There was a strange domed leather tent in the center of that inhuman army, a ribbed, glossy black tent of gigantic dimensions. But then it moved, opening, spreading wide—two great wings, curved and batlike. And then rising up from under the shelter of those wings, was a being huge beyond imagining, a creature of total darkness with a head shaped like an inverted wedge and with flaring, pointed ears. Two slitted eyes blazed in that awful absence of a face, and two enormous arms stretched forth hungrily. Lightning seethed beneath the glossy black skin, and the earth upon which the creature stood smoked and burned.
Abriel was strangely calm. He lifted his visor to look full into the face of Hell. ‘At last,’ he murmured, ‘a fitting opponent.’
And then he clapped his visor down again, drew his warlike shield before his body, and raised the sword he had carried with honor for over half a century. His unpalsied hand brandished the sword at the enormity still rising before him. ‘For God and Arcium.’ he roared his defiance, set himself, and charged directly into obliteration.
8
To say that Edaemus was offended would be the grossest of understatements. The blur of white light that was the God of the Delphae was tinged around the edges with flickers of reddish orange, and the dusting of snow that covered the ground in the little swale above the valley of the Delphae fumed tendrils of steam as it melted in the heat of his displeasure.
‘No!’ he said adamantly. ‘Absolutely not!’
‘Oh, be reasonable, Cousin,’ Aphrael coaxed. ‘The situation has changed. You’re holding on to something that no longer has any meaning. There might have been some justification for “eternal enmity” before. I’ll grant you that my family didn’t behave very well during the war with the Cyrgai, but that was a long time ago. Clinging to your injured sensibilities now is pure childishness.’
‘How couldst thou, Xanetia?’ Edaemus demanded accusingly. ‘How couldst thou do this thing?’
‘It was in furtherance of our design, Beloved,’ she replied. Sephrenia was more than a little startled by the intensely personal relationship Xanetia had with her God. ‘Thou didst command me to render assistance unto Anakha, and by reason of his love for Sephrenia, I was obliged to reach accommodation with her. Once she and I did breach the wall of enmity which did stand between us and did learn to trust each other, respect and common purpose did soften our customary despite, and all unbidden, love did gently creep in to replace it. In my heart is she now my dear sister.’
‘That is an abomination! Thou shalt not speak so of this Styric in my presence again.’
‘As it please thee, Beloved,’ she agreed, submissively bowing her head. But then her chin came up, and her inner light glowed more intensely. ‘But will ye, nil ye, I will continue to think so of her in the hidden silence of my heart.’
‘Are you ready to listen, Edaemus?’ Aphrael asked, ‘or would you like to take a century or two to throw a temper-tantrum first?’
‘Thou art pert, Aphrael,’ he accused.
‘Yes, I know. It’s one of the things that makes me so delightful. You do know that Cyrgon’s trying to get his hands on Bhelliom, don’t you? Or have you been so busy playing leap-frog with the stars that you’ve lost track of what’s happening here?’
‘Mind your manners,’ Sephrenia told her crisply.
‘He makes me tired. He’s been cuddling his hatred to his breast like a sick puppy for ten thousand years.’ The Child Goddess looked critically at the incandescent presence of the God of the Delphae. ‘The light-show doesn’t impress me, Edaemus. I could do it too, if I wanted to take the trouble.’
Edaemus flared even brighter, and the reddish-orange nimbus around him became sooty.
‘How tiresome,’ Aphrael sighed. ‘I’m sorry, Xanetia, but we’re wasting our time here. Bhelliom and I are going to have to deal with Klael on our own. Your tedious God wouldn’t be any help anyway.’
‘Klael!’ Edaemus gasped.
‘Got your attention, didn’t I?’ She smirked. ‘Are you ready to listen now?’
‘Who hath done this? Who hath unloosed Klael again upon the earth?’
‘Well, it certainly wasn’t me. Cyrgon had everything going his way, and then Anakha turned things around on him. You know how much Cyrgon hates to lose, so he started breaking the rules. Do you want to help us with this—or would you rather sit around and pout for another hundred eons or so? Quickly, quickly, Edaemus,’ she said, snapping her fingers at him. ‘Make up your mind. I don’t have all day, you know.’
‘What makes you think I need any more men?’ Narstil demanded. Narstil was a lean, almost cadaverous Arjuni with stringy arms and hollow cheeks. He sat at a table set under a spreading tree in the center of his encampment deep in the jungles of Arjuna.
‘You’re in a risky kind of business,’ Caalador shrugged, looking around at the cluttered camp. ‘You steal furniture and carpets and tapestries. That means that you’ve been raiding villages and mounting attacks on isolated estates. People fight back when you try that, and that means casualties. About half of your men are wearing bandages right now, and you probably leave a few dead behind you every time you try to steal things. A leader in your line always needs more men.’
‘I don’t have any vacancies just now.’
‘I can arrange some,’ Bevier told him in a menacing voice, melodramatically drawing his thumb across the edge of his lochaber.
‘Look, Narstil,’ Caalador said in a somewhat less abrasive tone, ‘we’ve seen your men. Be honest now. You’ve gathered up a bunch of local bad-boys who got into trouble for stealing chickens or running off somebody else’s goats. You’re very light on professionals, and that’s what we’re offering you—professionalism. Your bad-boys bluster and try to impress each other by looking mean and nasty, but real killing isn’t in their nature, and that’s why they get hurt when the fighting starts. Killing doesn’t bother us. We’re used to it. Your young bravos have to prove things to each other, but we don’t. Order knows who we are. He wouldn’t have sent you that letter otherwise.’
His eyes narrowed slightly. ‘Believe me, Narstil, life will be much easier for all of us if we’re working with you rather than setting up shop across the street.’
Narstil looked a little less certain of himself. ‘I’ll think about it,’ he said.
‘Do that. And don’t get any ideas about trying to eliminate potential competition in advance. Your bad-boys wouldn’t be up to it, and my friends and I would sort of be obliged to take it personally.’
‘Stop that.’ Sephrenia chided her sister as the four of them moved through the corridor-like streets of Delphaeus toward the home of Codon, the Anari of Xanetia’s people.
‘Edaemus is doing it,’ Aphrael countered.
‘It’s his city, and these are his people. It’s not polite to do that when you’re a guest.’
Xanetia gave them a puzzled look.
‘My sister’s showing off,’ Sephrenia explained.
‘Am not,’ Aphrael retorted.
‘Yes you are too, Aphrael, and you and I both know it. We’ve had this argument before. Now stop it.’
‘I do not understand,’ Xanetia confessed.
‘That’s because you’ve grown accustomed to the sense of her presence, sister,’ Sephrenia explained wearily. ‘She’s not supposed to flaunt her divinity this way when she’s around the worshippers of other Gods. It’s the worst form of bad manners, and she knows it. She’s only doing it to irritate Edaemus. I’m surprised she hasn’t flattened the whole city or set fire to the thatching on the roofs with all that divine personality.’