“Right,” I said, and stabbed myself in the elevator button with a finger, aiming for the next floor down. Gears and electrical signals whirred into activity, the doors pinging closed. Half of it was controlled by distant mechanisms another universe away, and I didn’t want to mess with it on my end in case the fragile integrations broke. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get them back.
Did anyone new drop in? I asked Themis as we rode down. New, like Inanna and Baal.
I received the sense of her head shaking. Not people. Magic, yes. And not much of that either.
I kept Yggdrasil to myself for now. That it had expanded into the task system was one thing. Even being used as a weapon by Siphon was one thing. Yggdrasil, a mindless construct, helping someone on more than reactionary instinct was another entirely, raising all sorts of questions about consciousness and evolution I didn’t have time to dive down the rabbit hole into. The kind of assistance Siphon had received had to be more than instinct. It had been too directed; too targeted and precise – not the kind of blind probing you’d expect tree parts to conduct as they poked around for the dimensional equivalent of nutrients or sunlight.
And if Yggdrasil had somehow woven our fates together, I didn’t even know what that meant. I couldn’t exactly ask. Reaching out into grenade territory still meant instant capture, and the task system was completely shut off. I wouldn’t be getting back in that way any time soon.
The lift pinged open and Gia threw a second grenade out. This floor was as inky black as the other.
Someone new, Themis informed me a few seconds later. Multiple someones. Mot. Shapash. They’re not on our register. I heard the accusation in her tone. Are you conducting resurrections?
More old gods, I thought to myself. Also from the Middle East. More contemporaries of Yahweh and Enki. A third and fourth floor confirmed it, both dark, with more drop-ins from the same epoch and region.
By the time the doors opened on the holy of holies – which nearly gave me a heart attack from the queues of stopped angels lined up in wait outside them – the number of gods contained in Lucy’s soul jar had doubled. None on the company register, and all meant to be dead. More than half the names were unfamiliar; prisoners left for so long the intention had to have been to keep them forgotten.
Even Themis drew blanks on most of the names. They’re talking, she informed me. And angry. Beyond that, I have whoever’s capable working on translations, but between the chaos and the fact we’ve all been split into pieces – I felt her exasperation directed at me – it’s slow going.
You wouldn’t know it from the inside of the lift. If Providence had noticed anything amiss yet, the fallout hadn't reached us. I had Gia throw a grenade into Yahweh’s starry sanctum, whereby the distant pinpricks winked out and plunged the angels into even eerier darkness, their unmoving faces lit only by the remaining glow shed from our metal shaft.
It felt like we were shutting things down.
Large influx of undirected power, Themis informed me, somewhat more warily. No souls. It’s becoming crowded in here.
Oh, we’ve got a long way yet, I said.
The angels’ faces stared. I shuddered and hit the next button, watching ‘Suite: Chief Financial Officer’ light up in glowing blue until it snapped dark again to the tune of the latest cheerful ping.
Flowers filled my nostrils a few moments before Hera’s seat of operations bloomed into radiant dappled existence. Calming sunlight filtered onto its verdant courtyard and elegant canals. When the grenade hit it, the whole thing warped with a violent suction and spiralling light trails into the centre, before it, too, fell dark. The smell of flowers faded, and the light from the lift showed me only barren, cold concrete.
I could feel Themis observing quietly in the back of my head, but she made no comment.
Vishnu’s office resisted; presumably from stasis. But it failed to last, and half the office was sucked inside, with only the maze-like latticework remaining.
And then Valhalla, with its intricate coatings of runes. I found myself hesitating, but Gia didn’t, and her grenade sailed to a stop at the foot of the nearest long table, did nothing for a moment, and activated.
Runes strobed in my vision like camera flashes, detonating in miniature explosions magnesium-white. When the visual cacophony cleared, it was all gone. The whole pocket dimension. Replaced with another slab of concrete, and, in the distance beyond the illumination from the lift, something that might have been a tall shadow rising out of the gloom.
I held up a hand before Gia could punch in the next button, and peered out as best I could from my prism of protection. Very carefully, I pushed the boundaries of myself out of the door and into the hall, swerving a detour around the grenade, until I came close enough to make it out.
The object turned out to be a gnarled root, taller than most humans and grown from the same brown ash I’d seen infiltrating the task manager. Here, in Providence, as a physical structure. Hiding behind a truncated dimension and its tableau of runic magic.
Yggdrasil? I asked it, to no response.
That was what you got for trying to talk to a tree, I supposed. At least a non-shapeshifted one. I didn’t feel anything approaching a soul, not that I could properly tell from behind my dimensional fortification. Siphon’s containment field didn’t appear to bother the world tree, which made sense given my recent discovery. But how and why it was here remained a mystery.
“Loki?” Gia asked, breaking into my thoughts, and I jettisoned the parts of me outside the lift.
“Next floor,” I said, and jabbed the button.
Legba’s office gleamed out in cold fluorescence, its glass partitions housing the subtle manipulation of many. In the end, their influencer had succumbed to the same just as readily. The ceiling lights flickered out at the detonation of the relevant grenade, but otherwise little changed.
I hadn’t made it to Enki’s floor earlier, and now regretted not doing so. The lowest of the executive floors greeted me with by far the most magical offering, even compared to Yahweh’s. Starved of such destinations for centuries, I would have spent some time there, had I known.
But instead I was here to destroy it. Funny how that worked out. For a few seconds, I took in the bright floating trapeziums, winding stairs and glittering glyphs, only for it all to collapse in a screech of rending violation.
An ominous creak sounded from the building around me as I stared at the leftover concrete. Faint vibrations filtered back into the lift.
That probably wasn’t good.
Uh, what was that? Tru queried. He craned his neck nervously up towards the ceiling, but there was nothing to see. To ram it home, another, louder creak stuttered out of the darkness.
“Whatever it is, it’s technically in another universe,” I evaded. “I can probably cut that connection if needed.” Though if I did, and we floated off in our own isolated pocket, I wasn’t sure I knew how to bring us back.
I hadn’t investigated the interior of Enki’s office. We might have set off anything. I quickly punched the button to the top of Providence’s managerial floors and wondered if it had been an edict keeping the building stable. Possibly more than one. The lift shuddered into motion, shakier than before. Without knowing the details, however, there wasn’t a lot we could do about it, and we’d just destroyed any investigable evidence.
We rode down. The sparsely-populated managerial floors posed little of an obstacle. A handful of souls dropped in on each storey; all powerful high-level deities nevertheless unprepared for Siphon’s endgame. We dropped past the pearly gates, which yielded no souls at all, and into the general-purpose floors with only a handful of new additions. So much of the upper floors amounted to wasted space, reserved for appearances while the rest of us were crammed in below.
I had Gia and Tru stand at the ready, wedged surreptitiously behind the rim of the door in case of any brutal surprises. We were past the easy floors now. Coming up were Odin’s labs for R&D. Knowledge gods, bastions of perception and insight. Trappers, illusionists and inventors with an eternity of time on their hands to plan for incursions. If any non-seers would spot us coming, it would be them.
I made some changes to the door pieces, changing their coverage without altering the underlying mechanism. When the ping sounded, the metal drew back to reveal a separate plate of inner armour, with only a grenade-sized hole left open at the bottom.
I rocked back as a dent the size of a car gouged itself into the doors with a bang like thunder. Gia fumbled and dropped the grenade, but I took over and shoved it the rest of the way through. A few seconds later, all was silent.
Thirty-eight new souls, Themis reported, Research and Development division, top floor. And a huge amount of divine energy. You must have drained their lab work. The last part, I was interested to note, was faintly relieved.
Is that all of them? I asked, sliding back the doors to their original open configuration.
Less than half. But it’s a twenty-four hour team. I wouldn’t expect them all in the office at once.
I peered out. The lights were already out. In the distance, I could make out small pockets of illumination; cube-shaped prisms of glowing translucence that had somehow survived. The god bomb wasn’t completely infallible, then.
Aurally, I heard only silence.
Gia glanced at me, clearly shaken from the event. A loud creak pierced the lift almost on top of us, the vibrations this time stronger. Nothing to be gained by hanging around except regret.
I expected more trouble on the next floor, but instead it was eerily quiet. Only twelve new arrivals this time, which worried me. Word might have gotten out. Still, gods were gods, and our collection was growing.
Between R&D and Finance, the lift jolted to a sudden halt, my mechanisms uncomfortably stuck. I couldn’t feel anything wrong on my end, which meant it had to be an external influence. That was bad. I depressed a few more of the buttons to no avail, and peeled back the doors for a better look.
Instead of the expected concrete shaft, I found myself staring into a fragmented expanse. Corners of dimensional space stretched, puckered and warped into geometric divisions glued and welded at the seams with actual physical supports, themselves attached to supports in other spatial realities. As dimensional engineering went, it was the most elegant and complex work I’d ever seen by a long shot; the combined effort of hundreds of gods in Facilities. Dropping a few grenades into it seemed tempting, if not for the immediate health hazard.
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If Facilities had escaped their prison – and it was only a matter of time – we were in dire straits. They were the experts in dimensionality, after all, and the only reason I’d come this far was by gall and surprise.
A second thud rocked the compartment again, this time from on top of the lift, followed by a third in the same location, much bigger than the second. Grunting, and dreading the worst, I reconfigured some eyes to the location in question and found myself very surprised.
In what seemed a fairly unlikely turn of events, a large brown bull was balanced precariously on top of the lift, accompanied by a golden winged goddess. Inanna and Baal, escaped. How this had been achieved, I hadn’t the faintest idea. Had the first grenade dislodged the barrier upstairs? How had they found the exit?
Just because there was no shaft now didn’t mean there wouldn’t be further down, or that the lift wasn’t depending on particular elevator dimensions. With great exertion, I moved the interior walls outward while Gia and Tru shot each other alarmed glances as their positions moved further apart. The external boundaries I kept contained. As shapes went, it definitely wasn’t my favourite.
I opened the ceiling and Inanna and Baal dropped through, the former floating down with the grace of an angel. Baal crashed in exactly as you’d expect from a slab of bovine half the size of a car, but shook his head and stood up unhurt. I kept a few eyes on them in case of trouble, but the pair seemed content to stand by. Tru stared at Inanna’s wings.
“We have guests,” I announced, motioning at Gia to commence decontamination. I sealed the roof back into a seamless metal slab and tried again with the button. It worked, and the ribbons of dimensional weaving jolted into upwards acceleration. “Gia, Tru, this is Inanna and Baal. Inanna’s from the Mesopotamian contingent, and Baal is –”
I broke off. Baal was Canaanite, awfully close to the tyrant’s home territory. And from the same time period, too. His earliest conquests, it had to be, but why the secrecy?
Themis, I requested, how many of the early drop-ins are Canaanite?
We’re still figuring that out, said the goddess of justice. But most of them, by the looks of it.
And how many from that pantheon are on the company roster? I followed up, a burgeoning suspicion clawing its way up from my subconscious into the part of my brain that already had too many problems attached.
Themis’ response was grim. None. They were all confirmed dead.
Confirmed?
The spatial knitting outside gave way to a more expected concrete shaft, followed by an outer set of double doors. Without being prompted, Gia drew a pin from the latest tiny doom capsule and rolled it out the moment they opened, a new white laptop wedged in between her other elbow. I had a few seconds’ glimpse of a scene of utter chaos, raised voices and urgent activity, before the whole thing sucked itself into a funnel of oblivion and introduced itself to Themis. Several small crashes sounded as various pieces of newly dead office equipment hit the carpet.
There were – I felt Themis wince as the arrivals landed – checks. Every few decades or so. Faking death was one of the favoured early tactics of internal opposition, so we made sure to account for it. At an executive level, no less. And you’ve just imported several hundred people. Are you sure we have room?
Inanna had crept over towards the entrance to gaze out at the sudden transition, and I rippled the doors closed to prevent her mistake. Danger, I thought at her with enough emphasis that the message would hopefully get through, and with an appraising stare at me, she eventually stepped back.
A long, whining groan sounded around and above us, ending in the kind of splintering crack encouraging an urgent reassessment of priorities. “Next,” I declared, and punched the button.
Finance, for their part, didn’t stand a chance. I was more concerned about the upcoming Facilities floors, but when we reached them, those, too, were quiet. A few lingering departmental staff joined Themis’ growing soul jar department, but either the rest hadn’t broken out of my previous trap, or they had, and retreated to somewhere less assailable.
I caught Inanna’s eye, who stared calmly back as if the whole ludicrous affair was entirely expected. Not the reaction I’d expect on a prison break. I’d have to prod Themis about those translations.
Security arrived first. Not a war party, but the relevant floors. Being as they were packed with hundreds of Durgas, a few fidgets seemed justified. I held the doors closed few moments longer than I had to. A single warrior god at the ready would never let a grenade make it out of our chamber, and we’d likely find it turned back on ourselves at that. What were the chances the word hadn’t gotten out by now, given where we were and who we were dealing with?
Themis had been cooperative so far, in the passive sense of a lid on a pressurised jar of volatile explosives. I wasn’t sure if she’d want to actively start pulling the trigger. But we needed her. It was that or attempting some complicated dimensional manoeuvres I wasn’t sure I could pull off in an environment sounding ricketier by the second. Themis?
I stopped, reaching for Inanna’s arm as the Mesopotamian approached the doors again, only for the limb to slide free like oil in water. Bending to retrieve a grenade, and somehow evading both Gia and Tru’s attempts to cover the stash with their bodies, the goddess cupped it in her hand and moved to depress the control that opened the doors.
I kept them firmly closed. That would change the moment she pulled the pin.
The doors opened. I felt them opening.
“Hah,” I voiced, slamming them shut before more than the barest sliver of space had been parted. She shouldn’t have been able to do that. No one could do that. Not while I was at full strength. Certainly not while funnelling well beyond my usual means from whatever divine fount had seen fit to supply me.
Gia tried to pluck the grenade back out of the goddess’ hand. A wing moved across and blocked her attempt. Inanna’s gaze didn’t even falter. She pushed the button again.
The doors slid open, and this time I couldn’t stop them. I threw up a new, unbroken wall instead further in, shutting it down that way.
The Mesopotamian’s glance was almost chastising. She raised her free hand to the grenade and paused, fingers hovering above it, when all three of us lunged to stop her. Tru’s contribution was more of an ineffectual spring, but he tried.
When the flurry of sudden extended wings died down, I held out my own hand and waggled the fingers in the direction of the grenade. I had a lot more where that came from.
Still no gods on the other side of the door, unless it was an ambush.
“You do that, and you’ll end up in it,” I said, wishing I had an iota of Akkadian to my name. I reiterated the ‘danger’ message. Themis, I need an Akkadian speaker. We have an Inanna problem.
Something crashed into me from far above, sending the lift rocking violently and generating a storm of echoes that took a few seconds to die down. I kept a few eyes on the upper shaft in case it was another god paying a visit, but only found a boulder-sized chunk of concrete. Not that that was better. Things were collapsing up there. So that was how the inconvenient lair destruction thing happened. I’d have to start giving the concept more credit.
Well, we have plenty now, Themis said dryly, but my attention was already shifting as Inanna turned back to the now seamless wall. I opened more eyes, causing Gia and Tru to huddle further towards each other with supportive glances, and watched as the visitor raised a hand to the barrier.
I crumbled, small pockets of my being shoved to either side to make way for something new. Or not ‘something’. Small though they were, I recognised the presence of Yggdrasil. Seeds taking root inside me, where they should never have been able to gain a foothold, were they not from my own pantheon. Although Yggdrasil didn’t play favourites in that regard.
According to reputation, Inanna and Baal had both been gods of fertility. As domains went, it tended to get a bad rap. Fertility, while required for basic mortal survival, didn’t possess the coolness factor of lightning blasts or stasis freezes, which said something about people’s aptitude for setting priorities, gods and mortals alike. They’d be wrong, of course – the relative excitement of sitting and watching trees grow had a lot more to do with varietal, potency and particular speed than most people considered, especially when the tree in question was what was keeping, oh, the entire universe together.
I wrenched off the Yggdrasil-infected wall before it could claim the rest of me, and watched as its surface riddled through with metal-parting twigs.
“It was you,” I proclaimed, looking between the pair. No further timber incursions were attacking me yet, so I assumed it had just been a demonstration. “You did this.”
“Did what?” Gia asked warily. She drew the tips of her shoes back from the crumbling wall debris and hugged at the laptop.
“All of it,” I stated. “Everything. Why we’re here, doing what we’re doing.”
What’s happening? Themis prompted from the soul grenades. Are you there?
Peachy. My upper lip curled in a sour expression. “How’s that decontamination going?”
“Well,” said Gia, “I tried. But I can’t log in. I’m locked out. This already had a password set on it before I got there. I don’t know what that means. That she’s clean? I can’t tell for sure.”
Inanna held my gaze a moment longer, then deliberately moved up to the outer door. I let her go, and frowned when the fingers she manually wedged between the doors found purchase and moved them apart.
The suppressants hadn’t worked on her or Baal, and neither did my signature powers. Daughter of Enki she might be, which might well explain the strength, but in nature her abilities more closely resembled the tyrant’s.
It occurred to me I’d only assumed she’d been a prisoner. The tyrant kept everyone hostage; it was a natural assumption to make. If he’d met his match, however; if the barrier atop Babel had been generated from the other side – then I had some reassessments to make.
Inanna stepped over the fallen blockade, now sprouting into pale blossoms, and wedged the fingers of her free hand into the small indent separating the doors of the lift. I waited for Security to crash in on us then and there.
Rather than the recognisable Security level, I found myself looking into a surreal spray of verdancy. Roots swarmed over the grey office carpet, still largely visible, and dangled from the office ceiling in thick ribbony tassels. More crawled up the walls and over desks, growing and expanding as I looked. Leaves unfurled in viridian motion, pushing themselves out from distant cracked computer monitors. Warring against them amid gouts of fire and flashing weapons was a good contingent of Security staff, limited in battle by their own restricted location as they hurtled past on the attack. Too much power and the office protections would kick in, leaving them dealing with the backlash. But Yggdrasil seemed to be having no such trouble punching through.
Even hampered, Security were succeeding in cutting back the growth, splintering and crushing the intrusions, but Yggdrasil pressed on like the tide; an ocean of leafy foliage, fruit and blossoms adding ever-increasing targets and obscuring visibility.
Inanna stepped into the mess, wings deflecting the inevitable barrage of stray projectiles on autopilot, and pulled the pin on the grenade. Immediately I redirected my attention to making sure the dimensional walls didn’t come down.
No! Tru called out.
A second later, it all went quiet. The sprinting figures, blazing guns and flaming swords vanished, sucked inside the grenade en masse with the detonation. Yggdrasil shivered, its leaves rustling ominously in the ensuing silence. Office equipment cracked and disintegrated further, and a couple of pieces of fruit crashed to the ground.
Inanna, still holding the now-active grenade, was completely unaffected. She walked across the rustling floor to the nearest desk, placed the metal shell on top of it, and strode back towards us with wings still extended, looking for all purposes exactly like the avenging angel people expected of the company roombas.
“What the actual shit?” Gia whispered.
“I don’t know,” I replied in a similar tone. “But I’m worried I’m starting to.”
Two hundred plus in the Security department, Themis reported an instant later to the accompaniment of stunned disbelief. How?
Inanna rejoined the lift, as calm as ever, seemingly oblivious to our incredulous stares. “She has an override like Yahweh’s,” I said to everyone present as she pressed the next glowing button on our tourist route down. “I don’t know what else it could be.”
Who? Inanna?
“Ask her friends from the upper plus storeys. They must know something.”
If she and Baal – likely both of them – had set the barrier, the prison of their own making, their overrides had to have been at least as strong as the tyrant’s. I had to hope that also translated to Baldr immunity.
She’s definitely not an angel, Tru stated uncertainly. Right? His sheep’s body had backed into the side of the lift next to his fellow demon lord. Because she sure as hell looks like one.
I opened my mouth to argue, and then stopped. She did look like one in many ways. Or the old idea of one. I considered the white laptop still in Gia’s hands; the white feathers in her wings, and the way she moved like Lucy. I thought about her override, her age and region of origin, and being hidden away at the top of the tyrant’s tower of conquest.
But she was Mesopotamian, not Hebrew.
Unless that was a lie.
We knew her parentage. She even looked like Enki, the family resemblance plain to see for anyone familiar with the god of magic.
Unless the lie was bigger than that.
Yahweh hadn’t been able to stomach competition, now or ever. Most of Providence’s staff accepted his story of being his pantheon’s sole deity as conceit. They just didn’t voice it aloud. Lucy was clearly a full god in all but name, and his siblings had been the same. The tyrant had eliminated the latter.
That didn’t mean there hadn’t been others first.
Pantheons weren’t perfectly distinct. They blended around the edges as people travelled and adapted, categories not always so clear. I was a jötunn who’d joined the Aesir, but both they and the Vanir fell under a larger Norse banner. Beyond that, I had more names than I cared to count.
No two people had exactly the same abilities, but trends ran in pantheons. Our runes and dimensions, Hindu time shenanigans, Danann illusions, Aztec sacrifice and Greek associative concepts. And Hebrew control.
Or, perhaps, Mesopotamian control.
I thought about how easily Lucy had repurposed Enki’s edict in Akkadian. How the tyrant had been born as a child. How Inanna had possessed Yggdrasil – because of course it had to have been that, it all made sense.
All those gods in Etemenanki, locked away in what I was coming to suspect had been stalemate. Canaanites and Mesopotamians both.
They were Yahweh’s old pantheon.