Downfall (15 page)

Ah, Niko, enjoy your conceit. You’ve earned it. Punishing your swords might be somewhat odd, but your personal life is your own.

Defamed swords or no, sparring with him to subtly train him out of adequate dojo-taught habits into far more successful ones came with incredible ease. That hadn’t been the case long ago when Niko carried a pointed stick meant to be a spear and Cal a torch to set
the attackers on fire. I’d first come to realize that these two particular humans kept appearing in my life, from decades to hundreds of years apart, sometimes looking similar, sometimes not, but forever with the same somewhat irritating personality, Cal, and unbreakable nature, Niko.

I do admit humans didn’t get interesting until they developed into an upright form, lost that matted fur, and eventually gained a primitive culture and language. They had known less words than your current treat-trained Pomeranian, but it was an improvement nonetheless. It still had taken me another thousand years or so to recognize the two humans following me from life to life and another five hundred years before I decided what to do about it.

The first time I had approached these peculiar humans who followed me from death to life and back again, it was pure curiosity. This was before war and cities. This was a time a stranger could be cautiously welcomed provided he brought food. I’d not interacted with humans before, but I’d observed their customs. I brought a great deal of food and was instantly the most popular person in the camp. It had taken me about two hours to become fluent in their language, surprisingly complex as it had come to be from that of their ancestors. I also brought them alcohol, the first they’d tasted. It was fermented mare’s milk, no favorite of mine, but there were no grapes in this region and I made do. It was a success. Cal—Kree as he was called then—became my new best friend right as he toppled over and passed out across my lap as we sat in the dirt. I laughed and patted him on the back.

I’d lied to myself. It hadn’t been curiosity that had brought me to meet them.

It was loneliness.

I had lived more years than I thought could exist, and it seemed I would keep living through them. If there was an end in sight, I could not see it. I didn’t want to live them alone.

Patting Kree’s limp form one last time, I leaned against the shoulder of the man/boy who went everywhere with him. I leaned and felt the warmth of another person in more years than I knew. “You are a good brother to watch and protect Kree as you do.” Kree had a temper and no fear, which could be a problem that some people didn’t care for. That would be nothing new in all the future days to come.

Val shrugged. He was big for the younger age that sat smoothly on his face. His hair could’ve been dark blonde, light brown, or dark brown. With not enough water to keep them all alive, the people of the tribe didn’t waste it on bathing. Their hair in matted twists tied back with cords of more goat skin, it was impossible to guess anyone’s hair color . . . except Kree. His was black, a dusty, filthy black, but black all the same.

“I don’t know that he is my brother.” He ate another bite of the food I’d brought, face lightening at the taste of dates I’d picked far from here. “Everyone lies with everyone. We are too few to take one mate only. We need to grow.”

I could see that, but I could see what I had since I’d come into their camp. Val watched Kree as if he were a child of four summers rather than the same age that Val appeared to be. Fifteen summers for each of them, perhaps sixteen. If they lived to be twenty, that would make them legends in this part of the desert.

Four or five more years and I would be alone again.

They’d come again—I’d seen that—puzzling from a distance or retreating if they approached me, but their rebirths didn’t fall in a pattern. Sometimes a hundred
years, sometimes a thousand right before I forgot they’d existed. That wasn’t acceptable, four or five years. I needed longer with them. I might grow bored of them or loathe them, but I first needed that chance to know for certain.

“Val,” I said, carefully moving an unconscious Kree off my lap and onto more dirt for a nice nap. I did a quick check of his movements and eyes. Val had drunk the mare’s milk as all the others had, but not as much. I had seen when he felt the intoxicating effect on him and passed the still two-thirds-full skin to Kree. He wanted to stay alert. If no one else in the camp felt that responsibility, he did. It was a good sign for what I had in mind.

“Val,” I repeated. “How would you like to learn to fight and fight well?”

“Fighting is but waste. Waste of blood and lives when all the people could join together, share what we have.” From his dark expression I could tell he thought that’s how it should be, but not how it would be.

“You’re correct, but, Val, there are too few of you in this land to make that a reality. It would be a long time before that has a hope of happening. I can teach you though. Teach you to defeat any enemies you might have here. You could live longer; you could keep Kree alive longer. You could live long enough to join the tribes, to force a peace, that no more children die fending off attackers with sticks.” It was manipulative, but not a trick. Val did want that, all of it, and if I received what I wanted as well, where was the harm?

It was one of the better decisions I’d made.

Niko as Val hadn’t been anything special then except for his determination in the days when in warm weather people wore nothing but desert ocher paint and thought horses were for eating not riding. Yes, a very long time ago. He’d had raw talent, but this was long enough ago
that humans hadn’t yet organized murder and they didn’t have a word for war. Nor a concept. There were too few of them, no cities to speak of yet. Wars are not made of fifty men and boys fighting over a cluster of ragged tents.

In those days, rocks lashed to a thick wooden handle to smash skulls and spears that were no more than stone-sharpened lengths of wood—basically a pointy stick—were the only human options. I kept my
paien
metal weapons hidden and worked with what was available to Val.

That’s how it began.

Finding someone who knew enough to teach you to fight was unheard-of then. The battles hadn’t been large enough. There was a new leader every day with the corpse of the previous one, head crushed, feeding the scavengers. No one would waste their time training you—if there were someone worthy to be a teacher. There was not. Survive one skirmish and that was blind luck. Surviving two made you a wise veteran. I’d not seen anyone make it through a third one in my wanderings. One learned on their own by fighting for their life.

Until I had come along.

The first to share food, mare’s milk, and fighting skills.

Val had been the start of it, and I was teaching him even now. I had found him and his brother every time after their deaths as Val and Kree. Niko had gone on to become among the best of whoever he was with at the time—tribes, nomadic raiders, protector of small clans living in houses built of mud, finally towns and cities, palaces, and temples. Thanks to his first instruction from me, his continued education in each following life, and his innate will to protect.

In every life I taught him and in every life he improved. I was just now realizing Niko improved
too
much. He didn’t start with a blank slate in each life. Well,
he did, but within weeks he was fighting at a level most would take years to accomplish—in a year, he had the skill of decades of daily battles. I hadn’t thought about that before, more concerned with finding the newly incarnated him and Cal, and then more concerned with trying to convince them to do anything possible to stay alive, the reckless idiots.

I’d carelessly thought he was unequaled in this life thanks to being descended from Achilles—the most skilled human warrior I’d ever seen, having the genes of an epic warrior passed down from the Rom, generation to generation in the Vayash clan who’d wandered Greece at the wrong time. But it was more—of course with Achilles and reincarnation, he was basically descended from himself—I doubt he enjoyed thinking about that procreational peculiarity. In the other lives, though, without Achilles, he’d gotten better and better, learned more quickly than a human could.

Cal said the Auphe had racial memory. Perhaps the only difference between them and humans was that the Auphe could mentally access those memories, whereas with humans it was locked away in the subconscious, showing up in instinct and muscle memory. Picking up an old skill in a fraction of the time that it had once taken you long before this new life. It was undeniable Niko couldn’t be the fighter he was in the short number of years he’d had to learn. He was too young. He could be good, but good wouldn’t bring down an Auphe, and Niko had brought down more than one.

He was all that he’d ever been, accumulating what he gathered in each life into the unbelievable skill he possessed today. He was . . . Achilles, yet impossibly more. It was astonishing. Phenomenal.

Naturally, I was still better.

That went without saying. I was Goodfellow.

But I had also been and remained his instructor, whether he knew it or not, and I was proud of my student. To see him cut an army in half practically on his own. To see what I’d created in him with my teachings. To see the perfect human warrior.

It wasn’t my fault—no one could say it was—that I hadn’t been able to teach Cal an Ares-blessed thing.

A teacher is only as good as his student. Cal had invariably wanted the minimum skill to keep him alive, as he needed his other valuable time to drink, get in fights, chase women, sleep, and generally enjoy the hell out of life. I had to respect that if not out-and-out applaud it.

Cal and I had weaved a decadent path of debauchery and sin across the world throughout history. While Niko could come close to keeping up with me in weapons, Cal came close to keeping up with me in everything else. There’d been a time that when I said, “Orgy,” Cal didn’t freeze up and flee; Cal had said, “Where? And let me grab the two fleetest horses in the camp.”

Watching him in this life was . . . difficult. In most all others he’d been happy, horny, and human through and through, foulmouthed and laughing—someone who loved life. Now he rarely drank because of his alcoholic mother and Auphe tolerance. He avoided most sexual encounters unless they could be proved beyond all doubt not to produce more Auphe offspring. He fought, but it was with a bitterness that was the opposite of the fun-loving spirit with which he’d gone about it when he was completely human. He’d once fought for the thrill of it and usually everyone staggered home drunken, beaten to Hades and back at the end of the night, but alive. When he was a Viking, I’d been involved in innumerable alcohol-fueled brawls while watching his back every single night. Now when he fought, it was for a reason, not a hobby . . . or a much more vicious hobby than it had
been. Cal was the only one to walk away still breathing from fights these days.

He did still sleep a good deal and thank the God of the Forge that guns had been invented, as those he used with genuine skill. This Cal . . . all his lives had been short as he’d earlier guessed and I cursed that . . . but at the same time, the majority of those limited lives he had reveled in. Not all—not Phelan and Cullen and there were others that ended no better—but most . . . most had been good lives.

Exceptional lives.

Mayfly ones, but exceptional yet brief enough to make me think of walking away the next time I found them. Spare myself the pain. I had thought about it, I admitted, as they were so fleeting, but I hadn’t been able to do it.

I knew I never could.

“How is Cal?” I questioned Niko as I sat down at the computer, which rested on the desk by a window overlooking Central Park. I opened up my e-mail account I’d set up days ago with dual subjects of “RVs” and “Canada” and swallowed a sigh. When you knew all the tricksters in the world, your network was wide and effective but generated enough e-mails to make your eyes ache.

I’d clicked on the first e-mail and tried not to groan at the ignorance contained within. I knew Cal was all right. I knew that he was alive, I told myself as I deleted the e-mail.

If he hadn’t been and the last gate had killed him, Niko wouldn’t bother with warning me to arm myself. He would come for me from behind, honor discarded and nobility tossed aside. He would do whatever it took—there are warriors and then there are berserkers who will do anything it takes, no matter how horrific. Cal knew he was a killer, every life he’d known, whether he excelled or was at best mediocre at it. Niko knew the
same, but Niko thought he was in control. Niko had rules and lines not to be crossed and a code, or so he thought. His blind spot was truly extraordinary.

I’d seen that in the Trojan War. Of all our time, I always thought of that life first . . . always. It had been the best in all the ways until it had been the very worst when Achilles went insane.

I’d seen him do, Zeus . . . when Patroclus fell and Achilles had charged the field, Death himself would’ve fled the atrocities. Uncountable numbers of soldiers are nothing against the willingness to do essentially anything and everything necessary for vengeance.

Niko didn’t remember other lives as Cal could. He’d forgotten what he was capable of, but I hadn’t.

That was how I knew Cal was alive and more or less fine. If he hadn’t been, there’d be a good possibility I’d be reading my e-mails when Niko’s sword buried itself in my back. “Is he sleeping, then?” I went on, not waiting for a response from Niko. He was taking too long to answer, and that wasn’t the most positive of signs. I needed him back to normal. I needed them both back to as close to normal as could be hoped for right now.

Niko responded with a sharp bite, “Yes, he’s asleep. He gated us to a field where a carnival we once lived at had been. He dropped, covered in blood from his mouth, nose, and ears. Luckily they’d built a motel since then by the road. I checked us in, cleaned him up, and now he won’t wake up.” Niko’s control was wavering, but his anger wasn’t. It was growing. “You told him to do this. To take us away. Now he won’t wake up. Why did you do tell him to do that? He wasn’t healthy enough to gate again. Why did you risk him like this?”