J Simon
I
Being a god in this modern world is tough. I mean, the trick with making one fish into a bunch of fish, pretty miraculous, right? Which—given a boy fish, a girl fish, a pond, and lots of time—I CAN pull off. The problem is getting people to care. When everyone owns a magic glowy rectangle which lets them fight cartoon zombies with candy weapons (and also, you can use it to make phone calls if there’s something wrong with you), there’s not a lot of room left to appreciate long, drawn-out, boring old miracles.
There wasn’t a lot to inspire me in our surroundings, either. The village of Kumbutale was mostly sparse forest and red earth… not exactly a hub of culture and faith. There were some shops, some houses. Plenty of spice gardens and cinnamon trees, plus flocks of green parakeets with red-banded necks scolding us from atop groves of swaying coconut palms. Just another day hunting evil gods in Sri Lanka.
“Advertising,” I said meditatively. Iggy pausing in unloading all of the inconceivable guns he’d packed into our rental car. It was taking a while. He was about the biggest mortal I’d ever seen, with plenty of scars and a super-cool eyepatch. Plus, for his next birthday, I intended to surprise him with a parrot I’d been training to ride on his shoulder and say piratical things, if I could get the pet store to un-ban me.
“You gonna start singing jingles about how great you are again?” Iggy said, his hand creeping toward the hilt of the fairystopper. “Makes my trigger finger lonesome, it does.”
I drew myself to my full height (what there was of it), the band of chunky gold plates that crossed my white robes clunking together. He still towered over me, damn it, so I climbed up on a stump and glared down at him.
“I am Samantha, your lord and god. I am mighty. I am also incredibly stylish. Hence, you should be glad to wear a hat shaped like a casino shaped like a pyramid that displays my name in flashing neon lights. Fancy!”
“Sammy—”
“You’ll be the envy of mortals everywhere! Besides, doesn’t this whole ‘marriage’ thing mean that I own you now?”
Iggy grinned. “Knew I should’ve read the fine print. Come to think of it, didn’t you vow to love and protect me, too?”
“Until death do us part,” I pointed out, “which, given the laughably inadequate lifespan of mortals, basically makes it a way to get your stuff.”
“You’ve said that before.”
I blew out an exasperated breath. “Gods are infinite. Words are finite. Given enough time, I’ll say everything more than once. For example, that your face looks like a monkey’s butt. It wasn’t me! I didn’t want to say it! Infinity forced me to!”
Iggy just stood there, smirking faintly. I cocked my head, puzzled.
“What are you doing?”
“Waiting. See, you’re one of the good ones, you are. Not like those loser gods who try to extract worship—and power—from mortals they view as inconsequential, squeaking piles of meat. You’re gonna feel bad about insulting me, and you’re gonna take it back. In about three, two, one…”
I groaned brokenly. So help me, I liked Iggy a lot more than I should have. Liking mortals—it was a weakness, unbecoming a god. Somehow, I still hadn’t outgrown it.
“I’m perfect,” I pointed out. “Therefore, I’m never wrong. Therefore, I would never take something back. You do look like a monkey’s butt.” I fidgeted. “However, the monkey in question has a shining solid-gold butt of staggering grace and radiant beauty. And I may or may not harbor a secret desire to kiss it. So.”
Iggy snorted with laughter—kissed me—and went back to unpacking. Due to my past as an Egyptian princess of brief and minor divinity, plus that whole happy-fun mummification thing, I wasn’t sure where my heart was or how fast it was racing. Let’s just say that a museum-goer in Lisbon may have just gotten a big surprise.
Kavindi walked up to us. Our host in Sri Lanka couldn’t have been older that thirty, but she looked incredibly fragile, tiny and gaunt, as though she might blow away on the next breeze. Even twenty years later, the twin scars on her neck shimmered brightly.
“She’s back, isn’t she?” Kavindi asked. “I can feel it. Like an ache in my bones.”
Iggy grimaced. “Old Mother Okembe… she escaped. Kind of kicked our asses, if you want to get technical about it. Some gods… are not so kind. Some gods will do anything for one more day of youth and power. I don’t know why she came back to Sri Lanka, but I’m glad you called me.” He hefted a ridiculously outsized gun and smiled briefly. “Takes me back to my safari days, it does.”
“I have a daughter,” Kavindi said. “She’s happy and strong, and she’s going to stay that way. Tell me what to do. Tell me what to pay. My money. My blood. My life. Whatever it takes to stop that bitch.”
“You said that people were having… problems?”
Kavindi nodded and led us into the village. Iggy hesitated, gazing at the pope-gun for a long and wistful while before finally closing and locking the car’s trunk.
Our first stop was the town’s medical center. I wasn’t ready. Sure, I’d expected to see people lying on cots, moaning and twitching, held in thrall to ceaseless nightmares. I hadn’t expected them to be children.
“Damn it,” Iggy said quietly, his hand dipping into the Emergency Kit that hung from his belt. “I have to break them out of this, don’t I? Which means Old Mother Okembe will know. She’ll know we’re not dead. She’ll know we’re coming. We’ll lose our one chance of catching her by surprise.”
I gazed at a little girl whose head thrashed back and forth, eyelids fluttering, making hurt little noises. I don’t know where it came from, but suddenly I had all the power I needed. I blinked once, and the children visibly relaxed. They were still asleep, but the nightmares were gone. As quickly as it had come, the power fled, leaving me ice-cold and shivering.
“You did it!” Iggy said.
“You don’t have to sound so surprised,” I said. “I’m mighty. People come around all the time, sneezing at me in the hope that I’ll say ‘bless you’ and turn them into saints. Uh… don’t check on that. But it totally happens.”
“Uh-huh. Whatever you say.”
Kavindi led us back outside, down a dirt lane, and to the town’s rec center. The big, air-conditioned room was being used to quarantine a cross-section of villagers; every one of them bore at least one pulsating lump under their skin, as if something had burrowed deep inside and started feeding.
“Huh,” Iggy mused. “Looks like a bunch of second-order connections. How about it, Sammy? Think we can disrupt these without Okembe noticing?”
“You don’t know?” I rolled my eyes. “You mortals and your so-called ‘brains’. Take my word for it, thinking through meat is a bad idea. Seems risky. What if someone learned to exploit the system? I mean, you eat a hamburger, and—POW! Suddenly, you’re a republican!”
“Sammy…” Iggy said warningly.
Kavindi looked puzzled. “If Okembe is a god, how could she not know you’re alive? Aren’t gods omniscient?”
“Well, sure,” I said, “but there’s knowing everything, and there’s knowing everything. Omniscience is like having the world’s best search engine in your head. Look up ‘flaming cheese disaster’ and BLAMMO! There’s our honeymoon! But what about Juan Antonio Ovalle, President of Chile in 1811? His preferred style of shirt is in there, lurking deep in some corner of your mind, but you’re not aware of it because you didn’t bother to type it in the search bar. Why would you?”
“So, in terms of Okembe…”
“As long as she doesn’t consciously think about us, she won’t notice that we’re still alive.” I grimaced. “And why would she? Let’s face it, the last time we went up against her, she tricked us, cheated us, and killed us—in that order.”
“You’re dead? Are you a ghost?” Kavindi asked hopefully.
Iggy shook his head. “Nope. Came back clean. Long story.”
“Same here. Died and risen!” I said proudly. “How many gods can say that?”
“All of them?” Iggy hazarded.
“Hush, you.” I turned back to Kavindi. “As a side note, it’s well within my godly powers to pretend to be a ghost. I’m just that awesome! Cut some holes in a sheet and I’ll haunt whoever the hell you want!”
“She’s not kidding,” Iggy wryly noted.
I snorted. “Anyway, Old Mother Okembe didn’t consider us a threat then, and I don’t imagine she’s any less arrogant now. She doesn’t know we’re alive because she just doesn’t care.” I turned to Iggy. “Old Mother Okembe won’t be paying attention to second-order connections. Do whatever you want. She’ll never notice.”
Iggy slowly smiled. “Whatever I want?”
“Whatever you want.”
Iggy pulled an assortment of tools out of his Emergency Kit: Silver pins, rune-inscribed crystals, an eyedropper of holy water, a ticking movement of golden gears. One by one, he induced the parasites to move to hard, bony places where he could pop them with a well-placed thrust of his thumb. I wasn’t sure which was worse: The horrible squishing noises or Iggy’s boisterous laughter.
“Ah!” he said, wiping the tears from his eyes, “makes me want to go hunting, it does.”
“Hunting?” Kavindi asked. “For what?”
Iggy grinned. “See, when a god gets extra-grabby, I like to send ‘em a little reminder of what ‘pain’ feels like. Back in the car, I’ve got a rifle that I call the End Of All Things. Don’t know what it’s actually named—found it at the bottom of a demented cultist’s haunted tomb—but what the hell, calling it that just feels right. When I load it with enough power and weirdness, and get Sammy to spit on it—”
“See? I helped!”
“—and fire away, in a shower of embers that used to be the eyebrows of saints, I can blast a hole in just about anything. Even a god. Knocks ‘em senseless—permanently dormant, if I’m lucky. Facing down a god ain’t so scary when it’s just a rock with a funny face on it.”
“Can you stop Old Mother Okembe?” Kavindi asked.
“Ask me tomorrow,” Iggy said ruefully. “First thing we’ve got to do is find her. That’s for tonight.”
“Let me know if you need anything,” Kavindi said. “I’ll be at work.” She strode off to do whatever mortals do when they’re not worshiping me. Making pancakes, one would assume.
“Ready to get started?” I asked.
Iggy craned his neck. “Just a second. Does this place have a bathroom?”
“Again?” I demanded. “What is it with mortals and bathrooms?”
“They’re portals to strange and magical lands,” he said cheerfully.
I shook my head. “At least you should have the good grace to feel ashamed about your need to continuously leak horrifying things from disgusting places.”
“Naw, it’s okay. I’ve taught myself to whiz glitter.”
“I wish that were true,” I said seriously, “because there’d be a constant stream of tiny unicorns bursting in rainbows from your pants.”
Iggy, for some reason, didn’t have an answer for that. Chalking it up as a win, I went outside to look for bugs.
* * *
When Iggy found me, I was staring avidly at a colossal black beetle the size of my clenched fist.
“Huh,” he said, bending over to watch it trundle business-like up the dirt lane. I took a step forward, and the beetle suddenly unfolded wings as wide as my face and took off with a sound like a small airplane getting religion.
“That,” Iggy said, “was cool.”
“Damn it! How am I supposed to finish my thesis that mortals are wrong about everything all the time always when you go around saying true things like that?!”
Iggy rolled his eyes. “You want to be finding Old Mother Okembe, maybe?”
“Oh! Right!”
I closed my eyes and extended my senses. Finding her should have been as easy as feeling a chill touch of dread and following it back to its source. It didn’t work that way. The whole village was tainted, an oppressive haze of evil closing in on every side. There was no direction to it… just the same queasy wrongness coming from everywhere at once.
“Sammy?”
“I’m working on it,” I said grimly. I wandered the back streets of Kumbutale, looking for any kind of pattern in Okembe’s corrupt power. I was starting to get a feel for my surroundings; Okembe’s taint was new, and still on the surface. Below that coursed the faith and worship of the Buddhist majority, going back twenty-five hundred years or more. Below that lurked the faint remnant of the faiths that had existed before Buddhism. Who knew? A few of those old gods might still be around. Gods don’t go away when people stop believing in them. They simply fossilize—dormant, waiting, ready to be awakened by the right kind of faith.
“Maybe I’m going about this all wrong,” I muttered. “Maybe I need to stop overthinking it.”
“Right,” Iggy said wryly. “Thinking too much is your problem.”
“Hush, you. Help me blank my mind. Drop some funky fresh beats so I can do a rap!”
“No, no, no!”
“Good start! Keep going!”
Iggy sighed. “How do I keep getting myself into this?”
Some time later (swaying and snapping and dancing in little circles around Iggy), I was startled back to reality by a flock of black-hooded yellow birds exploding out of the bushes. I discovered that I’d left the village behind, wandering down a trail through hot, dry thorn-scrub forest. To my left stood the soaring ruins of a colossal dagoba, a dome-shaped buddhist shrine which had been abandoned over a thousand years before. To my right was the silent black mouth of a cave, obviously shaped and enlarged by human hands. I hadn’t been led here by Okembe’s power; I’d been drawn in by something much older. Shrugging, I ducked low to go into the cave. Suddenly, something huge flashed past my face. Not your everyday bat, like the cute little ones we have at home: It was big. I was favorably impressed.
“Way to be, bat!” I shouted, which echoed like crazy and panicked a few dozen more fruit-slaying giants into sailing past my head. “Try not to eat too many cookie elves!” I called after them. “Oh, who am I kidding? Those things are incredibly annoying. Go to town!”
“You’re not going to try to catch one?” Iggy said, bemused.
“They’re wild animals, Iggy! Having a pet bat would be cruel. I prefer to have friend bats. The ones we just saw? They all love me. They’re just too shy to admit it.”
“And here I thought you’d train them to be like those dogs that carry booze through the snow, but for s’mores,” Iggy said philosophically.
“Huh.” I paused. “Yeah. I… wouldn’t do that. Of course not. It would be cruel. Awesome, but cruel.”
I led Iggy further into the cave, aided by the fact that—as a minor goddess—I have a very faint full-body glow. Also, my feet don’t quite touch the ground, golden motes fall in continuous sheets behind my eyes, and I’m kind of indestructible. Believe me, I can fall down stairs like nobody’s business, which is a surprisingly big hit at parties. Well, the kind of parties I go to.
The tunnel levelled out and opened into a great chamber. A gigantic Buddha statue lay before me, flanked by dozens of smaller Buddhas passively observing the world through blank stone eyes. Not a big help. I walked past them, taking note of the shimmering sheets of gold leaf that covered the walls. Another passage led onward. The gold had mostly flaked off, exposing the surface underneath. Drawn by some inexplicable force, I stopped and examined it.
Thousands of years ago, a great mural had been painted on the walls of the passage. With the advent of Buddhism, it had been covered up in an effort to erase the old gods and the old ways. Now, finally, the ravages of time were revealing what had been there all along: Dozens of women, eye-poppingly topless and cavorting amongst sacred pools and rather startled-looking animals. But their faces… there was a quiet amusement there, the regal confidence of a predator who takes what she wants. A long time ago, these maidens had been worshipped—and I had the sudden, chilling conviction that no men who’d seen them had ever been allowed to leave.
“You know—” I turned to Iggy, only to find him plastered flat against the stone surface, stuck as fast as if I’d superglued him to the kitchen table again. Which, uh, I never have. That he can prove.
I held my hand close to the painted surface and closed my eyes, trying to figure out what was going on. Gently, so faintly that I hardly even noticed, their power wrapped itself around me. My eyes flew open. For one panicked moment, I couldn’t move—drawn to the maidens, lured in and snared deep in their web.
“All right, one, your fun little tricks don’t work on God, which is to say, me,” I sternly told them, taking a slow and deliberate step backward. “And two, you can quit being so busty at me. Back when I was mortal, I wished I had bigger boobs so that guys would like me. Then I realized that any guy who only liked me for my boobs was a superficial jerk and deserved to be slapped with fish. Then I realized that it doesn’t matter how nice a guy is if he never talks to you in the first place, and it doesn’t hurt having a way to draw him in and break the ice. And then I realized that there are less superficial ways to break the ice, like last Halloween, when I ran around cackling and carving pumpkins at Iggy, and somehow accidentally threw gourd-guts at him every time his back was turned.” I paused. “Since I can’t die, I’m going to assume that the death threats were a form of endearment. Go, me!”
“Sammy…” Iggy rasped.
“On it.” The maidens’ weird power resonated in my brain, pulling me in, drawing me closer. The hell with that. It wasn’t easy, but I pulled myself away. Then I poked Iggy over and over with my fingertips, finally inducing an animal rage that wasn’t subject to their power. Taking him by the arm, I led him back out of the tunnel. A minute later, we reached the entrance to the cave. Well. It should have been a minute later. When I stepped outside, the last light of the setting sun was nearly gone, four or five hours having skipped past unnoticed. Oops.
Iggy shook himself, coming out of his quasi-trance. “Umph,” he said, rubbing his brow. “You know, I think we’re going to be needing some help with this.”
“Walter?” I asked.
“Walter.”
* * *
Iggy and I sat on either side of a small round table in Kavindi’s place, his phone between us on the table. I glanced out the window at a star-splashed sky.
“Are you sure Walter will be up?” I asked.
“Damn well better be. Back in the States, it’s already nine in the morning. You ready?”
“I would say that I was born ready, but being bodily squirted out of another human being is a solecism that I, as a god, have been spared. I wasn’t born. I sprang fully-formed from a giant and mysterious pizza.”
Iggy squinted at me. “I thought you started out mortal, and became a god afterward.”
“The truth may be true, but it’s sometimes extremely uncool,” I pointed out. “That has never been one of my failings.”
Iggy dialed, setting the phone to speaker mode once it started to ring. In short order, the world’s foremost theoretical expert on gods answered.
“Walter Hittenmiller speaking.”
“Walter!” I cried. “Sorry I missed your birthday. Wow, thirty, you’re almost a hundredth as good as I am! Did you get my present?”
“The enlarged photograph of your face? Did you have to bill me for it?”
“Isn’t bestowing my exalted image upon you favor enough?”
“In a word—”
“BEHOLD!!!” cried a deep and lusty voice, a thump and rustle indicating that Walter had been elbowed out of the way. “GROCK, GOD OF THUNDER, IS HERE!”
“Grock!” I cried, pausing as a momentous booming crash echoed over the phone. “How are you doing?”
“Grock is MIGHTY! Let all who oppose Grock be smited by the forceful hurling of tiny circular plastic shields through the air! ALL WILL TREMBLE BEFORE HIM!”
“I tried to teach him checkers,” Walter explained. “It went… haltingly. So, have you found Okembe yet?”
“Not hardly,” Iggy said easily. “We just got here. Don’t suppose you’ve got a fix from your end?”
“Sorry. The crystals keep going crazy and pointing toward compass points that don’t actually exist. Maybe it’s just me, but damned if I can find sou’sou’sneeth on a map.”
Iggy sighed, rubbing his brow. “You’ve got nothing?”
“I didn’t say that. That village of yours has a nocturnal scare spirit that’s rocking the ectoplasm like crazy. At the triple crossroads, if these online maps are at all accurate.”
Iggy slowly nodded. “You know…”
“GROCK IS BORED!!!” Grock bellowed.
“Grock, honey,” I said, “let’s play a game. You’re the god of thunder, right? Have you ever noticed that mortals make noises just like thunder, only squeakier and way more hilarious? You, Grock, are the God of Farts, and it is your duty to extract vigorous worship from every mortal you can find, as frequently and as loudly as possible. Start with Walter.”
“LOOK OVER THERE!” Walter shouted. “Oops. It just flew away.”
“What? What??”
“A raven with a sampo,” he said casually.
“COME BACK!” Grock roared, his feet slapping as he ran off. “Face Grock and taste VENGEANCE!!!”
“Come on. How can you taste vengenace?” I raised an eyebrow. “Wait. Everyone stop. I just had a spectacular idea for a new kind of pie!”
“If we can quit it with the clown-college audition tapes?” Iggy grumbled. “I figure I can triangulate Okembe’s position from her secondary resonance on that nocturnal scare spirit of yours.”
“Better you than me,” Walter said fervently. “While you’re doing that, I’ll see if I can get in touch with Misinformation Technology, see if they know any hackers in Sri Lanka. You know. Just in case you need one.”
“Sounds good,” Iggy said philosophically. He glanced at me. “Sammy, I need to hash out some points with Walter, and it’s gonna be a while. Why don’t you make The Call?”
I nodded, taking my own phone and heading outside. I’d had other godfriends besides Grock, once, but they hadn’t woken from dormancy since the Battle of the Museum. Walter had placed a phone near their fossilized remains, set to pick up automatically on the fourth ring, and I liked to call them every few days. Just in case it helped. Just in case there was something I could do. Sometimes I fancied I heard some of Echo’s echoes, or the distant sound of an arch-djinn’s majestic laughter.
“They’ll be back,” I murmured as the phone began to ring. “Any day now…”
* * *
Midnight in Kumbutale wasn’t like midnight in other places. For one thing, believe it or not, it was still hot. I played my flashlight across the bushes, finding fat stick insects sitting on leaves and enormous spiders hanging between them.
“Where is she?” Iggy grumbled. “If a dread terror-spirit is gonna haunt the dark places of the world, the least she could do is be punctual.”
I marched to the middle of the crossroads, a spooky three-way intersection between a paved road and a couple of dirt tracks. Ancient ruins loomed nearby, lizard eyes shining as I played my flashlight back and forth.
“She probably needs something to latch onto. Think about it. If the spirit feeds on terror, why would she appear to someone who wasn’t afraid? That would be like me showing up at a broccoli party. Massively pointless.”
“So one of us has to act scared?” Iggy said dubiously.
“I told you we should have rented a little kid. Go on. You’re the mortal. Fall down a well or something.”
“Yeah, I don’t think that’ll work. See, I kind of came armed.”
“Iggy!”
“The fairystopper, it’s hardly even a gun,” he protested. “It’s more for scratching itches.”
“Yeah?” I said nastily. “Well, I’ve figured out how to duplicate myself. From now on, there’s going to be six of me.”
“What?” Iggy said, horrified.
A figure suddenly appeared in the crossroads, facing away from us. Waving at Iggy to hold his position, I approached. She was pale and beautiful, dressed in white like a shroud, with long black hair cascading down her—
“MICKEY!!!” I cried, waving wildly. She turned. Oops. Not Mickey. For one thing, the Aztec goddess of death generally brings me pizza. Made of spiders. Let’s just say that our friendship is a work in progress.
“Please help me,” she said mournfully, and I saw that she was holding a child swaddled in her arms. “I’m so tired. If you would just carry my baby for a moment…”
“Oh, right, that would be a genius move,” I said sarcastically. “What happens then, you unhinge your jaw and start swallowing my face? Ha! I’m three steps ahead of you: I don’t bathe!”
“What?” Iggy said, startled.
“Quiet! This is a very delicate stage of the negotiations!”
“Please help me,” she repeated. “I’m so tired…”
I put my hands on my hips, looking her up and down. “Keep in mind, being God, I’m incredibly dignified and don’t get scared. But sure, let’s give this a try.”
I grabbed the baby, or tried to. My hands went right through it, and her body instantly unfolded and bloomed into something else. It wasn’t a spider, or a maggot, or a corpse. It was the combined visual essence of every horrible, disturbing, disgusting thing that had ever existed. I opened my mouth. Someone—let’s assume Iggy—screamed. The spirit vanished, leaving me staggering around clutching my chest.
“Nice work!” Iggy said jovially. “Did you see how fast it was drifting southwest? Old Mother Okembe’s influence for sure. Now we just need to move fifty or sixty paces so we can take another sighting and triangulate Okembe’s location!”
“How about you hold the baby this time?” I suggested as Iggy led me to the next location.
“Naw. Marriage, see, has to be a fair division of labor. I get abducted by criminal street gangs and forced into illegal dune-buggy races. You grab ethereal baby-shaped wads of horror. I’m pretty sure it was in our vows.”
I glared at him. “Sometimes, I almost think you have a sense of humor. Stop it.”
We stood in the middle of the road, waiting for something to happen. I grimaced. We needed fear to summon the spirit, and neither of us was really the right person for the job.
“You know the other night, when you selfishly insisted on sleeping again like a coward, and left me all alone for hours and hours?” I said. “While I was acting out my favorite action movies by using your belt as a whip, I discovered something very interesting. I know where you keep your credit cards!”
Iggy stared at me. The specter instantly appeared, baby clutched to her chest, keening mournfully. I sighed and marched over to her.
“I’m so tired. Won’t you—”
“WHAT A CUTE BABY PLEASE LET ME HOLD IT!” I paused, arms outstretched. “Also, I don’t want to overthink this, but would you want to co-star with me in a TV show I just came up with called ‘DEATH SHARK!’ It’s about a goofy koala who loves pudding.”
She stared at me for a moment, then vanished into drifting mist.
“I didn’t even tell you her catchphrase!” I said, offended.
“I’ve got a bearing,” Iggy said. “C’mon.”
He played his flashlight across the ground, ducking around thorn bushes and muttering quietly to himself. We soon came back to the paved highway, where a dim pool of light surrounded one of Kumbutale’s three light poles. About four feet above the ground, someone had soldered on a conspicuously out-of-place metal box.
“OPEN!” I commanded, pointing portentously at it.
“It isn’t locked,” Iggy said.
“In which case, I win! Wow, I’m good!” I yanked on the little metal door, which promptly swung open. The box was crammed with wires and computer circuits, sure, but also weird little fetishes assembled from feathers and fish eyeballs, plus rune-inscribed bones that all but breathed corruption and wrongness. Several wires were running electricity into the pattern in a way I really didn’t like.
“Holy hell,” Iggy said, scowling. “Okembe isn’t here, is she? She’s… somewhere far away, parasitizing people remotely, draining away their souls from a distance like a spider in its web.”
“Spiders do that?” I said, impressed.
“Who knows how many cities she’s doing this in—a hundred? A thousand?” He shook his head. “You want to know what’s really disturbing?”
“Your sense of style?” I hazarded. “Ooh! I know this one!”
“Look at it. Look at the way it’s wired into the power grid. Old Mother Okembe wouldn’t stoop to learning the ins and outs of circuit diagrams. Someone did this for her.”
Suddenly, impulsively, Iggy grabbed the wires and started to tear them out of the box, fountains of sparks shooting out as metal snapped.
“STOP!” I cried, grabbing his wrists. “Iggy, she made them easy to find and easy to destroy for a reason. It’s a trap! If one of them goes out, she’ll know she has an enemy—and she’ll know where that enemy is!”
Iggy glanced at the half-destroyed mess of wires in his hand. His fist slowly relaxed. “I swore to protect Kumbutale…”
“And we will. Later. Old Mother Okembe can’t know we’re alive. She can’t know we’re coming. After we’ve dealt with her, we’ll have all the time in the world to clean up loose ends.”
Iggy grimaced, still holding onto those tangled wires. “Sammy… if Old Mother Okembe threatened to murder a thousand people unless you murdered nine hundred and ninety-nine, would you do it? Sure, logically, you’d be saving a life by taking her deal… but it would still be a terrible thing to do. The moment we allow good people to suffer, Old Mother Okembe has hurt us deeper than she could with any sword. I suppose you’ll tell me that we could save even more lives if we acted a little nastier, a little darker. If we fought her by her own rules, with her own lack of regard for human life.” He thumped his chest with his free hand. “It’s a great excuse, right up until you realize there’s no way to un-mangle your soul.”
I went up on tip-toe so I could kiss him. “You mortals,” I said affectionately. “All those kooky ethics. I suppose you’ll tell me that extracting pre-emptive tithes from my soon-to-be-loyal worshippers by stealing their wallets is wrong?”
“Actually…”
“But enough about me,” I hastily said. “We’ll get rid of this. We will. We just need to be smarter about it. We’re going to make it look like an accident.”
Iggy nodded. Finally, slowly, he let go of the wires, gingerly patting them back into the box.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s hear what you’ve got. Keep in mind, I’ve already spotted junction boxes on the other light poles and some of the businesses, too. Whatever you come up with, it has to take out all of them.”
I thought for a moment, pacing up and down the road. “Do you still have all of that Silly Putty you confiscated from me in Paris?”
“I do. Which, by the way, you’re welcome. It wasn’t exactly easy, getting all those guards off your back at the Louvre.”
“Oh, come on! I can make copies of comic strips by pressing the stuff against them,” I said pugnaciously. “Why wouldn’t it work on the Mona Lisa?”
“Sammy—”
“I’ve got this. Trust me!”
“Already regretting it,” Iggy said cheerfully.
I patted the loose wires, which sparked and sizzled but wouldn’t—hopefully—attract unwanted attention. Muttering to myself, I led Iggy back toward Kavindi’s place as I tried to work out how this was going to work.
* * *
Bright and early the next morning, I was hunched over a notebook putting the finishing touches on my Plan when a rather large shadow fell over me.
“Hey!” I said, looking up at Iggy. “Wanna see what I came up with?”
“In a moment. Right now, I want you to explain what I just found in our luggage,” he said, slapping a book down in front of me.
“It looks like a bound portfolio of arborescent sheets bearing cryptographic markings which—when decoded—represent successive phonemes that combine to represent spoken language,” I guessed.
“It seems to be a romance novel—of sorts.” Iggy cleared his throat and read from the front cover: “‘Hunting the Hunter—a tale of Forbidden Passion, Passing Fashion, and Fascist Pancakes. By Samantha La Dieu.’“
“Sounds exciting,” I suggested.
“Also, the cover appears to be a picture of me, taken while I was asleep, after someone had very carefully unbuttoned my pajama shirt all the way down.”
“Does it.”
“Along with a separate picture of you, taken under wildly different lighting conditions, which someone photoshopped together—badly—to make it look like we were standing next to each other. I could ask why you have two necks, but I’m not going to. There are some things I really don’t want to know.”
“You don’t say.”
“And also, since my eye was quite naturally closed when I was asleep, the ‘artist’ inserted bright white googly eyes which look kind of… well, shocked.” Iggy let the book fall open to a random page. “And should I even mention the spell-check error that seems to have consistently changed my name to ‘Icky’?”
“Look,” I said sternly. “I deserve worship, right? We all agree on that.”
“Actually—”
“Think of all those people reading my book, suspending their disbelief, giving me their rapt attention! Yeah, literary pseudo-worship isn’t as good as the real thing, but it’ll have to do until you finish that cathedral I keep bugging you about.”
Iggy shook his head. “I always wanted a dignified death. Heroic, you know, storming the gates of hell and blowing away the gods themselves. Never figured I’d be sitting on the can, reading a book and laughing myself to death. What the hell. How much?”
“You won’t regret this!” I assured him. “There’s about to be a copy in every major bookstore in Sri Lanka, if I can figure out where you hid your credit cards this time!”
After Iggy paid me (I ceremoniously handed the money back to him so he could keep it in his wallet for me), we went outside and I proudly showed him what I’d been up to. Namely, I showed him a wobbly, stretchy sheet of goo on which was printed a faint copy of one of the Kumbutale Maidens.
“What’s with you and defacing national treasures?” Iggy asked rhetorically. “If I staple Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ to my face, will you just start slapping me for no reason?”
“Let’s find out,” I said eagerly. Iggy rolled his eyes. I headed through town to a paddock behind the nearest temple, where a pair of elephants enjoyed each other’s company in the down time between parades and celebrations. There wasn’t much to the fence… just a couple of slender logs, really. Good luck stopping them if they wanted to leave.
“Huh,” I said. “You know, elephants are a lot more impressive close up.” I turned around and made shooing gestures at Iggy. “Back up.”
“Oh? And why would I do that?”
“You’re mortal,” I said curtly. “You squish.”
Iggy backed up. I unrolled my copy of the Kumbutale Maiden, braced myself, and showed it to them. The elephants ignored me, ears flapping lazily in the heat. I scowled and held the sheet up higher, but nothing happened. If I was right about the maidens—and, as God, I surely was—their irresistible power of attraction would affect all mortal life, not just humans. So why wasn’t it working?
The elephants slowly ambled around their enclosure. There was something about their quiet enormity, their slow and silent wisdom, that was at once awe-inspiring and really annoying. What’s the point of being all mighty and powerful if you don’t flaunt it a little?
“I bet dinosaurs stomped around roaring and stuff,” I muttered.
“I hear lots of them had feathers,” Iggy said cheerfully. “Other than being all gigantic and murdery, I bet T-Rex looked like an extra-big chicken.”
“You take that back!”
“And given what we know about cows and flatulence, any super-grazer like a giant sauropod had to be farting, constantly.”
“YOU TAKE THAT BACK!”
“And keep in mind that the most embarrassing parts don’t fossilize. Two words: ‘Triceratops wattles’.”
“That’s it! I’m putting you on the list.” I patted my pockets. “Uh… can I borrow a pen?”
Hiding a smile, Iggy walked over and looked at my defective Kumbutale Maiden.
“All right, see, there’s your problem. You’ve got a semi-phastic transverse image of a semi-delucinated deity and no amplifier at the second remove.”
“Are those real words?” I said suspiciously.
“You need to goose the power. Like this.”
Iggy dipped his hand into his Emergency Kit. He dusted the image with strange chiming spices and powdered pope, then tapped it with worn type-blocks that had printed so many holy books that they actually glowed. The image suddenly looked deeper, clearer, more real.
“All right, that did something,” I said suspiciously, “but I still don’t see—”
A dazed-looking parakeet flew straight into the Maiden, sucked in by a force beyond its ken. Iggy ran away, which I thought was funny until I turned around and saw the other six thousand parakeets winging madly toward me. And the orioles. And the cuckoos. And the flycatchers. And the owls.
“ARRRG!” I bellowed. A choice slice of flopping, flapping, squawking hell hammered into me. I started to shout something, right up until a parakeet flew into my open mouth. Suddenly, I heard the crash of the elephant gate being smashed to bits. I spun around, eyes widening as the two of them galloped straight toward me, trumpeting madly. As to what happened next… well, being a god, I can’t die, but I was hard-pressed to enjoy their sudden urge to tap-dance on my face.
When the elephants finally wandered off (the image of the Kumbutale maiden having been reduced to so much tattered nothing), I raised my head just in time to see Iggy smash the last junction box from a storefront.
“Couldn’t be helped,” he said mildly. “Rampaging elephants, you know. They knocked off every junction box in Kumbutale, the townsfolk can plausibly insist.”
“I did good?”
“Sort of. Don’t forget, you also stole two elephants. I don’t think they’re coming back.”
“Bah. Creatures that intelligent and wise shouldn’t be held in captivity,” I said sagely, slowly peeling myself out of a me-shaped depression in the earth. “It was the will of the universe.”
Iggy cocked his head. “That’s what you always say when you want ice cream for breakfast. Is this a trap?”
“…No?”
“One thing’s for sure,” he mused. “It took a hell of a lot of labor and expertise to build and install that many junction boxes. I think we have to assume that the Department of Occult Sciences for the whole damn country’s been compromised. We have to check it out. We have to go to the city.”
“Colombo?”
“You know it. I’ll pack. You tell Kavindi.”
* * *
As it turned out, Kavindi was busy with a customer, but I found a way to occupy my time. I sat on the steps of her shop, a minor horde of children sitting at my feet staring expectantly at me. I held a bag of Cheez-Lykes in one hand, and a bag of Yum-Flavored Pigglers in the other.
“See, Iggy drove away the badness before you were born, which is why it’s ridiculous you don’t celebrate an annual Iggy Day in his honor. Just think of what you could have! Fireworks and sparklers. Parades and masks. Dances and drumming. And what’s the best way to celebrate Iggy Day?”
“Worship Santa!” they chorused.
“Try again,” I said, nettled.
“Worship Samantha!”
“Much better.” I gave them all treats. “Because the best way to thank Iggy is to give him what he doesn’t even know he needs, due to the fact that his tragic mortal meatpile of a brain won’t admit that it wants a gigantic glowing golden girlfriend.” I paused, a smile spreading slowly across my face. “Or wife, as the case may be.”
Iggy walked down the street, looking huge and scarred and intimidating in his usual get-up of eyepatch, safari suit, and way too many guns. I thought the rattling bundles of scorched and splintered wands were a nice touch.
“You done here?” he asked.
“With what?”
He gave me a pained look. “Remember three seconds ago, when I told you to tell Kavindi we’re leaving?”
“In my defense, where I come from, people win prizes for Best Achievement in Ignoring Mortals.”
“Worship Samantha!” a little girl blurted out, her eyes locked on the pigglers.
“Wow! What an intriguing behavior to emerge spontaneously,” I said, handing her a treat. “You were saying?”
“Worship Samantha!” a boy shouted, reaching for the Cheez-Lykes.
“Well.” I handed over the entire bag, dusted off my hands, and stood up. “Their parents are going to be having some extremely enlightening conversations in the next few days. Shall we?”
Iggy shook his head. “You know, I’m pretty sure there was something in our wedding vows where you promised not to experiment on human children. Just a hunch.”
“I didn’t use negative reinforcement,” I said defensively. “I know I get a little carried away sometimes, but I’d never hurt you or your fellow mortals. I could never do that. I love you.”
Iggy’s expression softened. “I love you, too.”
“Besides, I couldn’t get same-day shipping on the shock collars.”
Iggy’s face did that slow-motion-crash thing that’s so adorable on mortals. “Let’s just… go,” he suggested.
I pushed open the door of the shop. “Hey, Kavindi…!”
“There you are!” she cried. “People have been warning me away from Sanjara Street all morning. None of them can say why. It just seems like there’s something, well, not-right there. Could you take a look?”
“On it,” Iggy said easily. He headed off at an ambling walk. I had to jog to keep up, which would have been a lot more dignified if he'd had taken the hint and started casting pearls at my feet.
Sanjara Street was a dusty back lane, nearly an alley, small and straight and completely empty. No children played in the shade of its fruit trees. No women gossiped at the crossroads. Glancing at a nearby house, I saw worried faces clustered around the nearest window. An old grandfather urgently beckoned us to come inside where it was safe.
“See anything?” Iggy muttered, a hand falling to one of his wands.
“I don’t… hold on. What’s that, behind the mango tree?”
I saw the blood first—lots of it—and then the dog. We arrived just as the last light fled from its eyes. Iggy scowled, bending down to examine the body.
“A leopard did this,” he said, puzzled. “But leopards avoid people. Why on earth would it come here?”
A coughing growl split the air behind us. Iggy took his time standing up. I whirled. There was nothing there. Well, nothing but a shadow which moved across the ground, cast by an animal that clearly didn’t exist.
“Hot damn!” Iggy said, impressed. “If this is anything like that Shadow Tiger I had to fight back in Bangladesh, we’re in for a treat!”
The disembodied shadow charged. I flung myself in front of Iggy… not out of any grand altruism, mind you, but because I have this quaint habit of not dying. The unseen beast crashed into me, carrying me to the ground and latching onto my head with what—to a mortal—would have been crushing force. I laughed, delighted. Maybe mortals are fragile and constantly fall down elevator shafts the moment you take your eyes off them, but some of us can enjoy the finer things in life.
“Wow! What a friendly kitty! I think I’ll call her Bitey 2!”
Iggy pulled out a wand carved from a single shark’s tooth and painted almost black with Maori petroglyphs. He poked it at where the Shadow Leopard should have been—and stumbled when the wand passed without resistance through empty air. Iggy tried a second wand and a third, to the same effect. He was just pulling out a fourth when a cloud passed in front of the sun. That curious, sourceless shadow vanished… and so did the furry body I’d been grappling with.
“Bitey 2, come back!” I cried. “I’ll do better next time! I’ll let you eat Iggy!”
“NOW!” someone shouted. A cage fell over me, rounded like a birdcage and spliced together from dried reeds. It was rickety, thin, and light enough to blow away with the next stiff breeze. Contemptuously, I tried to pick it up—and dropped to my knees as an unexpected weakness coursed through me.
“Goddammit! Not mummy dust again!”
Iggy braced himself as a god stepped into sight. Now, Iggy is plenty big, but this newcomer looked like a mountain after continental drift had made another mountain love it very, very much and fill it with smaller mountains. He was big, is what I’m saying. His skin shimmered with a faint scaly pattern, his neck flared out almost like a cobra’s hood, and his face was oddly rounded. He flung out a hand… and an unseen force slashed Iggy’s safari suit into tatters, blowing away his guns and wands and Emergency Kit as if they’d been caught in a hurricane. Iggy just smiled, studying the knuckles on one hand as the big god came closer.
“Given that physical conflict is intrinsically self-defeating,” the big god said politely, “would you, perhaps, be amenable to settling our differences through mediated arbitration?”
“Dammit, Sarpaya, this isn’t the time!”
A mortal dropped from the mango tree’s branches. She was tiny—almost a head shorter than me, which is saying something—but there was an absolute confidence in her stride as she walked over to the Shadow Leopard, which had reappeared once the sun came out. She tapped it with a gleaming silver brooch and it instantly vanished.
“You want to maybe tell me what’s going on?” Iggy said calmly. “I’m about two and a half minutes from taking offense, and believe me, the last time that happened, it was six months before they found all the pieces.”
The mortal glanced at him. She was a local, wearing worn jeans and a dusty shirt, and she appeared completely unafraid of him. She was either really good or really stupid.
“You want to maybe shut up before I have Sarpaya rip out your spine and return it to you via your ass?”
“Now, Ishka,” the god said in a deep, amused voice, “violence may occasionally be necessary to increase the overall amount of love and joy in the world, but I hardly think that this is such a case.”
“Stuff it,” she said shortly. She glared at Iggy, hands on her hips. “They call us The Team. We’ve been hired to make sure that nothing spooky, weird, or supernatural messes with Sri Lanka. Last night, we got word that something was going on in Kumbutale. Domestic, imported, doesn’t matter. Our house is clean, and I intend to keep it that way.”
“We’re official,” I assured her. “We’re the world’s foremost field experts on gods. Plus, I can get you your own talk show!” I paused. “Assuming that you have indulgent millionaire parents, which, really, if you don’t, you’re just not trying hard enough.” I paused again. “Quick question. Do you need a co-host?”
Ishka snorted. “If you’re official, you’ll have documents. Show me.”
Iggy and I exchanged glances. We’d kind of snuck into the country as tourists, on the theory that it would make it easier to slip past Old Mother Okembe.
“That’s a funny story,” I said. “I think you’re going to laugh. See, I’m actually a romance novelist, and Iggy here is my cover-art model. I wrote a little book called ‘Hunting the Hunter’. You may have heard of it?”
Ishka snapped her fingers and pointed at Iggy. “Sarpaya. Finish him.”
The big god smiled at her. “Someday, by being an exemplar of quiet goodness, unconditional love, and enduring joy, I’ll get through to you. Mortals are shaped by their experiences. Thus, if I pour goodness into the world, the world will reward me by becoming good.” He paused. “Admittedly, it may take a few millennia.”
“Fine,” Ishka said. “I’ll fight him.” She walked toward Iggy. He took a pragmatic step backward, putting up two gigantic fists. A good four feet away from him, Ishka suddenly collapsed.
“OWWW!” she cried, clutching both hands to her eye. “HE PUNCHED ME!”
“Believe me, if I’d punched you, your jaw wouldn’t articulate clean enough to go around boasting about it,” Iggy said, amused.
“It’s a lie,” Sarpaya said uncertainly, “an attempt to manipulate me against my better judgement.”
“Fine,” Ishka said, nettled. She got up, brushing the dust off her jeans. “But you know I will fight him if you don’t. And you know I’ll lose. And you know I’ll get fired, and end up homeless and unloved, wandering the streets of Colombo weeping bitter tears of shame.”
“I won’t fight him, not even to protect you. I do care about you,” Sarpaya admitted, “but part of that is trying to better you by encouraging you to improve.”
“You’re killing me. Just so you know.”
Ishka charged at Iggy again. He pulled back a clenched fist. Sarpaya blinked, and Ishka bounced off of a sudden thickness in the air.
“Perhaps… if I must… to protect you… a non-violent form of restraint?”
“Took you long enough,” she muttered.
Sarpaya held up his hand. The ground rumbled and suddenly split near Iggy’s feet. Sap-like liquid gushed out of the earth, covering his boots and swiftly hardening into amber as it began to ooze up his legs.
“Took you long enough,” Iggy said amiably. He leaned down and grabbed great handfuls of the sticky goo. He slapped it against the ground, rolling it into a ball the size of a melon. Before either member of The Team could react, he hauled back and hurled the thing right at me, blasting my cage into so much broken trash.
“SUCKS TO BE YOU!” I shouted, and sprinted toward Iggy—for the seven-thirteenths of a second until I bounced off a copy of Sarpaya which loomed just as huge as the original. “Oh, come on!” I said, outraged. “Duplicating yourself? Really? Pick a power and stick with it!”
“Do you think I should?” he asked, reaching down to help me up. “What’s your power?”
“These days? For the most part, the black art of chanting Iggy’s credit card number over the phone until pizza delivery boys magically appear!”
“What are you doing?” Ishka cried. “Don’t help her!”
“Oh! Right.” Looking doleful, Sarpaya latched onto my wrist with the approximate force and inevitability of Asia. Not the band. The continent.
“OWWWW!” I howled, flailing realistically. “MY WRIST, OH, THE AGONY! My dreams… my dreams of conducting the New York Symphony… fading… fading before my eyes!”
“What?” Sarpaya said, startled, his grip loosening.
“SHE’S A GOD!” Ishka shouted, storming toward me. “She’s lying. She doesn’t feel pain!”
“Oh, yeah? He hurt my feelings, dumbass!”
With one monumental twist, I wrenched free of Sarpaya’s grasp and sprinted toward Iggy again. Suddenly, there were a dozen copies of Sarpaya between me and him. I grinned. He’d obviously never fought a fully awakened, incarnate god before. I had. The key is, don’t try to avoid their blows. Run smack into their fists, and ride the momentum in new and exciting directions (have I mentioned how awesome it is to be indestructible?). I bounced off and between a dozen confused, grasping Sarpayas like a pinball hitting Super Mega Bonus Mode, finally skidding to a halt at Iggy’s feet.
“Took you long enough,” he said affectionately.
“Bite me.” I paused. “Preferably after I’ve worn a suit of marshmallows to Mardi Gras, rolled around in chocolate and graham crackers, and been worshipped as a living s’more. Here.”
I tapped the amber around his ankles, summoning my godly power and willing it to shatter into dust. A startled mole popped into being next to me, its body coursing with holy flame. It immediately got stuck in the goop and flailed helplessly for the handful of seconds before it vanished again. All right. Backup plan—
Howling like a banshee, Ishka slammed into me. She was amazingly strong for someone so small, but then, neither could she really hurt me. I carefully positioned myself in front of Iggy, then grabbed her ankle and gave it a quarter-turn sideways.
“Look at me! I’m huuurting her!”
All twelve of Sarpaya stopped, nostrils flaring as two dozen eyes locked onto me. “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” he said quietly.
“Sorry,” I said nastily, “all out of wishes. Wait. Are you a djinni? Because it would sound a lot more badass if—”
The nearest copy of Sarpaya closed the distance between us in two strides. I got a good look at an enormous fist getting real close real fast, and then I was flying, and then I was hitting Iggy, who grunted as my momentum broke him right out of the amber. Now, nothing mortal can phase me, but getting god-punched is something different. As I lay there, it occurred to me how very good it felt to lie motionless on the ground.
“Sammy?” Scowling, Iggy pulled a pair of rune-inscribed bone handles from his boot. He flicked open a pair of slender blades as he straightened up, both of them coursing with a ghostly negative image of flame.
“That’s it,” he said simply. “You’re over.”
A dozen copies of Sarpaya closed on Iggy. Looking almost bored, he whirled and dodged, his blades a blur. Startled copies of Sarpaya began to vanish. I sat up, rubbing my head. One Sarpaya and one Ishka remained. Iggy advanced on the defiant mortal—
“You will not hurt her,” Sarpaya swore, raising his hand.
“We’re not!” I cried, struck by sudden inspiration. “We’re non-violently restraining her, in the hopes that our continued love and compassion will gradually win her over to our way of thinking!”
“What?” Ishka demanded.
“What?” Iggy scowled.
I ran over, grabbed Ishka, and dragged her toward the rapidly congealing pool of amber. She fought like a deranged weasel, but again—I don’t break.
“SARPAYA…!” she cried, until I clamped my arm over her mouth.
“No, see, this is cool,” I hastily explained to him. “Her idiotic babbling is extremely annoying. Thus, if I were forced to listen to it, I wouldn’t love her any more. But since I do love her, I would never, ever let anything come between us and make me stop loving her. Therefore, I can’t permit her to speak!”
“That makes sense,” Sarpaya reluctantly admitted.
“MMMPH!”
I shoved Ishka into the amber butt-first, holding her there until it solidified around her ass. The glinting silver brooch caught my eye: I grabbed it, pinning it to my own robes.
“You don’t deserve this! Bitey 2 loves me, now!”
“Do you want to know what I’m going to do to you?” she growled.
“RUN!!!” I bellowed, sprinting past Iggy. I needn’t have bothered. Ishka was stuck fast, struggling uselessly while Sarpaya cautiously prodded the amber encasing her butt with one oversized foot. Iggy headed off at a swift walk, going in a completely different direction. Reluctantly, I swung around to follow him. Soon enough, we came to his lost guns and wands and Emergency Kit. I helped him pick everything up, frequently glancing over my shoulder to make sure neither Ishka nor Sarpaya was coming.
“Hey,” I said, “I just had an amazing idea: Let me drive! I’ve been practicing on this cool new video game. You won’t believe what it lets you do to pedestrians!”
“Look over there!” Iggy cried. I did, which meant that he was twenty feet off and pulling away by the time I realized I’d been tricked. I broke into a sprint, determined to catch up to him. I would have, too, except that Iggy started praying… to me!… that I would take the passenger seat. Well. What can I say? Answering prayers is tantamount to admitting that you can be pushed around by an entitled little squirt of a mortal making loud-mouthed demands at you, and is the last thing any self-respecting god should do. Sadly, by the time I finished working all that out in my head, Iggy had already dumped the guns in the trunk and settled himself in the driver’s seat.
“Next time,” I announced, piling in next to him. Hiding a smile, Iggy turned the key and we headed out.