Last time Providence’s Head of Security had taken a short enforced break, it had ended with my arguable attempted murder. Fortunately, it seemed to have been a one-time occurrence.
I lowered my hands from their preventative brace around my ears, turned my pain receptors back on, and ogled Hel’s first resurrection in several centuries. Shame we’d had to waste it on Apollo, but there were plenty of worse candidates, and none quite as useful.
The newly-reanimated seer squinted and rubbed a hand over his eyelids, his gaze moving from Hel to myself and the back of the toolshed we were skulking behind. Resurrections were one of those funny things that got you lumped with more work once people found out you could do it, and we didn’t have time to field that mountain of landmines.
“So,” Apollo began, returning his attention to rest on me. “You broke the world. Why am I not surprised? Thank you, Hel.”
“That’s not the insult you think it is,” I rebutted as my daughter smiled in return. “And it is basically what you hired me for. I assume you already know what you’re up against.”
The corners of his mouth twitched upwards. “Surprisingly little. I’ll need a while to catch up. The timelines are highly unstable.”
“We still need you.”
“Possibly.” His features twisted into a thoughtful expression. I didn’t think he was watching the shed.
I pretended not to notice the distinctive hole and bloodstains decorating the front of his shirt. Reanimation had brought the person back unscathed, but less so the accompaniments. Magic did draw the line in a lot of weird places. Instead, I put an arm around Hel’s shoulders and gave her a squeeze. She’d been with me the first time, and we stood together again. On the same page, this time. It had only taken over a thousand years.
“How was the void?” Hel queried when Apollo’s light snapped back on.
“Terrible. Get your demon lord.”
“And how long do we have before Themis’ control slips?” I followed up.
In answer, the seer nodded towards the flask in my hand, which immediately imploded.
“Oh,” I said, pieces of metal raining from my fingers, and got out of there.
I reappeared at Gia’s workstation and grabbed her wrist in time to witness Apollo appear beside me and send a glittering bolt through a god’s head. I had no idea where he’d fit into Themis’ planned release schedule.
“One down,” I thought Apollo said. It was hard to tell against the backdrop of competing noise exploding in my skull. Most of it angry. It must have been like this for Lucy and Durga when the task system had come down.
A thunderous crack split the ceiling above the temple podium in two, right through the neck of the snake, only for it to freeze mid-split as Vishnu asserted control. It wasn’t complete, though; ominous creaks rumbling throughout the platform and the wider city. Some of the voices in my head stopped, but not all, and more were already rejoining them.
“Give her to Hel,” Apollo directed at me. He shot another frozen goddess through the neck. The platform was far more crowded than I remembered. Every time I turned my head, it seemed to contain more people, frozen and unfrozen, and I was fairly sure it wasn’t my imagination.
A hand fell on my shoulder, and I turned to see Hel waiting expectantly, looking as uncomfortable as I felt.
“Loki?” Gia asked in an uncertain voice. She tugged at her arm.
I wasn’t sure leaving her was the best choice, but if Apollo had said it –
I nodded and pressed her hand into Hel’s gnarled fingers. A moment later the pair of them vanished, and I wondered at the cost. We could have used Hel. I’d seen her lay waste to whole battlefields with a twitch of her fingers.
But she could resurrect Gia. Twice, thrice, as many times as needed. Exposed though it left me, it was the right call.
Apollo dashed forward and impaled a third body as it burst into aggressive animation. The look he shot me was grim. “Only seconds,” he said, answering my question before it left my lips. “Interference is coming in everywhere.”
“Tez is replicating, I think,” I said. “He mustn’t have much left on his own.”
“And there’s Janus. I told you not to let him out.”
“Well, what can I say,” I said as the sky turned an ominous shade of red, still with no sun in it to justify the colour. Apollo lifted his chin to watch it with me. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“Shut up and let me keep you alive.” His arm darted out and pulled me aside, in time for a precise lightning bolt to strike the ground where I’d stood. Residual static raised the hairs on my arms. I shifted form in case my enemies were working off a visual blueprint. Apollo fired off another bolt a second later, and another god dropped in the crowd. A few people stared at the seer.
“He’s with us,” I called out, and followed it up in a low mutter. “Most of us.”
I wasn’t sure how much longer it would be true. Confusion reigned. I didn’t know all the names on Themis’ register or where we were up to; which of the gods around us were friend or foe. More were dropping in by the second, and my head was still full of cacaphony.
Themis, I yelled into it, but my words were immediately lost in the muddle. Vishnu?
No response.
All our preparation, and we were in complete disarray. Gods had never taken well to being told what to do; a side-effect of granting our agency back. I spied Inari forging through the growing crowd; Djehuti downcast and looking grim; the distrustful glances and glowering suspicion. Bodies were already hitting the floor, with people unsure how to respond. I didn’t foresee it improving.
“Bodyguard me,” I said to Apollo, made a few vocal adjustments, and materialised perched on top of the Yggdrasil offshoot. It had grown again, already resembling a young mature tree. The petrified sculpture coiled above and around its branches. “This is Loki,” I boomed into the sea of people, seeing several hundred faces turn up at me. A flash of gold in the crowd sparked from the crowd as another of Apollo’s bolts found its target. “Time’s up, and we’re under attack. This is now a declaration of war. Find Baldr and kill him, and –”
Apollo’s breath sounded in my ear. “Get everyone out of the building immediately.”
“– and evacuate now if you want to live,” I smoothly amended.
A split second passed, and then gods scattered. I took my own advice and dragged the blonde god with me onto a nearby rooftop in time to see the temple collapse in a crunch of folding stone, taking anyone still inside along with it. From the screams in my head, it claimed more than a few. Crap. So much for symbolism.
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
Cursing, I shifted form again, stumbling on my new feet as the building under us tore itself free of its foundations and rose rapidly upwards. Apollo pulled me away, landing us near the toolshed where he’d been resurrected only minutes ago. His eyes were wild.
“We need to find a tracker.” He paused mid-sentence. “No. The ambush. Hel gave you their locations. Where are –” He paused again, and growled in frustration. “Escort me. We don’t have much time.”
“Can’t hurt them in stasis,” I pointed out. “Are you sure you’re not broken?”
In answer, the sun god raised a single finger towards the empty sky. “What do you think?”
I groaned, kicking myself for not seeing it earlier. “Not you, too.”
“I’m alive,” he replied, pulling me aside again into a different copse of trees. I didn’t see what fate we dodged. Distant flashes lit the sky above my city busy proving itself more temporary than intended. “It’s an improvement. And not completely blind yet. We need Vishnu to unfreeze each target to put them out of commission.”
“Good luck getting through to him in this,” I exclaimed, gesturing out at the mental noise. Even the runes registered as barely more than smothered glitters among the wider storm.
Individual thaws were also inefficient. Vishnu should have been using rust to take the assailants out together. We’d planned it as such to buy time in the event of an assault. If the Preserver was doing nothing, then something had to be preventing him.
Out of nowhere, an uneasy, loose feeling tugged at my body, shivering its way through muscles and bone with the rapid speed of a wave. I pushed the incursion straight back out, and reached to steady myself against a tree trunk.
The bark sank rapidly under my fingers, my hand disappearing into an unexpected soft morass. I pulled it back, startled, and made an involuntary yelp as a splat of similarly gluggy liquid dripped onto my head. A rank smell like rotting plants assaulted my nose. Shifting it off, I caught the tail end of a branch dissolving into brownish sludge. What was left of it emitted an unappealing series of sucking noises and rapidly escalating plops as more brown goo rained down from above, twigs into branches and trunks, all melting into a layer of organic goop, forest vanishing before our eyes.
Removed so no one could hide. Or to punch through the stasis. Or just for destruction; it was hard to tell. It wasn’t Vishnu’s rust; we hadn’t been trapped in stasis. This was someone else’s power. I didn’t know whose, or what it was. But it wasn’t good, and it certainly hadn’t avoided us.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” I urged Apollo. The sun god was fine, at least physically, with no signs of imminent disintegration. Healing doing the job it was supposed to. More forest goo splattered over my face and shoulders, dripped down my front and sloshed into my boots, and I shifted it away. More replaced it immediately. The trees around us had already worn down to large branches and trunks, leaving the city beyond clearly visible. Like us. I crouched, hunkering down in the jungle’s sodden remnants.
To say the city wasn’t doing well was an understatement. Rocks blasted out with the force of cannons. Walls crumpled like paper. Sheets of coloured lights flashed and glimmered in full divine battle against the stark blackness of enforced night. That would be giving Tez a power boost, it occurred to me dimly. Another point not in our favour.
“Hold,” Apollo said, raising a hand. He fixated on a spot over my shoulder. I turned to look, saw a figure materialise and watched one of the seer’s effective golden bolts blast them through the face a millisecond later. I lunged forward and sent the remains into my disposal volcano before they hit the mud. The way things were, we couldn’t bank on anyone staying down without extra precautions, no matter how effective the blows. “Now we can go.”
The foul smell was everywhere now. Shapes were taking the place of the trees; low mounds covered in goop vaguely resembling people crouching among the cover. Not affected by disintegration, I took it, which meant the sludge conductor, whoever they were, probably wasn’t on our side. I found it vaguely affronting to think we might have been less prepared.
Joining them were Hera’s angels, still suspended where I’d left them in dots around the sky. If I knew one thing, it was that they weren’t on Baldr’s side. But until Vishnu lifted his stasis, we could hardly use them.
A different kind of movement whipped towards us, cutting against the sludge. Vines, young and green, striking out from the falling city in braided whips. Inanna, maybe. Or Yggdrasil? I braced to evade, but they passed us by, coiling around ambushers in pythonic constriction. “Hmm.”
“So now what?” Apollo’s tone was so sharp I could almost hear him grit his teeth. “You’re staying here? Watch over what you’ve wrought? You have no grand master plan.”
“Naturally. I already exhausted that. You missed it.” An explosion rocketed out from the city in a medium-sized mushroom cloud bounded by an outer layer of sludge. I put up my hands to shield myself from the rain of splats, then shifted it off again. “If you know where Baldr is, like for example inside one of these convenient lumps, we might be able to do something useful.” I paused. “You do know about Baldr by now, right?”
My companion grunted. “He’s not here. And if I knew where he was, I’m sure it would be surrounded with backup I wouldn’t run face into anyway. Regardless, you’d better make up your mind fast. Vishnu’s freeze is about to break.”
I watched, fascinated, as one of the lumps cracked open into sudden animation and tore off the vines engulfing it. Apollo’s bolt speared through the figure’s head before they made it any further.
I’d hoped he would tell me. If not Baldr’s location, then at least a plan, even if it was my own several minutes from now. Throwing myself into the fight didn’t seem like a winning strategy, even with all my new power to draw on.
Our advantages were initial numbers, which were rapidly being outstripped. Likely we’d already lost that edge. It was likely those of us made immune to Baldr could also resist all mental control, which made that class of weapon attractive. But they weren’t easy to come by.
“What’ll Janus try?” I asked Apollo.
Another lump burst, and my companion shot it. I recognised the victim as a music goddess. Not much use on a battlefield; Baldr hadn’t been picky with recruitment. I warped over and followed her through with a trip to the volcano, feeling no satisfaction at the easy wins. We could sit here and snipe off ambushers indefinitely, but it wouldn’t turn the tide. Sooner or sooner – because ‘later’ implied some level of divine patience – we’d face something big healing couldn’t fix.
Apollo caught up behind me. “Now? I don’t know. In other timelines, he’s had a tendency to break down boundaries. Trust me, you don’t want that.”
“The doors,” I stated.
“Worse. Dimensions.”
“Not relevant.”
“Minds.”
“We’re protected.”
“Souls, then. Bodies. Time.”
“Any one of us can end the universe,” I griped back. “But since we’re still here, it looks like we’re all still playing small fry avoiding it.”
“Oh, really?” Apollo grumbled. For all his resurrection, he looked in a sorry state. The god attempted to wipe the sludge from his face, only to succeed in spreading it further across his skin. “If it’s so easy, why don’t you do it?”
We both already knew the answer. I’d be stopped. Fast. World-ending actions would be visible to any seer the moment they entered the primary timeline, and they’d pass on the message. Even if we pushed it under the radar and managed to get something through, enough gods would survive long enough to resist. It was the perfect way to draw everyone’s attention straight to me the moment I tried, and I wasn’t quite ready to be bait.
By now, there had probably been gods who had already opened with it, been seen, and been dealt with. The indiscriminate brown goo felt like it had probably been one. Case in point, the landscape had ceased melting into disgusting slag.
“The plan’s the same,” I said. “Find Baldr. Kill Baldr. Talk sense into everyone else.”
“Except we don’t know where he is. Or a tracker.”
I thought of Regina. “We know where a Tez is.”
Apollo’s eyes flared into interrogation mode for a few nerve-wracking moments diverting his attention from immediate attacks. “Then we travel –” he held out a hand for me to take, and pulled me onwards a second later, “– here.”
The sounds of battle cleaved sharply into silence broken by lingering drips of sludge, the fetid air suddenly clear. Afterimages flared in front of my eyes where strobing lights had lit the skies instants ago, now plunged back into suffocating darkness. As I blinked it out, I realised there were still a few very small, very soft pricks of illumination accompanying us in the far distance. Fires, not stars, some way below us.
Soft grass cushioned my feet, its texture discernible even through the thick soles of my shoes.
The clamour in my head dropped away, too; still present but distant. I could feel the epicentre of it half a world away, expanding by the second and crackling outwards in small fits and bursts; new sparks blossoming out from the central blaze. The five demonic runes flickered between them, all still in one piece. For the moment, Hel was keeping our weapon safe.
Soft and unusually slow, light flared around the sun god enough to reveal the signs of struggle on his filth-ridden features. I helped it the rest of the way, taking control of the immediate environment long enough to make it shine in otherworldly reds, blues and greens. Blades of grass shimmered around us, and leaves dripped with colour from nearby walls. A table still lay shattered in the garden. Different to how it had last appeared, but recognisable all the same.
We were in Tez’s courtyard on Mayari’s island, and apparently he’d come home.