“I hardly expected to see you again, little shaman.”
“I hardly intended to leave you here. This isn’t your place, Cernunnos.”
“Oh, but it is,” he murmured, and lifted his hands, bloody sword in one, to encompass the bleak red sky and the death in the streets. “Look what I have wrought.”
“You marked it. That doesn’t make it yours. Come on, my lord master of the Hunt.” The words sounded like they would if I’d said them to Morrison, full of sarcasm. “Mano a mano, eh? You and me. If you win, I take the child’s place in the Hunt and you ride unbound. If I win, you leave this place now and forever and return to Earth with me.”
“Now and forever?” the god asked, a gleam in his brilliant eyes.
“That remains to be seen,” I said steadily. He lowered his head, ivory horns catching the bloody light, and considered me.
“How did you say it? Mano a mano. So it shall be. I swear it by my name and by my power and once more by my immortal life. Should I lose here to you, nevermore shall the Hunt return to Babylon, and with you we will go, to the place you call Earth.”
I wondered, briefly, what that name he swore by was. It was not, I was sure, Cernunnos. There was something deeper, more private, that he answered to in the most secret part of his soul, and no one else would ever know that name. Except maybe the camel, I thought in a fit of pure irreverence. I hoped he hadn’t heard that, and spoke out loud to cover the thought. “I have no immortal life to swear by. Should I swear by yours?”
Scathing disdain filled Cernunnos’s vivid eyes. My mouth twisted in a smirk. “Don’t have much sense of humor, do you?” I straightened my shoulders. Being a smart-ass might help keep my courage up, but this was important. My heartbeat, steady as the drum, sounded loud in my ears as I spoke. “As you swear it, so shall I, by my name and my power and my all-too mortal life. If I lose to you here, I’ll ride in your missing child’s place, and try no more to bind you.” A constriction came over me as I spoke, a very real compulsion, and it occurred to me once more that I’d gotten in way over my head. There was a proverb about that. Looking and leaping. Maybe someday I’d remember it before I leaped.
God knows what I was expecting. It wasn’t the force of Cernunnos’s will smashing down on me like a hammer, though. My words were still lingering in the air when he hit me, green strength like a mountain coming down. I dropped to my knees, the air crushed from my body, and held onto the contents of my stomach through clenched teeth.
Cernunnos dismounted with predatory grace, stalking toward me across the new cobblestones. I swayed, watching him and distantly remembering the helpless fear in the woman’s face a few minutes ago. I had been here before, weighed down under his power. Unfortunately, Gary wasn’t here this time to haul my ass out of the fire. I was going to have to do it myself. I reached for the internalized strength I’d borrowed from my friends, and hesitated.
Not yet. Cernunnos stopped a few feet away from me, easily within the reach of his sword. “Thou art bold, little shaman,” he murmured. “Foolish, but bold.” He drew the blade back, preparing for a deeply disabling strike. I didn’t think he was going to kill me. Not unless he knew a way to capture a newly released soul, which, now that I thought about it, I wouldn’t put past him. That didn’t make me feel any better.
He lunged forward, and I fell over.
It certainly didn’t have any of the grace the god persisted in showing, but it did get me out of his path without me having to fight off the weight of his power to get up. He stumbled, taken off guard, and I rolled forward, into his legs. Gratifyingly, he lost his balance for a moment. I twisted on my back and drove a booted foot up into his groin.
For one horrible moment Cernunnos stared down at me and I was afraid I might as well have kicked one of the Joshua Spires.
Then he screamed, so deep and angry it twisted my bones. The gray veil that I had willed Babylon behind shivered and faded. Cernunnos flung both hands up, his sword knotted in his fists, and drove it down toward me.
The weight of his power was gone, though, shattered by pain as thoroughly as crystal was by sound. I came to my feet as the sword slammed down into cobblestone. As he began to draw it back out I kicked him in the jaw. He spun around, torso moving faster than his legs, one full turn and an aborted half, just like Charlie Chaplin.
Against all the rules of good sportsmanship, I kicked him while he was down. I caught him one solid blow in the ribs, moving his whole body a few inches, but the second time he caught my foot and twisted it hard to the side. Something that shouldn’t have popped in my knee and I screamed, collapsing almost on top of the god. For a few seconds we lay there, panting at each other. I saw a flash of anger in his eyes.
It was just enough warning to throw up a shield as his power slammed down on me again. This time I could see it, the deep snarling green of his strength pushing at the silver-gray barrier I’d flung up, testing it for weaknesses.
And finding them. Uncertainty, lack of knowledge, simple fear, they were holes I didn’t know how to plug up. Like the Lilliputians with Gulliver, Cernunnos pinned me down through those holes, threading green power into the stone around me. He grinned, feral and strange on the half-animal face, and rolled to his feet, dragging his sword out of the stone.
An incongruous thought made me look away from him, to the thick-shouldered rider in the host. He lifted his bearded chin, a trace of amusement in his face, and then he nodded, a single drop of his chin. Something familiar glittered in his eyes as Cernunnos’s sword came free of the stone with a scrape. Then there was no more time to contemplate the riders while I looked for a way to get free of Cernunnos’s bonds.
The god rose up and drove his sword into my belly, and I stopped thinking at all.
CHAPTER 26
One thing I’d learned in the last few days was that a body gets used to different degrees of pain. For example, my head still throbbed, but I’d more or less forgotten about it while concentrating on the return to Babylon. The very bad popping in my knee was excruciating, but letting it distract me from the matter at hand was suicidal, so I didn’t.
Getting a sword in the gut for the second or third time in a week was not something you could get used to. I was too surprised to scream; instead I opened my mouth and a pathetic little bloody cough came out. Above me, smiling brilliantly, Cernunnos asked, “Do you yield?”
Interesting question to ask a shish-kabob. He leaned on the sword a little more, turning it slightly. I opened my mouth to scream again and didn’t even manage the pathetic cough that time. “Do you yield?” Cernunnos asked again. Pleasantly, even.
My vision faded out, into blood, and back in again with the peripheries stained red. The rest of the Hunt was gathered around us when I could see again. I felt like a particularly novel and newly discovered bug, skewered on an examining table.
“I…” I croaked. Cernunnos, still smiling brilliantly, leaned closer to hear me.
“I’ll see you in hell first,” I whispered, and did the most amazingly stupid thing I could think of. I released the coil of energy inside me.
It blasted out in every direction, most of its force screaming in a multicolored ball up the sword to smash into Cernunnos. There was one delightful moment of complete surprise on his face before he flew back, ass over teakettle. I heard a dull thud as he crashed into one of the Joshua Spires, and another one as he hit the earth a moment later. His sword made a dull tink against the stones as it landed somewhere between us.
Unexpectedly, all my pain went away. I stood up slowly, my vision turning to swirls of red and blue: infrared and ultraviolet. Detail faded to impressions, splotches of heat and cool. Energy still boiled out of me. It felt exhilarating, utter freedom from constraint, self-imposed or otherwise. I felt as if nothing could possibly stop me. A tiny part of me knew it was a false high, but for the moment I hung on and looked around.