The ranks of the Godoroth and Shayir seemed short handed on females.
I checked some of the more successful gangs but couldn't tell if they had gone shorthanded, too. They just looked more prosperous. A supply of believers surely helped, but maybe also a knack for drawing power from beyond this reality.
Maybe gods are like sausages and politics and should not be examined closely.
I always expect the worst. That means I can be pleasantly surprised sometimes. This didn't seem to be one of those times. Circumstances appeared to support my most cynical suspicions.
There were thousands of gods there, though most were hangers-on, many even smaller than Fourteen.
The cherub seemed to have settled down. Maybe he realized that nobody was paying him any attention. I knew I was invisible but still felt naked to every divine eye.
There was some subtle movement out there, and tension rising. The hair on my arms tingled.
52
There was big anger in the air again, much worse than before. Fourteen whimpered. Something had happened. The crowd around Lang and Imar were all in a rage.
"We need to leave now," Cat said. Her voice squeaked. "A ruling was handed down. The Shayir and Godoroth refuse to accept it."
Holding hands, in step, each laboring under the weight of a garbage-mouthed curse, we headed for our horses. "Explain," I squeaked. My throat was tight, too. I noticed Magodor drifting through the mob. She seemed intent on tracking us. I wondered why.
"Because of their behavior in town, the senior gods have banished the Godoroth and the Shayir from the Street of the Gods and TunFaire."
"And our boys won't go quietly?"
"Imar and Lang pretty much said, ‘Stick it in your ear!' "
"Can they do that?" Of course they could. Anybody can tell anybody anything, anytime. The tricky part is surviving the aftermath.
"There may be a confrontation."
Oh. "Uh-oh."
"And this is definitely the wrong place for that. This is where the gods originally arrived. It takes a lot longer than ten thousand years for wounds like that to heal. The walls here are tissue."
Which might explain why the little guys thought they could thumb their noses, except that I didn't credit them with sense enough to consider that subtle an angle.
"Keep hiking, girl. Runt, you stop sniveling or I'll kick you out of here."
Fourteen sneered. He wasn't afraid of any mortal. I was too busy staying in step with Cat to follow up.
I glanced back. I didn't see Magodor anymore. I did see a whirlwind of black paper chips and a mist of golden light around Lang, who raised his left fist and pumped his thumb in and out of his clenched fingers in a classic obscene gesture directed at the big boys. Then he struck suddenly right-handed, swinging a sword of lightning at Imar's throat. Just as suddenly, you had Jorken streaking around, the ugly guys looking for throats to crush, Imar flailing around with his own lightning. Trog went berserk with his hammer. Torbit, Quilraq, and others went wild. Black Mona galloped in with her hounds, her weapons flying everywhere.
"Hang on, Cat. Just a second." I watched as the fray disappeared inside a cloud of dust, then a light storm as those incredibly brilliant pops began ripping the fabric of reality. In seconds it began to snow. And Cat and I were moving again, faster than ever.
"Why did you stop?"
"Wanted to make sure I'd seen something right."
"What?"
"None of the females are in that mess, except Black Mona. And she's got more hair on her ass than anybody but Trog." Not even Magodor was involved. Maybe especially not even Magodor. What's an end of the world dustup without a Destroyer?
53
The temperature plummeted. My headache worsened till Cat had to help me stay on my feet. Numerous top god types tried to break up the fight. The Godoroth and Shayir went on like fools with nothing to lose and a complete willingness to take everybody with them. And they seemed to get support from some odds and ends of petty pewter types from other pantheons, mainly of the strike-from-behind, score-settling sort.
We made good time despite being inside the bag. We were behind the knee of a hill when the Bohdan Zhibak lit up with the grandaddy of all light pops.
I went down. "Bet they saw that back in town." My headache grew so intense I blacked out.
I recovered in seconds. "What are you doing?"
"Trying to get us out of this."
Trying to take a powder, actually. Hell. Give her the benefit. Say she was trying to scram because I was out and she couldn't move the sack with all that dead weight in it.
My head didn't hurt nearly so much now. I found the knot, got us out in seconds. Fourteen went catatonic with terror. I restored my cord to normal, wrapped it around my waist again.
There was a lot of noise from the other side of the hill. Cat told me, "We've got to keep going."
"In a minute." I wanted a peek. Just one little look. I was pretty sure my Midnight of the Gods was cooking now. Be a shame not to witness some of the action.
I kept a tight grip on Cat. Just in case. Much as I hate horses and heights, I hated the prospect of walking home more. Especially walking home while suffering a headache and a psychotic parrot. She had the strength to break away. She just didn't try. Ever seen a sea anemone? Thing like a little flower a couple inches across, pale tentacles that just drift around? Maybe not. I had the advantage of an all-but-the-pain expenses-paid trip to remote islands. Anyway, these little guys just sit there with their arms up and when something drifts by they snag it.
A black version thirty feet in diameter with two hundred tentacles fifty feet long was stuck in a hole in the air where Lang and Imar had been banging on each other. It was twenty feet off the ground, tilted forty degrees and wiggling like crazy. "No wonder the gods wanted to come over here."
The thing plugged the hole so tight no cold could come through. The snow had begun to melt.
The gods were active. Frantically. Some tried to deal with the interloper. Some tried to get loose from it. The really big guys were feeding it. I saw Ringo get flung into the middle of the tentacle forest. Many of the visible victims, in fact, seemed to be of Shayir or Godoroth extraction. Guess this will settle that question.
Other old scores were being recalculated as well. A general trimming of the divine population was under way.
There seemed to be enough gods actually taking care of business to push that thing back. While I watched, the hole shrank several feet.
Nog is inescapable. Oh my. Somebody fell through the cracks.
"Time to go."
Cat had gotten it, too. She outran me, though not by much. Wonder of wonders, her flying pals had not left us twisting in the wind. Considering Fourteen's timidity, I'd figured to find them long gone.
Nog is inescapable.
Maybe so. He was closing in fast.
He was so close, in fact, that he leaped and landed a raking blow on my mount's left flank as we went airborne. Which naturally irritated the horse. It gained some altitude, turned, dove, did a fine job of thunking all four hooves off Nog's noggin. Nog said, Ow Stop! That hurts!
The retard had double the vocabulary I had thought. But I didn't dwell on that. I was too busy screaming at the horse to get the hell out of there before I fell off or Nog showed us what other divine talents he possessed—or Magodor caught up or the other gods got bored with feeding each other to their new pet.
The winged horse took my advice.