Wine of the Gods 05: Spy Wars (14 page)

15 December 3478 / last week of 1361 Local

Karista, Kingdom of the West, Comet Fall

"I got a twitch today, down by those eastern wharf warehouses." Tony Monroe tapped his instrument package. "Tiger squad probably ought to walk the whole neighborhood."

"Good." Damien shivered. The shed made no pretense of being draft proof, and the wagons were cramped for six people sleeping and two on duty. Which they'd started doing when the first major storm front passed through. The old woman who owned the property was more than willing to rent it out for another six months, but almost anything would be better. "I need to start looking for a house in town, weather's been mild so far, but it won't last." The nights were cold enough that Damon had pulled out his magnet laden knit cap and wore it to bed. He'd be wearing it during the day, soon enough. "If it's in a high rent district, we have the synthetic stones to sell. I think we're well enough known that we could be expected to do some trading on our own. I asked Jek Nealy if there was much of a market, as I had connection to people in Verona and Auralia that cut gems. He quoted some prices and I said I'd pass that on and see if they sent me anything. Shall we give it one more month?"

Tony, straight faced asked if he was planning on someplace near the Sooty Duck. All of them but Allie had been there, and they all agreed that what the old ladies lacked in beauty they more than made up for in enthusiasm. But since he'd discovered the place, they blamed it all on him. Probably because the Sooty Duck and strolling down to the Farmers Market were the limits of their outside entertainment.

"Absolutely not."

At Mike's insistence, he'd started taking the jobs on the sea-going end of the extensive wharves. This was the first indication they
'd gotten in a month of looking.

The next day he dropped his five nephews off along the stretch from river barge landings to the big wharves, and picked up locals to handle the crates and boxes he hauled through town. Code popped up as usual, even though Damien knew his way around now. "I heard something about the Temple of Ba'al the other day. Do you know what they were talking about?"

Code looked up at him in surprise. "You didn't hear about that in Verona?" He proceeded to tell Damien an outrageous tale involving either entire infants or merely their testicles being burned on a sacrificial altar, big black goats freezing armies and invisible kidnappers saving a baby. "Except that happened in another town. Here they said evil spirits stole a sacrifice to Ba'al and the statue got up and chased them down."

The loaders chimed in with salacious details, involving a voluptuous blonde, naked of course,
and a black goat. "That was after the king let the Inquisitor General out of prison. Bet he wishes he hadn't let her out." After delivery, they steered him over to see the temple.

The place was impressive, a white marble edifice Code called the temple, and a lower building he said was the museum. There were smoke smudges marring the white exteriors of both buildings, damaged and collapsed facades on both. The other, smaller buildings appeared to be undamaged, but the grounds – it covered an entire city block – were over-grown and neglected.

"So the King arrested everyone when they kept barbequing babies?"

Murph chuckled. "Oh, he didn't arrest everyone, just enough to get the point across. And they didn't eat the babies. They said it gave the God life. But since then, the statue hasn't moved an inch. At least not that I've ever seen. Some people say that if you keep going back it has changed position."

Beezo shook his head. "The main problem wasn't the babies, however horrible that was. They kept a lot of guards, and started getting enough together in one place to be a danger to the Kingdom. Three thousand marched out of here once. The king put a limit on them, and when they disobeyed, he locked them up."

"The king confiscated all their land and buildings. But here they can't decide who owns the land, so no one can sell it or do anything with it." Code informed him. "Except the government, that took all the statues away."

"Some guy gave the Church some family property a century ago, and the family said he didn't have the right to give away family property, it was only a lease, and that there was a mortgage on it to boot, and the Temple also borrowed money against it, and then the government confiscated all of Ba'al's property. So it's in the courts." Murph said.

"You left out all of Ba'al's children. There's five separate groups of them suing too." Beezo pointed out.

"I thought this was a god?" Damien clucked to the horses and got them moving again.

"Yeah, when the worshipers of Ba'al sacrificed their virginity to the god, some of them got pregnant."

That, unfortunately led to descriptions of just how the virgins sacrificed themselves. Damien shook his head in disbelief. "I keep hearing about witches, wizards, mages and gods, but this is the first anyone's told me about an actual living god."

Code looked at him indignantly. "And you with Traveler's horses! Don't you believe in the God of the Roads? Don't you call on him when you're attacked?"

"Well, so far, the only people who've attacked me were you and your friends." Damien pointed out. "Maybe you should have called on the god for help."

"No! He doesn't help thieves. I don't think there is a God of Thieves. Too bad. We need one."

"No you don't. You lot make enough trouble without adding gods to it. If you were more successful, the City Guard would do something about you." He shivered as a gust of wind whipped in his face. Working in all weathers was bringing in the money, but what he wanted was a warm bed. "I need to rent a house closer to the docks." he complained.

Which led to further detours to see the property of various aunts and uncles and friends that could be rented. For too much money.

In the Sooty Duck, Damien pondered finances over a pint and a sandwich. Undisturbed. Almost.

"Most'o y
er little friends decided to go south for the winter, Sussy's got family with a farm, and figured her friends ought to meet her brothers. Jeinah's the only one left, and she's so preggers she's quit working." Barto grinned evilly at him. "You gonna miss those old girls?"

"Probably not for very long."

Barto cackled. "Aye, there'll be more along any time, city never will run out of whores." He shuffled away.

Damien sighed. "I probably ought to not rent a place anywhere near here."

"The problem is." His neighbor at the bar, a complete stranger, frowned at him. "Is that you're trying to rent instead of buy. You can't rent something fit to live in, but if you bought something practically falling down, you could fix it up."

"Really? I hadn't thought about it that way. Damien." He offered his hand.

"Call me Chance. There's place down Bass Lane that could be nice, but that bastard with the green warehouse across the alley scares people away. Go talk to Jinx Mainor about it."

It seemed like reasonable advice. Bass Lane was a narrow street lined with aging, and often sagging, houses. Damien asked around and tracked down Jinx Mainor in a bar. He hated to take advantage of the man, but the
native was pathetically grateful to sell the property. "That's how I got my name. The man across the alley put a jinx on me until I sell it." He looked down at the money in his hands and sighed happily. As he left the property registry office, Damien was glad to see that he passed a bar without a glance. So maybe he wouldn't drink it all.

"You don't believe in jinxes?" Code was looking worried.

"If that neighbor wanted him gone, I helped, so he won't jinx me." Damien shook his head. Primitive superstitions.

The ramshackle little house got a solid dose of Army Can-do that had it sitting up straight and proud in a very short time. The main alteration was to the foundations and cellar. The house had a 'root cellar', a hole dug in the ground, which they promptly enlarged. By the time they were done, it was a full basement with reinforced concrete walls. Water proofed, lined with a fine wire mesh and grounded to prevent EM leakage. Allie moved the electronics from the tiger squad wagon to the basement, and put passive receivers on the roof when they fixed the chimney and retiled the roof.

Mike declared that all their own reports would go out from somewhere well out of town, in the bear squad wagon.

The freight wagon sat out in all weather, but the ramshackle stable held all four horses and the bear squad wagon. The tiger squad wagon
, stripped of all its electronics, came in handy as the weather turned stormy. Damien picked up a lot of work with his covered delivery wagon. Which was just as well. Buying hay in the middle of winter was expensive. Feeding the eight of them—nine, once he realized Code had moved into the hay loft—wasn't cheap either. But they were now in excellent shape to monitor the One. All he had to do was keep everything running smoothly while the techs tried to find the Oners.

It was during the howling storms that he finally had time to rest and relax. "For all the moving about, it was a nice quiet year, an insertion without a ripple." He kicked back with a hot cider. The locals celebrated the Solstice with a bit of feasting and minor gifting. They followed the custom, trinkets
for each other, and for Code, clothing, including shoes.

Sometime around the first of the year Sombrero delivered her colt. All angles and legs and head at first. Bay with just a few white markings. Damien was relieved to see that he looked perfectly normal, and put off indefinitely ending his sister's experiment. Code named him Solstice.

1 Muharram 1364 / winter 1362

Karista, Kingdom of the West, Target World Forty-two

By morning the wind had died and the sun was out. There were some odd sounds . . . Usse was prowling and looking as well.

Ajha tracked the gleeful sounds to the back alley. Usse looked over the fence at his neighbors' small yard and stables. Ajha looked as well. A boy, fourteen or fifteen at a guess, was laughing at the antics of a newborn foal. Ajha felt carefully. The teenager's mind was quite clear and obviously
native.

The kid spotted them and grinned. "One of the mares foaled last night! See?"

The big mare had produced a preposterously scrawny and angular creature which was attempting to run around the tiny yard that usually held their wagon. It appeared to be four legs and a head connected by a minimal spine and ribcage, a brown and white pinto.

"Your wagon is blocking the alley," Usse told the under-aged native.

"But hardly anyone ever uses it."

"That doesn't mean no one ever does. Move it." He stalked back inside. The mother horse put her head over the high fence and sniffed at Ajha.

He rubbed her face. "That's called palomino, the goldish color with the white mane and tail? Right?"

"Yep. And
pinto, of course. All of Damien's horses are pintos." The boy held his hands out and the baby came to be scratched, already trusting people.

Ajha gave the angular creature another look; he really was quite funny looking. Then he ducked back inside.

"They're quieter than the last people there, no noise except for leaving in the morning, returning to swap teams in the afternoon and returning, usually late at night. You can't fault them for their work ethic, and that boy is the only child." Usse scowled. "I suppose I should leave them alone. The last tenants' children started sneaking into the warehouse, and I had to use the Discipline and Controls on them. Brats."

Ajha grinned and gathered up the books and pack that advertised his student status. He'd located the hang outs of the university students, and managed a few conversations. He was lucky today, hustling in from the cold, he found a collection of young men and women also looking like they were in no hurry to rush back out.

Ajha considered the earnest students across the table from him. "University students? I'm taking some classes at City College, just to get up to speed on the local history and all, but it's so different from what we were taught in Scoone. Why don't you let me buy you lunch? I have some questions itching at my brain, and perhaps you can help. I never have understood this thing about gods. I mean, wars between gods?"

The big blond boy sat up eagerly. He was the model of one of the common phenotypes in the Kingdom of the West. So odd, the deep toned skin with the blonde hair, it made him feel almost at home. The One, of course, had a genetically engineered dominant blonde gene that often combined with an Arab or Hindu complexion. Perhaps a natural mutation, similar to it had spread, here.
Or it's their genetic engineering, so similar to ours. Identical to ours—and that needs a great deal of thought, doesn't it?

"Oh, that's mythology. Although sometimes the History department tries to horn in on it, trying to prove something-or-other."

There were five large blocks between King's University and the lowly City College. Mostly given over to houses broken into apartments for students, boarding houses or converted to cheap tea houses and eateries, like this one. Ajha figured this batch of students looked well-to-do enough to be worth cultivating.

"It is history, David. Originally there were thirteen gods,
exiled from heaven and Earth. But in the Golden Ages they proliferated. Actually, historically." The brown haired boy looked sternly at the blond. "It was actually an age of atheism, with lip service paid to the beggar on the corner who claimed to be a God of the Crossroads, and all the military units had a mascot they called the God of War. Every herbwife was the Goddess and the casinos paid women to be their 'Lady Luck'. Very decadent civilization. It fell in a civil war, said to be magical, and suddenly people were back to thirteen Gods. Those are the same Major Gods the Auralians still claim to worship, even though their little shrines are to the God of Masons, or the Goddess of Weavers and so on."

"That was before the comet fell."

"That's a myth, too."

"Is not."

They can't tell myth from history, and neither can I.
Ajha steered the conversation back to the gods. "So what is this Ba'al?"

The girl, Lilly, shook her head. "You Scooners should at least have left the Gods in your history books. Ba'al was the God of Virtue. His worship began in southern Auralia during the Dark Ages, which
might
have been the result of a comet falling from the sky. The Church of Ba'al adopted a lot of the trappings of a bunch of little cults as it moved north. It even picked up your Scooner animosity toward wizards and witches. Well, Auralia as a whole had several periods of almost Atheism. Anyhow, the church migrated north, and its headquarters are here in Karista. What's left of it. The church is supposed to have killed the Black Goat of Scoone just about ten years ago, not that I believe a word of it, mind you. The goat they had stuffed in their museum was an obvious fake. A goat head, heavy ram's horns and a good sized elk for the body, all dyed black. Much too large to be an actual goat. And that statue of Ba'al did not get up and kill a bunch of Apostate followers three years ago. I think the Ba'alists must have been using hallucinatory herbs at their celebration and set the fires themselves."

The two boys were shaking their heads. David, the blonde one, spoke up. "No way. My dad was with General Rufi. He says the statue moved."

"He probably also told you about the mad hatter down the rabbit hole, didn't he?" Lilly smirked.

"He wasn't telling a story about Ba'al."

"Anyway, whatever happened, the King said he'd had quite enough, and outlawed the Church and arrested a bunch of the leaders and locked up the main temple. People sneak in all the time to look at the god. The god's actual body is supposed to be inside the statue." Tian, the darker haired boy, grinned. "Don't believe me? Go take a look."

Ajha wrinkled his nose. "I suppose I ought to go look. So, there was a God of Virtue. What were the other ones?"

"War, Luck, Love, Fertility, Health, Mercy." The girl rattled off, then paused to frown.

"Art, Vice, Eternal Youth, Just Deserts, Travelers, Logic." David finished up.

"No, I think there's only one Goddess of both Health and Fertility. We're missing one." The girl tapped her fingers impatiently.

Ajha snorted. "I think you're missing eleven. I mean, apart from that fellow in Auralia who claims to be a god, and the walking statue, where are they?"

"Oh, Peace, of course. Umm. We don't really believe in actual corporeal gods. They're just the archetypes, the ideals that everyone believes in. I suppose we may give them power through our collective magical ability, but it's all illusionary. What was going on with the statue was weird, but probably misunderstood. That fellow in Auralia is a faker." David was quite certain of his assertion.

"Humph. Next you'll be telling me there's no such thing as magic." Ajha prodded a bit.

"Most of the magic users died in the last Auralian war. Both sides used them, and especially targeted the other side's magicians." Tian again. "And Scoone kills them on sight, as you know. Magic may be extinct. Major magic. They say everyone's a little magic, but what's that mean?"

They all nodded glumly. Ajha paid for their lunches and busied himself with his own. Informative. He chewed and swallowed. "So that's why everyone 'believes' in magic, but there aren't any magic users to be found. They're all dead."
The idiots had let themselves be used, instead of taking over as they had on the One World.

They all nodded, then headed off for classes. He thought long and hard as he walked back to his own history class.
History of the Kingdom. It was the newest of the nations, founded less than five hundred years ago as a commercial venture out of Scoone and Verona to settle the West. Hence the clunky name. And another of the history or myths was that the settlers from Scoone had been magicians, leaving as the majority turned anti-magic. Which would explain the higher levels of the Prophets' genes. But there was also a myth that several gods had left Scoone then, as well.

These gods. Subtle, hidden magic users? Or completely imaginary?
Mentions of them kept popping up everywhere.

That God of War was no hallucination. Could he have been a . . . physical manifestation of the group psyche?

The Books of the One Power showed that the First of the One had lived extraordinarily long lives. If the equivalent, here . . . was it possible that these Gods could be some of Those Left Behind, stranded here, as the First of the One had been stranded on the One World?
Exiled from heaven and Earth?

Ajha was not a deeply religious man; he'd always taken the scientific spin on the Appearance of the Prophets, the ancestors of all of the One. It was obviously the result of gate travel, nothing supernatural, not a miracle. Even if it had happened more than a thousand years before such technology had been developed anywhere in the known Multiverse.
Marooned, I've always thought . . . but they could have been kicked out, exiled like the thirteen here. We know the Prophets weren't genetically identical, so the differences here could just be because of a slightly different founding population of genetically engineered people.

But even he quailed a bit at the thought of surviving compatriots of the Prophets.
No matter how many myths of "The Exile of the Gods" this world had.

"Utter nonsense," he growled under his breath. Letting his imagination get ahead of his reason was not acceptable. He simply needed to find the magic users who had fought Ba'al. And for that he was going to have to ask Usse if he had any contacts with people who had been in the Church, or who had been involved with mentions of magic.

And then he needed to track down this comet disaster. It would explain a lot about the present population. Many small surviving populations, out of contact with each other, hence the new racial types.

A year at City College wasn't going to be enough. Would the Princess commit the time and money for the Team to attend the University?

***

Ajha eyed the metal fence in the bright light of the full moon as he walked along, and noted the overhanging oak tree as an easy way to exit. Entrance, on the other hand, well there was a rusted out spot. He slipped through.

"I can't believe you talked me into this." Wink muttered as he squeezed through. "And I'm not as skinny as you are."

They headed away from the fence. The ground was damp in the
winter night. Ajha was glad he had put this off until the snow was melted, but with the warm snap it was harder to go about unnoticed in the evenings. There weren't many people out tonight, but it would be better to be completely unseen. He'd run out of research material, and it seemed silly to not examine the statues himself.

He stopped in a dark shadow and eyed the bronze statue sitting in front of the main carriage entrance. It was not the usual sort of thing he associated with religions. Vaguely Buddha-like in the cross legged poise, the figure was merely a bit pudgy, not fat, and looked rather muscular under the padding. But the six testicles and the erect phallus just didn't seem very godlike.

"That's disgusting." Wink looked around nervously.

"Most fertility figures are either pregnant women or large bulls. This is just a variation." Ajha slipped up the sidewalk to the next patch of shadow. He avoided the main doors, and sought the smaller side door. The lock was good, but still just mechanical. An application of thin oil, wiggling everything loose with probes, and then adding a bit of telekinesis had it open.

"Did I miss that class in Directorate School?" Wink looked around apprehensively.

"Hey, where's you sense of adventure?"

"Back home. It's hiding under the bed."

Inside, Ajha touched the stud on his light and took a careful prowl. The central room had tiers, as in an amphitheater, but no seats. There was the same seated figure, this one only a little larger than life, on a small stepped platform in the center of the dark room. In the moving light of the small torch the figure looked very life-like. A soft glow of light reflecting off all the white marble showed the perfect detailing. The black stone pillar behind it mirrored his light and gave an illusion of movement. Ajha smoothed down the hair on the back of his neck, and finished walking down to the floor of the amphitheater. The statue was a work of art, the grill it held a crude add on.

"One! All that artistic talent, wasted on a nasty thing like this."

"Don't let Usse catch you cursing like that. The art work . . . why add the tray?" Ajha almost smiled; from this angle it nearly looked like the Holy God was looking down at it in perplexity. "Even he's wondering how he came to be holding it." His voice echoed and he shivered and refused to imagine that the statue had turned its attention on him. He touch the cool brass arm and softened his shields, to see if there was anyone else in the temple.