Lucian: Dark God's Homecoming (35 page)

“What?” he repeated.

“Were they disposed of in the Fountain?”

“I assume so.”

“You assume?”

His frown, impossibly, became still deeper yet. He wiped the sweat from his face again, thinking.

“There were so many… We held funeral ceremonies in mass, in the main courtyard. The bodies themselves were turned over to Vorthan as part of the investigation. He was to dispose of them afterward.”

I nodded slowly.

“And where is Vorthan now?”

“I… I left him in charge of the defense of the City, while I sought help.” His expression had become unreadable. “We thought that only I… could break through their lines…”

“Probably true,” I said, “but leaving Vorthan there, in charge, was not a good idea, I think.”

“You would turn me against him, as well as against Arendal?” Baranak growled.

Ignoring that, I motioned for the humans to join us outside the doorway, on the broad shelf. The sky was brightening a bit, as whatever passed for daybreak in the place attempted to assert itself. The storm appeared to have blown over, I thought to myself, scarcely guessing the half of it.

“The only thing we can do now,” I said, “is get to the Golden City as quickly as we can, and hope it is not already too late.” I met his eyes evenly. “There we will find the truth, once and for all.”

“Perhaps,” Baranak was saying, “perhaps that—“

He never got to finish the thought.

Crimson lightning flared and split the sky in half, accompanied by a deep, rolling boom.

“They are upon us!” Baranak shouted, pulling his gauntlets and helmet back on.

With a cry, golden energy trailing from his fists as he moved, he rushed forward, just as a crimson portal shimmered open across from us and two Dark Men charged through it. The collision shook the foundations of the world, and all three of the big figures sprawled across the ground, dangerously close to the ledge.

Motioning for the humans to retreat inside the chamber once more, I summoned as much of the Power as I dared, flooding my body with its essence. Then, a shield of my blue energy firmly in place around me, I strode forward, a part of me shocked at the very notion that I was going into battle alongside Baranak.

The Golden God climbed to his feet quickly, roaring. His fists, glowing now like suns, smashed against the Dark Man nearest to him. The ebon figure, deathly silent, shuddered from the blows, but recovered and initiated its own attack, hurling crimson lightning bolts back at him. Baranak staggered, but advanced again.

The other Dark Man turned to face me, and I redoubled my shields even as I rushed into the fray. We met halfway across the rocky shelf, and I managed to elude two blows while striking my opponent with a series of quickly-hurled blue spheres, each of which sent him stumbling back a bit but none of which did any real damage.

Meanwhile, his anger and outrage only recharged, Baranak advanced on the other Dark Man once more. His fists moved like twin hammers, and the figure in black became the nail. The Golden God delivered such a beating then that our City would speak of it in hushed and reverent terms for millennia afterward, if any remained alive to do so.

On we fought, for what felt like hours, and the rains came again during that time.

Drenched and muddy and above all bone-weary, I fought on as best I could. All too soon, my strength flagged; I am not, after all, the god of battle.

Some part of me watched the clash from outside myself, and wondered at the very fact of it. Diving into battle is not a thing I have traditionally done often, or willingly, or well. Yet I found that something drove me on, spurred me to action, pushed me to go all out against our foes. As most of my attention remained focused on the Dark Men, a small sliver of my mind diverted itself to understanding just why that might be; what could be urging me to violence.

Hate?

How long had I hated Baranak? Forever. He represented everything I despised in a leader: the arrogance, the simplicity of thought, the belligerence against anyone espousing different views.

Hate, then. Hate for Baranak, though? How could that be pushing me to battle, when I was fighting alongside him?

Even as I thought it, I knew it wasn’t so. I did not hate Baranak—-not any longer. I disliked his stubbornness and his arrogance, yes, but among our kind he hardly held the monopoly on those traits. I wanted to convince him of my innocence, or at least to end his pursuit, but in the depths of my once-black heart I could find no more evil designs directed at him.

The hate that drove me into the battle and pushed me to pursue it to its end could only be hate of those who had brought all of this upon us; upon the Golden City, upon the gods themselves, and most especially upon me!

There, then, lay the true targets of my hatred: those who would harm the City. I loved that City even as I, dark lord that I was, loved myself—and, as I have said, the City always reflects in its beauty and its glory the esteem its inhabitants hold for it.

Perhaps the sharp blows my skull absorbed from the Dark Men contributed to my revelation, but in any event I became convinced then of a possibility I had suspected since first leaving exile: our natures and our Aspects might actually be able to diverge. Was it conceivable? Could we grow beyond our old simplistic restrictions and definitions? I had always found it odd that we gods were so much more than mortal, yet so confined within Aspects staked out for us in the unknowable depths of the past. Maybe the potential had always been there. Maybe something inside us changed when the Fountain was stopped and restarted. And maybe it simply took immortals a long time to grow up and out of our selfish, petty preoccupations. Whatever the case, I felt with certainty that my world was broader now than it had been before.

All of this passed through my mind in the time it took Baranak to drive one of the Dark Men to its knees and the other to force me back toward the cliff’s edge, about to strike. All of this and one thing more: If we could become more that we had been, if our natures were not encompassed entirely by our godly Aspects, then perhaps the outcome of my long quarrel with Baranak was not a foregone conclusion after all. Perhaps it did not have to be one or the other of us. Perhaps we could coexist, somehow.

Finding encouragement where none had existed, I moved. The black fists descended but the blows missed their mark. I rolled quickly to my right and scrambled to my feet, energized by something of which I’d known precious little, lately: hope.

We clashed again, and I actually managed to hold my own for a while. It would be a lie to say I bested the creature in any real sense, in a straight-up fight, but I gave a decent enough accounting of myself to retain some shreds of self-respect, and to cause Baranak an expression of surprise, once or twice, as he snuck an occasional look at how I fared. Nevertheless, the Dark Man surely would have beaten me had not fate intervened. Fate took the form of a shattering blow dealt by Baranak to his own foe, who in turn stumbled backward and into mine. The two sprawled out on their backs, limbs entangled. This was all the opening Baranak needed. Lightning crackled all around as the god of battle pounced upon them, his eyes burning with rage. His huge fists, two golden blurs, pistoned up and down, delivering thunderous blows that smashed them into the ground and took the last of the fight out of them both.

As the humans approached, surely awed by the display, I picked myself up and dusted off my clothes.

“Nice job,” I managed, my breathing still labored.

Baranak did not even look back at us. He straddled one of the still figures, his armored form crushing it down, and pried at the featureless faceplate. With a popping sound, the dark, glassy oval came loose, and Baranak actually gasped. Looking over his shoulder, I did the same.

A once-familiar face, now all pale and gaunt, stared back at us through vacant eyes. Half embedded in the center of the forehead, a small, ruby-colored jewel flickered with internal light. As we watched, the flicker changed to a steady pulse, and the Dark Man attempted to sit up.

As I kept an eye on that one, Baranak whirled and grasped the faceplate of the other, wrenching it loose. A different face greeted us, but in a similar condition, complete with throbbing jewel in the forehead. The surprise was gone by then, though our sense of shock and outrage felt just as profound.

Baranak stood slowly and uncertainly, a look of great confusion masking his features.

“This is what you suspected,” he said flatly.

I nodded.

Evelyn approached, gazing down at the black-clad bodies, seeing the faces.

“I take it you know them.”

“Ferrik, our mischief-maker,” I said, indicating the one I had fought. “And Kravak, god of the current.” Regarding Baranak, I asked, “Both were believed dead, yes?”

His silence was all the confirmation I needed.

“It seems the reports of their demise were slightly exaggerated,” I said, probably needlessly.

Baranak glared at me for a long moment.

“I felt their lights extinguished, all of them, within the aether,” he said at last. “Having seen them now, are you so convinced I was wrong?”

I looked again at those bleak, blank faces, and could not argue.

Someone had not murdered the gods, but done something nearly as bad, or perhaps worse: transformed them into automatons. Into mindless slaves.

Baranak looked from one to the other of our former foes, his face now revealing not fury but disgust.

“Kravak was no weakling. Someone brought him to this state… made him into this. To humble him so…”

Something else caught my attention then; something at the very edge of perception, like the buzzing of a tiny insect. “There’s a signal,” I said. “It’s pulsing to match the gems.”

Baranak nodded once. “I feel it.”

I gazed at their blank faces and knew unexpected grief. “They have been reduced to nothing more than puppets,” I muttered.

He frowned. “There’s something else. The Power…”

“Yes…”

I could feel it happening even as he spoke. The Power was fading. This could be no coincidence. Someone was tampering with the Fountain, just as they had before. And I was certain I knew whom.

“Yes,” Baranak said, nodding. “Just in the past few seconds, it has diminished…”

“It’s going away,” I said, the thought chilling me. “They’re shutting down the Fountain again.”

Baranak’s face grew ashen.

“We will be trapped,” I said. “Powerless.”

“The Golden City,” he barked. “Now!”

“How far away are we?”

“Too far,” he said softly. Then, with greater force, “But we have no other choice.”

Understanding what he was about to do, I stepped back a pace, watching. And I was awed.

Baranak raised both his mighty, gauntleted hands before his chest, arms extended outward, fists clenched tightly, knuckles almost touching. Closing his eyes, he emitted a deep, resounding groan, and then slowly moved the fists apart. In the widening space between them, the fabric of reality itself rippled and twisted and tore itself apart. How many layers, how many barriers he broke through simultaneously at that moment I do not know; but it represented a titanic effort, an act of sheer power and will, and on a scale I would never witness again.

He shuddered from head to toe, but still he stood, his arms stretched out wide to either side. A blazing golden portal stood open before us.

The humans rushing along behind us, we committed our bodies to the void.