Jurtan followed. Dortonn, obviously ignoring the banks of strange equipment on hand, had already made it to the other side of the spacious room, where a comfortable sitting area of divans and easy chairs around a low serpentine table had been set aside atop a dais. A human figure was slumped in one of the chairs, and another figure had keeled over across it. Dortonn, looking as always as though he was about to collapse himself, was gingerly approaching the both of them. He took a careful look, then equally carefully prostrated himself. “My master,” he proclaimed.
“Which one?” said Svin, approaching on his habitually silent feet.
“On the top.”
“You’re sure he’s not dead?”
“Of course not. You see - his chest rises. True, he may not be pleased with the body -”
“I wouldn’t be,” Svin said. The body in question had apparently suffered recent exposure to fire, explosion, and from the evidence partial dissection, was streaked with blood and bile, and had only one serviceable hand. The remains on the bottom, however, were worse. “However, if it was me I would be stuck with it,” he continued. “Can your master pick and choose?”
“Of course. He is, after all, a Death, and although this is a rude breach of etiquette -” he indicated the shrunken-head mummification of the lower occupant of the chair, and the positioning of the upper occupant’s hand on the lower’s waxy throat “- it is clearly an emergency. He is not inhabiting his original body but one that was conveniently close to hand. I believe his original body to be lost, but he is a god; he can grow a new one. Tissue samples will have been kept, and -”
“Look at this,” said Jurtan, coming up the steps to the dais. He was carrying gingerly, in a cloth, some small parcel, a parcel that had stained the white cloth red. Carefully avoiding crimson drips onto the carpet, he spread the bundle out on the coffee table.
“A finger,” Svin noted. “Partially gnawed.”
“Yes, but the ring,” said Jurtan. “That’s the ring.”
“Powerless now,” proclaimed Dortonn. “I will keep it as a souvenir of - what?”
“I don’t think so.” Jurtan had already whisked the thing away, and was stowing it in his pack. Maybe Max or Shaa or Karlini would want it, and maybe he could barter it to them in exchange for support against his father; plus, he didn’t trust Dortonn. Not that he trusted Max or Karlini, or even Shaa, completely and without question, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t try to use them as allies. Wasn’t that what they’d all been trying to teach him, after all?
“Should he be moved?” asked Svin, again indicating Dortonn’s master.
“Laying hands on a god is presumptuous,” Dortonn muttered, “but these are special circumstances, and he does appear to have finished with his feeding. This other is barely now a husk.”
Jurtan was having his first good look at the person in question. Although he had yet to glimpse the face, the whole seemed strangely familiar. Now, as they respectfully lifted the incarnate Pod Dall to transfer him to the adjoining sofa, Jurtan realized that his impression had been founded in fact. His music chimed in with a belated confirmation, recapitulating the theme he had heard when the body’s original owner had wooed his sister and had eluded him in the traffic and had transported her into near-disaster at the Karlini conflagration. “How much is left from whoever this guy was before?” he said.
“Easy to ask,” said Dortonn, “difficult to answer. If - ah.” He sank to the floor in another obeisance. Svin and Jurtan joined him. The eyes of the body on the couch had opened.
“Dortonn?” croaked his master.
“Yes, my lord?” he croaked back.
“Revenge.”
Dortonn sighed. “If that is your will, my master -”
“Not against you, you idiot. Get me a drink of water.”
Jurtan leapt up. He had noted a well-endowed bar on his way across the room. Would Pod Dall want ice? He splashed water from the decanter into a goblet and scooped up a load of ice balls from the freezer into another. When he scurried back Svin had lifted Pod Dall so that his head was reclining on the couch’s plush leather armrest. With his own hand the god lifted two ice balls and plopped them into the water, then after a moment’s deliberation added a third. “Ah,” he said with satisfaction, after a long closed-eye sip. “Much better. Thank you.”
Dortonn was wringing his hands. “May I get you something else, my master? Would you rest now?”
“There are things that must be done,” Pod Dall said sternly, sounding for the first time as though he might actually be a god. “I have had far too much resting lately. Although I was not asleep in the ring, it was rather the extreme of dissociative states, and in any case my ability to influence events was limited. I may have awakened...” His voice trailed off. Jurtan thought it was not as though he had just lost his strength, but rather had reconsidered the wisdom of continuing with that particular revelation. Jurtan had caught just a hint of another musical motif that rang familiar, down below the majestic chords accompanying the words of the god, as mundane as the words themselves might be. What motif was that - or whose?
“As I say,” continued Pod Dall, “I may have at last awakened fully, into this trap of a body set for me by Arznaak the schemer, but his snare has failed to bring me down. It is instead time for those who have hounded me to be brought low.”
Dortonn took a deep breath. “But my master - if I make speak freely - at the moment in this body you are barely alive, and perhaps not even that for very long. How do you expect -”
“I am not ready to retire. There is always enough energy for revenge,” Pod Dall breathed grimly. “This is a central tenet of godhood. What did you expect?”
“I thought you were the Conciliator,” Jurtan blurted out.
The gaze scrutinized him. “In some circles, yes. In others, no; you are already aware I employed Dortonn. One cannot conciliate without strength to compel respect. Now,” he said, addressing them all, “tell me this.”
The Creeping Sword. That was it, Jurtan thought, that was whose melody he’d heard; the Creeping Sword. Had Pod Dall awakened Iskendarian from his hiding place within the Creeping Sword? Judging by the trouble that had caused, it sure didn’t establish Pod Dall as a player looking to keep collateral damage to a minimum. And now they were supposed to help him in the next stage of his plan?
Suddenly Jurtan was wishing he had gone with his father after all.
Someone was moaning piteously. Someone close by sounded absolutely miserable. From the rank odor, someone had recently been sick to their stomach.
Somebody was still sick to their stomach.
Then I realized I was feeling the combined sensations of nausea and gill-greenishness far too personally for these to be purely vicarious observations. My head was pounding; actually, it felt like it had been pounded out so much from the inside as to have inflated it to the size of a watermelon, which was only precariously attached to the rest of my body. I didn’t want to look in a mirror, ever. I was afraid that I’d find that my brain-roommate had punched through my skull and out my forehead in the process of evacuating the premises.
Evacuating? Roommate?
Wait; I’d left Iskendarian behind, trapped in the Scapula’s web. But I was still here, even if at the moment I didn’t feel like being much of anywhere. How was that possible? If Iskendarian was the real owner of this brain and body and I was only some ruse thrown up by him as camouflage how could he be evicted, leaving me in sole possession?