War Maid's Choice-ARC (2 page)

And as he’d paced the confines of that lesser realm, contemplating the far vaster one he’d held so tantalizingly within his fingers, it had come to him.

The entire universe—the original, un-shattered universe, his father’s great creation—had broken with Orr’s power. It was as if a glass had been dropped upon a stone floor, and the shattered bits and pieces had flown in every direction. It had been impossible for anyone, even a god, to predict where any of them might land, far less where
all
of them might end their bouncing journeys across the stone. Now they lay scattered, tumbled into confused windrows without rhyme or reason, separated from one another and yet longing on some deep, fundamental level to become whole once more. To become
one
once again. And as they lay, they could be gathered back up by the proper set of hands. They could be...reassembled, put back together, and the hands which put them back together would control what they became on the day that they
were
one once more.

If he could reclaim them, gather enough of them together in the pattern of his choosing, he could remake them not as a reflection and restoration of
Orr’s
power, but of his own.

Of course, that infernal busybody Semkirk had reasoned it out before him, and his accursed brothers and sisters—even that flighty fool Hirahim and that pathetic simpleton Sorbus—had set themselves to restoring the broken bits and pieces themselves. But there was a catch. Those bits and pieces had minds of their own. They were...malleable. They could be shaped, convinced, seduced, even
taken
, but only from within. In the end, they would choose their own fates on the basis of their own decisions, and those choices—and
only
those choices—would decide whose hands they came into in the fullness of time.

It was a race between him and his brothers and sisters, and so he’d taken to himself a wife and begotten children of his own to aid him in the struggle. Even with them, he was badly outnumbered, but not all of the Gods of Light were equally suited to the nature of the struggle between them. And the most ironic thing of all was that individual strength was of secondary importance, at best. They were forced to contend for each reality separately, individually, and the nature of the contest leveled the difference between their abilities.
Any
god could have destroyed any single fragment of that broken power, yet none of them knew how
many
fragments could be destroyed before the whole failed, and so none of them dared to destroy any of them. They must confront one another within the limits and constraints each individual mortal reality could endure, until that reality reached its tipping point and fell as the possession of the Light...or of the Dark.

And in the fullness of time, enough of those individual realities would fall to one side to give that side possession of them all. Which meant, that despite his failure all those ages ago, Phrobus might yet win all he’d sought.

But that could happen only if those mortals he loathed with all his being—loathed because they ultimately held his fate in their hands—
gave
him that victory. Fortunately, only a tiny fraction of them realized the prize for which the gods truly contended, and their puny lifespans made most of them shortsighted and easily duped. Many of them could scarcely
wait
to give themselves to him and to his children, and his hatred for them only made the taste of their souls still sweeter.

Yet not all of them were blind, not all were easily seduced. Their resistance to the Dark ran through their realities like ribs of steel, and some of them...oh, yes,
some
of them were far more dangerous than others.

“All of you know how much Tomanāk has poured into Orfressa,” he said now. “All of you know how many possible outcomes run through that single cable of universes.”

His eyes burned even hotter as he glared at them, his anger smoking in the air as he contemplated how close they’d come to victory, to seeing that reality—
all
the facets of that reality—safely locked into their possession twelve hundred of the mortals’ years ago, only to have it slip through their fingers at the last moment. It lay now like a strand of fire wrapped in shadow, its central core surrounded by the penumbra of all its potentialities, not quite within his grasp, not quite beyond it, and the long wait to determine the side to which it must ultimately fall burned in his bones like slow poison. To be sure, centuries were but the blinks of an eye to one such as himself. Or they should have been, at least...had he been one bit less aware of the galling chains the mortal concept of “time” had set upon him.

“Father, the advantage is still ours,” another voice said. “No one in all of Norfressa—except, perhaps, Wencit—even imagines what’s preparing in Kontovar. Surely—”

“Don’t speak to me of ‘
surely
,’ Fiendark!” Phrobus snapped, turning the full power of his glare upon his eldest son. “There was a time when Orr’s power was ‘surely’ mine! And I tell you that I’ve looked long and hard into the future of this reality and all those spinning from it, and I see confusion. I see uncertainty. And I see threads of Tomanāk’s weaving that lead to places I
cannot
see. Places where this reality—
all
of these realities, and all the myriad others which might spring from them yet—fall from our hands into his unless we cut those threads of his, and do it quickly.”

“But how, Father?” Carnadosa asked. “As Fiendark says, the advantage is still clearly ours, and Tomanāk can no more act openly in Orfressa than we can. So how can those threads of his snatch it away from us now?”

“The answer to that lies in those places beyond my vision.”

Phrobus growled his reply, and Carnadosa frowned as the thunder outside the palace rolled darker and louder. Her father was stronger than any of them, and his ability to see the strands of future and past was greater. Yet there were limits even for him, for no one could predict what future any given reality would experience. There were too many variables, too many uncertainties, and until an event actually occurred, all possible outcomes of that event were equally valid, equally possible. Some were more
likely
than others, and outcomes became increasingly more likely—or unlikely—as a reality approached that particular event. Yet that uncertainty meant no one could predict precisely what would happen, or exactly
how
it would come about, and that, too, was the fault of those maddening, unpredictable mortals.

Still...

“But it continues to depend upon Bahzell, doesn’t it?” she asked. Her father glared at her, and she bent her head slightly. “I ask because that’s my own reading of this reality, Father. If yours is different...?”

She let her voice trail off on a questioning note, fading into the rolling peals of distant thunder, and her father glared at her. Yet the question lingered, requiring answer.

“Yes,” Phrobus replied after a fulminating moment. “Bahzell is the key, but perhaps not precisely as you think. It revolves
about
Bahzell; yet there are so many elements in play, and Tomanāk has worked so skillfully to confuse the possibilities, that I truly can’t say it depends
upon
him. Still, certain aspects are clear enough, aren’t they? The hradani are supposed to be
our
tools, not Tomanāk’s. They and the Sothōii are supposed to be at one another’s throats, not
allies
, and these accursed ‘war maids’ are an entirely new ingredient. Whatever else may be happening, Tomanāk and his meddling ‘champions’ are in the process of creating a fundamental realignment which threatens all our future plans for that reality, and Bahzell is the catalyst that brought all of them together.”

“I would never question your analysis, Father,” Fiendark said, his voice an alloy of obsequiousness and arrogance, “yet it seems unlikely to me that anything Tomanāk might accomplish where the hradani and Sothōii are concerned could truly threaten our ultimate plans.”

“You think not?” Phrobus returned his attention to Fiendark.

For better or worse, Fiendark was his senior deputy, yet there were times when his son’s delight in destruction for destruction’s sake got in the way of more...constructive approaches to a problem. He was too likely sometimes to think in terms of simply destroying an opponent to look for more subtle opportunities...or threats.

“I admit what I
have
seen shows it could be highly inconvenient,” Fiendark replied now. “Their efforts might make our task more difficult, yet what if it does? In the end, the destruction will only grow greater and even more complete as their resistance delays their final defeat, and that can only serve our own ends.”

“That might seem reasonable enough,” Phrobus conceded after a moment. “But Tomanāk’s invested too much in the effort for me to simply assume it to be true, and I don’t like those threads I can’t see. No. We will assume
nothing
, and we will bring this Bahzell Bahnakson and all those other threads which revolve about him
to
nothing. Am I understood?”

Heads nodded around the throne as fresh thunder exploded outside the palace to underscore his question.

“Good,” he said with a thin smile. But his smile was only fleeting, and a frown replaced it as he gazed at Carnadosa thoughtfully.

Of all his children, she was the most subtle. Indeed, there were times when even he sometimes wondered exactly what game she might be playing. And, whether he chose to admit it or not, she was the one who most worried him. Not because he thought she was actively plotting to supplant him, but because if she ever did decide to overthrow him as he’d attempted to overthrow his own father, she was the one most likely to succeed. She was unimpressed with the taste for cruelty which infused Sharnā, just as she disdained Krahana’s hunger and Fiendark’s lust for destruction. But neither did she have any use for Krashnark’s perverse sense of honor. Pragmatism was all that mattered to her, and she was a past mistress of the indirect approach. Very few of her victims ever even suspected her presence until she pounced from the shadows.

Yet she was also capable of direct—
very
direct—action when it seemed called for, and her status as the patron of dark wizardry and knowledge made her followers a force to be reckoned with in any mortal reality. It was possible—indeed, probable, given the outcome—he should have given her primary responsibility for the last attempt to disrupt Tomanāk’s plans for this Bahzell Bahnakson, whatever those plans might be. He’d chosen not to because it had seemed a case in which wizardry couldn’t be openly utilized—not yet, at least. And, he admitted, because Shīgū had been so insistent on doing it
her
way.

But now his options were limited. Sharnā and Shīgū had both been badly damaged in their recent confrontations with Tomanāk and his accursed champions, and it would be mortal decades yet before even Krahana fully recovered.

There were times Phrobus was forced to admit there were at least some advantages to the fashion in which Tomanāk and the other Gods of Light interacted with mortals. Their insistence that their “champions” had to give their allegiance knowingly, aware of the implications of their choices, made it far more difficult for them to enlist followers, and their refusal to simply enter into those champions and turn them into avatars limited their freedom of action. Seduction and corruption made recruitment far simpler for the Dark Gods, especially for mortals too foolish to suspect what their ultimate fate would be, and far more could be accomplished by turning those strong enough to bear the touch of godhood without being instantly destroyed into mere appendages. Not every mortal
was
strong enough, by any means, to be turned into an avatar, but those who were became conduits and anchors—doorways (so long as they lasted), through which their masters and mistresses could reach directly into the reality of mortals at will.

But Tomanāk and his fellows’ refusal to suborn the wills of mortals meant they could act in the mortal world only when they were allowed to—when they were
invited
to—by those who’d chosen to serve them. And their refusal to burn out their servants limited the total amount of their own power and presence with which they could invest them. No mortal could long survive the direct embrace of godhood, even when the god in question sought to protect him, and so the Gods of Light treated their champions with silk gloves. They gave only so much of their power as their servants could channel, and in the process they surrendered control of what their champions
did
with that power.

No Dark God would give up that control, nor would one of them worry himself unduly over the fate of one of his servants. Avatars existed to be used, after all, even if they tended to be...consumed quickly. Replacing them could be inconvenient, yet that was acceptable, because while they lasted, they gave their masters direct access to their own reality, and there were always others who could be recruited to replace them afterward.

Yet there was a disadvantage to that, as well, as Sharnā and Shīgū had both discovered. It was one thing for a god to decide to withdraw his power from an avatar in an orderly fashion; it was quite another when that avatar was destroyed
before
he could withdraw. When that happened, the power, the fragment of his own essence, which had been poured into his mortal tool was lost with the avatar. Worse, it left him temporarily maimed, unable to reach back into that particular reality until the strength he’d lost regenerated itself once more, and that was precisely what had happened to Sharnā and Shīgū.

Sharnā had largely recovered from the damage he’d taken when Bahzell slew Harnak Churnazhson, but he’d been foolish enough to invest even more of his essence in the sword with which he’d armed Harnak. He’d seen that as a way to ensure Harnak’s victory and
avoid
his avatar’s destruction, but it hadn’t worked out that way, and the sword touched by his essence now lay at the bottom of the sea. It would be centuries before he recovered from
that
, and until he did—or until the sword could be recovered from Korthrala’s keeping and returned to him—he had no personal access to that reality.