Wine of the Gods 1: Exiles and Gods (14 page)

"I summoned you, damn it. DO MY BIDDING!" Barry put his magical projection into it.

"Bugger off, you idiot." Wolf's comment was indifferent, his attention on his armor.

Edmund prowled around horse and rider. "It worked. I told you I was summoned."

"You said you did as you were bid!"

"It was something I enjoyed, immensely." Edmund
circled, his left hand out of Wolf's sight.

Barry stalked forward. He was glowing with power.

Michael's boxer leaped forward silently.

The black horse lashed out with a hind foot and connected solidly with Barry.

The dog's leap knocked the knife from Edmund's hand and staggered him into the horse's side.

Wolf fumbled the helmet, dropped it and snatched the sword as the horse spun away from the
men and out into the open.

Edmund waved a hand at the
men and women laying around in drunken stupors. They started rolling over, climbing to their feet. Staggering toward Harry and Michael.

"Harry, can you get back to your boat?" Wolf grabbed the reins
. "I think we need to get out of here." The horse high stepped over unconscious women and  turned to view the people now moving toward them.

"The horse won't fit!" Harry started backing away. Some of the moving bodies were between him and the quay.

"I'll bubble him, get going, the faster the better." Wolf frowned at Michael. "Do I know you?"

"Call me Michael, also know
n as the God of Just Deserts. Tell your horse to not step on my puppies." Michael turned and staggered toward Harry.

Oh right. He's drunk.
Harry remembered something . . . high school football? He lowered head and shoulders and charged at a closing gap between two local men. He knocked them right off their feet and kept going. A woman threw herself down in front of him. His leap caught a fold of her linen dress and he hit the ground hard. He rolled over. A man with a club swung at his head, but the club fell from nerveless hand as his eyes rolled up. Wolf galloped by, his sword trailing blood. He took out two more men, then galloped back to help Michael's dogs remove all threats. Michael helped Harry stand, and they staggered downhill, mutual support. The dogs followed, looking back, teeth showing.

At the wharf, they tumbled aboard. The horse ski
dded to a halt at the edge and Wolf leaned to slice the lines. The ship started drifting away. The dogs leaped the gap with ease.

The black stallion reared again . . . and was gone.

Harry swallowed to equalize pressure in his ears. The world suddenly looked normal, no huge magical
thing
blanketing everything. Less bright. More real. The bodies uphill were suddenly horrible, not part of some play, some fantasy. Innocents, controlled by the brothers, used as weapons, and killed by Wolf and the dogs.

He
blinked at the empty pier for a long moment. Then he ran out the oars and started putting more space between himself and anything the twins might come up with.

"Harry? Do you know how to teleport?" Michael looked more stunned than drunk.

Harry swallowed. "No. I didn't think it was possible."

"I'll
definitely come with you to Tripoli after all. I want to know what Wolfgang just did."

"Wolf . . . gang?"

***

Jet touched down, and froze.

Wolf lowered his plain iron sword in a series of jerky movements. They were back in front of the winery. Romeau and Chris ran up and stopped, as if afraid to touch and see if they were real.

He swallowed. "How long were w
e gone?" No armor, no saddle or bridle. He slid off the colt, who didn't seem to be as large as he'd been just a moment ago.

"Maybe fifteen minutes. What happened?" Romeau froze, staring at the sword.

The horse ducked his head and laid it against Wolf's chest, as if looking for reassurance. Wolf looked at the blood dripping from the sword, and it dropped from nerveless fingers. He wrapped his arms around the horse's head and leaned on him. "Oh. This is not good."

It happened again, four days later.

It was early morning, the sun was barely up. He was tending his grapes, checking, almost ready for harvest . . .

Then he was on the rearing horse, armor
, sword, the works. In a village. At least two houses ablaze. A screaming woman being dragged away by a man with an AK in his other hand. The man's eyes widened as he spotted Wolf. He released the woman, brought the AK around . . .

Shield. Wolf
knew how to shield. And did it as the gun coughed. Stinging pain up his arm, then jolts as the rest of the burst was bounced. Jet charged forward and he swung the sword, coordinated with the shields so he could . . . chop the man's head off. He jerked back in shock.
I don't even know what's going on. He could have been rescuing a hysterical woman.

Galloping hooves beyond the smo
ke. He rode toward the sounds. Cattle were being driven off. Stolen or saved from the fire? Another woman, screaming, being hauled onto a horse.

He took aim with Jet and rammed them. The girl fell free, landed on her feet and bolted for the burning house. The
other horse was staggered. The rider cursed, and kicked it into a gallop, out the gates. Silence, relative silence.

Then he thumped down in his vineyard.

He jumped up and scanned around. Jet trotted up, from the end of the row where he'd been grazing. The horse, was sweating and smelled of smoke. A twinge of pain, and he looked at his left forearm. A long straight rip, dripping blood. Not deep. He teased a bit of metal out of it. A deformed steel ring, such as one might find in chain mail.

Romeau questioned him while Gisele muttered and tried some herbs and spells on his arm.
"If it was still dark there, it must have been one of the villages way to the west. One of us will need to go there, ask about what happened, and who those raiders are." He stood and paced. "I wish Harry'd hurry up and get back. I want to hear his version. Damnit, we're not gods. How can someone summon us?"

"I think it's the collective subconscious." Giselle tied off the ends of a rather bulky bandage. "Do you remember when we arrived? I felt like the whole world was in my head. I shut them
out, first the strangest ones, then even the ones I agreed with. But I think we gave them access to our brains. And our abilities."

"I can't teleport." Wolf wiggled his fingers. "It was a pretty shallow cut, for all this wrapping."

"I'm testing a mixture of herbs and spells on you. Leave it on for a couple of hours—in fact, come back here then and let me see it. It might need stitches." She turned away, then glanced back at him. "And when you figure out how to teleport on purpose, come teach me. It sounds really handy."

Romeau fingered the distorted
ring. "I don't understand why this ring didn't disappear with the rest of your imaginary armor. And next time, be quicker with a shield. Can't have the God of War getting killed. Ruin all our reputations."

***

Harry and Michael landed the next day.

The dogs ran around in a
paroxysm of joy, to be on solid land again. Until Vito snapped at them to stay away from the livestock. They eyed him hungrily, and Michael hastily called them to heel.

The Bus Kids laughed, and plied the big dogs with snacks from the butcher shack.

"We're still hunting nearly every day, so there's plenty of offal and bones." Matt handed out huge bloody femurs, and the dogs settled down to gnawing.

There was a crash from the kitchen. Michael winced. The dogs got some fresh pancakes. The second round made it to the table intact, and Michael dug in. "I don't think I've
kept a meal down all week. From now on, I'm walking."

Harry grinned; the nearest dog growled faintly.

Romeau walked in and slapped down his note pad. "So, tell me all about Cairo."

"What about it?" Harry eyed the pad. "What are you doing?"

"Analyzing a very odd thing that happened to Wolf. Now stop asking questions, I don't want to lead you."

Harry and Michael swapped glances.

"Well, Harry, so much it being a hallucination."

"Talk. Start at the beginning."

"Well. Michael sailed across the lake with me. We landed in Cairo . . . "

They talked for hours.

"God of Just Deserts? Who invented such a cracked Pantheon? I trust they didn't give me a name."

Harry snickered. "This from the god who lives in the Temple of Love?
Performs all the marriages around here?"

"Oh no. I'm no cupid."

Snickers all around.

Michael'd been eyeing his dogs, as they got restless. "Look, I'm about to overstay my welcome, so it's been nice seeing you all again, even though I don't remember you worth beans."

Harry got up too. "You know, we're a lot more concentrated than Red River was. I'll bet you could live far enough away to not affect everyone twenty-four hours a day, and still walk into town whenever you wanted to."

"I think I need at least ten miles, maybe twenty, between me and anyone else." Michael whistled his dogs in close.

"Well, I happen to know where there's a spring to the east of us, probably a bit over ten miles away. And you still haven't opened up the bubble on your shoulder. I'll show you the spring, and you can experiment with that distance, eh?"

A pack of teenagers, mostly boys, mostly not magical, sneered at them. "Look another moron with brain piercings and delusions of godhood."

The dogs stiffened, hackles rising.

Michael sighed. "Harry . . . did it ever occur to you that I might deserve myself? And my dogs.
Heel.
"

Out of the gates, the
four dogs ran ahead, and Harry winced as they eyed the cows.

"Poor cows deserve nothing but pity. They won't bother the cows unless a really nasty character owns them." Michael lengthened his stride though, and
Harry angled them to the southeast.

The land was rockier and dryer, the limestone rising to the surface and getting wind carved into odd shapes
. Michael relaxed, and Harry realized his leg wasn't hurting at all.
I really wish someone other than Barry had provided that healing, though.

"Do you think we have any responsibility, for what Barry and Edmund are doing?"

Michael shook his head. "No. I mean, no more than if they were magic-less tyrants whom we'd never before met. We . . . have a responsibility to, oh,  hell. I don't know. Start a war? Not hardly. But . . . okay, while I was drunk it was really funny, all those older women mobbing them. But no one should have the ability to
make
people behave like that."

"I think you were just twisting their siren call to all the young pretty women."

Michael shrugged. "I shouldn't have had anything to do with it."

They walked on in silence. A slight dip in the surface, with a grove of trees surrounding the
oasis. Not that they were in a full-blown desert, but . . .

"Oh, nice." 

The dogs leapt into the pool. It was about twenty feet across, and an antelope leapt away on the far side. The dogs floundered out and gave chase. Michael laughed and fingered the bubble on his shoulder.

He turned and walked out to the east side. "Every foot of additional insulation is important. And something tells me I need a wide open space for this."

He also had a building. A big one. A mansion, ornate and . . . huge. He'd even grabbed the front patio. Two water fountains, each with a pair of naked nymphs trying to pour water over each other. A ballroom. A small movie theater. A huge dining room and auto-kitchen on the second floor. Thirty-eight bedroom suites on the third floor. In the basement, tiers of marble seating around a platform.

"Theatre in the round." Michael's forehead wrinkled. "I can't remember the name. Some famous Broadway actor. He did a few movies, but mostly live theater. He died, and about eighteen heirs were squabbling over the will. So I took it all."

"It's . . . uh."

"Yeah. Pretty funny,
especially for one man and four dogs, out in the desert. I wonder if I can get the fountains working?"

Harry laughed, and showed him Abram's one way pipe flow spell.

Harry didn't linger
long in Tripoli. He took  another load of glass up the chain of lakes. He found his basic spells had spread, and that new groups of magicians were forming, and starting to work collectively. Some villages had been abandoned; generally he found the people in the next successful town.

One
small village was burned to the ground.

He found the survivors in Gibraltar.

"I don't know why I yelled that." The woman had the speckled complexion of someone recovering from multiple small second degree burns. "But there he was, the God of War. He cut that man's head right off! Then he galloped off and saved Jackie."

A girl of perhaps eighteen nodded vigorously, in the background. "I've started carrying a knife, in case they try to raid here."

"We were out hunting, most of us men. We left before dawn, as soon as there was any light to see by. At first we thought they must have a spy inside, but they might have just been lucky. Picked the right morning to hit us. They had clubs, didn't actually kill anyone, but some of the kids had some bad burns." The old man tossed a worried glance at the small huddle of women and children. "I liked the idea of just us four families out there. But it won't work. We'll have to stay here or move to one of the other large towns. Start over. Not quite from scratch, but we lost half our livestock. Bastards."

"All the clothing we weren't actually wearing, linens and bedding, furniture." One of the other women sighed. "Every single one of those stupid chickens.
The grain, the hay."

Harry told them about the other large towns that were attracting people along the lake shore, and when they decided they wanted more distance between themselves and the bandits, he spent a week ferrying the families to Algiers while the men drove their surviving cattle overland.

In Algiers, Harry worked with the local magicians. They were getting very strong, figuring out things themselves. Thinking back, Harry realized that most of the towns that were growing had power users. Either a "pyramid" of witches or a "compass" of mages. Often both. And multiples of each. Or gods. Red River and Gibraltar were the only exceptions he could think of, and Gibraltar wasn't growing very fast.
Even Red River had Michael there, for awhile.

Cause or effect? He studied it, talked to people.

The towns seemed to be coalescing around the more powerful magician groups. The men were calling their groups "circles" or "compasses" and they all found eight people worked best, joining together to apply concentrated power where needed. The women—now calling themselves witches—still found three-woman groups to be most effective. For large projects they used three groups of three, and adopted the terms triad and pyramid. Like the men, they were codifying and analyzing their abilities.

How much tech can we duplicate with magic? And if the answer is "a whole bunch" where does that leave the non-magical?