Whom the Gods Hate (Of Gods & Mortals Book 2)

by M. M. Perry

  “Learn from me!” Manfred’s last words were marked with a furious maelstrom of blue lightning appearing to swirl in a massive cloud around him, building to such an intensity that Cass could no longer see the Djinn at the center, until it suddenly discharged, leaping from Manfred towards the dragons. The swirls danced around their massive heads. Drool fell from one of the dragon’s mouths. It hit the ground with a sizzle, bolts of electricity flowing across its surface.

  After a few moments, the lighting vanished abruptly and silence suddenly returned to the nest. Manfred plummeted to the ground and landed with a pained grunt. Cass, uncaring of what the dragons would think or do, darted down into the hollow after him.

  When she reached him, she gingerly rolled him over. He was a mess; huge gashes and scrapes covered every inch of him, oozing thick blue blood. He reached up and placed the sun gem in her hand.

  “And that’s it. Every bit of power a Djinn can hold, all blown in one go. If that didn’t work, I do apologize. Though I suspect you won’t have long to regret my failure.”

  He chuckled at his own gallows humor, which he immediately regretted as a dozen aches shot through his entire body. He winced and closed his eyes against the pain.

  One of the dragons looked down at her and Manfred. It began lowering its head towards them. It felt like ages to Cass before the creature’s face stopped moving, a dozen feet above her. It snorted and the wind from its exhalation blew the hair back from her face.

  “So,” it said in a voice that vibrated Cass’ very bones, “you do have words, hmm? Very good. Then you will understand me when I tell you this. Leave!”

  Chapter 15

  “They are speaking to us,” Anya said in an awe-filled voice, hushed in reverence. “This has never happened before,” she whispered to Cass. “They speak to each other all the time… but to us, never.”

  The dragon tilted its massive head at an angle, cat-like, to watch Anya, but said nothing.

  Manfred stood and brushed himself off.

  “He is speaking to you now,” he said with more than a hint of pride, “because I taught them how.”

  “Me,” the dragon rumbled. “You taught me, little thing. The others have no interest in what you have to say. So they choose not to learn. You taught me your language, granting me a better grasp of it than you yourselves have, apparently. I said leave. Go. Depart. Be gone. Vacate. Evacuate. Flee. Decamp. Exit.”

  “No,” Manfred said putting his hands on his hips and staring up into the dragon’s nearest eye. “We will not leave.”

  “Leave, or be eaten,” the dragon said bearing its teeth. They seemed impossibly white due to their stark contrast against the extremely dark skin of the lips that surrounded them. Each tooth was long—longer than a man’s leg—but less sharp looking than Cass had imagined they’d be from a distance. That didn’t make them any less frightening. The dragon could easily sever any of them in half with a quick nip, or make good on its threat and eat them whole, each one of them less substantial to the gargantuan creature than a delicate morsel served before dinner arrived.

  “No.” Manfred said again, his voice steady.

  “Manfred,” Anya began, “maybe we should…”

  Manfred held out his hand to silence Anya.

  “You admit that you chose to learn the language I offered. That means you must be curious about us. Maybe even about why we are here. You should sate that curiosity, dragon. You might find the experience far more fulfilling than the paltry meal we’d make,” Manfred said.

  The dragon looked down thoughtfully at Manfred.

  “That may be,” the dragon lowered its head until it’s chin was nearly resting on the ground, it’s head turned so that one eye, larger than Gunnarr was tall, was as close to even with Manfred as possible. “But you are some new blue thing the likes of which I have never partaken before. Perhaps the experience of eating you would prove much more enjoyable than you think.”

  Manfred frowned but held his ground.

  “I can’t speak to that, having never eaten Djinn. But I can offer you something that you may have been waiting a long time for.”

  “Do not play at enticing me, Djinn.” The dragon flicked its tongue out as it tested the new word, as if hoping it might impart some flavor of what the Djinn would taste like. It growled then, a sound from deep in its throat, and as the dragon’s temper rose so too did the temperature of the hollow as well. “Say what you mean, plainly, before you squander what little patience I have for you.”

  “Revenge,” Manfred said, “on those who destroyed you.”

  The dragon stared at Manfred for a moment. Then it laughed. Gunnarr had acquired a trove of impressive stories during his far-flung travels—the kraken, an elven brawl, traveling to the very peaks of the Razorback Mountains in search of teeton eggs, cavorting with griffins and a host of other amazing things—but to the very day he died, he would swear that the most amazing thing he had ever encountered was the laughter of a dragon.

  The sound was a mixture of a cascade of boulders crashing into each other as they slid down a mountainside, combined with the most violent thunderstorm shredding the sky. Everyone in the party pressed their hands tightly to their ears to try to stem the painfully loud sound. As the dragon continued laughing, the other dragons became intrigued. After what seemed like a minute or more, the dragon calmed and turned to its nest mates, who almost immediately began laughing as well. The walls of the hollow shook with the sound. The whole group stumbled from the vibration beneath their feet. Cass was sure the sound had travelled all the way to the other end of the valley, which would have been easily a six day trek on foot, but for the dragons’ laughter, would have been instant. It was only after the new ruckus had died down and Viola’s head stopped ringing that she realized she had just seen what Anya had such trouble attempting to describe earlier when she spoke of dragon’s having their own language. Although no sounds had passed between them that Viola could detect, the dragons had clearly communicated with each other.

  “Destroyed us?” the dragon said, its voice full of amusement. “We were never destroyed. We remember a thing your gods did that they may have thought harmed us. Turning our home into a barren rock. But it hardly destroyed us. A nuisance it was, but nothing more. But it was all they could do, throw pebbles at us and annoy us, like the ineffectual, petulant children they are. We expected it. We knew they would do it long before the first among them gave voice to the nascent idea. Before they could act out their plot, we killed most of them in the hope it would show them how futile it was to try to bring what power they could muster against us. That they should be pleased with their lot, such as it was, and stop trying to meddle in ours. But those creatures seem impervious to wisdom and knowledge both. No. We neither seek nor desire revenge. Revenge is for someone who has grievously harmed you. And no one has harmed us, little blue thing, in the least.”

  “But… you were gone,” Anya said. “All that was left was the eggs.”

  “You say that like it is a small thing, nursemaid. ‘The eggs.’ But they are eternal—they cannot be destroyed. They are our link to this world. From them, we came back. In time, we will all be back. We are in no hurry. Our patience is infinite, as patience is merely a measure of time spent waiting, and time itself is only something of consequence to those bound by it. Now,” the dragon lifted its head back high into the air “we have sated our curiosity as to who you are, and why you came. You amused us, so we will not kill you,” the dragon said. “Leave,” and with that final order, it began to turn its massive bulk in the direction of its brethren.

  “Guess you’ll have to re-work all those dragon theories of yours,” Patch said to Anya with considerable snark. “Typical, humans thinking they know all about non-humans and turning out to be completely wrong.”

  Manfred looked deflated. He didn’t know what else he could say. He turned to Cass, and his sad eyes would have let her know just how sorry he felt, for her, himself, and for his people. But Cass d
idn’t see him. She was too busy staring at all the eggs strewn around them.

  “Do you not miss them?” she shouted at the departing dragon. “Your kin?” Cass gestured to all the un-hatched eggs. “Or can you speak to them when they are… whatever or wherever they are now?”

  The dragon halted. It turned around and backtracked much more quickly than it had wandered off. It lowered its face to get a better look at her.

  “We cannot. They are without.”

  “Without?”

  “None of the words you have given me describe it adequately. They are without.”

  “Do you miss them? I mean, you can see them, the eggs. You know they are safe. But, that can’t be enough. Is it? The eggs don’t know you, they can’t know you. They are just rocks, eternal or not. Mere stand-ins for family and friends that, for the moment, you have lost. Loved ones that have been taken from you, against your will,” Cass looked to Gunnarr, Viola and Nat, then back at the dragon. “Wouldn’t you rather they be dragons than eggs?”

  The dragon raised its head and looked around at all the eggs. It turned to its companions. It was clear something passed between them. The middle dragon lowered its head again after a moment.

  “Yes, we’d rather,” the dragon said.

  “Then why don’t you bring them back,” Cass asked. “Hatch them.” The question seemed to stymie the dragon. It stared at her, bemused and silent.

  “They are afraid,” Gunnarr said to Cass, crossing his arms. “But perhaps afraid is the wrong word,” he said after looking the massive creature over, and considering its recent revelation of its indestructability. He looked the dragon in the eye.

  “I think, despite your protestations of endless patience, that you do not want to start all over again. I think you don’t like the idea that if you go out and hatch your families in earnest, not tucked away here in this sanctuary, that you’d no longer be hidden and that the gods, upon discovering you hadn’t been wiped out, might destroy the planet again. And you’d survive that, from what you’ve said, but you’d have to start all over. It may be all the gods can do, tossing their pebbles at you, but it’s clear that you dragons cannot stop it from happening. You can’t be destroyed, but you can be diminished. You can be reset, all of you, to eggs again.”

  “It would be,” the dragon said, searching for a word, “an inconvenience.”

  “What if we could make things more convenient for you?” Cass suggested.

  The dragon just stared at her, unblinking.

  “The world is not the way you remember it,” Cass said. “The gods have turned on themselves. If you choose one side, and assist them in their struggle against the other, they would be grateful. More importantly, because of their infighting, they are distracted. You could hatch all your eggs while they warred. And if the aid of your newly reborn ranks proved instrumental for the winning side, they would not want to lose you again, their most powerful ally.”

  “Or,” the dragon said back, “they could simply decide we are too dangerous to let exist, because what, they would surely say, would stop us from turning our might against them someday, as we had done in the past? And then they would start the cycle all over again. And we will have gained naught, and in fact have been diminished by sullying ourselves by lending our aid to those cretins.”

  “Yes, that could happen. I don’t trust the gods any more than you do,” Cass said. “But they are going to find out about you. You could kill us so we didn’t tell them about you, but that won’t matter. Eventually, someone will tell them about you. Especially if you keep bringing back your kind. This,” Cass gestured around her, “is a lot of eggs. There’s really no feasible way for you to bring your family back to Tanavia, your whole family, without the gods realizing you are here. And then, they might set aside their comparatively minor differences, rally and unite. If what you say is true, then they fear you far more than they fear each other.”

  The dragon lifted its head. It turned to its brethren and again they seemed to be conversing. This time, however, was not the brief head bob of their earlier communications.

  The moments of silence stretched in to minutes, and some of the uneasiness drained from the group. Viola approached Cass and whispered to her.

  “Why didn’t you just ask them to kill all the gods? Seems a simpler plan,” she said.

  Cass shrugged.

  “I imagine if they could just wipe out the gods, they would have by now, and they wouldn’t be brooding here, infinitely patient, waiting for the other dragons to show up in the long, slow course of time. Probably just like the gods were merely able to cull the dragon population, the dragons can only cull the gods. I’m beginning to wonder if the gods don’t just pop into existence like the eggs do. If our world isn’t forever stuck with both.”

  “Great,” Manfred said, “so gods and dragons are roaches with omnipotence. You don’t know where they come from, they just suddenly appear even after you thought you completely rid yourself of them. I held out some hope that at the end of all this,” his gesture took in the party as well as the dragons, “that we’d be able to free ourselves of meddling deities once and for all. Can’t we catch a break here?” he asked. Before Cass could formulate a response, the dragon’s ambassador turned back to Cass.

  “What will you need from us?”

  Skimming over the water’s surface with the sun shining brightly down from above, Nat and Viola reveled in their flight on the dragon’s back. Patch, however, seated behind Anya on a dragon gliding next to Nat and Viola’s, had his arms wrapped around Anya so tightly Cass was surprised the ukrotiteli ognya could breathe. Gunnarr, Cass and Manfred were bunched up on a third dragon, the one that had accepted Manfred’s gift of language. The sun refracted off the dragon’s dark scales, creating a spectacular show on the water’s surface mere feet below them. Shards of light danced back and forth from the scales to the ripples and then back again. The huge leathery wings of the dragons held them aloft almost effortlessly, save for powerful thrusts that came after long intervals of stillness, jostling the riders with their force. Everyone, save Patch who refused to release Anya, held on tightly to the edge of the broad, thick scales on the backs of the dragons. The scales were rigid and dense, but had a leathery skin that made them easy to grip and almost comfortable to sit on. Each scale was so broad that they could be straddled like saddles, save for the dragon’s girth making it more like they were all riding saddles that had been set on the ground. Each scale curved gently and gracefully up and away from the dragons’ bodies at the very tip, flaring in a way that served to keep the riders from slipping back and, so long as they gripped the flared tip of the scale in from of them, from slipping side to side as well.

  Centria loomed ahead. Cass hoped they wouldn’t stir up too much panic in the cities and villages they passed over. A dragon wasn’t going to pass overhead without notice. She had wanted to travel at night to avoid just such a thing, but Manfred said the sun had to be shining when they arrived at the Plains of the Dead Gods.

  “So,” Cass shouted, turning herself around to face the Djinn seated behind her, daring to bring one hand up from the scale in front of her to cup her mouth from the wind, “you have nothing else planned for your magic?”

  Manfred sighed, though in the roar of the wind Cass could only see, and not hear, the exhalation.

  “I’ve been researching dragons as long as I can remember,” Manfred said at a frustratingly normal volume. Cass had to lean far back, practically pressing her ear to Manfred’s face to hear him.

  “That’s what I do on Xenor. I’m a researcher. I knew dragons couldn’t or probably more likely, wouldn’t speak with us. I knew someone would have to convince them that they should. I’ve been teaching lizards to speak for some time now, as practice. It isn’t easy, since they are just lizards. On the one hand they have no magical resistance. On the other, they have brains the size of a nut. Even dealing with them I’d be drained for days after getting one to say a few words. The dragons, t
hough. Big magical resistance. And brains the size of houses and a will like I’ve never encountered before… It was even harder than I thought, and I thought it would be near impossible. Getting even just one of them to speak… It took everything. I have no magic left in me. I’m drained now, and will be until I set foot on Xenor again. That’s how the gods technically kept their part of our bargain, while still keeping us from interfering with them. They made us gods, but trapped us in a place where we could cause no trouble by making it the source of our power, and only when we are in direct contact with it.”

  “So it’s true then,” Gunnarr asked from where he was seated behind the Djinn, “the stories about how your people were created?”

  “Yes. We made sure that all the stories circulating out in the wide world about us were factual, to a degree.” Manfred twisted around adroitly in his seat, which could have held two or three Djinn easily, so he could face Gunnarr.

  “Anyone who visited, and that we felt was worthy of spending time with, like our Cass here, would leave with the true accounting of how we became what we now are. Oh, we had to wipe their minds of the memory of actually meeting us but we can be very selective, leaving behind the tales we shared, but wiping away all details of how they came by that knowledge. What? Don’t scowl like that. We certainly couldn’t just let people head home with stories that little blue gods did exist, and lived on Xenor, and were quite hospitable folk. Before you know it we’d be overrun with pilgrims, all clamoring to have a handful of wishes granted. And you know what they say about wishes, if they were horses we’d all drown in an ocean of manure. But we always left as much of their encounters with us as we could, so they would remember our story and spread it. We hoped it would be a cautionary tale,” Manfred said, “about the dangers of dealing with gods.”

  “Well,” Gunnarr said, his white blonde hair whipping around his head, “I’ve never heard of any other men who’ve become gods, so I suppose it did work. I’m curious. What does a lizard have to say?”