Ritual Magic

Then she bit into it and was suddenly ravenous. That first piece was gone now, as was the second, and she was finishing her third. She glanced out her window. They were on Market Street, passing Mount Hope, the cemetery where the first person she’d killed was buried. “We getting close?” she asked Cynna.

“Still a little over ten miles.”

That should be enough time. Lily washed down the last bite with Diet Coke. “I’ve got a question.”

Cynna was eyeing the box, where one last slice remained. “Go ahead. You want the last piece?”

“I’m full. It’s a couple of questions, actually. The first one’s for you as Rhej.”

Cynna’s eyebrows went up. She took the last slice. “Okay.”

“It seems as if all of the Great Bitch’s agents we’ve run across have been psychopaths. We’re known by the company we keep, right? I can’t help wondering if the Big B is literally crazy.”

“Well, sure!”

Lily blinked. “Then she is a psychopath?”

“Oh, no, I don’t think so. I think that’s a purely human malfunction, and whatever else she is, she’s a lot more than human. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that exposure to her causes psychopathy, though. Why do you ask?”

“Because what happened today doesn’t make sense. Unless she’s really around-the-bend nuts, not operating logically—”

“That’s not her kind of crazy.”

“What kind of crazy is she, then?”

“Um . . . she’s not human, so I guess I’d say she’s crazy the way her peer group defines insanity.”

Her peer group being other Old Ones? “Can you narrow that down for me?”

Cynna glanced at the three men facing them. “Most of the stories are shared with all the clan, but the thing you want to know is from the primus memorias. First Memories. First Memories are from when lupi were created, and they’re shared only with lupi, and they’re spoken while the Rhej is touching the memory itself, in order to keep the telling as close to the original as possible. Can’t do that perfectly because the language they’re in is hard to translate, but we do our best. But it’s considered safest to touch or enter those memories only at Clanhome.”

“So you can’t—”

Cynna flapped a hand. “Let me think this through.” She did that, frowning. Then nodded. “You’re Lady- touched, so it’s okay for you to know the primus memorias, but I don’t want to tell them without touching them. I’d be paraphrasing, and it’s okay for others to do that, but not me. But the guys can talk about them.” She looked at the three men facing them. “Someone want to tell Lily what the Lady told Aswan about the gods going insane?”

For a long moment, no one did. Miles and Jonathan exchanged an uncomfortable glance. Oddly, it was Mike who finally spoke . . . odd because he was Leidolf, so Cynna wasn’t his Rhej, and Mike was not exactly a shining example of liberated thinking.

“I’m not going to say this right,” he warned, “but here’s what I remember. The Lady was talking about why we aren’t ever to worship her. She said that it’s normal for the new races to worship those like her, who’d stayed on from the last cycle to help with this one. Like when a baby thinks his mother’s breast is the whole world, see? But that time ends. When he becomes a toddler he learns the word ‘no’ and can’t stop using it, and the older he gets, the more he becomes his own person. Only something went wrong this time. I didn’t understand, but somehow the godhead got sticky. It stuck to them when it wasn’t supposed to, and that was wrong. It would keep the younger races from knowing themselves fully, which is how God comes to know Himself—”

“Herself,” Scott put in.

“The universe,” Miles said. “The way I heard it, it’s how the universe comes to know itself. Through everything it creates, but especially the sentient races.”

“You’re all mostly right,” Cynna said. “The word from the memories doesn’t have an English translation, so your Rhejes would have used whatever felt closest. That could be ‘God’ or ‘the universe’ or even just ‘life.’”

Mike nodded, accepting that. “There was a big argument. Some of the Old Ones thought the sticky godhead must be the way God—or the universe, or whatever you call it—wanted to know Himself this time around. They thought it would be terrible and wrong to abandon their power and leave the new races without help and guidance. But most of them didn’t think like that. The new gods didn’t have that stickiness, and—”

“New gods?” Lily asked, then wished she hadn’t interrupted.

Scott answered that from up front. “Gods who weren’t Old Ones.”

“Like the Native American gods?” Nettie had said something about that once.

Jonathan nodded. “They weren’t as powerful as the old gods. Maybe that’s why they remained more like counselors and elders, worshiped but . . . differently. That’s not something the Lady said,” he added quickly. “That’s just me thinking about it.”

Mike picked up his thread again. “So the Lady and most of those like her stepped back from their godheads. It’s not just that they renounced being worshiped, though that’s part of it. They, uh . . . this part I don’t remember very well.”

“I do,” Miles said suddenly. “‘And so we sundered ourselves from the being and power of gods. Reft and bereft, we grew smaller and more vast, and slowly returned to ourselves. In our return, we saw that we had started to slip toward madness, and we looked at those who had not renounced godhead. We watched them, and we saw that they were insane.’”

“Right,” Mike said. “You’ve got a good memory. So that’s why we don’t worship the Lady. It would be the opposite of serving her because it would harm her.”

“You need to go left at the intersection,” Cynna told Scott, then glanced at Lily. “Does that help?”

“Some. Sort of.” There was one hell of a lot of information in those few passages, but most of it didn’t apply to the immediate question, as far as Lily could tell. “It doesn’t tell me what kind of crazy she is.”

“The kind that thinks they have all the answers,” Miles said. “That’s in another one of the First Memories, but it’s still the Lady talking to Aswan. Aswan was the first Rhej,” he added, in case Lily didn’t know that. “The Lady was explaining about submission and how we need to understand it because the crazy gods didn’t. It went something like this: ‘The unsundered gods, in their insanity, forgot surrender; they submit only to what they already know and confuse will with purpose. And so each is certain that her or his aspect encompasses all wisdom, with all others being lesser, or distortions, or lies.’”

Mike frowned. “Did she say wisdom, or truth? Or maybe I’m thinking about what she said about rainbows.”

This time it was Scott who quoted quietly. “‘Which color of the rainbow is the most true? Is red more true than green? Is blue the best path to understanding, and should you therefore outlaw yellow cloth and purple vases and the soft blushing sky awakening to day?’”

“Yeah, that bit. She was talking about how the clans are to respect each other, but it applies to lots of other stuff.” He paused, glancing at Miles sitting beside him. “I guess we haven’t always done a great job at respecting each other.”

Everyone got quiet. Nokolai and Leidolf were prime examples of clans not respecting each other. Lily decided to return to her question. “So you’re saying that the Great Bitch is the kind of crazy that doesn’t tolerate disagreement. My way or the highway.” This wasn’t exactly news.

“Pretty much,” Cynna agreed. “The interesting thing is that the other Old Ones considered that insane.”

Lily’s eyebrows shot up. “It is interesting, isn’t it? In a weird and startling way.” It also didn’t seem to help much. “If the Big B is acting rationally, however screwed up she may be, then she had a purpose for what she did today. Only I don’t see it. Sure, she’d like to wipe out Nokolai, but she didn’t. She didn’t even come close, however tight things seemed at the time. And she used an awful lot of power trying. And how come she can open gates that way all of a sudden? Last year she couldn’t.”

“Slow down, Scott,” Cynna said suddenly. “It’s just ahead on the right.” She frowned at Lily. “What are you saying?”

“Drummond thinks we have a second enemy. At least,” she corrected herself, “he thinks I do. He, uh, saw some kind of spiritual attack directed against me while we were fighting the dworg.”

“Shit. That’s not good.”