by C L Walker
“She has offered to save you, to save us all.”
“The gods are men.” There was a sneer on her lips, as though she found the natural order distasteful.
“Our gods are but pale imitations of the ones who came before. This god is more than they.”
“She,” Erindis said, tasting the word. “She will save us. In exchange for what?” I ached at the hint of hope in her voice.
“Life.” The way the cleric said the word, thunder should have rumbled across the world.
“Mine?”
He nodded. I tightened the grip on my sword.
“A sacrifice?” Her voice was little more than a whisper.
He nodded again and I stepped forward, ready to deliver a killing stroke. Erindis lifted her hand without turning to me and I stopped, confused.
“I will soon die anyway, Agmundr. What difference does it make how it happens?”
“I will defend you.” I would fall, I knew it, but I would take as many of them with me as I could. And she would never feel their hands on her.
“As you have defended my kingdom?”
Her words held no emotion but they sparked a world of shame.
“You will not die, princess,” the cleric continued. He was stroking the back of her hand and it was all I could see. “You will live forever, and you will have power the likes of which no person, man or woman, has ever had. This is her promise to you.”
“Why does this goddess not take what she wants?” I said. My voice sounded rough and wrong in the stillness of the chamber.
The cleric spared me a glance. “We cannot fathom why the elder gods do anything, but if I had to guess it is this: taking things is your way, not hers. She could if she desired to, but she does not.”
“I accept,” Erindis said, except when I looked into her eyes in shock I found someone else there looking back at me.
“What have you done?”
I rushed to her, grabbing the cleric and tossing him aside like the rags he wore. I tried to touch her, to check on her, but she was already standing. There was a new confidence in her, a straightness to her back and a clear look in her eyes that I had never seen before. My Erindis had been timid, shy, slow to action. This person before me wore her body like a cloak.
“Agmundr,” she said with my wife’s voice.
“You know me?” My sword was ready, inches from her flesh.
“I have known you since your birth.” She turned from me and walked toward the open walls and the darkness of the dying city beyond. “I am Ohm.”
“What will you do, my god?” the cleric said. He was on his knees, his hands folded in his lap.
“I will put the kingdom right,” the elder god said. She stepped out of the pyramid and stood on the air, turning back to face us. “And then we will begin to fix this world.”
She was gone. The screams of dying men rose with the scent of flowers and I was left alone with the cleric. He had a blissful look on his face and I lacked the strength to kill him for it.
“I like you like this.”
The voice wasn’t that of the cleric. It was younger, and I could hear the smile behind it.
This was wrong. This wasn’t what had happened.
“You’re weak and your defenses are useless.”
I looked around the room, searching for the stranger. When I turned to the cleric to see if he’d heard it I found myself alone in the chamber.
“What’s happening?” I said. I stood with my sword held ready. My immersion in the memory was fading and I was beginning to become aware of myself again. I wasn’t the king of this ancient kingdom anymore. I was in the far future, in the city of Fairbridge, and I had been badly beaten.
“Is this what you dream of, when you’re not killing the innocent?”
Seng appeared where the cleric had fallen to his knees. One moment the chamber was empty and the next he was there, and it felt like he’d always stood there and I simply missed him. He was young and well built, with dark skin and Asian features. He wore ceremonial armor, too ornate to be useful in the real world. He’d been the god of a small region of a kingdom that hadn’t existed when I was born, and he shouldn’t have been in my dream.
“You’re in my head,” I said. The world seemed to rock at the realization. I lowered my sword, knowing it would do me no good.
“It is a dark place, Agmundr.” Seng moved over to the open wall of the chamber and looked out at the city. “So this is where your life truly began. And that was Ohm.”
“Get out.”
“We’ve been trying to get into your head for eons.” He turned back to me and fixed me with a cruel smile. “Why would I go now?”
The shadows of other gods began to form at the edges of my vision, hundreds of them slowly taking a place in my memory. I had killed them all when ordered to. I had closed off their afterlives and removed their power, and then I had cut them down. I was their nightmare and they hounded me for it across history.
And now the blood-tattoos were dead and they could reach me.
“Shall we see the moment you made your own deal with the cleric?” Seng raised his hand as though he could force me to relive it, but nothing happened. “Seems not. What about this, then?”
I was in a jungle. A village on fire lay at my back and an ancient, enormous tree stood before me. Seng sat at its base, his armor smashed and broken. He’d only been a small god, a trickster who’d lucked into leading a tribe. He hadn’t stood a chance.
“Remember this, Agmundr?”
Seng clutched a female god in his arms. I’d destroyed her people earlier that day and she was even more powerless to stop me than Seng. The sword in my hand dripped with the blood of their followers.
“I did not choose this,” I said, as I had done every time they’d visited me. “I did not want this.”
I stepped forward and the dream-Seng raised his hand, sent a wave of power that would have destroyed a mortal man. My blood-tattoos glowed briefly, bright red lighting up the darkness more than the fire of his burning people ever could.
They were defenseless before me. I raised my sword for the killing blow.
“I am sorry,” I said, as I had on the night I’d killed them.
I only required one stroke. They faded from the world as I turned back to the burning village and planned which god to kill next, which people I would have to crush to do it.
I was back in the heaven of the great plain, with the statues of fish-people watching me, all the way to the horizon.
“This isn’t your heaven,” I said.
Seng stood beside me and I wanted to grab him and tear out his heart, but he had power in my dream that he lacked in life; I didn’t know what he might do in retaliation.
“Look at these people.” He nodded to the souls and their endless wandering in search of a new life they would never have. “You took away their afterlife and killed their god, yet you walk the world unharmed.”
“I’ve told you so many times, Seng, it wasn’t my doing. I was the instrument of another’s madness.”
“Still, you should be punished.”
“I have been punished.” The words were hollow beside the memory of his death, and that of his woman, but they were all I had. I knew the only thing he wanted and I couldn’t give it to him.
“Your reckoning is coming, Agmundr. I can feel it. Can you?”
“Leave your vengeance, Seng,” I said. I stood before the dead god and held his gaze. “You have locked yourself into a kind of hell, chasing me around and waiting for me to die. You’re as lost as these people, but you have a choice. You were a god. Just leave. Take your woman and find somewhere you can be happy.”
“She is busy with her own plans.” A moment of sadness flashed across his face, then there was only an anger I knew too well. “I wonder if I can hurt you here? Do you think you die in life if you die in a dream?”
His hand shot out. The ceremonial armor he wore came with sharp metal claws on the knuckles of the gauntlet
s and they pierced my gut and kept going until they burst from my back. Blood poured and Seng was smiling.
I felt nothing. Even with access to my mind the dead god had no power to harm me.
“I am sorry,” I said. “Sincerely, Seng. I wish so many things could have been different.”
“I’ll be here next time, Agmundr.” The dream was fading around us and he glared at me as I escaped him. “You can’t escape me. Not anymore.”
Chapter 17
“You changed my life.”
The words greeted me as I rose back to consciousness. I couldn’t move yet and my breathing was labored, but I was alive.
“You appeared for what, twenty minutes? Ten? And you changed everything.”
It was Roman’s voice. I opened my eyes and found the hedge-mage sitting beside the bed I lay in. His head was down and his eyes were closed as though praying, his wild hair hanging down in dirty corkscrews.
“I knew you’d come back. I knew you’d come back for me and I did everything I could think of to prepare. I studied you for decades and even then I knew it wouldn’t be enough, that nothing could ever keep you from what you wanted.”
I tried to raise my hand and barely managed an inch. I ached everywhere, and it felt like my limbs were weighted down by mountains.
“And now you’re here, helpless.” He raised his head and saw my open eyes watching him. The fear that settled onto his face hurt me, for some reason. “And now you’re awake.”
“I…” My mouth was dry and the words were nearly impossible to form. “I cannot move.”
He raised a gun, an old revolver, from his lap and placed the barrel against my temple. I could see the difficulty of it in the way he held himself, the tension in his muscles. Though I found it easier by the second to move my arms, I didn’t react.
“I can end it here,” he said. A tear rolled down his cheek. “I can stop the fear. I can stop you from ever hurting anyone else ever again. All I have to do is pull the trigger.”
“Then do it,” I croaked. He lowered the weapon and I used what little strength I had to grab his hand and force it back into position. “I have hurt more people than your histories record, and if I remain alive I will no doubt do it again.”
“I don’t know if I can.” His hand was shaking and only my own meager strength kept it in place.
“Kill me and this all ends.”
He pulled his hand away. “I can’t. I won’t.”
“Then stop whining and be a man.”
I closed my eyes again, eager to escape the dim light in the room. I could feel bandages wrapped around my chest and strapped to my various wounds. Someone had administered to me, working to heal me now that the tattoos couldn’t. It was simple, human medicine, but it told me things about my master that I hadn’t suspected.
I gave myself a moment to consider whether I’d truly wanted Roman to kill me, or whether I’d meant it as a lesson. Was it a bluff or was it something I desired?
No more than a moment of thought, though. I had too much to do to indulge myself with introspection.
“Where is Bec?” I said.
“I…I’ll fetch her.”
He rose and went to the door, dragging his feet and letting the revolver hang by his side.
“Roman,” I said before he could leave. “I would never have hurt you. If I gave you that impression I apologize.”
“You’ve told me that before. It didn’t help.” He opened the door and stepped out, then came back. “And now I’ve let you live, so anything else you do from now on is my fault.”
He disappeared before I could correct him, before I could tell him that my actions weren’t even my own, let alone something he could feel responsible for.
My actions weren’t my own. That idea was the foundation of my sanity and another thing I didn’t want to examine too closely. Seeing myself before the curse, even in a dream, I knew that it was only partially true. I’d always been this person, violent and uncaring for the woes of others. The curse had just given me the power to work on a grand scale.
Bec entered and she too was subdued. Her walk to my bedside was heavy. She collapsed into the chair and held up her hand to show me what she carried.
The locket, hanging from the fresh chain my young master had found for it.
“I’ll put you back,” she whispered. “Tell me how and I’ll put you back.”
I wanted to leap at the chance; I would see Erindis again, even if only for a moment. I would escape the chaos and confusion of this world and perhaps return whole again.
I couldn’t, not yet. There was something I had to confirm first.
“I was visited in a dream,” I said. “An old enemy. He goaded me.”
Roman was standing in the doorway. He walked into the room and to the foot of my bed.
“I imagine you have many old enemies.”
“I do.”
I told them about the massacre of the gods, about the decades of war I waged against the heavens for a master who had gone mad. They remained silent until I was done, taking a few minutes to process what they now knew of the world.
“It seems your class is bullshit, professor,” Bec said. Her hand lay on the bed with the locket in her palm. I couldn’t keep from glancing at it constantly.
“You can’t have killed them all,” Roman said. “That’s all magic is: weaving the power of the gods to create effects in the world. If they were dead there wouldn’t be any magic, and I can tell you from experience there’s plenty of it.”
“Not as much as there was before my actions.” I tried to shift my weight and pain flooded my body; the assassin had hurt me more than I’d realized. “New gods were born after I was put back in my prison, but they learned from what happened and have kept a low profile. They fear that I will return and complete my old task.”
Roman looked away. “I know what that feels like.”
“They have no heavens for me to close to them. They keep their presence small and ultimately inconsequential. The elder gods – the ones who came before everything and will be there until the end – ensure they keep to their places in the world.”
“So this Seng guy appeared in your dream,” Bec said, prompting me to continue.
“He shouldn’t have been able to, even with me weakened. They have no power. They are merely shadows in the world, slowly fading until they finally vanish. Yet he was there and he was…confident. More than he should have been.”
“And you think he’s behind the hollow men,” Roman said, putting it all together as quickly as I had.
I continued. “I have become very adept at listening to what people have to say, despite the words they use to hide it. He took me to the same heaven I visited after fighting the assassin. Whether he knew it or not he was showing it to me.”
“So?” Bec said.
“There aren’t enough souls there. A few thousand, perhaps. No more, and not close to the number that were there when I sealed it.”
“Perhaps they gave up,” Roman said. “They’ve been there for a long time. Maybe they just lay down and went to sleep.”
“That’s what I thought when I noticed it before, but if Seng was able to invade my dreams then he was getting power from somewhere and he has no followers left. I made sure of that.”
Roman looked sick. “You think he, what, ate them?”
“Absorbed their power, yes. It was enough to give him strength, but I believe he’s going after a bigger prize. That’s why he let the hollow men out, so they could act for him. He was too small to have angels of his own so he’s borrowed those of larger deities.”
“To what end?” Roman said.
“To open a truly powerful gate. The one I saw in that heaven. Nobody should be able to open the gates but me, and yet angels are walking the street. If I’m right, that’s Seng’s doing. He worked out a way through the seals. And if he can devour those souls he will regain his former power in seconds. He will be able to do more than he ever could while alive.�
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Bec sighed, shaking her head. “Why do you care? And why does it have anything to do with me and my father?”
“It doesn’t, except that you held my prison. He was trying to get you to summon me, because he believed I can open the gates at will. He’s wrong; I can only pass through the gates and my ability would never have helped him, but that’s what he thinks. When I returned with none of the power he expected he moved on to some other plan.”
“Answer the first question,” Roman said, a hint of anger in his voice. “Why do you care?”
“His only goal is to get revenge on me. It’s been his focus for millennia. If he gets the power he’s working toward he will come for me and he will destroy me. He will do the same to you if I am anywhere near you. Bec is my master and I must defend her.”
“That’s a lot to guess from one conversation,” Roman said. “Let me give you another interpretation: you’re looking for something that isn’t there. In your drugged mind you imagined all this and want to use it as a way to get back to what you really do best. Kill people.”
I lay in silence, my only companions in the world at my bedside judging me. I was broken and weak, and they were the only beings in the world who could help me.
And I couldn’t think of a reason they should. I’d spent my entire long life working to destroy people like them, not caring who they were, their wants and needs. They were insects, living and dying before really seeing the world the way I was forced to. Inconsequential and fleeting. I could see the irony that I would need the help of the least of them, of a hedge-mage and a rebellious young woman, to save my life.
“You say you’re responsible for everything I do from now on, hedge-mage? Then let me do something good. Let me put a stop to this. I will save lives in the process and that will be because of you.”
“You can’t fight,” Bec said. She took her hand off the bed, removing the locket from my sight, the action telling me she’d come to a decision. “I pulled strings to get you medical attention but you’re not walking out of here.”
“You’re going to set him loose again?” Roman said.
“If I don’t his old friend will end up killing me to get to the locket,” she said. “I’m acting in my own best interests.”
