“What’s the matter?” Isu fired a pair of vicious glares at Elyse and Rami in quick succession. “Never seen a goddess in the flesh before, fools?”
“Former goddess,” I muttered with a put-on cough.
She spun on her heels to face me, arms akimbo, jaw set tight with barely contained wrath. She wanted to unleash a torrent of rage. But she didn’t. Instead, she only glowered at me in silence for a long moment. Soon enough, her arms fell slack to her sides, and she flashed me a tight-lipped smile.
“Speaking of goddesses,” Isu said, “we have one to locate, do we not? We shouldn’t waste any more time standing around gawking.”
As she said “gawking,” she spun around and glared at Rami and Elyse, who still had their eyes locked on her in an expression of disbelief. They got the hint though, and they each finally stopped staring.
“I agree,” I said, “and I wouldn’t mind getting some good ol’ carousing in while this whole Saint Jorl’s party is going on. I could use a stiff drink or two after everything that’s happened tonight.”
“Wait,” Elyse said before she frowned, closed her eyes, and whispered something under her breath that might have been a prayer. “The Goddess of Death,” she murmured a little louder, her jaw tightening and her eyes hardening. “I’m sorry, Vance, but I can’t help you any more. I serve the one true God, the Lord of Light. This… this demon, or whatever she is... It goes against every one of the Lord’s teachings for me to work with her. Either she goes, or I go. I’m sorry to be so unyielding, but I’m a bishop of the Church of Light! I can’t—I won’t—associate with the likes of her.”
“That ‘creature’,” I said coldly, “is a major part of the reason I was able to defeat Nabu. Without the powers she gifted me with, we’d never have come this far. You owe her a lot more than you realize, Elyse. And now that I think about it, you didn’t seem to object to me using the powers of Death when it suited you.”
Elyse, to her credit, bit her lip and looked sideways. She glanced over at Isu, who was staring at her coldly, her head cocked as she waited for a response. Elyse looked away again.
“I suppose,” Elyse began softly, “you’re right. I didn’t object to your use of Death magic when it suited my needs. And now that I’ve gotten what I was after, it’d be rather terrible to simply to desert you for the sake of an… ideological disagreement. Perhaps I can be flexible.”
“I knew you’d see the ‘light,’” I said, smiling again. “So, you’re fine with Isu tagging along then, even though she was once the Goddess of Death?”
I made sure I emphasized the past-tense aspect of that. Isu was fuming. How I loved being a god, even though I was only a minor one for the time being.
“I’m fine with it, yes,” Elyse said meekly.
“Good. Let’s all play nice now.”
“You haven’t informed us what you’ll do with the dead Resplendent Crusaders,” Rami interjected. “You said you had a solution before she showed up.” She gestured at Isu but didn’t meet her gaze.
Now that I’d had some practice actually resurrecting someone from the dead—a goddess, no less—raising the dead Crusaders as zombies, using the same method I had for Fang, was simple. I motioned to Rami to wait and see. In less than a minute, all of the dead Crusaders were on their feet again. Except now, they were zombies in my service. They were covered head to toe in armor, so they could pass quite easily as regular people. Well, as long as nobody tried to speak to them, since as zombies they were incapable of speech, and nobody looked too closely into the slits of their great helms, where their eyes now glowed with the yellow-green luminescence of the undead.
“You really are the new Death God,” Rami murmured, her tone reverent.
“That’s what I’ve been telling you ladies,” I said.
Elyse coughed and looked at me with a knitted brow. I had to commend her ability to swallow her pride so fast.
“I have a plan to deal with the soldiers and guards who are still loyal to Nabu,” she said. “I need to quickly write up an official Church of Light scroll granting me my former position as Bishop of Erst back. That’ll be easy enough; all of the stationery is in Nabu’s chambers, and I now have his ring to emboss it with a bishop’s seal. The problem is getting the signature of the captain of the Resplendent Crusaders.” She motioned at the captain, who was now a zombie in my undead personal guard.
“He’s not really dead anymore, is he?”
“Can he still write like that? Looks like nothing more than a shell to me.”
“The undead do retain traces of who they were,” Isu explained. “Especially those of the zombie variety.”
“Right,” I said. “I’m sure I can get into his head and jog his memory.”
I had already been quite confident with the undead I’d made before, and the connection I’d felt while creating my new footmen had been unmistakable. I knew who they were and what they could do intuitively. We did the job in no time.
“That’s it!” Elyse said. “Now, I really am the official Bishop of Erst again.”
“I’m sure it feels good to be back in your rightful place,” I said, “but let’s see how seriously they take this scroll outside.”
“You’d better leave your skeletons, zombies, and Fang here. That would be a start,” Rami suggested.
I nodded. “The Crusaders can come, though. You can’t really tell they’re zombies, hidden in their armor like that. They’d also add some weight to Elyse’s claim to her title.”
“What about the horned woman?” Elyse asked.
Isu glared at her and hissed. In response, Elyse smiled innocently.
“I suppose they could be seen as decorations,” Elyse answered herself. “Plenty of folks dress up for Saint Jorl’s night.”
“That’s settled then,” I said.
