He runs toward a rise in the distance, a black dune with grains that glint in the dim sun like diamonds. In a flash he’s there, crawling to the top on hands and feet, looking out over the dark sands.
His breathing is labored, shallow, the fear tightening on his chest like a snake. From his view point on the dune, he can see the landscape filling up with statues, ziggurats, immense temples made of marble, ice, or fire. He tries to center himself, clear his head enough to make sense of everything. He knows this is a dream, but the knowledge slips away from him like hot butter on a frying pan.
A whirlwind of sand appears in front of him, and in the blink of an eye it is a blue-skinned giant of a woman with eight arms, each holding a different weapon. She wears an elaborate crown, a necklace of skulls, a belt of severed heads and hands.
“You will sing my songs,” she screams and Fitz is overwhelmed by Kali’s presence, her stories filling his mind. All of her different selves crash against each other: Mahakali, Daksinakali, and Smashan Kali. Mother, destroyer, entropy in all its forms.
The jackal-headed god Anubis appears behind Fitz and scoops him up in a giant hand, black sand falling through its fingers. Fitz’s head fills with his history, so fast it feels it might explode from all the information. “No,” he bellows. “It is my tales you will tell.”
“It is my glory you will bring,” Freya says, batting Fitz out of his hand, throwing him at the feet of Baldur, who leans down and shrieks, “I will have you, Chronicler.”
Fitz tries to run, but every step he takes is met with another angry god. Samantabhadra, Chernobog, Ereshkigal, Manabozho, Maui, Lempo, Guan-Yu, hundreds, thousands more. And with each one, Fitz knows their stories, feels their anger, hears their demands. Each voice hammers on the inside of his skull. All he can do is scream and scream at the violation, all of them ramming their lives into his mind.
Donar shoves Menrva, knocking Fitz clear of her grasp. Menrva swings a haymaker but misses and connects with Ao-Chin, flattening his nose, spraying golden ichor from his face and knocking him into Baron Samedi, who stabs Ao-Chin through the chest with a silver-handled cane. Perun kicks the Morrigan, seemingly just because he can.
Soon all of the gods are punching and kicking each other. Swinging swords, stabbing with knives, sending a menagerie of animals at each other. Fitz crawls through flailing legs, kicking feet, trying desperately not to die among the giants beating at each other in the epic slap fight.
A hand—a normal-sized hand, Fitz is relieved to see—reaches down and hauls him to his feet, yanking him through the battling gods. At first he’s thankful; and then he sees who it is.
“Well, that’s no way to treat a friend,” the Man says when Fitz shoves him away. He brushes black sand from his gray suit, puffs on a cigar and taps ash onto the ground. They’ve shifted far from the battle, traveling dream distances in the blink of an eye that would take hours in real life.
“I know what you are,” Fitz says. “Get the fuck away from me.” He has a pounding headache. The stories of all those gods are bouncing around in his mind as if fighting for dominance there.
“Fitz, please,” the Man says. “I’m trying to help you.”
“You’re trying to fucking use me, just like the rest of them. You were going to kill Sam.”
“What? No!” the Man says. “Dear lord, where did you hear that nonsense? Oh. You’ve been talking to Medeina.”
“And Sam. She overheard you planning her murder.”
“Oh, Fitz, you can’t listen to Medeina. She’ll stab you in the back. She tried to kill you, remember?”
“Yeah? And what’d you do to Blake? You fucking killed him and took his body or some shit.”
The Man shakes his head. “I’m just as much Blake as I’ve ever been,” he says. “In fact I’m better than I was. I’m a god now, Fitz. I’m not just some shlubby old drug-pusher looking backward at his best days. I’m somebody. And I could really use you right now.”
The Man points at the gods in the distance, and Fitz thinks they look like something between a Benny Hill routine and a Japanese monster movie. They don’t seem to have noticed that Fitz is gone.
“See them?” the Man says. “They’ll eat you alive. Every last one of them. They’re so stuck in their own little worlds they can’t see a bigger picture. It’s every god for himself over there.”
“Yeah? And how are you any different?”
“Fitz, if any one of them gets any more power they’ll destroy the world. Can you imagine if that Cherub, oh, what is his name—?”
“Zaphiel,” Fitz says.
“Zaphiel. Can you imagine if he gets you to do what he wants? What about Medeina? Or those monstrosities. You know what they are, you’ve read their histories, absorbed their stories. Are any of them good enough for humanity?”
“No,” Fitz says. He’s still trying to sort through the flood of stories still bursting through his mind, but that much is clear. Every single one of them is a monster.
“People’s faith is a paltry thing, compared to the kind of belief you can trigger in the world. You’re a godmaker, Fitz. Even the most widely believed-in of those petty tyrants over there is nothing compared with the one you grant your favor to. Imagine the good we could do together.”
“You’d take over the world,” Fitz says. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?” He may not know the Man’s plans, but he’s got a pretty good idea of what he’s looking to do. “Those guys? They just want to be back on top. Respected, feared. They just want to be relevant. But you... you’ve got plans, don’t you?”
The Man smiles and it looks just a little too wide, a little too feral. “Oh, indeed I do, Fitz. And I know that sometime soon, you and I are going to reach an agreement. We’re going to come together and make this world work.”
“You sound pretty fucking sure of yourself.”
“Oh, I am. The time of the old gods is ending. It’s time for new myths to take over. You’ll help me. I guarantee it.”
Fitz is trying to think of something witty to say, some clever retort he can throw into the face of a god. But before he can open his mouth, a shooting pain bursts through his face, taking him to the ground.
“The fuck are you doing to me?” Fitz says, the pain blinding him.
“Wasn’t me, Fitz,” the Man says. He looks around, peers into the distance. “Oh. That. Well, I had hoped to have a little more time with you, son. We’ll pick this up again later.”
Another stinging blow strikes Fitz’s face, making him scream. He tries to crawl away from the Man, but doesn’t get more than a few feet before another blow makes his ears ring.
The landscape shudders, fracturing between earth and sky, the sand falling away into huge pits that swallow up the ziggurats, the statues, the gods themselves. They finally seem to notice their prize is missing and begin heading toward him, their demands of him growing ever louder in his mind.
Another shock of pain in his face and the gods running toward him fracture like the sky and the earth do, exploding into shards, blown away on dream winds.
Whatever the hell is happening, Fitz can’t take it anymore. He’s always had bad dreams, those god voices always whispering in the background, but they were just dreams. This, though; this is beyond nightmare.
One final burst of pain in his face and everything explodes around him and—
He comes to on the bed with Jake slapping the ever loving fuck out of him. Fitz throws his arms up groggily to stop the blows, barely blocking the old man.
“Jesus, cut it the fuck out.”
“Oh. Shit. You’re awake?”
“Yes, I’m fucking awake.” He feels warmth on his face and neck. Puts his hands to his nose and ear. They come away with blood. “Goddammit, am I bleeding?”
“Yeah, that started a while ago. Amanda was trying to wake ya up, but it wasn’t working.” Jake gives Fitz one more big slap.
“Ow. The fuck was that for?”
“I don’t like ya.”
&
nbsp; “You were crying out in your sleep,” Amanda says. “You looked like you were having a seizure.” She and Sam stand behind Jake, Amanda’s face placid, Sam’s frowning in worry.
“And that’s when you started bleeding all over the place,” Jake says. “Wouldn’t be surprised if you pooped yourself, too.”
From the way Jake looks and smells, he’s probably had some recent experience with that. “Why aren’t you down getting your stomach pumped?”
Jake’s face twists into a grimace. “Came to with that fucking tube down my nose when the fun in here started and puked it all up.”
“How long was I out?” The dream seemed to last only minutes... and days.
“A few hours,” Sam says.
“I been slappin’ your fool face for twenty minutes,” Jake says. He rubs the side of his head. “I got a bit of that dream imagery you were getting before I came to downstairs. Black desert? Lots of freakin’ out? Saw a bunch of giants pop up out of the dirt. Didn’t like the look of ’em. Goddamn, what a headache.”
“They’re coming,” Fitz says. “Hell, I think they’re already here.”
“Who’s coming?” Sam says.
“The other gods,” Amanda says.
“All of them,” Fitz says. “Or at least most of them? I saw hundreds. Maybe thousands. Christ, how many gods are out there, anyway?”
“I have a list of seven-thousand-one-hundred-eighty-three,” Amanda says. “It grows daily.”
Fitz goggles at the number.
“You on that list, missy?” Jake says, tapping the side of his head. “’Cause I’m pretty sure I’m picking up some leakage on god radio in here.”
“I thought you were a burnout,” Sam says.
“The lady here tell ya that? Yeah, well, I was. Until about two days ago. Still can’t pick up much. Clearly not like you can. Started seeing shit I haven’t seen in years. Then you showed up.”
“I need help,” Fitz says. “You saw some of them, right? Then you know what I’m dealing with. If I side with any of them, what the hell are the rest going to do to me? I feel like an Elmo doll at a Wal-Mart Christmas sale.”
“Kill yourself,” Jake says. “Stick a gun in your mouth and eat a bullet.”
“Fuck you.”
“Hey, you want ’em to leave you alone, that’ll do the trick. It’s that or let ’em use you up until you’re just some burnt-out husk screaming in the corner.”
“There’s got to be another way,” Fitz says.
Jake looks at Amanda, then back to Fitz. “Where’s the other one? The chick with the horn crown?”
“Medeina is downstairs,” Amanda says. “She doesn’t sleep, but I believe she may meditate. She’s been in one of the bedrooms for the last few hours.”
“Huh. Okay,” Jake says, pauses.
“You got something to say?” Fitz says.
“How much do you trust this one here?” Jake nods toward Amanda.
“Whatever you can tell me you can tell her,” Fitz says.
Jake laughs. “Yeah, I don’t know about that, but whatever. All right, fine. Yeah, I got something to say. You seen like these red threads going from you to them?”
“Yeah,” Fitz says, surprised. “Around a god of money and an angel.”
“And you tugged on one of ’em and kinda nudged him around a little?”
“I threw one of them across a hotel lobby and changed the cards in the other one’s hand.”
Jake stares at Fitz, shock plain on his face. “Holy shit,” he says. “No wonder they want you. ’Course, if they really understood how this works, they’d probably rather kill you. See, they got this shit backwards. They all think you tell their stories and make people believe. But it’s really that you tell stories the people believe and they act them out.”
Fitz says nothing for a long time as he digests this information. If this is true, then this could be even worse than he thought.
“They’re gonna kill me,” he says.
“Yeah, probably. This one probably won’t. But that Medeina chick? I don’t think she’s the type to like having her strings yanked like a puppet. You try it on either of them?”
“No,” Fitz says. “It’s only ever happened with Zaphiel and Big. Those are the only ones where I’ve seen those red threads. How do I control it? Can I control it?”
“You really want to do this? I can do fuck-all myself, so they don’t much care about me, but you? Man, they’re gonna fuckin’ eat you alive. I’m telling you, sucking down a shotgun shell’s a mercy compared to what they’re gonna do to ya.”
He’s thought about it. Hell, he’s tried it before. Too many pills, too much booze. And with all the fucking around, it’s a wonder he isn’t dead or walking around with hep-C.
But things are different now. He might hide in a bottle or a handful of pills when shit got rough, but that was when he just thought he was crazy.
But this is a whole new ballgame. Before, he was just some waste of space with a drug problem and screaming fits. Now he’s something important.
“I’m not gonna kill myself,” Fitz says.
“Right, then. This is where we start getting into some Karate Kid wax on, wax off shit here, son. You need some practice. Need to know how to work your mojo. And I’m bettin’ we don’t have a whole lotta time to do it in. So it’s gonna be crash course time.”
“Where do we start?”
“I’m thinkin’ we jump ahead to how to kill one of those fuckers.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
“I DO NOT like this,” Medeina says, standing at the end of the hallway, tense and frowning.
Sam put the kibosh on the whole ‘killing a god’ thing, saying that the only gods they’d have to test it on were Medeina or Amanda and she wasn’t going to let that happen with either one of them. Fitz thought about arguing with her, but he knew that any fight he got into with her would end badly for him.
So they decided Jake would show him how to get those marionette strings to appear so he could pull on them. That was the key to everything. He’d have to have a strong connection to a god if he hoped to do anything to them.
They went back and forth for a good long while about whether to tell Medeina about what a Chronicler could really do. Amanda stayed out of it, standing on the sidelines and letting the humans argue amongst themselves. When Jake suggested trying it on her, she made it clear that wasn’t going to happen.
“I just want to see if I can see these things,” Fitz says.
“If I have the faintest hint that you’re going to try to make me do something, anything, I will end you,” Medeina says. Fitz has a flash of the bodies in the hospital, the severed heads, the gutted corpses. He wonders what in the hell he is even doing in the same room with her.
“I believe you,” Fitz says. He looks back at Sam. “If she kills me, it’s on you.”
“She won’t kill you,” Sam says. “Because you’re not going to do anything to make her kill you.”
The trick, Jake told him, is to see the threads connecting him to the gods when he wants. He was able to see them with Zaphiel and Big, but now he has to see if he can see them reliably.
It took some convincing to get Medeina to agree; in the end, Sam talked with her alone. Fitz has no idea what she said to her, but when they came out she agreed to be his subject.
“Yeah, whatever,” Fitz says. “All right, what do I do?”
“Well, this part’s a little complicated,” Jake says. “See, I got to the point where I could just barely see them, but that was after months of developing the skill. You don’t have months. So this is the crash course. First we’re gonna see if you can see them now.”
Fitz squints. Nothing changes. “Nope.”
“Yeah, I figured,” he said. “So what we have to do next is recreate the circumstances where it happened before.”
“Uh, I think Zaphiel was trying to kill me,” Fitz says.
“Big wasn’t,” Amanda says.
“No, but I’d just agreed
to be his boy toy if I lost that bet.”
“So you were a little stressed,” Sam says.
“When am I not stressed?”
“Look, I got this,” Jake says. “Uh, goddess—uh, Medeina, however the hell you call yourself—there’s something you could do that might help.”
Medeina glares at him, and for a second Fitz thinks he’s going to burst into flame. “What?”
“Try to kill him.”
“Whoa,” Fitz says. “The fuck?”
“Gladly,” Medeina says, her spear suddenly appearing in her hand. She raises it, pulls back her arm to throw it.
Fitz’s vision narrows, goes dark around the edges like he’s about to black out. All around Medeina he sees a faint red glow that quickly clarifies into a million fine threads that shoot out from her toward him.
She throws the spear.
Fitz can hear Sam yelling, Jake jumping out of the way. He knows he should move, should be screaming and diving for cover, but he’s rooted to the spot. A strange calm settles over him as he watches the spear spiral closer and closer to him. He watches the red threads shoot off the spear in all directions. He reaches out with his thoughts for a handful of them, feels a pressure somewhere in the distant recesses of his mind as he grabs hold.
Though he isn’t touching it, he has the sense of its weight, its heft. Its speed and trajectory. He knows where it will go, what it can do. He knows its history and all those who have fallen by it. He wraps his mind tight around those crimson threads.
“Go away,” he says and the spear blinks out of existence.
He doesn’t know where it’s gone, or how. If it’s temporary or permanent. He just knows he made it go away. And that’s enough for him. It beats having it punch through his skull.
The glowing threads surrounding Medeina disappear, his vision goes back to normal. He’s done it. He’s twisted a god’s influence, just like he did at the hotel and at Big’s casino. It was easier this time.
Then he throws up and passes out in his own vomit.
THE MOMENT THE spear disappears Sam can tell it’s going to get bad. Medeina’s face twists into pure hatred. She takes a step forward, her spear materializing back into her hand from wherever Fitz sent it.
Mythbreaker Page 18
