad floor to six twenty-one and opened it by pressing his hand on the palm plate, then took her inside.

  She wasn’t too drunk to wrinkle her nose in distaste at the splotched walls and sagging bed. For carrying his wire around inside her like a stillborn, the Bill probably paid her well enough to live more comfortably than this. She didn’t object, however. She made a small noise of protest when Nick disentangled himself to verify that the data terminal worked; but that had nothing to do with the depression of the room.

  In fact, the terminal worked fine. Now Nick could have simply extracted the information he wanted, coded a message for Milos by way of Captain’s Fancy, and left. That would have had several advantages. It would have spared him the effort of sex—would have freed him to spend more time thinking about Sorus. And it would have made his behavior look even more suspicious to the Bill. He could almost hear the woman telling her boss in a stupefied whine, I swear to God, all he did was take me up to that room and make me talk. Then he walked out. That’s all I told him what he wanted because I knew you were listening.

  Nick grinned at the idea hard enough to stretch his scars.

  But he couldn’t do it: his body refused. Maybe he would be able to pretend that this woman was Morn—that her drunkenness was the abandonment he craved—

  Before leaving the terminal, he spent a little more of his money to pipe in a program of modulated white noise, the kind of sound null-wave transmitters and nerve juice junkies liked when they slept; the kind that would muffle the bugeye’s reception.

  Holding the woman still with a kiss, he stripped away the small scraps of her clothes, then carried her to the bed and tried to bury his own needs deep enough in her flesh so that they would be quenched, at least for a short time.

  Unfortunately he couldn’t do that either. She came alive in his hands, of course; desire overcame her numbness. She writhed under him and gyrated over him and moaned at his kisses as if he gave her exactly what she wanted; as if she’d never felt this way before, or for so long. But she couldn’t supply what he wanted. He had no interest in her: he’d never wanted a woman for herself. What he wanted was her passion and surrender; he wanted her to desire him so much that she ceased to exist for herself. And only Morn had ever given him that: Morn Hyland, with her zone implant and her dishonesty, her absolute commitment to her own choices.

  Liete knew less about sex, but she was still better than this woman.

  So he kept going until the inadequate sweat at the woman’s temples and the hollow flush in her cheeks told him that she was worn-out; then he quit. Now was probably his best chance: fatigue and numbness would make her suggestible. If he caught her before she fell asleep, she might tell him almost anything.

  Incomplete and unfulfilled, he wrapped her in a grasp which would keep her under control if she reacted badly. Stroking her ear with his tongue, he whispered, “There’s one more thing you can do for me.”

 
; She laughed unsteadily. “I don’t believe it. I thought we already did everything. If there’s anything more any woman could do for a man like you, I want to know what it is.”

  He ignored the implicit challenge. Keeping his voice low, he breathed, “It’s just something you can tell me. The Bill has something that belongs to me.” As if he hadn’t felt her stiffen, he went on, “I want to get it back. You can help by telling me where it is.”

  Weakly she twisted against his arms. When she’d turned enough to look directly into his face, she asked, “What makes you think I know anything about him? I don’t. I just work here. I sell sex.” Suddenly flustered, she said, “I mean, not to you. I’m not asking you for money. I already got”—she smiled awkwardly—“something a lot better.

  “But I don’t work for him. That’s what I mean. I’m not that important. I just fuck men who buy me drinks and pay me afterward.”

  Nick gave her a lazy, warning grin. “Bullshit,” he whispered pleasantly. “You’re a wire. I know because”—he told the first lie that came into his head—“I’ve got a nerve beeper that tingles when it gets near any kind of transmitter. When I sat down beside you, it went wild.”

  The flush faded from her cheeks. Drink, satiation, or natural stupidity left her unable to doubt him. She swore pitifully for a moment. Then she protested, “But if you know that, you know you can’t ask me questions about him. It isn’t safe. He can hear you. He’s recording you right now.”

  Natural stupidity, Nick decided. Even a drunk should have recognized the potential consequences of warning him like that.

  “Oh, it’s safe, all right,” he told her with some of his old insouciance; but softly, in case the white noise didn’t cover him. “I killed your transmitter. That was the pain you felt in your neck. I poked you with a needle and cut the leads.”

  For an instant her eyes rolled: she was close to fainting. But then panic brought her back.

  “Unfortunately,” he continued, articulating her fear for her, “that puts you in a difficult position. The Bill is going to think you switched yourself off. He’s going to think you’re protecting some kind of plot against him. Or maybe you’re plotting yourself. When he gets his hands on you”—Nick shook his head sadly—“I’m afraid he’ll tear you apart. You can tell him the truth, but he’ll assume you’re lying.”

  “You shit,” she moaned, not in anger, but in desperation, “you bastard. Why—?”

  He shrugged without releasing his grip. “Well, I couldn’t count on persuading you to trust me, could I? I needed a lever.” He kissed her strained mouth as if he didn’t know the difference between fear and arousal. “This way, you need me. I can protect you. I can take you with me, so he won’t hurt you.

  “But I am not going to do that,” he promised slowly, “unless you tell me where he keeps his prisoners. Soar intercepted an ejection pod from my ship. What was in that pod is mine. Tell me where it is, and you’ll never need to be afraid of him again.”

  She stared at him as if she were too stricken to see him; as if her fear of the Bill filled her sodden horizons.

  Putting his mouth to her ear, Nick murmured, “Do you really think you’ll be worse off on my ship—with me—than you are here?”

  Suddenly urgent, she panted, “Take me there now.” She may have remembered the bugeye in the room. “I don’t know anything about your pod. But I know where he keeps prisoners. I can tell you how to find it. I’ll tell you as soon as I’m safe.”

  Nick didn’t shift his hold or his mouth. “You know better than that. If I were willing to let you change your mind”—if I were that stupid—“I wouldn’t have killed your wire in the first place.”

  She still wasn’t angry. She was a frightened drunk: her life on the cruise hadn’t left room for anger. For a moment longer she remained indecisive, paralyzed. Then she surrendered.

  Barely audible, she sighed, “All right.”

  Looking as pale as if Nick had drained the blood from her heart, she told him how to locate the section of Billingate which the Bill used for his lockup.

  “Is that enough?” she finished weakly. “Will you protect me now? Will you take me with you? If you don’t, he—” She stopped: the thought of what the Bill would do to her was too appalling to be put into words.

  Nick laughed shortly. “No.” Women this stupid—no, anybody this stupid, man or woman—deserved what happened to them. “I can always get better sex than this, and you haven’t got anything else to offer.” The Bill would know at a glance that she hadn’t switched off her wire herself. “I’m afraid you’ll just have to take the consequences of betraying him yourself.”

  Dropping her from his arms, he rolled off the bed and moved to the data terminal.

  “Oh, please,” she begged his back, “please don’t do this to me, please, I’ll do anything you want, you can have all of me, I’ll never let another man touch me, I’ll stop drinking, I can do better if I’m not drinking, please—”

  Nick hardly heard her. The fact that she didn’t get angry only increased his contempt. At the terminal, he coded a complex message; sent it. Then he climbed back into his shipsuit and boots.

  For a minute he faced the woman’s pleading. When she finally ran down and began to sob, he growled, “Face facts, bitch. You’re shit out of luck. All this whining isn’t going to help you. I never did like winners.”

  Grinning as if this victory weren’t as hollow as all the others, he left the room.

  As soon as the door closed, he felt so exposed that he wanted to run.

  He wasn’t worried that the Bill would intercept—much less decipher—his message. On Angus’ instructions, he’d sent it in two parts, each differently coded, to Captain’s Fancy. One was for Liete Corregio, ordering her to relay the other to Trumpet ship to ship, bypassing Billingate communications. From his room, Milos could talk to Trumpet’s automatic systems; could receive Nick’s message without exposing its source.

  No, Nick’s only immediate concern was that the Bill might react to the loss of the woman’s transmission by sending guards to track her down. If he dispatched them promptly enough; if they caught up with Nick before he had a chance to blur his traces among the crowds of the cruise—

  Even then Angus’ plan might not fail. But Nick would be in trouble. At best he would lose his freedom of movement; his ability to put his own plans into effect.

  And the longer he was kept away from Captain’s Fancy, the more time Mikka’s disloyalty, and Vector’s, would have to fester.

  No wonder his successes with women felt hollow. By itself each one was trivial: all he gained from it was the opportunity to go on to the next problem.

  Sorus was going to pay for this. If it was the last thing he did, he would exact blood for what she’d done to him.

  He fought down the urge to run; but he allowed himself a brisk stride on his way to the lift.

  As he rode the car downward, a tic of tension began again in his cheek, pulling like small claws at his scars. When he tried to rub it away, the skin Sorus had cut felt tight and dead; but the tic persisted.

  After he left Ease-n-Sleaze, he began to see guards, but none of them took any notice of him. Apparently the Bill had decided to give him leeway; leave him free to condemn himself. That was another mistake which he meant to make the Bill regret.

  Grimacing involuntarily, Nick returned to his ship.

  He should have felt better when he’d cycled the locks and sealed himself back aboard Captain’s Fancy. She was his ship, his. There was no safety anywhere if not here. Nevertheless his sense of exposure and incompleteness remained. The tic refused to relax its grip on his cheek. He sampled the air as if he could smell something evanescent and subtly threatening from the scrubbers; but after a moment he realized that the atmosphere felt wrong, not because of a scent, but because of a sound.

  More precisely, the absence of a sound. The almost subliminal hum and throb of Captain’s Fancy’s thrust drive was missing.

  When
he’d first left her to talk to the Bill, he’d ordered Mikka to keep the drive on standby. And he’d renewed his instructions before leaving to meet with Milos: he wanted the drive active, not as a means of escape—that was impossible—but as a way of reminding the Bill that Captain’s Fancy could do the installation a lot of damage if Nick was pushed too far.

  But Mikka had shut down the engines.

  Swearing brutally, he started to run.

  By the time he reached the nearest lift, however, he’d regained control of his urgency. He’d left Mikka and her discontents alone too often, too long: he had no way of knowing what she’d been saying about him, or to whom. His people were volatile at the best of times. Now, under pressure from the Amnion and Morn, as well as from Nick himself, they were unstable enough to go critical. Without much effort Mikka could set them at each other’s throats.

  Or at his.

  That should have been inconceivable. He was Nick by God Succorso, Nick Succorso, and nothing should have been able to threaten him on his own ship, among his own crew. But he knew in his scars and his twitching cheek that his hold over Captain’s Fancy was fraying. Like his invincibility, he’d lost it somewhere in the midst of Morn’s treachery.

  He couldn’t afford to act panicked. If he did, Mikka and her supporters—Vector? Sib Mackern? Pup?—might think they could beat him.

  So he lowered his respiration, calmed his pulse, stopped cursing. Again he tried to massage the tic away from his cheek. By the time the lift opened on the passage which led to the bridge, he’d convinced himself that no one would be able to see how close he was to the end of his resources.

  When he crossed the aperture onto the bridge, he found it as crowded as the cruise.

  He’d left Liete and her watch in charge of the ship: Mikka was supposed to be readying a team for a raid. But now at least two thirds of the crew were packed into the small space.

  To some extent, the crowding was caused by the lack of internal spin. His people could only stand on that section of the floor which was oriented toward Thanatos Minor’s mass. When Captain’s Fancy first docked, the bridge stations had adjusted automatically to the rock’s g by sliding along their tracks until they rested almost shoulder to shoulder in the bottom of the curve. Because of that, the crew didn’t have much space.