99 Gods: Betrayer

by Randall Farmer

  He left nothing behind. He had used the Angelic Host’s trick and escaped their attack.

  Aw fuck.

  “So,” Alt said, “any of you God types want to explain what happened there at the end?”

  After Phoenix vanished, Persona, the projections and the Grade One Supported focused their efforts on healing. Nicole needed the most attention, her body below the neck resembling Swiss cheese. Every member of Alt’s squad nursed wounds and needed tending, as did nearly a hundred others among the attackers. Seventeen of the hundred and ninety attackers had died, unrecoverable.

  “Let me collect my thoughts,” Persona said. She kept her Alt shape and stayed near Alt while she healed. She worked primarily on Nicole, whose body approached functional despite the loss of her hands and a baseball sized hole through her hip bone and the flesh around it. Alt and Javier kept Nicole’s mind engaged throughout the ordeal, not letting Nicole know the extent of her wounds.

  “Phoenix used the same trick I once did, only he used the trick to transport himself as well.” Persona sent.

  “Uh huh,” Alt said.

  Quite a few of the Supported in this room had never worked with the Telepaths before, and they all had a hard time with the Telepaths. The Telepaths mixed their voices and their telepathy fifty-fifty, which meant very little of what they said made any sense. They also got to watch two versions of Alt, the Recruiter, talking to each other, ample brain strain for the uninitiated. The Indigo witchy-woman Diana, the public face of Boise’s Indigo squad, hovered around, staying out of everyone’s way but taking notes and analyzing Alt’s group intently. Abe, Tylee, Richard, Kara and one other old woman War didn’t recognize (and not part of the Indigo), stayed farther back, wearing the Indigo’s damned black silk cloaks and being ultra-careful about attracting notice.

  War really hoped Boise stayed on their side. She couldn’t deal with the Indigo now, and she certainly didn’t want to face them as enemies.

  “I didn’t have the pleasure of adding my immeasurable charm to the Truck Stop fight,” Walter, Alt’s illusionist, said. “What happened?”

  “Well, when my body vaporized in the truck stop attack and Boise helped me reform, I found I couldn’t reform as Celebrity. I had already been working on changing myself, from Celebrity into something else, but I hadn’t taken the full plunge. The discorporation flipped the switch for me, changing me from a Practical to an Ideological God. To my surprise, I didn’t have any choice.”

  “Okay, Phoenix discorporated himself,” Alt said. “Then what?”

  “He changed,” Persona said. “Since he did this to himself, he didn’t die, as Miami and Atlanta did.”

  War breathed a sigh of relief, glad her own analysis had been correct.

  “What happened to him, then?” Walter said. “What do you mean, he changed?”

  A Boise projection looked up from his healing. “He’s become a new Territorial God, by the name of Santa Fe,” Boise said. This Boise projection had head and beard hair down to his waist and wore a never-washed-ever breechclout. For verisimilitude, his projection stank. “In the process, he had to change his Imago as well as his Mission, and drop all his old Supported. From the feel of his Mission now, Santa Fe’s a hidden Territorial God, similar to Bristol and Cordoba.” Both of those Gods had hidden themselves from Verona, becoming mainstays of the World Peace divine faction. “Unfortunately, even so major a change didn’t free him from Dubuque’s clutches.”

  Alt sent.

  “It’s a win,” Boise said. “Santa Fe’s starting over, power-wise, similar to what the rest of us Territorials faced on day one.” The day after Apotheosis. “As a hidden Territorial, he can’t afford to support an army of followers.”

  “We should go grab him now, before he gains any strength,” Phil said.

  “You won’t be able to,” Boise said. “We don’t possess the techniques necessary to take a hidden Territorial God, if it’s even possible. We won’t be able to find him.”

  “Even if we can’t find him now, it’s really a win, Alt,” Phil said. He knew his boss would be grieving for those killed in the fight and would wallow in depression if the fight turned out to be all for nothing. “Phoenix’s power has been broken, his worshippers don’t have an object of worship, and his organization’s gone. There’s nothing stopping us from following the rest of plan 5, doing the same to Dubuque as we did to Phoenix and ending this appalling conflict.”

  “You’re right,” War said. “Furthermore, we can’t afford to give Dubuque and his allies any more time to develop any more direct worshipper-backed tricks. We have to attack him now.” She had hoped they would have enough time after confronting Phoenix to get the first of Portland’s non-Supported battle enchantment wielding troops into the fight. Unfortunately, they still didn’t have anything better than prototypes and a few soldiers testing them.

  Alt licked his lips and wiped more blood off his face. Alt sent.

  “How?” War said. “Trust me, we didn’t take any Mission hits. On the contrary, we’ve managed to get the overall divine Integrity back positive for the first time since Miami’s attack.”

  “I wish I could answer your question, War, but I can’t,” Alt said.

  War’s little girl projection walked over to Alt. “Let me touch your head.”

  Alt bent over. War touched and winced.

  “Sumbitch,” War said. “It’s the Angelic Host, not our faction or Dubuque’s faction, who won here.” She accepted Alt’s hunch as true, but the fact she couldn’t see or understand the Host’s victory bothered her a lot.

  “This isn’t good,” Diana said, exerting enough funky Indigo charisma to grab all their attention. “Whatever their role is in this mess, they represent unchecked power. None of us trusts them or understands them. They keep doing things that aren’t Angelic.” A comment only a member of the Indigo inner circle would have the nerve or experience to say.

  “Which brings up the next ugly question: what is the Angelic Host, anyway?” Alt said.

  No one in the ruins of Phoenix’s old lair could answer him.

  Part 2

  Underground

  And behold! He cometh with ten thousands of His holy ones

  To execute judgment upon all,

  And to destroy all the ungodly:

  And to convict all flesh

  Of all the works of their ungodliness which they have ungodly committed,

  And of all the hard things which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.

  -- The Book of Enoch 1,9

  “If a man smites you on one cheek, smite him back”

  21. (Dave)

  Haluk, their hired guide, turned and pointed at the grotto room and the rough-carved Christian cross on the side wall next to a window-like niche. “One of the amazing things about Kaymakli is its use in hiding people, especially Christians, from persecution. You see, before the treaty ending World War I, many Christians lived in this area. They often suffered and needed to hide. However, after the treaty, they were all liberated to Greece.” Where they lived happily ever after, Dave thought. Save us from similar liberation. However, this ersatz fairy tale explained why Christian tourists mobbed the area. Haluk currently had them five levels down in the underground city of Kaymakli, the second wonder of this particular area of Cappadocia.

  They hadn’t found a trace of the Ecumenists yet.

  The pictures he had seen led him to imagine Kaymakli as well lit, but of the places he had visited in Cappadocia this was the darkest of the bunch. Even the electric lights hanging from exposed wires couldn’t lift the gloom.

  “Long before, the iron age Hittites used the underground cities as hiding places from primitive wars. When a war threatened, they moved their entire community underground. The entrances to many of these underground cities were hidden
, often in above-ground cities, so when an invader came it appeared the populace had fled.”

  What better a place to hide or disappear in than these underground cities? All the invading army had to do was ignore the fact the inhabitants had dug everything else into the living rock. Dave suspected Haluk spun them yet another fairy tale.

  Georgia asked a question in Turkish and Haluk answered in the same language. Elorie took Dave’s hand and led him off to investigate one of the side rooms. Her hand shook, cold as ice today. “Why doesn’t this room have smudged ceilings?” she said.

  “They ran out of crayons, perhaps?”

  That got him a fingernail poke and a ‘seriously’.

  Dave thought for a moment before remembering a comment from his previous visit. “This must be one of the areas set aside as sleeping quarters. They forbade the use of torches and candles here; they would have consumed the oxygen out of the air. I expect they learned that lesson the hard way.” Dave pointed back at the partly smudged outside corridor. “The reason the corridor is not completely black has to do with the tufa.”

  “Tufa?”

  “Oh, sorry, that’s the rock-hound name for the compressed volcanic ash.” He smiled. “Tufa absorbs smoke.”

  “Was Haluk shitting us about the sheep?” Elorie said. She snuggled up against Dave and spoke quietly.

  “I don’t think so,” Dave said. “The locals’ sheep were a large part of their wealth. Why wouldn’t they take them down here?” Elorie shrugged. Her mood had oscillated from buoyant to dark after they had settled into their Urgrup tourist hotel, itself carved into the rock, and started to explore the area. “In peacetime, the place served as a natural refrigerator – not cold, but cool constant temperatures.” It felt about 50 degrees F to Dave; each level down in Kaymakli, to the one above this one, the fifth, had gotten cooler. This level was noticeably warmer.

  “I keep expecting to see Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble,” Elorie said.

  “Hush.”

  Elorie continued to examine the room, shining her flashlight into various nooks and crannies, pulling Dave along behind her. The rough-carved room appeared functional, not the least bit artistic. “I’m glad I’m relatively short,” she said. “You’re probably wishing you were shorter.”

  “The original builders weren’t tall, that’s for sure,” Dave said. He had spent so much time duck-walking through corridors built for five footers that he felt ready to quack.

  Elorie tired of the room and led him back to the rest of their group. Mohammed, Lisa and Osham stood in baffled wonder, senses overblown and minds lost in glee. For them, it was like visiting another planet. Darrel had retreated inside himself, no longer speaking unless spoken to, save for one word answers. Georgia and Jack remained themselves, sadly. Dave would have preferred some change from either or both of those two.

  “…stone doors could be rolled in front of the hidden entrances and wedged from the inside. An enemy would have had to carve their way in. In addition, some of the underground cities, including Kaymakli, had escape tunnels only the locals knew about. Very few of the underground dwellings had only one way in or out,” Haluk said. He stood shorter than Elorie and didn’t have to duck-walk at all. Dave suspected their guide’s ancestors had helped build the place. Kaymakli possessed all the urban amenities a community required: kitchens, bedrooms, wine cellars, group nurseries, wells, ventilation shafts, and dens for sheep and goats. Dave particularly liked the four foot deep stone ‘play pens’ Haluk said young children had been put in after they misbehaved. He wondered if he could patent such a thing back home.

  “So, have all these places been found and explored?” Jack said. From Dave and Georgia he knew the answer was ‘no’, but he wanted to hear the answer again from the guide.

  Haluk smiled. “No, not at all. There are forty known underground cities, and only small portions of each have been explored, less than ten percent, and only a third of the explored areas are open to the public. Some guides claim to be able to take tourists to never before examined underground cities, but they lie. All they do is take you around to a back entrance of one of the known places.” Haluk’s commentary was rife with put-downs of the other guides, who apparently always lied while Haluk, their utter saint, always told the truth.

  Haluk should have been selling used cars, in Dave’s opinion.

  “There.” Haluk pointed to the left. Another rough-hewn stairway down, though this one looked smaller than the others. Again, the stairway was strangely shaped, wider at the top, around one’s hunched over shoulder level, and narrower at the bottom. “Next stop, level six.”

  Dave held back, holding Elorie’s hand and waiting until the expected happened.

  “Hey,” Jack said. “I’m stuck or something.”

  Dave sniffed for effect when he got up close to Jack. “Instead of going down hunched over” which put Jack’s overly wide shoulders too low as he negotiated the steep carved stairwell “you’re going to have to go down sideways.”

  “You’ve been waiting for this, haven’t you?” Jack said to Dave, who just smiled.

  Haluk led them out of Kaymakli and into the bright sunshine about an hour later. Dave blinked and soaked in the fresh air. Tufa towers rose above low brown scrub, and the breeze carried the scent of cedar from somewhere in the omnipresent hills. The air in the underground cities smelled like his grandmother’s attic by the time it passed through the ventilation shafts. The closed-in lack of warmth reminded him of any dinner with Tiff in their last few months together.

  “Where next?” Elorie said.

  “The best of them all, although it’s the least underground,” Haluk said. “Goreme. You’ve probably seen it in your American car commercials. We’ll spend the rest of the day there.”

  Elorie rolled her eyes. They had toured Goreme the afternoon of their arrival, long before they hired Haluk. Still, another visit to Goreme wouldn’t hurt, another shot at finding someone who remembered seeing the Ecumenists. That was their real reason for being here, as Elorie kept reminding everyone.

  Unlike the underground cities, the builders made many of the buildings in the Goreme monastic complex to be beautiful. Functionality had run a bad race and came in way back in second place at Goreme. Their group split in two, Dave, Elorie, Mohammed and Darrel following Haluk around while Lisa, Georgia and Jack followed around a UN docent, asking pointed nosy questions intended to generate a clue about the Ecumenists.

  Elorie stood with her hands on her hips and admired the interior of the Yilanli Church and its frescoes of the damned, all enveloped in serpent coils. “I can see why this place attracts Christian pilgrims,” she said. “Though it’s a bit too much Greek Orthodox for me. I don’t understand half the symbolism.”

  “I don’t either,” Dave said. “About all I know is the more ornate the halo, the more holy the person.” The word ‘halo’ didn’t do justice, though. Not a simple gold ring in the lot. Instead, the paintings put a circle of light around the heads of the holy. You always knew Jesus – he always had a supernova behind his head. Elorie took a picture of the painting with her smartphone, ignoring the prominent sign about no photography.

  Dave appreciated the less ornate parts of the Goreme complex. It contained far more than buildings carved into cliffs, underground passages and cellars; Goreme was an actual aboveground city. He most appreciated the carved rock houses. Take ye olde wide-based toadstool shaped rock, as thin as ten feet wide part way up the stalk, and carve out the interior the same way you would carve out a ‘treehouse’ in a cheap trash fantasy novel. Only do so for real and keep the building from falling apart under its own weight. In the end, you had yourself your own rock house where you could raise your own Pebbles and Bam Bam. Some of the rock houses qualified as mansions, five or six stories with windows of varying shapes and sizes, courtyards, balconies and ventilation shafts, though Dave expected they had served as homes for several extended families. The Cappadocian plateau suffered real winters – when Dave v
isited here there had been snow on the ground – and Dave never had a chance to ask how one kept oneself warm in one of these stone houses with their many openings. Perhaps the people here just froze solid in the winter and thawed in spring.

  Elorie and the group wandered behind Haluk as he chattered on about the history of each of the many churches in the area and pointed out the iconography and meaning of many of the obscure symbols. Domes and pillars, ornately carved, dominated many of the passageways and smaller areas inside the churches. The monks built Goreme, according to Haluk, primarily in the 10th to 13th centuries, which Dave suspected made Goreme far too recently constructed to be of any true interest to the Ecumenists.

  Haluk led them outside and again the raw beauty of the place warmed Dave’s soul. The churches and chapels may have dominated the area, but the natural rock cones – cones upon cones upon cones in intense erosional relief – and fairy chimneys – pillars of rock that looked to Dave that they might collapse in the next strong earthquake – moved him the most. Cap rocks of darker tufa topped the fairy chimneys, eroded to resemble conical roofs. Unlike the Disneyesque houses, all ready to stand up and start dancing, the natural rock cones exuded solidity as well as beauty.

  The churches and shrines of Goreme also possessed their own beauty, but no one would ever utter them in the same breath as St. Peter’s in Rome or Notre Dame in Paris. Their exteriors followed the rock, and if the rock was ugly they were ugly; at times, the mixture of man-made and natural erosion grated on Dave’s esthetic sense. Inside, the elaborate arches and domes showed their age, which detracted. If he believed Haluk’s sales job, the natives built the older Goreme churches and shrines over a thousand years ago.

  “In the Seljuk period, the predominant buildings weren’t carved from rock but built as in normal towns, in the open air,” Haluk said. “You passed through Nevsehir. The Kursunlu Mosque there is typical of that era. Much pressure was put on the locals then to abandon the underground cities.” Likely for tax purposes, Dave mused.