by Nazri Noor
“Welcome to the big city,” Sterling growled. “We need to stop this thing. If those little gremlins ship out to the entire state, there’s no telling the kind of bloodbath we’ll have on our hands. Mason? Let’s do this.”
I nodded, my stomach knotted with doubt and anticipation. But this was what I was built for, what I was born to do. The thrill of the fight, the thrum of battle. Samyaza’s blood flowed in my veins. I was a fallen soldier, wasn’t I? In blood and in name.
In a blur of silver and leather, Sterling sprinted forward. I followed. He zigged, and I zagged, each of us slashing and slicing wherever the opportunities presented themselves. Thick rivulets of black goo dripped from every cut, but the creature’s wounds closed up again, like it was made of some repulsive, self-repairing gelatin.
The monster shrieked each time Susanoo’s katana bit into its flesh, jolts of electricity coursing through its body and searing entire sections of its quivering gray skin. The smell was horrible, this unearthly combination of burning plastic and human hair. I dreaded to think what the Cubes were made out of, how Loki came to birth these tiny abominations. And he wanted one of these in every home? By God. In every home.
Sterling quietly offered himself as the decoy, being the faster of us two, and where he dashed, the golem’s furious fists followed. I shielded myself from the first spray of concrete as one of the golem’s titanic hands punched a hole in the ground. The second punch slammed way too close to my feet, enough to throw me off balance.
I skidded and stumbled across the floor, only just staying on two feet. But I lost my grip, and my shield went flying from my hands, clanging and clattering against the concrete, then disappearing into nothing. From the back of the warehouse, some of the frost giants cheered. Fucking assholes.
Fine. A shield wasn’t going to help me anyway. But what would? We could cut into this thing all night long and nothing would happen. If only Florian could do something explosive with his magic to turn the tide of battle. But what?
And just where the hell was he?
I found him as I scanned the warehouse, one foot planted firmly into the stand where the three legendary weapons were placed. He was struggling to tug the staff out of its base. Florian was probably twice as strong as I could ever hope to be, but Gambanteinn wasn’t budging, like the sword in the stone. Staff in the stone, as it were. It was a good idea, if he could somehow unplug it from the base, and then figure out how to use it to blast things to hell the way Skirnir did.
“Give that back,” a voice cried out. My attention snapped to another end of the warehouse, where, at a door that opened up into the Gridiron, stood Skirnir.
What. The. Fuck?
He made a mad dash for Gambanteinn, and therefore, Florian, who immediately put up his dukes, ready for a fist fight. Then another figure stepped in through the open door, followed by another. Wyatt Whateley, this time, followed by – oh, sweet mother.
Quilliam J. Abernathy.
I narrowly dodged the golem as it swung its fist just half a foot over my head. Somewhere between its legs Sterling was screaming for me to help out, but I was too distracted. Whateley was waddling over to retrieve Mistleteinn himself, heading directly for an increasingly panicked and increasingly sweaty Florian, who now had to fend off two assailants.
And I had zero doubts whatsoever that this intrusion had everything to do with Quilliam and his anarchic antics.
“Abernathy, you piece of shit.” I brandished my sword at him. “This isn’t your fight. Get the fuck out of here.”
“Make me, you peasant.” He strode in, chest puffed out and arms spread wide, his eyes staring daggers at me, then at Loki. “The sword and the staff don’t belong to Loki. They just had similar-sounding names. Are you really that stupid? He tricked you all along. Laevateinn is his to keep, but the other two? Gambanteinn belongs to Skirnir by right, and Mistleteinn belonged to an ancient king, now in Whateley’s safekeeping. Loki has no claim to them. Read a book, Albrecht. Gods, how dumb are you?”
My gaze flitted from Quill to Loki. The god was shrugging, a shit-eating grin on his face. And speaking of eating – the frost giants lining the doorway somehow had open bags of microwave popcorn at the ready. These gigantic cockholes. Loki had planned this all along.
“You did this?” I yelled, getting increasingly furious as Loki’s smile grew wider and stickier. “For your own amusement. For your entertainment.”
Fucking entities, all the same. Immortality, they said, made things so boring. It was why Loki started his own corporation. It was why Odin, the All-Father, had his own bed and breakfast staffed by valkyrie. But Loki would always be worse – no, the actual worst, because he engineered these situations precisely for fun. Schadenfreude, but to a massive, meticulously orchestrated degree.
“You’re a goddamn asshole,” I yelled again, roaring loud enough so he could hear.
Loki’s response was voiceless, but deliberately mouthed with lips and teeth so I could understand him. “Guilty as charged.”
“Damn you all to hell,” I muttered under my breath. My palm was damp as my eyes flitted back to Quilliam. He was smiling, his nose lifted in the air. Not a great sign. Even from afar, I could hear the words of power as they left his lips.
“Libris grandia.”
Out of thin air, seven books materialized, rotating in a slow orbit around him. I licked my lips, tasting sweat, knowing exactly what Quill’s bizarre tome magic was capable of. All the while my blood boiled. I couldn’t leave Sterling to tackle the golem on his own, but I couldn’t ignore the threat of Quilliam’s fire, either.
I fucked up. I knew I fucked up. I shouldn’t have given Loki those artifacts, but what did I know? It was selfish, because all I could see was the end goal of fading away from the arcane underground, making enough money to turn myself invisible. But now, whether or not Loki was still paying me, I had to fix things. Money or no, I had to make this right.
The light of my body spilled into the warehouse as my anger built and mounted. Which, unfortunately for me, meant that I was a big, bright target for the twenty-something-foot-tall giant that was presently bellowing its rage throughout the warehouse.
A fist the size of a sedan came whooshing straight for my face.
Then it stopped.
In fact, everything stopped – the fistfight between Florian and Skirnir, Wyatt Whateley’s tear-stained attempts to rip Mistleteinn from its stand. Underneath the Cube colossus’s legs, Sterling was shouting something at me, eyes wide, veins bulging. Even Quilliam and Loki had stopped moving, frozen in place.
Or rather, frozen in time.
37
The confident, measured footsteps echoing around the eerie stillness of the warehouse confirmed my suspicions. Maharani, Scion of the Lorica, and the only chronomancer I’d ever met stepped out from the shadow of a pile of crates, her eyes boring into mine.
“Mr. Albrecht. I told you to keep your nose clean, didn’t I?”
I planted my sword against the ground, using it for support as I took a breather. “Trust me, this is as clean as it gets.”
She looked around, tutting. “Giving a god of deception access to multiple instruments of power doesn’t sound like staying out of trouble. Very irresponsible indeed.”
“I messed up,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t even know what to tell you anymore. I knew a betrayal was coming, but I didn’t think he’d designed for everything to be quite this big of a clusterfuck from the start.”
The smallest muscle in Rani’s face strained when she heard the expletive. She reminded me of Sadriel, in a way, very much obsessed with order and cleanliness, except that Rani had even less of a sense of humor. She stepped up to my side, the deep blue of her sari drifting as she walked, an odd, dynamic demonstration of movement against the chilling, impossible stillness of everything else around us.
“This won’t hold for long, Mr. Albrecht. I want you to know that I only did this to contain the potential havoc that might have ensued fr
om – gods, that really is the word, isn’t it – from the absolute ‘clusterfuck’ this meeting would have produced. I strongly recommend you pick a course of action while the stasis field holds. Divide and conquer.”
I glanced from every pocket of activity to the next, mulling over my options as quickly as I could. Quilliam first. He stood to do the most damage, after all. We were in a warehouse filled with empty crates and wood pallets, a pile of tinder waiting to go up in smoke.
“Mr. Albrecht. Have you decided? I don’t believed you understand how my magic works. I have to fight to contain these elements in time. The giant creature is proving particularly challenging.”
Rani winced, then faltered. I rushed to her side, holding her up by the elbow as she clutched my arms for support. “Are you okay?”
“It’s nothing.”
She brushed some hair away from her face, tucking it behind her ear. Wait. That particular lock wasn’t gray before. It’d turned white right before my eyes. It hit me then. Every use of her magic was aging her.
“Rani, are you sure everything’s fine? I can – ”
“Now, Mr. Albrecht,” she said, her eyes hard. “I can’t hold this for long. Act now.”
And so I did. I sprang away from her, diving directly for Quilliam, my heart pounding, blood racing through my temples as the books encircling him began to resume their orbit in slow motion, pages fluttering and flapping. Rani’s magic was wearing out. I brought my sword down in seven slashes, cutting every one of Quill’s tomes in half as I struck. It made me wince, knowing how some of those books must have been so rare and valuable – but better than all of us going out in a glorious fireball.
Florian could handle himself, that much I knew. Skirnir might have been a god, but he was weakened, lacking influence in the modern world. And Wyatt – damn, poor Wyatt was a blubbering mess, the tears frozen on the end of his nose only just starting to trickle as time remembered its purpose. No, my priority had to be the Cube colossus. Kill that thing, or at least disable it, and we could focus our energies and attention on severing Loki’s connection to his precious stolen relics.
My sword fell from my hand, my arms aching from the fight, from the short burst of exertion it took for me to ruin Quill’s bookish battle strategy. I winced from a sudden twinge of pain. The wound from the blast Skirnir fired into my torso with Gambanteinn had healed over well enough, but it had picked a prime time to start aching again, maybe from the strain. My hand went over it, rubbing uselessly. God, that bolt of magic had felt like a cannonball slamming into my chest.
Huh. A cannonball.
“Then improvise,” Raziel had told me, all the way back in Artemis’s domicile. “You cannonball them right back.”
I looked up at the colossus. Could I even come close to injuring the thing? I had to believe that inflicting enough damage on the monstrosity would cause it to collapse back into its parts, if not destroy it utterly. The Cubes individually had clambered on top of each other, interlacing, interlocking into a single organism. So if I applied pressure at its center, just enough power to break those connections apart –
“Mr. Albrecht,” Rani shouted. “The stasis is failing.”
The Cube golem’s fist was moving through the air again, slowly, surely, as it aimed its massive knuckles directly for Sterling’s face.
“Fuck it,” I muttered under my breath. I parted my arms and reached in front of me, spreading my fingers, envisioning, uh – God, what did those things even look like? A long pipe, I guess, tapering at one end, with a place on the other for the fuse. Did I even have any matches? How was I supposed to spark the fire?
These doubts and more filled my mind as I thought about how absolutely ridiculous it was to come up with such a cartoonish solution to our problems. But even as I scoffed and grumbled inside my head, even with my eyes closed, I could detect the barest gleam of light and the telltale warmth of divine magic radiating from my palms.
No. It couldn’t be.
My eyes flew open, and there it was: a thick cannon, as long as I was tall, pointed directly at the colossus. My mouth moved on its own as I muttered in disbelief.
“This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen. Or done.” But it made sense, a little bit. I could be a loose cannon myself, too reckless, too gung-ho. It felt appropriate.
“Mr. Albrecht. The field.” Rani’s voice was more strained than ever. “Get on with it, you stupid bastard.”
Well. I wasn’t quite expecting her to go full expletive on me, but okay, understandable. I patted at myself, horribly aware of how unprepared I was, wondering if I should have ex nihilo created a machine gun turret instead – then briefly wondering if that was even possible – when I remembered that we had a smaller, less dangerous source of fire than Quilliam J. Abernathy’s fingers.
I sprinted over to Sterling’s side, reaching into his jeans pocket. His eyes swiveled slowly down as I did, his body breaking out of the time field. The look he gave me was halfway between “What the fuck are you doing?” and “A little to the left.” I grimaced, but closed my fingers triumphantly around the metal lighter in his pocket.
My hands trembled as I fumbled with the lighter on the way back to the thing I’d created out of thin air. I still hadn’t decided if I’d made it myself, or if heaven actually had its own storehouse of cannons somewhere in its armories. Flick, flick, and finally a flame held steady on the lighter’s wick. I lowered it to the cannon to light the fuse, ran like hell, then crouched behind a crate, eager to witness the fruits of my labor.
The cannon exploded with an ever-loving kaboom, a quick gout of celestial smoke and gunpowder issuing from its mouth as its payload rocketed out in a thunderous crash. Even the cannonball was gold, gleaming like a perfect metallic marble as it spun and bulleted straight for the center of the Cube creature’s body.
And the cannonball struck true. A wet, squelching noise I can only correctly describe as “splorch” filled the warehouse, along with the Cube golem’s innards as black goo exploded from its torso, spattering the walls, the crates, the pallets – and naturally, most of Sterling’s face and body. He yowled in revulsion as Maharani’s time magic wore off, but that wasn’t the only scream filling the building.
Far at the other end of the warehouse, Loki was standing on tip toes, his fists balled as he yelled “My babies!” at the quickly collapsing and disassembling tower of gelatinous Cubes. His frost giants shook their heads solemnly. I caught two exchanging dollar bills, fulfilling the terms of a bet.
The thud of knuckles on bone cracked as Skirnir and Florian beat on each other in an exchange of blows that was really just an extended standstill. Wyatt sniffled and groaned as he tugged in vain on his beloved Mistleteinn.
But the greatest cry of frustration came, of course, from Quilliam J. Abernathy himself. His eyes were huge as they flitted between the disintegrating Cube monster, the cannon, and my face.
“No! But how?” Quilliam wrenched at his hair, his face wrinkled with dismay. “How is this possible?”
I shrugged. “You’re not the only one who’s good at magic around here.” Hey, I knew I got lucky with the whole cannon thing – still stupid – but he didn’t need to know that. And then I added, for good measure: “You huge dork.”
“You’re going to pay for this, Albrecht. Ignis grandia – ”
Somehow, in his anger, Quilliam hadn’t noticed that his books were no longer spinning in an axis around him. With his foci gone, and with nowhere to channel such a massive concentration of his magic, his spell sputtered – then backfired. Clothes, skin, hair, all went up in flames. Quilliam screamed.
The cannon at my side disappeared, and again I reached out to the Vestments. A sword. I just needed to run him through while he was on fire, and that would be one less problem to deal with, forever.
But even through the flames, Quill’s eyes focused on my face with an infernal hatred. I dashed towards him, my hand prepared to accept the blade from the Vestments, but he backed away. Quil
l spun in a circle, going faster and faster like a whirling dervish, until he vanished.
I clenched my teeth. No way was he dead, just off to lick his wounds. And when he came back, I knew that there would be hell to pay.
38
Sterling went through his third towel, retching and complaining the whole time as he wiped more of the Cube goo off his body. It was hard to tell where the black blood ended and his leather jacket began, and there was a good chance his clothes were permanently ruined. But what I found more interesting was how the Lorica had shown up bringing towels at all.
“Standard procedure,” Maharani told me, a look of boredom in her eyes. “There’s often at least one person on hot cocoa duty as well. Just in case.”
And no matter the situation, the Lorica’s teams could just as easily teleport in and out whenever they pleased, to retrieve more resources for whatever was required for a cleanup. We were still at the warehouse, my legs, for once, happy to resist the urge to flee at the first sign of the Lorica showing up.
On Rani’s command, a squad of Wings had appeared. Those were mages who specialized in teleportation magic of various flavors, and their job was to transport both supplies and the Lorica’s less transportation-competent members, whether it was to a battle, or to conduct what was referred to as a cleanup.
“This isn’t new to you, I trust.” Rani waved a hand at the fifteen or so men and women who had spontaneously popped into existence. “The Mouths are there to wipe memories, in case there are any witnesses. And the Hands, well, you know how it is with the Hands.”
The Mouths were Lorica mages who used telepathy in all its forms to delete the part of a civilian’s brain that might have spotted a manticore flying overhead, or witnessed a hobo firing lightning bolts out of his fingers. The Hands were combat specialists, second only to Scions in how dangerous they could be. Even in noncombat situations, it was always a good idea to have one or two Hands, er, on hand. Just in case.
