Volga’s heavy boots clomp on the stone as she comes to the bottom of the hierarchy, me. She blocks my view of the leviathan and the forming blister. I look up into her black eyes and see tears there. Hesitation. She turns back to Fá, reopening my view to the leviathan. “Please. Not her. Not this. I can’t. I can’t.” The blister has taken on a new form. An angular distension. Like something inside is making its way out.
“Kill your weakness.”
“For you?” Volga asks.
“For the Allfather.”
She stares at him for a long time.
Volga turns back to me. Tears stream down her face. She raises the gauntlet. It ratchets back. Blood and bone drip from its clawed fingers. It hangs there in the air for what seems an eternity. Volga’s shaking. Her eyes meet mine and I see not just pain there but doubt…
“Y-You d-don’t have to be broken l-like him,” I say through chattering teeth. “Eph-phraim’s d-daughter…”
A small breath escapes her chest and her will to kill me crumbles like rusted iron.
The gauntlet sinks to her side. Then someone screams.
Volga turns. One of the Ascomanni shamans is running away from the leviathan’s belly even as another stumbles back from it holding a bloody stump for an arm. Red work crews run in terror.
A demon is born forth from the viscera.
There’s no other way to describe the figure that bursts from the blister in the leviathan’s belly in a spume of dark liquid. A gristly black thing with two flashing blades. The screaming shaman soon has no head. Then the one with the stump for an arm has no legs. Two more demons follow after the first. A flash comes from a short rifle in one of their hands.
The first demon leaps from the altar and lands behind the last shaman just as the shaman clears the gap between altar and acropolis. The shaman stops and collapses in two pieces, cut from the crown of his tattooed head straight through the groin. The demon lifts a black, curved blade, dripping gore and effluence. His helmet slithers back.
Firelight bathes Darrow’s face as he cocks back his head and howls.
71
DARROW
Ashvar
Ido not believe ingods, but that didn’t stop me from praying during my time in the belly of the leviathan. I prayed for Lyria. I prayed for her safety to relieve my own guilt for sending her. I prayed for her success because it would mean that the spirit of Ragnar might still live on in Volga. And I prayed to not be met with a barrage of gunfire as soon as I exited the stomach that has been my home since Diomedes convinced the Kalibar to let their sigil beast swallow my friends and me whole in the acid-resistant pods we’ve lived in for three terrible days.
All that prayer calmed the mind, but if I’ve learned anything by now, it’s that only a fool relies on prayer alone.
Dripping with gastric acid and blood, I march toward the high table with Sevro and Cassius on my flanks. They are as heavily armed and armored as I am. In Godkiller, all.
Behind us, the Reds who carved at the leviathan howl like maniacs. Pinks scatter. LowColor servers and slaves evaporate, leaving only the actors in my play—Fá, Volga, the jarls, Lyria—I thank the fates she is alive—and bodyguards. Lots of bodyguards. They swarm in from the fringes of the garden to kill us. Fá roars for them to hold because Sevro’s rifle shot was true.
“Halt or the ugly bastard dies!” Sevro screams and holds up a detonator.
A dart protrudes from the Fá’s bare chest. He reaches for it and a red light glows from the end of its explosive payload. He freezes and lowers his hands, and resigned to watch me approach, like a pitviper watches adrillboy draw closer—swollen with poison and discontent, eyes seething a possessive hatred out from his lair in the rocks. Yet Fá’s lair is not made of rock. It is made of men, and men have ears.
“Volsung Fá! King of All Liars! I am Darrow of Mars, ArchImperator of the Republic, Tyr Morga of the Volk, and I have been wronged!Youhave waged war on my planet.Youhave enslaved my Red people.Youhave sullied the name of my brother Ragnar.Youhave killed my sister Sefi.Youhave taken my army like a thief in the night to corrupt their honor. I claim holy vendetta against YOU! I claimashvar!”
I stop ten paces from Fá and thrust up my left gauntlet. In it, I clutch a chunk of coal that I wipe on my brow in the mark of the Norse wargod Tyr. In the old Obsidian way, any wanderer so marked abdicates any worldly concerns except the resolution of their vendetta. They are to be given hospitality and immunity by all, for they have set their life on a mission to rectify their honor in one-on-one violence to the death.
No one speaks.
The bodyguards slow and encircle us. As many as fifty in the black armor with the blood crescent—all Ascomanni, I note.
At the table behind Fá, my old warlords are frozen in existential confusion. None have so much as stood, but various mouths hang agape. The Ascomanni are a different story. Dissuaded by distance and pirates, ships may seldom travel to the Kuiper Belt, but radio and light waves are not similarly constrained. A decade’s worth of broadcasts has heralded my slingBlade, my face, my great war against the hated Golds. To a warrior race banished from the sun by Gold, I am a natural celebrity, and my arrival via the leviathan is a religious experience.
They throw up their hands in gratitude to their Allfather, praising the darkness between the stars for giving them this gift. What more worthy foe could the Allfather summon to face their invincible Fá? Surely it is a miracle I have emerged from their sacrifice bringing not the awkward grinding of armies, but a clean fight. A test of Fá’s divine favor.
I rolled the dice and they came up sixes.
