99 Gods: Odysseia Read online

  Nessa shook her head, not knowing where her thought came from.

  One of the attackers swung a golden fire helix across them. Nessa freaked, seeing her own death, and instinctively pushed into the mind of the Dubuque Supported, trying to knock the woman out. To Nessa’s surprise, the woman died, blood leaking out her ears and nose.

  Oh, God, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t sin and take life in this manner.

  Betrayer.

  Nessa’s right sock sent, taking over.

  Betrayer sent, a hurricane bellow deep into Nessa’s mind. She knew far too much.

  left sock sent.

  Betrayer sent. Nessa smiled and took down another of the monsters threatening the twins, this time rationing her depleted energies so that she only knocked out the miscreant, and only barely. She could take out more of them this way!

  Nessa, not her socks, swallowed her vomit. Instead of this appalling combat nonsense, which she left to her left sock, she grabbed hold of Betrayer’s thoughts and followed them into PersonaJohn.

  Betrayer screamed in PersonaJohn’s mind. Poor old John couldn’t grasp the 99 Gods willpower trick, and he hesitated, not trusting Betrayer. Nessa did trust and bathed him in enough trust that he took the chance to turn on the trick. A defensive shell, 99 God variety, sprung up around him, just over his/Persona’s skin.

  “They’re going to kill us soon,” Ken said. He leaned harder into Nessa, and she put up her strongest teek shell, which helped her stand under the strain of Ken’s weight.

  “I love you,” Nessa said, the most coherent thing she could speak. She – well, left sock – reached out and disturbed the aim of one of the enemy Supported; the enemy attack passed harmlessly over their heads.

  Betrayer sent.

  John sent.

  Betrayer repeated, a musically rising series of statements.

  Ken parried a blue helix attack with his telekinesis, sending the attack angling off to the side, where it brushed by an enemy Supported. Gunshots startled Nessa. Dubuque’s Supported sensed the end had come and shot into Orlando’s defensive shell to weaken the defense faster. End game tactics. Over two hundred Dubuque Supported still advanced on Orlando’s camp.

  Nessa took a second to watch Bob’s neo-Supported, S’up, bounce among the remaining Dubuque Supported, physically fighting them with his reality-defying overly large sword, and delaying those he didn’t kill outright. The willpower this teen carried sang to PersonaJohn’s senses, immense, impressing not only John, but also Betrayer and thus Nessa. Bob, personally, had focused his entire self on protecting Dana and the Natural Supported.

  Twitchy nervous about something in her subconscious, Nessa tried to duck; entwined in Ken, she couldn’t. An enemy Supported pinpoint attack, a green helix, penetrated Orlando’s shell and splattered into her. She let loose a soul-curdling telepathic scream as Divine energies played over her body and vanished, leaving her skin dripping off her body.

  At least I kept the attack off the twins, she thought, as she died in soul-rending agony.

  23. (John)

  His Persona senses heard a muttered curse as a projected hand appeared from nowhere – Betrayer, it had to be – and grabbed Nessa, stabilizing her and restoring her to life as her flesh began to slough off her arms and legs. Betrayer sent to him.

  John’s mind and ego leapt back to his real body, with the Fallen Angels. He felt almost gut-shot, aching from Nessa’s near demise. Her soul had left her body! Betrayer had grabbed her soul and stuffed her soul back into her body! They were Gods!

  He could barely breathe and his heart hammered in his chest.

  “Give me the gamme!” John said, ignoring decorum and shouting at the Watchers, pushed beyond all limits. “You must.”

  Sorrow floated back. “We are not decided.”

  “I demand this – now!” John said. He pushed his entire being into the command.

  Sorrow glanced at the computer screen and nodded. “I take his action as my responsibility.” She gestured and an elaborate device reminding John of a medieval astrolabe appeared in her hand. “This is the gamme.” Satan took one look at the device and backed away, hauling Reed by the collar as she withdrew. Grover and Lara followed, ill at the combat, but chagrined they weren’t in the battle to fight evil.

  Wisdom and Glory screamed at Sorrow and John in their private language; their magic beat at him, and then lifted. Sorrow now protected him from the other Fallen Angels. He turned to the keystone gamme, the astrolabe-like device, and took the device from Sorrow’s hand. Like all things of the Fallen Angels, the keystone gamme reeked of age and evil magic; inside was a mind, of sorts, a mind that enjoyed suffering and had gladly witnessed and partaken in the deaths of nearly a hundred thousand human beings.

  John did his spell, the one to strip the ability to do magic from magicians. The keystone fought back, wiggling in his mind as he tried to destroy its ability to do magic. A thousand years of practice with this one spell made it inexorable when used on magicians, but the gamme wasn’t a magician. He heard screams of pain from the other side of his mind, from Orlando’s camp. The Dubuque Supported now concentrated their attack on the Kid God and his computers. Soon he too would fall.

  Removing the keystone gamme’s ability to do magic wouldn’t be enough. He had to destroy the device, despite the risks.

  John muttered a spell and put his entire mental self into the keystone.

  He found the place; inside the place was a creature of nightmare, a creature of hands and arms and nothing else. Black hands from darkest Africa, pale white hands from the northernmost regions of Scandinavia, and every shade in between. Tiny infant arms, with minute delicate fingers, women’s arms with soft curves and graceful hands, hairy male arms with scars and muscles. Twisted arms, with broken bones healed badly, hands with missing fingers, arms thin with the effects of starvation, arms fat with the rewards of rich living, muscular women’s arms, graceful male hands, weak arms, strong arms, all rooted in some impossible invisible source. Hundreds, thousands of them. They writhed, twisted, gestured him closer. “I’ll make you the king of the world,” the hand and arm creature said to John, with no mouth to source the voice. “I’ll show you how to do real miracles, how to defeat your enemies at great distance with your magic. You don’t need to destroy anything; I have the power, if properly used, to kill even these enemy Gods you face.”

  The creature’s words stopped John as he worked. “How do you have this power?”

  “I am malevolence; put me in the mind of an enemy God and he will destroy himself in horror.”

  “Show me,” John said, readying.

  The arm and hand creature approached; this place of nightmare violated reality and geometry, the gamme’s hands and arms occupying extra dimensions. “I possess…”

  The horror’s voice cut off as John struck. The horror grabbed at John in this nightmare place, but John hopped back and ripped the magic out of the horror, as he had done so many times before with magicians.

  “…you tricked…”

  John nodded and took his magical self out of the keystone. Easy velvet.

  Yes, he had tricked the monster in the heart of the gamme; yes, he had no honor. Nessa was in mortal danger right now and he had to protect her, and so he didn’t care about honor.

  “Sorrow!” he said. “I can’t take this any further.” He had taken the mind and the ability to work magic from the gamme, but the magical enchantment of the device still remained.

  “Let me,” Cunning sa
id, from beside him. “Begone!”

  The gamme evaporated in John’s hand. Nothing remained but a small puff of dust, disappearing into the restless air of the room.

  “Now they can worship us,” Cunning said. “No longer can we shunt this worship off to prophets, miracle workers and holy men. I hope you have not doomed us, for your sake, for if you have, you will fall to oblivion with us.”

  “I understand,” John said. “Now let’s watch this modoc and see if the side effect works as I had divined.” If his plan worked, the side effect of the destruction of the keystone gamme would save Orlando’s crew.

  Evil filled his actions. The Father of Darkness both exulted and prayed for forgiveness.

  Orlando’s Supported slumped to the ground, some with heads in their hands; some fell from the air with bone-cracking force. A moment later Dubuque’s Supported slumped the same way as the wave of change caused by the breaking of the keystone gamme moved away from the Persona/John body. More of Dubuque’s Supported fell from the air, as most of them had been flying. Then the passage of the wave of change vanished from sight as the last of Dubuque’s Supported fell.

  “This changes everything,” a young woman Sibyl said. She stood next to Ken amid the shredded remnants of what had once been a tent. “Not necessarily for the good. Divine war’s now more thinkable, the triggers more pullable, the politics more polarizing.” Yes. Definitely a top-end Sibyl, reeking of the Indigo, and working behind his back with his telepaths. Hmph and double hmph. Not fair!

  He studied her some more, and her facial appearance triggered memories. He had known her years ago as a retarded and fey child named Diana, born he thought of Jurgen and Epharis. What was she doing there, and functional? The adult top-end Telepaths terrified the Indigo.

  “They’re gone!” Orlando said, rising from his crouched position in the center of the camp, where he had supported the failing defensive shell. He concentrated and restored his silvery flesh to whole and clothed; he waved his hand and the physical weapons of Dubuque’s army flew out of their hands and into the air. “All my Supported are gone!” he screamed. “What did you do!”

  The last he said to John, in his Persona body.

  “I’m sorry. This was the only possible help,” John said. “Supported, as you knew them, were only possible because of the twisted magic of the Fallen Angels. The power of the Supported has been returned to their divine sources.”

  “Fallen Angels? Holy crap, you’re talking about the Watchers, aren’t you,” Orlando said.

  “Yes,” John said. “There are now no more Supported. To save you I undid them, all of them, worldwide, with the help of the Fallen Angels, who are pulling back their ancient evil magic.” Orlando stared at him, horror mixed with ready violence. The God, fallen into his own Mission, couldn’t even see the victory this had won, today.

  “I win! I win! Heh heh heh!” Betrayer’s cackling projection appeared and began to caper about, dancing the dance of the insane, incongruous in her comic opera faux-fascist uniform. “No more Supported armies! No more trivial wars pissing off God Almighty! Those of us who turned our back on Supported are vindicated!”

  Yes, her Mission glowed stronger than before.

  “You cut off our hands to save our bodies,” Orlando said. “Lorenzi, this is wrong! This is evil!”

  John shook his head. “The Supported were corrupted by the tricks of the Fallen Angels, Orlando. In a decade or two, the Gods who allowed Supported would be as bad off as the worshipped Gods. The Supported had to go the way of the harquebus and buggy whip. I’m sorry.”

  The mangled remains of the Kid God nodded from where he lay plastered on the ground. “Sweet. Told you standard Supported were evil,” the Kid God said. “Did y’all listen to me? Noooo.”

  Dana crawled to her feet and went to Orlando. Her body moved but her heart didn’t beat, her blood circulated by a willpower trick residing in her neck. She didn’t breathe, but air moved in and out of her lungs due to yet another willpower trick. She even had willpower cooling down her body from her willpower exertions. John found himself impressed out of his mind. Even stripped of her myriad Supported talents, Dana still did the impossible, now as a Natural Supported. And her mind hadn’t fallen apart.

  She took Orlando’s hands in hers, to help him. John could feel the love, the nascent connection. He had the urge to marry them right then and there, complete with a Catholic mass. “Think,” Dana said. “Dubuque’s army is still out there and they still outnumber us. Can they do anything to us? Can we do anything to them? What does this change?”

  “Too much. Everything,” Orlando said. “My Mission’s in chaos.”

  “As your Mission should be, twit,” Betrayer said. She raised her arms and called divine glory down upon her. John, unable to resist, recolored Betrayer’s display with darker hues as she created her display, branding Betrayer as yet another of the Fallen. The lunatic God didn’t notice. “Too much loaning out of willpower sapped your own sense of reality and responsibility. The Supported were another form of worship: forced worship, bribed worship. As the Father of Darkness and the Kid God said, just as corrupting in the end as active prayer and formal worship. Be glad that temptation is now gone. So kiss my feet for saving your benighted souls. Now!”

  Orlando turned to Betrayer. “You’ve done evil today, you and Lorenzi. How many Supported were flying when this hit and will die falling to their deaths from this? How many…”

  “Not enough,” Betrayer said, and laughed. “My plans saved you, body and soul. This was my plan, my precious devious plan. Acknowledge my leadership and serve me well. You must! You owe me your lives.”

  John looked around. The Natural Supported still held their own magical power. One of the defenders, the bouncing teen, was still Supported; John sensed he got his support by an entirely different method. A Natural Supported, the khol-eyeshadowed Lydia, all dressed in black, picked up the Kid God to hold in her arms, distraught; she had to be the Kid God’s mess-around girl, the one the Kid God was all tits-and-zits over. Ken held Nessa in his arms, Nessa essentially dead but kept alive only through his Persona-body’s healing touch. Not only had her skin sloughed off her arms and legs to show bone, but her left arm, below the elbow, had fallen from the rest of her. John, horrified, feared what this would do to Nessa’s already severely strained sanity. Of the army, only Diana, Uffie, Dave, Elorie, and the twins in their arms had come through unscathed. Dave and Elorie smiled, quite happy to see the Supported pass from the stage. The horror of the battle hadn’t hit them yet. Someone, likely Ken, kept them from seeing the full damage done to Nessa. His former hirelings understood at a gut level the problems the Supported had caused. He smiled in pride.

  “We owe you nothing, Betrayer,” Orlando said. “I refuse to follow you as a leader.”

  “Then you will die, alone, betrayed by your own inadequacies, facing a multi-part horror you can’t even imagine today!” Betrayer said, and then cackled. She pointed her finger at John’s Persona body. “Go back to where you came, tool.”

  Betrayer’s willpower yanked John out of Persona. He couldn’t hinder her banishment in the slightest. He fell.

  “The image vanished,” Cunning said. John’s smartphone had gone back to being the no-signal paperweight it had been before this crazy nonsense started.

  John, back in his real body, shuddered. “Give me a moment,” he said. Carnage. Nessa’s near death. Betrayer’s betrayals and her increased Mission strength. He had been nothing more than Betrayer’s fork and knife. The Fallen Angels had been right. The keystone should have been the last gamme to go, not the first. Something lay broken inside him, something he feared would never heal.

  Sorrow gazed at him in hunger, and licked her lips. His pain was her morsel.

  Right this instant, he didn’t begrudge her his pain, not one bit. He wallowed in his pain even more, a gift to her.

  “The Daughter of Light is gravely wounded, but safe for now, in the hands of two Gods who can put
her back together. Hopefully her sanity will survive,” he said. Sorrow nodded and closed her eyes. If John guessed correctly, she would dine on Nessa’s pain and in the process help preserve Nessa’s sanity. Good and evil at once, the way of the Fallen Angels. “The Child of Morning is hurt but not gravely. The side effect I predicted, that the keystone gamme had allowed the 99 Gods to create and support their Supported, proved fully correct. The destruction was successful. The Supported are no more.”

  Cunning laughed. “Only the worship-shunt-based Supported are ended, oh great Father of Darkness. There are many other ways, slower ways to make such things, and some of the 99 Gods already use their versions of gamme, which is of course the best way to ultimate power. What will rise from this ruin will eventually and inevitably be more powerful and dangerous. On the other hand, you did remove the 99’s second most dangerous means of self-corruption. You aided God Almighty more, today, than in your entire serially-mortal life, oh Father of Darkness. And killed more people. You are one of us, now.”

  Satan and Reed came up to him and took him by either shoulder, and led him away. Neither spoke. Grover and Lara, though, couldn’t hide the glee bursting out of them. They, now arm in arm with Glory, too, understood.

  “What we did today was necessary,” John said. “My heart says we’ve won the largest victory since this started.”

  “And your victory almost assures the absolute annihilation of all humankind,” Cunning said and lowered his gaze to the ground, and his voice to a whisper. “All victories have their price.”

  Part 2

  Virgins No More

  “As Solzhenitsyn pointed out, to kill by the millions you need an ideology. … In a utopia, everyone is happy forever, so its moral value is infinite. … So how many people would it be permissible to sacrifice to attain that infinite good? A few million can seem like a pretty good bargain.” – Stephen Pinker, The Better Angels of our Nature