The Warlock ch 40 pt 1 - A Goddess

This is only about half of chapter 40, but I wanted to get it out tonight for you folks. The other half I'm working to have ready for tomorrow. Then it's the epilogue, and then we're done!

My love is forgotten. My love is gone. I will kill you all. I will spare none of this rotten world. For all the hurt you dealt my husband. For bringing him to me and taking him away. I will not stop until this civilization is scoured clean.

The first dominion I pluck apart, limb by limb, until he’s a screaming, exsanguinating trunk. One clawed foot lands on the thrashing tin-can torso and crumples it flat. Tracer fire from the second blasts chunks of black flesh from my hide. I barely feel it. I barely feel anything. The tentacles burst from the floors, the walls, his eyes, his mouth, and he tears and pops and bursts and is gone, is a quivering inverted soup for the heartbeat it takes him to expire.

I rage. I break. I stain the Father’s house with the steaming effluvia of his children. It intermingles with the scraps of my warlock. The useless pieces of what used to be my husband.

I don’t even know the noises my Irene Cartwright manifestation is making where she’s curled on the grass. Gut-wrenched and throat-cracked and full of wound.

I was supposed to have him forever.

“I caught him!” Salome is sprinting across the grass. “Irene. I caught him.”

“What.” I rise to my knees. “What?”

“I’m in Eight’s mouth and I’m stretched out trying to hold onto her teeth and he was going in and he went past me and—” She gulps a breath. “I caught him. I had to harpoon him, but I caught him.”

“Who.”

“Who the fuck do you think, girl? Look.”

All but one of Salome’s spikes have hooked into Eight’s maw. The last one is dangling further into her depth.

A flickering soul clings to it, like a dying star.

“I’m holding on and so is he,” Salome says. “But I don’t know how he hasn’t been digested yet and she’s pulling so hard.”

I have five seconds left on Diamante. Caspar might have even less.

“The Key, Irene,” Salome says. “Get the fucking Key.”

Somewhere in the massacre, I killed Armos Pastornos. I'm sorry, reader; I don’t even remember how. When the last Pastornist stops moving, I take one of my priceless seconds to realize. I only recognize him because of the Key hanging around the twisted gristle of his neck. A claw severs it from his remains.

I flicker in a cloud of blood and sinuous tentacles to the pillar behind which Caspar’s friends are hidden.

Tilliam falls babbling and weeping to his knees. Peat Moss stares with fearful awe at my handiwork. Adaire stands unsteadily.

“Lady Irene,” she manages.

My gory fist slaps into her trembling hand and opens.

The Key, smeared and sticky with the blood of its last holder.

Adaire’s eyes go wide. What color there is on her pale face drains. “I hear her,” she whispers. “My God. I hear—”

Like a bungee cord pulling taut, I ricochet out of reality.

A clear, high tone, a perfect buzzing sine wave frequency, emerges from Salome’s prime form.

Her quicksilver exterior shivers. And then her spikes burst forth with such violent eruption that the lower half of Eight’s jaw is ripped from its housing.

She whirls. Caspar Cartwright—or what’s left of him—is catapulted from Eight’s gullet. He goes arcing across Heaven’s wreck and lands on its dusty surface. Another precious second of maddening exposure before I reach him and pull him desperately into my prime form.

I ignore the war forms that break from Eight’s horde and set upon me, swiping and gnawing. Only in retrospect am I grateful to my sisters, as they array around me to keep my fragile body from being ripped asunder. For all my vast and manifold mind, I can’t think of anything else. Anything but Caspar.

I drop him into Autumn, into my Irene Cartwright manifestation’s shuddering arms. He’s been exposed to the twin shocks of Eight’s hunger and Heaven’s madness for nearly a full minute. A broad shock of silver has slashed through his dark hair like a lightning bolt. His face is crusted with dried blood from his mouth, his nose, his eyes and ears.

How much of him is left? Is he even Caspar any longer? How long will it take to repair him, if I can repair him?

“No no no no.” I cradle him. His eyes are wide and unfocused and leached of their color. The hazel is gone, replaced by a clouded slate. The ring of gold at the edge is tarnished and bloodshot. His hands have closed so tight his nails have cut bloody half-moons into his palm. I open one fist—its fingers part lifelessly—and lay my hand atop his. “Cas. You’re here, baby. You’re here with me.”

“Caspar. Oh shit.” Bina’s manifestation is the first to reach us. She crouches by us. “Is he gonna be okay?”

“Oh, my dear.” Saoirse peers over my shoulder. “I’m so very sorry.”

“I don’t know how much of him Eight took,” Salome says. “I don’t know what he remembers. Whether there’s anything left in there.”

“He’s still in there.” I caress his chest. “I’ll fix him. I’ll get him out. You hear that, Caspar? You’re not off the hook, mister. I own your eternity, remember? I’m gonna collect. We’re gonna live together in your little apartment and you’re gonna take me to my first barn raising and we’ll have a river out back and we’ll have more of Salome’s weird cake—”

He twitches. “Ch.”

“What?” My eyes widen. I frantically put my ear-spiracle to his vacant mouth. “What did you say, lover?”

“Chicken parm,” he says.

I scream and weep and rock back and forth with his head laying in my lap. “You’re okay,” I sob. “You’re okay you’re okay.”

“Holy crap.” Bina crouches next to us on the grass. “It took me weeks to get anything close to a word out of Mr. Darius.”

Caspar’s voice is like a creaking hinge on an opening door. “I’m good. Just uh.” His breath whistles in through his nostrils. “Chicken parm and. And some rooibos.”

Ganea stares uncomprehendingly. “How did it not scour your sanity? How did your soul withstand it?”

Caspar’s cracked lips close and reopen as he tries to gather enough moisture into his mouth to speak again.

“Faith,” he says.

The Key isn’t in Eight’s possession any longer, but the countless souls she devoured, and the pieces of Milinoe and of Ganea she ate, still empower her, and now thanks to my dumb ass my sisters are out of position. The eldest Sister of the Void is still a horrifying and mighty power; her war-forms still flood from the Kingdom gate, still seek to tear us apart.

She is still hungry. She is hungrier than any being has ever been.

I wish I could say it was my plan, what happens next, but I’m too busy crying and shaking Caspar’s shoulders to think straight. This one’s all Bina. Any credit I can take is from my vociferous support for it and my efforts in convincing Salome, who really doesn’t like it.

But it’s her warlock with the Key, and the shifting face.

Twoscore templars breach the Suzerain’s throne room. A dozen laser-sighted autoguns dance their dots across a scene of carnage.

The Suzerain is stooped in the middle of a splatter-painting in shades of red, leaning on his canes.

“Out,” he says. “Get out and guard the door.”

“Your Sacredness—”

“Out,” he screams. “Prepare my address. Five minutes.”

The templars behold the gore. They behold Paul Tilliam, face pallid, curled by a column and holding his ears. They behold a fawn, stooped by a body turned into foul ribbons by some catastrophic trauma, crying his eyes out with the voice of a child.

“Sacredness, are you—” A templar takes a shaky step past a smear of gray matter. “Are you hurt?”

“Your Suzerain adjures you.” Armos Pastornos CDXXXI holds his Key aloft. “Leave. All will be divulged. Prepare my fucking address.”

The moment the Templars are out, Adaire’s frailty is shed and she hurries to where Peat curls before the remnants of his surrogate father. “Peat.”

“He was gonna teach me to whittle,” Peat sobs.

She squeezes him. “Peat, he’s all right. I hear Salome. Caspar’s safe.”

Peat draws in a sharp breath. “What? What? How?”

Adaire steps past the bewildered little fawn and gives Tilliam a nudge with her toe. She gestures to her own ears and mouths Evoke.

“What?” Tilliam bellows.

“Evoke, Tilly. Fix your ears, dammit. I need you.” Adaire tries her best to straighten the crumpled brim of the Suzerain’s cap. “We have a television debut to make.”

You’ll remember, later, where you were when Armos Pastornos delivered the final Suzerain’s liturgy. Most people who are alive at the time do.

Maybe you’re in the daily crowd outside the balcony, cheering when the golden banner was draped from basilica and the little figure appeared on the balustrade. Or maybe your radio is playing it, or the loudspeaker atop your village’s temple. Maybe you see it on television, where (if you had a colored set) you realize, before anyone else, that something is different about this one.

First:

Armos Pastornos CDXXXI is early. He’s barely ever early. Often he’s late.

Second:

Archbishop Paul Tilliam of Chamchek is sharing the platform with the Suzerain. It’s likely you recognize him, if you’re well-informed.

It’s possible you know there have been perhaps a dozen homilies where a Suzerain has shared the platform. And those have been great heroes, or tyrants, or the authors of pivotal moments in Pastornist history. Paul’s all three.

Third:

Hundreds of Suzerains have preached hundreds of thousands of homilies across the history of Pastornism. Nobody’s ever delivered one covered—covered—in blood.

The Suzerain’s robe, more red now than white. The blood dripping from the key around his neck.

“Brothers. Sisters. Children of the Father. I bring glad tidings. Tidings of change. I bring you word of a new era. For you, your friends, your neighbors. For the world.

“I bring you word the Father is dead.”

Silence in the crowd.

Every station that wasn’t playing the liturgy now is.

“He is dead.” The Suzerain’s arms rise. “Paul?”

“That—uh—that’s right, folks.” Tilliam’s television grin has never been quite this sickly, but the man is a professional. “Seen it myself. Dead and gone.”

“Be full of joy. Know that you have a new God. A Goddess. A Goddess who is listening, even now, to your prayers and vexation. A Goddess to whom you all must pray, starting now. Right now. A Goddess whose name you already know.”

His smile gleams through the crimson mask on his face.

“A Goddess whose name you can count to on your fingers.”

My prime form speaks the black tongue, then, to my eldest sister. A sentence of rage and its abatement, of enmity and charity, of contempt and compassion. A sentence encompassing all she and I were and are, and all I wish we will be again.

Let me humanize it for you:

It’s all for you, Eight.

The mindless hunger was the coal firing Eight’s engine. The terrible need for more. Billions of you are too stunned or confused or horrified to let a prayer to her pass your lips. But millions of you, at least, obey your Suzerain. The warmth of worship, that craving light, flow through you and into her.

She falters. She shrinks back. Her war-forms are stilled. I like to think that, maybe, she’d have spoken to us, then, given up on her own terms.

Sorry, Eight. Jordan Darius taught me about the risks you take on when you leave things to chance and compassion.

We spring upon her, my sisters and I. We rip her open and unspool her entrails across the Heaven we’ve taken from her. We rend and amputate until we know beyond doubt she can’t hurt us.

Now, then. Do me a favor, reader, and pray to your maimed Goddess. Sate her, if you can. She’ll need your faith if she’s going to recover from the mythic asskicking her pissed-off family has just dealt her.

“That’s that. The Key is mine.” Atop my autumnal hill, there’s a scabbard-sound scrape as Salome crosses her arms. “I believe it’s time to reopen negotiations on the future of Heaven.”

The bottom drops from my stomach. “Sal—”

“I’m kidding.”

Bina lets out a pinched sigh. “Salome, come on.”

“Fuck you,” Ganea says.

“I’m kidding! It’s a joke!” Salome throws her hands in the air. “Are gods not allowed to joke?”