I let my senses play out in a circle around me, the machine spirits now connected to my will spiraling out to taste the air. I could hear Volistad’s heartbeat now. It was strong as ever, though his breathing was ragged. He wasn’t moving- chances were he was paralyzed- but he was alive, and he was awake. I winced, but I didn’t have time to try to help him yet. The priest. This all hinged on the priest. “Hey! Eater-Spawn!”
The cavorting Kotikedd stopped, and then swiveled suddenly to face me, mad eyes staring. His face split into a wide, insane grin, and he showed me all of his teeth. Surprisingly, he was still capable of speech. “Ah, ‘Chosen of Ravanur’. I wondered if I would get to kill you today.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Please. You failed to kill my ranger. What makes you think you could kill me?” I sent an invisible cloud of nanites toward him, 'and they surrounded his head, letting themselves get sucked into his lungs with his next breath. Immediately, I was able to sense the target I was looking for. Just like the minotaur, there was something metal curled up in this thing’s chest, right around where the heart should have been. Well, shit. That last one hadn't been a cakewalk to bring down. On the other hand, I hadn't been a god then. The nanites in the berserker's lungs began crawling through into his bloodstream. I wondered if the priest was dead, and there was nothing more than a meat suit, or if the original personality of Kotikedd was in there, a prisoner in his mind.
The inquisitor glanced over at Volistad’s crumpled body. He shrugged. “Dead enough.”
"Well then," I said, showing all my teeth in an Erinye grin. "Maybe today is your lucky day. Come and get me." My nanites found the metal creature curled up in the berserker's chest. A commotion had started somewhere behind me, but I couldn't waste a second looking to see what it was. This all hinged on the next couple of seconds. I scanned the Eater-spawn and quickly found what I was looking for. This creature was a machine. Machines needed power. This one, I reasoned, would run off of the bioelectric energy of its host's body, saving whatever internal power it stored to escape if its vessel died. That meant that it was uniquely vulnerable, in a way with which I had become intimately familiar. Like every other non-Stormcaller out here, this man was wearing one of the Deepseeker's "blessings". Though that old man had been conspicuously absent during this whole farce, his works were not. I had recharged one of those devices with bioelectric energy, and they could store quite the charge despite their unassuming appearances. This one was in the form of a simple metal bracer, worn about the priest's right forearm. I reached out for it with a machine spirit, found its energy storage, and broke it. The energy trapped within was released, all at once.
Kotikedd took one step towards me and froze, his narrow eyes flying open wide. His muscles spasmed, all at once, and his teeth slammed together. Something pink and bloody fell to the ice at his feet. He had bitten through his tongue. He voided his bowels and fell, his whole body still seizing even as he writhed in his own filth. The commotion turned to shouts, and I could hear running feet coming up from behind me. "Come on!” I seethed under my breath. “Show yourself!”
The priest’s chest exploded out in a gout of blood, and his struggles immediately ceased. From the shattered remains of his ribcage something metallic and slick with gore scrambled. It crawled up out of the corpse on too many legs, letting out a tinny, horrible wail. It began to scramble towards me, though the shock had clearly wounded it badly. It weaved back and forth erratically, and sparks dribbled from between its segmented metal plates. I raised one hand high toward the cloudy sky, calling the great storm spirits I knew waited far above. Their answer was immediate. A great bolt of lightning dropped from the heavens and smote the Eater’s Spawn, striking everyone around me blind with the intensity of the strike. Steam billowed up around me in a pillar, and I moved to Volistad’s side.
His neck was bent at an unnatural angle, and his blue-on-brown eyes stared up at me with helpless rage and pain. He tried to speak, but I shook my head to silence him. I took one of his limp hands in mine, knowing he probably couldn’t feel it. “I’m sorry,” I said, holding back the tears. In a minute, the steam would clear, and I would need to be a god again. Gods did not cry. “I’m sorry I sent you into that. If I had known-”
Volistad moaned something, spit bloody foam, and managed to say, “No.” He was right, of course. This had been necessary. It had been the plan. I had had my part of it, but so had he. But that didn’t make me feel any less guilty. What kind of god was I if I couldn’t even save my own champion?
The commotion had stopped. Everything was silent as if the whole of this frozen, shitty world was holding its breath. I let go of Volistad's hand. I would do everything I could to save him. But I had to keep us from being torn to shreds by a mob first. I stood, the steam fading around me like a ragged shroud.
The crowd was silent and still, every one of them staring, rapt at attention at whatever was happening behind me. I turned and stopped. Vassa was still frozen where he stood, Nissikul standing beside him with a lazy hand on his petrified shoulder. Beside him, Elder Lot lay on his face, one of his arms twisted painfully behind him in Elder Perwik's iron grip. The Master of the Rangers held a dagger point to the base of the Master Stormcaller's skull and was ready to bury it in the old Erinye's brain. Beside the pair of grappling Elders, there stood a ragged old man with wide, mad eyes, a weapon dangling lazily from his knobbly hands that was unmistakably some kind of gun, though not any gun I had ever seen. Beside me, Volistad began to laugh weakly. Through his pained chuckles I heard him grunt out, “utrezbekan Deepseeker.”
…
Chapter Eighteen: Parley
Joanna
I watched the door to the little hut with unflagging intensity, trying not to show my anxiety on my face. Never let them see you bleed. I didn't know where I had heard that, but it was true. I couldn't show weakness, not for a single moment. I wasn't just a leader here; I was a god. Gods were calm and self-assured. Gods always had a plan. I sure as shit didn't feel calm or self-assured right now. The crazy old tech shaman ducked out of the hut a moment later, a satisfied half-smile in his eyes, contrasted sharply by the otherwise ferocious expression twisting the rest of his race. He looked around at all of us, gathered at the fire pit outside his hut, poking at the embers of a mushroom stalk blaze. "The young ranger will recover." Everyone gathered breathed a collective sigh of relief.
We had all been pretending to eat the food that the severely cowed priesthood had insisted on serving us. No one was hungry, though. In the space of just a half of an hour, the entire Erinye government had been turned on its head. The High Priest, Vassa, was locked in a cell beneath the stone of the mountain, awaiting judgment from an Elder Council that didn't exist anymore. Lot was being watched very closely by an order of very angry Stormcallers, who had been pulled back from the brink of rebellion by an impassioned Nissikul. They would be fine, but they needed something to vent their spleen upon. I didn’t need a few dozen stir-crazy, angry mages rampaging around the village. I would need to find them something to do. No one seemed to know what to make of the Deepseeker, who had been accused by the others of being corrupted by the Dark Ones around the same time that my camp had been attacked and destroyed. With Vassa clearly corrupted and Lot suspected of the same, everyone seemed ready to kill the strange old shaman too, just to be safe. Only Elder Perwik was still in power, and traditionally he only involved himself in the business of the rangers. Now he was nominally wrangling all four branches of the Erin-Vulur government. It wasn’t the clean, mostly bloodless coup that I had hoped for. But it had worked a lot better than simply kicking in the front door and murdering Elder Lot would have.
Perwik was eating in silence, staring up at the frozen ceiling of the village's great ice cavern. Thukkar sat cross-legged beside him, picking at his claws with a knife far too large for the task. He was studiously avoiding looking at Nissikul. The one-armed Stormcaller was sitting naked to the waist, utterly unconcerned. She had dispelled the witch-ice sim
ulacrum arm she had worn for most of the previous day, and was not working some foul-smelling poultice into the stump with single-minded determination. I watched the Deepseeker come down from his hut and join us around the pitiful fire. Finally, I quit stalling and blurted, "Will Volistad walk again?"
The tech shaman snorted as if the idea was patently ridiculous. I opened my mouth, with an angry snarl already on my lips, but he cut me off with a dismissive wave. "Of course he will walk again, silly gosling. I didn't bring that boy back from the brink of the abyss just to watch him die the first time some brute broke his neck." He pointed a dirty, chipped claw at me, completely ignoring Nissi's warning growl. "That daft boy is about as hard to kill as you are. Probably heals faster, too. You two have more in common than you think." He pointed to my heart. "You aren't the only one with part of a god for a heart."
“Wait, what?”
But the Deepseeker just kept speaking as if he hadn’t just casually suggested that Volistad was also some kind of god. “Now we need to discuss this plan of yours, Storm Queen, and we need to do it soon. I’ve been keeping an eye on that old spirit of yours, and he’s up to no good. We don’t have a lot of time.”
"My plan was to kill him," I snapped, irritated. "I find Barbas, the Erin-Vulur hold off any horrible creations he's made, and I kill him. I knock down the tower he's building, and I take him down to Ravanur's temple. I tear out his heart and seal it in one of those god-cells. Done."
The Deepseeker laughed, his voice crackling like breaking ice. "Ah yes, that always was the old bint's plan. Containment. Well, look where that got us." He leaned in close, one eye open wider than the other, which seemed to have started twitch so hard that he was having a hard time aiming it at me. "Let me ask you something, godling." Nissikul twitched, but I waved her off, annoyed. The Deepseeker didn't appear to have noticed. "Storm Queen, have you ever considered just killing all of the miserable bastards?"
...
Volistad
Having my neck broken was a uniquely hellish experience. I couldn’t move, I could barely breathe and I could hardly speak. Things just happened around me. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. I was Joanna’s champion, not the other way around. Sure, she had the powers of a demigod and could absolutely handle herself, but she had trusted the duel to me. And now here I was, lying in the Deepseeker’s workbench in the middle of his scrupulously neat hut. Furs and hides had been laid down over the stone work-table, but that didn’t change the fact that I felt like one of the old shaman’s magick projects. Joanna had been explaining some of her own magick, the metal and spirits with which she had come down from the sky. She didn’t call it magick, she called it teck. I wasn’t sure what teck meant, but it didn’t mean anything mystical or spiritual. When she said teck, she meant things like the grain mill. Machines. The Deepseeker made machines, not magic. Was I one of those machines? After all, I had magick, no, a teck heart in my chest instead of one made of flesh. Had the Deepseeker really saved my life? Was I still Erinye, or was I something… else? After all, I had just had my neck snapped, and I hadn't died. There was only one other thing I knew about like that- the very Child of the Eater King that had killed me. Was that all that beat in my chest a wriggling, metallic insect that wore my meat body like I wore armor?
I heard the leather door flap pushed aside and resisted the urge to try to turn my head. I had learned very quickly that it either knocked me unconscious with pain or did nothing after all. I supposed I was fortunate that the old shaman knew how to block the pain that I knew that had to be there. Honestly, I was surprised I could even think. Everyone I had ever met who had been using the Deepseeker’s pain blocking herbs and treatments had seemed half-asleep. At this moment, I couldn’t have been more awake. A moment later, the craggy, mad face of the Deepseeker appeared over mine. “You seem to be doing better,” he mused.
I laughed, carefully lest I provoke the terrible pain I knew that had to be waiting in the dark. "I broke my neck, and I'm paralyzed. Please, define ‘better,' Oh great Elder."
To my surprise, the Deepseeker didn’t fly into one of his characteristic rages, despite the disrespect I had shown him. Instead, he narrowed his twitching eyes into a smile and disappeared from my sight. I felt something pulse down my neck, through my chest, and along my legs. It took me a second to realize I hadn’t been able to feel any of that a moment ago. I tried to wiggle my toes. I felt them wiggle. Cautiously, I turned my head the tiniest of fractions to the left. No pain. Some tightness in the muscles, a little stiffness, but otherwise no pain.
The Deepseeker reappeared, a mischievous glint in his eyes. “Get up.”
“What? How-”
The Deepseeker cut me off with an impatient chopping motion. “I said get up. We have a lot to go over and not a lot of time.”
Gritting my teeth in anticipation of agony, I sat up. Nothing. No problem. I looked down at myself, halfway expecting a metal body like that of the creature I had fought in the dark while searching for Joanna. But no, it was still my body. I was beaten, I had some fading bruises, but I was fine. I reached up and felt at my neck. It felt normal- if a little tender to the touch. "Deepseeker, how did- how did you do this?"
The shaman looked at me from beneath bushy white brows, leveling a surprisingly lucid skeptical stare at me. “I replaced your heart, boy- after it got stabbed with a magick spear. Why does it surprise you that I’m capable of repairing a neck as well?”
I frowned. “That’s not the same. When you replaced my heart, I was laid up for a long time. And now-” I stopped, realizing that I didn’t know how much time had passed. “How long have I been down?”
“One night.” The Deepseeker muttered, reaching over and disconnecting a thicket of cords, cables, and wires that had apparently all been connected to me at one time or another. They dripped with a black fluid I couldn’t identify.
I stood, finding it easier than I thought. No wobble, no weakness. It was like nothing had happened. “This doesn’t make sense,” I whispered, feeling overwhelmed. “This isn’t possible.”
The Deepseeker laughed. “Of course it is.” He thumped me hard in the chest, right over the scar where a black spear had skewered me from behind. “I put some serious stuff in there where your heart used to be. The machine spirits inside it can fix damn near everything, given the right materials to work with. Do you think I would risk everything I invested in you on some fancy weapons and armor?”
I just stood there and stared at him, open-mouthed. After a few moments of silence, all of the words bouncing around in my head came vomiting out of my mouth. “What have you done, you crazy old cur? What have you turned me into? Tell me, am I a machine? Tell me!” I stepped forward, not sure what I was going to do, but sure that whatever it was required me to seize the ancient bastard by his skinny, leathery neck.
The shaman didn't let me grab him, however. He held up a small, boxy device that flashed with blue lights and flipped a switch. Immediately, my arms and legs went limp, and I crashed hard to the floor. The Deepseeker leaned in close, with a tone more exasperated than angry. "Don't do that." He flipped the switch again, and I could stand. He held out a hand for me to take it, and then pulled me to my feet. "I've done exactly what I said I had done the last time I dragged you away from death. I turned you into a peerless ranger. You don't feel cold. You are fast and disproportionately strong. And unless someone actually cuts off your head or tears the heart out of your chest, you'll be enjoying those benefits of immortality for quite some time."
“In short,” the Deepseeker continued. “I have made you into my heir.”
“What is that supposed to mean? What are you?”
The Deepseeker laughed out loud, “You idiot, haven’t you guessed? You’ve already met one of your gods, and she all but told you the answer.”
I remembered it then, standing before the altar, face to face with Ravanur. Unless I missed my guess, the Great Mother had said, Palamun has already left his mark on you. My blood felt co
ld in my veins as the realization struck me. “Palamun. You’re the Great Father, the King of the Sky.”
“Actually,” said Palamun, his face briefly riven by a series of twitches all along his jaw line, “I’m the eighth Palamun, in a manner of speaking, and it would be best if you didn’t tell anyone about this- except maybe the Akkandaka. She will understand. Now come outside. We have a war to plan.”
…
I stepped out of the hut a moment later, still only clothed from the waist down. Between my magick heart and the protections that the Stormcallers maintained over the village, the air was a comfortable sort of chilly. There was just enough bite to the air to make me feel more awake, more alert. Gathered around the fire pit that lay before the Deepseeker’s hut were Elder Perwik, Joanna, Nissikul, and Thukkar. They all looked up as I emerged, and their expressions betrayed varying levels of disbelief and shock.
“Vol?” Joanna asked, half rising from her place by the fire.
“I’m alright,” I assured her, with more confidence than I felt about that fact. I was still skeptical of the Deepseeker’s definition of alright, and adding to that the fact that the old shaman was actually Palamun… I was fairly certain I was somewhere very far from alright.
Alien Romance Box Set: Romantic Suspense: Alien Destiny: Scifi Alien Romance Adventure Romantic Suspence Trilogy (Complete Series Box Set Books 1-3) Page 62
