Lucian: Dark God's Homecoming (13 page)

“You do have a secret storehouse somewhere,” he said softly, more to himself than to me.

Still frowning, he tucked the pistol into his belt. Then, wiping at the blood that streamed from his nose, he strolled leisurely back to where the three humans hung suspended in midair. Reaching up, he took hold of Evelyn’s ankle and pulled. As if emerging from quicksand or molasses, she slid slowly but steadily away from the others. Still immobile, she floated along behind Arendal like a helium balloon on a string.

I watched these actions, a still greater anger building within me, but found myself quite powerless to intervene. My muscles felt as frozen as the humans’ must have been, though after a few moments I could feel the numbness ever so slowly beginning to recede.

Stopping about ten yards away from me, Arendal released Evelyn’s ankle and allowed her to hang there.

“Well, well. I could scarcely have imagined it.” He looked down at me, a contemptuous smile spreading across his face. “You have some sort of feelings for this… human.”

I wanted desperately to reply—to heap scorn upon his outlandish fantasies—but found my jaw still as limp as the rest of me.

“How long could you possibly have known her?” He snorted. “Some sort of whirlwind romance, I suppose.” He looked her over, once, then turned back to me, gesturing with his cane. “This, then, is our dark lord now,” he pronounced gravely, voice overflowing with sarcasm. “Once the scourge of the gods. Now a sad and ineffectual fraud.”

Prostrate on the sand, I glared at him.

“I’ve had names and titles given to me over the centuries, too, you know,” he said then. “Those in our City have called me quite a few things.”

I noticed his voice was slightly distorted by the damage I had done to his nasal passages.

“‘Hero’ has never been one of those things,” he continued. He smiled flatly. “Perhaps now that will change.”

I tried to reply with a scornful rebuff, but only an unintelligible grunt emerged from my nearly dead lips.

“Yes, yes, well said.” He brushed impatiently at the flecks of blood on his white jacket. “Your eloquence has always moved me.”

Trying desperately to ignore his banter, forcing myself to concentrate, I summoned the Power and channeled it through my limbs. Pins and needles raced over nearly every surface of my body, and I gritted my teeth, willing the process to speed up. My right index finger moved, then my whole hand. I pulled in more of the Power and let it flush the lingering numbness from my system. As the seconds crawled by, ever so slowly, I felt normal sensations returning.

Arendal stood over me, leering down, kicking at one of my seemingly paralyzed legs.

“The funny thing, Lucian, is that, aside from Baranak—who is just too pig-headed to think things through—they all pretty much know you didn’t kill anyone.” He shrugged. “But they don’t care. You have been designated as the sacrificial lamb. Lamb? No, that hardly fits, in your case.” He stroked his chin for a moment. “The sacrificial black sheep, perhaps. Yes. A sacrifice to appease the gods, I suppose you could say.” He glanced back at Evelyn. “Along with some degree of… unavoidable… collateral damage.”

I screamed then. What I said, I do not know. It was a scream wrenched from the depths of my soul, and I believe it actually startled Arendal. Perhaps it caused him to hesitate. Perhaps it did not. In any case, I had an opening, and I knew I could move again, and I struck.

Admittedly, my first blow might not be best described as honorable; but then, we were not exactly engaged in matters of honor at the moment.

He staggered back, clutching his groin, stunned, as I struggled to my still-somewhat-leaden feet. Behind him, I saw Evelyn fall to the sand, the force he had used to hold her apparently disrupted by my attack.

Fists, boot, blue spheres—whatever I could tag him with, I used, and I aimed them at any vulnerabilities I could find. For a short while, things seemed to be going my way. Then his damned cane struck me again, this time a glancing blow to the forehead, silver fire flashing in my eyes, and I staggered back, reeling.

He had already recovered from my assault. All traces of humor were gone from his face now. He brandished the cane again, flames crackling in the air around him. I had always known him to be clever, wily, and very likely treacherous in the extreme, but nothing I had ever seen or heard about him had given me reason to think he possessed reserves of power as great as this. Had I so misjudged myself? Had I become weakened during my long exile among the humans? Or had Arendal tapped into some new power source, boosting himself beyond what he once had been? None of those possibilities struck me as positive or encouraging. For the first time, some measure of fear crept through the dark recesses of my mind.

“You have this coming, Lucian,” he said then. “After what happened to Halaini.”

I froze, just staring at him.

“I loved her, you know,” he said.

I blinked, my mouth opening and closing, but I remained silent. I had no idea how to respond to that.

“It was your fault, after all,” he continued.

He pulled himself up straight, smoothing his cream colored suit with one hand. His eyes had a wild, haunted look in them, suddenly.

“Entirely your fault. She didn’t have to die. She had absolutely no business being there, in the courtyard, that day. She was only there because of you. You killed her.”

With his left hand he raised the cane into a horizontal position in front of him. Grasping the other end with his right hand, he pulled. The bottom portion slid loose with a popping sound, revealing itself to be only a hollow sleeve. Where before the cane had ended with a flattened base, now it trailed down to a fine, wicked point. He tossed the sleeve aside and brandished the cane like a dagger, over his head, eyeing my chest—and then lurched suddenly forward with a grunt, sprawling facedown in the sand. Evelyn stood behind him, a grimace on her face, still in the stance from which she had delivered a solid, violent kick to his back.

The pistol, knocked loose, tumbled away from him. I dived for it, grabbed at it.

He scrambled toward his cane where it had fallen. Clutching it, climbing to his feet, he looked up, only to find himself staring down the barrel of my gun.

“See,” I said in an extremely soft, smooth voice, as I channeled my energies down my arm and into the specially designed weapon, and thus into the small, red crystal contained within, “that whole bit with Halaini—all it did was piss me off.”

He scarcely had time to react before I fired. The weapon barely made a sound, such that one might have questioned if it had fired at all; yet, at another level, it
felt
overwhelming, yanking all of my nerve endings tight and shaking me to the tips of my toes. Such is the nature of the weapons of the gods. My single shot, a blue lightning bolt trailing behind it, nailed him right between the eyes, shattering his little round glasses and sending pieces flying. He stood there for a second or two, swaying, a tiny dark circle having appeared just above the bridge of his nose. Then he fell face-first to the sand.

“And now I’m really pissed. Because I didn’t want to shoot anyone but Baranak.”

Evelyn walked up beside me and looked down at him, frowning. I glanced at her quickly, making sure she was okay.

“Nice work,” I said.

She simply nodded, then started back toward the others.

I waited there a moment, gun at the ready, in case Arendal moved again.

He did not.

I found myself somewhat surprised; one shot should have only staggered him, drained some of his energy temporarily away. I had expected more from him, given the formidable accounting he had given of himself to that point. Yet still he lay, like a mortal shot by a true firearm.

I was not about to complain, of course. Shrugging, I tucked the now-warm pistol back into my belt, silently and futilely wishing I had a few dozen more of them readily at hand. But while Arendal had been quite right in guessing that I had one last storehouse of weapons at my disposal, actually accessing it was going to be a pain. Even as the anger drained from me, though, a plan began to form itself within my mind.

“Lucian!”

I whirled. Evelyn stood a dozen feet away, her back to me, staring back up the sloping beach toward the trees.

“What—oh.”

I saw it then. The other two humans were gone.

“They just disappeared,” she said.

I frowned. Running to where they had been before, I asked, “Did you see any energy discharge around them?”

“No…” Panic crept into her voice. “Where did they go?”

I summoned the Power, though it was not easy, given my physical state at the moment, and searched for any telltale signs or traces of one of the others having opened a portal there. Finally, I shook my head.

“No one grabbed them, as far as I can tell.”

“So what does that mean?”

I sighed. At the moment, it hurt even to think.

“It appeared as if Arendal had placed all of you within some sort of bubble, suspending you just out of synch with this plane, probably. I have seen others do it before.”

I kicked at the sand under my feet, thinking.

“He pulled you out of it, but the other two were still there. Once I shot him, his connection to that plane must have snapped shut. Essentially, they were pulled back.”

She just looked at me.

“Back… to where?”

I shrugged.

“Who knows?”

Evelyn rubbed at her temples with her fists for a few seconds, then stalked over to where Arendal lay.

“He does. He knows. But I assume he’s dead now, right?”

“Quite to the contrary. Unfortunately.”

She stepped back quickly, as if she had stumbled over a snake—which was not far from the truth.

“He’s still alive?”

“The Fountain still flows. The Power surrounds us. He cannot die.”

She frowned down at him, back at me.

“Then what—?”

“The weapon—or, more precisely, the crystal within it—does not kill. It merely stuns its victim, and drains some of their energies into the crystal. I added a bit of my own energy to it, as well, just to be sure, and apparently it was more effective than I could have guessed. He will recover, but from what I sense of him now, not for a while. It should give us enough time to get away from here.” My mouth was a tight line. “And he will not be terribly comfortable for some time after he comes to. I see this as an added bonus.”

“But he’s incapacitated,” she said, ignoring my dry wit. “He can’t tell us where Cassidy and Kim are.”

She seated herself on the sand, clearly unhappy.

I shrugged.

“Not any time soon, no.” This seemed to me, in many ways, a good thing. Understandably, though, Evelyn did not see it that way.

Some length of time passed, during which the waves and the seabirds solemnly serenaded us—a god, a woman, and a near-corpse. I gazed out at the idyllic vista of my tropical paradise, yet found my thoughts arguing relentlessly, insistently in favor of a more dark and depressing attitude. I thought of freedom and of imprisonment, and of all the points in between. I considered the dubious wisdom of attempting murder, or at least inflicting grievous bodily harm, in the midst of seeking to clear my name of murder charges. Somehow, I doubted self-defense would serve to exonerate me—but then, what was one more body on an already distressingly, depressingly large pile, with all the survivors pointing at me, the accused? At least Arendal, unlike most of the others, had deserved what he had gotten. The pity was that he, alone among them, would not stay dead.