The abandoned village had been some sort of illusion.
Nessa turned away from the poles. The bodyguards’ faces turned hard, but Uffie moaned and covered her eyes. Dave started forward, at a jog, but Ken caught him and held him back.
“We do this as a group,” Ken said, voice quavery. “Nessa?”
“Let me adjust,” Nessa said, voice an octave higher than normal, her tone clipped and abrupt. Rage filled her; someone had killed these people and put their heads on poles as a warning. She focused her telepathy into mental protections for herself and those around her. The urge for offense seeped into her mind, the urge to blow minds out of peoples’ ears, but she couldn’t locate any targets. She made sure she had her guns in her hands. “Okay. I’m ready.”
They walked forward, slowly, paralleling the road but not on it.
The nearest heads were of two men and two women, freshly killed, dripping gore barely dry. None of the women’s heads was Elorie’s; from Dave’s sob and his reaction to cover his face, Nessa realized he recognized them as former team members.
Beyond the four were about two dozen skulls on poles, desiccated by the dry mountain air, pecked at by crows but not completely ruined. Months old. Nessa guessed they had been on their poles through the winter.
“Uffie?” Ken asked. Nessa peeked through Ken’s eyes and realized Uffie had gone shocky. Ken held her by his telekinesis; otherwise, Uffie would have fallen.
“I knew three of these men,” Uffie said. Uffie’s otherness in action. The heads looked like skulls to Nessa, and one skull looked pretty much like another.
“These must be the dead Ecumenists,” Dave said, his voice breaking. “They were your compatriots, Uffie? That clears up several mysteries about how they were able to contact the God Marseille so quickly.”
There Dave went figuring things out again. Uffie nodded and wiped her face. “I had hoped I might be of some use here, but just like with the 99 Gods, I and my people have no protection against whoever did this.” Her voice was weak and tear-clouded.
“Or they got shot,” Nessa said, waving a gun. Not everything was mumbo-jumbo crap.
Nessa frowned.
Here they came, radiating evil.
The four entities, magicians to Nessa’s senses, stepped through the front gate of their fort, accompanied by a cold dry wind from the north that scattered dust and sand across Nessa’s feet and blew her hair flyaway, at least that part of her hair not in her braid. She stepped back, involuntarily, away from the four. All four magicians were indistinct to her eyes, as if she saw them through a bottle of thick shampoo. Two men, two women. One man and one women stood tall and imperious, each well over six feet, Adonis and his Adonisette. The second woman matched Nessa’s height, nearly as thin, but her appearance screamed ‘athlete’ to Nessa. The second man mirrored John Lorenzi so uncannily that at first Nessa thought Lorenzi had set them all up, until she noticed the man wore a different aura, clean shaven and younger. Just as rotund, just as short, though. The clothing of the four, as best as Nessa could tell through their screwy protections, was obscure and archaic; black robes that came to their knees, headdresses woven into their hair with pictures of horns on the side, sandals on their feet.
All four reeked of evil, dark evil done often and for years. Nessa moaned and grabbed Ken’s waist to hold herself close to him.
“Begone!” the tall man said, in accentless English. A wave of magic assaulted Nessa’s mind and she fought off the control, a magician trick she had long since found ways around. Even his foul power tasted the same as Lorenzi’s, though this man’s magic carried the rich tang of blood. The mental grip of their magic receded, impotent against Nessa’s mental shield, but it left behind information Nessa suspected the four wouldn’t have wanted her to know. The short woman, who hadn’t spoken, led them. She you were supposed to fear. The tall man and women were the mouthpieces; you were supposed to be awestruck by those two. The short rotund man was the woman leader’s confidant and counselor, the brains of the outfit. Him you weren’t supposed to notice.
“Murderers,” Nessa said, her hiss riding a wave of hot rage threatening to swamp her. Anger, not fear. They had minds; she could destroy them.
What about the other dozen of their kind who huddled ready inside the castle, though? Or, what about her fear that others hid with those dozen behind better mind shields?
She didn’t want to start a fight she would lose.
The speaker grew in height to tower over them, fifteen feet tall. Not an illusion, but an actual bodily change. “I said begone!” he said, his words palpable thunder.
The ground rumbled underneath everyone, and Nessa realized it had to be Ken’s work as he set up a grounded teek shell with enough potency to stop mortar rounds.
Exactly. Nessa concentrated her mind into a thin needle and poked – hard – at the mind of the man. Just an instant of power, quickly withdrawn.
The evil magician speaker shrunk back to his original height, balloon deflated, and stepped back. The growing and shrinking bothered Nessa. Lorenzi didn’t have anything like this in his repertoire.
“We’re here to speak to you,” Nessa said. “We demand an explanation for the murders you’ve done, of those who have come before us.” She motioned with her free hand at the skulls on the poles, and at the heads on poles farther back.
Their speaker didn’t respond.
Nessa’s mind made connections and she found a possible answer to her worries.
Ken grunted, unconvinced.
“I will speak to you, if you insist. You may call me Wisdom. We are the Watchers.” Wisdom, the tall speaker for the evil magicians, took a half step forward and his three peers a half step back. “You should not be here. You risk yourselves in too many ways to simply elucidate.”
When Wisdom named his people ‘Watchers’, Dave recovered from his stony terror and walked up to stand on the other side of Nessa from Ken. He put his hand on Nessa’s shoulder; Nessa glanced at him and his pleading eyes. He wanted to speak; Nessa lowered her eyes and nodded in acquiescence. She focused her mind on the mental interplay of the four Watchers and readied herself to strike at them at their first twitch, despite the bad odds. She didn’t like them, she didn’t trust them, and she edged toward striking first and asking questions later.
“Why did you kill them?” Dave said. Good question, Nessa thought.
“It is our right to do so, as they attacked us,” the tall woman said. “If you want, you can call me Glory. I am a judge.”
“If you’re so damned powerful, why kill?” Dave said. “Why not subdue and cure them of the thing that had taken them over?”
Wisdom laughed. “Why not kill them? Yes, killing them, or not, was our choice. But since killing them was our right, by our rules, we did.”
“What about the one whose head is not there? What have you done with my wife, Elorie?” Dave said, balling his fists in anger and yelling at Wisdom.
“We are not ready to speak yet
about her fate,” Glory said.
Dave shook in anger, his face beet red. Nessa put her hand on Dave’s arm and gripped it tightly.
Nessa changed her attack accordingly, following Ken’s lead. A fighting retreat was a better thought than her all-out attack ideas.
“What about the Ecumenists? Why did you kill those harmless scholars?” Dave said.
“Them? Harmless?” Glory laughed, her laugh the sound of a distant dulcimer. “We had no choice but to kill them. They awakened the demon of Abelsha, allied with the horror, used the damned thing to find us, and then attacked us. The battle was hard fought. They laid several of us low before we slew them.”
Dave frowned. “But they… What power did they have that could have threatened you?”
“Power you don’t have. A single Bodhisattva, as you have in your group, is no threat, but a group of them? Yes, a dangerous threat when aimed at us. A very dangerous threat. They encompassed the secret ways.”
Uffie moved up to nestle under Ken’s other arm. “You’re talking about me, aren’t you, Glory? A Bodhisattva? What lunacy is this?”
“You use a different name for yourself; it is of no consequence to us what you think you are,” Glory said. “Nor are you armed as they were, and nor do you possess the martial spirit.”
“You’re talking crap out of the oral legends of my kind, then,” Uffie said. “Silver bullets and silver swords, incense and herbs that dull the minds of certain supernatural types, or so the pre-Indigo stories went. You’re vampires and werewolves? I find that hard to believe. You show none of the signs.”
“No, we are not such perversions,” Wisdom said. “We are Watchers. We are what we are. Such weapons as you stated can harm us; the Ecumenists, as you style them, were so armed. However, their fearsome weapons proved insufficient to slay us.”
Nessa frowned.
Ken didn’t answer.
“Release Elorie,” Dave said. “Show us you aren’t wholly evil.”
“But we are blackest evil. This is not hidden. We are also lightest good. That is also not hidden,” Wisdom said. “To be both is our bane and our promise. Now, begone. We only speak to those men and women who we agree to speak to, those we call, and we do not agree to any more conversation with you and yours.”
Dave shook his head; Nessa squeezed Dave’s arm twice. Her turn.
“You have power. Fine. So do I,” Nessa said. She pushed, and the air filled with the sound of barking dogs, whinnying horses, bleating sheep and several screams. The short Watcher woman gestured with her hands, and then radiated dark thoughts.
Ken sent.
“We aren’t merely men and women,” Nessa said. “We’re not leaving here without some better answers, and Elorie.” Nessa concentrated her mind, listening for lies. Was Elorie alive or not?
Wisdom didn’t answer; instead, he spoke to his own kind behind their layers of defenses. Nessa tapped her foot, impatient. The Watchers didn’t think normally. As Portland might say, they didn’t think on the normal human thought bands. If normal humans were ones and Telepaths were twos, your standard Grade Two and up Supported and Lorenzi-style magician were also ones, others were fours, Grade One Supported were threes and the 99 Gods were sevens. These were either fours or fives. Nessa wasn’t sure, or if this mattered.
“We will agree to speak to you if you agree to tell us your story: who you are, what sort of strange beings you are, and your knowledge of the entities that call themselves the 99 Gods,” Wisdom said.
Dave staggered. “You don’t know about the 99 Gods?”
“We understand enough to ask your group,” Wisdom said. “What say you about our generous offer?”
“Very well,” Wisdom said. Ken picked them up and carried them back across the stream. After they landed, pebbles and small rocks popped, crumbling into dust, betraying Ken’s anger.
Nessa put a sock on her right hand. The mood Ken was in she was going to need some reinforcement.
44. (War)
War sat her projection down in one of the chairs. Portland had done it again. This time, instead of a boardroom style meeting, she had set up this Divine Compact meeting in a circle of chairs. Portland had upgraded her meeting room, with leather chairs, cherry sideboards, solid cherry tables, and even an illusionary higher ceiling, but War still sensed the low ceiling of the bomb shelter pressing in, and it made the place feel like a dump.
Eighteen Gods appeared by projection and one, Researcher, in person. She hoped it signified nothing more than Researcher’s continuing inability to do anything useful with willpower. If this meeting turned into another of Researcher’s fuckwit blabfests on willpower theory, she would leave this projection on automatic and go on to other things.
She still wasn’t happy with the fact that two of the Indigo, Grover and Lara, had infiltrated the Citrus Heights research group under false identities. She wasn’t sure what those two crazies were doing, but it couldn’t be good. She had even caught Researcher spouting some Indigo cant about ‘there is no magic except the alien supernatural’.
“What’s the problem?” Lawyer asked Portland. He appeared harried.
Portland held up her hand and waited. Two Supported, one representing Marseille and another, an independent, walked into the room and took chairs. A third Supported followed, one of Portland’s own, this one linked to Javier and representing Alt’s Telepaths. War hadn’t seen this before. She pitied the Supported, who had to cope with Javier’s endless hunger and never-ending and incurable walking pneumonia.
Portland, as a projection in her own headquarters, probably just to avoid playing favorites, turned to Orlando. “Tell them,” she said.
“The State legislatures of Alabama and Mississippi met last night and dissolved their own state governments, including the state officers that head their state bureaucracies,” Orlando said. “Today, the Alabama and Mississippi State Governors are going to sign the bills. The City of God, in specific Dubuque’s people, will take over the state bureaucracies and start pruning, replacing paid employees with Supported volunteers.”
Orlando had put together a spy network she hadn’t penetrated. Impressive.
“This is a direct attack on Dana and the Kid God,” Orlando said. Even he refused to use the Kid God’s chosen name, Bob, in public. “Dubuque’s moving much faster than any of us expected.”
Portland nodded. “The push isn’t just in the United States. The governments of Italy, France and Panama are in the process of doing the same. I think Italy’s government’s going to dissolve itself first. All of this is new, just a few days old.”
“Is this legal?” Inventor said. “I’d think there’d be court challenges here. Yes, the French government can probably do such a crazy thing, but I don’t think the Italian constitution allows that. I’m certain the Panamanian doesn’t.”
“Legality is the least of their worries,” Boise said. “The idea that legality can trump morality is at the core of this dispute. The City of God views everything they propose as ‘moral’, the work of God Almighty on Earth, thus making everyo
ne opposing them ‘immoral’. Legality is secondary at best.”
“But this doesn’t make any sense,” the Supported channeling Javier said. “The whole idea behind the City of God was to allow local democracy. They’re not following their own script.” Yeah, and the whole idea of Communism was to empower the proletariat, War thought.
“You have to look at the fine print,” Scholar said. Scholar, an ex-Professor of humanities from an Ivy League school, had become the Compact’s expert in Dubuque’s political work. She was an improbably tall and plain-looking older woman, and since War vaguely remembered her from before the apotheosis as a near-celebrity professor who wrote grimy books on the intricate horrors of ethnic cleansing, Scholar had likely been tall, plain looking and old as a normal woman. “Think town meetings and direct democracy, not state legislatures. The entire concept of representative government is part of what Dubuque opposes.”
“What’s going on with the Vatican? I can’t believe Italy’s taking part in this,” San Jose, the Territorial God of Costa Rica and most of Central America, said. San Jose was one of a whole slew of Gods of all varieties who had recently switched from independent to Divine Compact. War had to admit the Divine Compact was a bang-up recruiting tool.
The Marseille Supported raised her hand. “My Papal diplomats have been taken into custody; I believe that the Pope and the Vatican bureaucracy have also been detained.”
“The people won’t stand for this,” Worcester said. She had been drifting away for weeks until the proclamation of the Divine Compact; today, she had drifted back. “Dubuque’s gone too far.”
“The European putsch wasn’t Dubuque, it was Verona, in person,” the Marseille Supported said. “There’s only one possible explanation, an attempt to discredit the Vatican. I predict they’ll release a flood of Vatican documents showing economic and political chicanery, likely with public confessions by selected Vatican bureaucrats and clergy. The wealth of the Vatican has always made it vulnerable to this ploy; whether the crimes are real or not truthfully doesn’t matter.
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