Two (The Godslayer Cycle Book 2) (7 page)

*     *     *

Ankor lay across the throne haphazardly, twiddling a dagger between his fingers.  It really was a lovely place, he thought absent-mindedly.  A shame truly that it would soon pass the way of its mistress.

Kelvor reached across and swatted the dagger from his hand.  “Would you pay attention?”

“
I am,” protested the God of Mischief.  “I was paying quite a lot of attention to my little knife before you threw it away, thank you.”  With a whim, the dagger once again appeared in Ankor's hand, and was soon spinning between his fingers yet again.

“
To me, you miscreant.  To me!”

“
Oh, well.  Now that I can't help.  See, I never was one for being yelled at all the time.  I tend to pay far less attention to people like that.”

“
Please, Kelvor,” urged Galentine from behind the larger God's form.  “We should be grateful he is cooperating, at all.  Drive him away, and what will that accomplish?”

“
Perhaps the truth of his involvement in the death of our sister!” shouted the God of Justice.

“
Hey now,” yelped Ankor, sitting upright while the dagger vanished.  “What's all this about the death of a sister?”

“
That is what I have been
trying
to discuss with you, you twit,” growled Kelvor.  “Imery is dead.”

Ankor laughed.  “Oh, that's rich.  Gods don't die, you knuckler.”  Ankor reached out and rapped on the metal helm of his fellow God.  “Air not getting in there?  I think you've become confused with
mortals
.  They die, not Gods.  Ask Elevan if you don't believe me.”

Kelvor's entire body tensed, but Galentine stepped forward to prevent his eruption.  “Please, Kelvor.  Let me handle this.”

The God of Honor leaned low to speak softly at their lesser companion.  “Please, Ankor.  This is difficult enough without your antics.”

“
Honor is hard, that's true,” responded Ankor.  “But it's good of you to admit to the problem.  First step in the cure.  If you'll let me, I can show you much easier ways to work things so you're not always so uptight.”

Galentine closed his eyes and took a steadying breath.  “Imery is gone.  Her being simply ceased to exist sometime last evening.  None of us were quite sure what it was when it happened, because we have never felt a God die before.  As you say, none of us knew it was possible.  We only wish to understand how this came to be.”

“So why are you asking me?” prompted the God of Mischief.  “Ask anyone, I know about as much of value as ol' Kelvor there has a sense of humor.”

“
Be that as it may, you were known to be in the area where we believe Imery...  well, passed.  Any insight you may have would be appreciated.”

“
So you're saying I'm a witness?”  Ankor beamed.  If it was possible, the idea of being the witness to a murder may well possibly have been more entertaining than anything else he had done all day.  And his grin showed this to his interrogators.

Galentine nodded.  “Yes, I suppose you could be.”

“He's been around, you know.”

“
Who?”

“
The Witness.”

“
He has?”  Galentine looked over his shoulder to Kelvor.  “The demi-God?”

Ankor nodded.  “Showed up in Scollhaven about a couple days ago.  Just sits all by himself in the tavern.  Not like him really, 'cause usually he sees what he's come to see then goes on his way.  Something's got him off his game.”

“Are you trying to say he has something to do with Imery?”

“
No, why?  Do you think he does?”  Ankor leaned forward excitedly. 

“
I'm asking you.  You brought him up.”

“
Oh,” said Ankor, leaning back in his chair.  “I was just making conversation.”

Galentine sighed loudly.  “Can we please speak of Imery?”

“What about her?”

“
Did you encounter her at all while you were...  visiting this Scollhaven place?”

“
Nope.  Didn't see her.  Unless she was disguised, in which case I could have seen her, but wouldn't know if I had seen her.  Would that count?”

“
This is getting us nowhere!” Kelvor bellowed.

Galentine decided to try a new tact.  “Prankster, you see that Imery's domain is fading?”

Ankor looked around casually.  “I
did
notice the furniture was getting kind of squishy around the edges, yeah.”

“
You know that Imery was one of the Greater Powers.”

Ankor rolled his eyes.  “Yes, yes.  She was my better, blah, blah, blah.  I should show her more respect, blah, blah, blah.  I should stop trying to sneak looks at her naked, blah, blah--”

“What was that?” interrupted Kelvor, pushing past Galentine.

Ankor raised his hands in mock supplication.  “What?  You always wanted me to look up to her, but when I did it up her dress, that was wrong?”

Galentine seized Kelvor's arm.  “Can't you see he's doing this on purpose?  He's
trying
to upset you so you'll dismiss him.”

“
And doing a right fine job of it, if I do say so myself,” insisted Ankor.

Galentine ignored the Lesser God.  “He doesn't want to be here.  That alone should tell us something, don't you think?”

Kelvor did not immediately respond to Galentine's words, but eventually awareness donned in his eyes.  The helmeted brow of the God of Justice bobbed up and down in recognition.  “Pranked by the Prankster.  Should have known better.”

“
Does this mean you won't be getting mad anymore?” asked Ankor.  “Let me know, because I'd hate to waste the effort.”

Galentine turned to the God of Mischief.  “Look, there's something you don't want to tell us.  That much is obvious.  Sooner or later, we
will
ask the right question, and you will tell us what you know.  So why not just tell us and you can get back to whatever it is you were doing when we summoned you.”

“
I have a better question,” said Ankor, once again leaning forward.  “Why don't you two tell me why it wasn't the whole Greater Assembly that summoned me instead of just you two?  What is it
you
don't want to talk about?”

 
Galentine threw a guilty look at Kelvor, which was all the confirmation Ankor needed.  “I knew it!  You guys are playing a game, one you don't want anyone else to know about.  No fair.  I want in!”

Kelvor pulled his head back.  “You what?”

“It's a game, isn't it?  Well, I
love
games.  And I so rarely get invited to anyone else's.  You just
have
to let me play!”

Galentine and Kelvor exchanged glances.  After a moment, Kelvor shrugged.  “Why not?  We're not going to get anywhere any other way.”

Ankor immediately leaped to his feet.  “Great!  So what's the prize?”

“
Prize?”  Galentine asked.

“
Sure, the prize.  All games have to have prizes for the winners.  Otherwise, what's the point in playing?”

“
Well, what would
you
like for a prize?”

Ankor thought for a moment, then perked up.  “I know.  The Truth.”

“But that's what we are all trying to get, the truth,” responded Kelvor.  “How can that be a prize?”

“
No, I mean
The Truth
.  Imery's truth.  Or, more specifically, her job.”

Galentine blinked.  “I don't follow.”

“So Imery's gone, right?  Her domain is dissolving and soon she'll be just a memory.”  Avery swept his arms around for emphasis.  “But you still need your twenty-four Higher Powers for balance, which means you need someone to handle the Truth.  If I win and solve who killed Imery – be the one who finds the truth in her dying and all – I think it's only right that I should get the job.”

“
You know,” said Kelvor to Galentine.  “That does make a weird sort of sense.  Even coming from him.”

“
I'm afraid I have to agree,” Galentine concurred.  “Although we alone cannot decide who takes Imery's place, there
must
be a Goddess – or God – of Truth.  And I cannot imagine anyone but a Lesser Power taking over.”

“
So you'll give me the job if I can be better at finding the truth than anyone else?” prompted Ankor.

“
Well, it would certainly go a long way towards getting the, er...  the job,” agreed Galentine.

“
Then it's settled.”  Ankor clapped his hands together, bending his head down over his folded fingers.  “I solve the mystery, I get the job.”

Galentine sighed.  “We make no promises, but that does seem a reasonable request.”

“Then let me tell you what I know,” the God of Mischief purred.  “See, I was real close to that Avery guy when he left Scollhaven.  And all he would ever talk about was this Godslayer...”

Leaves danced in the air, swirling in a crescendo of silent chaos.  They darted in equal exuberance towards and away from each other, adding to their performance with impossible rises and falls.  Between their dancing forms, the wind could be seen in gusts of grit and soot raised into the air, coloring the otherwise invisible lines of force that pushed the leaves and other inanimate objects to and fro.

A storm was coming.  Nathaniel thought the visible manifestation to be an appropriate metaphor for the real tempest brewing unseen.  He knew it was there, and though he could not see the signs as well as the one preceded by the gusts of air, he felt it upon him all the same.

A God was dead.  There was one less God in the New Order; the perfect balance of twenty-four greater and lesser powers was forever shattered.  He had slain Imery, Goddess of Truth.  As impossible a notion as that was, he saw it with his own eyes, felt the electricity of Imery's final dissolution, became aware the void that the Goddess' absence had left in the aether all around him.  A presence he never before realized had existed was gone.  A function of his plane's reality destroyed, wiped from existence.  There was not even a body left behind.

And Nathaniel Goodsmith had done it.  The simple recluse from Oaken Wood had taken the life of a God with a single stroke of a magical sword.  Never in his wildest dreams did he imagine that such was possible.  Even when members of the Old Gods told him what the swords were capable of, he had not given their words proper merit. 

So it was necessary for my sphere of influence to be used in empowering the swords, to give each sword power enough to slay a God.

Charith said those words.  She had given the swords the
power
to slay a God, but how could Nathaniel have known what that truly meant?  That simply striking a God with a sword was enough.  It did not need to be a fatal blow, or at least a blow that would have been fatal to a mortal.  It was enough to run the sword through them.  And in doing so, the very essence of a God could be destroyed. 

It had not been Nathaniel's intent to kill Imery.  Not at that point in time, at least.  He had intended to wound her, to stop her rampage upon Brea.  And yes, to hold the Goddess, if possible, so that she could answer for her crimes.  There had been so much to answer for.

Mari was dead, slain at the hands of Imery's faithful.  Gregory had been abducted, carried off into the night by those who slew his mother.  Bracken's inn had been razed to the ground, people's livelihood put at jeopardy.  All to strike out at Nathaniel.  All to punish him for being the unwilling pawn of the Old Gods. 

Since the night of Mari's murder and Gregory's kidnapping, Nathaniel had gone over those events again and again.  The Old Gods insisted that the New Order was blind to his existence, that their magic had masked him.  Yet Imery knew enough to send Brea, and then later to send a raiding party to attempt to kill him.  Only he had not been there – he had been taken away by Airek, the Master and Mistress of Benevolence, in an effort to convince Nathaniel of the evils of the New Order.  Whisked away to a strange part of the world, Nathaniel had not been home when the raiders came.

But Mari was.  And she had died because the servants of Imery could not find their target.

The irony was that Nathaniel had been unconvinced by the words of the Gods who were trying to recruit him.  It took seeing the evil of the New Order first hand – as if he had not seen enough from their mortal agents already – before he could be compelled to cooperate with their bequest.  Oh, but the cost had been so high...  So high.

As Nathaniel looked up into the sky, the leaves seemed to dance to the macabre rhythm that ebbed within his soul, moving faster and faster as the force of the wind increased.  His wife was dead.  His son was gone.  All he had had to drive him was the belief that he could track down Brea and through her, confront Imery – find out where the Goddess had taken his son.  Yet even that had proven fruitless.

Nathaniel took a deep breath, as if by force of will he could somehow alter the wind by stealing its power into himself.  He may have become powerful enough to slay Gods now, but he still lacked the power to change the course of a storm.  He held the stolen air in his lungs for as long as he was able, but eventually he had to release it.  Yet not even an attempt at mastering the elements could assuage the ache in his chest.

The others in the camp could be heard in the background.  Everyone else was breaking camp.  Well, they were breaking down
Brea's
camp.  Their own gear, save their bedrolls, was still tacked to their horses.  Bracken had retrieved them the night before from where Nathaniel and he left them tethered while facing Brea.  And of course, that confrontation ended with a battle with the would-be-God, Avery.

Nathaniel lowered his head into his hands.  He was so confused, so bewildered over what to do.  Brea and her mercenaries were breaking camp with Bracken's help, but not a one of them had spoken of where they were going, not even which direction they would travel in.  It was as if somehow they would just know when the time came. 

But Nathaniel did not know.  He had no idea where he would go from here.

Geoffrey was missing, and Nathaniel knew his priority needed to be finding him.  But Brea had only been another pawn of Imery's, apparently.  And when Nathaniel killed Imery, any hope of learning from the Goddess where her own mercenaries had taken Nathaniel's son evaporated.  So where was Nathaniel supposed to go to look?

Then there were the swords.  Oh, those God-be-damned swords!  Nathaniel glanced over to where the two swords in his possession leaned against a nearby tree.
One
and
First
.  That was what they each called the other.  To his eye, they looked identical in every way – except that in the pommel of
One
was a single pitted die engraving, and that of
First
was unmarred by any marking whatsoever.  Otherwise, they were the same.  Identical it seemed down to the length, composition and immaculate etchings upon each blade.

Nathaniel risked a glance in Brea's direction.  She still visibly avoided looking in his direction.  Her body language was difficult to read – a mixture of anger and shame, was the best he could ascertain.  The stranger's violation of their minds, memories and emotions seemed like a distant dream on many levels now, but the feelings those changes had left behind – the sense of intrusion and defilement – those remained.

There was a new resentment that each now carried, a fresh wound that none knew how to heal.  Though in his mind he knew who was to blame, Nathaniel could not help but to feel a certain amount of frustration at Brea, as well.  He knew – he
knew
– it had not been her fault.  But it felt as though she had taken advantage of him, used the enchantment cast over them all for her own pleasure.  By Charith, he was not even sure whether the memory of their coupling was a fragment of false memory or true.  Yet regardless, he could not escape the feeling that he had broken his marital vows, and in doing so, he could not escape blaming the temptress with whom he had shattered them.

The feeling must be true for them all, Nathaniel reasoned.  They must each hold some resentment against each other, for there was no way to exorcise the false memories completely.  Some were too intertwined with real ones to completely dismiss – like the memory of his physical relations with Brea.  If it had happened, it had been wonderful, blissful.  Yet those feelings were betrayals all by themselves, for they meant he took pleasure in another woman.

The Old Gods had made a promise to him.  They promised that if he could find the New Order's Goddess of Death, Elevan – that if he could slay
her
– then Charith would gain control of Mari's soul and they could resurrect her, bring her spirit back into her body.  The Pantheon kept Mari's body in stasis, keeping it from deteriorating. 

Another task Nathaniel had to find a way to complete, yet he knew even less of how to find or summon Elevan than he did in finding his son.

Three tasks then, none of which he could complete.  He knew not where to find another sword, his son, or the New Order's Death Goddess. 

And none of that included trying to find out who their intruder had been.  All any of them knew was that he possessed one of the nine swords, one that could manipulate memory.  Or perhaps it manipulated reality.  Nathaniel was not really sure which.  But it was dangerous, and it represented a genuine threat to them all.

Another thought occurred to Nathaniel then – why had he not sensed the other sword?  Why had he not received a vision as he had with
One
?  When that sword awoke, he had dreamed of being
One
, of being embedded in the ground.  He had later seen himself as though he were being wielded.  But even when visions did not flood his mind's eye, he could sense the sword, knew which direction the sword lay in. 

Yet Nathaniel sensed nothing of the sword the stranger had wielded.  Nothing at all.  Not its presence, and certainly not where it was now.

A hand touched his arm gently from behind.  “Nathan?”

Nathaniel turned around to face Brea, pulling his arm from the priestess' grasp – though he found himself doing so far more delicately than he once would have.  Was that shame at work, he wondered?  Guilt?  Or something more insidious – a lingering desire to not drive her away perhaps?

“We should talk, you and I.”  Brea put it simple, and yet somehow it seemed like the most complicated set of words Nathaniel had ever heard.  How could they talk, what could be said?  Nathaniel was not even sure what had happened in the first place.

“
Yes.”  Nathaniel had not meant to say anything.  The word simply escaped with his breath unbidden and unwanted.  The last thing he wanted was more confusion.

Brea glanced over her shoulder before turning back to Nathaniel.  “We're almost done.  Really, we would have been done some time ago, but I think we all know that none of us know what comes next.  We are doing what seems normal, because none of us knows what else to do.  Packing things is what we would do any other morning, so it is what we are doing this morning.  But once that task is done...”  She shrugged her shoulders in a small, delicate fashion.

“I came here to find a pretender.  He's been found and run away.”  Brea began to pull at the tuft of her sleeve, paying an inordinate amount of attention to the seam.  “You came here to find me.  I would say that was successful, even if you did not get what you came to find.”  Brea turned soulful eyes up to the much taller man.  “But what is next?  Do you know?”

Nathaniel took a moment to look deeply into Brea's eyes.  He found it difficult to do anything else.  He felt the overwhelming sense that if he answered her question, she would stop looking at him, and at that moment, he wanted nothing else but to look at her.  But the moment passed and his self-loathing returned.

“Your Goddess is gone, as is the only source I knew of who could tell me where Geoffrey was taken,” answered Nathaniel.  “The stranger has disappeared, and with him any clue as to why he was here or how he knew so much about us.  So no, I don't know what is next, either.  I have been trying to reason out that very thing, and I am no closer now than when I began.”

Brea lowered her eyes.  “Imery is dead,” she whispered.  When she looked back up at Nathaniel, tears brimmed her eyes.  It was enough to break Nathaniel's heart.  “And you killed her.”

“I didn't mean to.  I only wanted to stop her--”

Brea held up her hand.  “Please, don't say it.  Don't try to defend yourself just now.  It's too soon.”

A stray gust pulled a strand of the priestess' hair loose from where she had it bound back and blew it straight into the air.  For a moment it held Nathaniel's attention before it settled again.  But in that moment, he had not had to think of anything else.  But Brea was not finished speaking, and his mind was drawn back to her face.

“
I can't deal with the why right now.  All I want to deal with is the fact that it
is
.  She's gone, and you killed her.  You took her from me and from every other mortal in existence.  But what I don't understand...”

Now the tears streamed freely down Brea's cheeks.  “What I don't understand is why I don't hate you for it.”

Nathaniel swallowed hard.  “You should hate me.  I would understand if you did.  If you don't, all I can think is that it must have something to do with the man who pretended to be Avery.  I know my memories and feelings are confused.  I can't imagine what you must be feeling.”

Brea shook her head.  “No, I don't think that's it.  Not entirely.”  Brea leaned closer to Nathaniel.  “I knew something was not right before she came through the fire last night.  My faith was...  It wasn't what it should have been.  It hasn't been for a while now.  Not since...  Not since you.”

Nathaniel felt his cheeks warm.  “Please, don't blame me for your crisis of faith.  I didn't ask you to chase after--”

“
No, I didn't mean it like that.”  Now it was Brea who was blushing.  “I know something happened when I met you.  I...” 

Brea took a deep breath.  “Well, I fell in love with you.”  She held up her hand again to forestall Nathaniel interrupting.  “Please, let me finish or I'll never be able to.  See, I don't even know how that is possible.  Imery was convinced it was a charm of some sort, that you had cast a spell on me.  She claimed it was Old God magic, that it was beyond her power to break because of that.  But none of that mattered, because it wasn't just that I'd fallen in love with you.  It was that I wasn't in love with
her
anymore.  And I think that's why she went...  well, crazy.”