Sword of the Gods: Agents of Ki (Sword of the Gods Saga) (101 page)

"Kasib!" General Hudhafah's voice barked from the other side of his doorway.

Kasib rose and straightened his uniform. He tucked his tail up tightly along his right-hand side and skittered into the general's office, his flatscreen held in front of his chest like a shield.

"Sir?" Kasib saluted. He tasted the air with his long forked tongue, frowning when he tasted the pheromones which indicated the general was already in a foul mood.

Hudhafah stood in front of a map, adjusting the colorful pins which indicated whether an area was allied, hostile, or merely unexplored. Reassuring green pins sat clustered around their base at Ugarit, while further afield the pins moved to white, yellow, and red. The general poked at the pins, deep in thought as he moved
different
pins, these ones representing natural resources, over the map to indicate which area had items they needed to roll out Sata'anic Rule.

"What's the status of those supplies?" Hudhafah asked.

Kasib's hand trembled as he pulled up the data that no amount of massaging had been able to change.

"We are critically low on every resource," Kasib said. He hesitated, and then added, "especially grain. Sir? I recommend we pull back all soldiers from the Special Overflow Housing back into the general barracks."

"Those men are all Sata'anic lizards," Hudhafah asked without turning around. "Are they not?"

He picked up a larger, wheat-shaped golden pin and jabbed it into the midst of the dozens of angry red pins which lined both sides of the primary grain-growing region of this planet, the villages which the angry young chieftain was trying to subdue.

"Y-yes, Sir," Kasib stuttered. "They are."

"What are we going to
feed
those men if we bring them back inside the base?" Hudhafah asked.

Kasib snaked his tail around his own back and used it to rub himself along his dorsal ridge. He had no answer for this problem. While the more
primitive
Catoplebas and Marid soldiers were meat-eaters like the chieftain, lizards such as himself were primarily vegetarian … consumers of the very product in critically short supply.

"That's what I thought," Hudhafah growled. He picked up a second golden pin and jabbed it in another village close to the first one. The force which he stabbed the pin into the map indicated the general didn't like this situation any more than
he
did. "Institute Plan Epsilon. Order the men to take whatever resources we need so we don't go hungry."

"Do we have to do it
here,
Sir?" Kasib asked. He tasted the air, and then dared push forward like a much bolder lizard. "I mean, Sir. These people have welcomed our men into their homes. Can't we send the skull-crackers out someplace
else
to get what we need?"

Hudhafah whirled to face him, his dewlap mahogany with worry.

"We are low on shuttle fuel," Hudhafah said. "But if you can get there and back again
frugally,
you may take the resources from wherever you like. Find out who these people's enemies are and take it from
them
. And for goddess' sake, don't get our people into any battles they can't win!"

"Yes, Sir," Kasib said.

His mind whirring, he hurried out the door to find the angry young chieftain, the one whose tribe sat right in the middle of the best grain-growing region on the planet.

~ * ~ * ~

For when I am weak,

Then I am strong.

2 Corinthians 12:10

December, 3,390 BC

Earth: Village of Assur

Mikhail

"I just want you to know that I'm against this!"

Mikhail stared up at his mother-in-law, who stood over him wielding a wooden spoon as though she held a sword. There had been an odd sort of tension in the house ever since he'd woken up three days ago, but whenever he asked questions, Immanu gave him an evasive answer.

"I have to do this, Mama," Mikhail said. "You heard what Pareesa said. Qishtea has arrived, demanding you produce me, or he no longer has to abstain from the lizard people's demands."

"He can meet with you
here,
" Needa said. "In private. Look at you! You're so weak you can't even sit up on your own!"

"They need to see him as strong," Chief Kiyan said. "He needs to address them.
All
of them. Even our own warriors doubt he is still alive."

Needa harrumphed and shook her spoon at the village chief.

"He just rose up from the dead!" Needa scolded him. "
You
gave up on him! You even gave him a memorial ceremony to bless his passage into the Dreamtime!"

"We all did," Chief Kiyan met Mikhail's eyes. "And for that, I am sorry. But my first concern is the well-being of the village. You were in limbo, and so long as you were in that state, the village was crippled. It seemed crueler to keep you here."

"Pareesa told the warriors a very compelling tale," Immanu said. "She claimed the God of War promised her that if you died, he would carry your spirit into a Great Hall of Heroes, where you would be more powerful in death, than you even were in life. In a way…"

"I was more useful to you dead," Mikhail said.

"No!" Needa snapped. She shook her wooden spoon at her husband this time. "A
dead
man doesn’t know how to travel up into the stars and steal back my daughter from the Evil One!"

"I didn't say it was real," Immanu said. For some reason, the man's expression appeared to be exceedingly guilty.

"It
is
real," Mikhail said.

All eyes turned towards him. Now that he had his memory back, it felt as if there was
two
of him stuffed into the same body. The emotionless, Cherubim-trained Special Forces officer, and the emotion-filled person who had integrated in with humans. Neither version of himself had yet reached an agreement as to which personality had permission to inhabit his body. His greatly
weakened
body.

"The shamans have heard of no such legends about your people," Immanu said softly. "Only the granting of safe passage by She-who-is into the Dreamtime."

"The Hall of Heroes is a Cherubim legend that stretches far back into the origins of the universe," Mikhail said. "They believe if you lead a good and brave life, that when you die, you'll be freed from the wheel of rebirth and allowed to enter the Hall of Heroes, where you will be offered the choice to move into the highest ascended realms, or remain behind to look after the people you care about; to give them guidance until
they
are freed from the wheel of rebirth as well."

"Why would a godlike creature choose to remain behind?" Immanu asked, his eyes intently curious.

"It is said the Cherubim
choose
to remain in this universe," Mikhail said. "That Bishamonten is just such a hero, and that the Cherubim take turns incarnating into semi-mortal form until every last Cherubim has evolved enough so they can all make the journey as a single species."

He remembered the ant-like Cherubim queen had sent him into Hashem's Alliance to search for his
own
queen. As a species, the Cherubim were tired. The last few lingered only because they loved the Eternal Emperor. They had trained
him
because they needed a successor species to guard the Alliance, and he had failed them by losing the very queen Jingu had sent him forth into the universe to find.

Ninsianna … another mission … failed.

"I would like to meet these Cherubim someday," Chief Kiyan said. He placed his hand on Mikhail's shoulder. "Son, I'm just glad you're still alive." The Chief's voice warbled with emotion. "How sick you were when you raged with the fever? That wasn't living. That was some kind of hellish purgatory."

A peculiar lump rose in Mikhail's throat and settled in his chest, a strange echo he couldn't recall having ever felt before, as if there were two of him, maybe even
three
people all living in his heart at once. He glanced over at the red cape hung forlornly on the woven reed wall, a poignant reminder of who was missing.

He reached up to clasp the Chief's hand, forearm-to-forearm.

"It
wasn't
living," Mikhail said. "And you're right, our people needed to grieve. But I'm not dead, yet. My mission won't be finished until we kick the lizard people off of your planet, and I'll be
damned
if I let myself fail at another mission."

"You can address them later," Needa pleaded. "
After
you're a little stronger."

"Mikhail is right," Immanu said. "If we lose any more support from the surrounding tribes, we've little hope of fending off these lizard demons. A fragmented alliance cannot stand."

Needa rapped her wooden spoon against her husband's chest with surprising ferocity. Immanu yelped.

“Ten minutes,” Needa glared at Mikhail sternly, “and then I’m coming out to get you and dragging you back in by the tail feathers to the bed. You got that, fluffy?”

“Yes, Ma'am,” Mikhail gave her a weak smile.

He tried to lurch up from the bed and fell backwards, too uncoordinated to prevent his wings from flopping like a fish thrown up onto the shore. He flailed, feathers flying as he waved off Immanu's hand. His face twisted with determination as he ignored the gaping sore which screamed pain from his mangled chest. He
would
get up on his own. He would! If he couldn't even stand, how could he rally these people to help him retrieve his wife?

It was finally Needa who stepped forward, not with a hand, but an elbow, the way he'd often seen her do with elderly patients.

"For balance," she said. From her stern expression and the way she gripped the wooden spoon, the implication was clear.
Or else…

Mikhail grabbed her elbow and decided not to protest when Immanu and the Chief each stuck a hand under his armpit and shoved him upwards to stand. The room spun, but he took deep breaths and forced himself to focus, breathing
into
the pain.

"Somebody's got to help me down the stairs." Mikhail gave the Chief an apologetic grimace. "Just a hand for balance. My wings…"

"You can barely lift them!" Needa said. She poked at the sorry, brown-black appendages which drooped behind him. "I don't think you'll be flying down the stairs anytime soon!"

"I'm too heavy…"

"Ipquidad carried you up here in the first place," Immanu said. "We could go and fetch him, to carry you back down."

"You're a lot lighter," Chief Kiyan said, "than you were six weeks ago."

"I will
walk
down the stairs," Mikhail said. He gave the Chief his most unreadable expression. For some reason, though he'd regained his memories of how the Cherubim had trained him to suppress his emotions, he had a harder time doing so than he'd ever had before. It felt as though he'd been stripped of his emotional defenses and left as wounded and bare as the flesh which oozed puss as his body cleared the infection.

He stared down in dismay at his cavernous clothes. He'd lost so much weight that his dress uniform sagged off of him like a woman's shawl-dress. Even his belt was too large to keep his pants up; they'd had to improvise with a length of rope. He remembered the way his hands had shaken when he'd tied his combat boots. Six weeks of total inactivity had caused him to lose some of his manual dexterity. Once he
had
gotten them tied, the darned things were so loose it felt as though his feet rattled around the inside of a large, leather bucket. How was it that he no longer even filled his own shoes?

Ipquidad moved towards the ladder. "Let me help you."

"No."

"You will win no battles if you fall."

Mikhail stared at the enormous son of a wheelwright, a young man who'd been little more than a joke as he'd run at the back of the line, always complaining that he was hungry. Where was that soft young man now? All he saw now was the warrior that man had become.