Glen Cook - Working God's Mischief

Asgrimmur kept trying to discuss it with Heris. Heris was busy.

She finally grumbled, “Will you quit stressing about what happened back when? We have problems now. The Trickster ended up in there because what’s inside you spent what was left of him to make it happen. Now help me with the hammer mill.”

Some of the soul eggs were too large for the injection tube. Heris meant to break those up. The eggs would shatter when hit hard.

Anna and the children had been making themselves useful by moving equipment and materials no longer needed out of the chamber. The divinities were not pleased by their indifference.

Two sizable, still-warm soul eggs had been set aside, on a table all their own. Two falcons not so subtly pointed their way. Heris talked about trying to reverse their misfortune.

Hecht would as soon see them all destroyed. To the last and least these entities mocked the religion of his youth and the religion he had adopted since coming west.

His mind might know that all things were true inside the Night but his heart desperately wanted that not to be so. There is no God but God!

“Piper?” Heris asked.

“Huh?”

“You’re daydreaming. Again.”

“Have to. It never gets dark here.” He glanced toward the doorway. The green area boasted a half-dozen Old Gods who looked like ordinary people with anachronistic senses of style. They included one of Red Hammer’s mothers-different myths assigned the honor to different goddesses-and his wife and that wife’s daughter by an unknown father.

They made Hecht nervous.

Cultures that had worshipped the Old Ones had had strange notions of justice.

“In a world of an eye for an eye the last man standing has got the world by the balls.”

Heris said, “Piper?”

“Nothing. Something Pinkus Ghort said.” He checked his family.

They were spent emotionally. Pella had begun spelling them at the falcons. The boy could be a surprise when he set the attitude aside. “How much longer do you want the falcons manned? Asgrimmur says we don’t need them anymore. But I’m more suspicious than him. I can’t help thinking how honorable I’d be if the Old Ones had the upper hand.”

Cloven Februaren said, “You’re the product of thousands of years of the Instrumentalities having had the upper hand. You’d need to live that long with them to grasp their thinking. The simple fact that death is something that only happens to somebody else makes a huge difference.”

Hecht said, “That should be changing.”

“The change started centuries ago. But they got it wrong, which is why we are where we are today.”

“Why did you come over here interrupting, Double Great?”

“I wanted to tell you to get on with your work and stop worrying about the numb-nuts hangers-on.”

“I missed your point. Assuming you had one.”

“Stop worrying about the gods. They can’t interfere. That would be suicidal. You got them by the short hairs. Yank or squeeze, as appropriate, when the mood takes you.”

That did not reassure Hecht till he recalled that the Old Ones were inside their Paradise already, specially constructed by the Aelen Kofer. Suicide would not take them onward to any wondrous eternity.

The Adversary’s cunning termites of doubt kept gnawing at the foundations of his faith.

“If I understand Double Great right, Piper, it’s all right if Anna and the kids take off. All we have left is to dump the trash through the midden hole.” Heris waved. “Let’s do the drop, Renfrow.”

“As you wish.” The Bastard fiddled with petcocks. A thousand amber beads, from pinhead size to an inch in diameter, rolled down through silver glass tubing. A silver ball followed so nothing of the Night could head in the other direction.

The Bastard closed and opened petcocks again. Beads and ball disappeared into Asgrimmur’s pocket universe.

“There’s one load gone,” Heris said. “Let’s get crushing and grinding. We’ll have this done in another hour. In two we’ll be sucking down Aelen Kofer ale.”

Hecht checked his family again. “You’re sure you don’t need fire support?”

“You stay. Pick a falcon.” Heris stepped past him. “You gods get a sudden notion to knock boots with a mortal girl, just remember that their mother, father, and aunt already wrote the last verse for four major Instrumentalities.”

It was more than four but Hecht was not about to start threatening gods. Heris ought to have better sense, too. She should have noticed, as well, that only one of these gods was male.

Hecht was distracted by the novelty of her concern for Lila and Vali.

Some of the divinities did have reputations. Old northern myth and culture valued virginity, chastity, and fidelity much less than did the followers of Aaron of Chaldar. And Chaldareans were less obsessive than Pramans, who stoned somebody if they even thought about sexual congress with anyone but young boys or the renewable virgin houris of Paradise.

Anna and the children left. Hecht leaned on his falcon and brooded about the quirks of religion.

The Founding Family had been crystal clear and bloody fierce in matters sexual. There was no room in the Faith for buggery. But, as people generally do, the Faithful overlooked rules they found inconvenient. Nor did useful pre-Revelation gods vanish in the light of the god who was God. They put on disguises and went to work as ifrits and other spirits, now supposedly in thrall to the Adversary. And the thing about boys …

That had confused and appalled Piper Hecht even when he was young Else Tage.

He thought of Osa Stile, ensorcelled so he would remain a pleasure boy all his life. Osa was still out there, nearing forty, looking a small twelve, still unconvinced that those who had warped him did not deserve his loyalty.

The hammer mill cycled. It shook the chamber. The smash and rattle startled Hecht out of his dark reverie.

Heris joined him. “This is going all right but it’s taking longer than I expected.”

“Everything does.”

“Why? The individual steps aren’t causing complications.”

“My staff call it friction. Natural drag that just slows things down even when there aren’t any problems. Titus Consent has an equation he uses to guess how much friction we can expect in an operation. And, guess what?”

“It doesn’t help?”

“It does. But the attempt to calculate friction causes friction of its own. I suspect an undiscovered law of the universe.”

“And that doesn’t drive you nuts?”

“Of course it does. But if you accept it, don’t fight it, and take it into account, things go fairly well. Most leaders can’t handle friction. They make things worse by screaming, yelling, threatening and punishing. People slow down when they’re afraid to make mistakes.”

“More philosophy. More intellectualization. More friction.”

“You could be right. They’re ready to run another load.”

Februaren had sieved the material processed in the hammer mill. The finer stuff went into the tube for delivery into the void. Big chunks would take another pass through the hammer mill. “If we mixed this with water it would go through faster.”

“Or oil,” the Bastard suggested.

“Oil would create a viscous slurry.” A vigorous debate commenced.

Hecht wrestled his temper. These men, participating in the industrialized destruction of the Instrumentalities of the Night, were bickering over the easiest way to make an end of the last relicts of entities who might have existed for millennia.

Did longevity qualify them for special empathy? Their long lives had provided them untold opportunities to rain down misery on mortals.

“Piper, do you know where you want to point that thing?” Cloven Februaren asked.