False Gods

by Nazri Noor

  “We don’t want any trouble,” Florian said, glaring. He remembered our last encounter with Quilliam just as well as I did. Florian’s body was tense, his muscles perfectly still, but he was just a hop and a skip away from a tree. Proximity to nature was enough to give Florian access to his alraune magics, but if his skin actually made contact with the tree, it’d make it even easier for him to tear Quilliam to shreds.

  “Two against one doesn’t seem fair,” Quill said. “We should make this more interesting.”

  He snapped his fingers and the world around us shimmered. I steeled myself, reaching to the Vestments for the same suit of armor I’d used to fight both Quilliam and Mammon. I hadn’t forgotten about Greed, either. It was only a matter of time until it showed up to crash the party.

  “Where are you taking us?” I said, glancing around me, backing slowly away.

  Quill shook his head. “No where. We’re right where we were, out on a sidewalk in Valero. Only this way, the normals don’t get to see us.” Quilliam’s teeth gleamed in the sunlight when he smirked at me. “And the Lorica won’t, either.”

  He’d put up a cloaking shield, then, one that would keep us hidden from the normals. Yet it also meant that the Lorica couldn’t be alerted to the magical essences we’d release during our fight. Both a good and a bad thing. I didn’t want the Lorica on my ass any more than Quill did, but if it came down to fighting dirty – and knowing Quill, this fight was going to be extra filthy –

  “I don’t like where this is going,” Florian muttered.

  “Me neither,” I said. “But Quill’s a magus. Just another mage. Knife in the throat will end him just fine.”

  Quilliam threw his head back and laughed. “It will, will it? I suppose you aren’t wrong. It’d be prudent for me to stack things in my favor. Again, two against one is hardly fair.” He gestured with both hands, then spread them apart, filaments of magic trailing after his fingers. “Libris grandia.”

  The air around us shimmered again, and I waited for the inevitable swarm of demons that Quilliam had summoned. But the things that appeared weren’t demons. In fact, they weren’t humanoid at all.

  “What the hell?” Florian said, totally taken off guard. “They’re just books.”

  About half a dozen of them, each floating in midair, rotating like rocks spinning through empty space. They rustled with the soft crackle of parchment and aged leather, the flipping of their pages like the sighs of old, dead scribes.

  A bunch of books? That was it? I changed my mind about the suit of armor, reaching instead into the Vestments for a trusty sword. The warmth of divine steel felt good in my hand, my fingers gripping tightly around the sword’s hilt.

  “Some dictionaries,” I said, scoffing. I slashed at the closest book, cutting easily through its pages and its spine, watching with relish as it fluttered to the ground, useless. “Seriously, Quill? What are you going to do with these, bore us to death?”

  I should have known something was off from the way Quilliam was smiling. He gestured once more. When he spoke his words of power, they came as a whisper.

  “Ignis grandia.”

  The five remaining books stopped spinning, spreading themselves open and turning precisely towards me. From the depths of their pages roared five enormous gouts of guttering fire.

  Ah, nuts.

  11

  Here’s that tired old cliché of time slowing down, or at least seeming to, in moments of truest danger. My life did not, however, flash before my eyes. Eighteen years doesn’t seem like much to anyone who isn’t eighteen years old, I suppose, but it still didn’t matter. I didn’t feel sad, or regretful, or remorseful of anything I’d done in my life.

  What I wanted to do in that moment was crush Quilliam’s throat in my own two hands. What I felt was my blood boiling as hot as the fire threatening to scorch my skin and flesh completely off my bones. I could smell the fire, too, or rather the absence of its scent, the way the flames burned everything so cleanly in the air between me and the pages of Quilliam’s accursed books. It smelled like nothing, like how the afterlife must smell.

  To an outsider, summoning and engaging the Vestments seems like something that happens instantaneously. I’m here to tell you that this simply isn’t true. It takes time for me to decide on what piece of gear to requisition. In light of that, I should recant my previous statement. I did have one regret. I should have summoned an entire suit of armor, damn it.

  And besides, would suiting up in full armor even protect me from five jets of arcane flame? I would have been roasted alive either way. The armor might even speed up the process, the equivalent of pouring myself into a cake pan. I closed my eyes and waited for death, the roar of fire so much louder than Florian’s screams.

  Then, through the skin of my eyelids, came a flash of golden light. My eyes fluttered open in time to see a golden hand reach for my throat, clutching me by the collar of my shirt. A second hand reached for Beatrice Rex’s pink bag – what I then realized was Quilliam’s actual target. I reached for the bag as the golden hand hurled it towards the flames, but a pressure in the center of my chest took me off my feet.

  I landed heavily on my ass, dull pain shooting up my spine as my tailbone connected with the cement. I finally understood what had happened. A man in a full suit of gold armor had pushed me out of the path of the flames, the point where the five streams intersected. The golden knight threw himself across me, covering me with his body.

  Beatrice’s bag and all the jars of wine that Florian had so painstakingly brewed spun in midair ever so briefly before the fires ate through the enchanted leather, silk lining and all. An ungodly crack split the air, my ears, and my skull, and the world turned a terrible shade of brilliant, life-ending orange.

  I shouldn’t have survived that explosion. The white-hot blast that burst from the center of the five flames was fueled by fifty jars of highly flammable material, but it was the catastrophic act of utterly destroying a magical artifact that really gave it that extra face-melting punch.

  A massive, horrible groan issued from where Beatrice’s prized handbag used to be, the sound of the pocket dimension built into it imploding. The fires that were just seconds ago threatening to destroy everything under Quilliam’s dome of force were receding into the collapsing dimension, sucked hopelessly into a spherical vortex of furious, swirling void. My fingers dug into the ground, desperate for purchase as the vacuum pulled harder, this time tugging at my entire body.

  “Stab it,” the golden knight told me.

  “Raziel?” I said. “Is that you?”

  He lifted the visor of his helmet. “Well, who the hell else did you think it was? No time to talk. Just stab it.”

  Raziel didn’t even give me time to answer. He rolled off me, allowing the vortex to pull even more forcefully. The wind tore at me, shearing through my clothes and my hair. The hell was he doing? Stab it, he said, as if that was even going to work. Only one way to find out.

  I sprinted at the spinning whirlwind of nothing, taking a running leap as I set my sights on its heart. The centrifugal pull of the void only made me move faster, adding more power and weight to my blow as I lunged forward and slashed at the pulsating sphere. Imagine my shock when the sword from the Vestments not only passed through the orb, but cleaved it in two.

  The two halves of the sphere of annihilation fell away, then faded into nothing. I looked around, my breath coming to me in huge gulps as the air around us filled with smoke. The fires that escaped from the detonation had reached far enough to burn nearby trees and bushes, but the smoke was rising above the limit of the protective dome Quilliam had conjured around us.

  But wait. Quilliam. He was nowhere in sight. The books he’d used to attack me had either disappeared with him or been burned into ashes by the same explosion. His force field was gone, which meant the choking smog had somewhere to go. We could breathe. But that also meant that we were exposed – our camouflage was down. I wondered how we looked to onlookers,
of which there was a slowly growing number. There we were, one dude with a golden medieval sword, another on the ground encased in gleaming, red-hot armor, and a third who – oh.

  Oh God. Where was Florian?

  I cursed under my breath, my hand squeezing harder around my sword until it slipped from my grasp, slick with sweat. It clanged against the ground, then disappeared.

  Raziel was still on all fours, coughing, but his armor was gone. That left just the regular version of him, which really wasn’t very regular at all considering his addiction to designer clothing. He was wearing a thick mustard turtleneck over leather pants, an insanely impractical outfit for the weather we were having, and proof of just how out of touch Raziel was with normal human life. He was going to be fine, though. Angels could reconstitute themselves even if they died on earth, and Raziel wasn’t just some rank and file celestial. He was the angel of mysteries, and that held some cachet.

  No, I was more concerned about the mortal members of our party. I rushed over to check on Florian. He was ancient, and resilient, sure, like an old oak tree – but that didn’t mean that he was invincible.

  I learned the distinction a long time ago, back at the Boneyard, when the lich who served as my employer explained the difference. Immortality only meant that you lived a really long time, potentially forever, never dying from illness or old age. That didn’t mean an axe through the neck, or in this particular case, being burned alive wouldn’t drop you dead, though.

  “You okay there, buddy?” I clapped Florian on the shoulder. He looked dazed, but none the worse for wear.

  He gestured vaguely at the ground and at the blazing pillar of fire near him, what used to be a tree. “I threw up a shield just in time. Made one from vines. But. All my wine.”

  I squeezed him by the shoulder, giving him the best sympathetic smile I could muster. “I know, man. I’m so sorry.”

  “But I worked so hard on them,” he mumbled, his shoulders sloped and rounded.

  Sighing, I clapped him on the back even harder. “It’s going to be fine. We’re going to work something out, okay? It doesn’t mean that we’ve lost the contract with Dionysus or anything.” I wasn’t so sure I believed that myself when I said it, but he had to hear us out. We really, really needed that money. It was the best way to ensure that we would avoid this exact situation in the future. If the entities, hell, if some asshole like Quill could track me down so easily, it meant that my friends and I would always be in danger.

  Florian looked down at his hands, then up into my face, his eyes slowly widening. “Oh. Uh-oh. Beatrice’s handbag.”

  I slapped myself in the forehead. “Oh no. Oh, shit. So on top of losing this entire stock, we owe Beatrice nine hundred bucks, too?”

  “Mason, I told you,” Raziel groaned, picking himself up off the ground, an uncharacteristic smear of ash dirtying his cheek. “I told you to become a doctor, didn’t I? They make so much money. But did you listen?”

  I rounded on him, snarling. “Don’t you know how long it takes to study to become one? Oh my God, Raziel, you’re one of the smartest people I know, but you don’t even understand the first thing about being human.”

  He blinked at me, his hands held up, palms forward. “Okay, whoa. ‘Thanks for saving my life, Raziel. Thank you for sacrificing the structural integrity of your bespoke leather trousers.’”

  “Shut up. You shut right up. Do you know how long I was sick after I went flying that one time? Why didn’t you warn me that that was going to happen?” I noticed I was breathing harder, my skin glazed with sweat, but Raziel was giving me the sort of hurt look you see from a puppy who just wants another treat. Damn it. Damn him. I stomped my foot and folded my arms. “And fine, thank you, I guess,” I said angrily. “Thank you for saving my life.”

  “May it not be the last time your friend does so,” said a voice from behind me.

  I balled my fists, ready to confront the plucky normal who thought it was their place to butt in on our conversation, only to come face to face with a woman swathed in brightly colored silks – a sari. I noticed the tiny hourglass she wore like a pendant around her neck, mainly because it was glowing with pale yellow light.

  I glanced over my shoulder to check for Raziel, knowing how flighty he could be. True to form, he was already gone, leaving just me and Florian to deal with the new stranger.

  “And who are you, exactly?” I said, scowling at the woman, my body still way too full of sass.

  “A good friend, Mason Albrecht, or a new enemy. My name is Maharani, and I am a Scion of the Lorica.”

  Shit.

  The Scion snapped her fingers once. The hourglass at her throat flickered, then the world around us went silent. No – it stopped completely. The fires weren’t moving, just static, like great amber sheets of glass. The rubbernecking pedestrians froze in place. Even the smoke stayed curled close to the ground, like huge gray ghosts locked in time.

  Great. Just great. We had ourselves a chronomancer.

  12

  Maharani had the power to stop time, which was terrifying enough under regular circumstances. My old employer at the Boneyard had told us about chronomancers, a rare breed of mages who could control the ebb and flow of time as easily as a child might manipulate the sand in an hourglass.

  Mages could be many things. A mage who stuck their nose in books earned the potential to become even greater, but each is born with something that makes them unique. Maharani was born with the gift of chronomancy, and to make matters worse, for me, at least, she then grew into someone ambitious and vicious enough to rise to the Lorica’s very highest ranks.

  “We need to have a little chat, Mason Albrecht.”

  I frowned at her, stepping away cautiously. “I find it really unsettling that you all know who I am, yet I know so little of you.”

  “But I only just introduced myself,” she said. Her tone could have made the words sound like a joke from anybody else, but Maharani was a very, very serious woman. The edge of her mouth curled slightly, her attempt at a smile. “My name is Maharani. It means ‘great queen’ in Hindi. You may call me Rani, if the casual comfort of knowing my nickname puts you at greater ease. Why, I even gave you my rank.”

  I winced. That wasn’t meant to be a formality. It was a threat. The Lorica was the highest order of mages in the Americas, meant to monitor and police the use of magic within the region. In ancient times, a lorica was a kind of breastplate, making the organization the literal governing body. Its mages were ranked according to their specialties. The Hands were combat specialists, doling out justice with raw, horrific magical powers. The Mouths were telepaths who could read and erase minds. The Wings were teleporters who transported the others to various missions and destinations.

  But the Scions were the worst of all. These experienced mages held the highest rank attainable within the organization, sitting at a council known collectively as the Heart. And contrary to a heart representing fluffy things like love and tenderness, the Lorica’s version of it was utterly ruthless.

  Florian stepped up to the frozen flames, his finger just inches away.

  “Don’t touch that,” I hissed. “You know better, damn it.”

  He tucked his hands behind his back, sulking. “I wasn’t gonna.”

  “My goodness,” Rani said, once again using a mocking, amused tone. “The two of you do have fun, don’t you?”

  I raised my chin at her. “We do. Is there a problem?”

  Rani blinked at me, unperturbed, and gestured around us. “This. This, Mason Albrecht, is a massive problem. For you, and for the Lorica.”

  “Okay, listen up, because I really don’t want to have to repeat myself. This has been a long, shitty day, and I really don’t need to deal with being attacked again. We didn’t do this. Florian does nature magic, and I do arms and armor. No fire magic between us. We were ambushed, fella by the name of Quilliam.”

  Rani clasped her hands, looking around the area pointedly. “I see no one else here.
No sign of this ‘Quilliam’ either. Though I did catch a glimpse of your feathery friend just moments before he made his expedient exit.”

  “I can explain,” I said, and proceeded to do so, only stopping for breath when I spread my arms out to describe the explosion. I may have used the word “kaboom” at some point. Rani listened closely all throughout, staring intently and nodding.

  “These alleged wines you mentioned, the ones that became fuel for this extremely regrettable incident. Did you obtain proper permits for the manufacture and commercial distribution of said products? Was your workspace inspected by a professional accredited by the Lorica? No, gentlemen. There is more to operating a small business in the arcane underground than simply making things and selling them.”

  “Okay,” I stammered out, “but we didn’t know all that. What if we were to – ”

  “What if your customers were to contract illnesses? What assurance does the Lorica and the general magical public have that your products are not, in fact, tainted with curses or hexing tinctures, or even mundane bacteria? I think not. I would prefer to nip this operation in the bud before someone contracts a more than mild case of food poisoning, or worse. There will be no further attempt to sell your ‘wines,’” she said, making air quotes around the word, “until you can satisfy all of the underground’s requirements.”

  “Fine,” Florian said, defiant now, his chest stuck out, his fists at his sides. “Okay, fine, we’ll have everything done properly, and you can send your health inspector or whatever, and – ”

  “Which isn’t even to say anything of the taxes.” There was a heavy finality to her words, and again that artificial excuse for a smile worked its way across her lips.