Isabis held a hand to the side of her face, gasping out, ‘Shut up! Why can’t you mortals just shut up!? I don’t want to hurt anyone, but if death is the only way to silence you…’
Breathe out, empty your lungs, hold, a mortal thought somewhere close by, interrupting her.
The man responsible was three hundred paces away, lying as still as a corpse in the browning grass. The image in his mind was of her — through a sniper scope.
Isabis turned towards him, furious, her shoulders rigid. How dare this mortal aim a weapon at her? How dare he, this follower of hers? And how had she failed to hear his thoughts before now?
Their eyes connected through the scope.
And then he pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER TWO
Maintaining a routine was a sure way to end up dead.
Was it arrogance or a complete disregard for her own safety that saw The Goddess visit a town’s shrine, as she always did, during the first rain meeting of a major drought? Was she aware that she had been spotted on hundreds of different worlds doing this same thing? Did she even care?
When she stepped out onto the soil, Sanyul’s decision to lie unmoving for hours in the long grass, his lasrifle propped up on its tripod, finally bore fruit. He hadn’t seen her enter the shrine and had begun to doubt the information he’d gathered over the years, but there she was — doubling over for some reason, an offering clenched inside her fist. There was something he liked about the way the leaf-strained sunlight glanced over her skin, which was the same rich brown as the mgunga trees surrounding her. If Sanyul was an artist, he might have tried to capture such beauty with a vidcam, not a sniper scope.
Breathe out, empty your lungs, hold, he reminded himself.
That was when she looked right at the scope, as though she could somehow see him.
He fired.
A single lasbolt, unhindered by the wind that had plagued the marksmen of Old Earth, burst from his weapon and drew a steady line that would bend for no one. It was the perfect shot. It should have punctured her chest.
The Goddess wasted no time in escaping her fate.
She exploded into specks of dirt just before the lasbolt dashed through the space where her torso had been. The bolt instead struck the trunk of a nearby mgunga tree, burning a hole right through the centre, announcing his failure for all to see.
Sanyul remained frozen in place, unsure if he could trust his eyes. He allowed a slow blink and drew the breath that his lungs demanded (he had denied them during that crucial moment of firing, to maintain accuracy), but this did nothing to change the empty scene in front of him. Sanyul’s heart faltered and he inwardly cursed the organ for evading his control.
Where had The Goddess gone? Was she coming to kill him?
There was no way he could outrun a sub-level god.
The yellowed grass that had shielded him began to whip back and forth, frenzied and furious, the sharp blades tearing into his suit like paper and only stopping when they hit the lasproof panels underneath. This form of attack was more inconvenient than deadly, but he had a feeling The Goddess wasn’t done with exacting her vengeance. This was only the start.
Sanyul knelt, his lasrifle on the ground and his hands laced behind his head. Doing this wouldn’t save him. He knew that. But he refused to meet death with anything but dignity.
‘Goodbye, Bibi; goodbye, Ablar,’ Sanyul murmured, wanting his last words to be full of love, not fear or hatred.
The nearest clumps of grass violently uprooted themselves, throwing dirt into his eyes and pressing in around him, creating a tightly-wound cocoon that would surely compress his chest and steal his breath —
He bent over, wheezing. But his tiny attackers had already retreated. The hands he’d flung out to support himself touched ice-crusted rocks instead of grass and the air in his lungs was cold, thin and unforgiving. He shivered. His suit was better at blocking lasbolts than the temperatures that reigned here in the mountains.
Sanyul found his eyes drawn to the low, flat plain beneath him, where Tanza glinted and beckoned, a rapidly spreading metropolis that might very well encase his hometown one day. He realised that he was now kneeling hundreds of klicks away from where he’d been a moment ago. It would take most of the day, but he’d be able to reach the city at a steady walking pace. Clearly The Goddess didn’t wish him to starve or die of thirst.
‘Why did you bring me here?’ he demanded as he got to his feet.
‘I thought it would give us an opportunity to talk,’ a woman answered him.
Sanyul turned towards her, his arms loose by his sides, ensuring that The Goddess saw no physical tell of what he planned to do. The blade at the small of his back was archaic in style, not powered by anything except the arm of its wielder, but it was silent —
— and suddenly gone, teleported to the ground at her feet.
‘Really, I would like to talk,’ The Goddess said, frowning.
Sanyul lowered his stance and lifted his hands, flattened instead of fisted, into a defensive position in front of him. ‘You could have killed me by now. Perhaps you are only keeping me alive to find out if I was working with others. I was not. This decision was my own.’
The Goddess sighed and rubbed her temples, a surprisingly mortal-like gesture. ‘I know you were working alone. I can see your thoughts, Sanyul Bello.’
Well, that explained his failure. He mentally berated himself for this gap in his knowledge.
While he did this, The Goddess turned her back to him. Because she could. She had nothing to fear from him. He was powerless, just as he always had been.
‘You are not powerless,’ she told him in a tone that was too gentle, too understanding.
‘All your people are,’ Sanyul bit out and advanced on The Goddess, not to harm her because there was no chance of that, but to make sure she at least felt his presence. ‘We can do nothing — nothing that helps — when you decide to toy with us. We perform meaningless rituals, give great speeches and make offerings we cannot spare, just in the off-chance that you will feel generous enough to spare us some rain. You watch — and do nothing. You enjoy our suffering.’
The Goddess spun back around. A fierce scowl warped her face, erasing its beauty and making her look as frightening as she sounded in the tales told about her in Sundafar’s schoolyards.
Her voice now dripped with unrestrained venom. ‘Do you know what I must do to get you that rain? No, you don’t.’ A dark laugh. ‘You mortals. Always expecting someone else to suffer for you. Always asking someone to save you. Always wanting to give up at the slightest hardship.’
‘Slightest hardship?’ Sanyul spat. He had already accepted that his death was imminent; courting her ire couldn’t possibly do any more damage. He hoped. ‘There hasn’t been a planting in five Old Earth years! We are one heartbeat away from disaster.’
The Goddess gave him an imperious stare. ‘That is why I’m here.’
‘You could have done something earlier!’
She marched forward and speared his chest with a finger, her golden eyes lit with fury. ‘Your people know how to prepare for the worst. They store food, they store water, and they never use more than they should. Centuries ago, well before you were born, they opened trading routes to Tanza, even to other planets, in case of a drought such as this. They survive. They always have. But now, when things are desperate, when their thoughts are piercing cries instead of whispers…this is the right time for me to intervene. Not before.’
She holstered her hand at her side, chin held high as though daring him to disagree. Sanyul rubbed his chest. She had known to strike him through his shirt, without the reinforced suit in the way to soften the blow.
‘I would die for my town to see rain more often,’ Sanyul told her. ‘And I would gladly die if it meant my family could prosper without having to rely on you.’
‘Do you think I wouldn’t die for these things either?’ she asked him, her expression pained.
Sanyul hate
d himself for believing her, for being persuaded by the body language that could so easily be performed. He took a step back.
‘You would prefer to leave us to rot,’ he accused, managing to keep the uncertainty from bleeding into his words.
The Goddess sighed. ‘I did not say that. You know I didn’t.’
‘But it would be easier for you to ignore us,’ Sanyul said. ‘And maybe it would be better for us if you did. You’re right. We can deal with this drought on our own.’
‘You cannot.’
‘Yes, we can.’
‘No, you can’t, not this one!’ The Goddess cried, then swiftly clapped a hand over her mouth, eyes wide. After a moment, she peeled her fingers away from her lips to let the laugh escape. ‘I cannot believe this — I am arguing like a child! I have not felt this young in thousands of Old Earth years.’
Sanyul frowned. ‘You are not taking our plight seriously.’
‘Foolish mortal,’ she said, now wearing a patronising smile. ‘Sanyul, I am the one responsible for the rain that will fall tomorrow. I had to ask my brother, the god of water, for that boon. If I left your people alone, there would be no rain at all for a full decade. Would you rather the drought forced your family to flee their farm entirely?’
‘I can’t trust anything you tell me,’ Sanyul said flatly.
A strange look came over face. ‘I suppose you can’t. What if I could show you?’
‘Why don’t you just kill me?’
The Goddess bit her lip, looking down at the small wooden figure cradled in one of her hands. Sanyul remembered making a similar one when he and Ablar had been children. They’d been desperate for some way to pass the time during the tedious wet season — when there had been a wet season in these parts.
‘Because I’d like someone to see me as I am,’ The Goddess said at last.
‘You’re a child of the Creator God, a mere child who discards her toys when she is tired of them,’ Sanyul snapped, jerking his head at the figure she held. ‘See? I know exactly who you are!’
The Goddess meet his eyes squarely. ‘No. You don’t. But you will.’
A nearby shrub threw out a branch that ensnared Sanyul’s ankles and dumped him onto his back. Sharp rocks cut into his palms as he struggled to rise, but even the ground was his enemy. The rusty soil writhed and buried his limbs until he was trapped, The Goddess kneeling beside him.
She lowered a hand to his forehead, her thumb and forefinger braced against his temples.
‘What are you doing!?’ he demanded.
‘Making you see,’ she said. ‘Making you see what it’s like to be me.’
The agony began as white-hot sparks inside his skull and quickly spread throughout his entire body, making him arch and cry out in a way he hadn’t done since that training session at the academy, when his sparring partner had snapped his arms and legs in several places. But at least back then he’d been able to put up a fight.
The Goddess slashed her way into the deepest crevices of Sanyul’s mind and planted something inside him, something powerful, something that had no place there —
When dark oblivion came to take him, Sanyul didn’t even try to resist it.
CHAPTER THREE
Isabis teleported Sanyul’s supine form into the spare bedroom in his parents’ house, where he could remain out of harm’s way until his family returned from the rain meeting. His mother was already planning to scold him for disappearing when he should have been helping her make a case against her neighbour — a woman who had obviously asked The Goddess to give them a drought out of spite, because her daughters were nowhere near as beautiful as anyone else’s.
When Sanyul finally woke, no doubt to his mother’s voice, it wouldn’t take him long to discover the mind-reading abilities that Isabis had given him. And once he was on his knees, driven to the brink of insanity by his family’s thoughts…she would be there to laugh at him, to mock him for thinking her life any easier than his.
Isabis used the coordinates she had scoured from Sanyul’s mind to locate his starship, which he’d stashed inside a cave some distance from his hometown. Even though it was cramped, the ship wanted for nothing — for a single-minded assassin, that is.
Two seats were wedged together inside the small cabin that served as cockpit, study and sleeping area. The ship’s onboard toilet and shower shared one tiny cubicle that looked, from the outside, no different from the storage lockers beside it. Isabis wasn’t surprised to discover that Sanyul kept no personal items or frivolous clutter in the limited cargo space underneath the cockpit; he had turned it into a charging bay for his hoverbike.
Bending over to avoid brushing her tight braids against the ceiling, Isabis moved through the cabin and took the pilot’s seat. Every password the console asked for she was able to give and soon she was watching the vids Sanyul had recorded for his family, vids she knew she had no right to watch — but she hoped to glean information from them that even Sanyul’s mind had not yielded to her. It was exhausting to dig that deep into someone’s thoughts and she was still vulnerable from the act, incapable of defending herself.
But she was more than capable of learning about this strange mortal without resorting to her powers.
‘Ablar, don’t you dare have a go at me,’ Sanyul told the vidcam attached to the ship’s console, skating a hand over his recently shorn hair. ‘I know it’s a month later than I promised, but here I am. Checking in. Alive. And I’ve got good news — I’m coming home. I know, I know, I’ve only done that in the past to lie low between certain jobs, but I swear this time I’ve got a better reason for showing my face down there. Just wait and see.’
He spoke so tenderly, making sure his sister knew he loved her — all while plotting Isabis’ murder behind that smiling face. He was a killer. A master of deceit. And he thought he knew everything because he spent weeks, sometimes even years, studying his marks and their movements.
Foolish, ignorant, dangerous man.
Isabis flicked through the hours of footage stored on the console, watching Sanyul grow younger and younger. Some vids were boring, others vaguely interesting, and then there were the ones showing him covered in bruises, cuts and plasters — trophies he had earned from his training at the Arms Academy on Leeds.
‘I completed my first commission today,’ Sanyul declared in yet another vid, his brown eyes gleaming with pride. ‘I nailed the mark at six hundred paces. My instructors didn’t think I’d manage it inside a month, much less a week. But it was easy. He was too predictable. Even a thick head like that can’t repel a lasbolt, especially if you’ve taken off your armour to go swimming like you always do just before dawn. At least I stopped him going to that Jezlo café afterwards. He always got indigestion from there.’
Isabis laughed, delighted. There were times when the assassin delivered, straight-faced, an unexpected moment of humour. Perhaps this was his way of reminding his family that he had no reservations about his career. He didn’t apologise for the decisions he’d made.
Just like he hadn’t apologised to Isabis for trying to kill her. And he probably never would.
She flipped to the next vid. Sanyul was still a teenager in this one and the footage had been captured inside a dim square-shaped room instead of a starship.
‘I don’t know why I put myself through this, Bibi,’ he muttered, downcast. He was never this vulnerable or honest in the vids he sent to the other members of his family. His grandmother he trusted the most. ‘It was going so well. I really thought she might be the one. Anyway, we were up to our seventh date and I was walking Dahlia home like always when she turns to me and asks if I’ll kiss her this time. So I did it, because it’s not hard to kiss someone on the cheek, especially if you know they’ll like it in a way you can’t. But then she wanted me to go in and have sex with her.’
Sanyul sighed, rubbing a hand over his stubble-ridden face. ‘I tried to fob her off, but she was just so insistent, kept demanding to know why. So I had to tell her it�
�s not my thing, I’m not into sex. She accused me of leading her on, told me I should have said something earlier. Maybe she’s right. But I was so afraid she wouldn’t go out with me if she knew. And now she knows.’
The shadows around him deepened, almost as dark as the despair he was clearly feeling. Isabis bit her lip, annoyed, when unwanted sympathy ached inside her chest.
‘Stark, I want kids — one day,’ Sanyul added quickly. ‘Don’t you start getting ideas, Bibi. But how am I supposed to find the right mother for my children? Someone who actually gets me?’
Isabis looked down at the small toy in her lap. She stroked her thumbs over its cheeks, imagining that the grainy wood was skin, that this was a child of her own. Someone to give her love and attention to, someone who accepted and loved her in return.
Sanyul’s voice abruptly lost all inflection. ‘Bibi, I’ve got to cut this short. I need to go shoot some shit up at the firing range. My instructor says I show promise as a sniper but only if I keep at it.’
Isabis waved a hand over the console, pausing the vid. He was so angry. Angry at the universe, at her, at any convenient subject. But she understood. She felt that unaimed anger herself often enough, even if hers was caused by the abilities she had inherited from her father, the Ine and Creator God. But somehow Sanyul could switch his anger off, along with his thoughts, until his mind became as still as stone. She hadn’t felt his presence at the shrine, nor any of the agony that usually came from being so close to a mortal. He’d lost control after that, understandably.
Why was he taking so long to wake up? She needed to ask him how he did it.
Isabis glanced down as something fluttered onto the floor from the seat beside her. She bent over, startled to find scattered pieces of flimsy paper, an outrageously archaic form of keeping records. Paper was made from trees, which meant that plants had to die in order to create it. But anything written on the thin sheets was impossible to find on the Web, impossible to hack.
The Galactic Pantheon Novellas Page 14
