Godslayers

“I don’t have your fucking documents, lady” I shot back at Erid. “It’s only been a couple hours and you didn’t tell us where to look.”

“How would I know where to look?” Erid snapped. “They’re not mine, are they?”

“Danou has been reticent with the details so far,” said Val. “Munda, by the way. Danou speaks highly of you.”

Erid glared at him. “Now I know you’re both full of shit. Thanks for clearing that up.”

“Godsmile, Munda,” said Dal Salim. “A wild name you have. Like a familiar taste I can’t place.”

“I come from the north,” Val replied blandly.

“Shut up, both of you,” Erid said, earning a bemused look from Val. “There’s no time for this. The ’messenger’ or whatever you’re calling him hasn’t moved for the past hour. If we can’t get our hands on the Crown, we’re scuttled. Pellonine sent a delegation to the Magistrate’s palace, but it incinerated them before they got there.”

“Can you enlighten us as to the nature and working of the Crown?” Val said. “Danou was vague about why you needed it.”

“Color me surprised,” Erid said. I scowled at both of them.

“The Crown of Horcutio?” asked Dal Salim. “It’s beneath the ocean. No retrieving it now.”

We all looked at him—Val considering, Erid with hostility.

“Three virtues were stolen from Horcutio,” he continued. “His might, his courage, and his rage. These three were bound into a crown, which his chosen maintain in secret. Some years ago, it was cast into the sea.”

“Hold on,” I said. “Didn’t you say Kives made Varas out of them?”

Dal Salim shrugged and smiled. “Perhaps she gave them back.”

“We’re not here for stories,” Erid said. “We have the maps, remember? They said it’s here, and whoever wears it can commune with Horcutio’s servants. Your pirate toy’s misleading us.”

“Mm,” Dal Salim replied, nodding as if she were sharing wisdom and not questioning his trustworthiness. ”Lady Danou, do you remember—?”

He said a name.

“Remember who?” I asked, blinking.

Val said a name.

I furrowed my brow. “I think my ears are malfunctioning.”

“Let me try another path,” Dal Salim said. “I once served under a chosen of Horcutio. He was not born blessed. We sailed in secret to an isle sacred to the Lord of Tempests, where he plunged into the sea and did not re-emerge for a night and a day. When he did, he was greater in stature than before, and the creatures of the sea listened to his call.”

“Oh, shit,” I said. “I remember someone doing something like that.”

“So do I,” Erid said, glaring at Dal Salim. “So your captain had the Crown of Horcutio?”

“He left it there,” Dal Salim said. “Either way, it is not here.”

“Well, ain’t that a necklace of jellyfish,” Erid said. “There’s got to be a temple here or something with more information. We’re skewered to the deck here, and it’s only a matter of time before that piece of shit in the storm realizes he can break the boats open to get to the meat. Danou, you said you had people on Ethelios. I assume he’s one of them.”

Val inclined his head, a courtly gesture somehow dripping with irony.

“I get enough antics outta her,” Erid told him. “Can you do something or not?”

“In the long term, yes,” Val said. “In the short term, we’ll need to improvise.”

“We’re good at improvising,” I assured Erid.

“No you’re not.”

“You got a better ship afterward!” I said, waving my arms. “Look, it’s us or the great bug zapper in the sky, here. We’ll do our jobs, and then you can get back to exterminating the pirates.”

“We have wounded and we need supplies,” said Erid. “And the ships will need repairs. The repairs can wait. The rest can’t.”

Val let out a thoughtful noise. “Captain, where was the site of the smiting?”

“Other side of the docks,” Erid said. “Can’t miss it. The locals are too scared to even haul away the bodies.”

“Hm.” He turned an analytical gaze on me, and I did not like the look on his face.

*

I heaved myself over the edge of the roof, grumbling at the indignity of it all. Horcutio’s laziest sniper floated patiently above me, motionless and vindictive. If you thought about it, it was really petty of him—to me, personally—to force me to haul a signal relay up four stories of building. The commander had let me borrow his exoskeleton, so it wasn’t like I had to do all the work of giving gravity the finger, but shit, man. Climbing is exhausting.

“Are you in position yet?” Val asked.

“No,” I panted. “Also, I hate you.”

Markus laughed.

“Interesting use of your emotional energy,” said Val. “I suppose backing up your memories must have eliminated your already tenuous fear of death.”

“I fear death just fine,” I retorted.

“You jumped off a three-story building,” Aulof said.

“Without a plan,” Markus added.

“I hate all of you.”

I pulled myself to a kneeling position, taking great care not to look upward. I had my cloak on pretty strongly, trying to hold on to whatever feat of will I’d managed in Val’s live fire exercise a couple hours ago. I hadn’t even noticed myself doing it—whatever it was—but now I was doing it wrong and my cloak felt awkward. I was overcompensating by cranking the power levels, and I knew I wasn’t supposed to be doing that either, but the alternative was getting flash-fried by tall, white, and stormy up there.

“I’ve isolated the signal,” Val said. “We’re ready to go.”

“Give me a moment,” I said.

“Erid would like to inform you that if she dies during this stunt, she’s coming back as a Faceless until she kills you for good.”

I stood up. “Tell her I said to bring it, but it’s more convenient if she holds off for a bit.”

“I have better things to do than facilitate your byplay. Tell her yourself.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m ready.”

The commander pinged us all that the mission was beginning. “Lilith, drop your cloak.”

I flexed the exoskeleton once, then looked up at the robed figure hanging above the city. I released the cloak and flipped him off.

“Hey fartface!” I shouted. “Your aim sucks!”

On my back, the relay device—a more powerful version of the the device we’d used on whats-his-face during the pilgrim incident—broadcast Val’s best impression of the signal from the smote sailors. It seemed he’d ended up with something in the vicinity of “looking real disrespectfully at you,” so hopefully even if it wasn’t the exact frequency that had triggered the Passing Wind to strike before, he’d still get pissed off.

I launched myself into open space, the exoskeleton hurling me farther than even my augmented body could manage. A bolt of energy struck the rooftop I’d been standing on, blasting bricks in every direction. One missed my head by two inches, painfully ripping out some of my hair. I activated my cloak on reflex, which kept me safe until I hit the wall of the building I was jumping for. I decloaked and waved at the angel.

The North Wind apparently decided to switch up his tactics, because the next thing he hit me with was a violent gust of wind. My boots and gloves were affixed to the wall of the building with ethertech, so that basically did nothing. The building was creaking alarmingly, though.

I gave him my best shit-eating grin and then recloaked, climbing down toward the street. Before I left line of sight, I popped back into existence to taunt him again. We made eye contact—“No one’s ever gonna get lost in those eyes, you old geezer!”—and then I left myself drop.

Now the question was, would he follow me? Or was he stuck up there as long as he was maintaining the storm?

I’d left my boots stuck to the wall, so dropping just sent me falling backward until my hands hit the wall. Or at least that was the plan; there was an open window below me, so I had to hastily catch the top of the frame before I accidentally plunged into this poor woman’s room. Apparently with all the lightning and wind, she’d been about to close her shudders, so my ponytail whipped her in the face. I released my boots, flipping over again like some kind of spec ops Jacob’s Ladder, putting me face to face with an angry-looking Estheni woman with a hand over one eye.

“Sorry!” I called. “You should probably close those shutters. Like, real quick.”

“Thief!” she roared. “There’s a thief crawling around the walls!”

“Why does no one ever think we’re trying to help?” I asked no one in particular, then dropped out of sight.

A shift in the win had me looking up, and I saw the North Wind heading straight for me. His face was a mask of deadly concentration and his hair and robes whipped around him as he sped through the air like the angry love child of Superman and Moses. I grinned, whipping out the force mace I’d borrowed from the armory.

The North Wind descended on me with one hand outstretched in a throttling motion. Behind him, coalesced into a wall of water, ready to flatten me. I gripped the force mace in both hands, held it out to the side, and dialed the output into the red.

“Batter up!” I said glibly, and whacked him.

Crack went the force translator, a bubble of pure kinetic energy blasting the rain apart in all directions. North Wind’s arm got blown completely off, saltwater spraying where there should have been blood, and he veered off course into the cobblestones.

The impact knocked me to the ground with a worrying crunch from the signal relay and some painful bruising where it pounded into my back. I groaned loudly and shoved myself up. There was no sign of the body, but the streets were covered in an inch or two of water. Given what had happened with the arm, he could be anywhere.

As I stood watching, a humanoid shape began to rise out of the water.

“Nope nope nope fuck this,” I said, and decapitated him with the force mace.

The head reformed immediately after.

“Oh, come on!” I yelled. “Angels are such fucking bullshit!”

The North Wind finished reforming, robes and all, and gave me a cold smile.

Interloper, he said. Your struggles are of no use.

“Fuck you,” I said. “And fuck this. I’m out.”

I activated my cloak and sprinted away.

You only delay the inevitable, he called after me. But he didn’t pursue.

*

While I had been taunting the angel, Val had been smuggling Erid and Pellonine off the ship under a transmitter that screened the etheric frequencies we considered likely to attract the angel’s attention. I’d delayed enough for them to get away from the ship, so now they were just faces in the crowd. If they could stay out of sight and avoid looking up, they had a straight shot to the palace.

Me, I had a real convoluted, zig-zaggy shot. I kept dodging around random corners and leaping over walls—this exosuit was a blast—zipping along and splashing random civilians as my feet slapped down in the water. I headed uphill where I could—the palace was in the middle of the city, where the elevation was highest—but apparently that didn’t imply, like, a smooth gradient across the island, because I kept ending up at intersections where every exit went downhill.

I ended up having to climb another building to take a look around, and let me tell you, I was getting real tired of that. But it did help me locate the central tower of the island, a giant lighthouse with a signal light apparently made of a million ghostlights. The palace, Erid had told us, was below.

North Wind wasn’t anywhere to be seen either. The storm was still visible, encircling the island along each part of the horizon I could see, but the robed man in the middle was gone.

I was pretty sure he wasn’t following me, because my comm wasn’t registering any spikes of angelic threat, but apparently the storm was also considered part of his body? Angels are etheric entities that project themselves into realspace, so maybe he’d just retracted that appendage of himself.

Had the force mace done more damage than I’d thought? No, he was way too big. That didn’t sound right at all.

I strolled damply up to the palace, which was more like a large house now that I could actually see it. Space was at a premium on Ethelios. Two guards stood at attention near a pair of double doors that had clearly once been gilded but had since had all the gilt scraped off. I looked at them, the extremely closed door, and then an open window on the second floor.

I sighed.

Two minutes of invisible exertion later, I tracked obvious muddy bootprints across some top-quality mosaics, following the sound of Erid’s angry shouts. It was a pleasant sound. It probably spelled bad news for us, since we kinda needed Erid to get her way here, but she was such a pain in the ass that she deserved to be on the receiving end a little bit too.

“My men are dying!” Erid was yelling. “We’re not in violation of any codes of sanctuary!”

“I am bound to maintain emergency supplies of food and medicine,” said another voice. This one was cold and aristocratic, and I took her to be the Magistrate everyone kept talking about around here. “Now that we are besieged by the very gods, Captain, I am loathe to deplete those supplies at the first opportunity. Especially on those who, by all appearances, brought this catastrophe upon us.”

I reached a vantage point, a second-floor balcony with a view into the Magistrate’s audience chamber. The women were seated at a long table with refreshments. Pellonine sat calmly, an untouched plate of food in front of her, while Erid hadn’t even bothered to sit down.

The Magistrate was a young-looking woman, maybe around my age. She was adorned in a psychedelic collection of colored sashes, with her head wrapped in a red scarf—like some kind of Harley’s Angels of the ancient world. Her sleeves billowed out from her arms, which were folded behind her head, and her golden eyes flickered observantly over every move the Estheni made.

There were a handful of other people in the room, most of them women. One of them drew my eye; her name was Ell. Why did I know her name was Ell?

“Uh, guys?” I subvocalized. “Do we know anyone named Ell? Because apparently I left a note about her on my comm, but I don’t remember writing it.”

“Ell?” Val said. “What is she doing here?”

“Then let us make sacrifices to Horcutio,” Pellonine said smoothly. “It is known that the sea is capricious. We will pray for him to turn his gaze away.”

“A wise suggestion,” said the Magistrate. “I thought of it already.”

Ell covered her mouth with her hand, trying to hide laughter.

Pellonine looked expectantly at the Magistrate. “And…”

“The temple,” the Magistrate said icily, “is gone. Flooded. The acolytes were floating, dead, in its halls.”

“Val, who is she?” I asked.

“She’s the one who told us about the hippocampi,” he said. “She was an Oathkeeper—more of a contract lawyer than the ones we met in Vitareas. She specialized in shipping contracts, if I remember correctly.”

He always did.

“Is there nothing that can be done?” Pellonine asked.

“What’s the use of negotiation?” the Magistrate asked. “My people won’t go near your ships for fear of being struck down.”

Now was as good a time as any. I decloaked and jumped, dropping down near Erid and scaring the shit out of her.

“Don’t worry about that,” I said, straightening up. “He’s gone for now.”

Behind the Magistrate, two men in armor raised large clubs of twisted metal and moved to defensive positions in front of her. They looked pretty cool, and would certainly hurt if I let them land a hit on me. Shame I was too awesome for that.

“Who are you?” the Magistrate demanded.

“Just passing by,” I said, brushing off my hakmir. “Anyway, you don’t need to worry about the angel. He’s taking a nap or something. If you move the supplies now, you’d be fine.”

Suddenly, there was another woman in the room. My eyes narrowed as I recognized Cloak Girl from the rooftop earlier today.

“It’s her!” she shouted, pointing at me. “She was one of the ones who went down to the temple!”

Every weapon in the room came out at once.

“You,” I said, pointing at her. “Invisibility is fucking cheating.”

There was a strangled growl behind me, and then Erid stabbed me in the kidney.