Lucian: Dark God's Homecoming (31 page)

Gingerly stretching my legs out before me, I kneaded them, trying to work some feeling back into them. After a few minutes, I found I could stand, and so I made my way, stumblingly, over to Yassili. He lay in a twisted heap, his long, gangly arms and legs splayed out around him. I contemplated his unconscious form, thinking of the few times I had encountered him before. None of those incidents registered as a particularly pleasant memory. Idly I wondered if I had wronged him at some point in the distant past. Then again, no one else had ever much cared for him, either. He had never been terribly social. For many years, he preferred to spend his time in his large garden outside the City. Eventually, he abandoned even that, and moved out into the wild. Over time he had grown more “wild” himself, his body changing along with his voice, and with his mind. Rumor had it he had used the Power to bring this about willingly, along with gaining some mastery over plant life itself. Evidently this was all true. I shook my head, thinking of his clumsy attack on us, and how it had nearly succeeded. How he would have sold us to Baranak for something as pitiful as slightly better treatment in his rare dealings with the City. Had he simply come to me for help, in normal times, I would have aided him, I believe. Certainly I would have sided with him against Baranak and his minions, and would have treated him far better than they ever did, had the Golden City been mine to rule. Now, though, I looked down at him and felt nothing but anger and revulsion and disgust.

“I believe I have come up with the ultimate proof that I am not guilty of the murders,” I said then.

“Oh, indeed?” Alaria looked over at me, interested. “And what might that be?”

“The survivors,” I replied.

She raised an eyebrow, waiting.

“Because most of those still around are not the ones
I
would have chosen to leave alive.”

Her expression soured. “Present company excepted, of course,” she said.

“Oh, quite so,” I replied with a small bow. Evelyn laughed.

I bent down and examined Yassili’s head and neck, where Evelyn’s first shot had struck him, and found no wounds whatsoever.

“What is it?” she asked, leaning down beside me.

Alaria came up behind her, peering over her shoulder to see.

“It did exactly what it was supposed to do—what all my weapons are supposed to do,” I replied, continuing to examine Yassili’s body for wounds like the one Arendal received. “It stunned him and drained his energy. The second shot knocked him out completely; he will probably sleep for a day or more.”

Evelyn kneeled down beside me and studied him carefully.

“No burn mark. No hole.”

“Right.” I frowned. “That is a good thing, but still—“

“Why did it affect Arendal the way it did?”

I bit my lip, thinking.

“The gun I shot him with. I’ve been thinking it was one of mine, one from my original production run, before the rebellion. It certainly looked like one of them. But—“

“You didn’t have it when we first met,” Evelyn said. “Where did you get it?”

I told them both about finding it on the table in the otherwise empty storeroom on the island. I did not mention the “note” that had accompanied it.

“Someone left it for you?” Evelyn asked, surprised.

She frowned, thinking, then said, “Someone wanted you to have a more deadly version of your own weapons? That doesn’t sound like any of the gods I’ve met so far. Quite the opposite.”

I looked from Evelyn to Alaria, who had said nothing during this conversation. She merely shrugged, shaking her head.

“I suppose we will find out soon enough,” I said, finally. “There are other mysteries that require answers before that one.”

We started forward again, and then Evelyn asked, “What about him? Yassili? Do we just leave him there?”

“He should be fine,” I said. “Better than he deserves, anyway.”

Apparently Alaria concurred, for she never even looked back. On she led us through the forest, until we came to a spot, unremarkable from most any other spot we had passed through, where she raised her hand and brought us to a halt. Extending that hand out from her body, she made a slight twisting motion, and another portal sparkled into existence before us.

“Only a couple more jumps after this, I think,” she said, and we followed after her.

Her pace was quite good, and Evelyn and I pushed ourselves to keep up. The remainder of our journey carried us through a strange set of locales—a rocky canyon, done all in oranges and purples, was my favorite—though not much stranger than any I usually choose when I map out a new path. One generally seeks routes that contain mostly clement environments—not too hot, not too cold, not too little oxygen in the air, no acid rain, and so forth. Scenic routes are nice, and are generally appreciated by guests when we choose not to travel alone, even if they take a little longer to traverse. For our purposes now, however, I was hoping Alaria would skip the sights and concentrate on the most direct path to—to wherever we were going.

She must have done this, for at the end of only two or three hours of hiking we emerged from a sparse clump of dying trees and found ourselves walking along the edge of a steep cliff, and there she signaled a halt.

I looked around, now that we were out in the open, trying to get a sense of where we were. Dusky mountains towered behind us, the sun dropping below them even as I looked. Their ragged slopes did not level out to flat, boulder-strewn land until just a few dozen yards from where we stood. In the other direction, the cliff dropped off dramatically, giving the overall impression that we occupied a narrow strip of horizontal land in an otherwise nearly vertical world. There was little else to see; the bottom of the cliff lay far below, obscured in fog, and while there appeared to be another, matching cliff face, it had to be nearly a mile away from us, across what must have been a vast ravine. As nightfall crept over us, the wind picked up, tugging at my long coat with surprising force. It was getting cooler, and there was no shelter to be found, that I could see, anywhere.

“Alaria,” I said then, only half-sarcastically, “is Arendal’s place invisible?”

Ignoring me entirely, she walked to the cliff’s edge and peered down for a few seconds, then stooped down and hopped off the edge.

My eyes widening, I rushed to see where she had gone. Evelyn did the same.

Alaria gazed up at us from a narrow ledge about ten feet below where we stood. Motioning for us to join her, she moved quickly but with remarkable agility and grace along the ledge.

I hopped down myself and then helped Evelyn, and then we were rushing along, as quickly as we dared, following the redheaded goddess’s lead. I noticed soon that the ledge inclined slightly down, and after a couple of minutes looked up and realized we had curved back under the cliff to such a degree that I could no longer see the top. The world had become rock wall on one side and blank emptiness on the other, and the fog rolled in thicker to obscure what little there was to see. Lightning flared in the distance, followed by thunder several seconds later, low and rumbling. The wind grew stronger, and a few scattered raindrops smacked on the ledge around me. A storm was setting in.

“Come on,” Alaria called back. “We are nearly there.”

I grew a tad nervous. This was not a situation I wanted to be in: no visibility, exposed against a uniform background. I followed her advice and moved as rapidly as I dared, short of running over Evelyn, who occupied the middle spot in our procession.

After a while, the ledge curved around to the right and opened up into a much wider shelf that had been hidden from sight. We continued across it and at last Alaria stopped, standing in front of a narrow, rectangular groove that seemed to have been cut into the rock of the cliff face.

“Ah, this must be the front door,” I observed.

Ignoring me, Alaria brought both of her pale hands up, her long, black sleeves hanging down. The golden rings she wore on three of her fingers glittered dimly in the pale light. Stepping forward, she pressed her hands to the rock wall. We waited—

—and nothing happened.

Glancing back at me, puzzled, she repeated the attempt at whatever it was she was doing. Again, nothing came of it.

“Did you try knocking?” I asked, but she was already drawing her hands back in toward her body, clenching her fists. I felt the Power surge through the area, buzzing through me but clearly building up in Alaria. Then she reached out again, touching her now-sparkling hands to the rock wall.

The shrieking sound that resulted I first attributed to Alaria, but I quickly realized it was not being produced by a throat. Some sort of alarm had been triggered, and I took that as a cue to back up and summon a blue sphere of protection around Evelyn and myself. Alaria I left to her own devices. The last thing any god ever wanted was a knee-jerk protective gesture from another of us. Even so, I stood ready to extend the sphere if she looked to be in danger.

The danger hit soon enough. As she stepped back, surprised by the sound, two small, heretofore invisible panels slid open above her head and metallic, snaking tubes extended outward, small spheres at the tips glowing bright green. Like insect eyes on stalks, they waved about, looking this way and that before focusing on the three of us. The tubes retracted back inside the panels with a snapping sound and another pair of cylinders, these not so flexible, protruded out from below them. I knew a gun when I saw it, and called out a warning. Alaria, though, was slow to react, focused as she was, I presumed, on trying to open the door.

Instantly I reached out with my left hand, the one not currently engaged in channeling the protective sphere, and willed the creation of a smaller sphere just in front of the barrel of the weapon. A brilliant emerald beam of energy speared out, met my new sphere, and deflected just enough to miss its target.

“Dammit!” I yelled at Alaria, just as the other weapon fired a shot that struck my larger sphere but failed to penetrate it. “Get in the game!”

Alaria looked back at me and blinked, as if only just noticing what was happening around her. In her defense, it had all transpired within a couple of seconds, but still I expected better from her—-there was no telling how powerful these weapons were, or what they could do, even to us. Especially since they were, presumably, Arendal’s creations. Moving into action now, she reached up and grasped one of the gun barrels. The Power flooded through her and sparkling light rippled down her arms. As I watched in amazement, she exerted her strength upon the barrel and it twisted in her hand, then came entirely free in a shower of sparks and metal fragments. Repeating this with the other weapon, she had them both disabled before they could fire again.

I waited for a few more seconds, just to be sure we were safe, and then dropped the defensive sphere.

Behind me, Evelyn clapped her hands slowly and said, “Nice job.”

I nodded and said, “Yes. Nice.” Alaria continued to surprise me with her resourcefulness and her abilities.

Bestowing a half-smile upon us, Alaria turned back to what I was sure now was a door, pushing and poking and prodding it. Minutes passed, during which her mood grew blacker and her language coarser. Finally she whirled and glared at us.

“The defenses are entirely disabled,” she growled, “but I cannot find a way to open the locks. And they are… formidable.”

Before I could make a suggestion, Evelyn said, “What about the cane?”

Alaria’s eyes widened.

“Yes,” I agreed, somewhat annoyed it hadn’t occurred to me, either.

Alaria rubbed at her eyes with her left hand, muttered a few more choice phrases, then raised her right hand to chest level and exerted the Power.

“We have traveled a great distance from your island, Lucian. I will have to approach the pocket universe from a different direction, obviously,” she said, reaching inside.