“Ha. You have a long way to go if defeating the Demogorgon is your aim.”
“You have no idea of the depths of my ambition, Isu.”
“I’m just telling you the truth, Vance. Perhaps it’s an unpalatable truth, but believe me when I say that if the Demogorgon jumped out from behind that tree, it would crush you—and everyone else in this party—under its feet like insects.”
“Maybe that’s the case now,” I said, more determined than ever, “but it won’t be for long. Not when I get as powerful as I’m aiming to get.”
“If you say so.”
“Now tell me, since this Demogorgon managed to wipe out the entire population of Kroth in the blink of an eye, how is it that nobody knew that until now, until went back in time and saw it? That thing was fucking massive. How did nobody see it before or after then? How come it didn’t flatten any other towns or cities?”
“Kroth was an experiment,” answered Isu. “An experiment on the part of the Blood God. The Demogorgon dwells in a different plane than the one in which this mortal world exists. You already know something of the planes now, don’t you? You’ve seen the Sea of Souls, and you’ve visited the Great Tree.”
“So, if the Demogorgon exists on another plane, how did it get to Kroth?”
“The Blood God was able to summon it to this plane, only for a few minutes, for he was weak, but as you saw at Kroth, his experiment was a success. A cruel, bloody success in which hundreds were killed in the blink of an eye, but a success for him nonetheless. The more power he gains, the longer he will be able to call the Demogorgon into this world. Eventually, if he gains enough power, he will be able to bring the Demogorgon into this world permanently.”
“From what I’ve seen of the Demogorgon, that would not be good.”
“Not for the world of mortals, no. But the world would be drowning in blood with the kind of destruction the Demogorgon could unleash. All the better for the Blood God.”
“And that gives me even more of a reason to kick his ass all the way back to whatever primordial privy he climbed out of. Before he can pull that fucking Demogorgon into this world for good.”
Isu chortled strangely. “And who knows how long that might be, Vance? Perhaps in a hundred years, perhaps, tomorrow. We do not know how much power the Blood God has gained. And as a minor god, you don’t yet have the ability to sense this. When your power grows, you will become able to sense such things, but until then, it will remain a mystery.”
“All the more reason to get shit moving,” I said.
Things were getting way more complicated than I’d ever imagined they could. I’d had dreams of ruling the world for as long as I could remember, but I never dreamed that I might one day have to save it. Shit, I didn’t see that one coming, but I was never one to back down from a challenge. A thought suddenly struck me; there was one more question I needed to ask Isu.
“Why did it take you this long to tell me about the Demogorgon? And if you knew all along what happened at Kroth, when a bunch of us were talking about it, why didn’t you say anything?”
A flicker of a mocking smile, tinted with muted wrath, flashed across her face.
“You never asked me,” she said.
“Yeah, and something tells me that even if I had, you wouldn’t have said anything.”
In response, Isu chuckled humorlessly. I was done speaking to her, and more than done with her attitude. Without another word, I spurred Fang on and caught up to Rollar. Trying to get my mind off all this Blood God business, I talked with him about some light-hearted things: battle, killing people, that sort of stuff.
We kept up a good pace, took as direct a route as we could with the aid of Talon’s eyes surveying the landscape from above. By the time it grew dark, we’d covered half the distance to Brakith. It was an impressive feat because if we’d followed the roads, the journey would usually have taken four or five days, and that was traveling at a good pace on horseback. Now, we only had one day to go.
I could have kept going, of course. I wasn’t tired at all, and neither was Fang or my skeleton cavalry and their skeletal mounts. Rollar and his men, though, and the women with me and their horses, were pretty beat by the end of the day, so we found a suitable clearing in the woods and made camp for the night.
I kept to myself, avoiding both Rollar and the women. I had too much on my mind and needed some time alone. My uncle was going to be more of a challenge than I’d thought; Nabu had been plenty tough, and the Blood God had only given him a fraction of his power since that fat-ass bishop had split his devotion between the Blood God and the Lord of Light.
My uncle, it seemed, was completely devoted to the Blood God, and this was bad news. He’d be at least twice as powerful as Nabu had been, possibly more so. It had been years since I had last been in Brakith, and that meant my uncle had been sacrificing virgins for years (and blaming it on me and the non-existent vampire), and that meant he had to have acquired some pretty substantial powers from the Blood God by now. And that was on top of the military strategy expertise he’d gained from being a Sunsword. My uncle was a cocksucker of epic proportions and a lying puddle of goblin piss, but he would be a tough opponent.
I’d gained a bunch of souls in the attack on Rollar’s camp, and while a few of them had gone toward developing my ability to
