Douglas Niles - Goddess Worldweaver

Four rockets, their launchers evenly spaced along a line three hundred feet long, exploded upward, trailing plumes of fire and smoke, tugging the slender lines of a vast net behind. Arching high, crackling overhead with explosive speed as they dragged their webbed cargo across the sky, they tilted toward Riven Deep in unison. The net leaped upward and curled like some filmy, cosmic embrace. Finally the four fiery engines flamed out and the still-smoking rockets tumbled through the flock of harpies as they bore the end of the net downward.

Hundreds of the shrieking flyers thrashed and twisted as their momentum bore them into the mesh of silk. As the weight of the dead rockets plunged into Riven Deep, the net pulled countless harpies out of the air. The whole mass crashed to the ground in a flailing mass of wings, talons, and spitting, hateful faces. Some of the great flock of harpies were too high or too slow to get caught in the trap. Spooked by the sudden attack, many of them scattered. Others dived lower to attack and fell to the arrows of alert Hyaccan archers. Those caught in the net were already incinerating each other, so blind was their fury. They kicked and raised a furious cacophony, but they couldn’t get free nor could they raise their heads enough to direct their fiery sputum at the grimly advancing elves.

Janitha dismounted and advanced, sword in her hand, beside the closing ring of Hyac. Five minutes later, the last of the harpies had ceased its screaming.

“You want me to do that which I have never done-in the service of a goddess who profanes everything my life has meant? Surely you see that this is blasphemy, a desecration of my church and my Savior!”

Shandira glared at Miradel. The newly reborn druid was clad in a gown of white, now, and stood in the shade of the great Grove. She was tall, even statuesque, possessed of a dignity and pride that struck the elder druid as almost superhuman.

Miradel drew a breath and shook her head. “No one will make you do anything you do not wish to do. But you must understand that so much of what you learned during your life in the Seventh Circle is untrue. Mankind does not understand the reality of the cosmos or even guess at the existence of the first six Circles. You have been brought here as a reward for your labors and suffering upon Earth. You are a very special person; the goddess recognized that and bade me to bring you here. Think of Nayve as a place not so very different as the Christian heaven of which you were taught.”

“How dare you make such a comparison! You bring me here so that I can seduce a warrior from that world and bring him here as well? Why did you not just bring the warrior, then, and allow me to go on to a mortal death? Perhaps you are wrong. How do you know that I wouldn’t have gone to heaven, to a blessed rest with my immortal God?”

“Do you remember what I told you?” Miradel said, allowing her own tone to grow sharp. “I was born seven times on the Seventh Circle, each time to grow old and perish-sometimes violently, often suffering from hunger or great pain. There was neither heaven nor hell awaiting me, merely another birth, another chapter of life so that I could watch the extermination of my people. All that ended when the goddess brought me back to Nayve, in the year that much of your Earth numbers as 1864. This is real-this is your destiny, Shandira!”

“I, too, know about the extermination of people,” retorted the black woman. “I have watched the Arabs and the English, the Portuguese and Belgians and Germans and French overrun Africa and divide it into their private fiefdoms. My grandfather was carried into slavery when my mother was but an infant. She had to sell herself to gain enough money to feed her children. She sent me to the convent on Zanzibar before my thirteenth birthday so that I would not share her fate. The priests were kind to me, and the church gave me a home and a promise that became my life. And I was devoted to that life.”

“That devotion is part of your power! Think of your life as the good, the virtuous tale that it is!” Miradel pressed. “And know that not all acts done in the name of your god have been so benign. I have seen damage done by your church-I will tell you what was done to the Mayan people of Mexico, sometime, in the name of your pope and your god-but I also know that your faith is capable of goodness. It gave you a home and a purpose, and you did good works.” Her tone grew soft again. “I watched you, in the Tapestry, as you tended to the inhabitants of your city, when the plague swept through every street and alley. You eased the suffering of countless people, even saved lives against unthinkable dangers. Now you are called upon to do new works-but believe me, they are works of good and can result in benefits to very many people!”

“Explain to me how an act of fornication-three acts of fornication, as you describe it-can result in benefits to anyone!”

“The Spell of Summoning is a cherished, sacred rite; it is not fornication!” snapped Miradel. “It is a rite that is blessed by the Goddess Worldweaver, and it is necessary to the bringing of humans to Nayve. It calls upon your beauty, your caring, your love-you must arouse your warrior and bring him to release three times in the night of the casting-but by so doing you bring him the chance of immortal life on Nayve.”

“Immortal life, if he isn’t killed, you mean. Tell me, how is this world, this Fourth Circle, heavenly?”

“Nayve is a world of peace, and yet we find ourselves beset by war-by a war greater even than those that convulse the world of our birth,” the druid explained patiently. “The Lord of Null, Karlath-Fayd, is sending a fleet against our world that numbers thousands of ships and a million warriors-warriors whose souls he has drawn from Earth since before the age of Caesar. Nearly every man killed in war has come to him, unwilling yet compelled. In the last hundred years the carnage wrought by Napoleon and his enemies, by the American Civil War, and now this Great War that threatens to consume all of Europe, have swelled his ranks to an unthinkable degree. Even now, his ships have turned toward land; the battle will be joined in a matter of days.”

“But you summon warriors from Earth yourself, you and your fellow druids?” Shandira challenged. “To fight and die in this campaign?”

“Yes. We select men of great skill and bravery and honor and goodness. We bring them here at the moment of death, through the Spell of Summoning… the carnal magic that you have called fornication.”

“Why do you need me? I have seen many women here, in the temple and in the Grove. Some of them are clearly wanton. Can they not summon warrior after warrior, one every night perhaps?”

Miradel flushed, unease and guilt wrestling within her. “It is not that simple. When first the spell was cast, it was a sentence of death upon the druid who worked the summons. I used it to bring Natac here, more than five hundred years ago, because I sensed his greatness, and I knew that Nayve, that the goddess, would need his help. In the course of that casting I became an old woman in one night, commencing an inevitable slide toward mortal death.

“It was not until one of our order, Juliay, cast this spell to bring a warrior from America, at the end of their civil war, that we made a discovery: there is a stream in the Mountains of Moonscape, and a druid who drinks the water of that stream may cast the spell-once-without suffering the ravages of age. Juliay’s discovery has given us the means to resist. Just two days ago a party of heroes journeyed, magically, to that river and returned with six casks of the precious liquid. In the years since Juliay’s discovery, we have brought nearly a thousand valiant warriors from Earth, all of whom have been enlisted in the defense of Nayve. But no druid can cast the spell a second time without facing the future of aging and death. So each new warrior requires a new druid.”