Paul Kemp: The Godborn

The devil stabbed him again, but Magadon was beyond pain, and heard, more than felt, the blade slice his flesh and organs, grate on bone. Lights flashed before his eyes, sparks, then darkness. He was fading, falling, but he held onto the fiend’s mind and used their connection to set up an empathetic connection. When he felt the connection take firm hold, felt the psychic bridge between them, he grinned, tasting blood, and transferred the wounds and every damned bit of pain in his ruined body through the connection and into the devil.

The fiend’s eyes went as wide as coins. It dropped its blade as its fanged mouth opened in a wail of pain. Shadows swirled around it, a storm of darkness. A jagged hole opened in the devil’s abdomen, spilling gore, as the hole in Magadon pinched closed and painfully healed.

“This is for you, bastard,” Magadon grunted, pushing his agony into the dying devil. He shoved the creature backward and the fiend stumbled back against the wall, tripping on tankards, trying and failing to push its innards back into its abdomen.

Magadon reached back to the bar and grabbed an arrow in his fist, sidestepped a feeble stab by the devil with its sword, and plunged the arrow into the fiend’s eye, deep into its horned head.

The devil fell to the floor and Magadon rode him down, the two of them slick in shared gore. He pulled the arrow out and drove it into the fiend’s other eye.

Magadon stood, breathing hard, his legs still weak, and found Riven right behind him, crouched atop the bar, backlit by the glow of the spreading flames. Shadows made a slow swirl around him. Somehow he reminded Magadon of a crow.

“Like old times,” Riven said.

Magadon stood upright, wobbled, nodded.

“You all right?” Riven asked. He wasn’t even breathing hard. In passing Magadon wondered if he breathed at all.

Magadon looked at the gory arrow in his hand, his blood-soaked clothes, the corpse of the devil behind him, his burning tavern.

“I’m good,” he said. He picked up the hogshead from the floor and found that the spill hadn’t drained it entirely. He filled two tankards and gave one to Riven.

“It’s a shit brew,” he said, draining his.

Riven drained his, too. “Best I’ve had in a long while, Mags.” Riven’s pipe appeared in his hand, already lit, and he took a long draw.

“Fire brigade will be coming,” Magadon said, as he watched his tavern burn, a thick column of smoke pouring through the hole in the ceiling. His fiendish blood protected him from heat and fire. Riven, too, would feel no threat from flames.

“Too late for this place,” Riven said. “Sorry, Mags.”

Magadon shrugged. “I’d had enough of it anyway.”

Riven nodded. “Let these bodies burn. If these three had been working for your father, we’d have had ten score fiends here by now, and maybe the archfiend himself.”

The mere hint of Mephistopheles’s name, spoken by a godling, caused a cool wind to waft through the bar. Flames hissed and popped, the sound suggestive of dark words.

“These three were working for themselves, probably trying to get in your father’s favor. Their mistake.”

“Aye.”

Riven took another draw on his pipe, exhaled the smoke. “Well?”

Magadon eyed his old friend, more god than man, while the life he’d built burned down around him.

“I’ll be ready,” he said.

“Well enough,” Riven said, and Magadon thought he looked relieved. “Link us, then.”

“A mind link?”

“So I can call you when I need you. Just leave it laying there so I can pick it up if I need it. And don’t look around in there, Mags. You won’t like it any.”

The thought of linking minds with a god disconcerted Magadon, but it needed to be done. He opened his mind, drew on his mental energy, reached out for Riven’s mind.

The shock of contact caused him to gasp. Mindful of Riven’s admonition, he kept the link superficial and narrow. Still, he sensed at a distance the scope of Riven’s mind, his expanded perception of time and place, the voices of the faithful that echoed through his mindscape.

“Gods,” Magadon said softly.

“Gods, indeed,” Riven said. “Makes a man a monster, Mags. No way to avoid it.”

“I’m. . sorry.”

Riven shrugged. “We’ve all got our burdens. And don’t feel sorry for me just yet. Things will get ugly for you before all’s said and done. Count on it.”

Magadon smiled ruefully. “When has it not?”

Riven grinned. “Stay sharp, Mags. See you soon. And Mags? He’s alive.”

“Who?”

“Cale. And we’re going to get him.”

“What? Wait!”

The darkness gathered, folded Riven into it, and he was gone.

He’s alive. He’s alive. The words and their implication pushed all other thoughts out of Magadon’s mind.

Cale was alive. And his son was alive.

Grinning like a lunatic, Magadon gathered his weapons and gear. He donned his wide-brimmed hat, fitted it over his horns, and walked unharmed through the flames and into the night-shrouded streets of Daerlun. Already some passersby had gathered. The fire wouldn’t spread, though. It’d burn up his garret and the tavern, but nothing else.

One of them, a tall, gaunt bald man who held an open book in his hands, struck Magadon oddly. He didn’t look at the first like the rest of them. Instead he wrote something in his book with a quill.

The man must have felt Magadon’s gaze. He looked up from his book.

His eyes had no pupils. They looked like opals set in his skull. He grinned.

Goose pimples rose on Magadon’s skin. He had no idea why. Something about the man. .

“Hey, are you all right?” shouted another of the gathered passersby, a sailor with drink-slurred speech. “You all right, friend? Look at your clothes! Gods man!”

The bald man had gone back to his book, writing, his mouth bent in a secretive smile.

“I said, are you all right?” the sailor shouted again.

Magadon looked at the sailor, raised a hand, and smiled. “I’m fine.”

He was better than fine. He was good as he’d been in a hundred years.

Magadon walked for a time, thinking. The streets bustled even at the late hour: Mule-drawn wagons of supplies moved toward the barracks, and groups of grim-faced soldiers stood on corners, monitoring the traffic and the passersby. The city was preparing for war. Every day hundreds of soldiers marched out of the city to the parade grounds outside the towering basalt walls that ringed Daerlun, and there drilled for hours. Scouts mounted on veserabs-giant-winged lamprey-like creatures-swooped over the city, carrying messages from Cormyrean nobles to High Bergun Gascarn Highbanner. Rumors had an alliance brewing between Daerlun and Cormyr. Magadon wasn’t sure that would be enough to thwart a Sembian assault, when it came.

He didn’t realize it until he arrived, but his boots had carried him to the east gate. Beyond the dark, basalt wall, the shroud of Sembia’s shadowed night hung across the sky. Lines of green lightning flashed, the veins of Sembia’s sky. He felt the gentle touch of the Source’s consciousness brushing against his own.

Sakkors was out there, floating in the dark. As was Cale’s son. And with that, he knew what he would do.

The gate was closed and the guards stiffened at his approach. But their minds were ordinary and easily manipulated by his mind magic. “I’m on official city business by order of the high bergun,” he said, and pushed acceptance of his statement into their minds. “I need to get out of the city right now. Apologies for the late hour.”

“Of course, of course,” said the gate sergeant, a heavyset bearded fellow whose breath smelled of onion and pipe smoke.