Sword of the Gods: Agents of Ki (Sword of the Gods Saga) (80 page)

A woman screamed.

"Good god, Immanu! What are you doing!"

"Ninsianna is dead!" Immanu screamed. "And I come home to find out you have let her killer lay down with her husband!"

"Gita saved his life!"

"This
viper
is responsible for our daughter's death!"

"Ninsianna is still alive!"

"She is
NOT
alive!" Immanu shrieked. "Every shaman in Ubaid territory gathered with me in Nineveh last night to perform a summoning! We sacrificed ten rams, sixteen goats, an auroch and a criminal who'd been condemned to die. Not one of them could tell me where she was! Her spirit has been consumed!"

Needa began to weep.

"It can't be true! I can still
feel
her. It feels as though she is still alive!"

Immanu kicked Gita again for good measure. Gita stifled her cries. She'd learned long ago that the more she cried, the longer her father would beat her. Her esteemed uncle, it appeared, carried the same sadistic streak.

"This time, I shall make a sacrifice of
her,
" Immanu jabbed a finger in her face. "It is my right, as the father of a murdered daughter, to demand recompense for her death, and so I do. I demand this viper
be sacrificed by the ritual of fire so that She-who-is will free our daughter's spirit from whatever
hell
the Evil One has sent her to!"

Immanu began to kick her again. Gita glanced frantically around the room, searching for Mikhail's sword. They must have taken it from her last night, after she'd fallen to her knees. The bodies were gone, but the stain of blood still marred the floor, still stained
her
where she'd slain the assassins.

"I did nothing wrong," Gita cried out. "I defended him, that was all!"

The rustle of feathers shifted on the sleeping pallet.

'Chol beag?' 

Mikhail's voice was little more than a whisper, but it was enough to prompt Needa to leap to her defense.

"Don't you
dare
beat that child for something she did not do!" Needa screeched at him. "Do you have any idea what happened last night, while you were off gallavanting around the dreamtime with your shaman friends? We were
attacked,
Immanu. Attacked! And almost killed! And
you
were not here to protect us!"

"It was a trick!" Immanu shouted. "All along she's been in league with Jamin!"

"You are both blind and a fool!"

Needa slapped her husband.

Immanu knocked his wife onto the floor. Needa cried out, unaccustomed to this rough treatment. Immanu stood in shocked silence, realizing what he'd just done, and then turned to take out his anger on Gita. Needa threw her body over Gita's, preventing her husband from kicking her again.

"Get out of this house," Needa hissed. "Get out of this house, and don't come back until we are gone."

Immanu jabbed a finger into his wife's face.

"It is
my
house, woman," Immanu said. "And it's about time you learned your
place
, that
-I-
am the one who wears the kilt!"

Needa rose, beautiful, graceful, and strong. Even pale and shaken from the poison she'd consumed and six weeks of grief since Ninsianna had been taken, her aunt was the strongest woman whom Gita had ever met.

"My place is in Gasur," Needa said softly, "with the parents who love me, and the man who
should
have been my husband had you not tricked me into believing that marrying
you
was the will of She-who-is. I only realized after I'd succumbed to your seduction that you'd tricked me, that you'd manipulated my mind into desiring you and believing you were the one. Had we not concieved a child that day, I would have returned to Jiljab and told him I was sorry. All these years I've stayed with you because Ninsianna needed you, but if Ninsianna is dead, there is nothing to bind us together! As soon as Mikhail dies, as soon as all
hope
dies that her husband will arise from his deathbed and return to me my daughter, I shall be gone from this place, and then you can
have
your house and live in it alone!"

Immanu stepped back as though he'd just been punched in the stomach. Gita trembled, but she knew to keep her mouth shut. Whatever marital difficulties had just erupted between her esteemed blood-uncle and the aunt who was only related to her by marriage, it had been long-simmering. If she spoke up, their anger would be redirected towards
her.

"She is
guilty,
" Immanu said. "She-who-is has shown me this is true."

"Then let She-who-is convince the Tribunal," Needa said. "Let the goddess who allowed our daughter to be taken come into this house and convince three elders that
you
are right and
I
am wrong. Because I don't
believe
in
HER
anymore! Any more than I believe in
you!
"

Needa pointed at the door.

Immanu backed up to the curtain. He met Gita's gaze.

"I go now to summon the Tribunal," Immanu said. "And when I am done, I shall invoke my right under the ancient decree. A life ... for a life." He pointed down at her in judgment. "You shall end your life, traitor, upon a sacrificial bonfire the moment Ninsianna's husband dies."

He stormed out of the house, slamming the outer door behind him as he ran off to implement his threat.

Gita stared up at her aunt with tears in her eyes. Needa was not her friend, but she was not her enemy, either. Immanu had cast enough doubt of her guilt that Needa had taken a 'wait and see' attitude.

'Mo chol beag, cén fáth a bhfuil tú ag gol amach i bpian?'

Mikhail cried out, his breathing frantic. Every ounce of love she'd just sung into him, the entire benefit of the brief time she'd allowed him to share her warmth evaporated as that one sentence cost him his life's energy.

Needa glanced at her son-in-law, her expression softening into one of genuine distress. Needa might not care about
her,
but her affection for Ninsianna's husband was real.

"Save him." Needa said. "Save his life, I don't care what you have to do, and all shall be forgiven. For as long as
he
lives, I have hope that somewhere, somehow, Ninsianna is still alive."

"I don't know what to do," Gita said. "I am not a healer like you!"

Tears streaked down Needa's cheeks.

"Then perhaps my daughter is lost, for real?"

Needa gathered her shawl and limped out of the room, still graceful in her grief as she no doubt considered her husband's words that her only child was dead?

Gita crept back to Mikhail's bedside, cognizant of the fact she was still covered in blood from last night's raid. His expression grew peaceful the moment her hand grasped his, but what little improvement in coloring he had gained, he had lost by mere virtue of being forced to utter a single sentence in her defense. She rested her cheek upon his forearm, no longer muscular, no longer strong, and picked dried blood out of his feathers.

Once she was done, she began to sing the song she remembered from the dream.

~ * ~ * ~

Galactic Standard Date:  152,323.12 AE

Hades-6

Emperor Shay'tan

Shay'tan

The Eternal Emperor Hashem wasn't the
only
person who kept a laboratory in the bowels of his palace, although in Shay'tan's case, the old dragon's curiosities ran more to what effects could be achieved when a mortal species encountered social engineering than with any real interest in what happened when you started mucking around with their DNA. Nature vs. Nurture. The debate had existed for as long as the universe, but it had been
she
who'd piqued his interest in the subject, she and her dreams of an empire which would be perfect.

Shay'tan had built it for her … and then the Evil One had come and snatched her away from him…

"When are you going to get that computer back online?" Shay'tan paced back and forth across the floor.

"They won't get it done any faster, Your Eminence," his elderly scribe stated calmly, "if you burst into flames or keep knocking over their equipment with your tail."

Shay'tan bared his fangs and growled at the man, but truth be told, after having disemboweled the statue, he felt better,
much
better. The fact he had finally killed
The Destroyer
in the process, well…

His fangs disappeared. He sat down and curled his tail around his legs, twirling it thoughtfully as he rued his loss of temper. He'd gone there to enlist
The Destroyer's
aid, after subduing his fleet, of course … he couldn't very well have a fleet that massive undermining Sata'anic rule … not to kill the man.

He stared at the scorched parts he had teleported out of the cave before it had collapsed. It was nothing but a robot, not the deity he had at first mistaken it to be. The protective outer skin had been burned off, but the chassis underneath was fireproof, a metal so hard that even
he
would have a hard time melting it unless he worked himself up into a frenzy.

He began to pace again, back and forth along the meticulously laid out workstations. This creature had been built to take on
him.
Why then, such a wimpy operating system? He stared at the skinless bovine head which he'd severed from the body. He'd defeated the robot, not because he had won, but because there'd been nothing but a limited computer program to ask supplicants to feed it a meal of fresh, live-roasted consciousness, medium rare and still screaming as it died.

Revulsion shuddered down Shay'tan's dorsal ridge, thankfully solid at the moment and no longer comprised of fire. Abaddon, unfortunately, had
been
that meal. He'd had no idea the robot was still even operational until it had moved. Thank-the-goddess he'd plucked
The Destroyer
out of the brazier before his death-energy had fed whatever mechanism was in place to alert the Devourer of Children that dinner was about to be served. Not that Shay'tan wasn't above roasting his enemies alive. He was, after all, a dragon. But Shay'tan only toasted enemies who deserved it.

Mostly deserved it…

Okay, maybe once in a while he still inadvertently lost his temper and took out a planet or two, but those didn't count. It wasn't like he fed off their anguish or anything. Not in the way that Moloch did…

He realized his scientists had all drawn back, fearful he'd erupt again into flames. His elderly scribe stood at attention, tail tucked up tightly along his right side, waiting for Shay'tan to acknowledge he had permission to speak.

"What is it, Budayl?" Shay'tan asked.

The scribe's long, forked tongue darted out of his mouth to taste his emperor and god's mood.

"We've just received a subspace message from Admiral Musab," the scribe said. "An Alliance shuttle just breached hyperspace around the ice-planet where you found
that
thing and hailed them."

"What do they want?"

"They want access to the planet, Sir," the scribe said. "They claim to wish to secure their dead."

Shay'tan glanced over at the chassis where the scientists had just cracked the ribcage and were pulling zealously at some wires. There was still a lot of equipment down there, buried beneath the avalanche he'd inadvertently triggered. The last thing he wanted was the Alliance gleaning the location of Earth from some clue his scientists had missed before he'd collapsed the cave.

"Tell them permission is denied," Shay'tan said. "When we get around to excavating the cave, we'll tag the bodies and ship them back to Hashem on a Sata'anic cargo vessel."