Gods of Earth (57 page)

But then Sarah sprinted the last of the distance, pointing her swords straight out before her. She leaned forward, hands close together, so that the parallel blades shone together like one weapon.

And she ran them into Hexus’s back and through his chest.

The grip on Chance’s body shattered.

Hexus screamed.

“Yes,” Sarah said clearly, slowly. “Yes, twice.”

Chance saw that Sarah truly stood there. Her short hair was caked brown with dust, her cut cheek inflamed red with infection, her eyes swollen. But she stood with her mouth set in grim determination, both sword hilts tightly gripped.

Chance seized the bar at his feet. He swung it wide and brought it down hard on Hexus, unable to keep from cringing as the heavy iron struck against his own brother’s shoulder.

Chance froze again.

Paul’s eyes looked at Chance and then squinted angrily.

“Bitch!” he said, in Paul’s voice, with Paul’s disappointed invective.

A loud
snap
sounded out. Sarah stumbled back, drawing her swords from Hexus. Snap, snap, snap, snap, snap.… The sound went on. As Hexus turned, Chance saw that Sarah’s swords were breaking, a finger’s width of steel at a time splintering off. A shining pile of bright shards collected on the ground before her feet, ringing as they fell.

In a moment she held only the handles of swords, studded with small torn nubs of steel.

Then Chance heard another
snap
. And Sarah cried out and fell to the ground. Crack, crack, crack. She screamed, writhing.

“Stop!” Chance howled. “Stop, you goddamned foul, filthy devil! Stop!”

Hexus was breaking every bone in Sarah’s body. Her legs, her arms, her fingers. Her jaw twisted aside. Her chest heaved as her ribs crumbled. Her hips turned impossibly as her pelvis shattered.

“Oh God, save us, save us,” Chance whispered. “Oh God, please have mercy and save her.” Tears streamed from his eyes. But Hexus held him tightly.

Hexus turned and faced Chance. He shouted over the sound of Sarah screaming in pain. “Your god does nothing, Puriman! It is silent, impotent. It does not exist. But I—I could save her, Puriman. I could save her as I just saved you. But I will not. There is no god, no god that will save her—
unless
—unless you become that god. Unless you go into the Well and return to redeem. Unless you yield now to me.”

CHAPTER

53

T
his is how I always expected to die
, Wadjet thought, as she shoved with all her might at the modghast’s steel leg that held her down.
I expected to die pinned in some battle between ancient causes for which I care nothing. Murdered by histories I did not choose and long ago renounced
.

The foot could not be pushed aside. It slowly sank down against her. Soon it would sluggishly crush her organs. The death of the wolf had been far kinder.

She looked up at the modghast, at the twisted festering nest of wire and iron and old concrete and animal flesh that made its confused and fetid underbelly and face. And there, above it, floated the Guardian.

Ah, Wadjet thought, if only I were that lucky. But I’m never lucky. I am Wadjet the free, Wadjet the wild, Wadjet who smashes cages and spurns the judgment of elders, Wadjet who spits on dead histories—but never am I Wadjet the fortunate. And this hopeful hallucination is a misfortune; it does nothing but distract me.

But the Guardian was not floating. He was paused at the highest point in the arc of a great leap, left arm stretched straight out before himself, fingers open and held out like a blade, and with his right
arm high above his head he held Threkor’s Hammer from the very bottom of its shaft. And now he was falling, but falling toward her, so that it seemed he was almost still. He came more quickly, accelerating, swinging the hammer down.

Still caught in the modghast’s mouth, Mimir in that instant opened her silver flashing eyes and smiled.

The metal claw lifted away from Wadjet as the modghast began to rear up. Wadjet crawled out of the way, scrambling backwards frantically, and fell onto her back again.

And as she did so, an explosion of tearing metal boomed, and the modghast was torn open. Huge shards of steel and iron burst from it. Wadjet watched, unable to escape, as one round thick panel spun down onto her.

Her world went black.

“Oh God, please have mercy and save Sarah,” Chance cried. Tears streamed from his eyes. Sarah cried out in pain, writhing on the floor behind Hexus.

“Yield, Puriman,” Hexus said. “You cannot win, and the sooner you submit, the sooner she could be saved.”

“You—” Chance hesitated. “You give your word? If I yield, you’ll save her?”

“Yes. My word.”

Chance bowed his head. “I yield.”

But then the air rushed out of the hall. Dust stirred over the desiccated ground. An explosion of tearing metal sounded in the distance, and then instantly upon the sound of it a hulking naked shape occluded the light falling through the doorway, and a voice called out, shaking the ground, the walls, the column of space that formed the hall.

“I am very angry now, Hexus. Very angry. I’m going to hurt you.”

“Atheos!” Hexus spat.

A minute before, Chance would have cried out with joy, but now he could care for nothing but Sarah, twisting in agony on the ground, broken and dying.

Hexus stepped over her. Chance was released. He fell to the Earth and crawled toward Sarah. Just steps away, the immortals smashed into each other with such force that powdered stone fell from the ceiling and rained down, laying a corpse-like color over Sarah’s hair and face.

“Sarah, Sarah!” Chance called, shouting above the explosive thundering of the battle.

She hissed.

“What?” Chance asked. “What, my love?”

“Go,” she managed to get out through her broken mouth. Chance saw then that Hexus had cracked even her teeth. The fractured bloody stumps of them broke unevenly from her gums, and the splinters of her front teeth were spread on her lip. Blood covered her tongue.

“Oh my love,” he whispered, touching her hair. “It cannot end like this. It cannot end like this.”

“Go,” she whispered. “Forget… Guardian. Do it. Save yourself. Save us.”

Chance touched his forehead to hers.

“I’ll be back in a moment,” he said.

He stood. Before him Hexus and the Guardian twisted about each other, hammering and tearing at their bodies and at space and time. They were visible only as a gray and black blur.

Chance picked up the steel bar and ran for the hall of Ma’at.

“Are you a Potentiate?” Ma’at asked Chance, as the lights flickered on and he ran toward the pink cylinder with its school of brains. And then the voices began, “You have returned—” but said no more, as Chance slammed the steel bar into the pillar of glass.

It cracked. Pink fluid beaded on the gnarled fracture.

Thetis had told him, “It is said that one voice gives passage, and the other voices deny passage.”

“Stop!” the voices called.

Chance struck it again. The frozen dogs of Ma’at struggled at their bonds of ages, screeching, biting at the air, twisting their heads. But they remained fixed in place still by eons of corrosion.

“Stop!” the voices demanded. “We are the many voices of the Numin Well, Gatekeeper of Bifrost, immortal of the Penultimate Age! Who are you to harm us? Young Potentiate, you know not what you do!”

Chance held the metal rod far behind his back, his torso fully twisted. “I hear that often these days.” Then he swung with all his strength.

The cylinder shattered, sharp fragments of crystal scattering across the room. The fluid gushed over the floor. Some of the gray brains fell to the stones in shapeless heaps, each with a wet slap. A sweet smell that reminded Chance of fermenting wine rose from the smoking pink liquid. Other brains, still suspended from wires that now cut into their flesh, bent and began to tear. Chance smashed through the few standing glass shards of the cylinder, cutting all the wires, severing every connection.

He tossed aside the heavy bar. It clattered loudly on the stones of the floor. He stepped back into the circle.

The yellow light shone on him.

“You are a Potentiate,” the lone, mechanical voice said.

“Open the Well,” he told it.

The mirrored door before him shimmered, turned transparent. Through it, Chance saw a tunnel of stars, spinning. And perhaps a hundred paces ahead, another door. The door he had seen in his dreams.

He ran past the snapping teeth of the iron dogs, and leapt.

And fell.

“Ah!” he cried. He reached out for something to grip to, and touched a smooth wall of clear glass that separated him from the black and the stars beyond. He could get no purchase, he fell still—

And yet, he did not fall away from the wall.

He was floating, he realized. Not falling.

After a moment Chance adjusted. It was hard to move, like floating in the center of the lake—like floating in water, he realized, but being unable to swim because air is too thin to kick against.

He tentatively stretched, turning in place. The stars spun by. A salt taste rose in the back of his mouth. If there had been anything in his stomach he would have vomited. But after a minute the nausea passed. He found that he could touch both walls with his feet and his one free hand, and by pressing against them get enough hold to move himself. It was cold in the hall. He began to shiver.

He looked over his shoulder. There was the hall of Ma’at, the Anubin warriors, and the broken cylinder, but dim now, as if the door were half closed. Then the passage between places turned opaque, and then became a mirror. Chance gazed only upon himself reflected in the closed doorway.

Slowly, he managed to pull himself forward to the other door. It was featureless, white and oval shaped. A round red disk was set in the wall beside it. He touched this. The door slid aside. As it passed he saw that it had no width: the edge was invisible. He remembered Thetis’s warning.
The door is like the sharpest blade imaginable.
Blood-warm air poured out from the room beyond.

Chance looked back—and caught his breath in shocked amazement. The door was there, at the end of the short tunnel, but beyond it, visible through the tunnel walls, a blue globe floated in the stars, with blue seas over which swirled delicate wisps of white cloud. It filled his view.

Was this the world? The whole world? Where all men and all their trials and pains and hopes dwelled? It seemed so small, almost insignificant, set here floating in the vast black of God’s creation.

But down there Sarah suffered. He could not pause now to marvel at it.

He pulled through the doorway. On the other side he floated in another hall, this one not of glass like the hall behind, but of white metal. There were seven bright shimmering surfaces, like oval pools of water, along one side of the corridor. These were the Aussersein membranes, as Thetis had called them. From these the gods emerged. Past these, no god could go.

He pulled himself down the hall.

One door. Another. Another. He drifted, as quickly as he could push himself, down to the penultimate door. The symbol that Thetis had told him meant
six
was cut into the metal above the shimmering surface.

Chance looked back at the other shimmering surfaces. He remembered the Guardian’s plea:
you could kill them all, after you kill this one
. Or, he realized,
before
.

“Sorry,” Chance said. “But I don’t have the time to kill them now. And after.…”

He pushed through the surface. The hair on his head and skin stood stiffly up, and he felt a slightly painful prickling all over, but then he was through. Dim lights flickered on. He floated in an oval room, little bigger than a closet, with a single black door opposite the Aussersein membrane. It was even warmer than in the hall outside.

A small, simple handle was on the black door. He turned it, and pulled it open.

A white sarcophagus stood behind it, with a lid of thick crystal. Within lay a naked, hairless boy, only a few years younger than Chance, perhaps, but pale and without any scar or even a callus. Wires and tubes covered him. As Chance watched, one of the tubes twitched.