by K. C. May
At last, when the darkness had blanketed the city, Jora picked up her flute, extinguished the candle, and they left the Korlan statue in the dark shop. Jora would send Po Teng to release him before they left the city. He would run back to the Justice Bureau and awaken Milad with his alarmed report that she was gone, but they wouldn’t know where to begin looking for her.
“Whither are we going?” Arc asked, walking beside her under the cloudless night sky. The air was cool enough that their every exhale was visible under the dim light of the rising moon.
She pulled the red hat onto her head, grateful for the little bit of warmth it provided. “To the Legion building. It’s time to free your friends.”
He gave her a twisted smile. “Eftsoon to war?”
“That’s right. And then to war. First, though, I need to Borrow the command.” She summoned Po Teng and whistled the Borrowing command to ask him for the ability to free the Colossus statue.
“Ere you free anymore o’them,” Arc said, “tell me what you are planning. Wyth so many free, we must agree on our plan. We need to secure food, raiment, and shelter for all.”
Jora scrunched her face in annoyance, uncertain she should put a voice to her plan before they reached the Isle but knowing he was right about needing a plan to take care of the warriors. He’d been right about disrupting the smuggling, too. Perhaps he would have a better idea about how to go about executing this new plan. “All right. Earlier this evening, I took command of a new ally—one that wields fire. We’re going to go to the Isle of Shess and burn down the Tree of the Fallen God.”
Arc’s eyes lit up. “Let no one have the godfruit. I thought to propound the notion, but I was certain thou wouldst refuse.”
“I might have, before the other plan failed.”
Po Teng’s eyes lit up, sparkling with a brilliance she’d not seen before. “No,” he said. “I cah-nah al-low it.”
Jora gaped at the ally. “Po Teng? What on Aerta–”
“Caw-luh Shon-nish,” Po Teng said. “Ha-red to taw-kuh wif dish one.”
Jora felt the blood drain from her face when she realized it wasn’t Po Teng speaking. “Retar.”
Chapter 26
When Jora summoned Sonnis and instructed him to take his old human form, Arc stepped back and tried to push Jora behind him. “Fie!” he said.
“It’s all right,” Jora said. “He’s another ally.”
The supernatural light came into Sonnis’s eyes. Jora swallowed, apprehensive about the god’s objection.
“You cannot burn down the Tree,” Retar said. “I forbid it.”
“What is this? Thine ally dares to speak so boldly?”
With Sonnis’s pretty green eyes, Retar eyed Arc up and down. “Ah, the Colossus. I’m glad you picked up on my hint.” He turned his gaze back to Jora. “But you can’t have my tree.”
“I’m sorry, Retar,” she said. “It’s the only way to end the war.”
“It’s the only way you’ve thought of. It’s not the only way. And I say no.”
“Retar?” Arc asked.
“And you are?”
“Archesilaus Asellio. You are the god?”
“In the flesh,” Retar said with a flourish and bow. “Or… whatever this is. Not flesh, exactly, though I must say the imitation is quite remarkable.” He pinched a bit of skin on his left hand.
“How can that be?”
“For the last hundred years, he’s been using animals as god vessels to talk to people,” Jora explained. “He can also use my allies.”
“One hundred twelve, to be exact,” Retar put in. “Which is exactly how old my tree is and shall remain… unless you wish to challenge me?”
“Challenge you?” Jora asked, aghast. “No. God’s challenger, no.”
“Challenge the god if you want to destroy the Tree,” Retar said, “because that’s the only way it’s going to happen.”
What if she simply set her ally Foul onto the Tree without challenging Retar? He would probably take control of the ally and stop her. Perhaps she had to do it without using Foul’s fire. Set fire to it the old fashioned way.
“Listen to me, Jora, and listen closely.” The usually jovial god glared at her, his face more stern than she’d ever seen it. “If you take one step toward destroying the Tree, whether by fire or by axe, I will take it as a challenge. Perhaps you don’t know how this works, so let me explain it to you. Are you listening?”
She nodded, her eyes wide and blinking, her throat too thick with nervous fear to speak.
“I can materialize when needed, taking any body of my choosing.” He tossed his head in Arc’s direction. “That one, for instance. And when I do, you and I will fight to the death. If I win, I return to being the demigod until the next fool comes along to challenge me. If you win, then congratulations. You will become the god known as Jorar, and every uttered oath of ‘challenge the god’ will refer to you.”
Jora’s entire body trembled, and her heart thudded in her chest. This was all wrong. This was not what she wanted at all.
“Is that what you want? You think you can do a better job than I? Then challenge me now and let us get this over with. I grow tired of your naive games.”
“No,” she said, breaking into tears. She loved Retar. The last thing she wanted was to fight him. No, she thought, the last thing I want is to be a god. “I don’t want to challenge you. I swear it. Please, don’t.”
He relaxed and exhaled loudly, the kindness returning to his features. “Good. For a minute there you had me worried. Now, you and your friend had better sit down and think up some other way to accomplish your goals, because I’ll defend the Tree to my last breath. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir,” she said.
“And by the way, I love you, too, Jora.” Retar smiled gently.
“How can we halt the war, then?” Arc asked.
Retar looked up at him. “I can’t very well hand you the answer on a platter, when I’ve refused to do the same to two kings, a queen, and a number of princes and princesses. As long as you don’t directly threaten my well-being, the options are yours to devise.”
Including the option to leave well enough alone and let the smuggling continue, let the war continue, let more men die while the dominee’s coffers spill over. No. That was not an option. Letting the deaths of the Kailders go unanswered was not an option.
“Could you at least explain why?” she asked. “The godfruit benefits us, but why does killing the Tree hurt you? Why is it worth fighting to the death for?”
“I knew you would ask that,” Retar said with a wry smile. “It’s complicated.”
Jora crossed her arms to ward off the shivers. “We’re listening.”
Retar sighed. “You’re cold, and this might take some time to explain. Let’s return to your shop and sit. You can make tea. Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve tasted tea?” He looked down at himself. “Can this body even drink tea?”
Arc and Jora exchanged a look of humorous disbelief.
“All right, let’s go.” She looked up at Arc. “I’ll release the others when we need them. We need a plan first.”
“Aye,” Arc said. “I agree.”
Retar prattled as they walked, expressing his relief that she didn’t want to challenge him, that he wasn’t ready to give up the throne, so to speak. He talked about King Yaphet’s mother, Queen Yasda, and how desperate she was to end the war but couldn’t come up with a solution that satisfied the cabinet members—or Retar himself.
Once they got to the shop, Jora put on her robe for warmth while Arc moved the seated Korlan statue to the floor. His body wasn’t properly situated to sit on the floor, so he lay it on one side, legs and hips bent at ninety-degree angles. Though Arc offered Jora a chair, she declined, preferring instead to sit on the floor in a corner so she could tuck herself into the fabric of the robe. He went upstairs and returned a moment later with a blanket, which he draped over her.
She smiled up at him, and h
e replied with a wink.
“I can nie make tea,” he said to Retar. “I have none, only water.”
“Oh, it’s all right,” Retar said. “I probably couldn’t taste it anyway.”
“Back to the topic at hand,” Jora said. “Why do you want this war?”
“I don’t want the war, dear Jora,” Retar said. “Let me go back a bit. My predecessors, Hibsar among them, did things differently. They unleashed plagues upon the world for which there were no cures.”
“Aye,” Arc said. “Terrible plagues ravaged our people e’ry few yeres.”
“To control the population?” Rivva asked.
“No, to, ah, feed themselves,” Retar said. “You see, the reason I claim to be only a demigod, and perhaps not even that, is because I require sustenance. A true god would simply exist, correct?”
Jora and Arc nodded their agreement.
“When people die, a substance is released, a by-product of death. It sustains me, you see. The previous gods created plagues in order to create this aliment for themselves.”
“You eat… souls?” Jora asked. She heard the disgust in her voice, but she was unable to contain it.
“No!” Retar said, aghast. “Challenge the god! No, girl. Not souls. Like I said, it’s a by-product of death. I call it expirate, but the ones who came before me called it spirol or releasement.”
“Spirol,” Arc said. “I have heard o’this. Whensoever someone dies, we say ‘Spirol for the god,’ though we know not what it means.”
“Anyway, that’s what sustains us. When I became the so-called god, I made a promise to you people that I would help you, rather than plague you.” He chuckled, looking expectantly at their faces. “Oh, come on, tell me that wasn’t funny.”
Normally, Jora would have laughed at his jest, but she was still trying to grasp the concept of expirate. “So the more people who die, the better you feed.”
“To a point. Like you, I can only take in so much at a time. The extra goes to waste. On the other hand, if I don’t get enough I begin to weaken. Without sustenance, I couldn’t hold simultaneous conversations with people all over the world. It’s quite a juggling act, you know, being everywhere at once.”
What better way to create a constant supply of death than with a war? “So this war keeps you fed,” Jora said.
“Exactly so. War is an excellent source of the expirate that keeps me talking to you and everyone else who communes with me.”
People pay for access to the god vessels, Jora thought. That meant the dominee herself had a vested interest in prolonging the war. She was getting wealthy by riding on Retar’s shoulders. A wave of dizziness made her queasy. “What role does the godfruit play?” she asked.
“Rather than unleashing plagues, I give you godfruit. The benefit to you is that you get to relive—a second chance at life. Jora, your father wouldn’t have returned home were it not for the godfruit, so in essence, you owe your very existence to it. The benefit to me is that everyone who eats it daily dies twice, producing twice as much expirate as someone who doesn’t eat it.”
Jora felt her lip curl in revulsion. “That’s sick.”
“That’s the arrangement I made. You’d rather I plague you with horrible, flesh-rotting illnesses instead, striking young and old indiscriminately? Perhaps flooding or drought would be more to your liking. Let the strong and wealthy survive and the poor and weak succumb?”
She didn’t know how to answer that.
“My way gives people a choice. You can partake or not, but as long as there’s a war, there’ll be people wanting to survive it. End the war, and I’ll have to make up the difference some other way. Tell me, Jora. Which way would you choose?”
Jora wrapped her arms around her legs and rested her forehead on her knees. With her plan to stop the war abandoned and no other in place, what point was there to even try? Her family was dead. There was no use in continuing to fight a battle she couldn’t win. She cried into her bent knees, feeling defeated and utterly alone.
“Dear Jora,” Retar said.
She peeked up for a moment and saw him squatting in front of her, his Sonnis face looking concerned and his green Sonnis eyes full of sympathy.
“Go away, Retar. That’s the face of the one who slayed my family and ruined my life. I don’t want to see you right now.”
“Is this face any better?” he asked in a gentle voice, a voice that had brought comfort all her life.
She looked up again to find her father squatting before her, his face just as she remembered it with the short-cropped hair graying on the sides and gray whiskers speckling the cheeks she’d kissed so many times. Papa. The pain of his death speared her heart. It bled in her chest and through her eyes as she sobbed. “No,” she cried. “How cruel can you be?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to renew your grief. I thought only to bring you comfort.”
“With the face of my murdered father? That brings me no comfort. Nor my dead mother or sister or brothers.”
“Jora, listen to me,” Retar said, only now his voice was that of her brother Finn. “Don’t give up now. I need your help now more than ever.”
“Finn?” she asked, her tears pausing as she tried to understand why he would show her Finn’s form. “He’s not dead?” Her voice was small, like that of a lost child.
“No, of course not.”
“But his finger–”
“Is fine. The surgeon Naruud put the bone in place, stitched him up, and splinted both fingers. He’ll never play the flute like his sister, but he’ll be fine.”
Jora burst into tears again but this time from happiness. Finn’s alive. He’s alive.
“Yes, he’s alive. Oh,” Retar said, snapping his fingers. “You can’t see him because of the bracelet.” A bracelet of gleaming silver appeared on the false Finn’s left forearm. “Like this. Your friend, the princess, had two brothers, you know. Their bracelets were returned with their shrouded bodies. Finn’s wearing one now.”
Why would they want her to think he was dead?
Retar patted her knee. “Leverage.”
Jora shook her head, struggling to believe but rejecting the notion that the god would lie to her. The bracelet kept her from Observing Finn in the present, but she had no trouble witnessing his past by starting from her own thread, unlike the barring hood. “So he’s a prisoner.”
“Not exactly, but neither is he a guest.”
“King Yaphet knows that hurting Finn would make an enemy of me. Why would he put a bracelet on Finn to make me think him dead?
“Well, think about it. If he can control you, he can use you as a weapon.”
Jora wrinkled her brow, considering his words. That sounded like the king was planning an offensive, but not against her so much as with her. Using her. “Is he going to attack one of our enemies?”
The god gave her a tired smile. “That’s not a question I can answer in good conscience.”
She climbed to her feet, now feeling less defeated than excited. “You want my help, but you haven’t said how. What should I do?”
Retar in Finn’s form stood, too, and glanced over at Arc, standing with his thick arms crossed, watching with the wary face of a man who didn’t know how to comfort a distraught woman. Retar leaned close to whisper into her ear. “Sometimes, a different perspective will rattle loose ideas that might be stuck up in the rafters. Go on. Talk to him. Maybe he can help.” He shook a finger at her. “No destroying my tree.”
Jora managed a smile. “All right. The Tree will be safe from me.”
He patted her back. “There we go. I’d appreciate it if you’d also discourage anyone else who gets the lame idea to cut or burn it down, too.” He winked at her. “Now, if you don’t need anything more from me, I’ll be off.”
“Wait,” Arc said. “You said to kill the tree is nie an option. I propound you make the Isle sovereign.”
Sovereign. Jora perked up at the idea, and her thoughts began to whir. Sh
e started to pace, the wooden floor creaking under her feet, as a plan began to form in her mind. If the Isle became sovereign, governed by an equal number of diplomats from the four countries, it could sell each an equal lot of godfruit. “It’s a pleasant notion, but what’s to prevent one country from trying to seize the Isle for themselves?”
“Three other countries join forces against them.”
“But that’s what we’re doing right now,” she said, despair seeping back into her heart. “It’s getting us nowhere.” Except that it was Serocia that had tried to keep it for themselves.
“Nay,” Arc said. “The king sells godfruit in quantities small enow to perpetuate the war. That is the problem. That is why peace eludes you.”
“He’s right, you know,” Retar said. “It’s my own fault, and I’m sorry for that, but with effort his solution could work.”
“But you need dead,” Arc said. “That is what you have seyed.”
Retar said, “More people die throughout the peaceful regions of Serocia, Mangend, Arynd Ban, and Barad Selegal than soldiers die on the shores of the Isle. There’s godfruit aplenty. Give everyone access to fruit, and I’ll be fat and happy without a war.”
“Then that is what we’ll do,” Jora said.
“Assuming you can convince the king,” Retar said. “And the dominee. There’s a challenge you might not win.”
Jora gave Arc the choice of which warrior to release first to help with their plan. As she’d expected, he chose the one he’d earlier called his brother, the third statue down from where Arc had been.
He was every bit as tall and broad as Arc, but he wielded a sword rather than a poleaxe. He stood in a battle stance, somewhat crouched, with the blade extended as if he were running through a foe. The fierceness in his expression gave Jora pause.
