by Eric Flint
Themis looked at Zeus and Nemesis, both of whom were glaring at her. “Remember, Sister—and you too, Zeus—I am still the titan of proper behavior. And one of the things that my time as a slave taught me was that nobility of spirit deserves reward.” She laughed. “Half the reason I forgave Charles of France for attempting to claim me was his knighting of Pucorl. It was a noble act, and not his only one. It was Pucorl that finally broke Beslizoswian, and to the victor goes the spoils.”
“Very well, Sister. It’s clear you won’t change your mind. But what are we to do about the mortals calling us? I have no desire to be forced into ‘the sword of retribution’ and serve some mortal moron who deserves to be cut in half more than any of his enemies do.”
“Let me talk to Wilber and Gabriel,” Themis said.
“What? You would have us ask the aid of mortals?” Zeus’ face became bright red.
“I am free today because a mortal chose to do the right thing instead of keeping me as his plaything,” Themis said. “Would you have made the same choice, Zeus?”
Zeus looked at her, then at Nemesis. It was exceedingly difficult to get a lie past a god, even for another god. “It wouldn’t have been an easy choice.” He took another look at Nemesis, who was looking like she might pull her sword of justice on him, and finished, “Yes, I think I would have, if only out of fear of your sister’s reaction if I tried to keep you.”
“Well, when Roger did it, it wasn’t out of fear.”
Nemesis looked at her, and said, “I am not sure how I feel about that. But, yes, if that is the character of your mortals, call them and we will speak together with them in search of a solution.”
Location: Guest Quarters, Magnaura, Constantinople
Time: 6:06 AM, November 17, 1372
Wilber was having a lovely dream when the phone rang. He muttered, “Go away, Igor. Not taking any calls now,” speaking in both the dream and the waking world, because Wilber was aware that his dream was the product of the dryads of the grove.
Suddenly trumpets blew in his dream and the dryads were gone. Then Merlin’s voice in his cochlear implant, over the phone, and from the computer, were all saying “Get up, Wilber! You have to take this call.”
Wilber found himself sitting up in the bed, deeply disappointed, highly frustrated, and ready to kill Merlin and whoever was calling. “What the fuck is it?”
“Themis is on the phone, and she’s not the only one,” Merlin said.
✽ ✽ ✽
In another room, Amelia Grady woke to trumpets blaring from her phone Laurence, followed by, “Wake up, Amelia. We have trouble right here in River City. The gods want to have a little chat with your boy toy.”
The trumpets had woken Gabriel, so he heard Laurence’s comment. Normally he and Laurence got along well, but Gabriel had been sound asleep only seconds before. “Can we drown your phone, dear one?”
“It’s not me, Gabe,” Laurence said. It turned out that Laurence Olivier had a low sense of humor off camera, which had an influence. “This is serious. We have the Olympians gathering in Themis’ hall and more are arriving even as we speak. They want to have a little chat with you about that book you wrote back in Paris.”
Laurence the phone had a quad core, so it had four separate but linked processors that allowed the muse that occupied the phone to carry on multiple conversations at once. While he was talking with Gabriel and Amelia, he was also on the phone with Shakespeare, Amelia’s computer, Merlin, Wilber’s computer, and Pucorl. And everyone was in a tizzy because everyone was getting calls from Themis.
By the time Gabriel and Amelia were dressed, the plan was in place. All of them would repair to Pucorl and thence to Pucorl’s lands, where they would be able to meet, not entirely in person but close to it, with what might be called the council of European gods.
Location: Pucorl’s Lands
Time: 6:34 AM, November 17, 1372
Pucorl appeared in his reserved parking spot on the blacktop outside Pucorl’s Garage, the side doors opened, and the first load of mortals piled out. Included among them was Monsignor Savona with Raphico, Roger, Annabelle, Wilber, Gabriel, Amelia, Paul, Jennifer, Bill, Liane, and Lakshmi. Pucorl was going to make a second trip to include Cardinal de Monteruc, Bertrand, and Tiphaine.
As soon as they were out, Pucorl returned to the converted stable next to the Magnaura to pick up the next load.
Wilber and Gabriel made a beeline for the pentagram room on the opposite side of the garage from the Happytime Hotel. When Themis added her own pentagram, she insisted on a separate room to house it. But to pay for it she agreed to add some other pentagrams, a new one for Merlin, and for each of the demons inhabiting one of the twenty-firster devices. It was a large room and Themis’ pentagram had pride of place in it. As they opened the door to the pentagram room, they saw that it had, at least temporarily, expanded into a great hall.
Themis’ pentagram had expanded. It was at least twenty times the size it had been and it was packed with thrones, and each throne had a god or a demigod on it. Most of them were the Greek gods, who were also the Roman gods, but next to Mercury was Woden. And next to Zeus was Thor.
Wilber stopped in the door until Roger tapped him on the shoulder and squeezed by. Roger walked ahead and knelt to Themis, holding out her sword. She reached out and touched the hilt, and then he put it back on his shoulder and went to a smaller chair next to Themis’ throne and took a seat.
One other thing had stopped Wilber at the door. The gods on their thrones weren’t human sized. They varied, but the smallest of them would be twelve feet tall if standing. Roger’s chair was a normal-sized human chair.
Wilber found his chair. It was to the left of a throne. An empty throne that was human-sized. All the chairs on their side of the room had name tags and the name tag on the throne was Pucorl.
“I don’t think the van is going to fit,” Wilber muttered to Merlin, who had his own chair. No one else heard, because he spoke through his implant connection.
“Zeus apparently has no desire to talk to a cart, so he’s arranging things. By the way, we may have some power issues since Zeus isn’t that thrilled that one of his lightning bolts is spending its down time as our electrical system. He didn’t notice it until he got here, but at the moment he is having words with Ilektrismós.”
“We can build a generator if we have to. I want to see Pucorl when he gets here. Say, did you notice Annabelle’s chair is right next to Pucorl’s?” Wilber shook his head. He liked Annabelle, and knew that she had a sort of old-fashioned love-from-afar crush on Pucorl. That had to remain an unrequited crush, since Pucorl was a van, not a man. This could add whole levels of complications that Wilber was fairly sure they didn’t need.
✽ ✽ ✽
Pucorl wasn’t warned. He did get a call telling him to make sure that he dropped off his passengers before he entered the garage. Until he got the instruction, he’d planned on staying in the parking lot and attending by phone. As he pulled into the garage, he started to change.
He changed like a Transformer from one of Paul’s movies, until he was a metal man. He was dark green, like his van body. Then he turned, and as he approached the door, he became flesh, covered in a dark green flack jacket and twenty-first century body armor, including a helmet with a heads-up display.
He had no idea what he looked like under the armor. The major effect of the change to flesh and armor was to leave him utterly terrified, because he couldn’t do it. He lacked anything like that ability, and if Zeus . . .
That was who it was, Merlin informed him.
If Zeus could do this, what else could Zeus do to him?
Pucorl had been playing out of his weight class ever since he got the van body. And even more after he ran over the demon. But this? He wasn’t a mouse among cats here. He was a cockroach in a room full of elephants.
With great trepidation, Pucorl walked into the pentagram room and sat on the raised chair.
✽ ✽ ✽
Then they got down to it. For what seemed like a week, they talked about magic. How the demon realm worked. How it was that mortal callings were more powerful than almost all demonic callings. About the threat to the netherworld caused by the rifts in the veil. And, for that matter, the danger to the mortal realm, at least the planet Earth.
And mostly they tried to figure out a way to prevent the gods from being called against their will. That, to Zeus and most of the rest of the gods, was the overwhelming issue.
The Creator of All wasn’t in attendance, not in its own person, and while Raphico was, he was unable or unwilling to offer any concrete suggestions. As to Cardinal de Monteruc, Zeus and the other gods essentially ignored him. Their only answer to any of his queries about their status in Heaven were met with “You wouldn’t understand.”
Wilber got a bit more, let drop mostly by accident. But it amounted to “the gods didn’t understand either.” They were gods, angels, heroes, demons, devils, villains, all mixed together and would, in the course of their cycles, fulfill all of those roles and more, including being a part of the Creator and totally separate from it.
It was suggested by the cardinal—and sarcastically at that—that since they were gods they could change the books that Gabriel had printed, so that they lacked the knowledge of how to force a demon into a mortal world container. There were two problems with that. One was that if you knew how to ask them to come, you knew how to force them to come. The spells weren’t that different. And, second, because the gods had limited power in the mortal realm, they had to work through proxies who were in the real world, unless they were committing way too much of themselves to the project. They were much more powerful on this side of the veils.
And there was the issue of Leona, the self-made griffin. She was proof that, given the right circumstance, a mortal could injure a demon and, in so doing, gain some of the abilities of the demon they ate. Leona, for instance, had the will o’ the wisp’s ability to disappear by slipping halfway into the netherworld and back at will. She also got the ability to fly, and knowledge of how to fly, as well as speech centers, from the crow. Which wasn’t how it normally worked when a cat ate a crow.
That meant that humans, or for that matter, animals from the mortal realm were at least potentially a real and permanent threat to beings of the netherworld.
And as the rifts in the veil between worlds expanded, that threat would get worse. There could come a day when a cat or a bird might wander by accident into the netherworld, eat a demon, and return to the mortal world, taking the magic with it. And if that happened often enough, the netherworld itself might never recover.
“We’re like global warming,” Lakshmi commented. “Only worse.”
✽ ✽ ✽
As it happened, the gods weren’t the only ones with issues. Roger and Bertrand wanted a better communications for the military of Constantinople and there wasn’t time to do it piecemeal. At the least they needed all their phones and devices to be able to contact one another from anywhere in Byzantium, and they needed that ability right now. They couldn’t produce that quickly enough, not in the mortal realm. They didn’t need “Deus ex Machina,” “god from the machine.” What they needed was “Machina ex Deus,” “machines from the gods.”
Zeus wasn’t willing to make the necessary “demigods”/ devices/people to run the system and while Themis wanted to help, she pointed out privately that she had been diminished by what she was forced to do in the sword. She was a ravaged land as much or more than the Byzantine empire. Still she agreed to work with Wilber to at least set up a phone exchange.
More talk ensued, and a telephone exchange was installed in Themis’ realm that would connect all the phones. In exchange, Wilber and Gabriel promised to do all they could to find a way to anchor the gods and prevent them from being forced into containers.
Location: The House of Gaius Augustus Crassus, Constantinople
Time: Evening, November 19, 1372
Theodore Meliteniotes knocked, paused, knocked twice, paused again, and knocked once more. The knocks had started out as security in the time of Constantine. By now it was hallowed tradition, but still security. If he had knocked differently they would have known either that he was not here on the business of the senate or that he was here under duress.
The door opened and Gaius gestured him in sharply, then closed the door so quickly that the door almost caught Theodore’s cloak.
Once the door was closed, Gaius hissed, “What are you doing here? Have you betrayed us?”
The “us” in question was the “Senatorium Republicum.”
“Never!” Theodore was startled and greatly offended by the suggestion.
“Then how did you get your release?”
Now Theodore understood. “The French delegation. One of its senior members is a correspondent of mine.” He snorted. “Not a proper scholar. Gabriel Delaflote is subject to flights of fancy and believes in ghosts and fairies, much as he might deny it.”
Gaius, a short, pudgy man with a ring of black hair surrounding the completely bald top of his head, looked at Theodore and shook his head in wonder. “You do recall what got you arrested, don’t you? It was the successful use of Doctor Delaflote’s book to summon a demon.”
“Yes, yes, I know. But Gabriel believed in demons and the old gods before there was any evidence for them. He tried to hide it, but it was there in his correspondence, in the experiments he wanted to try. And he says that astrology works. Not a proper scholar.”
Gaius shook his head again. “Never mind. What are you doing here?”
“It’s the twenty-firsters,” Theodore said. “They come from republics. The Republic of France, the United States of America, which is a tiered republic. An alliance and more than an alliance of states, which are all republics. And even the England of that time, backwards as the English always are, is a republican monarchy, in which the crown represents the state, but the government is republican in form.”
“Yes. I had heard something about that, though not in such detail. But what has that to do with us or our cause?”
“They are proof that republics are not a passing fad. And more, they offer knowledge of the methods of their republics’ methods that we can use in restoring the Republica Roma.”
“It’s not the time, Theodore. No one wants to see the republic restored more than I, but. . . . We need stability and a strong monarchy right now. Even in the heyday of the republic, dictators were appointed in times like these.”
That was true, but they continued to talk and Theodore persuaded Gaius, who was the senior senator of the Senate Republica, to let Theodore investigate the twenty-first century republics to understand how they dealt with difficult times.
Chapter 10—Attack on Tzouroulos
Location: Happytime Motel, Pucorl’s Lands
Time: 6:35 AM, November 17, 1372
Pucorl stepped through the door and his body changed. He was still humanoid but definitely no longer human. His armor was again part of his body and his body was now filled with oil and electrical systems, no longer blood and nerves. And he couldn’t remember how that change was made. As a landed knight Pucorl had greater control over his form than most pucks, and his make up was much of earth, because the demon whose lands he took was a system of caves. But caves aren’t only earth. They are air, water, and fire too. He should be able to take any form he chose, even if his default body was that of the van. He had the power. What he lacked was the know how.
“Hey,” said Annabelle, “Why’d you change back?”
“It wasn’t my idea,” Pucorl said. “Zeus changed my form and changed it back. If I’d been running things, I would have waited until we had a chance to talk.” Pucorl leered the last word, trying to make it sound like one of his usual off-color jokes. But he couldn’t carry it off. He really did want to “talk” with Annabelle, and now that he knew it was possible, he wanted it even more. And he thought, believed . . . wanted to believe, that Annabelle
felt the same way.
✽ ✽ ✽
Roger interrupted. “Sorry, kids. We don’t have time for that. We have to get back and we need you to be a van again.”
“How am I supposed to do that?” Pucorl complained.
“Step outside the garage,” Wilber offered. It was a guess, but an educated one, and it worked. As Pucorl approached the bay doors, he transformed into the van.
✽ ✽ ✽
As he was leaving the garage, Wilber got a phone call from Themis, one that neither Merlin or Igor were privy to. That was both a feat and an act that was out of character for Themis. In essence, she forced Merlin and Igor temporarily out of their bodies. Well, Wilber owned the phone, the computer, and especially the implant, but still. It wasn’t something that the titan of proper behavior ought to be doing. Her first words explained why.
“I need your help. I was weeks gathering the dead for Philip’s army, but only had days to put things right. A twentieth of my substance was left in the mortal world when I returned to the netherworld, and left me too weak to fight off the other gods should it become necessary. Nemesis, my sister titan, still supports me, but even she is not fully comfortable with the other changes my manumission made in me.”
Wilber knew what she meant. Themis had been a slave and because of that she now understood how evil the institution was. As the embodiment of proper behavior, she was the law giver of the gods, but the other gods were probably not overly thrilled with the notion that freedom should be held as a thing of such value. “What can I do to help?”
“I need a way to restore myself.”
“Mass equals will,” Wilber muttered. “Not E=MC2 but E=W, probably with a conversion factor analogous to C squared in there.”
“What does that mean?” Themis asked, sounding utterly confused.
Wilber, deep in his heart of hearts, felt a bit proud of himself over that. How many people could honestly say they had confused the heck out of a god?
“More than can say they have survived doing so,” Themis informed him tartly.
