“Pil, you’re just fine, you’re safe, and you don’t need to worry. You can let go of me anytime you want to.” I didn’t say that she’d better want to pretty flipping soon.
The girl glanced at me and then stared back down. Of course, darkness hid her face, but she hunched against my side with her back to the rest of the world, as if she thought the trees or the air might tear her apart.
I patted her hand and began walking circles around the camp, watching for anything that might mean us ill.
At the end of my third circle, my stomach flopped over and something hauled my spirit upward out of my body. For a moment, I felt it would be a relief to vomit. Then every sensation of sight, touch, and smell vanished. Some god had brought me to his home to bargain, or at least to pile abuse on me, and I knew with near-perfect certainty which one it was.
A smooth, precise voice cut through the nothingness. “Murderer, you are not allowed to have any more children. We agreed upon it, agreed with crystalline specificity.” Harik, God of Death, always reminded me of a banker looking at your last coin.
“Mighty Harik, I have no children anymore. I understand that to you it may seem like I do, maybe because you lack kids of your own. That swamp of emasculation between your legs must be a bother at times.”
I imagined drawing my sword. It had been forged by some slope-brow, floppy god at some point in history, or by some god’s ass-kissing lackey, and they had bestowed upon it a name so trite that I could hardly bear to say it without banging my fist against something—The Blade of Obdurate Mercy. As a weapon, it was exactly as magical as a butter churn in the world of man. In the Gods’ Realm, it allowed me to see as the gods see.
My sword’s point swept through the air, wiping away the nothingness like cobwebs. My breath caught. A double rainbow circled a full, chalk-white moon trapped in a star-pricked sky. Moonlight drifted down and struck tiny sparks wherever it touched something sharp or angled. A massive field of fat, silver flowers flowed downslope into the distance, their faces turned down. The blooms fluttered in waves, as if creatures were running around beneath them, close to the ground. On the other side of me, a light, open forest of straight trees swayed. They weren’t swaying with the wind. Instead, they moved in and out as if the entire forest was breathing.
I fought off the urge to lie on the dirt and curl up asleep. Instead, I stood straighter and glanced at the shadowed, marble gazebo above me. Harik was sitting in there someplace, whether I could see him or not.
Something made a sound to my left, and I spun that way. It was a foolish thing to do, since I couldn’t harm or affect anything in this realm. The thing sighed, and I saw Pil standing there, staring around at nothing, since she had no sight in the Gods’ Realm. A sorcerer herself, she must have clung to me and come along when Harik seized me. It wouldn’t have been hard for a sorcerer to do, even a disturbed one.
“Pil, stay calm.” I would have told her to take a deep breath, but she couldn’t perceive that she was breathing. “I’m taking us back right now.”
“Don’t.” She looked up and then down, wide-eyed. “How did you know I was here? I didn’t say anything.”
A chuckle came out of the darkened gazebo. “She is already questioning you with vigor, Murderer, but she cannot conceal her fear of being without you. Tell me again that you don’t have a child.”
I pointed my sword at the spot where the god’s voice seemed to be coming from. “She is not my daughter, you celestial dimwit!”
“Perhaps not. If she survives to the end of the week, I will be convinced. Murderer, you dispose of daughters as if they were empty wine cups.”
Pil spoke up before I said something really appalling. “I am not his daughter!” she said to a tree directly away from the gazebo. “Bib, is that really the God of Death? I’ve never heard him speak before. What does he like? Weapons?” Pil focused on the treetop. “What do you like, Mighty Harik? Sacrifices? Jokes? Things that are just dead?”
I waved at the gazebo. “Harik, we’ll be going now and let you get back to whatever unnatural shit you were engaged in.”
“No!” Pil shouted.
“Listen to her, Murderer. You may not go until I give you leave, you oily spot of arrogance. You must be chastised.” Harik leaned forward into the moonlight, showing his face, a stretch of his void-black robe, and one arm swathed in muscles. His face was beautiful in a particular way, as if unimaginative teenagers had designed the most gorgeous face they could think of.
“All right, Harik, call me a son of a bitch or whatever else you need to say.”
“Bib!” Pil yelled, jerking around and trying to face things her nonexistent vision couldn’t see. “Be nice! Don’t make him destroy you!” Her voice edged into panic as she gaped back at the tree. “Mighty Harik, destroy me instead! Well, no, don’t, but if you really must destroy somebody, don’t destroy Bib. I mean, it would be much better if you destroyed somebody else altogether, but if it’s one of us, then make it me.”
Harik leaned farther forward into the light, his eyebrows furrowed. “What?”
I said, “Pil, didn’t Dixon teach you anything? The gods don’t kill sorcerers. They fool sorcerers into getting themselves killed. Harik, send her back before she agrees to something fatal.”
It might seem that standing before a god and saying “Destroy me!”
