99 Gods: Betrayer Read online

  “Geor-gia,” Lisa said. She grabbed Dave by his shirtsleeve cootie-avoidance style and dragged him over to where Georgia leafed through medieval texts on the main worktable. From what Dave knew, John Lorenzi, the Magician, had sent a ‘cleaning crew’ to some damned place in Europe to cart off the Ecumenists’ documentation. Elorie’s team didn’t have everything; this cabin held only the materials from the Ecumenists’ functional library. Apparently, Lorenzi’s cleaning crew found thousands of books, some over five hundred years old, in storage. Those went elsewhere.

  Georgia Kelly looked up and glared at Lisa and Dave. Elorie went through so much work every morning with the extravagant clothes and makeup because of Georgia. The competition. Brilliant, fluent in dozens of languages and able to read dozens more, Georgia was a few years younger than Dave and Elorie and a stunning natural beauty. “You’re interrupting,” Georgia said. Oh, also, she was a complete pain in the ass.

  Elorie walked over. Georgia and Lisa regularly sniped at each other. Lisa, no natural beauty but younger and thus with her own innate advantages, considered harassing Georgia to be her duty, the same way Jack considered it his duty to harass Dave. “So right,” Lisa said. “Dave reads German.”

  “So do I, so do you, and so does Darrel,” Georgia said.

  “I’m too busy, so are you, and the only German Darrel’s interested in is porn.” Lisa bent down and got way into Georgia’s personal space.

  “Don’t bother me with this.”

  Elorie padded up to them, quiet and cautious. “Georgia,” Elorie said, helpful, “don’t we have some written German crap we haven’t had time to dig into?”

  Georgia rolled her eyes. “Our scientist here likely learned standard German. The documents in question are all in Plattdeutch – Low German – with the archaic vocabulary and spelling common to the era, along with the most appalling misused slang from more languages than I’m familiar with. And far too many Church Latin puns.”

  “I should be able to piece through the Plattdeutch,” Dave said. “Pf’s were P’s, Ch’s were K’s, and Ts’s were T’s, if I remember my schooling. The Benrath Line?” They spoke Low German in north Germany (north of the Benrath Line), and its phonemes shared many of the same sounds with English, which in Dave’s mind made it easy. Standard German had been a mixture of Middle and High German, if Dave remembered correctly.

  “Yes,” Georgia said, with a sigh. “He’ll need some good dictionaries, especially for the Church Latin, Middle French and Old Church Slavonic slang littering those documents.”

  “No problem. I’ll set him up with a laptop and the electronic dictionaries,” Elorie said. “Dave, you’ve got yourself a job.”

  “Took him long enough,” Jack said, sniping over his shoulder with a fully-auto flapping tongue. “Now if we could just teach him how to cook something besides weight watchers anonymous slop…”

  Dave stood up straighter and sucked in his belly.

  Elorie sat him down at the same table where Mohammed Farid worked. No laptop needed for Mohammed. The soft-spoken man was fluent in nearly as many languages as Georgia, written and spoken, but a slightly different set. He, for one, had no problem with the Catalan dialects appearing in some of the Ecumenists’ documents, nor with some of the far more difficult Aramaic pieces. The Recruiter had rescued him from the wreckage of another company done in by the Seven Suits, in Mohammed’s case, a multinational oil company. His job with the multinational? Negotiator.

  “Take a look at the signature first, my friend,” Mohammed said. Mohammad, at least, seemed willing to overlook Dave’s association with Dubuque.

  Dave did. “Monseigneur Johannes D’Lorenzi? Franco-German? Wait…” Dave grew cold. “These are John Lorenzi’s letters back to the Ecumenists, aren’t they?” A hell of a thing to start on, Dave thought. He wondered if the Magician had enchanted them…

  “And a turgid lot they are,” Mohammed said. “Scary, supernatural and satanic. Literally.”

  Dave saw five bound books of these letters. “Holy crap.”

  “Peace. He is our employer, of sorts.”

  Dave read. The letters in front of him swam softly through his gaze until, a half hour in, his mind clicked on Lorenzi’s Gothic penmanship, allowing him to form the letters into words. Progress began.

  When he took his break, Darrel shanghaied him into sweeping the floor and emptying the trash again. Then he fixed lunch. Elorie, after making another pass through the workroom, decided to lend him a hand.

  “Getting anywhere?” Elorie asked, as she set out the whole-wheat buns and the deli-sliced low-fat turkey breast.

  “There’s nothing in them with any of the buzz words that Georgia’s hot after,” Dave said. He made the salad today. “I’ve got a feeling I’m wasting my time. That, and learning that Mr. Lorenzi’s not exactly Mr. Nice Guy and got into enough supernatural scrapes to inspire a never ending fantasy series.”

  “That’s if his letters are at all truthful,” Elorie said, a half grin on her face. “He is, though, most definitely strange.”

  Dave finished the salad then helped Elorie serve lunch.

  “I’m bored,” Jack said, after he polished off his sandwich. “There’s an entire lake out there, and I’ve seen bear and deer tracks. How ‘bout some hunt’n or fish’n? Get everyone here some fresh air.”

  “A wonderful idea,” Elorie said. “With one problem. Take a close look across the lake. See that other cabin?”

  Jack nodded. “Ritzy place, almost as lux as this here ladies’ cabin. Nothing like that dump you put us men in or the place you reserved for yourself and P…”

  Elorie cleared her throat. “Pardon,” Jack said.

  “The cabin’s where Lorenzi trains his magicians,” Elorie said. “There’s…”

  The fish in the lake jumped at once.

  A fork clattered, from someone who had been eating the salad. Dave’s mouth gaped open.

  “That’s just not natural,” Jack said, real slow. “Perhaps you’re right about the fish’n. Another day, then.”

  The fish in the lake all jumped at once again.

  “You didn’t have to rub it in,” Jack said, muttering.

  Dave turned to Elorie. “You know, this gives me an idea.”

  Elorie raised an eyebrow and grinned at him. “You and your ideas. I don’t even have to guess to know this one. What makes you think it’s not too dangerous to contemplate?”

  “Because, as Mohammed said, in a way he is our employer,” Dave said.

  Dave could have predicted he would end up with mud up to his knees, this being that kind of lake, if he had bothered to think first. Still, he sludged over to the Lorenzi cabin without dropping the fifth volume of Lorenzi’s letters into the mud. Now that would have been embarrassing.

  Three men and a woman appeared out of nowhere and waved their hands at him. He froze in place against his will. His adrenaline spiked and his heart started racing mightily.

  “He’s a Dubuque spy, and his mind is fully shut tight,” the short man said, after a corpulent old man waddled out of the cabin. Mr. Lorenzi, Dave guessed. The old man frowned and squinted, barked something into the short man’s ear that was half profanity, then waved his right hand at Dave. Dave found he could walk again.

  Dave guessed Mr. Lorenzi wasn’t having a good day. He appeared to be beyond peeved.

  “Mr. Lorenzi, sir,” Dave said, stammering, after he calmed himself. “My name is…”

  “I know who you are, son,” Lorenzi said. “Stand there and calm down. Be my prop for a few moments.” Lorenzi turned to his magician students. “I want you to examine this man and tell me your mistakes. Mistakes, mind you, that could get you killed in the line of work you horse apples are now doing.”

  Horse apples? Sounded like Lorenzi had as much trouble with modern slang as he did in his ancient letters. How old was the Magician, anyway? The internet said ‘centuries’, which Dave didn’t trust. Too unbelievable. Still, if these letters weren’t forgeries o
r a ruse, he had quite a few more ‘centuries’ under that fifty inch belt of his than even the bloggers realized.

  The woman cleared her throat. “He isn’t a Supported, sir.”

  “That’s right, Abigail,” Lorenzi said.

  “Well, damn,” the short magician said. “Why’s he detect as Dubuque’s then?”

  “He’s a worshipper, a well linked miracle-carrying worshipper,” Abigail the lady magician said. “What’s he doing here?”

  “He’s got a hot ticket. That is, he’s with Alt’s Ecumenist quest crew,” Lorenzi said. “Larry?”

  “Oh, right,” a non-descript fifty-ish fellow with a black beard and beady eyes said. “The project of yours Dubuque’s supposed to support?” Lorenzi nodded. “We should have expected someone like him, sir.”

  “Yes, you should have. Being able to cast spells isn’t an excuse to be idiots,” Lorenzi said. “You’re Dave?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come with me. Mind the mud, now that I’ve cleaned off your fancy duds.”

  Dave looked at his feet and his Levi jeans. They were clean again.

  Lorenzi sat Dave down at a table littered with chocolate wrappers and doodles of dolphins. His chair gave him an itchy feeling, as if he sat here too long he would be compelled to do something stupid. His head started to hurt.

  “What brings you over here?” Mr. Lorenzi asked.

  “I’ve been assigned your old letters, sir,” Dave said.

  “Don’t call me ‘sir’; you’re not my student, you’re someone who’s helping me.”

  “John? Or Johannes?”

  “Johannes? Those old letters? Now there’s a waste of time if ever there was,” John said. “The name’s John, these days. Hell, I wanted your team looking into the Ecumenists’ current documents, not the archives. Whatever lay behind their disappearance and possible demise has to be in their working stack.”

  “This book of letters was from the working stack.”

  “Oh?” John said. He bent over and put his chin on his hand, scratching his Santa beard. “What could possibly make them interested in my old letters? How many volumes?”

  “Five.”

  “Which five? Are they sequential?”

  “They appear to be sequential, and they’re all from the seventeenth century,” Dave said. “The question I had was the relationship between this Satan character you keep mentioning in your letters and one of the things that Georgia’s got us all looking for, the fallen angels. Whatever they are. Is Satan one of them?” The only potential tie-in he had thought up so far.

  “Fallen angels… Fallen angels?” John looked puzzled, then nodded. “The old fixation of the Ecumenists? The fallen angels are either a myth or a bit of badly mucked up history. The name ‘fallen angel’ is the common term used to describe both the nephilim, which means ‘the fallen’ or ‘the giants’, as well as another group referenced in the pseudoepigraphical book of Enoch, the ‘îrin. ‘Those who watch’. The Watchers.”

  “According to what Georgia’s said, there are several references to these fallen angels in the current writings of the Ecumenists.”

  John’s eyes opened wide and he seemed to wake up from a deep slumber. “Well! So, what else does this Georgia have you looking for?”

  “Let’s see,” Dave said. He closed his eyes. “Carthage, One Mind, unity, Sibyls, Seers, Mystics, and the Kingdom of God.”

  “But not references to Angels, Archangels, Wanderers, Travelers, Shamans or the Ha-qodeshim?”

  Dave shook his head.

  “Well,” John said, shaking his head. “Anyway, Carthage doesn’t ring a bell as far as importance to the Ecumenists is concerned. ‘Unity’ is a way of referencing the mystery of God, though it may have other meanings in the Ecumenist writings as well. ‘One Mind’ is the name of an order of Telepaths who live in the hinterlands of Central Asia, in what’s now northwestern Tibet. Sibyls, Seers and Mystics are alternate names for varieties of abnormal humanity, including Telepaths; the terms change over time. The Kingdom of God? Well, you know what that is.”

  “Jesus’s promise? The next step beyond Dubuque’s City of God?”

  John sighed. “The idea that Heaven and Earth will eventually merge into one. Book of Revelations and End Time stuff, common in many Middle-East religions.”

  All above Dave’s pay grade. “What about this Satan character?”

  “Trouble. Utter trouble. Think the tormenter of Job, not the Dweller in Hell, though. Satan’s a she, she’s a Telepath, she’s immortal, and she’s a self-serving evil bitch addicted to making trouble. She hasn’t changed much since my conflicts with her in those letters you have in your lap.” Lorenzi frowned. “Most of what I know about Satan I learned in the period of the letters. Which brings up the real point of all of this: what in the gosh darn blue blazes were the Ecumenists thinking of? Why Satan?” John looked over at Dave. “Know what, though? She’s here in the ‘States as we speak, bedeviling your object’d’worship, Dubuque.” Pause. “Think hemorrhoids.”

  Dave blinked. “I don’t… This is all real?” He tapped the book of bound letters.

  “Every last word, save for the exaggerations. There’s a lot more unnatural and supernatural strangeness involved in our world than anyone else living knows about. More than any of you would ever want to learn about. Luckily, most people can’t sense the craziness,” John said. His voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “And, yes, in a way I am that old. Don’t tell anyone.”

  “Did Satan park herself on the Ecumenists’ doorstep and force them to leave? You and your witch-hunters had to leave every time she showed up.” She. Satan was a she. The idea just wouldn’t settle in Dave’s brain. Next thing he knew John would say God’s an elephant and Jesus a brother magician or some sort of Telepath.

  “Not likely. She can’t abide old holy places, and the Ecumenists lived in one, despite their heretical beliefs. For instance, from a Christian perspective, the Ecumenists don’t consider Jesus to be an incarnation of God but a true ‘son of God’, a demigod as the ancients used the term, half-God half-mortal, a magician like myself. Despite their…”

  “You read my mind!” Dave said, with a shriek.

  “Fat chance,” John said. “I’m a well blinkered Mindbound even the most powerful Telepaths have a hard time reading. However, Nessa Binglehauser sat in your chair four hours ago and she’s more than capable of sparking mind and soul-bending coincidences, even with us quite powerful but totally stuck-in-our-own-minds failed Telepaths.”

  Dave rubbed his chin. “Sorry. I’m just not used to dealing with this level of, well, insanity.”

  “Son, you came over here of your own accord. Live with your decision,” John said, mock gruff. He stood and clapped Dave on the shoulder.

  “Another question, if you have time, about your letters,” Dave said.

  John sat down with an ‘oof’. “Fire on.”

  “All of these volumes of letters deal with this Satan woman. I don’t think it’s a mistake,” Dave said. “Does she have something to do with the appearance of the 99 Gods, perhaps?”

  “I certainly hope not,” John said. “However…” He rubbed his temples. “What was the last of these you have?”

  “This one,” Dave said. He handed John the volume. John flipped through it and handed it back to him.

  “Ah. Then I understand what this hoo-hoo is all about,” John said. “Do you remember my big fight with Satan, near the end of this volume?”

  “Yes,” Dave said. He hadn’t translated much of any of these, but he had gone searching for all the easily found references to Satan. “You failed your magician-removal spell the first six times you tried the spell on her, then, later, found a way to maneuver her into the St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague, where you succeeded and stripped her of her powers, the rebound stripping you of your magic. How’d that work, afterwards? Your letters didn’t say anything about your recovery, save for the fact you ended up a magician again and she got her tricks bac
k.”

  Lorenzi shrugged. “Well. A bit of background: I’d named her Satan a generation before, and there were enough kooky Satan-worshippers in the 16th Century to have the worshipper effect on her. According to Satan, she’d gone mad and didn’t understand why. Her insanity allowed me to strip her abilities off her; Satan’s incredible age allowed them to come back. After they came back, she figured out the problem was Satan-worshippers, who she then after shunned.”

  “And you?” Dave said.

  “Satan captured me and showed me how to retrieve my own abilities, using my own great age. She has a strange sense of honor, understand.”

  “So you’ve been cooperating since back then?”

  “I wouldn’t say ‘cooperating’,” John said. “After she got back her abilities and reduced me to being a dying old mortal, all I could do was surrender to her. Which I did. That’s when I learned the trick, because Satan’s radioactive bad luck ability, or whatever else you might call it, is far less likely to affect someone who’s surrendered to her.”

  “So what you’re saying is Telepaths can end up worshipped and driven insane, just like the 99 Gods?” Dave said.

  John nodded and did a totally incongruous old-man’s fist pump. “Yes! That has to be the connection.” He paused to shift position in his chair. “The Ecumenists must have figured out the 99 Gods might be driven insane by worship. Somehow. Likely after they met Marseille. They must have realized he was a divine magician and decided this would be a danger to them and, somehow, the fallen angels were behind…” John closed his eyes in thought. Dave didn’t interrupt.

  “Well, enough of this mommicked up mess,” John said. He stood and stretched. “Now you’re going to get to suffer some simple flying, because it’s time I visited your team and because I have no desire to get my feet and pants muddy.”

  They flew. Dave’s pulse topped one thirty on the way.

  12. (Nessa)

  “You’re better?” Ken said. “I can’t tell.”

  Nessa flounced and sniffed. He was such a worrywart this morning. She finished ironing the fancy dark green blouse one of Portland’s Wise Shepherds bought for her, and put it on. Ummm. Warm clothing. Ken kept the hotel room’s AC too cold for her taste, given the horrific steam bath awaiting them outside. She had spent too much time in Alaska. Nearly everywhere was a steam bath to her these days.