Immortal Progeny (Fragile Gods Book 1)

by Philippa Ballantine

  The Rainbow Queen's face remained smooth and unyielding, but her hair twisted on itself like a snake ready to strike. "You are not, but perhaps you do not know your own worth. I certainly didn't when last we met. You have aged, Isobah," her cold finger ran along his jawline. "Yet, you are still powerful enough to kill two of the three I sent to bring you to me. Impressive for someone with grey in his beard."

  Even knowing her powers, he could not help but feel ancient. His bones and muscles ached, and a yearning to just be free of all this washed over him. He should just give up. Yes, that would be so much easier. She had changed tactics with the emotional manipulation.

  Isobah shook himself slightly, trying to recall how he managed to stand against such mental attacks all those years before. It might have been his wife at his side, but what she was saying also didn't make sense. Killed? As much as he would like to claim it, he had not killed anyone at all. Perhaps Mariki herself had grabbed hold of the other and flung him off the finger?

  "Admit it," the Rainbow Queen said, folding her hands in front of her chest, "you have missed me, Isobah. You spent so many years chasing me through the skies, fighting my men, killing my men. I have given your life purpose, and now look at you."

  Despite himself, Isobah did remember those years; they had been terrifying, but there was a nugget of truth in her words. Back then he'd been young and much stronger. He thought himself capable of anything but dying. Kiya had been blazing and impossibly wonderful in that battle. Their boy had been conceived shortly after they thought the Rainbow Queen vanquished. Looking back on those times, he had been happy. The realization gave him pause. Killing her men, trying to find and kill the Rainbow Queen herself, had made him happy? He had never been as happy since then. That felt true to him.

  What that said about his character Isobah really didn't want to consider.

  "Stop trying to get inside my head," he shot back at the Rainbow Queen. "You can manipulate me all you like, but you can't change my thoughts."

  "I can't manipulate you all the time," she crooned back. "Remember, the oil, the fire you poured on me? Don't you think I tried to stop that happening? I am a goddess, but I still feel pain."

  She claimed to be the goddess of the weather, the wife of the Sky Serpent, but it was a mad title she gave herself. He couldn't trust her, and more importantly he couldn't trust himself while in her presence. Without Kiya and the thrill of battle, he felt exposed.

  Mariki was his goddess, and if he should die there on the empty floor of that evil temple, then she would catch his spirit and take it home to the far reaches of the skies. Still it was hard to hold onto that when the Rainbow Queen leaned down at him.

  Her pale eyes raked over him, while her hair caressed his face and thickened into a tightening tentacle around his abused throat. "We could have been friends, Isobah. Mariki and I are sisters after all."

  It was a lie, but he held his tongue and would not give her the satisfaction or a reason to kill him. The Queen was an abomination, a creature who called herself a goddess, yet wore human form. She prayed on the loss and despair of the downtrodden, and used it to her own purposes.

  Her hand touched his head again, and Isobah could not help flinching away. She laughed before standing, while the guardsman jerked like a landed fish. "Just kill me," he howled, frustration overwhelming him. "Be done with it, and kill me. You mean to stop me being at the congress...then finish it now."

  Her eyes flickered over him, devoid of laughter. He thought he might have even detected a little sadness in her expression. Slowly, she turned and sat down on the ground, heedless of the mess around her. Leaning against the wall of the finger temple, she looked out towards the Void.

  Finally, when she spoke, her voice was almost a whisper. "Do you remember the girls, Isobah? The girls your wife died for?"

  He wished she was shouting now; her gentle reminder of the most terrible day in his life struck deep. He exhaled slowly, trying to dry his voice of any emotion. "Of course I do."

  The Rainbow Queen looked back at him, her face a still mask, but her hair now fluctuating through bright shades of blue. "They didn't believe, no one in the square that day believed, but they were in the presence of deities. Three sisters, three paths." She raised her finger and pointed at him. "And they gave you a gift. Something very precious...something I have been searching for."

  Isobah felt as though he was pinned by her regard. "Gift?" he blurted out, rage bubbling up until he forgot his situation. "Those girls cost me everything! My wife dead, my son lost to me! I didn't get any kind of gift!"

  The Rainbow Queen watched him, unmoved by his rage or his thrashing. "You didn't feel it then." She got to her feet, and from her waist drew a long, thin bladed knife. "Never mind, I'll show it to you when I cut it out—there might be time for you to see it before you die."

  Isobah's eyes focused on the knife, but he did not struggle in his bonds anymore. It seemed only just that he was going to be killed for those girls. Kiya would be waiting for him in the skies, and they would be able to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all.

  That was until someone else stepped into the temple. Isobah couldn't see who it was, but he heard them take a few steps, and throw something towards the Rainbow Queen.

  The head of a surprised looking man bounced across the cracked floor, to rest against a loose rock facing up to the sky. The Rainbow Queen glanced down, and then up at the person who delivered it. Isobah rolled madly to see who it was that entered the forgotten finger temple.

  It was Feculent. He'd quite forgotten about his rotting, silent partner. Though her kind were made to fight, she’d only ever shambled. Immediately he noted the change in her. Standing straight in the doorway of the temple, her eyes gleamed with a newfound energy. Fresh blood splattered her clothes, the sword in her hand dripping with the blood of the man whose head now lay discarded on the floor.

  Isobah yanked on his bonds desperately, suddenly finding a new lust for life. He didn't want his fate to be decided by a madwoman and a decomposing homunculi. One bright cloud though, for the moment it appeared the Rainbow Queen had forgotten about him. She moved towards Feculent, examining her closely as if there were something familiar about her.

  Then she drew up short. "That isn't possible...Mariki would never do such a thing..."

  The long laugh that emerged from the homunculus was enough to chill Isobah to the bone, but he was too close to getting his hands free to stop. Feculent's voice seemed to be emerging from a great distance, as if she were getting closer to the living world with every word.

  "You would think that wouldn't you. The world is a cruel place, and my bargain was just as cruel."

  It was not the voice of Mariki—that was sweet and gentle. This voice sounded angry, as if it had been dragged through the greatest foulness to reach this place. The homunculi's jaw barely moved, but despite the rotten flappings of the tongue within, she was perfectly understandable.

  The Rainbow Queen's hair flared out wide, making her seem much larger and more dangerous than her form would have suggested. The colors of her stolen hair scintillated rapidly shades of green now, and her attention fixed solely on Feculent. "It's you," she hissed, gesturing behind her to where she thought Isobah still lay. "It wasn't him."

  Feculent's dead white eyes followed her. "In fact it is both of us. When we moved to save the girls we became their first apostles. We declared ourselves for them.”

  "Apostles?" Isobah could not help blurting out in his surprise. Apostles were the first followers. They started a temple in the name of their god or goddess. Since no deity had come from the God Void for generations, there had correspondingly been no apostles for that long. "I am not a..."

  His voice trailed off as he realized they were both looking at him now, and he could not decide which was more traumatic; the dead-eyed Feculent, or the burnt Rainbow Queen.

  With rising anger filling his chest, Isobah shouted at them, "I am a good and faithful servant of Mariki."
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br />   The Rainbow Queen smiled. "Oh, you haven't been that since your wife died, and now you belong to someone else entirely. Don’t you see that?"

  A lightning bolt should have struck him down. The heavens should have rained on him, and yet nothing happened. Isobah stared at Feculent, strangely demanding she affirm his assertion. "You," he said, as angry with her as he was with the Rainbow Queen, "You were made by the Lightkeeper! You should know who is a believer and who is not."

  The rancid face seemed for the first time to find some kind of emotion, and it was not one he would have expected. "Oh bright one, you really don't see do you."

  The voice was not hers, but no one called him that...not anymore. He shook his head, mutely staring at the rotting face, and trying not to see. The expression in her voice he was not familiar with, but he recognized it.

  Pity. Why a homunculus should be pitying him, he couldn't understand.

  Around them in the temple, he could make out the sounds of others of the chimera's making drawing in on them. The Rainbow Queen certainly learned to be more covert in her ways. That was perhaps the least strange thing about this situation.

  As Isobah and Feculent stared at each other, it was the mad chimera who broke the silence...with laughter. "You really don't see her do you? Oh that is too cruel!"

  Feculent dropped her eyes away from Isobah, and instead she advanced on the Rainbow Queen. Her movements were smooth and coordinated, and Isobah wondered if her former actions had been a ruse, or if she had in some way gained more from Mariki.

  The chimera twirled the knife in her hand, while her hair turned a shade of scarlet that almost hurt the eyes. "I only need to cut it from one of you. It doesn't matter."

  The sudden pain behind Isobah's eyes made him curl in on himself. It felt as though she jabbed that knife into his brain through his eye sockets, so that for a moment he thought that was exactly what she had done.

  He heard the Rainbow Queen laugh again. "Oh and the arm too. This is so much better than your husband."

  While he struggled to get to his feet, his mind was grabbing hold of what the chimera was saying. Husband? A homunculi had no husband. The Rainbow Queen’s half-made creatures scuttled from the ceiling and surrounded them now.

  Without a blade of his own, he felt useless, but he grabbed tight onto the bonds that held him and clenched his hands into fists. Still the word bothered him.

  Husband.

  That was almost more distracting than the shambling creatures who silently circled him. They seemed not to want to engage, but merely keep him from leaving the finger temple. They couldn't know that this was the thing furthest from his mind.

  Feculent had no such compunction. She stepped in close, swinging for the chimera's head, and then about again smoothly for her torso. It was a masterful move, and one Isobah would never have believed possible from a homunculus. They were generally creatures of brutish abilities and only made to take punishment before being torn apart. The congress competition had taught him that years ago.

  Yet Feculent moved as well as a living being, making the Rainbow Queen have to step back quickly. Her expression was suddenly not so calm, with her hair flashing green. Perhaps she expected Feculent to fall down with the same pain she was inflicting on Isobah. She was an undead creation—despite her sudden acquisition of fine flourishes and moves.

  The chimera had to duck and weave backwards, displaying her own agility as she tumbled through the air, out of the way.

  "Oh Kiya, you have learned some tricks of your own," she called out, almost with a hint of glee in her voice.

  That name hit Isobah like a stone crushing him down. It could not be Kiya! That thing Mariki made could not be from the remains of his dead wife. Someone was screaming in outrage, and he took a long moment to realize it was coming from his own throat. The bellow stopped everyone; the circling creations, the grinning Rainbow Queen, and most of all Feculent herself.

  Turning she glanced over her shoulder, her milky white eyes fixing on him, but her rotting and stitched face flexing into a rictus of pain to match that in Isobah's own chest.

  The chimera who thought herself a goddess laughed out loud, her hair pulsing white and illuminating the dark corners of the finger temple. "You didn't look did you, Isobah the loyal. You sky dwellers never look for the body...not that of the child, not that of the wife."

  It was an abomination. It was a breaking of the faith between Kiya and the Mother-Sky. Not only to create a homunculus, but to make it from one of her most devoted servants. Isobah wanted to die, and lose himself in the moment that he never imagined. He yearned for the slice of the knife that would save him from this pain.

  It was then that the thin, one-armed girl walked down the stairs into the temple. Engrossed in the stand-off, Feculent, the Rainbow Queen and her creations didn't see her. Isobah might have thought her an apparition, but the two huge snarling dogs at her side somehow made her real.

  She watched the circle of people in the tiny space of the temple, and her face went from smooth and carefree, to full of rage in an instant.

  When she spoke, they finally noticed her. They had to because her voice filled the space with strangely righteous anger.

  "This is a temple, a holy place for pilgrims. You need to leave!"

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Death Comes to the Mountain

  It was cold in the mountains. Rowan knew that in the way that people who read books and did not travel at all did. However, the manner in which it sliced through her thin coat, and made her break out into impossible-to-control shivers was not expected. The Pierced Man, or Croombe—she still wasn't sure what to call him exactly—stood at her side, and appeared not to feel it as she did.

  Over one shoulder, he carried the dead body of Gentian, and she knew why. He wanted her to use it, to raise it, stitch it with something, and practice her godhood with it. The idea both repelled and excited her. She was not sure enough of her feelings to tell him no, so she let him bring it, and didn’t bring it up.

  Snow fell in his hair, but his eyes were glued to the fog-covered the hills before them. They unfortunately reminded Rowan of the walls of the temple of Serey, but were even less welcoming than that.

  After the horror of her experiences at her mother's hand, she had been numb on the inside for some time, but that was beginning to wear off. Back then, when she'd been lost and grasping for reason in a world turned upside down, Croombe's assertion that she was a god made a lot of sense. However, standing shivering in the sharp wind, her hands shoved into her thin coat, she couldn't have felt less like a god.

  She was cold, hungry and afraid. If this was godhood, she was sorely misled. Serey was a god, but she was a powerful and invisible force, and maybe that was how it was meant to be. Rowan mentally added confused to her list of complaints.

  As she wrapped her arms about herself, she was glad at least she had not voiced any of them. Croombe might have saved her and her sister, but he did not seem the gentlest of creatures in that bleak landscape.

  She found something else to question him on. "If you could carry us that way all along," she said tartly, "why didn't you simply get us out of my mother's dungeon like that?"

  Croombe shook his head, and smiled at her as if it were perfectly obvious. "You and your sister needed to find your true power. If I had just whisked you out of there you would have learned nothing."

  If she'd been more sure of herself, she might have shot back that being drained of her blood had not been that revelatory. The thought stuttered to a stop in her head; perhaps it had been. Rowan still didn't voice it though.

  He didn't seem bothered by her silence, instead examining the mountains as if there were answers there. "In any case, you would have missed this wondrous experience. What do you think of your new home?"

  Confused, Rowan glanced up again, straining her eyes to see something she had not previously. Above the lines of snow shrouded pine trees, the solid grey of the mountains didn't seem to have an
y doors, walls or decorations of any kind that would mark it as a human's habitation. Yet she knew where she was.

  "It's a mountain," she said, through clenched teeth. "I don't see anything there to call home."

  Croombe turned back to her, head tilted, eyebrows raised. It was such an appraising glance that even Rowan's meekness could not stand for it.

  "I'm not a fool," she snapped. "I know where we are, and I know the mountain king lives here, but I hardly think he's going to let us just move in."

  A wicked smile flickered over Croombe's mouth. "Certainly, he's not going to just let us in, but I think the knock of the dead at his door will." He hefted Gentian’s corpse from off his shoulder and dropped her down on the ground like a sack of flour.

  She felt a shiver that was nothing to do with the cold. "You meant it? You want me to be this god of the dead, and turn into a thing of ugliness and fear."

  Images of skeletons and rotting corpses ran through her brain, and no part of her being wanted to become that dead thing. She had no desire to sit on a throne of their bodies and command nothing but the sad ghosts and corpses. Suddenly her sister Vervain's powers seemed kinder and more desirable.

  If that was Croombe's suggestion, Rowan might as well run down the slope as quickly as she could. If she stumbled and broke her neck on the path, then so be it.

  "No," The Pierced Man said, and grabbed hold of her hands, "that is not what I meant at all. When you see the dead, do you see ugliness and fear?"

  Rowan shook her head slowly. "No...they are beautiful, lost things." She stared down at their joined hands and muttered, "I want to take care of them."

  "And so you shall." His golden eyes softened somehow. "When I said gods are fragile, Rowan, I meant it. The temples of this land would take you. They would fight to the death for a chance to cut you up, use you to make the mightiest homunculi and progeny this world has ever seen."

  She could see that—she saw it in her mother's dungeon. The realization of how she might be used, and what she might be instead, warred in her head. Once again, she was burdened with all the insecurities and fears of her old life.